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Updated: May 26, 2025
Défago, shuffling where he sat, had moved in such a way that for the first time his legs were in full light and his feet were visible. Yet Simpson had no time, himself, to see properly what Hank had seen. And Hank has never seen fit to tell.
Between the two lonely figures within, however, there pressed another shadow that was not a shadow from the night. It was the Shadow cast by the strange Fear, never wholly exorcised, that had leaped suddenly upon Défago in the middle of his singing.
Défago shook the clinging blankets from his body, turned towards the woods behind, and with the same stumbling motion that had brought him was gone: gone, before anyone could move muscle to prevent him, gone with an amazing, blundering swiftness that left no time to act.
They might stay and search for weeks without much chance of success. The fresh snow destroyed their only hope, and they gathered round the fire for supper, a gloomy and despondent party. The facts, indeed, were sad enough, for Défago had a wife at Rat Portage, and his earnings were the family's sole means of support.
No guide, much less a guide like Défago, could have acted in so irrational a way, going off even without his rifle ...! The whole affair demanded a far more complicated elucidation, when he remembered the details of it all the cry of terror, the amazing language, the grey face of horror when his nostrils first caught the new odor; that muffled sobbing in the darkness, and for this, too, now came back to him dimly the man's original aversion for this particular bit of country....
He led the conversation on to other topics, on to Hank and the doctor, for instance, and the natural rivalry as to who should get the first sight of moose. "If they went doo west," observed Défago carelessly, "there's sixty miles between us now with ole Punk at halfway house eatin' himself full to bustin' with fish and coffee." They laughed together over the picture.
It was so incongruous, so pitifully incongruous and so vain! Tears in this vast and cruel wilderness: of what avail? He thought of a little child crying in mid-Atlantic.... Then, of course, with fuller realization, and the memory of what had gone before, came the descent of the terror upon him, and his blood ran cold. "Défago," he whispered quickly, "what's the matter?"
For the "Défago" who sat huddled by the big fire, wrapped in blankets, drinking hot whisky and holding food in wasted hands, was no more like the guide they had last seen alive than the picture of a man of sixty is like a daguerreotype of his early youth in the costume of another generation.
Behind him in the stern seat, singing fragments of his native chanties, Défago steered the craft of birch bark like a thing of life, answering cheerfully all his companion's questions. Both were gay and light-hearted. On such occasions men lose the superficial, worldly distinctions; they become human beings working together for a common end.
"Skeered stiff about some ole feery tale! That's all, ain't it, ole pard?" And he gave Défago a friendly kick on the moccasined foot that lay nearest the fire. Défago looked up quickly, as from an interrupted reverie, a reverie, however, that had not prevented his seeing all that went on about him. "Skeered nuthin'!" he answered, with a flush of defiance.
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