On the night of his return Hertel was pulling at his after-supper pipe, watching a piece of smoke-tanned moose-hide take the shape of a moccasin in the capable hands of Marie, when one of the dogs stood up with a low growl, hair bristling like a mad porcupine's quills. Then both huskies made for the door. Hertel sprang to the low entrance of the shack, while his wife's dark face went white with dread. Outside, the light from a frozen moon flooded the clearing in the forest. Hertel hushed the dogs, blocking the open door with his body, then waited, tense as a bow-string. Shortly, from the ridge back of the shack, drifted out over the still valley a wail, half-human, rising to a cat-like scream piercing in intensity, then slowly dying away.
The trapper closed the door, pushed aside the clamoring huskies, and seized his caribou-skin coat and fur mittens.
"Mon Dieu, eet ees le diable! Eet ees le diable!" moaned the terrified woman. "Don' leeve me, François!"
"Eet ees only de lucivee!" the man insisted as she clung to him. "He shout beeg, dees lynx, but he seeng 'noder song w'en he feel de bullet."
With such talk he strove to hearten the horror-stricken woman, but Hertel knew that the dread cry that chilled the blood of all living things that heard it was the howl of no lynx. What it was he was going up into the black spruce to find out.
"I leeve de husky and shotgun. You safe wid dem." And embracing the hysterical girl he closed the door against the dogs, who were useless in a still
