“’Tis near the time of the Hudson’s Bay brigade, is it not, M’sieu?” she would ask sometimes.  “Think you we shall meet them surely if we skirt the eastern shore of Winnipeg?”

And Dupre would always answer, “Assuredly.  By the third week in July they will be at the upper bend where the river comes down from York.  The Nakonkirhirinons will hold to the west, going up Nelson River and west through the chain of little lakes that lie to the south of Winnipeg, thence gaining Deer River and that Reindeer Lake which sends them forth into their unknown region beyond the Oujuragatchousibi.  We, then, will make straight for the eastern shore, skirting upward to the interception of the ways, and we will surely meet the brigade.”

“And they will surely lend help, think you, to a factor of the Company in such grave plight?”

“Surely, Ma’amselle.”

So the hours of day and darkness slipped by with dip of paddle and with portage, with snatched rest and fare of the wild.

In a plentiful forest and on an abundant stream Dupre was at no loss for food.  Trout, sparkling and fresh from the icy water, roasted on forked sticks stuck in the ground beside a bed of coals, made fare for an epicure, and the young trapper, watching Maren as she knelt to tend them, shielding her face with her hand, thought wistfully of a cabin where the fire leaped on the hearth and where this woman passed back and forth at the tasks of home.

“’Tis too great a thing to ask of le bon Dieu,” he said in his heart; “’tis not permitted even that one dream of such joy,—­’twould be heaven robbed of its glory.”

So he fished and hunted for her, as the primal man has hunted and fished for his woman since time began, tended her fires and guarded her sleep, and the wistful sadness within him grew with the passing days.

Down that northbound river the lone canoe with its two people hurried after the great flotilla, silent and determined, like a starved wolf on the flanks of a caribou herd.

Out on the breast of the great blue lake it, too, was shot by the rushing waters, lone little cockleshell, to head its prow to the eastward, where the green shore curved away, to take its infinitesimal chance of victory against all odds.

When the sun came out of the eastern forest, a golden ball in a cloud of fire, it saw the light craft already cutting the cool waters of Winnipeg.  When it sank into the western woods the bobbing dot was still shooting forward.

Child of the wilderness by birth was Dupre, child of the wilderness by dream and desire was Maren, and its simple courage was inborn in both.

The Indians were a day and night ahead, hurrying by dawn and dusk to the north, that the body of the dead chief, cured like a mummy by the smoke curling from the big tepee at every stop, might have burial, the earth-bound spirit begin its journey to the shadowy hunting-grounds.