Kanata (9 page)

“That is for your head too,” he said.

Thompson cut a piece of linen to bind her arm. They packed up the camp and walked west through a deadfall forest, the grey stalks angled in the half-light. The weather was turning colder, and the snow was deeper and more difficult to walk through. They moved along the Athabasca River, along the shoals and on ice that was crusted with snow though occasionally opened up to smooth, shiny sections thick enough that they looked black. The banks held stunted pine and willow. The dogs struggled in their traces and Thompson lightened their load, taking out food and making a crude wooden hoard to store it for when they returned. Eight sleds moved into a west wind that came over the peaks in violent gusts, and they came to the end of any grass for the horses. There were tufts that ringed a frozen pond, but the fields were bitten down by bison and half covered in snow. Thompson followed a line up to high land, through patches of dwarf pine. They needed snowshoes to move through the deep
snow. It became clear to Thompson that the Rook was unfamiliar with the country, and in the morning he sent him and his wife away.

T
hey needed firewood, and Thompson and MacKay spent the morning gathering it. In the afternoon they ventured farther, taking advantage of decent weather, to make caches of wood that could be retrieved later. Thompson narrowed his one good eye against the sun and avoided the horizon. He kept his head down. MacKay trudged, staring into the snow that reflected the sun with renewed intensity. When the sky began to darken in late afternoon he rubbed his eyes.

“It feels like there's hot sand in them,” MacKay said. Ten minutes later, he was howling in pain.

Within an hour it was dark and MacKay was snowblind. He sobbed and stumbled, and tried to run, to escape his affliction. Thompson ran after him and tackled him in the snow. He looked at the Orkneyman's face, his lips drained of colour and eyes red as fire, the devil's face. MacKay began to scream and Thompson slapped him, the frozen glove leaving a mark on his face. A cruel thing to strike a blind man, Thompson thought, but necessary. MacKay lurched awkwardly to his feet and punched the air instinctively and wheeled into the needles of a blue spruce and collapsed. He struggled to his feet and stood there like a chastened schoolboy awaiting punishment.

“We are going to die out here, Davy,” MacKay said. “Die a meaningless death in this meaningless land.”

If there was no meaning, Thompson thought, there was utility. Their bodies would be food for something, the bear, the wolf, the coyote tearing their flesh away in bloody strips,
the magpies and worms finishing their work. As for the land, it relied on Thompson to divine its meaning, to give it meaning with his map. Without that, the void.

“We won't die if we keep walking,” Thompson said.

“Oh, we'll die, Davy. We'll die.”

Thompson tied a length of rope around his waist and then to MacKay's belt beneath his heavy coat. “Walk behind me,” he said. “Keep a regular pace.”

It was getting late. Thompson could see Jupiter shining beside the moon. By tomorrow it would be on the other side.

“One eye between two men,” MacKay said. “The one-eyed king.”

“It's all we need, MacKay.”

“Spoken like a man with one eye.”

“We'll find the camp. We'll build a fire. We'll eat and remember this moment.”

“Moses,” MacKay muttered. “Leading me out of the wilderness.”

They walked in the deep snow, breaking through the thin crust with each step, making slow progress. When they fell it was awkward getting up in their heavy, frozen coats. MacKay's imaginative curses were interspersed with pleas for mercy.

The aurora borealis lit up the night sky, the absurd colours moving vertically in smooth syncopation as Thompson watched. The sky an unread book. He scanned it as he led his profane duckling through the snow.

“
Jesus
. My. Fucking. Celtic.
Eyes
,” MacKay yelled.

“The blindness can be healed,” Thompson said.

“Blindness can be healed. Thank you bloody Jesus.”

For an hour, MacKay was quiet, rendered mute by the cold.

“We're dying,” he finally whispered.

Thompson had a natural resistance to the elements, his mind elsewhere, observing the landscape, making calculations, or working out the elements of a new language. But he could feel its threat.

“What was my last sight of this world?” MacKay asked. “Was it the wet thighs of a brown Cree, staring into heaven with a belly full of ale? My last vision was grey sky and grey snow. A vision of nothing.”

“The last thing you see is the last thing you want to see,” Thompson said. “Picture your mother.”

“A whore.”

“Then picture a whore.”

They marched, silent and fatigued. Thompson saw a deer ahead, its dignified, cautious movement. He untied the rope, whispered to MacKay to stay quiet, and walked downwind, cradling his rifle. He tracked the deer slowly, stopping when it stopped, gaining sixty yards. He feared that MacKay would bellow some new obscenity, scaring the animal. After ten nervous minutes Thompson stood next to a tree, within range, sighting along the barrel at the deer, which was facing him. He waited for the profile to present itself, then squeezed the trigger, and the deer fell softly into the snow, a shot that owed more to luck or God than skill. He went back to MacKay, who was dangerously asleep in the deep snow, resigned to a peaceful death. With some difficulty Thompson roused him and they trudged to the deer. He used his knife to slit it from throat to tail along the belly, and then took MacKay's hands and pushed them into the warm entrails before thrusting in his own. They massaged the slippery familiar shapes and breathed the warm visceral scent that came out of the steaming carcass. MacKay's face
was turned upward to the sky, eyes closed in what looked like rapture.

It was past midnight when they returned, marching wearily, the blood frozen on their coats, MacKay's sightless face covered in ice crystals. Thompson made a fire and they sat silently around the heat. MacKay's face turned sickly shades of blue and red and then white, and Thompson noted a small dead patch on his cheek that would cause some grief. He wondered about his own face, then slept for fourteen hours.

E
arly Christmas morning DuNord beat one of his dogs to death with the copper handle of his knife, delivering heavy blows as he grunted curses. The moon was still reflected by the snow, a sepulchral dawn. He killed the dog out of anger and frustration and stupidity, but it was meat and they roasted it over a fire.

In the afternoon they walked through an alpine meadow into a blizzard driven by a hard northwest wind, the dogs plunging through the snow with every step, their eyes dulled by fatigue. The valley opened to a wide chasm between two high peaks, and Thompson's men were desolate at the sight. In five months it would be innocent with yellow dryas and sedge grass, but now it was a bleak gateway. As they walked through the snow, the men became so discouraged that they sat down, each in a separate melancholy.

Thompson plodded along the line, half ordering, half pleading. “Valade. Move yourself, man. Do you want to die here?”

“Better here than the next valley.”

“Grégoire, where is your spirit?”

“In France. Fucking Lise Goulet in the bathtub of the whorehouse. And my spirit is much happier than I am.”

DuNord was sitting in the snow, immune to orders and pleas. Thompson cuffed him on the head but he was indifferent to the blow. This enraged Thompson, who hit him repeatedly and finally broke his walking stick over DuNord's heavily padded body. “You useless bastard,” he screamed. “You meat-eating burden. You're not fit for this land, you useless bloody bastard.”

The attack exhausted Thompson entirely, and he collapsed in the snow beside the bloodied, silent DuNord. What did they care about discovery? Thompson thought. The land was the land. This valley as good as the next. Their hunger was for meat and women and stories. He sat with DuNord for half an hour. Then they made a dispirited camp.

I
n the night, four men deserted, among them DuNord, and Thompson was glad to be free of him. It was down to MacKay, Ignace, Charles, Coté, Valade, Pareil, Grégoire, and Bouland. The next day the men walked like plough horses, rarely looking up.

“Davy, DuNord's a swine, but he's heading in the right direction.”

“Away from us.”

“Even if we find a path, what godly use is it to anyone? No one is going to trade through here.”

“There's a river,” Thompson said.

“A bloody river. And this is the way to it, Davy? It's cursed, all of it.”

“You can join DuNord if you want.”

“DuNord's a fool. But even a fool is right sometimes.”

In the afternoon, lenticular clouds swirled in wisps, a cursive warning that a warm wind would blow down. When it came, it was almost too strong to walk into. It made the snow heavier and walking even more difficult. A limestone wall a thousand yards high had threads of snow like veins. Black slate glistened in the afternoon sun as the water leaked out from the snow and dribbled down slabs that looked as if they had been cut with a knife.

In the morning the world was ice. They moved carefully past quartzite that ran in parallel lines angled downward as if dropped unevenly from heaven. They found tracks and followed them to a stand of trees, and killed the moose that was sheltered there. Pareil made a small fire and they roasted pieces and ate. Thompson opened the skull to examine the moose's small brain.

It was the last meat they saw for two weeks. They walked sullenly and came upon the frozen carcass of a moose that had been eaten by wolves. It lay in the snow like a prehistoric ruin. A few miles on they stopped and built a small wooden hut and spent a week in it, hunting, drying their clothes, and arguing about the futility of their journey.

Valade's face was dark, smeared with grease. “We won't live if we go further,” he said.

“If we move south, we have a chance at better weather,” Thompson said.

“We have a chance to die,” MacKay said. “There is the issue of empire.”

“All empires are shit and they all come to shit.”

T
he men refused to go farther. They built a larger structure and prepared to starve. After six weeks their faces had
hollowed. They were filthy and gaunt, and ate a poor dinner of roots and the scrapings from a scavenged deer. Thompson wondered at the fortunes of his family. He ached for Charlotte, who now read well enough to teach the children. Civilization would follow them, and they would need skills.

Ignace stared at the fire and began talking. “A woman comes on the ships,” he said. “She lives in a village where she is well fed and unhappy and lives in fear of the Iroquois and of the winters. She thinks both are trying to kill her. One night there is a raid; the Iroquois have come. Her husband, who she had no interest in and who she wished dead a hundred times as she sat freezing in their wooden house, is tortured in front of her. Finally his heart is cut out and cooked. She is taken to the Iroquois village and becomes the wife of the torturer. They have three children and the woman learns the ways of the Iroquois and comes to understand the forest as a man does. After ten years, she looks at her husband as he sleeps and plunges a long knife into his heart. She takes her children and escapes into the forest. Her husband is found the next morning, pinned to the ground by the knife.

“The woman gets to a white village. She is no longer young and her beauty is spent. She and her children are taken in by a man who uses them to work on his small farm. She works long hours and is treated poorly. Her children grow up and when the last one leaves, the woman bakes a pie for her master, and as he is eating she comes behind him and slashes his throat with a knife. She goes back into the forest. The men in the village follow her, bent on revenge, but she knows the ways of the forest too well. They can't find her trail. She has vanished.

“She survives by eating berries and plants, and as winter comes, she takes up with a bear. She lies with the bear in its
cave and is warmed by it as it sleeps through the cold months. In April, the bear wakes up and sees the woman and can't remember that they were ever together. It kills her and eats her and her bones lie in the cave. Her hair, which became silver then white with age, continues to grow after she is dead. It grows out of the cave and through the forest, past the villages of the white men and the camps of the Iroquois. The white ribbon becomes a river that leads to the cave.”

“Why aren't your stories ever true?” MacKay asked. “They are true,” Ignace said. “They just haven't happened yet.”

A
pril brought a scent of spring. Mornings were ashen and the clouds low. Thompson sent the men out to look for birchbark to build canoes, but there weren't any trees large enough. He had to abandon the idea and instead cut down cedar trees, and they began the unfamiliar job of building cedar boats. At first, they dug too deep with the auger and split the delicate wood. Some of it was too green and needed to be dried by the fire. They cut boards and laid them in overlapping vertical lengths and sealed the joints, but the first boat broke in half when they tried to move it. They spent sixteen days at this.

They pulled the boats along frozen sections of the Columbia River, paddling where it was open. The river moved north and then doubled back, going south, and they paddled into a reluctant spring.

On a morning when the river was running clear and the air was fine, they came to a village along the banks. The San Poil Indians were painted red and black. Thompson stopped and smoked with them. Bright red salmon littered the rocks,
and Thompson traded tobacco for two fish and a basket filled with roots.

The Columbia River hosted a string of villages that depended on salmon. They drifted by the Wenatchees, Sahaptin, Solkulks, and the Sawpatins, where the chief wore a medal with the head of Thomas Jefferson engraved on it, a bad sign.