Kanata (8 page)

In the morning, the slain woman was buried as a warrior. Thompson stared at her face. Where does such defiance come from? he wondered. Where did you find such faith, such love?

5

Î
LE-À-LA
C
ROSSE,
N
ORTH
W
EST,
1799

In 1799 there was already the breathlessness of a new century. Napoleon had seized power in France, the Corsican peasant who embraced democracy, aristocracy, and the military with equal fervour, who needed to swallow the world and immersed himself in Josephine, whispering that she was his homeland, he lived only in her, her smell of drying leaves and damp mornings, leaving her wetness on his chin at breakfast. It hadn't been that long—six years—since Louis XVI had had his head removed by the heavy blade of the guillotine, held up wigless and slack-faced to a cheering crowd. Those pints of blood spraying over the rough wooden shackles and cleaned up ten hours later by a
toothless woman using dirty water and a coarse broom. So ended a century of divine right.

In England, George III had lost part of an empire in America and was losing his mind. The monarch was now an amiable rustic, walking the countryside, admiring its orchards, his long hair unkempt, asking farmers' wives to share their recipes for apple dumplings, smiling like a simpleton.

The world was shifting, ancient hatreds and new appetites redrawing the borders. North America hadn't been concisely divided; it awaited a fresh war, treaties, and cartography.

Thompson thought that he would bring the North West into existence with hard lines. The land didn't come before the map, he thought: the map creates the land. A map was knowledge. At some point, there would be claims upon that land, as there were upon all lands. Thompson believed that the North would be the only part of the continent not taken from the Indians by fraud or by force, saved by its barrenness.

Thompson saw the future arrive like a starving wolf and he saw the poverty that would follow the destruction of the beaver, its death coming from over-trapping and an equally cruel predator—fashion, the beaver hats suddenly become barbarous anomalies in the closets of Europe. Elders already warned of a looming desert, of crows descending on a dying nation like a black wind.

T
hompson needed a woman. This was God's purpose. What other point to this journey? He was God's witness, but who would be his?

Charlotte Small arrived like a revelation, as vivid as the devil at the checkerboard, tasting of earth and ashes. She was
thirteen and Thompson was twenty-nine. Her father, Patrick, was a Scot, a Hudson's Bay man who had abandoned his country wife and family and retreated to England. Charlotte was tiny and well formed, with the dark eyes and luxuriant blue-black hair of her Cree mother. Thompson was observant, nondescript, his hair cut indifferently by a Cree named, through awkward translation, Kozdaw. He had the same dark eyes as Charlotte, although one of them was useless. He lacked the skills to woo her and simply asked her to be his wife.

The night before they were married—without benefit of clergy,
à la façon du pays
—on Île-à-la Crosse, Thompson took a wooden chair outside and set up his telescope and scanned the night sky, happy for the gentle breeze and the solitude. He focused the glass at the moon—the Mare Nubium, Nectaris, Imbrium, and Serenitatis—and stayed up most of the night, as he often did, putting off sleep like a chore.

The wedding was simple, a brief exchange of vows to be faithful. That night Thompson explored the soft expanse of Charlotte's perfect skin. She looked up at him as he fumbled for an opening, her eyes filled with fear. Holding this child in his arms after he was spent, Thompson wept along with her.

He took a bath the next day, pouring boiling water into the tin tub. Her smell was on his body, a scent both new and familiar. In the warm water, he surveyed the pale landscape of his body before scrubbing it with brisk strokes of the hard brush. His form was compact and wiry, a practical machine. His moments last night with Charlotte furthered God's plan. He lingered over the last scent of her before obliterating it with soap.

There had been one other before Charlotte, a hasty coupling more than a year earlier, his disappointing and
long-delayed initiation. The following morning, the woman, a Cree, stared silently as Thompson left the trading post and walked west, carrying her stare inside him.

A
t Rocky Mountain House, Thompson spent each evening with Charlotte, teaching her to read English. He read from the Bible—“For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills”—and taught her to write, guiding her child's hand. They spent hours spelling words.

“Tree.”

“T-R-E,” Charlotte said.

“E.”

“Hills.”

“H-I-L-S.”

“H-I-L-L-S.”

“David, my head is bad. I can't think of more words.”

“Your head isn't bad. It will come. It takes time. We have time.”

“I'll never understand them.”

“You'll be teaching our children,” he said. “Sky.”

“S-K-I.”

Each night, Thompson mapped her, her scent and movements, the small rises, the contours and stained hollows.

By spring, Charlotte was swollen. In the rough hut, she began to breathe irregularly. The child came in a rush of fluid, the hard breathing of Charlotte suspended briefly, as if gathering for a scream. Thompson cut the cord with a knife heated over a flame and looked at the girl who had gushed
out, black haired and down covered, alien and inevitable. She slept in her mother's arms, and they all lay amid the wet bloody sheets. They named her Fanny.

With Charlotte, Thompson was no longer an exile. The fourteen-year-old mother of his child. His child and their child.

6

T
HE
R
OCKY
M
OUNTAINS,
1807

With nine voyageurs, among them MacKay, and two Iroquois named Charles and Ignace, Thompson took his family to cross the Rocky Mountains. There were three children now—Fanny, Samuel, and Emma. Thompson believed he could follow the Columbia River to its mouth at the Pacific Ocean and find a navigable route through the mountains, the culmination of three centuries of European dreams. The Americans were looking for the same thing. So, a race.

They paddled up the North Saskatchewan River, past Kootenay Plains and over Howse Pass, and arrived at Lake Windermere in mid-July. They built two cabins near the
shore and spent the winter there, trading with the Kootenay Indians.

Thompson had heard that the Cree woman he had left had borne a child, a boy, that his name was Tristan, and that she was variable in her attentions. He appealed to a friend to try to take the child from its mother and to send him to the trading post at Fort Augustus, where Thompson would claim him. Thompson thought about him nightly, a salted wound. A boy conceived in sin and left to fate.

Meat was scarce, but Ignace found a dead horse in the forest. There were hundreds of wild horses in the mountains, their owners dead from smallpox. They banded together, ghostly herds that had lost any taste for servitude. The horse gave off a foul smell and they boiled the meat for an hour, but it made them all sick anyway.

A week later Thompson shot a whitetail deer. Ignace immediately cut off its head with his long knife, and the deer suddenly stood up, headless and awful, blood spouting from its neck. It remained standing for almost a minute, a visceral reprimand, then fell over.

“It's the devil,” said Ignace, who was an occasional and confused Christian.

“It's only muscle and instinct,” Thompson said, observing the body. “The devil is elsewhere.”

“If you eat that meat, the devil will find his way inside you,” Ignace said.

Thompson cut off a piece of its haunch, roasted it, and then ate it. The men regarded him with horror and suspicion. Ignace built up the coals and threw the carcass onto them.

“You can't burn the devil,” Thompson said.

I
n the spring, Thompson left Charlotte and his family at Boggy Hall and tried to cross the mountains. A small band of Indians approached from the south. When they got closer, Thompson saw that it was Kootenae Appee, the Peigan war chief. He was still magnificent, a foot taller than Thompson, lean, his face dabbed in colour, a small mirror hanging from a leather strap around his neck so that his enemies could see themselves before they died.

“Koo Koo Sint,” he said to Thompson, using his Indian name, and unfolding the smile that conveyed both friendship and menace. “The mountains are not yours.”

“They aren't anyone's now,” Thompson replied.

Kootenae Appee's world was shrinking. Like Napoleon, he was fighting wars on every front, stretched thin, his empire no longer easily defined and impossible to defend. His enemies had guns. The Kootenay, the Flathead, the Snake. Appee was fighting the North Westers and to the south, the Americans. He had sent a small party out to meet the explorers Lewis and Clark. In the raid, one Peigan was shot in the stomach by Lewis and another stabbed in the heart.

“How is Saukamappee?” Thompson asked.

“Dead,” Kootenae Appee said. He had a rifle in a sheath. His men were armed. Thompson had armed the Snake Indians, enemy to the Peigan. He was arming everyone, partly the result of simple trade, but also to keep the plains in balance, to prevent unchristian slaughter. But he knew the plains were becoming unbalanced in new ways, that traders were pushing farther west, and the Indians were no longer as accommodating.

No one had accumulated as much knowledge of the terrain or the Indians as Thompson had. And this had given him a curious power, one he was increasingly aware of. The
territory was held in a delicate balance and he worried that it wouldn't hold. When Fort Augustus had been attacked, Thompson had arrived there to find a man standing naked and bootless, a larval spectre squinting into the afternoon sun. A group of Blood Indians led by the brother of Old White Swan cleaned out everything: clothing, tobacco, guns, and shot. Thompson heard that the brother of Old White Swan used his new arsenal to make war upon the Crow Mountain Indians. He killed several men with his gun, but when it jammed he was set upon by a Crow with breath like lamp oil who cut off his ears and dug out his heart.

“The mountains are a dangerous place,” Kootenae Appee said pleasantly. “Not like the grasses where you can see your enemy approach.”

Thompson turned his men around. They would have to find another route in.

T
hey went north and tried again. With him were MacKay, Ignace, Charles, Coté, Valade, Pareil, Grégoire, Bouland, DuNord, and a few others. Thompson had hired a Cree guide whom he didn't trust. Appropriately named the Rook, he had brought his wife, a silent, suffering woman whose face had the deepening lines of a rotting vegetable. On a night when the sky was partially clear, Thompson sat with his journal, making entries and marking their position through his instruments. The Rook came over, drunk on brandy, and sat heavily on the scrub, cross-legged, sweetly curious, his upper body listing in the mountain breeze.

“They talk to you, the stars?”

“They talk to me.”

“What do they say about me?”

“That you will sleep badly and wake with two heads.” The Rook laughed and fell over and stared at the stars briefly and then fell asleep and snored heavily.

In the morning, the Rook sat blurry and quiet by the fire. He took his wife's arm and drew a sharp flint along the vein in her forearm, leaving a widening red line. His wife made no attempt to pull her arm away and didn't change her expression. The Rook drained some of her blood into a bowl and drank it in three long gulps.

Thompson looked at him with disgust.

“It's for my head,” the Rook said.

Thompson got up and slapped him on the side of his head, and he fell over.