"You shame me, colonel," I said, and went on hurriedly. "Rafael, the guide, was pleased about the bear. 'When gentlemens kill t'ings, guides is more happy,' he explained to me, and he proceeded to tell an anecdote. He prefaced it by informing me that one time he hunt bear and he see devil. He had been hunting, it seemed, two or three winters before with his brother-in-law at the headwaters of the St. Maurice River, up north there," I elucidated, pointing through the window toward the "long white street of Beauport," across the St. Lawrence. "It's very lonely country, entirely wild, Indian hunting-ground yet. These two Hurons, Rafael and his brother-in-law, were on a two months' trip to hunt and trap, having their meagre belongings and provisions on sleds which they dragged across the snow. They depended for food mostly on what they could trap or shoot--moose, caribou, beaver, and small animals. But they had bad luck. They set many traps but caught nothing, and they saw no game to shoot. So that in a month they were hard pressed. One cold day they went two miles to visit a beaver trap, where they had seen signs. They hoped to find an animal caught and to feast on beaver tail, which is good eating." Here I had to stop and explain much about beaver tails, and the rest of beavers, to the Frenchman, who was interested like a boy in this new, almost unheard-of beast. At length: "Rafael and his brother-in-law were disappointed. A beaver had been close and eaten the bark off a birch stick which the men had left, but nothing was in the trap. They turned and began a weary walk through the desolate country back to their little tent. Small comfort waited for them there, as their provisions were low, only flour and bacon left. And they dared not expend much of that. They were down-hearted, and to add to it a snow-storm came on and they lost their way. Almost a hopeless situation--an uninhabited country, winter, snow, hunger. And they were lost. '_Egare. Perdu_,' Rafael said. But the Huron was far from giving up. He peered through the falling snow, not thick yet, and spied a mountain across a valley. He knew that mountain. He had worked near it for two years, logging--the '_chantier_,' they call it. He knew there was a good camp on a river near the mountain, and he knew there would be a stove in the camp and, as Rafael said, 'Mebbe we haf a luck and somebody done gone and lef' somet'ing to eat,' Rafael prefers to talk English to me. He told me all this in broken English.