Behind them, Jean had been coming up swiftly, and now they heard him break for an instant into the chorus of one of the wild half-breed songs, and Philip listened to the words of the chant which is as old in the Northland as the ancient brass cannon and the crumbling fortress rocks at York Factory: 

    “O, ze beeg black bear, he go to court,
    He go to court a mate;
    He court to ze Sout’,
    He court to ze Nort’,
    He court to ze shores of ze Indian Lake.”

And then, in the moment’s silence that followed, Philip threw back his head, and in a voice almost as wild and untrained as Jean Croisset’s, he shouted back: 

    “Oh! the fur fleets sing on Temiskaming,
      As the ashen paddles bend,
    And the crews carouse at Rupert’s House,
      At the sullen winter’s end. 
    But my days are done where the lean wolves run,
      And I ripple no more the path
    Where the gray geese race ’cross the red moon’s face
      From the white wind’s Arctic wrath.”

The suspense was broken.  The two men’s voices, rising in their crude strength, sending forth into the still wilderness both triumph and defiance, brought the quick flush of living back into Josephine’s face.  She guessed why Jean had started his chant—­to give her courage.  She knew why Philip had responded.  And now Jean swept up beside them, a smile on his thin, dark face.

“The Good Virgin preserve us, M’sieur, but our voices are like those of two beasts,” he cried.

“Great, true, fighting beasts,” whispered Josephine under her breath.  “How I would hate almost—­”

She had suddenly flushed to the roots of her hair.

“What?” asked Philip.

“To hear men sing like women,” she finished.

As swiftly as he had come up Jean and his canoe had sped on ahead of them.

“You should have heard us sing that up in our snow hut, when for five months the sun never sent a streak above the horizon,” said Philip.  “At the end—­in the fourth month—­it was more like the wailing of madmen.  MacTavish died then:  a young half Scot, of the Royal Mounted.  After that Radisson and I were alone, and sometimes we used to see how loud we could shout it, and always, when we came to those two last lines—­”

She interrupted him: 

    “Where the gray geese race ’cross the red moon’s face
    From the white wind’s Arctic wrath.”

“Your memory is splendid!” he cried admiringly.

“Yes, always when we came to the end of those lines, the white foxes would answer us from out on the barrens, and we would wait for the sneaking yelping of them before we went on.  They haunted us like little demons, those foxes, and never once could we catch a glimpse of them during the long night.  They helped to drive MacTavish mad.  He died begging us to keep them away from him.  One day I was wakened by Radisson crying like a baby, and when I sat up in my ice bunk he caught me by the shoulders and told me that he had seen something that looked like the glow of a fire thousands and thousands of miles away.  It was the sun, and it came just in time.”