It rained all the afternoon, stopped for a half hour at sunset, when the sky, for a few moments, showed streaks of red, then closed in for a night’s drizzle.  I had built what shelter I could for the woman out of boughs covered with sheets of paper birch and elm.  I had made a similar shelter for myself that I might not seem to discriminate too much in favor of the Englishman, and had told the men to do the same.  But they were indolent, and stopped at chopping a few hemlock boughs, which they laid across crotched aspens.  In truth, our shelters accomplished little against the cold and wet.  Do what we could, we had great discomfort, and morning found the rain still dripping and the sky still unbroken gray.

And so it went for three days.  The north country has such storms in the spring, and they chill all beauty out of the woods.  We could do nothing.  We kept what fire we could, regummed the seams of the canoes, and for the rest ate, sulked, and tried to sleep.  The men gambled among themselves, and I grew weary of the click, click of their balls and the sound of their stupid boasts and low jesting.  Yet I had no ground for stopping them, for the woman understood almost nothing of their uncouth speech.  Indeed, she was little in sight or hearing.  She stayed in her bark shelter, and I could hear her moving about, trying to keep it neat and herself in order.  In those three days I learned one secret of her spirit.  She had a natural merriment that did not seem a matter of will power nor even of wish.  It was an instinctive, inborn content, that was perhaps partly physical, in that it enabled her to sleep well, and so to wake with zest and courage.  By night her eyes might be dark circled and her step slow, but each morning there was interest in her looks to see what the strange day was about to bring.  I had seen this nature in men many times; I had not thought that it belonged to women who are framed to follow rather than to look ahead.

For twenty-four hours we held little more intercourse than dumb people, but the second day she came to me.

“Monsieur, would you teach me?” she asked.  “Would you explain to me about the Indian dialects?”

I agreed.  I threw her a blanket, which she wrapped around her, and we cowered close to the bole of a pine.  I took birch bark and a crayon and turned schoolmaster, explaining that the Huron and Iroquois nations came of the same stock, but that most of the western tribes were Algonquin in blood, and that, though they had tribal differences in speech, Algonquin was the basic language, as Latin is the root of all our tongues at home.  I took the damp bark, and wrote some phrases of Algonquin, showing her the syntax as well as I had been able to reduce it to rule myself.  She had a quick ear and the power of attention, but after an hour of it I tore the bark in pieces.

“We will not try this again,” I told her roughly, and we scarcely met or spoke for the next day.