第16章

He pictured himself, side by side with his goodwife, in the salle a manger of the Hotel Richelieu, ordering their dinner from a printed bill of fare.Side by side they were walking on the Dufferin Terrace, listening to the music of the military band.Side by side they were watching the wonders of the play at the Theatre de l'Etoile du Nord.Side by side they were kneeling before the gorgeous altar in the cathedral.And then they were standing silent, side by side, in the asylum of the orphans, looking at brown eyes and blue, at black hair and yellow curls, at fat legs and rosy cheeks and laughing mouths, while the Mother Superior showed off the little boys and girls for them to choose.This affair of the choice was always a delightful difficulty, and here his fancy loved to hang in suspense, vibrating between rival joys.

Once, at the Riviere du Milieu, after considerable discourse upon Quebec, there was an interval of silence, during which I succeeded in hooking and playing a larger trout than usual.As the fish came up to the side of the canoe, Patrick netted him deftly, exclaiming with an abstracted air, "It is a boy, after all.I like that best."Our camp was shifted, the second week, to the Grand Lac des Cedres;and there we had extraordinary fortune with the trout: partly, Iconjecture, because there was only one place to fish, and so Patrick's uneasy zeal could find no excuse for keeping me in constant motion all around the lake.But in the matter of weather we were not so happy.There is always a conflict in the angler's mind about the weather--a struggle between his desires as a man and his desires as a fisherman.This time our prayers for a good fishing season were granted at the expense of our suffering human nature.There was a conjunction in the zodiac of the signs of Aquarius and Pisces.It rained as easily, as suddenly, as penetratingly, as Miss Miller talked; but in between the showers the trout were very hungry.

One day, when we were paddling home to our tents among the birch trees, one of these unexpected storms came up; and Patrick, thoughtful of my comfort as ever, insisted on giving me his coat to put around my dripping shoulders.The paddling would serve instead of a coat for him, he said; it would keep him warm to his bones.As I slipped the garment over my back, something hard fell from one of the pockets into the bottom of the canoe.It was a brier-wood pipe.

"Aha! Pat," I cried; "what is this? You said you had thrown all your pipes away.How does this come in your pocket?""But, m'sieu'," he answered, "this is different.This is not the pipe pure and simple.It is a souvenir.It is the one you gave me two years ago on the Metabetchouan, when we got the big caribou.Icould not reject this.I keep it always for the remembrance."At this moment my hand fell upon a small, square object in the other pocket of the coat.I pulled it out.It was a cake of Virginia leaf.Without a word, I held it up, and looked at Patrick.He began to explain eagerly:

"Yes, certainly, it is the tobacco, m'sieu'; but it is not for the smoke, as you suppose.It is for the virtue, for the self-victory.

I call this my little piece of temptation.See; the edges are not cut.I smell it only; and when I think how it is good, then I speak to myself, 'But the little found child will be better!' It will last a long time, this little piece of temptation; perhaps until we have the boy at our house--or maybe the girl."The conflict between the cake of Virginia leaf and Patrick's virtue must have been severe during the last ten days of our expedition;for we went down the Riviere des Ecorces, and that is a tough trip, and full of occasions when consolation is needed.After a long, hard day's work cutting out an abandoned portage through the woods, or tramping miles over the incredibly shaggy hills to some outlying pond for a caribou, and lugging the saddle and hind quarters back to the camp, the evening pipe, after supper, seemed to comfort the men unspeakably.If their tempers had grown a little short under stress of fatigue and hunger, now they became cheerful and good-natured again.They sat on logs before the camp-fire, their stockinged feet stretched out to the blaze, and the puffs of smoke rose from their lips like tiny salutes to the comfortable flame, or like incense burned upon the altar of gratitude and contentment.

Patrick, I noticed about this time, liked to get on the leeward side of as many pipes as possible, and as near as he could to the smokers.He said that this kept away the mosquitoes.There he would sit, with the smoke drifting full in his face, both hands in his pockets, talking about Quebec, and debating the comparative merits of a boy or a girl as an addition to his household.

But the great trial of his virtue was yet to come.The main object of our trip down the River of Barks--the terminus ad quem of the expedition, so to speak--was a bear.Now the bear as an object of the chase, at least in Canada, is one of the most illusory of phantoms.The manner of hunting is simple.It consists in walking about through the woods, or paddling along a stream, until you meet a bear; then you try to shoot him.This would seem to be, as the Rev.Mr.Leslie called his book against the deists of the eighteenth century, "A Short and Easie Method." But in point of fact there are two principal difficulties.The first is that you never find the bear when and where you are looking for him.The second is that the bear sometimes finds you when--but you shall see how it happened to us.

We had hunted the whole length of the River of Barks with the utmost pains and caution, never going out, even to pick blueberries, without having the rifle at hand, loaded for the expected encounter.

Not one bear had we met.It seemed as if the whole ursine tribe must have emigrated to Labrador.