Miller was already three-parts drunk when he came down to the wharf, his head cocked suspiciously at the three young strangers coming ashore in the company of John Senior. He didn’t remember meeting Richmond as a boy either. He didn’t recall the harsh weather during the trip out of St. John’s or the way his business partner had sat next to him without speaking
a word the entire journey. “Although that sounds like the contrary bastard, hey?” he said. He nodded at John Senior where he sat and laughed. He scratched wildly at his hair as if it wasn’t untidy enough to suit him. “You didn’t just make that bit up now, did you? I promised you work, did I?”
John Peyton had never heard Miller speak but his voice changed when he quoted these words to Buchan, borrowing the tone of contented surliness that those who’d known Miller used when telling the story.
Buchan shook his head. He said, “I’m sorry not to have had the chance to make Mr. Miller’s acquaintance. He was quite the character it seems.”
“It was Richmond and Taylor that found him. The body,” Peyton said. “After the Reds got to him.”
Buchan nodded. “And they stayed on with your father.”
“Yes sir. And scrapping all the while.” Peyton watched the fire. His feet were so close to the heat that steam rose from his boots and still he was shivering with the cold. “As long as they don’t turn on any of the rest of us, they can snipe at one another as much as they like, is my opinion.”
Buchan tapped the bowl of his pipe against his boot. “All right,” he said.
The wind had gone down with the sun and the temperature dropped as the sky cleared overhead. A second fire was kindled and the men huddled between the two under blankets or furs, but the cold was so intense that no one was able to cobble together a proper stretch of sleep. Peyton managed to fall off only a few minutes at a time before the aching woke him and he stamped his feet or slapped his hands to bring the tingle of feeling back into his limbs. Men got up to fuel the fire or simply
to pace the length of the camp to ward off the frost.
Some time after midnight Peyton woke with severe stomach cramps from the nearly raw game he’d eaten and he walked a little ways into the woods to relieve himself. He squatted beside a tree facing the sail wall which billowed and snapped in the breeze. The firelight threw the men’s distorted shadows on the canvas where they lifted and fell like souls lost in a tide and a sadness that he mistook for fear came over him then. Below the tilt the frozen length of the Exploits was a wide blue scar banked by darkness. The force of the water moving underneath the ice shifted the surface and the forest echoed the hollow crack back and forth across the river. Peyton hunched there and shivered and he thought of Cassie walking alone through these selfsame woods in the fall. The voices of the men still awake in the camp moved in the trees overhead like birds calling against the cold and the darkness.
They broke camp at dawn. The morning was clear with a sharp wind out of the northwest. The men were so tired and in such a frozen state they stumbled and moved drunkenly about, their hands and feet nearly devoid of feeling until the day’s exertions returned some warmth to their bodies. They travelled for two miles, past Reilly’s trapping tilt nestled back among the trees and on to the Nutt Islands. Half an hour beyond them they reached a small waterfall and stopped to rest and trade off the sledges. Above the waterfall, a long series of rapids had ridged the ice so severely that it was nearly impossible to haul the sledges over them and a small party walked ahead of the main group to map the least treacherous route forward. The leather
lashings that held the sledges together worked loose from the constant banging and they were forced to make frequent stops to rebind them.
By late afternoon the expedition had travelled a little less than seven miles. They hauled the sledges into the trees on the north side of the river and cut spruce to fence in the fireplace and cooked a meal of salt pork and meat from the second haunch of caribou that they’d collected on their way past the carcass earlier in the day. The night was no warmer than the one previous but the men were so exhausted that all but the watches slept through until dawn. Before setting out in the morning, Buchan had a cask packed with two days’ worth of bread, salt pork, cocoa and sugar buried at the campsite for use on the way back down the Exploits.
The shelvy ice conditions deteriorated as they moved upriver and the men not employed at hauling worked ahead with axes or cutlasses to level the highest ridges and fill the valleys with ice and snow to keep the sledges from coming to pieces on impact. By afternoon three of the sledges were so badly damaged that the party was forced to stop while repairs were made and the expedition’s gear was repacked. Two of Cull’s men and the ship’s boy were sent a mile ahead to set up camp and start a fire, which the rest of the party reached just after dark.
In the early afternoon of the sixteenth they arrived at the foot of the first great waterfall. Buchan travelled ahead with Cull and Hughster to search for the Indian path used by the Beothuk to portage above the falls and the rest of the party fenced in a fireplace to camp for the night on the north side of the river. Peyton and Reilly strapped on pot-lid rackets and took their firearms up
a brook that met the river near the camp and half a mile in came on a beaver dam that backed the brook up into a fair-sized pond. The rattle at the head of the dam kept an area clear of ice and the two men crouched in the woods nearby. Since Cassie’s visit to Reilly’s tilt, there was a new awkwardness between the two men. Their habitual banter seemed contrived and adolescent and they hadn’t managed yet to fashion a language to suit the darkened circumstances of their friendship. They waited for more than an hour in silence until there was little enough light left in the day to see fifty yards ahead and they had almost given up on finding supper. What they shot at was no more than a shadowed movement above the dam.
The beaver’s fur was sleek and oily and it stained their gloves as they turned the hump of the animal on its back to paunch it. It lay more than three feet in length from its nose to the tip of the wide, flat paddle of its tail and weighed a good sixty pounds.
“Reminds me of the rats aboard the East India ships on the Thames,” Reilly said. He tapped the huge buckteeth with his bloody knife. “Fangs the like of that on them.”
Back at the camp, they set a large kettle of water to boil and dressed the animal and added the lean fore-haunches to the pot for broth. The back haunches were skewered and cooked undivided until the thick layer of fat was crisply roasted. The night was surprisingly mild and the men ate their fill and talked with more enthusiasm than they had managed since setting out. The Blue Jackets and marines had never tasted beaver and most pronounced it fair eating. After the meat was finished, Reilly fried the tail in pork fat and each of Buchan’s men was offered a taste of the rich marrow. The ship’s boy
chewed meditatively for a moment and asked if it was true as he’d heard it that a beaver, cornered by a predator, will turn on itself and chew off its own testicles.
“True as the tides,” Richmond announced solemnly. “Eating for strength, he is. You mind to steep a beaver’s pride and drink off the liquid, it does wonders for your nature.”
The boy scoffed. “Go away with ye,” he said.
“Tom Taylor,” Richmond appealed, “am I speaking the God’s honest truth or no?”
“Gospel,” Taylor said. “Knew a man drank beaver’s pride before going out to a bawdy house, didn’t he up and die with exhaustion. Licked right out he was. And still hard as the rock of the Church when they laid him out at the dead-house.”
“It’s all bull you’re talking,” the boy said.
“Beaver or bull, I could care less about,” Corporal Bouthland interrupted. “But who here has seen one of these Red Indians we’re after?”
It was the first time since they’d left Peter’s Arm that anyone had deliberately pointed in the direction they were heading. Buchan had been sitting with a pipe, making notes in his journal by the light of the fire as he did at the end of each day’s travel. He seemed not to be following the conversation, but sat suddenly forward. He tucked the journal into a satchel. “Yes,” he said. “How about it?”
Peyton glanced across at Reilly. The Irishman was staring into the fire, but seemed to sense Peyton’s look and he shook his head slightly without taking his eyes from the flames. The others fidgeted where they sat.
Buchan said, “John Peyton?”
Peyton cleared his throat. He said that before he came
across to Newfoundland he’d seen a young girl put on display in Poole who was said to be a Red Indian. She was outfitted in a dress and shoes and looked nothing much more than an English girl, though someone had painted her face and tied a feather in her hair.
Tom Taylor was stroking his blond beard with both hands and he jumped in then to say that according to what he knew the Reds were a race of giants by and large, and that many of the Indians he ’d heard spoken of by others were said to be over seven feet tall.
Reilly said it was only an idiot that believed all he was told, which Richmond took exception to. He said, “A Papist should be one to mock believing what’s told us, I’m sure.” He and Taylor had worked with Reilly on John Senior’s rivers twenty years and more, but there was no love lost between the three. The fact that Reilly was Irish Catholic was enough to make him a target of Richmond’s hostility. Reilly’s marriage to Annie Boss was more fuel for the steady fire. Richmond stared at Reilly as he spoke now, daring him to contradict or interrupt him. “I have had occasion to come upon old gravesites of the Indians,” he said, “and once or twice to satisfy my own curiosity on the matter I have held a shank bone against my own. Now I am no small man by most measures and I was but a lad to the frame of those Indians.”
There was a round of murmuring in the camp, a scatter of dismissive laughter. Reilly shook his head but said nothing.
“Mr. Cull,” Buchan said. “I understand you carried one into St. John’s, didn’t you?”
“I did sir, yes. Nigh on ten year ago now, as I recall, it was a young woman out in a canoe by herself and heading for a
bird island in Gander Bay.” Cull pulled his coat up around his shoulders as if it was about to slip down his back. He had hardly a tooth left in his mouth and his face had a concave, half-starved look about it. “The governor in those days had offered fifty pound to bring one in friendly-like and it seemed as she was alone there’d be little trouble to do so. Took her up in the fall and they made a bloody great fuss over her, the merchants and their wives tripping over themselves to cultivate her good graces. In all the years I been going into St. John’s I was never so much as offered a barelegged cup of tea by the quality and they brought my savage into the shops on the waterfront and let her walk off with whatever caught her fancy. Mostly ironwork she wanted, pots and kettles and such, I can see her now waddling under the weight of it all in her arms and a bloody great pot on her head to boot. I tried to help her carry some of it, but she seemed to think I wanted to steal it away and wouldn’t allow me to touch an item.
“They put on a dance for her one evening and invited all the quality in town to have a view of her. There was music which I remember she seemed fond of but she could not be prevailed upon to dance. She was a modest creature and very sensible to the presence of children as I recall and as long as she was in the company of women she seemed not to mind being where she was. I was the only man she’d permit to hang nearby. I s’pose as I had taken her, she allowed as I would watch out for her or some such thing. The governor paid me my fee and I was told to bring her back with her pots and set her loose.”
Corporal Bouthland spoke up again. He was among the oldest marines who had volunteered for the mission, about
his middle thirties. The pate of his head was nearly bald but he wore a pigtail stiffened with grease and flour at the back. He had a mole on his right cheekbone that sprouted a cluster of stiff hairs like the feelers of some blind insect. He said, “What did this one look like?”
“She was tolerable fair for an Indian,” Cull said, then he looked across at Reilly and said, “No offence now, Joseph. But she was only middle size, this one. She dressed all in deerskins and was covered from head to toe in that red paint they wear and there was no way to persuade her to wash. And eyes as dark as hell’s flames.”
“What was her name?” Buchan asked.
“We never had a name for her as such, Lieutenant.”
“Did anyone manage to speak to her while she was in your care?”
“Not in so many words, sir, no. It was all a dumb show and grunts and such we managed with. There was no sense to be got out of her mouth as far as anyone could tell.”
Buchan had refilled and lit his pipe and puffed quietly for a few minutes. “There are some that suggest the Red Indians are of Norwegian extraction and that their language is likewise related,” he said.
Cull nodded, a quizzical expression on his face. “Is that right?” he said.
“Private Butler,” Buchan went on, pointing out a marine with the end of his pipe, “is fluent in Norwegian and conversant in most of the dialects known to the north of Europe. I’m hoping he can assist us when we reach the lake.”
Tom Taylor was incredulous. “Now how did such a young pup manage a feat the likes of that?” he asked.
Butler sat up straight and hugged his knees. “My mother is Norwegian.”
“Go on then,” Taylor said to the marine. “Give us a listen.”
Bouthland prodded the young man in the back. “Get up, laddie,” he said.
“Sir?” Butler asked, looking across at Buchan.
“By all means. Perhaps the gentlemen who have heard the Red Indians’ language will recognize a similarity.”
The marine stood up from his place as if he was about to give a speech or recital. He held his arms ramrod straight at his sides and stared off into the woods as he spoke. He had straight blond hair braided down the length of his back, and an earnestness that made him seem childlike. When he finished his speech or recitation, his shipmates began applauding and slapped his back.