Kanata (5 page)

“If the nets are stained with blood,” the factor had said, a man with a dark smile named Guttins, “foxes eat them. And how will they get repaired? You'll be sitting in a circle like spinsters, sewing with cold fingers in the dark, my pretty idiots.”

They caught sixty birds a day for a week. Thompson lay on his stomach, staring at his companions in their Crusoe poses, feathers in their mouths, their knees bloody.

“You're a long way from London, Mr. Thompson,” Guttins said.

O
n Sunday morning, Samuel Hearne read a sermon of his own creation for the men. Hearne was six feet tall, a handsome, muscular man who had walked from Fort Churchill to the mouth of the Coppermine River at the Arctic Ocean guided by Copper natives, a journey of more than twelve hundred miles. He had hoped to find gold, but saw only pyrites and the grim slaughter of a band of Inuit. His presence was heroic, but his reputation was diminished by two events: the first was not finding gold, despite his hardships and effort; the second was letting the French capture Fort Churchill two years earlier without a shot being fired. He had allowed the French commander to advance on the fort with his small army, ignoring the pleas of his men to cut them down with grapeshot from their heavy guns, to shred these papists and send them to hell. Inexplicably, Hearne opened the gates and surrendered the fort, which the French burned, although the stones withstood the fire and were reclaimed, the fort rebuilt under the British flag. Even the French commander held Hearne in contempt. He was tainted now, a caricature of a hero, still golden looking but already fallen. Worse, he was a Voltairean, his only bible the writings of a French freethinker. He argued against the religious hierarchy of created beings, from ant to monkey to man to angel. He saw equality and a hell of one's own devising.

In Hearne's room, the only comfortable space at Churchill Factory, he read Voltaire's words in place of a Sunday sermon, his soothing voice penetrating the smell of labourweary bodies. Thompson shifted uncomfortably in his seat, staring at his fellow men: the misshapen, reeking sailors, the failed husbands, the indebted and adventurous who had left England for the unknown. He had come upon Tetley and MacAvoy in the supply room, Tetley's back to him, MacAvoy kneeling in front. Tetley had looked over his shoulder with a defiant terrible face. Go away, boy.

“The Bible is a book much prized by sheep and invalids,” Hearne said. He stood by his desk, holding a copy of Voltaire's
Philosophical Dictionary
. “This is my bible. I know no other.”

Hearne took a few theatrical paces, preening. In London, they were summoning charges to sack him for cowardice.

“Voltaire himself only ever offered a single prayer,” Hearne said. “‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted his wish.”

God granted the French commander the same wish
, Thompson thought. How could such a man, this noble specimen who had explored the North with such purpose and surely with God's hand guiding him, how could he stand there, salving his own sins with the words of a Frenchman?

After an hour of Hearne's quiet blasphemies, they left the room. A young native woman was waiting, wrapped in skins, her brown eyes inscrutable. Lingerers would hear Hearne's satisfied grunting.

B
y October the marshes and swamps were frozen; by mid-November the river solid. December brought a cold that
shivered everything. In the night, Thompson heard a rock split with the sound of a gunshot. He spent the morning collecting fuel for the fire. The stunted trees were no taller than Thompson and there was only enough fuel for a fire in the morning and another at night. In the afternoon he searched for game, which was scarcer than wood. The labour of moving through deep snow both warmed and tired him, and by late afternoon he collapsed in his room, still wearing his heavy coat. Ice had formed on the log walls, and he had given up chipping it away.

MacKay came to his door. An Orkneyman with a squat face, as if he had carried a great weight on his head all his life. He was slightly taller than Thompson, who guessed him to be a few years older, though it was difficult to say as the country aged a man.

“You've got the darkies,” MacKay said. “Can't stay awake.”

“I've no will to move.”

“Your first taste of it. It gets worse. Birds falling out of the trees, stone dead. Frozen. You won't know if you're awake or dead.”

“There must be other forts, other trading posts. I want to see the country.”

“No one will ever see this country,” MacKay said. “It goes on like Job's trials. Take fifteen lifetimes.”

“What is out there?”

“There's buffalo herds with a million beasts. Power of God in them when they're moving. There's Indians can cut your heart out so fast they'll take a bite out of it before you're dead. I've seen the sky darken with birds, ten million in a flock, knocking the sun out of the sky.”

“It can't all be this cold.”

“There's no relief.”

“Surely as you move south …”

“The mosquitoes get bigger.”

“You're a clerk?” Thompson asked.

“When there's clerking,” MacKay said. “A vile waste. But there are worse fates.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Far too long.”

“You miss home.”

“The only thing worse.”

Thompson guessed that MacKay was fleeing some grief in Orkney. He wanted to ask more, grateful for the company, but his eyes closed heavily and he slept.

In the morning he woke in his clothes and got up, wrapped the heavy buffalo coat around him, and walked along the coastline. On the shore he saw a polar bear, its white mass partly submerged in the guts of a white whale. Its head rose up, the red muzzle sniffing the air, and it growled like a mastiff, the massive forepaws resting on the whale, defending its kill.

T
he winter froze spit and piss; it froze Thompson's breath. The malevolent cold froze thoughts, and finally, time. Nothing moved in the darkness and each day cruelly mimicked the last. Sound was magnified; everything else shrank within itself. There were moments when he questioned his own existence. Had he been swallowed by the landscape?

He was sitting at the small table with the checkerboard on it when the devil sat down opposite him. He hadn't seen him appear: He was just suddenly sitting there, his features and colour those of a Spaniard. He had two short black horns on
his forehead that pointed forward, and both his head and body to the waist (he saw no more) were covered with glossy black curling hair. His countenance was surprisingly mild. They played several games, the devil losing every one, yet each time keeping his temper. His movements were languorous, a lazy power, an evil strength coiled within. He uttered not a word. Then he got up or simply disappeared. At any rate, he was gone. Was it a dream? Thompson wondered. His eyes were open. There was a smell in the room, not sulphur, something else, like a singed animal.

Having defeated the devil in this black cold, Thompson began a dialogue with God, a conversation that reached a vividness in late February when He laid out the order of all things and Thompson's task:
You will map the land and its beasts and the fruits in the field and the men on the grasses, you will bear witness to My work
. Witness to God's work and man's struggle.

At the age of fifteen, Thompson had a mission.

W
inter passed in solemn darkness, the light fading in midafternoon before it could bring any warmth, the land without horizon.

Spring arrived with its release, the relief of water, of warmth and movement. The ground turned to bog that took a man's leg up to the thigh. Rude boards were placed on the ground to walk on, but they sank into the wet earth.

In May, the Indians came with their beaver skins to trade. Thompson watched them arrive in canoes that were low in the water, laden with pelts.

“You want to know why you freeze all winter?” MacKay said. “Here it is.”

“Do you suppose they are one of the lost tribes?” Thompson asked.

“Lost tribes?”

“The ten lost tribes of Israel. Descended from Joseph, perhaps.”

“We're the lost tribe, Davy. They're in their homeland, happy as larks.”

“It's possible,” Thompson said.

“They're not lost now, but they will be. The factor will see to that.”

Guttins offered the Indian chief a suit of clothes: a scarlet tunic, a pair of wool trousers, a linen shirt, and a hat with a feather. The chief put on this London attire and danced among his people. Indians and traders sat and smoked tobacco and began the long ceremony that marked the trading season. Guttins made sure the tin cups were filled with brandy, which he had watered down to make more palatable. The talks went on for nine hours, fuelled by drink. At dusk, the two camps broke apart for the evening.

Thompson observed two Indians in the meadow to the west, coupling drunkenly. A man stood and screamed at the sky and lurched sideways, stumbling downward, his head meeting rock. After two days of trading, the natives sat outside the fort, chastened and morose, their heads angry with a new pain, a sled piled with iron and copper implements sitting in the light rain. The chief 's new clothes were covered in mud, the scarlet tunic torn at the arm, blood drying on the linen shirt, the hat gone. He led the children of Israel down to the river and they loaded their canoes and paddled westward with their prizes.

S
ummer was mosquitoes, the fall short, and the following winter a dismal repeat of the first. He had learned how to clerk, and had learned something of the Cree language. In spring Thompson was called into Hearne's room. The debauched hero stood in his leather pants and blue shirt, his golden hair matted. “Have you the stomach for discovery?” he asked.

Thompson stared at him. The Hudson's Bay Company, a fat fading monopoly, sat next to the frozen sea waiting for the Indians to arrive with their furs while its rival, the North West Company, took the trade inland, sending its men across the plains laden with copper and tobacco and kettles and brandy, seeking out the natives rather than waiting for the natives to seek them. The Hudson's Bay Company had a few inland trading posts, and Thompson worried that its trading operation was losing ground to the North West Company. In his view, it hadn't fully engaged its mandate to explore the North West and had become a palsied extension of an empire that was stretched thinly across the globe. Hearne, the great explorer, personified this lost purpose.

“I am a strong walker, sir, and a decent paddler, and I have some knowledge of navigation,” Thompson said. He had left Grey Coat with a Hadley's quadrant and the two volumes of Robertson's
Elements of Navigation
. “I can speak a little of the native tongue and I've read a good deal.”

“Fine, fine.” Hearne examined Thompson's schoolboy face. “You will see things out there you've never read about.”

“I hope so, sir.”

“You won't always hope so.”

U
ntil then, what had he seen? A few bears. Too much cold. He was still a clerk, like thousands of boys his age in London, but instead of staring at a bleak, dark interior, he stared at a bleak, almost universal night. He made lists of everything the Hudson's Bay Company had and didn't have in alphabetical order: flannel, flints, gin, hatchets. He could have added: patience, purpose, time.

In October he left with MacKay and Welland, an Englishman whose fleshy face was collapsing, his large features moving downward with their own weight. It was before dawn and Welland sang a song about a woman in Glasgow with an unusual talent. “Oh Mary had a hunger for everyone that bunged her …” There were a dozen verses, each more ludicrous than the last: men disappeared inside her, as did canoes, and by the twelfth verse Westminster Abbey filled with parishioners, their voices lifted in choir. “You'll be next, Davy boy,” Welland yelled. “Walking in upright, sin and salvation all of a piece.”

Their intent was to establish contact with the Peigans who camped east of the mountains and who were allied by language and custom with the Blood and the Blackfoot. Thompson's facility for languages had already come to the House Master's attention in his dealings with the Cree around the fort, and he was being sent to learn the Blackfoot language. He examined his supplies: leather pants, blue cloth jacket, buffalo robe, rifle, forty rounds of ammunition, two long knives, six flints, two awls, needles, two pounds of tobacco, and one horse to carry it.

“You came from London?” MacKay asked Thompson.

“Yes. Wales before that.”

“But London. Why would you leave London for this?”

“An opportunity to better myself. In London my life would be simply clerking.”

“It's clerking here.”

“What is in Orkney?”

“Wind. Too few sins shared among too many.”

“But your family.”

“I'm grateful for the distance.”

Thompson wondered about his own family. How his mother was faring. She was without the burden of her children. She would be fine.

“You've never been with a woman, have you, Davy?”

Thompson was silent.

“You could die a virgin,” MacKay said. “They used to sacrifice them, you know. I suppose they still do. You'll want to be careful.”

Ahead the plain yawned uneventfully. An hour later a brown mass approached, massive, a herd of what Thompson took to be large deer. He fired into it and watched for five minutes before claiming his prize. MacKay helped him skin and quarter it, and they roasted a haunch over the fire and cut pieces with their long knives to eat.

The sky was a convex dome and the stars were unusually clear and close.

“You'd think you'd be able to see God on a night like this,” Welland said.