It would have died, had it not been for Nepeese, his daughter.

His wife had named her Nepeese, which means the Willow.
Nepeese had grown up like the willow, slender as a reed, with all her mother's wild beauty, and with a little of the French thrown in.

She was sixteen, with great, dark, wonderful eyes, and hair so beautiful that an agent from Montreal passing that way had once tried to buy it.
It fell in two shining braids, each as big as a man's wrist, almost to her knees.

"Non, M'sieu," Pierrot had said, a cold glitter in his eyes as he saw what was in the agent's face.

"It is not for barter." Two days after Baree had entered his trapping ground, Pierrot came in from the forests with a troubled look in his face.
"Something is killing off the young beavers," he explained to Nepeese, speaking to her in French.