Kanata Read online

  “A bloody river. And this is the way to it, Davy? It’s cursed, all of it.”

  “You can join DuNord if you want.”

  “DuNord’s a fool. But even a fool is right sometimes.”

  In the afternoon, lenticular clouds swirled in wisps, a cursive warning that a warm wind would blow down. When it came, it was almost too strong to walk into. It made the snow heavier and walking even more difficult. A limestone wall a thousand yards high had threads of snow like veins. Black slate glistened in the afternoon sun as the water leaked out from the snow and dribbled down slabs that looked as if they had been cut with a knife.

  In the morning the world was ice. They moved carefully past quartzite that ran in parallel lines angled downward as if dropped unevenly from heaven. They found tracks and followed them to a stand of trees, and killed the moose that was sheltered there. Pareil made a small fire and they roasted pieces and ate. Thompson opened the skull to examine the moose’s small brain.

  It was the last meat they saw for two weeks. They walked sullenly and came upon the frozen carcass of a moose that had been eaten by wolves. It lay in the snow like a prehistoric ruin. A few miles on they stopped and built a small wooden hut and spent a week in it, hunting, drying their clothes, and arguing about the futility of their journey.

  Valade’s face was dark, smeared with grease. “We won’t live if we go further,” he said.

  “If we move south, we have a chance at better weather,” Thompson said.

  “We have a chance to die,” MacKay said. “There is the issue of empire.”

  “All empires are shit and they all come to shit.”

  The men refused to go farther. They built a larger structure and prepared to starve. After six weeks their faces had hollowed. They were filthy and gaunt, and ate a poor dinner of roots and the scrapings from a scavenged deer. Thompson wondered at the fortunes of his family. He ached for Charlotte, who now read well enough to teach the children. Civilization would follow them, and they would need skills.

  Ignace stared at the fire and began talking. “A woman comes on the ships,” he said. “She lives in a village where she is well fed and unhappy and lives in fear of the Iroquois and of the winters. She thinks both are trying to kill her. One night there is a raid; the Iroquois have come. Her husband, who she had no interest in and who she wished dead a hundred times as she sat freezing in their wooden house, is tortured in front of her. Finally his heart is cut out and cooked. She is taken to the Iroquois village and becomes the wife of the torturer. They have three children and the woman learns the ways of the Iroquois and comes to understand the forest as a man does. After ten years, she looks at her husband as he sleeps and plunges a long knife into his heart. She takes her children and escapes into the forest. Her husband is found the next morning, pinned to the ground by the knife.

  “The woman gets to a white village. She is no longer young and her beauty is spent. She and her children are taken in by a man who uses them to work on his small farm. She works long hours and is treated poorly. Her children grow up and when the last one leaves, the woman bakes a pie for her master, and as he is eating she comes behind him and slashes his throat with a knife. She goes back into the forest. The men in the village follow her, bent on revenge, but she knows the ways of the forest too well. They can’t find her trail. She has vanished.

  “She survives by eating berries and plants, and as winter comes, she takes up with a bear. She lies with the bear in its cave and is warmed by it as it sleeps through the cold months. In April, the bear wakes up and sees the woman and can’t remember that they were ever together. It kills her and eats her and her bones lie in the cave. Her hair, which became silver then white with age, continues to grow after she is dead. It grows out of the cave and through the forest, past the villages of the white men and the camps of the Iroquois. The white ribbon becomes a river that leads to the cave.”

  “Why aren’t your stories ever true?” MacKay asked. “They are true,” Ignace said. “They just haven’t happened yet.”

  April brought a scent of spring. Mornings were ashen and the clouds low. Thompson sent the men out to look for birchbark to build canoes, but there weren’t any trees large enough. He had to abandon the idea and instead cut down cedar trees, and they began the unfamiliar job of building cedar boats. At first, they dug too deep with the auger and split the delicate wood. Some of it was too green and needed to be dried by the fire. They cut boards and laid them in overlapping vertical lengths and sealed the joints, but the first boat broke in half when they tried to move it. They spent sixteen days at this.

  They pulled the boats along frozen sections of the Columbia River, paddling where it was open. The river moved north and then doubled back, going south, and they paddled into a reluctant spring.

  On a morning when the river was running clear and the air was fine, they came to a village along the banks. The San Poil Indians were painted red and black. Thompson stopped and smoked with them. Bright red salmon littered the rocks, and Thompson traded tobacco for two fish and a basket filled with roots.

  The Columbia River hosted a string of villages that depended on salmon. They drifted by the Wenatchees, Sahaptin, Solkulks, and the Sawpatins, where the chief wore a medal with the head of Thomas Jefferson engraved on it, a bad sign.

  The river was wide and muddy with runoff. Past the mouth of the Snake River there was a village of twenty huts and no sign of life. Thompson put the boats ashore to survey the huts, which were crude and sat on dark volcanic soil as fine as dust. Two old men emerged from the pine forest, crawling naked over the rock. Behind them were three women on their knees, their hands lifted in supplication. Ignace spoke briefly to them. They had seen a white man (Meriwether Lewis, Thompson later discovered) shoot a sandhill crane out of the sky. They didn’t know if Lewis was human. They didn’t know what Thompson was.

  Ignace told Thompson they had to leave, and when they were on the water, he refused to answer any of Thompson’s questions.

  The cedar boats moved downriver in an ethereal parade, the late-morning sun framing fifty men along the crest of a two-hundred-foot ridge, staring down at them, arrows poised in their bows. Thompson and his men moved slowly, glancing up at the painted faces as they passed.

  “What do they want?” MacKay asked.

  “I don’t know,” Thompson said. “I don’t think they know, either.”

  “If they let those arrows go, we’re done. There’s no refuge.”

  “Don’t look at them. Paddle steadily. They won’t fire without cause.”

  “And what would bloody cause be, do you imagine? We reach for a drink? We paddle too slow? Too fast? We talk like the devil?”

  They camped downstream, and Coté ate a red mushroom and became feverish. He began roaring, and waded into the river, screaming he was a fish, that he would fish for himself. Pêche pêcheur ma pêche. They dragged him out of the water and laid him near the fire. The fever faded and he slept for twenty hours.

  Thompson wanted to see the ocean, to gaze toward China sitting invisible on the horizon.

  The next morning, he saw a harbour seal sitting on a rock.

  The Americans had gotten to the Pacific first. The Tonquin had left New York in September, provisioned by John Jacob Astor and crewed by adventurers, some of them former Nor’Westers, and they had sailed around the Horn and up the west coast. They arrived in spring and built Fort Astoria. Thompson came ashore and introduced himself, and he and the Americans stood at the edge of the Pacific, assessing one another as civilized men and enemies.

  Thompson recognized one of the Indians at Fort Astoria. It was One-Standing-Lodge-Pole Woman, who had been Pareil’s wife briefly. She was witchy and loose, and Thompson had ordered her out of the camp in the Flat Bow country after he found her naked, entertaining Bouland and Coté. He feared she would set his men against one another, less a moral decision than a strategic one. Thompson had heard that she’d since declared she was a man, and a prophet no less. Sh
e took a wife and left for the Oregon Country. And now here she was, dressed as a man in blue pants with a red sash, shells in her nose and a tattoo under one eye. She gave Thompson a look of recognition and disdain. The Americans told him that her name was Qanqon and that they wanted her out of camp—she was spooking the Indians and jeopardizing their trade. MacKay suggested sewing her into a bag and drowning her like a pup.

  Qanqon walked over to Thompson. “A disease will move into your heart,” she told him. “And live there forever.”

  LOST

  1840 –1857

  What is a child? A simple question, you’d think. But there were nine-year-olds working sixteen-hour days in English factories. Such was childhood. Thompson was fifteen when he sailed off to the New World to work. He never knew his father—not that there was any model for fatherhood then. Children were sent away: to school, to work, to die. Thompson had thirteen children with Charlotte, and then there was Tristan. Fourteen children. He travelled with them, showed them the natural world, taught them how to write. He wanted to invent fatherhood, like everything else.

  When Thompson was living among the Peigans, a young man announced he intended to eat his sister. He repeated this thought for several days. His parents became worried and sent his sister away and the young man said he would still need human flesh to eat. He said this calmly, as if deciding on fish for dinner. The council met and decided that a Weetego—an evil spirit—had entered the boy, and he was sentenced to death. The father was to be his executioner, not out of a sense of cruelty but to avoid any possibility of retaliation. The next day the father told his son of this decision and the boy received the news without emotion. “I am willing to die, Father,” he said. He sat in a circle of men, and the father stood behind him and wrapped a cord around his son’s neck and strangled him, his tears falling onto his son’s head until he stopped moving.

  How to protect your children? From the natural world, from strangers, from each other? From themselves.

  Michael looked at Billy. Was he a child? A teenager, that twentieth-century invention. The concept of childhood revolved around innocence, a state that didn’t last long in previous centuries. Perhaps not in this one either. That idea of an innocence uncorrupted by civilization was what Rousseau had embraced. Who knew how innocent Billy was? Not much was known about the evening he got hurt. He was out with others, drinking. A small-town Saturday night. His father was an oil worker, a big, sullen man who was home rarely and when he was, he made people nervous, including Billy, Michael guessed.

  He had seen Billy’s mother visiting, a small woman with blue-black hair who hovered over her son. She might have been chanting something. She didn’t drive and lived twenty miles away and it would be hard for her to visit. She had other children and her husband was gone most of the time. She would come when she could, unsure of whether she was visiting or mourning him.

  Thompson had some money when he came to Montreal. This was when you made your money in the country then retired to the city. Now, of course, it’s the opposite. Montreal was a city of brilliant divisions: English/French; Protestant/Catholic; the Scottish elite living in mansions on the hill while the Irish suffered on the choleric floodplain below. It was a romantic place, though, even then, and it drew restless villagers and young people who want that sense of possibility that cities sell.

  Thompson flourished in the wilderness, where he made his own path. But he didn’t have much luck in the city. Those paths had already been laid out. The city didn’t offer possibility for Thompson; the wilderness did, with its epic space. The city was a narrowing of possibility. Cities were glorious if you were wealthy, hell if you were poor. Thompson had money when he arrived in Montreal and then lost it all. Like people, cities lurch toward oblivion even as they grow, the stones crumbling, systems failing. It’s sometimes hard to tell progress from decline.

  1

  MONTREAL, 1840

  Thompson rose early and uncertainly, his bad leg brittle in the cold. It had been bothering him more than usual lately. He dressed quickly, not waking Charlotte, who was asleep under the heavy covers. Her hair was still black at fifty-four. He couldn’t remember the last time they had made love. Two years ago, perhaps. He left their small apartment, carefully negotiating the iron stairs. It was April, though there was still a foot of snow on the ground.

  He had retired to Montreal in 1812, the year of the war. A war where both sides claimed victory, a modern idea. Thompson had seen the clash with the Americans coming, the lack of clarity about the border, the chafing of interests at the Pacific, the growing ambition in the American Congress. It wasn’t the numerical difference between the two countries that had worried him (Canada had only half a million people, some of them Americans, while the United States had seven million). No, the problem was that Canada had yet to become a country. It was still an idea, forming slowly. Who would fight for it? What would they be fighting for? The unarticulated nation that sits sublime and separate in each head.

  That year he drew his map. In the rented home in Terrebonne (a blissful time, wondrous and almost incomprehensible now), he had approached his masterwork, drawing the imagined nation as the Americans marched over the border with their guns, their imperial hopes meeting with disaster at Crysler’s Farm. Each section of rag linen paper was two feet by eighteen inches. He had stretched each one taut and fitted it into the frame and then scaled the outline. He made ink from oak apple galls boiled with iron sulphate and gum arabic and it went onto the paper in a rich oily stream and dried to a softer shade.

  The flow of rivers was indicated with a feathered pattern and mountain elevations were noted. More than two million square miles of country laid out in a form that could be understood, settled, sold. He worked at night, by candlelight, for seven months. The twenty-five separate sheets glued together with mucilage, assembling the country even as it was being invaded. Was he mapping something that didn’t exist?

  In August 1814, as he was finishing the map, an army of four thousand British soldiers marched on Washington, setting fire to all that would burn, and like Moscow when Napoleon tried to take the city, it lit the night. The Library of Congress was burned to the ground, those pages of recent history floating softly like black snowflakes on the summer breeze. The White House was burned too, but President James Madison’s wife, Dolley, had the presence of mind to save the original Declaration of Independence and a lifesized portrait of George Washington, aware, even as the Capitol burned, its written deeds obliterated, that nations are built on symbols, not history. The map had brought him satisfaction—the culmination of a life’s work. But it hadn’t brought profit.

  There weren’t many people about on the streets. A few horses moved along McGill Street, pulling coal and wood in the dark. He found it comforting to walk in the snow; it made the city more humane. There is equality in adversity, he thought. He walked briskly, his bad leg moving with a slight swing to it. His good eye was failing, and in the dawn light, images occasionally became muffled and indistinct, as if he was walking in a dream. A seventy-year-old man moving carefully in the dark.

  The row houses of Griffintown were beginning to erupt. Behind each peeling door was a large family, sometimes two, desolate Irish who had fled famine. They had stayed in the immigrant sheds on Grosse Isle on the St. Lawrence River, herded like cattle into quarantine, and they died by the hundreds of cholera or typhus, pressed against each other in those rooms, staring into one another’s doomed faces. The children of the dead were delivered to the city like dark gifts, raised by nuns or relatives or worse.

  Thompson walked up the hill, past the mansions built by tobacco and fur and beer fortunes. He knew some of these men, had met them in the North West. The city had grown up around them like Nineveh, suddenly formidable, stupid with money.

  The April snow was heavy and he pulled his leg through it with some effort. He saw a child bundled in dark clothes sitting on the back of a coal wagon, a girl whose face was dusted black. She might have been
six, out with her father to make the morning deliveries. He thought about his daughter Emma, dead at seven, as innocent a being as ever walked this earth, and he was surprised to find himself crying. Her death remained incomprehensible to him, the severest test of his faith. For a week he held her, giving her calomel and castor oil, trying to kill the fever. Her small body was limp and then felt weightless, and finally, cold. She returned to him in a handful of images that had become like etchings, worn from so much use.

  His son John had died a month before Emma, and perhaps he’d never been properly mourned. He hadn’t spoken to his son Samuel in six years. Thompson had felt the boy’s resentment building and hoped his son was merely going through a passage, would emerge a man, an equal, that their relationship would resume. Samuel would be silent for days, and then yell accusations at his father.

  And of course Tristan was gone. The child he carried in his heart, never glimpsed, still perfect, the offspring of his only experience outside Charlotte. He would be forty-two now. Perhaps he had his own family, children, grandchildren even. Sometimes Thompson found himself staring into the faces of men Tristan’s age on the streets of Montreal. His son could be anywhere, could be anyone. Occasionally he’d see a man with a dark face and an intense look, and Thompson wondered if this was indeed his son. Once, he stared so intently the man walked up and inquired if he was well. Thompson stared into the man’s eyes, looked at his dark hair; there may be native blood, he thought. He wanted to ask him, but how to phrase it? Are you my son? Thompson couldn’t manage a word, and the man simply walked away. Tristan was a ghost.

  His money was gone too, invested in his children’s unsuccessful schemes, and in his own ill-fated plan to supply the British army with firewood. He had left the employ of the North West Company with a share of the profits, not rich by any means, but comfortable. All of it was gone now. Arrowsmith, the British publisher, which had reprinted his map without his knowledge, had finally compensated him: 150 pounds for a life’s work, and that too was gone. He had lobbied the British government for a modest pension, but his request was denied. He received the letter last week. After diligent investigation, it is our view … He hadn’t shown it to Charlotte. He also hadn’t told her about Washington Irving, the American writer who had offered to buy his journals and turn them into a novel. The idea that his work would be reduced to entertainment filled him with despair and he turned Irving down, even though he and Charlotte were living in penury.