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.

The two sat there, the man half-kneeling on the low bed, and stroking
the fur very gently. It could scarcely be thought that such pride should
be spent on a little pelt, by a mere backwoodsman and his nine-year-old
son. One has seen a woman fingering a splendid necklace, her eyes
fascinated by the bunch of warm, deep jewels--a light not of mere
vanity, or hunger, or avarice in her face--only the love of the
beautiful thing. But this was an animal's skin. Did they feel the
animal underneath it yet, giving it beauty, life, glory?

The silver-fox skin is the prize of the north, and this one was of the
boy's own harvesting. While his father was away he saw the fox creeping
by the hut. The joy of the hunter seized him, and guided his eye over
the sights of his father's rifle as he rested the barrel on the
windowsill, and the animal was his! Now his finger ran into the hole
made by the bullet, and he gave a little laugh of modest triumph.
Minutes passed as they studi