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"Is it not consuming terrible to be so shaken?... Yet I never gain my desire, for there in my path my own self rises to confront me, blocking my way. And I can never pass never.... Once, in winter, our agent, Mr. Fonda, came driving a trained caribou to a sledge. A sweet, gentle thing, with dark, mild eyes, and I was mad to drive it mad, cousin!
He was almost ashore, and in my thought I saw him bounding up over the hills away out of our reach, and was glad. When George took the rifle to shoot I was not in the least afraid for the caribou, because I knew he would not be hit and he was not. But, Alas! I soon learned that it was not meant he should be.
Reaching the divide at last, they came on an open park-like ridge, bounded north and east by lofty shining peaks. Deer and caribou tracks were everywhere. It was now that the region became known as Cariboo. They camped on the ridge, cooked supper, and slept under the stars. Should they go on, or back? This was far above the benches of wash-gravel.
Food they could do without for a long time, but life without smoke was intolerable; and they offered their whole dried product of two Caribou, concentrated, nourishing food enough to last a family many days, in exchange for half a pound of nasty stinking, poisonous tobacco. Two weeks hence, they say, these hills will be alive with Caribou; alas! for them, it proved a wholly erroneous forecast.
Up to the time that he heard the far-off sound of their automobile struggling up the long hill, he had made no mental picture of his employers. He rather hoped that Mr. Kenly Lounsbury uncle of the missing man would represent the usual type of middle-aged American with whom he had previously dealt, cold-nerved, likeable business men that came for recreation on the caribou trails.
The barren-ground caribou is still plentiful in the north, where most of the herds appear to migrate in an immense ellipse, crossing from west to east, over the barrens, in the fall, to the Atlantic, and then turning south and west through the woods in winter, till they reach their original starting-point near Hudson bay in the spring. But this is not to be counted on.
Oftener than not no caribou come within reach of the folk that live on the coast, and in these frequent seasons of scarcity the only meat they have in winter is the salt pork they buy at the trading posts, if they have the means to buy it, together with the rabbits and grouse they hunt, and, in the wooded districts, an occasional porcupine.
"I was just thinking," she said, "that I am a law-breaker. I have no license to kill caribou." "I have no doubt that you may be forgiven if you will send the money to St. John's and apply for a license. Then you can shoot two more, with an easy conscience." "I will certainly send it," she replied, "but you ought to keep that head, you know."
And we fell often by the way, but we fell, always, with our faces toward Salt Water. "Our last grub went, and we had shared fair, Passuk and I, but she fell more often, and at Caribou Crossing her strength left her. And in the morning we lay beneath the one robe and did not take the trail.
The forest people were three quarters of a mile from this open when they came upon the trail of the lone caribou hunter. Where he had stood and looked up at them the snow was beaten down; from that spot his back-trail began first in a cautious, crouching retreat that changed swiftly into the long running steps of a man in haste. Like a dog, Kaskisoon hovered over the warm trail.
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