The Tenderness of Wolves (22 page)

‘What do you think it is?’

Sturrock swallows the contents of his glass and grimaces as if it were medicine.

‘This will sound preposterous, but … well, I believe it may be evidence of an ancient written language of the Indians.’

Knox’s first desire is to laugh. It does sound preposterous–a boys’ adventure story. He has never heard anything so ridiculous.

‘What makes you believe that?’ He has never thought Sturrock a fool, despite his shortcomings. Perhaps he has been wrong, and that is the man’s flaw; the reason why, in his sixties, he wears an old-fashioned coat with frayed cuffs.

‘I can see that you think it is preposterous. I have reasons. I have looked into the matter for over a year.’

‘But everyone knows there is no such thing!’ Knox cannot stop himself. ‘There is not a scrap of evidence. If there had ever been such writing in existence, there would be traces … there would be some document or record, or anecdotal evidence … and yet there is nothing.’

Sturrock regards him gravely. Knox puts on a conciliatory tone. ‘I’m sorry if I sound dismissive, but it is … fantastic.’

‘Perhaps. But the fact remains that some people think it possible. Do you concede that?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course they may.’

‘And if I am looking for it, others might be looking for it also.’

‘That is also possible.’

‘Well, then, what I have been thinking is this: the man I mentioned, Kahon’wes, was a sort of journalist, a writer. An Indian, but a very gifted one. Educated, intelligent, able to weave a pretty phrase and so on. I always thought he might have some white blood in him, but I never asked. He was fanatically proud; obsessed with the notion of Indians having a great culture of their own, in every way equal to white culture. He was fervent in the way that some men of religion are. He thought me a sympathiser, and I was, up to a point … He was unstable, poor fellow–took to drink when he did not make the sort of splash he’d hoped for.’

‘What are you implying?’

‘That he, or someone like him, who believed passionately in an Indian nation and culture, would do almost anything to get a piece of evidence like that.’

‘And did this man know Jammet?’

Sturrock looks slightly surprised. ‘I really don’t know. But people get to hear of things, don’t they–you wouldn’t necessarily need to know someone to want what they had. I didn’t know Jammet myself until I heard him talking about the piece in a Toronto coffeehouse. He wasn’t close-mouthed.’

Knox shrugs. He’s wondering if Sturrock really pulled him out of his house to tell him this bizarre story. ‘And where does this Kahon’wes live now?’

‘That I can’t tell you. The last time I saw him was years ago. I knew him when he was travelling round the peninsula, writing articles. As I said, he took to drink and dropped out of sight. I heard he went over the border, but that’s all.’

‘And you are telling me this because you think he may be a suspect? Rather slim grounds, wouldn’t you say?’

Sturrock looks at his empty glass. Already, dust has fallen onto the trails of liquid, thickening them.

‘Kahon’wes talked to me once of an ancient written
language. The possibility of one, I mean. I had never heard of such a thing.’ Sturrock smiles a wintry smile, tight at the corners of his mouth. ‘Of course, I thought he was crazy.’ He shrugs his shoulders in a gesture that Knox finds strangely pathetic.

‘Then I came across the tablet. And I remembered what he’d said. It may be that I tell you this at some personal cost, but I felt you should know all the facts. It may not be important, I am merely telling you what I know. I do not want a man’s death to go unpunished because I did not speak.’

Knox drops his eyes, feeling that familiar sense of the absurd sweeping over him. ‘It is a pity you did not confide this information sooner, before the prisoner escaped. Perhaps you would have been able to identify him.’

‘Really? You think …? Well, well.’

Knox does not for an instant believe the look of dawning realisation on Sturrock’s face. In fact he is beginning to doubt the whole story. Perhaps Sturrock has some other motive for turning attention back onto the half-breed, to deflect attention from his own presence. In fact, the more he thinks about it, the more ludicrous the story becomes. Knox wonders whether there ever was a bone tablet; no one apart from Sturrock has mentioned it.

‘Well, thank you for telling me, Mr Sturrock. That … may be useful. I will discuss it with Mr Mackinley.’

Sturrock spreads his hands. ‘I merely want to help bring the murderer to justice.’

‘Of course.’

‘There was one other thing …’

Ah, now we come to the true matter, thinks Knox.

‘I was wondering if you could possibly stand me a little more of the filthy lucre?’

On the short, cold walk back to his house, Knox suddenly remembers, with a hideous, piercing clarity, what he said to
Mackinley earlier: ‘I saw with my own eyes how your idea of justice is achieved.’

He had told Mackinley (or at least allowed him to form the impression) that he had not been back to see the prisoner after Mackinley’s interrogation. He can only hope that Mackinley was too drunk or agitated to notice.

A forlorn hope, given the circumstances.

Over breakfast, Parker talks about the night-time visitor. The wolf we saw was a young female, probably about two years old and not yet fully mature. He thinks she had been following us for a couple of days, out of curiosity, staying out of sight. It is possible that she wanted to mate with Sisco, and may in fact have done so.

‘Would she have followed us without the dogs?’ I ask.

Parker shrugs. ‘Maybe.’

‘How did you know she’d be there last night?’

‘I didn’t know. It was possible.’

‘I’m glad you told me.’

‘A few years ago …’ Parker pauses, as though surprised at himself for volunteering anything. I wait.

‘A few years ago I found an abandoned wolf cub. I suppose its mother had been killed, or it may have been driven out of the pack. I tried to raise it like a dog. For a while it was happy. It was like a pet, you know … affectionate. It would lick my hand and roll over, wanting to play. But then it got older, and the playing stopped. It remembered it was a wolf, not a pet. It stared into the distance. Then one day it was gone. The Chippewa have a word for it–it means “the sickness of long thinking”. You cannot tame a wild animal, because it will always remember where it is from, and yearn to go back.’

Try as I may to imagine a younger Parker playing with a wolf cub, I cannot do it.

*

For four days the sky stays grey and low, the air wet as if we are walking through heavy cloud. We travel gradually but distinctly upwards, all the time moving through forest, although the trees change; they become shorter, there are more pines and willows, fewer cedars. But now the forest thins out, the trees dwindle to sparse scrub, and we come, unbelievably, to the edge; the end of the forest that seemed to have no end.

We emerge onto a vast plain just as the sun burns through the cloud and floods the world with light. We are standing on the edge of a white sea on which waves of snow march to the horizon to north, east and west. I haven’t seen such distances since standing on the shores of Georgian Bay, and it makes me dizzy. Behind us, the forest; ahead, another country: one I have never seen before, glittering, white and huge under the sun. The temperature has dropped several degrees; there is no wind, but the cold is like a hand that is laid with gentle but implacable force on the snow, telling it to stay.

I feel the mounting panic I felt when first confronted with the virgin forest of Dove River: this is too big, too empty for humans, and if we venture out onto that plain, we will be as vulnerable as ants on a dinner plate. There is truly, here, nowhere to hide. I try to stifle my desire to head back under the cover of the trees as I tread in Parker’s footsteps away from the familiar, friendly forest. I feel a sudden kinship with those animals who burrow into the snow in winter, to live underground, in tunnels.

Actually the plateau is not flat, but full of mounds and cones of snow that hide bushes and hillocks and rocks. The whole plateau is a bog, Parker tells me, and hell to cross before it freezes. He points to a churned-up hollow where he claims someone sank in: one of the men we are following. We, apparently, have it easy. Even so, the ground is so rough
that after two hours I can barely move my feet another step. I grit my teeth and concentrate on lifting one foot after another, but I drop further and further behind. Parker stops and waits for me to catch up.

I’m angry. This is too difficult. My face and ears are frozen, but under my clothes I am sweating. I want shelter and rest. I am so thirsty my tongue feels like a dry sponge in my mouth.

‘I can’t!’ I shout from where I am.

Parker treads back towards me.

‘I can’t go on. I need to rest.’

‘We haven’t gone far enough to rest. This weather may change.’

‘I don’t care. I can’t move.’ I sink to my knees in the snow, as a protest. It feels so good to be off my feet I close my eyes in ecstasy.

‘Then you’ll have to stay there.’

Parker’s face and voice don’t change at all, but he turns and walks away. He can’t mean it, I think, as he reaches the sled and the dogs, who have been fidgeting and tangling themselves in their harness. He doesn’t even look back. He flicks the dogs on and they begin to move off.

I am outraged. He is prepared to walk away and leave me here. With tears of fury in my eyes, I struggle to my feet and begin forcing them painfully after the sled.

My anger drives me on for another hour, by which time I am so tired that I have no feelings at all. And then, at last, Parker stops. He makes tea and repacks the bags on the sled, then indicates that I should sit on it. He has arranged it so that the bags form a rough backrest. I am as touched now as I was angry before.

‘Can the dogs manage?’

‘We can manage,’ he says, but I don’t understand what he means until he attaches another line to the sled to help the dogs. He places the loop of hide around his forehead, and
leans into the pulling, shouting at the dogs, until the sled is torn free from where it has frozen into the snow. He tugs and strains and then finds the same metronomic stride as before. I am ashamed at being part of his burden, at making more difficult something that is already close to the limits of what is endurable. He doesn’t complain. I have tried not to complain either, but I can’t say I’ve been all that successful.

Clinging on to the sled as it bucks and plunges over mounds of snow, I realise that the plain is beautiful. The brightness makes my eyes water, and I am dazzled, not just physically, but awed by this enormous, empty purity. We pass bushes whose branches contain cobwebs of spun snow, and nodules of ice that catch the sunlight and split it into rainbows. The sky is a burnished, metallic blue; there is not a breath of wind, and there is no noise at all, of any kind. The silence is crushing.

Unlike some people, I have never felt free in the wilderness. The emptiness suffocates me. I recognise the symptoms of incipient hysteria and try to fend them off. I make myself think of the dark night, and relief from this blinding visibility. I make myself think of how tiny and unimportant I am, how far beneath notice. I have always found it comforting rather than otherwise to contemplate my own insignificance, for if I am negligible, why should anyone persecute me?

I once knew a man who had been spoken to by God. Of course there were many such men and women in the asylums I lived in–to the extent that I used to imagine that if a stranger from another land arrived at our door, he would think he had stumbled on the place where all the most holy of our society were gathered together. Matthew Smart was tormented by the conversation. He was an engineer who had conceived the idea that the power of steam was so great that it could save the world from sin. He himself had been
charged by God with the task of building such an engine, and had sunk considerable resources into starting this project. When he ran out of money, his scheme, and his insanity, were uncovered, but taking him away from his engine was the most unbearable torture for him, because he thought that due to his enforced idleness, we were all going to Hell. He knew how important he was in the scheme of things, and would seize each of us in the grounds and beg us to help him escape, so he could continue his vital work. Among those tortured souls, almost all of them bewailing some private anguish, his beseechings were the most heartbreaking I ever heard. Once or twice I was even tempted to stick my loaded needle into him, to put him out of his misery (but not unbearably tempted, of course). Such is the torment of knowing your own significance.

Parker shouts to the dogs and we come to a bumpy halt. We are still nowhere, only now the forest has long been out of sight and I’m not sure I could any longer point to it.

He comes back towards me. ‘I think I know where they went.’

I look around, to see nothing, of course. The plain stretches away in every direction. It is truly like being at sea. Without the sun, I would have no idea what direction we are travelling in.

‘Over there,’ he points in a direction away from the sun, now sinking to our left, ‘is a Company trading post called Hanover House. Several days away. Over this way the trail leads. There is a place called Himmelvanger–a religious village of some sort. Foreigners. Swedish, I think.’

I follow his pointing finger and peer into the dazzling distance to the west, thinking of the asylum and its turbulently pious inmates.

‘So, Francis …?’ I can hardly give voice to my hope, which is clutching me by the throat.

‘We should be there by nightfall.’

‘Oh …’

I can’t say anything more, in case I destroy this great gift of luck. In the sunlight I suddenly notice that Parker’s hair is not black after all, but has hints of dark brown and chestnut in it, and no trace of white.

He shouts to the dogs again, a wild yell that rings around the empty plain like the cry of an animal, and with it launches himself into the harness, and the sled jerks away from its standstill. The breath is jolted out of my body, but I don’t care.