The boy at nine years of age was, in manner of
speech, the merest child, but his thoughts were sometimes large and
wise. The only white child within a compass of a hundred miles or so;
the lonely life of the hills and plains, so austere in winter, so melted
to a sober joy in summer; listening to the talk of his elders at
camp-fires and on the hunting-trail, when, even as an infant almost, he
was swung in a blanket from a tree or was packed in the torch-crane of a
canoe; and more than all, the care of a good, loving--if
passionate--little mother: all these had made him far wiser than his
years. He had been hours upon hours each day alone with the birds, and
squirrels, and wild animals, and something of the keen scent and
instinct of the animal world had entered into his body and brain, so
that he felt what he could not understand.
He saw that he had worried his father, and it troubled him. He thought
of something.
"Daddy," he said, "let me have it."
A smile struggled for life in the hunter's face, as he turned to the
wall and took down the skin of a silver fox. He held it on his palm for
a moment, looking at it in an interested, satisfied way, then he brought
it over and put it into the child's hands; and the smile now shaped
itself, as he saw an eager pale face buried in the soft fur.
"Good! good!" he said involuntarily.
"_Bon! bon!_" said the boy's voice from the fur, in the language of his
mother, who added a strain of Indian blood to her French ancestry.
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