It was a terrible winter—­that winter of Le Mort Rouge.  So far down as men and children now living will remember, it will be called by my people the winter of Famine and Red Death.  Starvation, gentlemen—­and the smallpox.  People died like—­what shall I say?  It is not easy to describe a thing like that.  They died in tepees.  They died in shacks.  They died on the trail.  From late December until March I said my prayers over the dead.  You are wondering what all this has to do with my story; why it matters that the caribou had migrated in vast herds to the westward, and there was no food; why it matters that there were famine and plague in the great unknown land, and that people were dying and our world going through a cataclysm.  My backwoods eyes can see your thought.  What has all this to do with Joseph Brecht?  What has it to do with Andre Beauvais?  Why does this little forest priest take up so much time in telling so little? you ask.  And because it has its place—­because it has its meaning—­I ask you for permission to tell my story in my own way.  For these sufferings, this hunger and pestilence and death, had a strange and terrible effect on many human creatures that were left alive when spring came.  It was like a great storm that had swept through a forest of tall trees.  A storm of suffering that left heads bowed, shoulders bent, and minds gone.  Yes, gone!

Since that winter of Le Mort Rouge I know of eyes into which the life of laughter will never come again; I know of strong men who became as little children; I have seen faces that were fair with youth shrivel into age—­and my people call it noot’ akutawin keskwawin—­the cold and hungry madness.  May God help Andre Beauvais!

I will tell the story now.

It was in June.  The last of the mush-snows had gone early, nearly a fortnight before, and the waters were free from ice, when word was brought to me that Father Boget was dying at Old Fort Reliance.  Father Boget was twenty years older than I, and I called him mon pere.  He was a father to me in our earlier years.  I made haste to reach him that I might hold his hand before he died, if that was possible.  And you, Sergeant McVeigh, who have spent years in that country of the Great Slave, know what a race with death from Christie Bay to Old Fort Eeliance would be.  To follow the broken and twisted waters of the Great Slave would mean two hundred miles, while to cut straight across the land by smaller streams and lakelets meant less than seventy.  But on your maps that space of seventy miles is a blank.  You have in it no streams and no larger waters.  You know little of it.  But I can tell you, for I have been though it.  It is a Lost Hell.  It is a vast country in which berry bushes grow abundantly, but on which there are no berries, where there are forests and swamps, but not a living creature to inhabit them; a country of water in which there are no fish, of air in which there are no birds, of plants without