A Dark and Promised Land Page 10

  They hold a hasty conference around the morning fire, presided over by several weeping cottonwoods that rattle and scatter leaves among them. The fire snaps loudly as they speak in lowered tones. Left with few options, they decide to press on. The widowers are in a state miserable to behold, but they cannot stay any longer at the foot of the rapids. Gibson does his best to hide his grief, and even tries to smile once or twice, but the effect is ghastly. Costie remains inconsolable, and Alexander fears there will be trouble when the time comes for them to break camp.

  In honour of the dead women, Iskoyaskweyau climbs a large spruce leaning over the water and cuts away all the lower branches. It is a lopstick, Alexander explains to them, a prominent pole with a shaggy top used as a landmark and to honor important gentlemen. Along with the marking of the passage of the governor — who seemed remarkably untouched by recent events and hesitated not a moment to carry on with the brigade, leaving Turr behind to mind the dead — all felt it would be a suitable monument for the deceased.

  While climbing the tree, Iskoyaskweyau finds a torpid owl in the lower branches; he knocks it on the head and it falls out of the tree in a puff of brown and grey feathers. The cook plucks it, singes it, and tosses it into boiling water. Rose peeks into the kettle, and it so looks like a wrinkled, pink child that she loses all interest in breakfast.

  When all is prepared for departure, everyone gathers around the boats; the Indians wait in their canoes a little ways off.

  “My word, but it feels damp this morning,” Turr comments, staring up at the sky and the clouds gnawing the treetops. “I doubt we shall see the sun today.”

  Lachlan follows his gaze. “If this were Stromness, I would surmise that we are in for some rather ill weather. I hope Mr. Gibson and Mr. Costie are up to it.”

  “He is nae coming,” Gibson says, throwing his bedroll into the boat.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He wishes to stay. He will nae listen to me nor anyone. It is his choice.”

  “My word, Mr. McClure, surely we cannot allow this?”

  Alexander looks down the beach at the man sitting on a log, still staring at the river. He turns to Lachlan: “I have left him what food we can spare, but there is not much we can do. He refuses to leave, and we cannot stay. I can hardly knock him on the head and drag him along.”

  “I will speak with him,” Lachlan says.

  Alexander shrugs. “If you wish; I have tried, to no effect. But we must leave presently.”

  Lachlan walks down the beach to speak with the man; he argues and pleads, to no avail. At last his frustrated shouting carries down the river; all stop and stare. When he returns to the boat, he is red in the face.

  “Damned willful fool, won’t see reason. He would rather starve than carry on without his wife. I suppose there is a touching nobility in that, but it’s a bloody tragedy all the same.”

  He and Rose join Alexander and Turr in the boats. None of the remaining colonists wishes to ride the rapids again and the Bay men carry the lines. As they are pulled upriver, Rose turns around and sees the tiny figure of Mr. Costie, still sitting and staring at the river. They move around a bend, and he is gone.

  Chapter Seven

  The two boats follow the rest of the brigade upriver. There is sporadic evidence of them at likely landing places: ashes at the foot of White Mud portage, a torn oilcloth discarded on a beach. A fly-blown pile of quills and guts from a porcupine shot by one of the Indians.

  As predicted, the days turn cool with dark masses of thunderclouds threatening the horizon, lightning playing along their foundations. Thunder mutters around them and leaves continue to patter the river. When the skies at last clear, the deep blue of the north is dimmed by a grey-brown haze, and the smell of smoke follows the wind down the river valley. The sun is ringed and dimmed, cut by thin, endless lines of waterfowl fleeing the oncoming winter. All night long, they can hear the train as it heads south; the hurried whistle of duck wings, the honk and yelp of crane and goose. And while all else flees that can, they drag, line, and portage, making their way deeper into the continent, and the Bay now seems a distant memory.

  After a long and wearying climb up the Rock Portage, it is late in the day. They drop their burdens onto the muskeg and drag the boats to shore. The evening fire is lit, and the kitchen assembled with a sound of pots banging, and the curses of the cook and his flunky. Alexander sends out the Indians to search for game, and they vanish like a whisper into the bush.

  After seeing that camp is well underway, Alexander invites Lachlan and Declan to accompany him inland to scout a cabin he recalled in the area; he discovered it when he passed by the previous spring. It was an outpost of the North West Company — installed with great arrogance as a final attempt to intercept the passage of Indian brigades and their furs to the Bay. Turr declines to accompany them with an impatient wave of his hand, citing a sudden attack of flux, brought on by the incessant harassment of mosquitoes — those damnable, monstrous, bloody-minded little God-cursed beasts of the Devil.

  They soon find a small pole shack a little distance back from the river. The lands they have passed through these many weeks is one upholstered in a dense integument of mostly spruce and the occasional pine and tamarack, an unbroken landscape of emaciated trees gnawed by squirrels and afflicted by moulds and disease and perpetually frozen or perpetually flooded earth; but here the forest is neither so dark nor so haggard, the post built in a clearing surrounded by a sward of lovely young paper birch and aspen.

  The opening feels like a hallowed space where medicine men gather and contemplate the moon. The north wind blows through the trees, and the ground is alive with the tremors of dry yellow leaves stirred by this cold breath. As the men enter the clearing, all feel subdued as though entering a cathedral. The silence is disturbed only by their footfalls and the hiss of leaves that rise about them, flashing in the sun that has escaped below the purple fringes of wrack. They lift and fall in a choreography of air and space and great secretive distance — a voice to the empty wind. They gather in the lee of the post where they tumble in a column like a Djinn materializing on the threshold.

  A raven, dark as night, sits on the ridge of the roof, its black eyes reflecting the sun. At their approach it spreads its wings, hesitates, and flies off, its harsh voice diminishing in the distance.

  Alexander has his Baker in his hands, and he pushes the door open with the barrel; the leather hinges are cracked, and the door grates on the floor as he follows the gun inside.

  Packrats have destroyed the interior, their moldering nests piled high with trophy mounds of junk. A few old, gnawed furs lie on the floor by the door, and the skin windows and rafters are ghosted with layers of cobwebs that undulate in the sudden breeze from the open door. Lachlan hesitates, and decides to remain on the stoop while Declan follows Alexander inside. The Highlander stops just inside the door, he, too, sensing something amiss.

  Looking around the room, Alexander’s eyes fall on something bright propped up in a windowsill. His moccasins stir the dust as he walks over and picks up the delicate thing with his thick fingers. It is a small porcelain angel, with cherubic features and a broad, sad smile. Its head cocks to one shoulder, eyes gazing heavenward. It caresses a golden harp.

  Turning it over, Alexander feels a lump in his throat. Some Voyageur had carried this treasure thousands of hungry, desperate miles from Montreal; some gift of a loved one perhaps, a woman or a parent sending him off with this tender memento by which to recall them. But why would a man burden himself with such a delicate trifle? he wonders. Beyond the fragility of the thing itself, it evoked a fragility of the heart; not an undangerous thing to a Voyageur.

  He had seen them several times; they were a colourful people, dressed in capotes tied with worsted sashes and shirts striped in scarlet and open in the front to reveal broad chests. They wore bright sailor’s kerchiefs tied around their swarthy necks, and their headdresses were wild and fanciful, sporting all manner of c
oloured feathers and bullion tassels. They always seemed to be singing, while at work or at rest, puffing their long pipes.

  The glaze on the angel is crackled, and a knob on the end of the harp has been broken off. Wounded, but still capable of loving, he thinks. Very carefully, he places it back in its spot.

  “This is a terrible smell,” Lachlan says from the door, holding a handkerchief to his nose.

  “Aye,” says Declan. “There be vermin here — and more. Look!” He points to a long, rough-hewn table pushed against the far wall, knocked over so the top lies facing them, hiding from view what lies behind it, all but a knot of shaggy black hair visible on the upper edge. They all stare.

  “The poor man,” Lachlan mutters. Alexander steps forward, but the others do not follow. There is a story on the other side of that table, and one deserving to be told, thinks Lachlan, but he has had quite enough of that kind of tale on their journey. A man came here to toil his last day and others might wonder what has become of him, unaware that his bones are lost in some distant tumbled-down hovel to forever stare at a dark and uncomprehending wall until the wood itself rots into the soil around him. Or until others of his kind come and render him with soft words to the earth’s breast. He can imagine nothing lonelier.

  Alexander stands behind the table for a long time. At last, he looks up and sighs. A final glance around and he leaves the fetid room, herding the others before him. Although it is now cooler outside, the clouds having conquered the sky once more; it feels as if they have emerged from a dark mausoleum into a bright day. Alexander gently pulls the door closed behind him.

  He commands the men to gather loose brush and leaves and to pile it about the post. When he is satisfied there is enough, he kneels and stuffs a ball of down stolen from an old bird’s nest under some twigs. He strikes sparks from his knife and a flint.

  Declan’s eyes widen. “No,” he whispers. The others do not hear him. A thread of smoke rises from the duff.

  Soon the fire is licking at the dry walls of the post and smoke and sparks sail high above them. In silence, they turn their backs on this wilderness pyre and return to the river, each man lost in his own thoughts. When they return to the camp, Rose wonders about the troubled look in her father’s eye, but he does not speak of it to her.

  That night supper is served cheerless and quiet. When all have eaten and feet are offered to the fire and embers to pipes, Declan vanishes. Rose does not consider following; she had come to the conclusion that only a fool took an axe to the rotten bridge that one walked upon and that undermining her father in the opinion of others could prove personally disastrous. Eyes follow her constantly and even her habitual need to flirt is subdued.

  Declan wanders into the night, at first with an ear tuned to possible danger, but he, too, comes to a new conclusion, realizing that the true peril in this land is emptiness, the absence of warmth and succor and love. Even the desolate north Atlantic offered fish aplenty, and leviathans, and all manner of birds, and one crewman even swore he had seen a mermaid. But other than the strange deer the brigade had seen swimming the river many days ago, this land seemed barren of warm-blooded life. Scarce ever a bird to be heard or seen, except for the unlovely croaks of ravens and migrating flocks high above the land. He is sure that man in the post had died of aloneness, not violence.

  He returns to the clearing, to the still-snapping fire. Sitting in the thin grass, he looks up at a proud moon that shines down into the open space, striking everything in a pale light. The shadows of the trees seem filled with secrets. He bows his head and surrenders his tears.

  “The year of the burning, they call it,” says Alistair Gordon beside the snapping fire. Alexander had asked him why he and his people had made the hard crossing into the unknown, and he looked up to see others watching him. With a cough he rose and walked to the fire and sat close, knowing they would follow like acolytes: as the tale warmed, so would they.

  “Strathnaver, Assynt, Caithness, Dornoch, Rogort, Loth, Clyne, Golspie, and Kildonan, all put to the torch. Damn them, damn them to the flames that they had spread so far and wide.”

  He talks of the destruction of his family’s croft, the smell of burning wood and peat and the scorched flesh of his kin, his old aunt too frail to get from her bed and the soldiers, the treacherous, vengeful Irish of the Royal Fusiliers tossing in torches while holding the family at bay with musket and claymore. They had shouted that an old woman lay abed inside the house, and that vile dog of Sutherland, Patrick Sellar, turned to them and said: “Damn her, the old witch. She has lived too long. Let her burn.”

  Their croft had been burned without warning, his father and mother and two brothers cast out without possessions of any kind. In tears, they stumbled down the road toward the sea, their hearts as hot as the coals of their house. They soon discovered that it was the same everywhere, house after house, village after village burned to the earth to make room for the cursed Cheviots: Grummore and Grumbeg and Archmilidh and Sgall. Achness, Rhifail, Kidsary, Langall, Rossal, Syre, and Ceann-na-coille. Achcaoilnaborgin and Achinlochy. The glens choked with smoke and ash; the glow by night made it seem as if all of Scotland was being consumed in fire.

  They had passed the corpses of those dead from starvation and disease and violence; bodies half-consumed by dogs and rats — women, children, the old and sick, piled like fresh-cut turves along the stony path. You could not risk helping anyone who stumbled, anyone who fell.

  Sellar had accused Christy MacKay of giving shelter to an old wretch he had previously burned out, and when they found the crone, they dug a hole in the cold earth and flung her in it — still alive — and buried her. They then nailed up ’Christy’s house with her inside and set it ablaze. Her cries were heard by many, but none dared come to her aid.

  They had seen a man stop on the roadside to bury his poor dead wife. Head bowed, he had said loud enough that many could hear, Well, Janet, the Countess will never filt you again! But then the constables rode up and beat him and dragged him away, the unshrouded, fly-covered body left lying in the muddy hole by the roadside.

  But when they at last arrived at the lowlands, they found the coasts choked by a miserable mass of once-proud Highlanders seeking shelter and food. And, in the bitterest of avarice, the same lairds who had burned them from their crofts now pressed this desperate pool of labourers into harvesting kelp for almost nothing; the Lady Sutherland had created a nation of slaves.

  He yearned to gather a troop of his clansmen to rise up against those who had abused them so cruelly, but the clan chiefs were having none of it. He thought it the vilest betrayal, worst than that of the Sutherlands: you swear your life to a chief and his to yours, and together the clan is unbeatable. The Gunns had rallied against the clearances, to little effect, perhaps, but at least they carried the game to its conclusion. But the Strathnaver chiefs were murdered and bribed and burned out, and the old clans melted away like snow before a warm wind.

  The revolution in foreign parts that saw kings and queens lose their heads had struck terror in the lairds and even the merest whisper of discontent was a sure and quick path to the gallows. All knew they waited for any sign of rebellion at which they would push the Highlanders into the sea.

  But as long as the people could be sat upon and cowed, they were useful, and so emigration was forbidden. When Lord Selkirk’s envoy had offered transit to the New World, Alistair had not hesitated; he had once loved his laird, his chief, and his country, but now he could not wait to see the back of it all. Perhaps now he had a chance to make something of himself. In Rupert’s Land, they say a man does not suffer himself to be burned out. And his people will always be suspicious of fire.

  The next morning as the brigade heads out into the river, a long pall of smoke rises behind them.

  “Quire right,” Turr says. “Scoundrels and trespassers all of ’em. They should be burned right out of the country.”

  This length of the river is a series of falls and tumbling water, and
most progress achieved by dragging the boat over many portages and poling through rapids.

  After their earlier loss, the colonists are reluctant to remain in the boats through the white water, but often there is no alternative; with no passage on shore, they had to ride it out aboard.

  These are now horrible moments for Rose; she sits hunched in the bilge with black hissing water tossing them about, eyes closed and fists clenching the gunwale, a fog of spray dampening her hair and shawl.

  Alexander directs them here and there across the surface of the river, and if Rose had opened her eyes, she would have seen the art in this; behind every large stone is an arrow-shaped region of calm backwater, and in this gentle current, the men are able to pull the boat forward with little resistance. Upon reaching the face of the rock, they swing back out into the current and madly pole into the tail end of the next eddy.

  In this manner, they are able to climb many miles of rough water without mishap, but the going is exhausting work and provisions are running low; the hunt is poor, the fishing dismal. The daily allotment of pemmican is reduced, which as far as the Orkneymen are concerned is of debatable hardship, but fourteen hours of rowing and poling requires food to sustain itself and their pace upstream slows.

  “It is nae what I expected, the emptiness,” Declan says to Iskoyaskweyau.

  “It is you whites, you Êmistikôsiw,” Iskoyaskweyau replies, looking at Turr relaxing on a chair with a mug of tea beneath a large spruce. “The Company. They have trapped and hunted out all between the Bay and Missinipi.” He does not share the universal belief in the canoes, that the sour stink of so many whites announced their coming miles ahead in the river valley, clearing whatever game remained.

  “How is that possible? The land is so vast …”

  With that, Iskoyaskweyau tells Declan what life was like for his grandfather, and his father, who lived and hunted throughout the north before the Êmistikôsiw came inland, when York Fort was a wigwam on the Bay. In those days, his people brought furs to York Fort while the Êmistikôsiw hid in their wood house, like children.