Minutes passed as they studied, felt, and admired the skin, the hunter
proud of his son, the son alive with a primitive passion, which inflicts
suffering to get the beautiful thing. Perhaps the tenderness as well as
the wild passion of the animal gets into the hunter's blood, and tips
his fingers at times with an exquisite kindness--as one has noted in a
lion fondling her young, or in tigers as they sport upon the sands of
the desert. This boy had seen his father shoot a splendid moose, and, as
it lay dying, drop down and kiss it in the neck for sheer love of its
handsomeness. Death is no insult. It is the law of the primitive
world--war, and love in war.




[Illustration]

II


They sat there for a long time, not speaking, each busy in his own way:
the boy full of imaginings, strange, half-heathen, half-angelic
feelings; the man roaming in that savage, romantic, superstitious
atmosphere which belongs to the north, and to the north alone. At last
the boy lay back on his pillow, his finger still in the bullet-hole of
the pelt. His eyes closed, and he seemed about to fall asleep, but
presently looked up and whispered: "I haven't said my prayers, have I?"

The father shook his head in a sort of rude confusion.

"I can pray out loud if I want to, can't I?"