Rendezvous (4 page)

But he didn't rue his escape. Indeed, with each passing day he rejoiced more. These days tested his mettle, tried his courage. He was a freeman, master of his destiny, even if his destiny was to starve to death. He wished he had counted the days since his escape, but he hadn't, and his mind stumbled when he tried to think back on his flight. But he knew a fortnight had passed, and he had made good his escape from the navy. His impulse to run, run, run had ebbed these last days, and now he intended to learn how to wrest food and perhaps clothing from this silent wilderness.

That warm spring day he set up his fishing rig and then whittled a thick sapling into a lance, pleased with its weight and heft. He sharpened its point, and practiced throwing it, not unhappy with the result, but aware of how much he had to learn about the weapon. He fire-hardened the wooden point and threw his lance at targets until his arms hurt. Then he checked his fishline and found nothing on it. He would go hungry again that evening, save for whatever roots he could choke down.

He collected his gear and hiked a few miles more across dreary plains until he came to a slough with fat geese swimming on it. Without a bow and arrow, or sling, or firearm, he would not be able to kill one. But perhaps if he sat bankside as quietly as he could for an hour, one might drift close enough to club. He settled on moist earth, close to thick cattails, and waited. The distant geese eyed him but never approached, and after an hour or so he knew patience and quietness wouldn't fill his belly. He was feeling miserable and at the end of his wits.

But he calmed himself. He had won the gift of liberty; he would subdue his body. Dusk settled without visitations from unwary geese, and he gave up. He had gnawed on cattail roots before, and would again. This time, though, he would do more. He pulled up quantities of the plant, cut off the gnarly roots, scoured the slimy surfaces, cut the roots into small pieces, and then patiently ground them into a fibrous pulp. He acquired two or three pounds of roots this time: real food if he could stomach it. He built a fire, boiled a few pulped roots in his large tin mess cup, and then set aside the mushy material to cool while he boiled more. He made a satisfying meal of the mash, and learned that patient preparation could yield edible food. This wasn't Eden, and nature's bounty could not be plucked off trees—but he had filled his stomach.

That evening he pulverized and cooked more of the starchy root, making enough mush of it to last a day or two if he should need it. A small reserve in his kit would lift his spirits and strengthen him. In the last light he doffed his boots and waded the slough, intending to camp on its far side and start off in the morning with dry clothing. He found a much-used campsite there, probably because of the geese and ducks in the slough, and rolled up in his sailcloth. Sleep came hard; he had never gotten used to sleeping on the earth.

A cold drizzle awakened him in the night. Miserably, he sat up, donned his skullcap and pea jacket, pulled the sailcloth cape over his head, and waited for better times. Sharp gusts of wind drove rain into his tiny shelter. In that brutal cold, his spirits slid to their lowest ebb. He was alone in a black and bitter night, wincing at every volley of icy rain, without a friend in the world, without anyone to love, without the ordinary comforts. He rummaged about in his mind, looking for succor against this bitter moment and finding none—except the long-remembered, half-blurred prayers recited from a church pew in his youth. He stumbled through these fragments, feeling hollow, and then enduring the numbing night.

Something came to him then, something important that he had ignored from the beginning. He didn't know how to survive alone. He could not live long on his own, without help. He could not count upon a stray carcass or the occasional catch of a fish whose habits he didn't know, or a diet of roots. He could survive only if he approached other people, trusted them, made friends, sought their help, learned their ways, and gave something in return. In short, he could not live a hermit's life. If he did not starve to death, he would go mad with loneliness. Only these tribesmen could show him how to garner food, or supply the companionship he craved, or shelter him from the elements. His God was telling him he wasn't alone in the world, and he should not be afraid.

Chapter 5

At first light Dr. John McLoughlin walked through the great gate of Fort Vancouver and instructed his men to bar it after him and defend the post if they must. He walked majestically down to the riverfront, where the
Jaguar
lay anchored in navigable waters twenty yards off. The crew was unfurling sail to take advantage of a freshening southeasterly breeze. Sailing a three-masted, fully rigged frigate down the Columbia against prevailing westerly winds would be a tricky business.

He stood silently on the bank, waiting for Commodore Priestley to notice him, but for the moment the ship's master was overseeing his junior officers. Then at last Priestley observed the white-haired Hudson's Bay factor.

“Where are your men?” he shouted across the turbid water.

“Defending my post.”

Unfurling sail high above caught the eddying breeze and flapped. The ship strained against its leash.

Priestly laughed. The commodore's threat to press an HBC man had dissolved in the night, as McLoughlin knew it would if he resisted.

“Not much of a hail and farewell,” Priestley said. “The Royal Navy has a long memory.”

The factor stood like a rock, silent and unbudging.

“Bring us Skye, McLoughlin.”

“Permission to weigh anchor, sir,” bawled a junior officer.

Priestley nodded. A crew turned the squeaking capstan, water dripped from the rising anchor cable, and suddenly the ship sprang free, heeling away from the wind and sliding down the half-mile-wide river, running like its namesake. In minutes it rounded a bend and disappeared.

McLoughlin returned to his gloomy office and lit a lamp. The
Jaguar
had reprovisioned at Fort Vancouver, taking on firewood, sugar, flour, tea, dried apples and vegetables, tobacco, whiskey, and sundries. Priestley had expressed outrage at the prices, never pausing to consider the pounds and pence of bringing such goods to a wilderness post. McLoughlin totted up the charges, drafted an invoice, and set it aside for the next express to his superiors. It would be a long time, if ever, before HBC collected from the Admiralty.

He turned to his post journal, and entered the departure of the Royal Navy, not failing to include the commodore's threat to press a man, the factor himself if necessary. Then he added a final sentence to his entry:

“Have decided to conduct intensive search for the deserter, Skye, apparently a man of criminal nature. Will direct that the tribes be notified, a reward posted, and my brigades and posts informed as fast as feasible.”

He set down his quill pen. A favor to the Crown would not hurt HBC. And cleaning a criminal out of his district would be desirable. If the man survived, he would eventually show up. All this he would discuss further in a letter to George Simpson, governor of Hudson's Bay, up at York Factory headquarters.

He spent the next hour penning identical messages, instructing his factors to be on the lookout for a deserting seaman named Skye, stocky, big-nosed, powerfully built, probably in seaman's attire. If possible, they were to capture the man alive. The man would be tried, perhaps in London. They were also to post a five-pound reward and offer it to any tribe that brought Skye in alive—definitely alive and well. There would be no reward for a dead man. John McLoughlin did not intend to encourage the killing of a white man, or to give such a license to the various tribes that HBC traded with. He penned an additional letter to his gifted brigade leader in the Snake country, Peter Skene Ogden, saying much the same thing.

He summoned two of his senior French Canadian engagés, Pierre Trintignon and Antoine Marie Le Duc, to his office and addressed them in his fluent French, the tongue of his mother. “I have decided to catch that deserter if possible,” he said. “Which means sending expresses to the posts where the brute's likely to show up. Antoine, I suspect that Skye's heading up the Columbia—his other choice is Mexico—and you'll have the more urgent task. Take these expresses to Nez Perces House and Flathead House, and look for Ogden south of the Snake, delivering this express to him en route.

“Pierre, you take this express to Spokane House and continue onward to York Factory with an express for Simpson. You'll each take a mount and remount, and draw whatever provisions you need. The sooner the better.”

“Ah,
oui!
And what does this Skye look like that the lord commodore wants so badly?” asked Le Duc.

“Priestley was rather vague. Odd how some men don't see what's before their eyes. Look for a man of powerful build, medium height, with a formidable nose—probably in seaman's clothing.”

“Ah,
le nez formidable!
Such a man will identify himself without a word.”

“This nose, I gather, rivals or exceeds my own nose,” McLoughlin said, “and that makes it a nose unlike any other you have ever examined.”

“It is so. I shall study
le nez.
”

“All right, then. If you run into Skye, bring him in. He probably isn't armed. He may be starving unless he's a canny woodsman. I want him alive. He'll have his trial, but I also want his story.”

“This Skye, he makes the trouble,
oui?
”

“If Priestley is to be believed, yes.”

“But you don't believe the commodore.”

McLoughlin stared out the wavery glass window, one of the few glass windows in his post—or all the far west. “The commodore is a faithful officer of the Crown, but he sees commoners through the lens of his class. Skye is probably just as bad as Priestley makes him out. But I reserve judgment. I did learn that Skye was pressed into service as a youth and fought it. When you pull a man off the streets and make him the Crown's sailor, the man has a grievance.” He smiled wryly. “Some men regard their lives as their own. It's a novel thought to feudal lords, even now.”

“They pressed this Skye.
Mon Dieu!
Let the Crown press me, and there would be blood spilled.”

McLoughlin thought the conversation had gone far enough in that direction. “Skye is no doubt exactly the blackguard he is made out to be. Pressed or not, he deserted.”

“Maybe we should help him,” Trintignon said.

McLoughlin didn't reply for a moment. “Bring him in and let Simpson and me decide that. Pierre, you take the north bank, which is your route anyway; Antoine, you ride the south bank. Have Gervais sail you across.”

“I'll be gone before the sun reaches noon,” Le Duc said. “This man Skye, he will walk into my snare. I will scatter bait and catch him like a goose.”

“See to your safety. He's a brawler.”

The burly Canadian laughed cynically.

His engagés took the expresses and vanished. Riding good mounts, they were likely to overtake Skye in days, or at least reach the posts well ahead of the deserter. HBC might preside over a vast wilderness, but it had its ways, and the veteran factor McLoughlin knew them all.

He debated sending a man up the Willamette to check for Skye's passage, and decided not to waste the precious manpower. If Skye was making his way into Mexican California, HBC would be well rid of him. But that was unlikely. The deserter would try to find refuge among the Yanks.

If any HBC man were to capture Skye, McLoughlin hoped it would be Ogden. Peter Skene Ogden would be a match for a dozen Skyes. The brigade leader had single-handedly rescued the faltering Columbia Department, and before that the faltering Nor'west Company, from certain ruin, using a combination of toughness and good humor while dealing with the company's free trappers, harsh discipline, an eye on the purse, and sheer strength of character. Ogden might even transform the deserter into a valuable HBC man. There were other valued employees with worse records behind them than deserting and brawling, and Ogden had nurtured industry and loyalty in them.

McLoughlin wondered how Ogden's brigade had done this season. The man's mission had been both hard and delicate: to trap out the Snake country so thoroughly that the slim pickings would discourage the Yanks, who were flooding into the jointly held Oregon country. The course of empire, both HBC's and Great Britain's, required that the Yanks be shut out until a boundary could be agreed upon. The Yanks were truculently insisting on the 49th parallel; Great Britain, with just as much determination, was holding out for the Columbia River as the boundary, which was why Fort Vancouver was built on its north bank.

If Skye ended up with an American fur brigade, it would be just one more problem for HBC. Ogden would know what to do: the man had a genius for cheering up sour engagés and winning the loyalty of bitter men. If Skye was not utterly incorrigible, HBC might have a new man. That was a thought McLoughlin would not share with Simpson, whose blind loyalty to the Crown sometimes overrode good judgment.

But all that was speculation, McLoughlin thought. Ogden was due to return after the spring hunt south of the Snake, travelling right along Skye's probable escape route. And with any luck, he'd have Skye with him, the sailor glad to have some food in his belly. And if Skye slipped by Ogden, he'd run into the equally formidable McTavish at Fort Nez Perces, located at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia.

McLoughlin laughed softly. What was a poor hungry seaman to do against men like that?

Chapter 6

Antoine Le Duc rode up the left bank of the Columbia, finding nothing. The spring rains had washed the trail clean, but this seaman, Skye, would be easy to find. What would such a one know about wilderness? Le Duc rode easily, enjoying the fresh April weather, glad to escape the post, always happiest when he was prowling alone, unfettered by the will of others.