Coppermine (2 page)

But there remained for me that first contact with the people, the brief, seductive taste of possibilities so soon after my arrival. In early October, before Hornby left me, we made a trek north from the Dismal Lakes almost as far as the southern reaches of the Coppermine River itself. I was delighted to find a small hunting band of the very Copper Eskimos I was after, and I rejoiced that the Bishop’s mission might in fact be fulfilled. They were not the hostile savages I had been warned about, and once their curiosity overcame their initial fear of me, they became friendly companions and good hosts. Hornby and I camped together with them for a few precious days and they fed us, gave us furs, and attended when I tried to speak to them. Such lovely, good-hearted creatures!

But Hornby did not know their dialect. Their language was impossible to him, and though their eyes were politely interested as I showed them the Cross and the pictures of the Crucifixion, of Heaven and Hell, of angels and devils from my illustrated catechism, I knew they had no idea what I was talking about. And as I looked into those amiable, confused faces I felt I was in the presence of very ancient men. Stone Age men. From long before even the Christ. Willing, curious, hospitable, but very much from another, long-ago world. So much to say to them. So far to bring them.

And then one morning they vanished. They must have gone north again, for Hornby had said the Dismal Lakes were as far south as they ever roamed. And after this first contact, this brief liaison with those beings I so passionately hoped would become my flock, Hornby took me back to the cabin and I was left alone to face almost two months of the Arctic night locked inside the blue-black vault of the winter sky.

When there were still two hours of light in a day, a Métis trader came by the cabin and stayed with me for two nights before continuing south. I took great pleasure in speaking French with him, a rough man with rude jokes. I indulged myself to laugh at his stories. The trader in return allowed me to say Mass and give him Communion and even hear his three- year confession of life among the Cree, the sexual contents of which severely shocked me! And then he left me, carrying my long letter to the Bishop speaking of my very modest accomplishments—and making a special request. I was careful not to have it too forceful. I asked in my letter to be sent a companion. Someone skilled in languages.

I learned to chop firewood from the scraggly little spruce at the edge of the treeline. Hornby taught me how to fire the Winchester .44 calibre rifle with the heavy brass cartridges to hunt elk or caribou. But I had enough tinned food to survive. I celebrated blessed Christmas alone, saying the Mass and eating tinned corned beef and beans as a blizzard howled around me. Despite my repairs, it blew through the broken insulation of Hornby’s sorry cabin. I prayed a great deal and wrote letters to my family and superiors, unsendable until the spring, and I memorized the Scriptures again, prayed more, and, as the blizzards swept in on me from the big lake to the south, held on. I had forgotten to wind my watch, and when I found it had stopped I did not know at what time to reset it. I didn’t know what was day and what was night, when a day ended and the next began. The dark was endless. Time became meaningless. Was it an hour ago I last ate, or a day, or a week? No way to tell.

I had heard of it, been warned of it: the sickness that comes from weeks without sunlight in the wilderness. The Mackenzie delta Eskimos called it
perleromeq,
a psychosis whose symptoms are a feeling of deep sadness, of profound weariness, of utter defeat.

They told me it can render a man comatose or drive him to extreme violence or cause him to run naked out into a minus-forty-degree night to embrace the relief of death.

It was not until early January that I felt the chilling touch, the first weight of this deep depression brought on by relentless darkness. I began to imagine that Satan had taken up residence inside me. I refused a dialogue with him. I stopped praying and was sure my leather bible was hot to the touch. I felt the irony that I had come to bring the light of Christian knowledge to these people, the very light of Christ’s spirit, and now I was denied virtual light, the sustenance of solar light, and my doubts were increasing every day that it would ever return. Sometime a little later—and I am ashamed now to mention the contemplation of a mortal sin, but I write it down so that it illustrates the depth of this depression—I fashioned an effective noose and chose the beam most likely to support my weight and not allow my toes to touch the frozen dirt floor.

Then quite suddenly one day a strange, thin, growing light pushed through a crack between the logs. What was this light? I opened the door against the drift of snow, squeezed out, and scrambled up the snowbank to stare into a glow coming from the gap made by the Dease River between the scrub trees. And then there it was: the sun. It stayed only a moment, peeking over the earth’s horizon. It moved neither east nor west, but appeared for a few moments as I watched to simply roll over and disappear again, the glow remaining for almost half an hour. This was all I needed. Hope. A promise. A covenant with God. I was not forsaken in the darkness. Satan had departed and I became almost myself again. It had been a little longer than forty days and forty nights in the darkness by my calculations. It had shaken me, what I saw as a weakening of my faith, and I promised myself this would never happen again.

As the days returned and the sun strengthened, so did my resolve to continue the mission. I had been excited by the meeting in the autumn with a few of the people who would become my flock. Soon, as the days lengthened, I would go north as far as I had to and find the rest. I would establish a beachhead for Christ, bring enlightenment to these good, ignorant people. At the mouth of the Coppermine I would create a little outpost of the Kingdom of God.

The letter came to me in early May by way of two Royal North West Mounted Police officers checking in on me. These good-natured men, who stayed three nights, brought me playing cards (we played Wisk!), a fine round of ripe Oka cheese from our brothers in Quebec, tinned fruit, a bottle of Hudson’s Bay rum, and the tragic news of the sinking of the
Titanic
the year before with great loss of life. But the best thing, the most amazing thing they brought me—these pleasant messengers of hope—was a letter from Bishop Breynat. He was sending me a priest! Father Guillaume Le Roux. Young and fit, a Breton gentleman, a student of philosophy at Liège, two years of service in Rome, an intellectual, and, most important, a linguist! I could not have asked for anything more in a man to share my mission. And my dreams.

FATHER ROUVIÈRE STOPPED there in his writing and looked up, his eyes squinting against the glare of the low sun on the surface of the Mackenzie. He sensed something coming. He stood up and took a few steps forward out onto the dock; his heart beat faster. The little steamboat had swung into view, carried sideways on the treacherous current, crabbing its way toward the makeshift landing. He waited for it there, his open, still-youthful face reflecting both his failures here on the edge of the world and the anticipation of his dreams fulfilled.

One

APRIL 12, 1916

CARIBOU MOUNTAINS

NORTHERN ALBERTA

All night, beneath an amazement of stars, Corporal Jack Creed of the Royal North West Mounted Police pushed a course due west through the knee-deep snow of the black spruce forest. The ponies with their grim burdens followed in an easy line. There was the sound of his breathing, the jingle of tack, and the muffled hooves but little else on this still night. Creed glanced back from time to time, making sure the bodies had not shifted. He hadn’t had sufficient rope to secure them all properly and if one slipped off, the wolves that were following would be on it in a heartbeat.

The senior officer of the patrol, Inspector Armstrong, had been a tall man. The pony that carried his body was a small quarter horse. It was an unfortunate match. Slung across the pony’s back, the Inspector’s fingers brushed the snow. Creed should have trussed the arms up as he had with Cunningham and Reas, but the day was fading and by the time he had the others loaded and secured, the evening temperatures had plummeted despite the fact that it was nominally spring. The Inspector was stiff and Creed couldn’t bring himself to force the frozen flesh of the raised arms to the man’s sides. He just bent him over the horse—his core not fully frozen—and roped him down. So now in death Inspector Armstrong reached out with bare, lifeless fingers, probing the passing texture of the deep, crystalline snow.

Jack Creed was confident inside his five-foot-nine-inch frame, a good balance between strength and speed that had benefited him on the playing fields of Upper Canada College in Toronto, where he excelled at football and cricket, captaining the first eleven. At UCC he knew he was above his station, but he didn’t mind. His father, a cattle farmer outside Peterborough, after a few prosperous years had paid good money to send him to the college to rub shoulders with the Eatons, the Gooderhams, and the Masseys. He had enjoyed the friendship of his wealthy classmates but was not really of their world. Off the cricket pitch he read everything he could get his hands on, from Tolstoy to Twain, Conrad to Kipling. His father called him a dreamer, but Creed wondered how that could be a bad thing.

Creed had also been called handsome by various women, not infrequently, but this too meant little to him. His intelligent brown eyes saw the world around him with clarity, often a sense of irony, but never cynicism. He believed in humankind, despite the battering his faith in it had taken by what he had seen so far in his twenty-eight years of life. He looked to an improved future.

The aurora borealis crackled and whispered behind him on the trail. He tried to whistle the lights down closer. Sometimes it worked. They were keeping him company. Creed found corpses very poor company. He looked back again. All seemed secure. His eyes held on the slightest figure, slung across the pinto. Reas was just a boy, a farm kid from Weyburn, Saskatchewan, proud as hell of the uniform he wore—the broad-brimmed stetson on the saddle horn, military tunic under his fur coat, the woollen trousers with the yellow stripe. All of that would be sent back to his mother. It still deeply troubled Creed to see a boy cut down so suddenly, even after his months on the front in Belgium. He thought it’d be different here.

Like his older brother, Charles, before him, Creed had joined the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in 1915, against the strong wishes of their father. One son was enough. He needed him on the farm. He called him a fool. In retrospect his father had been right, but Creed had been determined to go and find Charlie.

Creed pulled his hand from his mitten and slid it inside his fur coat to rub at his shoulder, where an old wound was aching from the efforts of the day, or perhaps the ache had been triggered by the memories that had surfaced from the smell of gunpowder and blood. The third body, on the last horse, was his friend Cunningham, a good, seasoned officer. Begley had recognized this threat and shot Cunningham first. Creed would deeply miss Cunningham. They had shared a non-cynical nature. They could spend congenial days on the trail together and not say a word. On the trail there was really little need for talk, and when you did, it had to mean something.

THEIR SPRING PATROLS
had been fairly routine. The officers separated to do solo rounds of two dozen hunters and trappers in the north section of the Caribou range. That had been the best time for Creed. It had been a hard winter, with little or no game. The Mounties brought extra flour and tinned meat and fruit to the desperate. It gave a lot of satisfaction to put sweet slices of peach in the tin cup of a starving man. The four officers had met up again south of Buffalo Lake for the final leg back down to their detachment at Hay River.

There was one last call: check on a couple of trappers named Ross and Begley at a remote cabin high in the Caribou near the source of the Buffalo River. No one had seen them all year. In the last of Ross’s letters he had said that Begley had been acting odd, arguing, hoarding food, and stealing his things. And some who knew Begley said he could be unpredictable. The Ross family in Halifax was concerned and had asked the Mounties to look in on them during their patrol.

The Mounties came upon the small, well-built trappers’ cabin mid-afternoon. An old fire was smoking a haunch of meat hanging on a neat tripod outside. The camp seemed well kept, with firewood stacked against the wall, a line of laundry drying.

Creed turned, his saddle creaking, to look out at the view of the mountains, young peaks extending to the west, plenty of snow still on their flanks and summits. He noticed Cunningham too was taking in the vista and nodded his approval. No question they had found a beautiful spot here, and Creed caught himself thinking how fine it would be to live in a place like this for a year or two. Do a little trapping, as he had done in Ontario as a boy. There’d be trout in the streams lower down. A few books and a deck of solitaire cards for wintering. Lonely. A long way from humanity, true. But Creed had had enough of humanity for a while.