The Tenderness of Wolves (38 page)

Alec has been walking beside his mother, sometimes putting his hand in hers, sometimes not. It is hard for him; Elizabeth wondered whether to let him come at all, but there was a look in his eye that reminded her of Nepapanees. He was resolute and serious. Only yesterday he was still a boy with a father to test himself against. Now he has to be a man.

The men leave the sleds up on the bank, and go down to the river. Elizabeth takes Alec by the hand. It will not be his place to pull his father’s body from the water. The men walk out cautiously, jabbing the ice with long poles, testing its strength. When it breaks, near the shadow, the water beneath is black. One man exclaims–the water is shallower
than they thought. They study the current, discussing how to go about it. From their higher point on the bank, Elizabeth looks downstream, at the white curving road. Somewhere down there, Nepapanees is waiting.

‘Stay here,’ she tells Alec, knowing he will obey. She strides off downstream without looking back. The men watch her nervously.

What she has seen: an interruption in the white smoothness of the river; a rough place where branches have snagged on a sunken bar and held, forming a weir. Anything carried downstream with the current would come to rest here for the winter until the spring floods washed it all away.

Elizabeth slides and scrambles down the bank above the weir. Part of her mind wonders why Stewart didn’t think to look here, but the snow is virgin. The ice is strong beneath her feet. She kneels down and scrapes the snow away with her mittens, throwing it aside, revealing the ice beneath. Glare ice, clear as glass. The river’s darkness leers up at her, brown-black and full of rotted matter under its icy shield. She claws at the ice with her hands, breaking the edges where it is pierced and spoilt by the branches, punching and cracking it, until …

There … there deep down, caught in the morass, she can see something, something both light and dark, something large and wrong and trapped in the watery darkness.

There are shouts, and some of the men scramble down the bank behind her, but she is not aware of them, nor of her breath coming in great hissing gasps between her teeth, nor of her hands, bare now, bleeding and blue with cold, scrabbling at the jagged ice edge. Then they are beside her with their sticks and axes, smashing at the ice, chopping it into great foaming chunks. Hands try to pull her away from the hole but she takes them by surprise, lunges forward, diving in head first, her hands reaching out to take hold of her husband’s body and drag him free. In the sudden shock of
dead cold, even with her eyes open she sees nothing but blackness in the depths, and green-grey light above; until the something breaks free of its bonds and comes to her outstretched arms like a nightmare lover.

The carcass of a deer is swimming towards her, its rotting eyes wide and empty, black lips eaten back from grinning teeth, skull gleaming coy and white through sodden fur. The skin floats round it like a tattered shroud.

When they pull her out again they think for a moment she is dead. Her eyes are shut and water runs out of her mouth. Peter Eagles strikes her chest and she coughs, vomiting river. Her eyes open. They are already carrying her up the bank, pulling off her wet skins, chafing her flesh. Someone has made a fire. Someone else brings a blanket. Alec is crying. He isn’t ready to lose another parent.

Elizabeth tastes the river in her mouth, the taste trapped behind her teeth, cold and dead.

‘He isn’t there,’ she says, when her teeth have stopped chattering.

George Cummings is rubbing her hands with a piece of blanket.

‘There’s a long stretch to look in; we will smash every piece of ice until we find him.’

She shakes her head, still seeing the pale dead deer face smiling in triumph at her. ‘He isn’t there.’

Later they sit round the fire eating pemmican and drinking tea. Normally they would fish, but no one wants to fish in this river; no one even suggests it. Alec sits up against Elizabeth, so that she can feel the warmth of his side and thigh.

They have made their camp on another beach, out of sight of the destruction they caused, protected by high banks from the wind. But it is surprisingly still and the smoke from their fire rises straight up in the air until it disappears.

William Blackfeather speaks in a low voice, to no one in particular. ‘Tomorrow, at first light, we’ll look, upriver as well as down. Between us we can cover a lot of ground.’

Nodding. Then Peter: ‘Strange how shallow the water is. You would have thought it would be hard to get swept away. The current isn’t so fast.’

George nods towards Elizabeth, warningly. She, however, doesn’t seem to be listening. Kenowas drops his voice when he speaks.

‘There was new ice, where it was broken. What was there before wasn’t thick, half as thick as the new ice.’

There is silence, in which they all think their own thoughts. Kenowas speaks his out loud.

‘I wouldn’t have gone onto that ice, no matter what I was following.’

‘What are you saying?’ Arnaud is gruff and belligerent, even when sober. Kenowas turns to him. There is a longstanding dislike between them.

‘I can’t see Nepapanees going out on it either. Even an idiot like you would think twice.’

No one laughs, even though it’s meant as a joke. There is truth in what he says, and Nepapanees was the keenest tracker, the most experienced among them.

What no one says, although most of them think it, is that the guiding spirit of Nepapanees was a deer. He was not baptised, so instead of a baby looking after him, he had the deer-spirit. A strong, fast, brave spirit that knew the woods and plains. Better than a baby for him, he said. How could a human baby, born long ago in a hot, sandy country, know how to survive in the cold wilderness? What could it teach him? Then Elizabeth, baptised with a special saint for company and with white blood in her veins, shook her head and tutted if she was angry, or teased him and pulled his hair if she was not. When she became a convert in adulthood, she had liked the thought of St Francis, with his kindness and
his way of communing with the birds and other creatures. He was almost like a Chippewa in this, and for this reason was very popular–four children and two adults in their village alone had chosen him for confirmation.

Now St Francis seems far away and irrelevant, a stranger who could not possibly understand this death, her icy grief. Elizabeth cannot shake the sight of the deer’s head from her mind. In the river she had felt strongly that her husband was not there at all, was nowhere near, but perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps her husband’s faith has been the right one all along, and what she saw was his spirit, come back to taunt her for her unbelief.

She feels distant, frozen by more than cold, utterly apart from the men and the food and the fire. Even from the snow and the silence and the bottomlessly hollow sky. The only thing that connects her to this world at all is the gentle pressure of her son’s body; a thin thread of human warmth, easily broken.

The temperature continues to drop. In this cold, the air feels as though it is being tightened in a vice. It takes your breath away, sucks moisture from your skin, burns like fire. There is a deep, almost conscious silence in the yard, in which feet crunch the snow with startling loudness.

That’s what wakes Donald: the press and squeak of new snow underfoot.

He has stayed in bed all day, pleading a slight fever, and slept into the late afternoon, a chair wedged under the door handle, dozing pleasantly as the light faded. There is nothing unusual about the footsteps–there are still people around to make them–only they have a peculiar, uneven pattern which jolts him out of his comfortable daze. Unwillingly he finds himself listening as the person walks, stops, then walks a little further. Then stops again. He waits–dammit!–for their next move. At length he is forced to push himself up on his elbows and peer out into the darkening courtyard. A couple of squares of light spill from rooms further along; the offices, perhaps. At first he doesn’t see the person, but that is because he is keeping to the shadows; presumably he assumes that Donald’s room, because dark, is empty. Then he sees him: a man dressed in furs, with long dark hair. Donald wonders if the search party has returned. He does not recognise this man, and after a few moments realises that he is not from any search party. He is furtive, looking around him with exaggerated care, and moving in a
sort of pantomime of stealth. He is colossally drunk. Donald watches with mounting amusement as the man stumbles over something in the darkness, and swears. Then, when there is no response to the noise, he moves off towards the stores, and out of sight. Someone too drunk to be any use in searching. Donald sinks back into his cocoon, pulling the blankets round his chin.

There are men at Fort Edgar who spend months inebriated, who are good for nothing all winter. It is sad when they get to that stage, and means their working life will be short. Drunkenness is a progressive disease, and Donald was initially shocked that the Company elders took no steps to counteract it, allowing the voyageurs unlimited access to their poor-quality liquor. When he tentatively pressed Jacob on the subject, Jacob hung his head; it had been alcohol that caused him to stick a knife in Donald’s belly. As far as Donald knew, Jacob had not touched a drop since. Only once had Donald brought up the subject with Mackinley, to have Mackinley turn his pale eyes on him with amusement, if not downright scorn. ‘This is the way the world works,’ was what Mackinley’s argument boiled down to. All the traders lure trappers and staff with liquor; if the Company didn’t provide it, it would lose out to rival outfits with fewer scruples and less regard for the welfare of those who work for them. To act any other way would be naive. Donald felt there was something amiss with this argument, but did not dare say so.

After a while he gets to thinking about what Mrs Ross told him last night. Nesbit is a young man like him, fairly recently arrived from Scotland. A man of education and some breeding. A junior clerk, but with the intelligence to advance in the Company. The similarities alarm Donald; or rather, once those similarities are taken into account, the differences begin to alarm him. Nesbit’s nervous tics, his bitter laugh, the flagrant hatred for his life. He has been in
the country more than twice as long as Donald, and though he is clearly miserable, he seems to assume that he will never leave. A slight shudder runs through Donald as he contemplates the prospect of Norah, with her wide, mistrustful face and insolent speech, in whose broad arms Nesbit has apparently found comfort. In the past he has been aware of mixed liaisons–even at Fort Edgar they were common–but Donald held himself aloof from the idea that this would ever happen to him. He felt he was destined to marry (somehow; the details were obscure) a nice, white English-speaking girl–a girl like Susannah, in fact, only he had never dared dream of someone as pretty. In his first eighteen months at Fort Edgar, such a prospect began to seem increasingly remote. But looking at the native women who abounded at the Fort, he still drew back, even when the men teased him about this or that girl who had giggled in his presence. But he has never seen a native woman as beautiful as Nancy Eagles. He can still feel the warmth of her soft flesh, the thrilling boldness of her hand–that is, if he allows himself to think about it. Which he won’t. Hard to imagine Norah having the same galvanising effect on Nesbit, somehow. Still.

The letter to Maria is on the desk. Last night, after his private outburst, he picked up the balled paper, smoothed it out and pressed it as well as he could under some spare sheets, weighted down with his boots, but he fears it will not be enough. Perhaps it was unwise of him to write to her anyway. Perhaps crumpling it up into a ball was a blessing in disguise. It is Susannah he should be thinking of, and he does, trying to grasp her elusive image, to hear her light, silvery voice in his head.

As the last of the light drains from the sky, Donald dresses. He is hungry, which he seizes on as a sign of returning vigour, and wanders out into the deserted corridors. He finds Nesbit in his office–the beacon of light he saw from
across the courtyard. There is no sign of Stewart, Mrs Ross, or anyone else.

Nesbit leans back from his desk with a grimace, unkinking the hunch in his back. He yawns hugely, revealing blackened molars. ‘Fucking accounts. Bane of my life. Well, one of them. Used to have an accountant here once–Archie Murray. Funny little chap–mousy sort of fellow. But since he went I’ve had to do it myself, and it’s not my forte, I don’t mind telling you. Not my forte at all.’

Donald toys with the idea of offering his help, but decides he isn’t feeling that vigorous.

‘Not that we’ve got such a huge turnover to deal with. More outgoing than incoming, if you know what I mean. How’s tricks at your place?’

‘Fairly good, I suppose. But then we are more of a way-station than a source. I suppose once–years ago, before there were so many men–the whole country was full of furs.’

‘I’m not sure that there was ever much of anything round here.’ Nesbit looks gloomy. ‘Do you know what the natives call this neck of the woods? Starvation Country. Even the bloody foxes can’t find anything to eat–and they’re all red, of course. Time for a drink.’

From his slumped sitting position, Nesbit lurches past Donald and pulls a bottle of malt whisky from behind some ledgers. ‘Come on.’

Donald follows Nesbit into his sitting room–the small, bare room next to his office that contains a couple of overstuffed armchairs and some pictorial relief of a questionable nature.

‘Where is Mr Stewart this evening?’ Donald asks, as he accepts a large glass of malt. Fortunately it is of a better quality than the rum at Fort Edgar. Donald wonders fleetingly how it is that–at the back of beyond, when decent food and housekeeping seem beyond them–the inhabitants of Hanover House drink like kings.

‘Oh, round and about,’ Nesbit says vaguely. ‘Round and about. You know …’ he leans forward in his chair, staring at Donald with disconcerting intensity, ‘that man … That man is a saint. An absolute saint.’