Specimen Song (6 page)

“Leave?” said Tim. “He hasn’t said anything about that.”

“He will,” said Du Pré.

They carried the bags up to the camp. Chase started scrabbling in them. He took a vial of pills out and swallowed two.

“We’ll break this expedition off at the dig,” he said after a minute.

“We’ll go on,” said the canoe builder. The rest of the Quebec Indians nodded in agreement.

“So will I,” said Du Pré.

“I am in command!” Chase screamed.

“No,” said Nappy, “I am. You are not shit. Chase.”

“You won’t be paid!” Chase screamed.

Nappy shrugged and walked away. Chase jumped after him and grabbed his shoulder.

Nappy punched him expertly. Chase folded up like a wet bag dropped. His assistants looked startled, then they started to laugh.

They all laughed. Chase was out cold.

“I don’t work for him no more, he should not grab my shoulder, eh?” said Nappy.

More laughter.

Du Pré thought he heard the sound of an airplane. Engines snarling out there to the west. He saw a glint in the livid blue behind the storm front.

In twenty minutes, the clouds overhead had gone on, leaving a bright, washed sky.

The airplane came down from the north and roared overhead. The pilot wiggled the wings.

“One them de Havilland Otters,” said Nappy. “What the hell he want here, anyway?”

Du Pré started to laugh.

The plane floated over the trees at the far side of the lake and slid into the water. The pilot throttled back. The plane roared on toward them. The pilot turned the plane broadside a hundred yards offshore and stopped engines.

The door opened. Big sunburned face in it. Big red hand waving.

Bart, the idiot.

A raft plopped out on the water. Bart lowered himself into it, screwed the paddles together, and began to row in, sort of—he wasn’t very good at it.

“I got worried,” he said to Du Pré, “And so did Madelaine, so I said, ‘Hell, I’ll go see.”

Du Pré introduced Bart.

“So how’s it going?” said Bart.

Du Pré shrugged.

Bart described the goings-on in Toussaint. Not much. Jacqueline was pregnant again.

Du Pré shrugged. Jacqueline was always pregnant. One more grandchild. Du Pré needed to write down their names, carry a card.

“Well,” said Bart finally, “you need anything?”

Du Pré looked at Paul Chase, who was sitting up now, looking at some blood in his hand.

“Yeah,” said Du Pré. “You could do us all this big favor…”

W
HILE
B
ART FLEW OFF
with Chase and his assistants and to pick up a few odds and ends he might need for the balance of the trip, Du Pré and the Québécois and Nappy and Felix rested and dried out sodden stuffs and gathered wild berries.

After a decent interval, the canoe builder voiced a complaint. The expedition had been mercifully free of these idiot whites, but now Bart was coming back, and he was white. Frenchy Canucks and Indians were all right, but…

Du Pré thought about that for a long time, smoking his cigarette and sipping some whiskey and lake water.

“Bart ain’t white,” he finally said. “He’s Italian.”

Nappy roared with laughter, roared till his eyes ran tears. Felix smiled and shook.

The Cree looked dubious.

“Bart, he is a good man,” Du Pré said. “Not like those others there. You are here why? The dams are to go on the other side of the bay, and let me tell you, this Bart, he has some real power and maybe could help you. I mean, he chartered that airplane for a whole week. His credit cards are maybe made out of some metal I don’t know about. They are too heavy, those cards, for me to lift. But Bart, he is okay. Used to be a bad drunk, but not anymore.”

After some talk among themselves, the canoe builder said that they liked Du Pré and if he liked Bart, then it would be fine. It was their law, anyway.

Nappy and Felix had shrugged when Bart offered them a flight home.

“We said we do this, so we better do it,” said Nappy, looking at the places where the fingers on his right hand used to be. “Otherwise, it would maybe bother us.”

So when Bart was dropped off early the next morning, the pilot rowing the raft to shore, they were ready to move. There was one paddler for each of the small canoes and three each for the freighters.

They made good time, Du Pré and Nappy slicing on ahead a half mile or so to give plenty of time to warn the freighters of coming portages or the shoals of broken rocks that sometimes rose to within a few inches of the surface.

They didn’t halt for lunch, just chewed trail food and kept going. In the middle of the afternoon, Du Pré squinted hard and saw the boil of a rapids. He sent Nappy back to slow the others, beached his canoe, and walked down by the rushing water.

It was really a long waterfall set at a shallow angle, with a lot of velocity in the water. A well-trodden portage trail went through the trees and down. Du Pré walked for a few minutes. He saw a cluster of tents through the trees.

The archaeologists. The long, looping fall ended in a deep, long pool.

Du Pré thought of the voyageurs who said, “Well, we try it.” He wondered how many had drowned. A lightly laden canoe could make it if the paddlers knew what they were doing. If nothing happened. The pool was mean-looking, swirls of water rising up beside the main current. Water was running around all over the place down there.

Du Pré saw someone in a frogman suit and mask rise up in the middle of one of the great, greasy boils, raise a hand, and sink back down. Then there were two black flippers in the air for a moment.

He heard a winch whine, a diesel engine speed up.

Du Pré walked on down. There were several people in stained, wet clothes guiding the cable. Others stood at tall tables, running water over piles of what looked like globs of rust.

Du Pré asked the first man he came to who was running this dig. The man said a name hurriedly and pointed to a tall gray-haired man with a clipboard who was standing on top of an old cedar stump, one hand on his hip.

“Dr. Pearse!” Du Pré said loudly.

“Yes,” the man said mildly, “speaking.”

“I am Gabriel Du Pré, part of that expedition from Lac La Ronge to York Factory.”

Pearse looked down at Du Pré for a moment.

“Chase’s expedition?” he said sourly.

“Chase left,” said Du Pré.

“Now I must talk to you,” said Pearse, clambering down from his perch. “Little Paul Chase
left
the expedition?”

“Yes,” said Du Pré.

Pearse was humming, he was so happy.

Du Pré told Pearse the tale of Chase’s departure.

“That little prick,” said Pearse. “I have been stewing about having to be civil to him for weeks. And he’s not coming. Thank you.”

“He is pretty bad,” said Du Pré.

Du Pré lingered for a few minutes, walking by the scrubbing tables, where people were knocking the worst of the sand and rust off the ax heads and bar lead, the kettles and frying pans, the fused masses of smaller metal objects.

The chunks were then carried to a spray booth, where a woman wearing a breather mask sprayed them with clear plastic.

Du Pré walked down by the pool. There were lines snaking out into it, tied to a cable that ran across the pool from shore to shore coiled around huge trees on each side. The cable was high above, maybe ten feet. A kingfisher sat on it, head turning.

He glanced at the tidy little tent village. This was a well-run, clean, orderly camp.

He thought of the expedition, how disorderly it was till Chase had left.

Lot of wrecks here over the years, pile up that much trade goods. Damn furs would have floated off or rotted, bones ground to powder by the shifting gravels. The pool was big and mean
now
; when the snows melted and the spring runoff hit, it must be awesome.

Pearse wandered over to Du Pré.

“I …” he started, but then there was a shout from the shore down by the pool. People were pointing and yelling at the long falls.

Du Pré started to run to them.

He looked back up the long tongue of fast green water. One of the big freighters was coming down it, paddlers front and back digging to keep the big canoe lined right with the current.

Lucky, the canoe builder, was standing in the middle of the big canoe, holding a staff. Feathers fluttered from the tip.

The freighter shot across the foaming boil where the green tongue of the river dove into the pool. The paddlers dug in and the canoe went free into the green waters. The rear paddler dug his paddle in the water at the canoe’s side and the freighter turned to the shore.

Lucky was still standing.

The canoe ground up over the gravels.

“Pretty nice canoe,” said Du Pré to Lucky.

Pearse was smiling. “I guess some of the time it worked,” he said. “You gave us quite a fright.”

“Yeah, that’s a strong canoe,” said Lucky. “You got to hit the water right, though.”

“Whew,” said Pearse. “Who built it?”

“I did,” said Lucky.

“I wonder,” said Pearse, “if a lot of the deposits on the pool bottom are there because of bad design or flaws in the canoes. Interesting.”

Lucky nodded.

“See if the other one works,” said Lucky. “It don’t got that birch roll in the back there.”

“What other one?” snapped Pearse.

“That one,” said Lucky, pointing back up the river.

Du Pré looked, winced.

The other big freighter was coming down, the women paddling this time. They were keeping the canoe lined well.

The big canoe shot down the tongue and across the foaming boil.

But Bart Fascelli lost his balance.

He’d been standing up like Lucky.

He shot off to the side and sank.

A thwart broke and the canoe hogged and the birch bark ripped down the side at the seams.

The canoe broached to and the women went in and the gear went over. The canoe swamped.

The hydraulics dragged everything and everyone under.

Du Pré glanced to his left, at Lucky, who was laughing.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Du Pré screamed, running.

Before Gabriel Du Pré could prove how well he could swim (not very), the frogman came up, though, with Bart in hand. The frogman hauled poor Bart to shore, where he vomited a lot of water.

“You dumb shit,” said Du Pré sympathetically.

“We knew that,” Bart wheezed.

Du Pré went back up to help carry the smaller canoes down.

That pool, it eat one of these just fast like that, he thought, looking down at the path pounded two feet deep over the centuries.

T
HE
C
REES SANG AS THEY
paddled. They hadn’t before. The songs were sad, the melodies on a strange tonal scale.

Early one morning, as they were loading the canoes, the Crees began a ballad, one in English, the words so burred Du Pré couldn’t make them out. The song was about the burning of the Highlands.

“Where you learn that?” he asked Lucky.

Lucky shrugged. One of the Cree women, Françoise, said that the Hudson’s Bay factors were usually Highland Scots. Their blood was commingled with that of the Cree/Chippewa, and many of the people scattered across the length and breadth of the Canadian fur trade had Scottish surnames.

“Mine’s Roudedge,” said Françoise. She was a pretty woman. The light of the fire shone red in her black hair.

The Scots and the French, Du Pré thought. Them Jesuits must have been the hell and gone to the Rockies before we lost the war with the English. The one in the 1760s.

“Do you know ‘Brave Wolfe’?” Du Pré said.

They nodded and sang it. Brave Wolfe dying on the Plains of Abraham. But the English took Quebec. And the Cajuns were removed to Louisiana.

The day was blustery, with high stratocirrus cloud and vees of geese flying in huge circles, to toughen the young birds for flying over half the continent to winter in the swamps of the Gulf Coast. They passed a flock feeding on wild rice in a shallow backwater. An old admiral goose honked contemptuously at them, bidding them be gone, and soon.

Fall came early this far north. Already a few times, there had been a thin skim of ice on the shores. The insects had pretty well died off, all but the infernal no-see-ums. Bart had brought along a cure for them; he said he had gotten it on a fishing trip to Alaska. White tequila rubbed on the face kept the fierce, tiny insects at bay. He would not use it himself.

That night, the Quebec Indians talked sorrowfully of their homes, how a few thousand of them had gone back to the old ways in the vast forests far from the whites and alcohol, one as disorienting as the other. They tried to live as their ancestors had done before the whites came, but that was impossible.

“It’s hard to give up nails and twist drills and tea,” Lucky said, laughing, “and why spend a day braiding spruce roots when you can pay a dollar for a big ball of twine?”

The Jesuits and Anglicans still moved among them, welcomed by most. 

There were those, however, who would destroy everything they had. New York in its hunger for electricity and Hydro-Quebec, the giant electrical-generation company, proposed $20 billion worth of dams in the far north country.

Cities, they are vampires with very long fangs, Du Pré thought.

Bart shyly brought forth a harmonica one night and added lonesome notes to a slow sad song Du Pré was fiddling. Du Pré looked at him in surprise.

“When you learn to do that?” he said.

“Uh,” said Bart, “Booger Tom. He told me I was shoveling shit so good, I’d probably make a mouth-harp player, and he showed me a few things. It’s pretty simple, really.” He slapped the harmonica against his palm to clear it of spittle and put it back in his duffel.

“If it is your country,” said Bart, “and I seem to remember that the Canadians gave it back to you, why can’t you just say no?”

Lucky explained that the long legal process hadn’t extinguished rights and interests and there were so many that the courts would be full for a century. The government of Canada was treacherous about its gifts. After all, they were English.