In a few minutes Laroque removed the wire from his pipe, the end of which was now red-hot. Then between his moccasins he stretched on the deck a piece of dressed caribou-hide a foot long by a few inches in width. For a moment he listened for footsteps, then, striking a match, held it close to the hide between his feet and behind his dog's body while he burned slowly into the skin with the hot end of the wire a syllabic character of the Cree tongue.
Pipe after pipe he smoked as he crouched there in the dark on the deck with his dog, for the wire soon cooled and needed reheating. At the sound of footfalls the Cree would snuff the match out in his calloused hand and wait until the sailor passed. Once the smooth-faced lieutenant, whose watch it was, stopped to chat with him about the Northern sled-dogs and his own Great Danes on his father's place at home, but so thick was the fog that the Cree did not deign even to remove the wire which he was heating in his pipe at the time.
So, slowly and with much patience, Gaspard Laroque, working under the kindly curtain of the thick night, was able to cover the strip of hide with the phonetic writing of the Cree. Then grunting into the hairy ears of his friend, and with a parting scratch of the ever-receptive back, the trapper went to his bunk in the forecastle of the ship, which was vocal with the snoring of strong men deep in sleep, to dream of the burning of Fort Albany by a shore party of Germans and the loss of those he loved.
The following morning Gaspard Laroque went on
