Coppermine (5 page)

“I assume you’re going to take me to the garden party on Saturday night? I have a new gold dress that will look smashing beside your blue serge.”

“Garden party? Where is it?”

“At your barracks, you donkey. Don’t they tell you anything? Mayor Henry and his wife will be there, and some of the cast from
Gloria’s Romance.”

“Who’s Gloria?”

“It’s a play, Jack. At the Majesty. Billie Burke’s in it. With a five-piece band. I went with Harold and Ruby last week. I’d go again if you want. I’ll get tickets for Thursday night.”

“I’d like to, Nicky, but I have something to tell you.”

At his serious tone her lips reconfigured into the slightest of frowns.

“I’ll be going away again for a while. Another assignment.”

“Going where? You just got home.”

“Two priests have got themselves lost up north.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Months. Maybe a year.”

She stopped and turned to him in shock, throwing the cigarette into the street. “A year! That’s not fair! You don’t have to do that. They can’t make you. Someone else can go. I’ll have my uncle talk to Worsley. They can find someone else. It’s ridiculous—”

“Nicole, the priests could be in trouble. I want to go.”

The hazel eyes appraised him. The real pain suddenly reflected in them startled him. “You
want
to go? You
want
to leave me? I thought you loved me. I thought we were going to talk about ... a future together. ”

“I would like that. I’d like that very much.”

“Then why is it you want to go off and live like some nomadic hermit? Do you hate me so much?”

“Of course not. It’s my job. It’s what I have to do.”

“I don’t understand you, Jack.”

“It’s not you, Nicole. You’re wonderful.”

“Then what is it? Why do you want to leave a comfortable life with people who care about you and go off into the bush where you’ll freeze to death or drown or get eaten by a bear?”

Her rising, angry voice projected well even in the din of the traffic and pedestrians slowed to look at them.

“I just need to be out there a little longer. I don’t think it’ll be forever. Maybe this will be the last time.”

She was fighting back tears as she studied him. She knew he was a good man and she believed he was fond of her. She had let him make love to her once and had never regretted it. He was polite and congenial and would make such a good husband, but she sensed within him the presence of doors that were closed to her. Though he listened and said the right words, she sometimes sensed she never had his full attention.

“Please don’t go.”

Creed looked at her in silence.

“It would just help if I knew why you’re doing this. Going back out there. What do you get out of it?”

Creed thought about this a moment and came as close to the truth as he ever had.

“Peace.”

Nicole’s lips trembled. “I have to go.” She turned and walked away from him. Though he wanted to, he did not follow.

JACK TOOK NICOLE
to the garden party at the barracks on Saturday, and she was right—her gold dress and his formal blue serge uniform complemented each other beautifully. She smiled proudly when guests found out he was to leave again.

“Oh, you know Jack, hightailing it for the bush every chance he gets. I try not to take it personally.”

She is magnificent,
Creed thought as he watched her put on a brave face despite the pain he caused her.
She’s probably too good for me.

He was scheduled to take the train north on Tuesday. She was civil with him as he prepared to depart, and even made jokes. They did not discuss the trip. On the evening before he left, there was a small gathering at her uncle’s house and she toasted his journey and wished for his success and safety, and he marvelled again at her poise and selflessness.

She dutifully saw him off at the station the next morning, and for the first time since he had told her of the mission, there were tears. They embraced and kissed, but then she looked into his eyes.

“Jack, I love you. You’re the only man I want. Please take good care, my darling. I don’t want to lose you. You find those priests. You do what you have to do, and come back home to me.”

“All right. Thank you for understanding, Nicky.”

“Fine, then. Good luck.”

She did not kiss him again. She stood for an awkward moment, then before the tears got worse, she turned and left him. For a moment he felt the hollowness of regret. He hated that he was such a disappointment to her. But there was nothing he could do. He turned and stepped onto the train.

CREED WAS THINKING
about that moment now as he stood on the deck of the little steamer named, with a determined lack of imagination, the
Mackenzie River,
making its way north between the shifting sandbars and the deadheads of that noble waterway. She had said she loved him, at the station. He had said nothing in return of love. He had never been sure of what that was and whether he was capable of it. He hoped so. But did he love Nicole? This he didn’t know.

Creed was in his field-uniform shirt sleeves, and in his hand was the journal of Samuel Hearne’s travels in the Arctic, A
Journey to the Northern Ocean.
It was an early edition, a gift from Cowperthwaite. Hearne had been the first white man to see the Arctic Ocean, in 1771, and his personal impressions, told in a florid but accurate accounting, would be pleasant company on the voyage. He had that and
The Valley of the Moon
by Jack London and Ford Maddox Ford’s new novel,
The Good Soldier.
Lyle Cowperthwaite had also given him a dubious collection of Robert Service poems with a bookmark at “Clancy of the Mounted Police”:

In the little Crimson Manual it’s written plain and clear

That who would wear the scarlet coat shall say good-bye to fear

Shall be a guardian of the right, a sleuth-hound of the trail

In the little Crimson Manual there’s no such word as “fail.”

Creed had left the simple-minded book on the train.

He now felt the power of the huge river beneath the sturdy little boat and looked across its vast surface, which cut between the Franklin Mountains in the east and the Mackenzie range in the west, their snowy summits in stark contrast to the deep azure skies. He looked up to see an immense golden eagle riding the thermals high above the river, too high to spot prey, apparently just for pleasure. And Creed considered for a moment the bird’s point of view. He imagined what he himself must look like, a tiny, warm creature carried on the wide water in a little vessel far below, hardly more than flotsam. He was heading into the great North again, moving even farther away from the clamorous din of humankind with its righteousness, arrogance, and death. And Creed realized suddenly why he loved the North so much. He could now answer the question she had asked of him. It was the freedom of insignificance within this enormous country that breathed life into his ailing spirit and lifted the weight from his heart.

Two

Fort Norman was an unplanned gathering of log buildings and shacks at the confluence of the Mackenzie and Great Bear rivers. The only sense of order came from three log buildings of similar dimensions: the Hudson’s Bay store, the Anglican church, and the Royal North West Mounted Police detachment. The detachment had the best location, on a high point of land that overlooked both the Mackenzie and Great Bear rivers and faced lofty Bear Rock on the far shore to the north, an orphan of the Franklin Mountains. A quarter mile out of town, as if in rejection of the vulgarities of the settlement, in the middle of a treeless field, stood the Roman Catholic Mission of Saint Theresa. Creed gazed at it all as the boat approached the landing.

All of the trees near town had been reduced to stumps, which gave the settlement the barren, deforested look of a Belgian battlefield. This impression unnerved Creed for a moment as the steamer nudged up against the ramshackle dock, which offered a weary groan. The crew secured her and threw down a narrow gangplank. Though no rain had fallen for days, the streets held a perpetual layer of sticky mud several inches deep. Creed had the distinct impression that no female influence had ever been brought to bear on the creation and maintenance of Fort Norman.

Creed stepped off the gangplank onto the rough and shaky dock with his pack and duffle. The three-man crew unloaded crates of supplies to the Hudson’s Bay agent while the captain barked orders, impatient to carry on downstream to the delta and the lucrative whaling stations on the Beaufort Sea.

Along the shore of the Great Bear River, a family of Cree—mother, father, older daughter, and two young boys—filleted pink salmon and hung them on a sturdy cedar rack to dry in the thin sun and wind, sharp knives flashing as they worked. Skinny dogs fought over the discarded offal in the shallow eddies. Both man and beast stopped to watch Creed, the lone passenger, disembark from the
Mackenzie River.
He raised a casual hand toward them and the family responded in slow motion, holding hands or knives slightly aloft. The dogs went back to fighting and Creed made his way up the mud road toward the detachment.

THE BURLY RNWMP SERGEANT,
Eli Farrell, CO of the Fort Norman post, had never heard of Creed. Farrell had only recently been appointed and was clearly drowning in administrative paperwork.

“We’re the last people they tell what’s going on half the time,” he said, pawing through the papers on his desk. “We’re way down on men here. Everyone’s taken off for Europe to fight the Hun. Lost two more good men last week. They get talking and dare each other, eh? But what can you do? Just the way it is.”

Creed tried to remain patient. When Farrell finally did come up with the week-old telegraphed memo from Edmonton, he seemed to blame Creed personally for this interruption to his schedule.

“Didn’t know you were coming so soon. It’s going to take a little time to organize all this. With the war rationing, we don’t have much in terms of provisions, and I don’t know what kind of boat to put you in. Our canoes are all out or stripped down. I could get you Mason’s riverboat, but you’d need a crew and I don’t think they’d want to cross the big lake. We have a York boat one man could handle, if you like to row.”

“I don’t like to row. When will the canoes be back?”

“Hard to say. A couple days. A week.”

“How about an interpreter? Copper dialect.”

On this count too, Farrell was pessimistic. “Let me ask around.”

“You realize time is an issue here, Sergeant. With any luck I hope to get up there, find the priests, and get out before deep winter.”

“I’ll tell you what. I haven’t had my breakfast yet. Why don’t we just step down to the mess for an eye-opener.”

The mess was the biggest room in the detachment and featured a long rough-hewn bar with a large cracked mirror behind it. Creed met two congenial constables, Willis and Oberly, drinking coffee. Farrell, his hands trembling slightly, poured Hudson’s Bay rum and tomato juice into a melonite tumbler.

“Would you care for one?” he asked Creed.

“No, but I’d have some of that coffee.”

Oberly poured him coffee.

Farrell drank half his tumbler. “I swear it keeps me in the pink.”

Creed did find it unusual for an RNWMP sergeant to be drinking on duty at midday, but he had become used to it, of course, in the trenches of Europe. Rum was often the only thing that kept body and soul together there. And so it worked with Farrell, for he was quickly transformed into a positive, decisive officer.

“We’ll get you the provisions you need. Find a canoe. Have you on your way day after tomorrow. So, what can we tell you about the priests?”

“You remember them? Rouvière and Le Roux?”

“Of course. They came through here in ‘13. The one, Rouvière, had been in the area a couple years before that and travelled alone up to the treeline looking for Eskimos to convert. Nice fella. Little guy. Sense of humour. Liked to play cards, and he was good, too. He stayed the winter alone in one of Hornby’s lousy old cabins up there. Hornby’s something of a trapper, trader in the area. Bit crazy.”

“Yes. I’ve heard of him.”

“Willis and Oberly here went up to check on the priest that first spring.”

Willis and Oberly had been listening and Oberly now spoke up. “That’s right. We had some food and mail for him. He was pretty damn glad to see us.”

Willis continued: “We tried to convince him to come back with us, but he wanted to stay and find those Eskimos. We were there a few days. Helped him chink up the cabin—it was in rough shape—and shot some game for him. He came down later that year, well after the big thaw, to meet the other one.”

Oberly picked up the story: “Yeah, that’s when the second priest joined him. Father Le Roux. A Frenchman, from France like. He was supposed to be good with languages, which would come in handy when they finally found some Eskimos to tell about Jesus.”

“What do you remember about Le Roux?”

Oberly took a moment to gather his impressions. “Tall man. Big. Kept to himself. Kind of moody. But could just be his way.”

“They provisioned here?”

“Yeah. Set off in an eighteen-foot canoe up the Bear. They didn’t take a lot. Travelling pretty light if they figured on wintering up there. They planned to get back up to the cabin, then head north again toward the Coppermine to hunt for Eskimos. But that was the last we ever saw of them.”

Creed turned back to Farrell. “So you would see regular letters from Rouvière?”

“Yes, he’d get out letters every couple of months by way of some half-breed trapper or trader in the area. We’d forward it on to Montreal or sometimes Winnipeg—Rouvière had a sister there. Then, a few months after Le Roux arrived, the letters stopped. I believe Oberly and Willis were on patrol in the area again and went to check in on them in November. They found the cabin deserted.”

Oberly continued: “No one had been at the cabin in a while. The river was freezing up. We went north for a few days on foot as far as we could. There was no sign, no Eskimos. Then the big snow got heavy, food was low, days short. We headed back south again. Then last winter that breed came through here with a rosary and a prayer book with Le Roux’s name on it and we got worried. Sent the report.”