“Muche Munito!” he shuddered.

He swallowed the rest of his meat hurriedly, and after that took his blankets, and with a few words in Cree to the Missioner left the cabin.

“He says they are little devils—­the mice,” said Father Roland, looking after him reflectively.  “He will sleep near the dogs.  I wonder how far his intuition goes?  He believes that Tavish harbours bad spirits in this cabin, and that they have taken the form of mice.  Pooh!  They’re cunning little vermin.  Tavish has taught them tricks.  Watch this one feed out of my hand!”

Half a dozen times they had climbed to David’s shoulders.  One of them had nestled in a warm furry ball against his neck, as if waiting.  They were certainly companionable—­quite chummy, as the Missioner said.  No wonder Tavish harboured them in his loneliness.  David fed them and let them nibble from his fingers, and yet they gave him a distinctly unpleasant sensation.  When the Missioner had finished his last cup of coffee he crumbled a thick chunk of bannock and placed it on the floor back of the stove.  The mice gathered round it in a silent, hungry, nibbling horde.  David tried to count them.  There must have been twenty.  He felt an impulse to scoop them up in something, Tavish’s water pail for instance, and pitch them out into the night.  The creatures became quieter after their gorge on bannock crumbs.  Most of them disappeared.

For a long time David and the Missioner sat smoking their pipes, waiting for Tavish.  Father Roland was puzzled and yet he was assured.  He was puzzled because Tavish’s snow shoes hung on their wooden peg in one of the cross logs and his rifle was in its rack over the bunk.

“I didn’t know he had another pair of snow shoes,” he said.  “Still, it is quite a time since I have seen him—­a number of weeks.  I came down in the early November snow.  He is not far away or he would have taken his rifle.  Probably setting a few fresh poison-baits after the storm.”

They heard the sweep of a low wind.  It often came at night after a storm, usually from off the Barrens to the northwest.  Something thumped gently against the outside of the cabin, a low, peculiarly heavy and soft sort of sound, like a padded object, with only the log wall separating it from the bunk.  Their ears caught it quite distinctly.

“Tavish hangs his meat out there,” the Missioner explained, observing the sudden direction of David’s eyes.  “A haunch of moose, or, if he has been lucky, of caribou.  I had forgotten Tavish’s cache or we might have saved our meat.”

He ran a hand through his thick, grayish hair until it stood up about his head like a brush.