Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 10, 2025
Baree, watching him, saw his head swing slowly even as the footsteps of Nepeese and Pierrot became more and more distinct. It was the first time Baree had ever stood face to face with the big bear. He had watched him fish; he had fattened on Wakayoo's prowess; he had held him in splendid awe.
Under his close-cropped beard his reddish face blazed with the fire that was in his blood. It was an unpleasant face like iron, merciless, filled with the look that gave him his name of Napao Wetikoo. His eyes gleamed, and he drew a quick breath as he put out the light. He chuckled again as he made his way through the darkness to the door. Nepeese as good as belonged to him.
It was one of the black devils of chance that favored him again, for in his excitement he had not snapped the safety shut after shooting Baree. Now he had only strength left to pull the trigger. Twice his forefinger closed. Twice there came deadened explosion close to Pierrot's body. In Pierrot's face Nepeese saw what had happened.
It was he who had run away from the Willow, who had deserted her at the call of the pack, and it seemed at times as though he sensed the depths of his perfidy and was striving to make amends. There was indubitably a very great change in him. He clung to Nepeese like a shadow.
Her laugh, sweet and wild as a bird's trill, set Baree's heart throbbing with a desire to jump about with her among the flowers. For a time Nepeese seemed to forget Baree. Her wild blood raced with the joy of her triumph over the factor from Lac Bain. She saw him again, floundering about in the pool pictured him at the cabin now, soaked and angry, demanding of mon pere where she had gone.
She did not foresee the peril that in an instant would have stamped the wild flush from her face and curdled the blood in her veins she did not guess that McTaggart had become for her a deadlier menace than ever. Nepeese knew that he must be angry. But what had she to fear? Mon pere would be angry, too, if she told him what had happened at the edge of the chasm. But she would not tell him.
It would have died, had it not been for Nepeese, his daughter. His wife had named her Nepeese, which means the Willow. Nepeese had grown up like the willow, slender as a reed, with all her mother's wild beauty, and with a little of the French thrown in. She was sixteen, with great, dark, wonderful eyes, and hair so beautiful that an agent from Montreal passing that way had once tried to buy it.
It was the beginning of August the Flying-up Moon when Pierrot returned from Lac Bain, and in three days more it would be the Willow's seventeenth birthday. He brought back with him many things for Nepeese ribbons for her hair, real shoes, which she wore at times like the two Englishwomen at Nelson House, and chief glory of all, some wonderful red cloth for a dress.
But at present he said nothing of what was in his mind to Nepeese. The Willow had almost forgotten the factor from Lac Bain, for the glory and thrill of wilderness autumn was in her blood. She went on long trips with Pierrot, helping him to blaze out the new trap lines that would be used when the first snows came, and on these journeys she was always accompanied by Baree.
Baree's quest for Nepeese became now more or less involuntary, a sort of daily routine. For a week he made his burrow in the dog corral, and at least twice between dawn and darkness he would go to the birchbark tepee and the chasm. His trail, soon beaten hard in the snow, became as fixed as Pierrot's trap line.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking