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Kay-gwa-daush, and tell her about the beauty mark.
    Now they would eat the stew and he would make a sterile mud pack for the wound and they would head north. Just a nice, leisurely trip to see old friends.
    But still he found himself pushing, hurrying, and he didn’t really know why.

Chapter 7

    Brian boiled lake mud and packed it, still wet but not hot, on the wound. Much of it fell off but some stayed and seemed to help and while he was doing it he thought of a better solution. He would get spruce and pine gum from tree sap where it formed on the trunks and melt it and put that over the wound. That stuff stuck to everything. He thought, I’ll do that when we stop this evening. He smiled. He was already thinking and saying
we
—it was like the dog had always been there.
    He ate a little of the rabbit meat and two of the fish and gave the rest to the dog, still in the pot. And the dog ate everything, fish heads, bones, rabbit bones, meat, and then drank all the broth and looked at Brian in open gratitude, wagging her tail and folding her ears down in a submissive gesture.
    “My, my, you were hungry, weren’t you?” Brian cleaned the pot and loaded the canoe, wondering how it would all work. He had become competent with a canoe, perhaps even expert, but he had never tried to take a large dog with him. Canoes were not the most stable of craft and a dog going crazy would pretty much upset the whole applecart. He tied the cargo down well and used a bit of cord to lash his bow and quiver so that if they rolled all the gear would stay with the canoe.
    He needn’t have worried.
    He pushed the canoe into the shallows, turned it until it was sideways to the bank and turned to get the dog but she jumped in ahead of the cargo and sat down and waited for Brian to get in.
    Clearly, Brian thought, the dog had been in canoes before—as she would have done if she had been a Cree camp dog.
    He pushed off and had not gone twenty yards when the dog’s full stomach, the warm sun and the rocking motion of the boat combined and the dog lay down on the floor of the canoe and went to sleep.
    Brian stroked evenly, using a long reach and a straight pull back to move the canoe in a steady flow forward. There were thousands of lakes in the north country, and almost all of them were connected by streams or small rivers. The general flow was north, or northwest, although there was a lot of meandering through low hills. Brian moved to the north end of the lake looking for the outlet and saw a beaver dam across the stream that flowed there.
    He had to unload the canoe on top of the dam, lower it by hand and repack it in the stream below. It was the only thing he didn’t like about the Kevlar canoe. It was light and wonderfully strong, but too flexible for hard work. He knew the Crees had heavy old thick fiberglass canoes and when they came to a beaver dam like this they would simply get up a head of steam and just slide over the top of it, down the far side and off into the stream.
    But the dog jumped nimbly out of the canoe and back in with no problem and they followed the stream four or five miles, moving through several ponds and over five more beaver dams before coming to another lake.
    Because of the time spent going over dams it was coming on to evening, time to find a place to stop before dark so he could catch some fish and maybe do an evening hunt for a small deer.
    They had seen four moose during the day, feeding in the ponds, and two of them would have been easy kills. Brian had come very close on one of them, a small bull. But still, he was over six hundred pounds and even with the dog that was too much meat to deal with and he didn’t want to waste it.
    The dog’s reaction to the moose had been interesting. Rather than bark or whine or even make a fuss the dog had merely crouched in the canoe, laid its ears down to lower its silhouette and watched in silence, now and then looking back at Brian as if to say, “Aren’t you going to