Kanata (6 page)

“God is in England,” MacKay said. “This is God's punishment.”

Thompson sat silently. If he was in England, he would be sleeping with seven boys in a small room, boys who squirmed with one another in the night. Furtive clutchings that ended happily or sadly or under the cane. Days were spent listening to the impatient teachers, the Sisters of
Christ with their good intent and vicious energy. He was happy to be on the plains.

“It is my intention to map this country,” Thompson said.

“If you draw lines around nothing,” MacKay said, “it's still nothing.”

“Perhaps drawing lines around it will make it something.”

“The North West isn't a place, Thompson. It's a distance to be crossed to get to a place.”

“You could draw me a map of Margaret Toomey's arse,” Welland said, laughing. “A distance I'd like to cross and a place I'd like to go.”

“This land has but one point,” MacKay said. “The lowly beaver. Ugly as sin and just as plentiful.”

“I have been commissioned by God,” Thompson said, immediately regretting the words.

“By God?” MacKay said. “Thompson, this is the land God gave to Cain.”

I
f he had a gift, and this was a land where gifts were prized, though not one where those with gifts were sent—among the industrious and moral there were Bay men with gifts for drink or rage or stupidity or bad luck—but if he had a gift, it was this: for observation. He watched. He watched the words that fell out of the mouths of men, the way lips moved to form the diphthongs of the Orkneymen, the rounded syllables of London, and he observed the forest in winter, the properties of snow as the temperature changed, the ingenious construction of the mosquito (exquisitely created for torment), the varying qualities of rock and ice, and the patterns of the stars, which appeared static but were symphonic in their movement. He watched the natives,
studied their gait and their beliefs, and listened to their words, a grid of related sounds that met the world in a hierarchy of meaning.

I
n the morning, they walked the faded yellow prairie grass that stretched flat as a table, uninterrupted. The sun was high and Thompson welcomed the shade from a small stand of stunted poplar. He trudged across a coulee and found buffalo bones so white they shone. A few miles farther on were the bones of a man, his skull caved in and his hand some distance from the rest of him, as if it had inched away. A rabbit darted from a bush near Thompson and he took a shot at it but the rabbit was too fast.

“You'll need a better eye,” MacKay said.

“Or larger game.”

There was desert with stretches of sand and scattered carpets of low cheatgrass spiking up and pillowy cacti growing in small green patches. MacKay killed a rattlesnake with his long knife, skinned it, and laid the slick hide on a rock to dry in the sun. He tied it around his neck for a day, then abandoned it to the prairie. To the south there was a creek, and they followed its grassy banks until it gave out into alkali salts huddled in dusty hollows, the surrounding area brown and grey and spotted with prickly pear and sage. The sun stayed high in the sky, throwing off a pleasant late-autumn heat. Thompson saw a thunderstorm approach from seventy miles away, gathering itself, the spidery lightning visible in eccentric bursts. A coolness hit his face in advance of the storm that brought the angled sting of rain. The sound was overwhelming, a muffled roar that killed their voices. They were drenched within seconds. They sat down
on the prairie, huddling like mushrooms as the lightning forked down.

“God's wrath,” MacKay yelled, though he was only a foot away. “I expect it's Welland he's after. Either Welland or yourself. Stay close. God loves an Orkneyman. That's why he gave us such beauty.”

When the sky finally cleared Thompson ate some salt meat and lay on the wet grass and stared upward. The light disappeared in quiet increments. He looked at the stars, the patterns that had been examined for thousands of years.

“Do you find comfort in them?” MacKay said.

“I suppose that I do.” Thompson hadn't thought of them that way, but MacKay was right. They were companions of a sort.

“Take what comfort you can from these barrens,” MacKay said.

T
he morning was damp, the sky still dark in the west. After a hurried breakfast, they marched. The men were weary.
If we keep walking
, Thompson thought,
if we persevere
.

The mountains came into sight like shining white clouds on the horizon.

3

T
HE
N
ORTH
W
EST,
1787

A small party of Peigans rode out to meet them, the dust rising in billows that blew east, visible a mile away.

“Do you think they're friendly?” Thompson said.

“I don't think anyone's friendly,” MacKay said. “But I think we can profit from them.”

“They'll trade with us?” Thompson asked.

“They may cut out our hearts and trade those amongst themselves.”

The Peigans escorted them to their camp, more than a hundred tents near the bank of the Bow River. The women said nothing and showed no expression. The children ran toward them and grasped at their clothes and hands and a few laughed. Thompson was led to a tent and ushered in.
Inside it smelled of smoke and the light was brown, filtered through the deer hide. A man of maybe ninety years sat motionless inside. Thompson examined his face, which was the colour of tea.

“I am David Thompson,” he said in rudimentary Cree. “I am a representative of the Hudson's Bay Company.” The man remained motionless. After two minutes Thompson wondered if he was dead.

“I am Saukamappee,” the man finally said. “I am Cree but it is some time since I have heard their language. I find myself a stranger now in the land of my fathers.”

Thompson sat down across from him, and Saukamappee sat there silently staring. Thompson wasn't sure if that was the end of their conversation or if he was gathering himself for more words.

After ten minutes of silence, Saukamappee quietly said, “When I returned from the battle with the Snake Indians I found my wife had given herself to another man and they had gone north to pass the winter. I was filled with grief and anger and walked to the white pine that stands alone on the plain and was thought to have great power. I slept beside it to see if it would grant me wisdom. If I had not gone to fight the Snake my wife would have stayed. But she never would have been mine. I only knew this by going away. So what had I lost? Someone I never had. I renounced my people and came to live with the Peigan who welcomed me. The chief gave me his eldest daughter for a wife. She is old now but she was beautiful and she was faithful, and yet I quarrelled with her and now I see that half my life was given to small battles of no meaning.”

Saukamappee's voice had a small range, like church music, and he spoke staring straight ahead as if reciting a lesson. The fire flickered and changed the light within the tent. The
air cooled and Thompson moved under the buffalo robes.

Saukamappee closed his eyes and Thompson wondered if this was the end of the story.

A few minutes later he opened his eyes. “Do you have a wife?” he asked Thompson.

“No.”

“You should find one. Perhaps tomorrow.”

W
hen Thompson woke up, he was alone in the tent. Outside, the morning was bright and crisp, the yellow grass still damp. Shivering slightly in his clothes, he observed a young man applying paint to his face, using one of the small mirrors they had brought to trade. He worked patiently with the colours, absorbed in his own creation, a combination of ferocity and decoration.

Thompson spent the day walking the camp, which extended out toward the foothills. He was regarded with curiosity but no one approached him. MacKay had laid out trade goods on a blanket and was negotiating by pointing and holding up fingers. In the evening, they ate trout that had been taken from the river and roasted over the fire. A woman gave Thompson a bowl with berries and grease. As it grew dark, the Indians took their bowls to the river to wash them. Thompson washed his and then went into the tent.

Saukamappee was sitting in his usual spot, his eyes closed, but he opened them when Thompson came in. Thompson sat down, the audience that Saukamappee had been waiting for.

He described his first encounter with whites, with their silent gift that crept westward. He had led a party of warriors into an enemy Blackfoot camp one night. Five
hundred men crept up to the tents and then slit them open to massacre the inhabitants.

“But our war whoop instantly stopped,” he told Thompson. “Our eyes were filled with terror: there was no one to fight but the dead and the dying.”

It was smallpox that had ravaged the Blackfoot, making its debut among the Plains natives. The warriors walked among the decomposing corpses and soundless, swollen children. They chose certain possessions and took them, the spoils of war.

“The second day after, this dreadful disease broke out in our camp and spread from one tent to another, as if the bad spirit carried it. We had no belief that one man could give it to another, any more than a wounded man could give his wound to another. We believed that the Good Spirit had forsaken us and allowed the Bad Spirit to become our master. Our hearts were low and dejected, and we shall never be again the same people.”

T
he morning was unusually mild, the strong warm chinook coming down and eating the light covering of snow. Thompson walked the foothills with MacKay and surveyed the land. To the west, hogback ridges leaned out where the rock began in earnest. Clouds topped the southern range like a confection.

He had seen MacKay leaving a woman's tent before dawn. “You'll want to be careful, MacKay,” he said.

“I am.”

“We're trading with them.”

“Some more than others.”

“We can't put that trade in jeopardy.”

MacKay stared to the south, squinting into the distance. “Look at this. I don't like it, Davy. It looks bad.”

Thompson saw the group approach, perhaps two hundred and fifty men, some of them mounted, others walking. Saukamappee had told him that a war party had gone off two months earlier to avenge the death of four Peigan hunters who were murdered by Snake Indians. An advance horseman who rode back to get them to prepare a feast for their arrival had told Saukamappee the story. The party had ridden south in search of the Snake but didn't find them. But they came upon a silver caravan being led by black-faced men—Spaniards, Thompson surmised—moving up from Spanish Louisiana. They slaughtered the Spaniards and took their horses and mules, emptying the heavy, useless silver onto the desert.

“Who are they?” MacKay asked.

“A war party returning. The husbands.”

“I walk in peace. I'm bloody Jesus.”

“They aren't. Be careful.”

“I will now.”

Riding ahead of the horsemen was a tall man, six foot six, lean, his skin stretched over sinew. A crowd ran to greet him.

“Who's that?” MacKay asked.

“Kootenae Appee,” Thompson said. “The war chief. He has five wives, twenty-two sons, and four daughters. MacKay, your odds aren't good.”

“Jesus sake, man.”

Appee's family gathered around him, and he stood in their midst like a maypole. The blood lust of the war party hadn't been sated; Thompson could see it buzzing around them like the nervous fluttering of a sparrow's wings.

Kootenae Appee saw Thompson and MacKay on the rise and got on his horse and approached them. Thompson
shrank slightly as he neared, clutching his notebook tightly to his chest. MacKay retreated behind Thompson, who gathered himself and took a step forward, holding out his right hand.

“I am a member of the Hudson's Bay Company,” Thompson said, his right hand wavering in the slight wind.

Appee didn't take the offered hand. “The hand that wields the knife,” he observed. He leaned down, looming into Thompson's vision like something out of Gulliver, his face full of war. There were sharp markings on his face. He looked like a man constructed only for war, with no excess for any other purpose.

Appee examined Thompson, a white child clutching something to his chest, exposed on the prairie like a shining root from an uplifted tree.

“Perhaps you will bring us guns,” he said.

“We will.”

“And perhaps you will use your guns against us.”

“No.”

“A child on the plains trading guns,” Appee said, and laughed. He turned and rode back to the camp. MacKay let out the breath he had been holding for more than a minute.