The Going of the White Swan

I

"Why don't she come back, father?"

The man shook his head, his hand fumbled with the wolfskin robe covering
the child, and he made no reply.

"She'd come if she knew I was hurted, wouldn't she?"

The father nodded, and then turned restlessly toward the door, as though
expecting some one. The look was troubled, and the pipe he held was not
alight, though he made a pretense of smoking.

"Suppose the wildcat had got me, she'd be sorry when she comes, wouldn't
she?"

There was no reply yet, save by gesture, the language of primitive man;
but the big body shivered a little, and the uncouth hand felt for a
place in the bed where the lad's knee made a lump under the robe. He
felt the little heap tenderly, but the child winced.

"S-sh, but that hurts! This wolfskin's most too much on me, isn't it,
father?"

The man softly, yet awkwardly, lifted the robe, folded it back, and
slowly uncovered the knee. The leg was worn away almost to skin and
bone, but the knee itself was swollen with inflammation. He bathed it
with some water, mixed with vinegar and herbs, then drew down the
deer-skin shirt, and did the same with the child's shoulder. Both
shoulder and knee bore the marks of teeth,--where a huge wildcat had
made havoc--and the body had long red scratches.

Presently the man shook his head sorrowfully, and covered up the small
disfigured frame again, but this time with a tanned skin of the caribou.
The flames of the huge wood-fire dashed the walls and floor with a
velvety red and black, and the large iron kettle, bought of the Company
at Fort Sacrament, puffed out geysers of steam.

The place was a low hut with parchment windows and rough mud-mortar
lumped between the logs. Skins hung along two sides, with bullet-holes
and knife-holes showing: of the great gray wolf, the red puma, the
bronze hill-lion, the beaver, the bear, and the sable; and in one corner
was a huge pile of them. Bare of the usual comforts as the room was, it
had a sort of refinement also, joined to an inexpressible loneliness,
you could scarce have told how or why.

"Father," said the boy, his face pinched with pain for a moment, "it
hurts so, all over, every once in a while."

His fingers caressed the leg just below the knee.

"Father," he suddenly added, "what does it mean when you hear a bird
sing in the middle of the night?"

The woodsman looked down anxiously into the boy's face. "It hasn't no
meaning, Dominique. There ain't such a thing on the Labrador Heights as
a bird singin' in the night. That's only in warm countries where there's
nightingales. So--_bien sur!_"