A Dark and Promised Land Page 3

  As he grew older, he had followed his father more often into distant lands, paddling with the others, trading and learning the craft of the wilderness. When his father drowned in Knee Lake, he took over where the old man had left off, as a fur trader on the Bay. But he felt an incompetent shadow of the great, bearish Scot who had dominated his life, especially after the death of his mother.

  Yet now, all is quiet. The ships have not come. What is happening in the world that so much he has trusted is in danger of slipping away?

  “I don’t know what to say, sir.”

  “Listen, son, if I didn’t think it was possible I wouldn’t put this on you. You’re young, but you’re capable. It’s a test, all right, but we all have to endure. The Company might not last another year. The ships might have foundered. You might lead the colonists to ruin. I don’t need to tell you that life is lived on the edge of death and disaster, but we do the best we can. I have my crosses, and I’m giving you yours. God help us all.”

  Chapter Three

  The Indians silently approach the survivors on the beach. As the Europeans become aware of the strangers, they stumble away. The tallest of the newcomers approaches Lachlan. His shadowed eyes travel over the Orkneyman and glance at the burning wreck. The cries for help are dying away; the flames still growing. The Indian gestures to Lachlan and turns away.

  Lachlan grabs the officer sitting on the beach, and hauls him to his feet.

  “I think they mean for us to follow them. Quickly, man, there is not a moment to lose.”

  “What? Oh, yes …” says the officer, seeing the departing Indians for the first time. “Come along everyone, we must follow the Savages. Smartly now!”

  One by one, the colonists fall into line. Moans and soft cries can still be heard. A dark line of them forms off the beach; not all who leave the water’s edge make it as far as the tree line before collapsing. A few hold back in fear, but, after the flames find the ship’s magazine, the Intrepid explodes with a great detonation, the icy water of the Bay instantly rushing in and consuming the hulk. A great hiss goes up, followed by roiling clouds of steam.

  Absolute darkness and the silence of the dead chase the last stragglers from the beach, following as best they can, stumbling over the occasional body in the darkness.

  The Indians had not waited, and, almost as soon as the Europeans enter the forest, they become lost in the tangled, scrubby trees. They stand together crying for help in God’s name, when they find the Indians amongst them again, eyeing them like mouse shit found in the pemmican.

  Rose clings to her father as they stumble over half-seen bushes and branches in the dark, snow dusting them. Her awareness has diminished to a small, shrinking core.

  The path to the Indian’s camp is mercifully short, and soon they come upon a collection of five conical tents of hide stretched over poles; a pale yellow they glow, a weird and unearthly light flickering like a will-o-the-wisp. Dogs bark and flaps are thrown open as they approach.

  The widowed women commandeer a tipi for themselves and the orphaned children. Once inside they sprawl about, several almost naked. The tipi is too small, and those with the strength sit leaning against each other. A few sobs for those who died, and more for those who survived.

  Indian women bring in armloads of wood and throw them on the fire. Sparks and a smoky haze, miasma of wet wool, and the sour spice of filthy, lousy bodies engulfs the tipi. The temperature soars. They sit in a huddle separate from the Europeans, and a sheen of sweat appears on their dark faces. They set a copper pot to boiling and toss in a handful of small, hairy leaves. One of them fills tin cups and carries the tea to the survivors. Perhaps a dozen are capable of responding.

  She brings Rose a cup, and, propping up her head, holds it to her lips. The scent is earthy and fragrant, but the taste bitter. She softly speaks words that Rose cannot understand, but there is no mistaking the tenderness in the woman’s voice. She chews several of the tea leaves and places them as a damp poultice on Rose’s cut hands. Rose smiles at the touch and looks into the kind woman’s face. The Indian returns her smile, her brown fingertips tracing with wonder along Rose’s white arm. She wraps the cuts in soft cloth.

  Another presents Rose with a ribbon of dried meat from a skin bag. While she had never really believed all the ghoulish stories she has heard about these people — stories of infant sacrifice and cannibalism — when confronted by this piece of anonymous flesh, Rose thanks her, and surreptitiously pushes it out under the edge of the tent where it is wolfed down by one of the dogs.

  The Indians give them a few blankets and robes in which to wrap themselves, and those who are able, turn away from each other and pull off their sodden clothes. The Indians watch with wide eyes.

  “I’ll take a cane to your eyes, any o’ thee that look upon me,” says an old woman in a voice high and weak, her thin jaw quivering. “’Tis not Christian to be seen like this, not afore the heathen.” She pulls off her rags, revealing pale, sagging buttocks covered in veins and blue blotches. The Indians attempt to suppress their giggles as they chatter to each other in their own language.

  “Look at the udders on her; like a nursing buffalo.”

  “They are so pale, like a pike’s belly.”

  “Pike with hair, you mean; see the thatch on the old one!”

  The wind rattles the stiff hides against the poles, and Rose feels a cold draft wrap around her legs like a snake. There are nowhere near enough furs for all the Europeans and they are forced to share; chilled, naked bodies press against one another in great embarrassment.

  Pushed to the edge of a robe, the skinny feet and legs of an emaciated and filthy girl stick out. Rose opens her blanket and the child mechanically slides over. Pressing her cold, knobby frame against Rose, she immediately falls asleep.

  Rose too needs to sleep, and wishes her father is with her. She curls up on the bed of prickly conifer boughs and wraps her arms around the child, surprised at how cold and hard she is: utterly without animal warmth, like a tree root. A flea bites her, and mechanically she scratches at the place. She wonders where they are and whether it is near the end of their journeying. Her father said something about Red River. Perhaps this is the same place.

  When she closes her eyes, scenes from that night’s horror intrude: screams of the dying, wooden feel of corpses that they pushed past on the trail. The smell of the burning frigate. She clenches her teeth, squeezing her eyes against the tears. Her body shakes.

  Beside her, the Indians stare into their snapping fire while Vega glimmers down through the smokehole. Out in the forest, a nighthawk chuurs and Rose thinks she hears a wolf howl, but it might be a dream.

  The next morning dawns cloudy and grey, the light in the Indian’s tipi broadening in the dull morning. The child beside Rose is stiff and cold. Rose had cried many tears in the long night, and, looking at the girl, all she feels is an empty sorrow. She pushes the matted hair aside and closes the eyes, muttering a brief prayer.

  The air in the tipi is thick with smoke and the low-tide smell of the colonists. Rose vaguely wishes she still had the perfumed handkerchief she had often pressed against her nose while aboard the close, foul ship.

  She sees one of the Indian women nursing an infant. They are comely enough, she decides, despite their bizarre colouration. High cheekbones, small, flat noses, and full lips. Black hair rolled up on either sides of their heads, held in place by a strip of leather and a bone pin. White paint and red ochre cover their arms, and white woollen blankets ringed with twin indigo stripes serve as coats. Soft leggings of skin, decorated with beadwork in colourful patterns. Their feet are dressed in slippers of a similar material, likewise decorated. They are very exotic, Rose decides.

  “We be forsaken,” moans an Orkneywoman from beneath a heavy fur robe. Limp hair hangs in her swollen red face. She jostles her huddled neighbors. “The heathen be eatin’ us for certain.”

  The nursing woman gives her an angry look. “If that was our wish, you alre
ady be dead,” she says, her comprehension of their language startling the colonists. An uncomfortable silence follows.

  An old Indian woman — with hair as long and white as her robe and with a face the texture and colour of old boot leather — leans sideways and farts. She opens a toothless mouth in a broad grin. Everyone begins giggling.

  Rose turns to the woman with the infant and hesitatingly introduces herself. The child suckles with great vigour. Its mother stares into the fire. After a long pause she replies, “I am Isqe-sis.”

  “Thank you for helping us, Isqe-sis. We would not have survived on the beach.”

  Isqe-sis looks up at her. “No good you die there. Tomorrow take to fort. Much …” she thinks a moment, “gifts for your lives: knives, pots, blankets. This why we do.”

  “You mean a reward?”

  The woman nods.

  “I see.” Rose frowns. “Is this fort very far?”

  “No far. One day’s journey.”

  Rose thinks the utilitarian motives for the Indian’s help far from Christianlike, and though it gives her a vague sense of being a hostage, she realizes their value is in being kept alive, therefore it is unlikely that any of them will be murdered or eaten. She had expected to see scalps hanging from the poles of the tipi and is surprised that there is only a few ermine, a white goose, and a pair of skin bags containing the dried meat and the strange tea. Despite herself, she feels vaguely disappointed at how crudely prosaic it all seems.

  “Rose? Is that you?” Her father taps on the outside of the tipi.

  Standing outside, huddled in their borrowed skins and blankets, they stare with fear at the encircling forest. Twisted black spires leaning this way and that, hung with pale green epiphytes that flutter like nightmarish cobwebs in the thin wind. Shadows lie heavy beneath the trees. The bright skulls of slaughtered animals hang on several boughs, and the clearing looks even more disturbing by day than it had by night.

  Another fire had been started, and the old Indian woman walks over to a carcass hanging from a tree. She saws off chunks of meat, impales them on willow twigs, and places them over the fire. The roasting smell is glorious.

  The colonists gather around, ravenous. Lachlan asks how Rose is feeling, and she affirms that she is well enough, all things considering.

  “Indeed?” Lachlan replies. “Well, my neck’s very sore. But after last night, praise the Lord that we are still drawing breath.”

  Rose agrees with him, though she has no idea where they are and is still uncertain of the outlandish people who have rescued them. With a lowered voice, she informs Lachlan that they spoke English. He looks at her with arched eyebrow, but does not respond.

  The wind seems to pass through her robe. She doesn’t need to climb a tree to know that the ranks of brush and bole go on for endless leagues. There is something about the chill of the wind, the immutability of it that gives the impression that the surrounding forest is breathing, and is a beast of unimaginable size.

  There were the odd winter days in Stromness when the weather turned to the south and the thermometer almost burst in the sudden warmth; she could smell the lush green of distant tropical lands on that breeze, hear the chatter of brightly plumed birds as they swooped from palm to palm.

  The air now moving past has that sense of space and distance, but unlike that delicious equatorial ghost, this air whispers of barrenness, speaks of a land cold and empty of anything warm.

  After a breakfast in which Lachlan watches the Indians closely, but does not address them beyond a cautious “Thank you, ma’am,” when he is handed a spear of meat, the survivors don what remain of their rags and the Indians give Rose a stained capote and a pair of moose-hide leggings. They are much too large for her and she is required to cinch them high up under her breasts with a length of hemp. The Indians have no moccasins to spare, and she is forced to tie rotten and discarded pieces of hide around her feet.

  Several colonists return to the beach. Wreckage is scattered far down the strand, and there are many bodies half-buried in gravel or shrouded in kelp. Of the two ships that accompanied them, there is nothing to be seen.

  Rose stands listening to the hush and roar of surf. On the blurred horizon, the grey water blends with the equally sombre sky, making her feel enveloped on all sides by the same empty waste. Somewhere out there is her home, countless leagues east. The ship that had died on these shores had been her only connection with everything she has ever known, and it feels as if a part of her has perished with it.

  She feels a sudden tumble of emotion — grief, fear, and anger at her father for bringing them to this terrible place. She had been awed by the enormity of the Northern Sea, and struck dumb by the mountains of blue-green-grey ice through which the Intrepid had attempted to navigate, but any sense of adventure she carried with her from Orkney — a delicate bird it had proved to be — had perished on the night’s killing strand.

  Most of all she feels overwhelmed by the emptiness. Her life has been a safe one; she had the time and comfort to believe in adventures filled with courage and extravagant heroism. But their arrival in Rupert’s Land changed everything: wonder and hope becoming meaningless, ignoble death. There is no page to turn or cover to close; she is trapped within a story not of her choosing, facing a future utterly beyond her control. Even now, the men gather to decide the course of action, her voice unimportant and unwanted.

  “Damned, unnecessary tragedy,” her father says, standing beside her in his wrinkled coat and breeches. She is startled to see how gaunt he looks, with shadowed cheeks and purple fans below his eyes. His hands tremble. “That captain was a fool,” he says.

  “It was an accident, was it not, Father?”

  “Yes, Rose, but preventable — ah, look at that damned whitemaa there. Get, get, I say!” He runs waving his hands at a gull that had approached a corpse. The bird spreads its long white wings and floats off, screeing down the beach.

  “We must bury these poor folk,” Lachlan says.

  “Aye, but with what?” someone replies.

  “York Fort will have the tools that we need.”

  “Perhaps the other ships, they will find us?”

  “They have been scattered by the tempest. But perhaps they will take us south.” Lachlan waves a hand at the Indians.

  “Aye,” replied a grizzled Orkneyman. “Ah spoke with their chief, the big buck standing there. He says they can paddle some o’ us down the coast to the fort. It’s nae far, he says, though I dinna much trust him.”

  “Pray, lower your voice, sir, they understand English.”

  “So kin me dog, but I dinna worry about it.” Several men share a nervous chuckle.

  Lachlan looks down at the body. A middle-aged man, naked but for a wrapping of polished green seaweed over his belly and legs. He is on his back, eyes open and staring. Tiny puddles of seawater had collected over his shrunken orbits, and he appears to be studying the sky through spectacles. Lachlan wonders if he had met the man, had spoken to him. He does not remember the face. He reaches over and closes the eyes, wiping his wet fingers on his breeches.

  “We cannot leave them here to the whitemaa or be washed out to sea. If we have no means to bury them then we must bring them above the tide, cover them with boughs, and stand watch. This much must be done.”

  “But which of us will go with the heathen?”

  “I shall go. And my daughter shall go with me as she has lost her habiliments. The Company officer will know from whom at York Fort we should procure assistance. I do not know whom else. You, perhaps.”

  The man, a muscular Highlander with a black scraggly beard and weary eyes, nods at him.

  The task of gathering the dead is a grisly one, as scavengers have already defiled some of the corpses. At least half of the ship’s complement has died, though most are not accounted for in the pale forms scattered on the beach.

  As the day lengthens, the clouds begin to dissipate and a weak sun gradually emerges. The breeze dies and biting inse
cts flow down from the wall of trees the way a cool air flows from a height with the coming of night. The Indians start a smudge fire of seaweed, but it doesn’t help much against the onslaught.

  The men carry the bodies to a spot above the high-water mark as far from the forest as possible, the Indians warning that there are animals who will and can walk off with a corpse or part of one at the turn of a back: bear, lynx, wolf, marten, wolverine, and lion, plus a host of small and furtive beasts happy to snatch a mouthful of carrion.

  The women take axes and cut spruce boughs to cover the bodies, the beach echoing with the sound of distant chopping. Although she is not expected to work, Rose feels she would be remiss to not contribute. She stands in a bog and hews at tough, pitch-covered spruce branches while mosquitoes and blackflies crawl over her hands and face. It is more difficult than anything she has experienced, and sweat runs into her eyes. With each step, she sinks ankle-deep into wet peat. Moss hangs from overhead branches, dragging through her hair, and coating it in cobwebs and pine needles.

  The axe handle suddenly shatters, the ricocheting head scoring her forehead. Blood quickly begins flowing. She stumbles and sits heavily in the peat, weeping. Isqe-sis yanks the broken handle from her hand and throws it into the forest.

  “This what you Êmistikôsiw, you Whites trade with us, this …” and she begins a long diatribe, not a word of which Rose understands, although the anger is unmistakable. Still cursing, the woman presses a handful of the moss to Rose’s wound.

  “In winter such axe could kill a man or his family,” she says. “Bad guns, bad axes, sick clothes …”

  Rose cannot help but feel that although Isqe-sis is tending her, the Indian would just as rather leave her to bleed. She feels a rising indignation; what has she done to incur this person’s wrath? Was not she the offended party? She sees a small, silver crucifix peeking from a fold in Isqe-sis’s capote.