Kanata Page 4

  He was sitting at the small table with the checkerboard on it when the devil sat down opposite him. He hadn’t seen him appear: He was just suddenly sitting there, his features and colour those of a Spaniard. He had two short black horns on his forehead that pointed forward, and both his head and body to the waist (he saw no more) were covered with glossy black curling hair. His countenance was surprisingly mild. They played several games, the devil losing every one, yet each time keeping his temper. His movements were languorous, a lazy power, an evil strength coiled within. He uttered not a word. Then he got up or simply disappeared. At any rate, he was gone. Was it a dream? Thompson wondered. His eyes were open. There was a smell in the room, not sulphur, something else, like a singed animal.

  Having defeated the devil in this black cold, Thompson began a dialogue with God, a conversation that reached a vividness in late February when He laid out the order of all things and Thompson’s task: You will map the land and its beasts and the fruits in the field and the men on the grasses, you will bear witness to My work. Witness to God’s work and man’s struggle.

  At the age of fifteen, Thompson had a mission.

  Winter passed in solemn darkness, the light fading in midafternoon before it could bring any warmth, the land without horizon.

  Spring arrived with its release, the relief of water, of warmth and movement. The ground turned to bog that took a man’s leg up to the thigh. Rude boards were placed on the ground to walk on, but they sank into the wet earth.

  In May, the Indians came with their beaver skins to trade. Thompson watched them arrive in canoes that were low in the water, laden with pelts.

  “You want to know why you freeze all winter?” MacKay said. “Here it is.”

  “Do you suppose they are one of the lost tribes?” Thompson asked.

  “Lost tribes?”

  “The ten lost tribes of Israel. Descended from Joseph, perhaps.”

  “We’re the lost tribe, Davy. They’re in their homeland, happy as larks.”

  “It’s possible,” Thompson said.

  “They’re not lost now, but they will be. The factor will see to that.”

  Guttins offered the Indian chief a suit of clothes: a scarlet tunic, a pair of wool trousers, a linen shirt, and a hat with a feather. The chief put on this London attire and danced among his people. Indians and traders sat and smoked tobacco and began the long ceremony that marked the trading season. Guttins made sure the tin cups were filled with brandy, which he had watered down to make more palatable. The talks went on for nine hours, fuelled by drink. At dusk, the two camps broke apart for the evening.

  Thompson observed two Indians in the meadow to the west, coupling drunkenly. A man stood and screamed at the sky and lurched sideways, stumbling downward, his head meeting rock. After two days of trading, the natives sat outside the fort, chastened and morose, their heads angry with a new pain, a sled piled with iron and copper implements sitting in the light rain. The chief ’s new clothes were covered in mud, the scarlet tunic torn at the arm, blood drying on the linen shirt, the hat gone. He led the children of Israel down to the river and they loaded their canoes and paddled westward with their prizes.

  Summer was mosquitoes, the fall short, and the following winter a dismal repeat of the first. He had learned how to clerk, and had learned something of the Cree language. In spring Thompson was called into Hearne’s room. The debauched hero stood in his leather pants and blue shirt, his golden hair matted. “Have you the stomach for discovery?” he asked.

  Thompson stared at him. The Hudson’s Bay Company, a fat fading monopoly, sat next to the frozen sea waiting for the Indians to arrive with their furs while its rival, the North West Company, took the trade inland, sending its men across the plains laden with copper and tobacco and kettles and brandy, seeking out the natives rather than waiting for the natives to seek them. The Hudson’s Bay Company had a few inland trading posts, and Thompson worried that its trading operation was losing ground to the North West Company. In his view, it hadn’t fully engaged its mandate to explore the North West and had become a palsied extension of an empire that was stretched thinly across the globe. Hearne, the great explorer, personified this lost purpose.

  “I am a strong walker, sir, and a decent paddler, and I have some knowledge of navigation,” Thompson said. He had left Grey Coat with a Hadley’s quadrant and the two volumes of Robertson’s Elements of Navigation. “I can speak a little of the native tongue and I’ve read a good deal.”

  “Fine, fine.” Hearne examined Thompson’s schoolboy face. “You will see things out there you’ve never read about.”

  “I hope so, sir.”

  “You won’t always hope so.”

  Until then, what had he seen? A few bears. Too much cold. He was still a clerk, like thousands of boys his age in London, but instead of staring at a bleak, dark interior, he stared at a bleak, almost universal night. He made lists of everything the Hudson’s Bay Company had and didn’t have in alphabetical order: flannel, flints, gin, hatchets. He could have added: patience, purpose, time.

  In October he left with MacKay and Welland, an Englishman whose fleshy face was collapsing, his large features moving downward with their own weight. It was before dawn and Welland sang a song about a woman in Glasgow with an unusual talent. “Oh Mary had a hunger for everyone that bunged her …” There were a dozen verses, each more ludicrous than the last: men disappeared inside her, as did canoes, and by the twelfth verse Westminster Abbey filled with parishioners, their voices lifted in choir. “You’ll be next, Davy boy,” Welland yelled. “Walking in upright, sin and salvation all of a piece.”

  Their intent was to establish contact with the Peigans who camped east of the mountains and who were allied by language and custom with the Blood and the Blackfoot. Thompson’s facility for languages had already come to the House Master’s attention in his dealings with the Cree around the fort, and he was being sent to learn the Blackfoot language. He examined his supplies: leather pants, blue cloth jacket, buffalo robe, rifle, forty rounds of ammunition, two long knives, six flints, two awls, needles, two pounds of tobacco, and one horse to carry it.

  “You came from London?” MacKay asked Thompson.

  “Yes. Wales before that.”

  “But London. Why would you leave London for this?”

  “An opportunity to better myself. In London my life would be simply clerking.”

  “It’s clerking here.”

  “What is in Orkney?”

  “Wind. Too few sins shared among too many.”

  “But your family.”

  “I’m grateful for the distance.”

  Thompson wondered about his own family. How his mother was faring. She was without the burden of her children. She would be fine.

  “You’ve never been with a woman, have you, Davy?”

  Thompson was silent.

  “You could die a virgin,” MacKay said. “They used to sacrifice them, you know. I suppose they still do. You’ll want to be careful.”

  Ahead the plain yawned uneventfully. An hour later a brown mass approached, massive, a herd of what Thompson took to be large deer. He fired into it and watched for five minutes before claiming his prize. MacKay helped him skin and quarter it, and they roasted a haunch over the fire and cut pieces with their long knives to eat.

  The sky was a convex dome and the stars were unusually clear and close.

  “You’d think you’d be able to see God on a night like this,” Welland said.

  “God is in England,” MacKay said. “This is God’s punishment.”

  Thompson sat silently. If he was in England, he would be sleeping with seven boys in a small room, boys who squirmed with one another in the night. Furtive clutchings that ended happily or sadly or under the cane. Days were spent listening to the impatient teachers, the Sisters of Christ with their good intent and vicious energy. He was happy to be on the plains.

  “It is my intention to map this country,” Thompson said. />
  “If you draw lines around nothing,” MacKay said, “it’s still nothing.”

  “Perhaps drawing lines around it will make it something.”

  “The North West isn’t a place, Thompson. It’s a distance to be crossed to get to a place.”

  “You could draw me a map of Margaret Toomey’s arse,” Welland said, laughing. “A distance I’d like to cross and a place I’d like to go.”

  “This land has but one point,” MacKay said. “The lowly beaver. Ugly as sin and just as plentiful.”

  “I have been commissioned by God,” Thompson said, immediately regretting the words.

  “By God?” MacKay said. “Thompson, this is the land God gave to Cain.”

  If he had a gift, and this was a land where gifts were prized, though not one where those with gifts were sent—among the industrious and moral there were Bay men with gifts for drink or rage or stupidity or bad luck—but if he had a gift, it was this: for observation. He watched. He watched the words that fell out of the mouths of men, the way lips moved to form the diphthongs of the Orkneymen, the rounded syllables of London, and he observed the forest in winter, the properties of snow as the temperature changed, the ingenious construction of the mosquito (exquisitely created for torment), the varying qualities of rock and ice, and the patterns of the stars, which appeared static but were symphonic in their movement. He watched the natives, studied their gait and their beliefs, and listened to their words, a grid of related sounds that met the world in a hierarchy of meaning.

  In the morning, they walked the faded yellow prairie grass that stretched flat as a table, uninterrupted. The sun was high and Thompson welcomed the shade from a small stand of stunted poplar. He trudged across a coulee and found buffalo bones so white they shone. A few miles farther on were the bones of a man, his skull caved in and his hand some distance from the rest of him, as if it had inched away. A rabbit darted from a bush near Thompson and he took a shot at it but the rabbit was too fast.

  “You’ll need a better eye,” MacKay said.

  “Or larger game.”

  There was desert with stretches of sand and scattered carpets of low cheatgrass spiking up and pillowy cacti growing in small green patches. MacKay killed a rattlesnake with his long knife, skinned it, and laid the slick hide on a rock to dry in the sun. He tied it around his neck for a day, then abandoned it to the prairie. To the south there was a creek, and they followed its grassy banks until it gave out into alkali salts huddled in dusty hollows, the surrounding area brown and grey and spotted with prickly pear and sage. The sun stayed high in the sky, throwing off a pleasant late-autumn heat. Thompson saw a thunderstorm approach from seventy miles away, gathering itself, the spidery lightning visible in eccentric bursts. A coolness hit his face in advance of the storm that brought the angled sting of rain. The sound was overwhelming, a muffled roar that killed their voices. They were drenched within seconds. They sat down on the prairie, huddling like mushrooms as the lightning forked down.

  “God’s wrath,” MacKay yelled, though he was only a foot away. “I expect it’s Welland he’s after. Either Welland or yourself. Stay close. God loves an Orkneyman. That’s why he gave us such beauty.”

  When the sky finally cleared Thompson ate some salt meat and lay on the wet grass and stared upward. The light disappeared in quiet increments. He looked at the stars, the patterns that had been examined for thousands of years.

  “Do you find comfort in them?” MacKay said.

  “I suppose that I do.” Thompson hadn’t thought of them that way, but MacKay was right. They were companions of a sort.

  “Take what comfort you can from these barrens,” MacKay said.

  The morning was damp, the sky still dark in the west. After a hurried breakfast, they marched. The men were weary. If we keep walking, Thompson thought, if we persevere.

  The mountains came into sight like shining white clouds on the horizon.

  3

  THE NORTH WEST, 1787

  A small party of Peigans rode out to meet them, the dust rising in billows that blew east, visible a mile away.

  “Do you think they’re friendly?” Thompson said.

  “I don’t think anyone’s friendly,” MacKay said. “But I think we can profit from them.”

  “They’ll trade with us?” Thompson asked.

  “They may cut out our hearts and trade those amongst themselves.”

  The Peigans escorted them to their camp, more than a hundred tents near the bank of the Bow River. The women said nothing and showed no expression. The children ran toward them and grasped at their clothes and hands and a few laughed. Thompson was led to a tent and ushered in. Inside it smelled of smoke and the light was brown, filtered through the deer hide. A man of maybe ninety years sat motionless inside. Thompson examined his face, which was the colour of tea.

  “I am David Thompson,” he said in rudimentary Cree. “I am a representative of the Hudson’s Bay Company.” The man remained motionless. After two minutes Thompson wondered if he was dead.

  “I am Saukamappee,” the man finally said. “I am Cree but it is some time since I have heard their language. I find myself a stranger now in the land of my fathers.”

  Thompson sat down across from him, and Saukamappee sat there silently staring. Thompson wasn’t sure if that was the end of their conversation or if he was gathering himself for more words.

  After ten minutes of silence, Saukamappee quietly said, “When I returned from the battle with the Snake Indians I found my wife had given herself to another man and they had gone north to pass the winter. I was filled with grief and anger and walked to the white pine that stands alone on the plain and was thought to have great power. I slept beside it to see if it would grant me wisdom. If I had not gone to fight the Snake my wife would have stayed. But she never would have been mine. I only knew this by going away. So what had I lost? Someone I never had. I renounced my people and came to live with the Peigan who welcomed me. The chief gave me his eldest daughter for a wife. She is old now but she was beautiful and she was faithful, and yet I quarrelled with her and now I see that half my life was given to small battles of no meaning.”

  Saukamappee’s voice had a small range, like church music, and he spoke staring straight ahead as if reciting a lesson. The fire flickered and changed the light within the tent. The air cooled and Thompson moved under the buffalo robes.

  Saukamappee closed his eyes and Thompson wondered if this was the end of the story.

  A few minutes later he opened his eyes. “Do you have a wife?” he asked Thompson.

  “No.”

  “You should find one. Perhaps tomorrow.”

  When Thompson woke up, he was alone in the tent. Outside, the morning was bright and crisp, the yellow grass still damp. Shivering slightly in his clothes, he observed a young man applying paint to his face, using one of the small mirrors they had brought to trade. He worked patiently with the colours, absorbed in his own creation, a combination of ferocity and decoration.

  Thompson spent the day walking the camp, which extended out toward the foothills. He was regarded with curiosity but no one approached him. MacKay had laid out trade goods on a blanket and was negotiating by pointing and holding up fingers. In the evening, they ate trout that had been taken from the river and roasted over the fire. A woman gave Thompson a bowl with berries and grease. As it grew dark, the Indians took their bowls to the river to wash them. Thompson washed his and then went into the tent.

  Saukamappee was sitting in his usual spot, his eyes closed, but he opened them when Thompson came in. Thompson sat down, the audience that Saukamappee had been waiting for.

  He described his first encounter with whites, with their silent gift that crept westward. He had led a party of warriors into an enemy Blackfoot camp one night. Five hundred men crept up to the tents and then slit them open to massacre the inhabitants.

  “But our war whoop instantly stopped,” he told Thompson. “Our eyes were filled with terror:
there was no one to fight but the dead and the dying.”

  It was smallpox that had ravaged the Blackfoot, making its debut among the Plains natives. The warriors walked among the decomposing corpses and soundless, swollen children. They chose certain possessions and took them, the spoils of war.

  “The second day after, this dreadful disease broke out in our camp and spread from one tent to another, as if the bad spirit carried it. We had no belief that one man could give it to another, any more than a wounded man could give his wound to another. We believed that the Good Spirit had forsaken us and allowed the Bad Spirit to become our master. Our hearts were low and dejected, and we shall never be again the same people.”

  The morning was unusually mild, the strong warm chinook coming down and eating the light covering of snow. Thompson walked the foothills with MacKay and surveyed the land. To the west, hogback ridges leaned out where the rock began in earnest. Clouds topped the southern range like a confection.

  He had seen MacKay leaving a woman’s tent before dawn. “You’ll want to be careful, MacKay,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “We’re trading with them.”

  “Some more than others.”

  “We can’t put that trade in jeopardy.”

  MacKay stared to the south, squinting into the distance. “Look at this. I don’t like it, Davy. It looks bad.”

  Thompson saw the group approach, perhaps two hundred and fifty men, some of them mounted, others walking. Saukamappee had told him that a war party had gone off two months earlier to avenge the death of four Peigan hunters who were murdered by Snake Indians. An advance horseman who rode back to get them to prepare a feast for their arrival had told Saukamappee the story. The party had ridden south in search of the Snake but didn’t find them. But they came upon a silver caravan being led by black-faced men—Spaniards, Thompson surmised—moving up from Spanish Louisiana. They slaughtered the Spaniards and took their horses and mules, emptying the heavy, useless silver onto the desert.