After I heard this story I was thankful every day that Eagle could not remember; that natural happiness had its way with her elastic body.

Madame Ursule told me the family learned to give her liberty.  She rowed alone upon the river, and went where she pleased.  The men in La Baye would step aside for her.  Strangers disturbed her by bringing the consciousness of something unusual.

Once I surprised Marie and Katarina sitting close to the fire at twilight, talking about lovers.  Eagle was near them on a stool.

“That girl,” exclaimed Katarina, speaking of the absent with strong disapproval, “is one of the kind that will let another girl take her sweetheart and then sit around and look injured!  Now if she could get him from me she might have him!  But she’d have to get him first!”

Eagle listened in the attitude of a young sister, giving me to understand by a look that wisdom flowed, and she was learning.

We rose one morning to find the world buried in snow.  The river was frozen and its channel padded thick.  As for the bay, stretches of snow fields, with dark pools and broken gray ridges met ice at the end of the world.

It was so cold that paper stuck to the fingers like feathers, and the nails tingled with frost.  The white earth creaked under foot, and when a sled went by the snow cried out in shrill long resistance, a spirit complaining of being trampled.  Explosions came from the river, and elm limbs and timbers of the house startled us.  White fur clothed the inner key holes.  Tree trunks were black as ink against a background of snow.  The oaks alone kept their dried foliage, which rattled like many skeletons, instead of rustling in its faded redness, because there was no life in it.

But the colder it grew the higher Grignon’s log fires mounted.  And when channels were cut in the snow both along the ridge above Green Bay, and across country in every direction, French trains moved out with jangling bells, and maids and men uttered voice sounds which spread as by miracle on the diffusing air from horizon to horizon.  You could hear the officers speaking across the river; and dogs were like to shake the sky down with their barking.  Echoes from the smallest noises were born in that magnified, glaring world.

The whole festive winter spun past.  Marie and Katarina brought young men to the peaks of hope in the “twosing” seat, and plunged them down to despair, quite in the American fashion.  Christmas and New Year’s days were great festivals, when the settlement ate and drank at Pierre Grignon’s expense, and made him glad as if he fathered the whole post.  Madame Grignon spun and looked to the house.  And a thousand changes passed over the landscape.  But in all that time no one could see any change in my Cloud-Mother.  She sewed like a child.  She laughed, and danced gavottes.  She trod the snow, or muffled in robes, with Madame Ursule and the girls, flew over it in a French train; a sliding box with two or three horses hitched tandem.  Every evening I sat by her side at the fire, while she made little coats and trousers for me.  But remembrance never came into her eyes.  The cloud stood round about her as it did when I first tried to penetrate it.