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The conjurer continued his song at intervals, and it was occasionally taken up by those without. In this manner an hour and a half elapsed; but at length our attention, which had begun to flag, was roused by the violent shaking of the conjuring-house. It was instantly whispered round the circle, that at least one devil had crept under the moose-skin.
"Spy," he shouted, throwing aside the moose-skin coverlet. "Spy! Who?" "It's Louis Laplante, of Quebec." "Louis Laplante!" reiterated the trader. "A Frenchman employed by the Hudson's Bay! Laplante, a trapper, with them! The scoundrel!" And he ground out oaths that boded ill for Louis. "Hold on!" I exclaimed, jerking him back. He was for dashing on Laplante with a cudgel.
Claud, who baited with grubs, soon had drawn in two, weighing as many pounds a piece, and began to feel disposed to banter the hunter, who had baited with a flap of moose-skin, which he had brought along with him, and which, to Claud, seemed little likely to attract the fishes to his hook.
In the second week of our stay at Bettles, while Divine service was in progress in the store building, crowded with whites and natives, the door opened and, with an inrush of cold air that condensed the moisture at that end of the room into a cloud and shot along the floor like steam from an engine exhaust, there entered an Indian covered with rime, his whole head-gear one mass of white frost, his snow-shoes, just removed, under his arm, and a beaded moose-skin wallet over his shoulder.
Lucien cut the moose-skin into fine regular strips; Basil waded off through the snow, and procured the frames from the wood of the scrub-pine trees where he had encountered the porcupine; and then he and François trimmed them with their knives, and sweated them in the hot ashes until they became dry, and ready for the hands of the "shoemaker."
His harness was neatly made of moose-skin, and consisted of a collar with a back strap and traces the traces meeting behind, where they were attached to the head of the sledge. No head-gear was necessary, as Marengo needed not to be either led or driven. The sledge consisted of two or three light planks of smooth wood, laid alongside each other, and held together by transverse bands.
The man-hunters spent a day at Northern Lights to rest the dogs and restock their supplies. They overhauled their dunnage carefully, mended the broken moose-skin harness, and looked after one of the animals that had gone a little lame from a sore pad. From a French half-breed they bought additional equipment much needed for the trail.
We ate roots raw which we had to dig out of the sand on the river bank. We killed all our dogs for food. We washed our moose-skin moccasins, scraped away the dirt and sand, boiled them in the kettle and drank the mucilage which they produced. When the first flour and cattle reached us from Sertigan, the most of us had been forty-eight hours without eating.
He came tramping along on snowshoes with his little hunting toboggan behind him on which was lashed his caribou robe, his tea-pail, his kit bag, and a haunch of young moose as a present to Amik and his wife. In his hand he carried his gun in a moose-skin case. He was a good-looking young fellow, and wore the regulation cream-coloured H. B. capote with hood and turned-back cuffs of dark blue.
They came to a solitary tepee, built on the edge of a lake with a background of snow-burdened spruce. This lodge was constructed of poles arranged cone-shaped side by side, the chinks between plastered with moss wedged in to fill every crevice. A thin wisp of smoke rose from an open space in the top. At the sound of the yelping dogs a man lifted the moose-skin curtain that served as a door.
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