Well,
good luck, Jean! but I don't like your tackling those breeds alone."

Jean shook hands with the factor.

"Bon-jour, M'sieu Cameron, and t'anks!"

"If you don't drop in here on your way back, give my regards to Gillies
and his family, and be careful," said the factor as Marcel left him.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MEETING IN THE MARSHES

Two days later, after rounding Point Comfort, Marcel was crossing the
mud-flats of Gull Bay. At last the stalk was on, for somewhere in the
vast marshes of the Hannah Bay coast, camped the men he had followed
four hundred miles to meet face to face and fight for his dog. Somewhere
ahead, through the gray mist, back in the juniper and alder scrub beyond
the wide reaches of tide-flats and goose-grass, was Fleur, a prisoner.

That night in camp at East Point, while he cleaned the action and bore
of his rifle, the clatter of the geese in the muskeg behind the far
lines of spruce edging the marshes, filled him with wonder. Never on the
bold East Coast had he heard such a din of geese gathering for the long
flight. At dawn, for it was windy, lines of gray Canadas passing
overhead bound out to the shoals, waked him with their clamor. The tide
was low, and he carried his canoe across the mud-flats through flocks of
plover, snipe and yellow-legs, feeding behind the ebb, while teal and
black-duck swarmed along the beaches.

As he poled his canoe south through the shoals, he recalled the tales
his father had told him of the marshes of Hannah Bay, the greatest
breeding ground of the gray goose and black duck in all the wide north.
Everywhere along the bars and sand-spits the gray Canadas were idling,
always with an erect, keen-eyed sentinel on guard. Farther out, white
islands of snowy geese flashed in the sun, as here and there a "wavy"
rose on the water to flap his black-tipped wings. Just in from their
Arctic breeding-grounds, they were lingering for a month's feast on
toothsome south-coast goose-grass before seeking their winter home on
the great Gulf two thousand miles away.

Slowly throughout the morning Marcel travelled along the mud-flats bared
for miles by the retreating tide. At times the breeze carried to his
ears the faint sound of firing, but there were goose-boats from Moose
and Rupert House on the coast, and it meant little. That night as the
tide covered the marshes he ran up a channel of the Harricanaw delta
seeking a camp-ground on its higher shores.

Landing he w