Adventure Magazine Cover, March 20, 1925 — page 143: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Bush Lopers His mind was divided in recalling the many years of savage freedom among the far tribes and in remembering disconnected phases of his youth on the St. Lawrence. Only his life with the Indians seemed real; the rest wasa dream. Beyond the St. Law- rence his boyhood was even more unreal, and yet he sighed dismally when Chartier spoke of old Anjou. His melancholy fled, however, and his companions cheered loudly, when Carcajou produced a keg of rum. Night had shrouded the point, and the fires flared against a background of velvet darkness. None could say when the bush loper brought the keg into the camp or whence he procured it. With something that smacked of legerdemain he presented it. “You can steal horns off the devil!’ ad- miringly cried the Picard. “T have loved you for your fighting; now I must love you for this,” grunted Dubeau. Chartier offered part of his ration to Dead Bear as a matter of courtesy and heard the usual refusal: “Tt makes me think of the comite. It makes my back hurt. The comite always smelled of brandy.” For two hours the keg was enjoyed by Carcajou’s circle and was then hurled empty into the water. The rest of the camp was already in blankets and the sen- tinels were at their posts. This watchful- ness resulted from custom rather than from any fear of surprize. The woods runners turned in. Carcajou took his blankets and walked outside the firelight. La Blanche followed him and complained that it was foolish to sleep away from a fire. Carcajou softly told him— “No sleep for us this night, Papa Simple.” “Even the fear of purgatory can not make me help you steal anything tonight,” passionately announced La Blanche. ‘‘Mon Dieu! What do you think? Do you expect to keep on stealing all your life and not be hung up in a cage to dry? Would you steal all of New France? Do you want to be killed as thief?” “Harsh words. Very harsh,” muttered Carcajou. ‘We will keep awake to stop some one else from stealing. Smoke that with your war tobacco, my boy.” “But there is nothing to steal, you big ox!’’ “Some one might try to steal a life, my boy. There is the black ax in the moon you dreamed of,” whispered Carcajou. 125 “The holy Saints help us!’’ croaked the old man. All the superstitions absorbed during his long life among the tribes impelled him to believe implicitly in dream omens. Like his red companions, he denied that there was any such thing as chance. Everything that happened was an omen. Dreams were superlative omens. He had endeavored to convince himself that the prophecy of the ax dream was fulfilled by the soldiers poisoned at the Narrows. But dreams had to do with the dreamer; else they would have small value. A black ax in the moon indicated violent death would come to him in the night. Carcajou’s sinister suggestion that it would be this night that Death stalked the camp left him very melancholy. He had planned to live indefinitely. Carcajou sensed his fear, and encouraged him: “Never mind the black ax, my boy. Since you dreamed that I have dreamed of many elks. An elk dream is stronger than an evil dream. One elk would be enough to cover me. But there were many elks; enough to protect my friends who keep near me. And surely I saw one very old elk that meant you, Old Papa. That is, if _you do as I say.” “I will leave my medicine bag wide open,” mumbled La Blanche. “But there was a feast I promised it. I should have made it at St. Ignace. Tell me what to do. Ifeel young. I ought to live for many years.” “You will live forever,” declared Car- cajou. “I believe you were alive when the Italian discovered this country. This is what we will do. Weare away from the light of the fires and we will spread our blankets.” “You said there was no sleep for us this night,” La Blanche reminded him. “And we will wrap our blankets around some pieces of deadwood, and then we will creep to one side and wait to see if any one brings the black ax you saw in the moon. Just remember I am an elk-dreamer, my boy, and you’ll be all right for the next two hundred years.” La Blanche was eager to. agree to any- thing. It required but a minute of groping about in the thin growth to find enough deadwood to round out the blankets in the semblance of human forms. This task finished, they crept to one side with the CORnNIECLO© S ©