ter!' 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 w