Kanata Read online

  Thompson needed a woman. This was God’s purpose. What other point to this journey? He was God’s witness, but who would be his?

  Charlotte Small arrived like a revelation, as vivid as the devil at the checkerboard, tasting of earth and ashes. She was thirteen and Thompson was twenty-nine. Her father, Patrick, was a Scot, a Hudson’s Bay man who had abandoned his country wife and family and retreated to England. Charlotte was tiny and well formed, with the dark eyes and luxuriant blue-black hair of her Cree mother. Thompson was observant, nondescript, his hair cut indifferently by a Cree named, through awkward translation, Kozdaw. He had the same dark eyes as Charlotte, although one of them was useless. He lacked the skills to woo her and simply asked her to be his wife.

  The night before they were married—without benefit of clergy, à la façon du pays—on Île-à-la Crosse, Thompson took a wooden chair outside and set up his telescope and scanned the night sky, happy for the gentle breeze and the solitude. He focused the glass at the moon—the Mare Nubium, Nectaris, Imbrium, and Serenitatis—and stayed up most of the night, as he often did, putting off sleep like a chore.

  The wedding was simple, a brief exchange of vows to be faithful. That night Thompson explored the soft expanse of Charlotte’s perfect skin. She looked up at him as he fumbled for an opening, her eyes filled with fear. Holding this child in his arms after he was spent, Thompson wept along with her.

  He took a bath the next day, pouring boiling water into the tin tub. Her smell was on his body, a scent both new and familiar. In the warm water, he surveyed the pale landscape of his body before scrubbing it with brisk strokes of the hard brush. His form was compact and wiry, a practical machine. His moments last night with Charlotte furthered God’s plan. He lingered over the last scent of her before obliterating it with soap.

  There had been one other before Charlotte, a hasty coupling more than a year earlier, his disappointing and long-delayed initiation. The following morning, the woman, a Cree, stared silently as Thompson left the trading post and walked west, carrying her stare inside him.

  At Rocky Mountain House, Thompson spent each evening with Charlotte, teaching her to read English. He read from the Bible—“For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills”—and taught her to write, guiding her child’s hand. They spent hours spelling words.

  “Tree.”

  “T-R-E,” Charlotte said.

  “E.”

  “Hills.”

  “H-I-L-S.”

  “H-I-L-L-S.”

  “David, my head is bad. I can’t think of more words.”

  “Your head isn’t bad. It will come. It takes time. We have time.”

  “I’ll never understand them.”

  “You’ll be teaching our children,” he said. “Sky.”

  “S-K-I.”

  Each night, Thompson mapped her, her scent and movements, the small rises, the contours and stained hollows.

  By spring, Charlotte was swollen. In the rough hut, she began to breathe irregularly. The child came in a rush of fluid, the hard breathing of Charlotte suspended briefly, as if gathering for a scream. Thompson cut the cord with a knife heated over a flame and looked at the girl who had gushed out, black haired and down covered, alien and inevitable. She slept in her mother’s arms, and they all lay amid the wet bloody sheets. They named her Fanny.

  With Charlotte, Thompson was no longer an exile. The fourteen-year-old mother of his child. His child and their child.

  6

  THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, 1807

  With nine voyageurs, among them MacKay, and two Iroquois named Charles and Ignace, Thompson took his family to cross the Rocky Mountains. There were three children now—Fanny, Samuel, and Emma. Thompson believed he could follow the Columbia River to its mouth at the Pacific Ocean and find a navigable route through the mountains, the culmination of three centuries of European dreams. The Americans were looking for the same thing. So, a race.

  They paddled up the North Saskatchewan River, past Kootenay Plains and over Howse Pass, and arrived at Lake Windermere in mid-July. They built two cabins near the shore and spent the winter there, trading with the Kootenay Indians.

  Thompson had heard that the Cree woman he had left had borne a child, a boy, that his name was Tristan, and that she was variable in her attentions. He appealed to a friend to try to take the child from its mother and to send him to the trading post at Fort Augustus, where Thompson would claim him. Thompson thought about him nightly, a salted wound. A boy conceived in sin and left to fate.

  Meat was scarce, but Ignace found a dead horse in the forest. There were hundreds of wild horses in the mountains, their owners dead from smallpox. They banded together, ghostly herds that had lost any taste for servitude. The horse gave off a foul smell and they boiled the meat for an hour, but it made them all sick anyway.

  A week later Thompson shot a whitetail deer. Ignace immediately cut off its head with his long knife, and the deer suddenly stood up, headless and awful, blood spouting from its neck. It remained standing for almost a minute, a visceral reprimand, then fell over.

  “It’s the devil,” said Ignace, who was an occasional and confused Christian.

  “It’s only muscle and instinct,” Thompson said, observing the body. “The devil is elsewhere.”

  “If you eat that meat, the devil will find his way inside you,” Ignace said.

  Thompson cut off a piece of its haunch, roasted it, and then ate it. The men regarded him with horror and suspicion. Ignace built up the coals and threw the carcass onto them.

  “You can’t burn the devil,” Thompson said.

  In the spring, Thompson left Charlotte and his family at Boggy Hall and tried to cross the mountains. A small band of Indians approached from the south. When they got closer, Thompson saw that it was Kootenae Appee, the Peigan war chief. He was still magnificent, a foot taller than Thompson, lean, his face dabbed in colour, a small mirror hanging from a leather strap around his neck so that his enemies could see themselves before they died.

  “Koo Koo Sint,” he said to Thompson, using his Indian name, and unfolding the smile that conveyed both friendship and menace. “The mountains are not yours.”

  “They aren’t anyone’s now,” Thompson replied.

  Kootenae Appee’s world was shrinking. Like Napoleon, he was fighting wars on every front, stretched thin, his empire no longer easily defined and impossible to defend. His enemies had guns. The Kootenay, the Flathead, the Snake. Appee was fighting the North Westers and to the south, the Americans. He had sent a small party out to meet the explorers Lewis and Clark. In the raid, one Peigan was shot in the stomach by Lewis and another stabbed in the heart.

  “How is Saukamappee?” Thompson asked.

  “Dead,” Kootenae Appee said. He had a rifle in a sheath. His men were armed. Thompson had armed the Snake Indians, enemy to the Peigan. He was arming everyone, partly the result of simple trade, but also to keep the plains in balance, to prevent unchristian slaughter. But he knew the plains were becoming unbalanced in new ways, that traders were pushing farther west, and the Indians were no longer as accommodating.

  No one had accumulated as much knowledge of the terrain or the Indians as Thompson had. And this had given him a curious power, one he was increasingly aware of. The territory was held in a delicate balance and he worried that it wouldn’t hold. When Fort Augustus had been attacked, Thompson had arrived there to find a man standing naked and bootless, a larval spectre squinting into the afternoon sun. A group of Blood Indians led by the brother of Old White Swan cleaned out everything: clothing, tobacco, guns, and shot. Thompson heard that the brother of Old White Swan used his new arsenal to make war upon the Crow Mountain Indians. He killed several men with his gun, but when it jammed he was set upon by a Crow with breath like lamp oil who cut off his ears and dug out his heart.

  “The mountains are a dangerous place,” Kootenae Appee said pleasa
ntly. “Not like the grasses where you can see your enemy approach.”

  Thompson turned his men around. They would have to find another route in.

  They went north and tried again. With him were MacKay, Ignace, Charles, Coté, Valade, Pareil, Grégoire, Bouland, DuNord, and a few others. Thompson had hired a Cree guide whom he didn’t trust. Appropriately named the Rook, he had brought his wife, a silent, suffering woman whose face had the deepening lines of a rotting vegetable. On a night when the sky was partially clear, Thompson sat with his journal, making entries and marking their position through his instruments. The Rook came over, drunk on brandy, and sat heavily on the scrub, cross-legged, sweetly curious, his upper body listing in the mountain breeze.

  “They talk to you, the stars?”

  “They talk to me.”

  “What do they say about me?”

  “That you will sleep badly and wake with two heads.” The Rook laughed and fell over and stared at the stars briefly and then fell asleep and snored heavily.

  In the morning, the Rook sat blurry and quiet by the fire. He took his wife’s arm and drew a sharp flint along the vein in her forearm, leaving a widening red line. His wife made no attempt to pull her arm away and didn’t change her expression. The Rook drained some of her blood into a bowl and drank it in three long gulps.

  Thompson looked at him with disgust.

  “It’s for my head,” the Rook said.

  Thompson got up and slapped him on the side of his head, and he fell over.

  “That is for your head too,” he said.

  Thompson cut a piece of linen to bind her arm. They packed up the camp and walked west through a deadfall forest, the grey stalks angled in the half-light. The weather was turning colder, and the snow was deeper and more difficult to walk through. They moved along the Athabasca River, along the shoals and on ice that was crusted with snow though occasionally opened up to smooth, shiny sections thick enough that they looked black. The banks held stunted pine and willow. The dogs struggled in their traces and Thompson lightened their load, taking out food and making a crude wooden hoard to store it for when they returned. Eight sleds moved into a west wind that came over the peaks in violent gusts, and they came to the end of any grass for the horses. There were tufts that ringed a frozen pond, but the fields were bitten down by bison and half covered in snow. Thompson followed a line up to high land, through patches of dwarf pine. They needed snowshoes to move through the deep snow. It became clear to Thompson that the Rook was unfamiliar with the country, and in the morning he sent him and his wife away.

  They needed firewood, and Thompson and MacKay spent the morning gathering it. In the afternoon they ventured farther, taking advantage of decent weather, to make caches of wood that could be retrieved later. Thompson narrowed his one good eye against the sun and avoided the horizon. He kept his head down. MacKay trudged, staring into the snow that reflected the sun with renewed intensity. When the sky began to darken in late afternoon he rubbed his eyes.

  “It feels like there’s hot sand in them,” MacKay said. Ten minutes later, he was howling in pain.

  Within an hour it was dark and MacKay was snowblind. He sobbed and stumbled, and tried to run, to escape his affliction. Thompson ran after him and tackled him in the snow. He looked at the Orkneyman’s face, his lips drained of colour and eyes red as fire, the devil’s face. MacKay began to scream and Thompson slapped him, the frozen glove leaving a mark on his face. A cruel thing to strike a blind man, Thompson thought, but necessary. MacKay lurched awkwardly to his feet and punched the air instinctively and wheeled into the needles of a blue spruce and collapsed. He struggled to his feet and stood there like a chastened schoolboy awaiting punishment.

  “We are going to die out here, Davy,” MacKay said. “Die a meaningless death in this meaningless land.”

  If there was no meaning, Thompson thought, there was utility. Their bodies would be food for something, the bear, the wolf, the coyote tearing their flesh away in bloody strips, the magpies and worms finishing their work. As for the land, it relied on Thompson to divine its meaning, to give it meaning with his map. Without that, the void.

  “We won’t die if we keep walking,” Thompson said.

  “Oh, we’ll die, Davy. We’ll die.”

  Thompson tied a length of rope around his waist and then to MacKay’s belt beneath his heavy coat. “Walk behind me,” he said. “Keep a regular pace.”

  It was getting late. Thompson could see Jupiter shining beside the moon. By tomorrow it would be on the other side.

  “One eye between two men,” MacKay said. “The one-eyed king.”

  “It’s all we need, MacKay.”

  “Spoken like a man with one eye.”

  “We’ll find the camp. We’ll build a fire. We’ll eat and remember this moment.”

  “Moses,” MacKay muttered. “Leading me out of the wilderness.”

  They walked in the deep snow, breaking through the thin crust with each step, making slow progress. When they fell it was awkward getting up in their heavy, frozen coats. MacKay’s imaginative curses were interspersed with pleas for mercy.

  The aurora borealis lit up the night sky, the absurd colours moving vertically in smooth syncopation as Thompson watched. The sky an unread book. He scanned it as he led his profane duckling through the snow.

  “Jesus. My. Fucking. Celtic. Eyes,” MacKay yelled.

  “The blindness can be healed,” Thompson said.

  “Blindness can be healed. Thank you bloody Jesus.”

  For an hour, MacKay was quiet, rendered mute by the cold.

  “We’re dying,” he finally whispered.

  Thompson had a natural resistance to the elements, his mind elsewhere, observing the landscape, making calculations, or working out the elements of a new language. But he could feel its threat.

  “What was my last sight of this world?” MacKay asked. “Was it the wet thighs of a brown Cree, staring into heaven with a belly full of ale? My last vision was grey sky and grey snow. A vision of nothing.”

  “The last thing you see is the last thing you want to see,” Thompson said. “Picture your mother.”

  “A whore.”

  “Then picture a whore.”

  They marched, silent and fatigued. Thompson saw a deer ahead, its dignified, cautious movement. He untied the rope, whispered to MacKay to stay quiet, and walked downwind, cradling his rifle. He tracked the deer slowly, stopping when it stopped, gaining sixty yards. He feared that MacKay would bellow some new obscenity, scaring the animal. After ten nervous minutes Thompson stood next to a tree, within range, sighting along the barrel at the deer, which was facing him. He waited for the profile to present itself, then squeezed the trigger, and the deer fell softly into the snow, a shot that owed more to luck or God than skill. He went back to MacKay, who was dangerously asleep in the deep snow, resigned to a peaceful death. With some difficulty Thompson roused him and they trudged to the deer. He used his knife to slit it from throat to tail along the belly, and then took MacKay’s hands and pushed them into the warm entrails before thrusting in his own. They massaged the slippery familiar shapes and breathed the warm visceral scent that came out of the steaming carcass. MacKay’s face was turned upward to the sky, eyes closed in what looked like rapture.

  It was past midnight when they returned, marching wearily, the blood frozen on their coats, MacKay’s sightless face covered in ice crystals. Thompson made a fire and they sat silently around the heat. MacKay’s face turned sickly shades of blue and red and then white, and Thompson noted a small dead patch on his cheek that would cause some grief. He wondered about his own face, then slept for fourteen hours.

  Early Christmas morning DuNord beat one of his dogs to death with the copper handle of his knife, delivering heavy blows as he grunted curses. The moon was still reflected by the snow, a sepulchral dawn. He killed the dog out of anger and frustration and stupidity, but it was meat and they roasted it over a fire.

  In the a
fternoon they walked through an alpine meadow into a blizzard driven by a hard northwest wind, the dogs plunging through the snow with every step, their eyes dulled by fatigue. The valley opened to a wide chasm between two high peaks, and Thompson’s men were desolate at the sight. In five months it would be innocent with yellow dryas and sedge grass, but now it was a bleak gateway. As they walked through the snow, the men became so discouraged that they sat down, each in a separate melancholy.

  Thompson plodded along the line, half ordering, half pleading. “Valade. Move yourself, man. Do you want to die here?”

  “Better here than the next valley.”

  “Grégoire, where is your spirit?”

  “In France. Fucking Lise Goulet in the bathtub of the whorehouse. And my spirit is much happier than I am.”

  DuNord was sitting in the snow, immune to orders and pleas. Thompson cuffed him on the head but he was indifferent to the blow. This enraged Thompson, who hit him repeatedly and finally broke his walking stick over DuNord’s heavily padded body. “You useless bastard,” he screamed. “You meat-eating burden. You’re not fit for this land, you useless bloody bastard.”

  The attack exhausted Thompson entirely, and he collapsed in the snow beside the bloodied, silent DuNord. What did they care about discovery? Thompson thought. The land was the land. This valley as good as the next. Their hunger was for meat and women and stories. He sat with DuNord for half an hour. Then they made a dispirited camp.

  In the night, four men deserted, among them DuNord, and Thompson was glad to be free of him. It was down to MacKay, Ignace, Charles, Coté, Valade, Pareil, Grégoire, and Bouland. The next day the men walked like plough horses, rarely looking up.

  “Davy, DuNord’s a swine, but he’s heading in the right direction.”

  “Away from us.”

  “Even if we find a path, what godly use is it to anyone? No one is going to trade through here.”

  “There’s a river,” Thompson said.