Each day added to the gloom at Lac Bain. For a time Jan could not
fully understand, and he still played his violin and romped joyfully
with Melisse in the little cabin. He had not lived through the plague
of nineteen years before. Most of the others had, even to Mukee, the
youngest of them all.
Jan did not know that it was this Red Terror that came like a Nemesis
of the gods to cut down the people of the great Northland, until they
were fewer in number than those of the Sahara desert. But he learned
quickly. In February, the Crees along Wollaston Lake were practically
wiped out. Red flags marked the trail of the Nelson. Death leaped from
cabin to cabin in the wilderness to the west. By the middle of the
month, Lac Bain was hemmed in by the plague on all sides but the
north.
The post's trap-lines had been shortened; now they were abandoned
entirely, and the great fight began. Williams assembled his men, and
told them how that same battle had been fought nearly two decades
before. For sixty miles about the post every cabin and wigwam that
floated a red flag must be visited--and burned if the occupants were
dead. In learning whether life or death existed in these places lay
the peril for those who undertook the task. It was a dangerous
mission.
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