The Deserter (16 page)

Thomas reached into the deep pocket of his coat for another ball. The moose bellowed and backed up, it’s foreleg bleeding. Quick, get the wadding for the shot, push it down the barrel! But his fingers were freezing. He fumbled with the wadding, nearly dropped it.

The huge moose readied for another charge. With horror Thomas saw the sapling attached to the snare had broken off. Hurry, he urged himself while One Arm struggled past through deep snow. With one good arm, the hunter raised his spear to await the charge.

Thomas grabbed his long ramrod to tip it into the opening of the barrel.

Before he could tamp down the shot, the moose charged.

Thomas pulled out the ramrod fast, but the moose bore straight down at him. As it passed, One Arm thrust the spear into the animal and caught it in the neck.

The charging juggernaut slowed just enough. Its massive antlers struck Thomas, smashing him backwards, sending the flintlock flying, goring his face and head. But he was alive, though stunned.

With an amazing agility, the animal stopped and tossed its head sideways to rid itself of the protruding spear.

Bleeding and dazed, Thomas reached for his firearm. The moose ignored his spreadeagled body and turned its attention to the other hunter, now defenceless at one side.

It whirled to face One Arm as Thomas tried to sight down the blurry barrel.

Head down, the moose lunged at One Arm. It tossed the man to one side with its great horns. Then it whirled to finish him off when Thomas pulled the trigger. Miracle of miracles, the snowy gun fired.

The shot struck the moose in the head and with a quiver the animal fell sideways. The whole of its one-ton bulk pinned One Arm to the snow, the massive antlers twisted so they gripped One Arm underneath.

It lay, kicking and quivering in its death throes, gouging One Arm more. Thomas breathed a quick prayer and struggled up. His forehead had been gashed and blood ran down into his eyes and face so that he could hardly see. He forced himself to wade through the deep snow, and with failing strength tried to shift the quivering beast off his friend. To no avail.

He stood panting. Strange gurgling sounds issued from One Arm’s throat. The weight of the animal seemed to be choking him.

Thomas reached out again to wrest the beast off One Arm’s body. But its weight and twisted neck pressed relentlessly into One Arm’s chest, suffocating him.

With a flash of insight, Thomas grabbed the foreleg thrashing in spasms and, with a last burst of energy, used that leverage to roll the animal over and off his friend. Then he lay back, panting hard.

One Arm raised his head, blinking, losing consciousness.

The body of the giant animal finally gave up the ghost, and was still.

All three forms lay without moving.

Then somehow, Thomas forced himself up and moved over to help hoist One Arm into a sitting position. His curious croaking sounds lessened.

Knocked the wind out of him, Thomas decided. In Micmac, he murmured, “You’ll be fine.”

Everything now happened in slow motion. The sun’s heat warmed them, and they began to collect themselves. One Arm crawled on hands and knees to their hideout under the spruce where he retrieved his pack. He returned and, still in pain, wiped Thomas’s face, cleaning his wounds on face and neck. He fashioned a bandage from a strip in his pack, and bound the gash. He also used his
únbesun,
his store of native medicine, to lessen the pain.

“But how are you?” gasped Thomas.

One Arm confessed his chest hurt badly, some ribs perhaps broken, but otherwise he seemed intact. With luck, they would both make it back to the winter wig-wam.

That store of meat saved their lives. But before they ate, they repeated special prayers to the Keeper of Moose: We are sorry for taking your life but we needed you to survive
.
And with the winter solstice behind them, although the days were still too short to travel the trapline, they rested and nourished themselves. Until the magic happened.

Little Birch and Thomas had been occupying themselves with their evening language lessons when One Arm went out to relieve himself. Full Moon was decorating a special blouse for Little Birch to be used, Thomas guessed, for her “stone ceremony” in the spring, an event Thomas preferred to forget. One Arm came back in, unusually stimulated, and spoke hurriedly to Little Birch.

“Thomas, we must go out now,” she ordered, in what was fast becoming good English.

“Out? But it’s so nice by our little fire.” Full Moon had thrown herbs onto it to scent their winter wigwam, snug in its heavy blanket of snow.

“Come, Thomas,” she commanded, getting herself dressed. Reluctantly, he tugged on Big Birch’s heavy outside jacket of caribou and out they went.

Thomas headed first to where they usually relieved themselves. “Hey, it’s really cold,” Thomas called back. “What’s going on?”

She waited until he came up to her and, taking him by the hand, pulled him along. “
Maliaptegen! Ditti!
”she scolded affectionately in her own language, as a form of intimacy. She went on, “You are like a moose bird! Much too curious!” She forged on ahead.

He followed her snowshoe tracks up a low crest. “Keep your head down,” she called, as she broke into a clearing.

He obeyed, and when he came close, she said, “All right, you can look up.”

An astonishing sight greeted him: the whole northern sky shimmered with an aurora borealis.

“
Waqadaskl
. They are dancing,” Little Birch said, her eyes alight with the same shimmer. She looked over at him.

Thomas had never seen such a display. The spectacular curtain of light wavered up and down, a greenish background, with streamers of red and purple flickering above a filmy curtain hung surely by some impressive Micmac deity to dazzle them both. “Little Birch, I can’t believe it.”

She seemed pleased at his reaction, and moved against him, to shelter from the light wind. They stood as one watching this amazing display, dancing, it seemed, only for them.

“When I was a little girl, we would whistle at them. Legends say if you did, they would come down to snatch you away. So we would whistle past the door hide, just open this much,” indicating with her hands, “and very fast, drop the covering to hide and stay safe. So exciting!” As she spoke, he found his arm go round her as it might a little girl.

Under her bundled clothes, her lean body began to press firmly against his. His arm tightened. She looked up into the sky, letting her head fall back onto his shoulder.

He breathed in her presence in this clear, icy night, and moved his cheek closer to her soft hair, flowing free above her heavy jacket. Tall for a girl, she was the perfect height for him. Then she turned to look up at him. “You like?”

“‘Do you like them?’ is better,” he said, lapsing into his teacher mode, and then kicked himself for being such a pedant.

“You have seen them before?”

“Never like this in the Navy, too far south I guess, but sometimes this winter coming home late from our traps. But not so vivid. I never dreamed...”

“Dream, yes,” she said. “When Grandmother Moon makes love to Sun, we say her spirit plays in sky. Spirit of sun and moon, playing together.”

“Playing?” Yes, that’s the word. “I think they are laughing, too. And dancing.”

“Yes,” she said, “laughing, their spirits are laughing and dancing.”

What pleasure could any Englishman have, in London town or on the turrets of the Raby Castle or in any county fair, that could compare with this? Even a flare from a neighbour ing man o’war, a rocket he had seen occasionally in the Navy, bore no resemblance. The whole sky was laughing and dancing. Silver freckled the snowy landscape as the moonlight shimmered with the joy of the dance.

She seemed comfortable leaning against his chest, looking up at him. Both his arms went round her, and now he stayed looking down into her dark eyes, alight with fun and the reflection of the lights. He could feel his heart hammering, and heard her breathing grow deeper, quicker, as though she had been running.

She must love this phenomenon, he thought, enveloped in her beauty and in the moment — when from some inexplicable depth, at the same moment they both leaned closer. And their lips met.

A rush of blood flooded his lungs and his heart. He clasped her ever so tightly as though they would never part.

They stayed in the embrace for what seemed an age. She broke away, panting a little, putting her hand to her forehead.

What had they done? Broken some taboo?

“I must go in.” She tore herself away, and strode down toward the wigwam. Thomas looked back up at the northern lights, thoughts churning.

How could he ever face Burn? No, he was just being foolish. Confused feelings flooded over him: was this not just a momentary passion? No, not at all, she was a truly gorgeous woman, so clear, innocent, purposeful, so direct, she would make a wonderful wife. To Burn! — don’t forget that, he reminded himself sternly. He and Little Birch must forget this and resume their roles of brother and sister. And when they are married, he went on to himself, I will still visit them, they will come to my cabin, I will share my meal with them as I would share everything with her, my life, my hopes and — wait, there I go again! Don’t overdo it — nothing happened, in fact.

Nothing!

But yet he knew that something had happened to his soul, and it would probably never change back.

***

In the ensuing days, the encounter left them both confused, as Thomas tried so hard to quell the wholesome appetites of his young body. Thankfully, their hours were full: Thomas kept going out for two or three days along the trapline with One Arm. The small game was back for some reason, or coming to life now that the days were getting longer. Little Birch worked with her mother at preparing the skins the men had gotten, and either smoking or hanging the meat to freeze-dry high in the upper branches of the one tall spruce that grew nearby.

Thomas was determined to forget what was happening between him and Little Birch, and worked ever harder on their languages in the evening. Brightstar, with his child’s inquiring mind, loved listening in and was picking up a lot. One Arm chimed in from time to time with questions, and answered Thomas in his concerns over certain traditions and taboos, but only when translated by Little Birch. Thomas soon realized that if he were to talk to One Arm, it would have to be in that man’s own tongue, though through no fault of his own. He just did not have Little Birch’s quick mind for words.

For the life of him, Thomas found it hard to get to the bottom of how their language worked. He couldn’t see the structure in Micmac. And then one day he hit upon it: “Little Birch, could it be that Micmac is a verb-based language?”

“Thomas, you ask such big questions.”

“Sorry. What I mean is, you all talk mostly in verbs. Walk, for example. We walk either fast, slow, happily, angrily. But you have a different word for each of them. You put the adverbs into the verb. That’s why I’m finding it so hard.”

“No, Thomas, you are doing really well.”

“Yes, but when you say hit, or hurt, how you hit or hurt changes the verb each time, like ‘with a sword’ — you put the tool into the verb. It makes for such long words.”

“But it’s so simple that way.”

“I guess it is, to you...

“Why do you bother with all this, Thomas, you are doing very well.”

“But even summer or winter, they’re verbs, too: ‘When it is summer...’” Thomas sat back and ran his hand through his hair.

“Thomas, let’s go on with our learning words. You’re putting me to sleep.”

***

The next fateful week, Thomas was out on the trapline with One Arm, and they stayed the night. One section had yielded almost no game, so at dawn when they struggled out of their bivouac, One Arm went off in search of new animal runs, letting Thomas head home with three carcasses round his neck: one muskrat, and two squirrels, their stiff frozen bodies swinging and banging against his waist. He gave One Arm his loaded flintlock since he could not, with his one arm, work a bow and arrow.

Thomas trudged down the shallow ravine that connected the two levels of swamp, tramping beside its stream running under thinning ice. They had felled a tree over it at the start of the season, and feeling care-free, with enough game around his neck to feed them, he hurried over the log, slipped, and fell splash! right into the icy water.

Not more than three feet deep, but freezing cold, the stream doused him and made his clothes sopping wet, his legs, arms, chest. He struggled up, cursing. How many times would he make mistakes before learning to be as error-free as this wilderness absolutely required? Chilled, freezing, in fact, he just clutched his game, waded out of the icy stream and started home as fast as he could. The weather was mild compared to the subzero weather they’d faced during the winter, but below freezing and certainly cold enough to do him damage, chilling him more as he went. Keep moving, he told himself, but then tried to forget it, apart from berating himself. Why ever had he not been paying attention? He could have cut a staff to help him cross, but the previous ice had always been thicker. No good giving himself another lecture, as he’d done every other miscue: the mistake of the shillings, falling down the cliff, careless about the bear, on and on. Mistakes here could be life-threatening. But he still had no idea of the enormity of what had taken place. Slowly, the heat drained from his body.

Only three or four hours to home, so no red flag went up, no great danger sign flashed in his brain, apart from knowing he had to get there as fast as he could, because the sopping wet clothes sure felt unpleasant.

Soon, his mind began to wander as his legs and feet and toes started to hurt. He was so hungry, having had little real protein — only one trout caught the night before in a lake. As his body chilled, he grew more and more fatigued.

On he trudged down the gorge and soon came out into a goodly wind on the plateau that held their winter encampment. Only a couple of hours more. But his brain was not functioning properly. Everything was so white.

Of course. But which way now? Where in fact was the camp? No blazed trail here: always easy to find one’s way back from this close. Or was it? Should he turn left or right? Everything looked different. He could not sight the one tall spruce by their camp. Nor could he climb a tree: they were too small, and he felt too weak.

He struggled on, trusting his instincts. But he was losing all desire to walk. And then, it came to Thomas that perhaps if he had a nap, he’d feel better, and then he could set out again.

Yes, how nice to sink into soft snow. Wouldn’t he feel so much stronger after a short rest? No, he’d better keep going. Have a sleep when he got home. Curious, “home” being now a primitive birchbark dwelling in the wilderness. His mind went off on tangents again. How far he had adventured! Home had always been a room in the loft above a stable with other footmen, none of whom had been promoted to head game beater. But he had. And now here he was, in a snowy wilderness far from civilization, with a native family. How curious! As his mind wandered, his footsteps faltered. No focus.

So maybe he should rest. He’d not heard of the white death by freezing, which every Micmac child is taught. The lore of the Indian was plain: never, ever, surrender to the sleep which lurks in every subzero wood: that relaxed and pleasing sensation of sinking into oblivion, with grace and no struggle...

Yes, he did need a rest. Just for ten minutes, a little snooze, and then up and at ’em again. How nice indeed, to curl up right here and now by the path, and just... let yourself go.

He walked a few more steps and then, at a convenient snowdrift, Thomas knelt, curled up, and knew no more.

***

Thomas lay in a dream-lit consciousness where nothing made sense. Strange haunting images travelled across the back of his mind. He wandered the earth and found himself back in the pantries at the castle, where he gorged himself on cookies, and then feasted on a huge caldron of soup.

His mother drifted by, fair and slim as she had been in his earlier years, caring and tender. As she passed by, floating back and forth, she caressed him, her hand passing over his brow.

And then he was out with the hunting parties, among the lords and gentlemen, handling a shotgun with the best of them. Conscious of rain falling, he again felt so very chilled, yes, freezing to death, but then he wanted to stay with the hunting gentry so that, chilled or not, he might enjoy their company. Then, oddly, he found himself in the huge kitchen by the open wood stove, with the cook opening the door so that the peat fire blazed up and his mother cradled him, long before he seemed to have reached the age of walking. He lay in her arms, allowing the warmth of the fire to seep into him. And then he felt her move, shift a little, and his consciousness grew faintly solid, and he seemed to be rising to the surface of some deep lake. Was that day breaking above? Who was really holding him?

The shifting of his mother’s body rocked him like a shallow boat, but then he forced himself back into the dark waters that shaped his awareness, hovering in the warm deep liquid between the stillness of death and a kind of half-consciousness.

For who knows how long this continued, when again for the second time, he felt his mother’s arms move and he began to be aware these were not her arms enfolding him. He tried to keep half-awake so as not to disturb the immensely comforting feeling she gave him, although it was more and more appearing not to be his mother, but another body.