For a week David and Baree remained at Horseshoe Bay with the Frenchman.  Then they went on around the end of the lake toward Fort Chippewyan.  Bouvais accompanied them, out of friendship purely, and they travelled afoot with fifty-pound packs on their shoulders, for in the big, sunlit reaches the ground was already growing bare of snow.  Bouvais turned back when they were ten miles from Fort Chippewyan, explaining that it was a nasty matter to have knocked two teeth down a factor’s throat, and particularly down the throat of the head factor of the Chippewyan and Athabasca district.  “And they went down,” assured Bouvais.  “He tried to spit them out, but couldn’t.”  A few hours later David met the factor and observed that Bouvais had spoken the truth; at least there were two teeth missing, quite conspicuously.  Hatchett was his name.  He looked it; tall, thin, sinewy, with bird-like eyes that were shifting this way and that at all times, as though he were constantly on the alert for an ambush, or feared thieves.  He was suspicious of David, coming in alone in this No Man’s Land with a pack on his back; a white man, too, which made him all the more suspicious.  Perhaps a possible free trader looking for a location.  Or, worse still, a spy of the Company’s hated competitors, the Revilon Brothers.  It took some time for Father Roland’s letter to convince him that David was harmless.  And then, all at once, he warmed up like a birch-bark taking fire, and shook David’s hand three times within five minutes, so hungry was he for a white man’s companionship—­an honest white man’s, mind you, and not a scoundrelly competitor’s!  He opened four cans of lobsters, left over from Christmas, for their first meal, and that night beat David at seven games of cribbage in a row.  He wasn’t married, he said; didn’t even have an Indian woman.  Hated women.  If it wasn’t for breeding a future generation of trappers he would not care if they all died.  No good.  Positively no good.  Always making trouble, more or less.  That’s why, a long time ago, there was a fort at Chippewyan—­sort of blockhouse that still stood there.  Two men, of two different tribes, wanted same woman; quarrelled; fought; one got his blamed head busted; tribes took it up; raised hell for a time—­all over that rag of a woman!  Terrible creatures, women were.  He emphasized his belief in short, biting snatches of words, as though afraid of wearing out his breath or his vocabulary or both.  Maybe his teeth had something to do with it.  Where the two were missing he carried the stem of his pipe, and when he talked the stem clicked, like a Castanet.