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Updated: June 8, 2025
"Suppose you enlarge your mind by looking up the stories of the old coureurs du bois who used to stumble through these woods when they were the border-land between Chippewa and Sioux." Dick threw a pebble at Norris' face. "Suppose you go up to that inky stream in the north, which twists mysteriously through the forests, black with the bodies of dead men rotting in its mire.
Both knew the legend of the loup-garou, the grim tradition of the peasants of Quebec which the coureurs des bois have carried with them into every part of Canada. Often in the Klondike, when seated round the stove on a winter's night, they had heard it retold by French-Canadians, in low excited whispers, with swift and frightened turnings of the head.
Factors of the Hudson's Bay Company, coureurs de bois, and voyageurs had come among them at times, and once the renowned Father Lacombe, the Jesuit priest, had stayed with them three months; but never to this day had they seen a Protestant mikonaree, though once a factor, noted for his furious temper, his powers of running, and his generosity, had preached to them.
Once while he was there, Father Halen and his sister, Mrs. Lauder, came. They found Pierre with the child, rocking the cradle, and humming as he did so an old song of the coureurs de bois: "Out of the hills comes a little white deer, Poor little vaurien, o, ci, ci! Come to my home, to my home down here, Sister and brother and child o' me Poor little, poor little vaurien!"
Obviously it was undesirable that he should invade Perrot's bailiwick in person. He therefore instructed the judge at Montreal to arrest all the coureurs de bois who were there. A loyal attempt was made to execute this command, with the result that Perrot at once intervened and threatened to imprison the judge if he repeated his effort.
Perhaps this ne'er-do-well father is to be classed as one of those rough coureurs de bois who, in his ambassadorship from his ancestors to their frontier posterity, forgot the conventions and manners of the ancestral life in the temptations of the open country to a man without a slave.
The man who lived in a log-hut among the stumps and could hunt at will through the forest was not a serf. Though the conditions of life kept him close to his home, Canada meant for him a new freedom. Freest of all were the coureurs de bois, those dare-devils of the wilderness who fill such a large place in the history of the fur trade and of exploration.
There were Indians with packs; and the old race of the coureurs des bois, who were still picturesque with their red sashes and jaunty habiliments. They were wild men of the woods, who had thrown off the restraints of civilized life and who hunted as much for the pleasure as the profit.
The Canadian traders, for a long time, had troublesome competitors in the British merchants of New York, who inveigled the Indian hunters and the coureurs des bois to their posts, and traded with them on more favorable terms.
Many of them were Indians, still more were coureurs de bois, wild bush-rangers who dressed and lived more like Indians than white men, and were as fearless, and lawless, and learned in the secrets of the forest as the Indians. These armies set out in the depth of winter. French and Indian alike were smeared with war-paint and decked with feathers.
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