Coppermine (7 page)

The well-worn portage was not long, and he had tried to pack light for times like this. As he neared the end, where the water calmed again, he was startled by the unexpected sound of harsh voices. He tipped up the bow of the canoe to see.

They had surrounded Angituk—three rough-looking Cree. They wore a hodgepodge of fur and white men’s clothing: canvas trousers, a waistcoat, a nautical cap, a soldier’s jacket. Angituk had dropped the wanigan and was holding them at bay with his skinning knife and paddle. The men were hissing at him and murmuring threats and insults, but by the way Angituk held the knife they realized he could use it, and for all their bravado they remained cautious.

Creed rolled the canoe from his shoulders, dropping it on a bed of soft junipers, and called out in Oji- Cree. “Get away from the boy!”

They saw the yellow stripe on Creed’s trousers and did as they were told, but they continued to glare at Angituk with contempt and suspicion and, Creed noted, even fear. The shortest man, in a bowler hat, sun goggles, and a wolverine vest, turned to Creed.

“Why is a white policeman travelling with a disgusting
Ayashkmew
?”

“Because it is my pleasure. Now go on your way.”

“You are in danger. One night he will stick that knife in your back and eat you.”

Angituk was embarrassed and would not meet Creed’s eyes.

“That is no concern of yours.”

The Cree in the bowler hat came close and spoke quietly to share a confidence with the white man. “Eskimos have magic. They are shape-shifters! They can become animals.”

“Stop talking nonsense.”

“Don’t trust him.”

“He is a good man.”

“I tell you this for your own good.”

Just then Creed noticed the heavy artifact hanging from the short man’s neck. Creed took two steps toward him. As the man raised his hands in defence, Creed grabbed the crucifix and inspected it. It was an unusually large silver cross inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He turned it over to find the initials
J.B.R.

“Where did you get this?”

The man looked worried. “I traded it from a Dene hunter up on Great Bear Lake a few weeks ago.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“I don’t know him. We were just passing.”

Creed believed him. He bought the crucifix from him for two dollars and sent them on their way.

Before the Cree left with the bales of marten and mink furs they were taking south in their battered birchbark canoes, they looked warily at the boy, and the one in the bowler hat again warned Creed about him.

“Even a young one. They have magic. They can steal your soul. They can make you sick. You will die.”

“You are like an old woman,” Creed scoffed.

The short Cree’s eyes flashed at this insult. He coughed up some phlegm and spat on the ground near the boy’s feet. “Remember. You were warned.”

They shouldered their canoes and their bales and were gone.

The boy looked up at Creed. “Thank you, Corporal. I’m sorry.”

“Superstitious idiots.”

They loaded the canoe and continued on their way without further discussion, but Creed found himself casually musing about the reaction of the Cree to the boy. Magic? He wondered what the signs would be.

That night at the campfire, Creed couldn’t resist. “Is it true? Do you know magic?”

The boy thought about this for a while, the fire illuminating his features. “Our shamans know magic. The rest of us? We know about the spirits around us. That’s all. We know how not to get into trouble.”

“That’s an important skill. Perhaps you can teach me,” Creed suggested with a smile.

“I’ll do my best,” the boy replied, his face dead serious at the responsibility presented to him. Then he crawled into the tent to sleep.

THEY PADDLED UP
the Great Bear for eleven days in all. The tall, thick pines surrounding Fort Norman gave way to a shorter variety as well as black spruce, whose numbers dwindled like the hairs on a balding head. They portaged five times and tracked that many times or more, walking in the ice-cold river, pushing or pulling the canoe over the rocky swifts and shallows the way Father Rouvière had done. Creed continued to read through the young priest’s letters. One described his first encounter with the Eskimos. He and Hornby had made their way across the big lake and were at a camp up the Dease River, halfway to the Coppermine.

Hornby was difficult this morning and went off hunting. I decided to take a walk in the opposite direction, northeast along the river. I’d walked half the day when I saw something at the top of a hill. I walked in that direction to see what it was and I saw several people in the cleft of the hill. Are they caribou? Are they men? I can’t tell at that distance. To make sure I go toward the hill. There’s no doubt about it: these are Eskimos! Thanks, O mother Mary! The first step of my mission fulfilled. Be pleased to bless this first encounter! I was wearing my cassock and holding my oblate cross. As soon as they saw me, they came toward me, holding their arms to the sky and bowing deeply. Immediately, I raised my arms aloft. The leader gently took me by the arm and presented me to the others. They called me by their word:
Kabloona.
They touched me, shook my hands, touched the cross around my neck. Immediately, I began to try to tell them by signs that …
celui qui est sur la croix
… He who is on the Cross …
s’y estimmolépour nous
… He was murdered for us! I gave out medals, which I placed around their necks. All were overcome with admiration. They brought me to their camp to eat. I struggled to make them understand that I had come for them. They are my new congregation, and I will stay among them. O mother Mary, that with your blessings we can convert them to the true faith. The Eskimos are a really hospitable people. This first impression was very favourable and I think if we can meet them often it would be possible to do a lot of good!

ONE AFTERNOON,
only about a day’s journey from the big lake ahead, Creed and the boy arrived at a place where the riverbed narrowed and the current gathered strength. Once again they lowered themselves into the water up to their waists and tracked the canoe, with Creed pulling on the bow painter and the boy pushing from behind. They dug their boots into the gravel and rocks of the riverbed and pushed, making slow progress against the river, but Creed spoke with encouragement as much for himself as for his young companion.

“We’re getting there. We’re doing well. One foot in front of the other. We’ll deserve that hot fire tonight, eh? Maybe we’ll open that tinned ham. What do you think?”

Creed glanced back to see the boy nod in agreement.

“Yeah, the ham,” Creed continued. “Warm it up in the tin. Maybe even peaches. Hell, we deserve it after this.”

Glancing back, he saw the boy nod again, but he was tired and struggling. Creed’s feet found their way between boulders on the bottom. The river was deep here, in some holes reaching to Creed’s armpits. The boy was shorter. They could go in to shore, but the solid wall of low black spruce there would make for a hell of a portage. Creed studied the unaccommodating river ahead.

“Maybe we’ll sleep in tomorrow. Just an hour or so. No one’s going to complain …”

Suddenly the canoe became much heavier and Creed turned to find the boy was gone. So complete was his disappearance that Creed scanned the empty shore for him. Straining at the painter to hold the canoe against the current, Creed stared at the river where the boy had been. Nothing. Then three fingers broke the surface. The boy was caught under the water.

Creed surged back to him and stared down at the boy, three feet below the surface, on his back, arms wheeling, one foot jammed and twisted between two boulders, his body held prone by the relentless current. Creed glanced downstream to where rocks would certainly take the canoe and all their supplies if he let go of it. He put the end of the painter between his teeth and submerged himself, embracing the boy and trying to drag him to the surface. The current was too strong. He worked his way toward the boy’s boot, the pull of the canoe snapping his neck as he took its full weight with his teeth. The boot was jammed in pretty solid. With a lunge Creed went deeper, pulling the canoe back with him, and got his fingers under the sole. The boy’s struggles were weakening. Creed yanked on the boot, the weight of the canoe now assisting his efforts. It didn’t budge. The boy’s arms moved in slow, helpless circles as the last of his strength ebbed. Creed renewed his grip on the boot and, this time with all his strength, pulled again. The air left in his lungs escaped in an underwater growl. The boot came free and he and the boy broke through the surface together, gasping in the air.

He helped the boy to some rocks in the shallows to rest. But for the bruised ankle, he was all right. Frightened and trembling, but all right.

“Thank you,” he said, still breathing hard.

They camped that night on a gravel bar nearby. Creed gathered driftwood for a big fire to dry their clothes, and warmed the promised tin of ham. They opened the peaches for dessert. The boy was embarrassed by the whole episode, and Creed resisted his natural inclination to tease him.

They dried their clothes on a makeshift rack and stared into the fire. It occurred to Creed how little they had spoken to each other on this trip. It had been a relief at first, the boy’s silence. It was as Creed wanted it. But after all these days, he realized he knew very little about him. And then, as if to deepen his curiosity, when Angituk was unpacking his dry bag, Creed noticed a thick leather-bound book that had half slid out onto the earth beside the fire. He was amazed to read the title:
Canterbury Tales.

“Where the hell did you get this?”

“From Father Ducot.”

“You stole it?”

“No,” the boy said with sudden indignation. “He loaned it to me.”

“Do you understand it at all?”

He caught the flash of anger in the fire-lit blue eyes and immediately regretted the question. The boy recited, like an accusation:

And specially from every shires ende,

Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende,

The holy blisful martyr for to seek,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.

“Why would I not understand? It is a journey. Journeys are what I understand. Though Herman Melville is better at it than Chaucer. Twain is good too, but Conrad is the best of all.”

The boy offered nothing further. Creed stared at him, astonished.

As the silence between them thickened, Creed realized he had lost the opportunity that night to pursue the questions in his mind about the boy.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON
they approached the enormous inland freshwater ocean that was Great Bear Lake. Three hundred miles of water stretched out before them. A brisk northerly was whipping up three-foot breakers. Even so, it was nothing the canoe couldn’t handle easily once they found deeper water beyond the breaking waves. The wind was dropping and clocking around slowly. It should be southeast by morning.

Creed and Angituk paddled in amiable silence, coming up to the mouth until they came in sight of a red beach. There, where the Great Bear River flowed out of Great Bear Lake, stood a large brown bear. For a moment Creed was sure he was seeing things. It stood in the shallow waters, nose elevated, taking in their wind-carried scent. It nodded to them several times. No stranger to bears, Creed was cautious, and he glanced down at the claw marks on the side of the canoe, determined not to share the fate of the previous owner. But as much as he paddled the craft out from the shallows, Angituk tried eagerly to take it in, closer to the creature with whom he was speaking softly in the Copper dialect.

“Close enough!” Creed finally told him tensely, but the boy was not listening, and as they drifted closer Creed felt an odd, dreamlike exhilaration.

The big bear—and it was larger than Creed had first realized—stuck his nose out toward the boy, his head bobbing at Angituk’s words as if in agreement. They drifted within twenty-five feet and Creed saw that they were in very shallow water. The bear, if he followed an urge, could sprint to the canoe and be on them in three, maybe four seconds. Creed glanced at the old .38-55 lever-action rifle in front of him in its leather case. His hand went to it and the boy noticed the movement.

“Don’t,” he whispered in a tone that stopped Creed cold. His pistol was more accessible, but a pistol would never stop this brute, it would merely anger him. He forced himself to stay calm and simply observe the bear and the boy.

As he watched, he listened to the boy’s youthful voice, an oriental murmur with a high, questioning lift on certain words and a rhythmic guttural consonant caught in the back of the throat, like a three-octave song. He was hearing the Copper language for the very first time. What had Freeman said at the barracks? A Siberian language. Even close to Chinese. And the beast actually seemed to answer in a series of grunts. It was to Creed as if the world held its breath. Then suddenly the bear turned west and lumbered slowly away, down the red beach toward a promising copse of black pine.

The boy watched the creature for a moment, then began to paddle again. Creed had the overwhelming desire to pose the ridiculous question, What did the bear say? He paused, and reformed the question in his mind.

“What did you say to the bear?”

“I told him who we are and where we’re going. I should have explained—he is my
tornrack.
My spirit guide. In the North he is the white bear. Down here he is brown.”

“What is a spirit guide?”

“When we are young, we look for a spirit helper in dreams. In my dreams it was always the bear. He helps me. He told us all is well, except a storm is coming tomorrow.”

“That right?”

“That’s what he said.”

Skeptically, Creed looked at the scarlet horizon, which promised a fair day tomorrow. Not even a suggestion of cloud. He smiled at the thought of the bear predicting weather.

“I don’t think so. Look at that sky.”

The boy shrugged and began to paddle hard. Following his lead, Creed put his back into the paddling, powering over the breakers until they were fifty yards out from shore. They would head east up the south coast for an hour, give a little distance to the bruin and make camp on the beach. They’d need a good rest tonight, for tomorrow they would rig a small sail and set out, not knowing when they might touch land again.