River Thieves (24 page)

Six inches behind the first set he dug another shallow hole. He removed his gloves to handle the trap this time, setting it as he had the first, but not bothering with the pan cover or a set
stake. He buried it and gathered his materials and backed carefully away.

Back at the halfway tilt, he boiled a piece of salt pork for his supper and sat a while afterwards feeding the fire at the foot of the rock face. He lay back and stared at the thickly layered roof of spruce branches angled above him. He raised a hand into the glow, making shadow animals in the firelight.

After John Senior gave him his ultimatum about going to the lake —
laddie boy
, he’d called him, crouched low over the fir log, the axe poised in his fist — Peyton had stalked up to the house alone. He sat at the table in the kitchen and placed his face in his hands.

“Is it tea you’re wanting, John Peyton?”

He folded his arms on the table.

“What is it?” Cassie asked him.

Peyton turned to look at her. “He’s going to go after them the winter.”

“What do you mean?”

“John Senior. He’s going down the river with Richmond and Taylor to make amends. To the lake if necessary.”

Cassie sat across from him. She was surprised by Peyton’s reluctance. “You can hardly blame him for wanting to recover the losses.”

He stared at her. He and his father had never argued in front of her about the Indians’ thieving or talked much about the days on the shore when Harry Miller was alive. Still, he didn’t think it was possible she could be so naive about his father after so many years in his house. In his bed. He kept staring.

She shrugged and made a face to say she thought he was being unfair. And in that wordless gesture he saw that it was true, that she knew next to nothing of the man, of what he had been party to in his day. What he was capable of.

He shook his head. He said, “It’s Richmond and Taylor I worry about. They still carry a grudge from the last time down to the lake. And once someone gets killed the law comes into it and there’s no saying where that will take us.” He took his pipe from a coat pocket and cut himself a plug of tobacco.

“Perhaps it would do to bring the law into it beforehand,” Cassie said.

“Meaning what exactly?” he asked angrily. He had no idea what she was talking about.

She spoke in a tone of mock officiousness. “His Majesty is still anxious to establish a friendly intercourse with the native population?”

Peyton pointed with the mouthpiece of his pipe at nothing in particular. “The reward still stands.” He stared up at the rafters as her notion came clear to him. “We could ask for permission to go in. Make it an official party. That should temper the mood of anyone who might be inclined to cause trouble.”

She tipped her head side to side. It was her way of allowing someone to claim an idea they would never have lit upon themselves.

“I’ll need some paper,” he said. He was already out of his seat after an inkwell and a pen.

After they finished their supper that evening, Peyton meticulously copied the final version of the letter he’d drafted on the back of bills and ledgers and then gave it to Cassie to read over.

When she was done she passed the letter across the table. She held the lobe of her right ear between her thumb and forefinger. Peyton was folding the pages she had just read and pressing the creases flat with the palms of his hands.

She said, “I didn’t realize there’d been so much thieving.”

“A waste of time to bring the bloody St. John’s crowd into
our affairs,” John Senior said. He was making a determined effort to muzzle his anger in front of Cassie. He said, “Permission be damned, we’ll be going in come March. You make sure you tell the governor that.”

Cassie smiled at Peyton. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’ll do just fine.”

When they brought the salmon to market in St. John’s they met with the recently appointed governor, Charles Hamilton, and he confirmed that the reward for bringing out a Red Indian to the coast stood at one hundred pounds sterling. Given the extent of the Peytons’ losses, he offered the blessing of his office to the proposed expedition. For a while this comforted Peyton. He even enjoyed a period of carefully concealed exhilaration, thinking he had outflanked John Senior for once, taken control of the situation. But that assurance left him soon enough. He saw again now how the expedition would take its own shape regardless of his wishes, gathering momentum until it was a careening downhill surge he would be helpless to direct or divert.

He sat up in the lean-to and stretched, pushing his arms out at the sides as if he wanted them to come free of their sockets. He placed more stunned wood on the fire, the flame licking up around the dry surface like a living thing feeding a hunger.

The fox was taken just above the right front foot and was lying as far from the set stake as the chain allowed when Peyton first came upon her. Fresh snow had blown in and covered the ground. He could see from the tracks around the stake that the
animal had been there some time and had done a bit of wild dancing to pull herself clear. There were three or four bright circles of piss within the circumference of the trap chain.

The fox raised her head and looked at him when he came into view but she didn’t get to her feet. The dummy trap in the set that he had deliberately handled with bare hands lay on top of the snow nearby. She had sniffed it out as soon as she arrived, dug it free of the ground and tripped the bed by using her paw or her nose to flip it upside down.

He stepped off the trail to cut a sturdy truncheon of birch wood and then walked to within twenty yards of the animal, crouching there, speaking quietly across the distance. “There you are now,” he said. A medium size, maybe fifteen pounds, he guessed. A beautiful creature, the fine coat a mix of silver and red, the thick tail almost black. The perfectly symmetrical face like a sign of her craftiness, her intelligence. Bright yellow eyes sizing him up. There was no show of panic or fear, only the light of her calm stare of assessment. He recognized that stare, he thought, the sense of being observed by it. He could see a ring of raw skin above the clamp of the metal jaws where the fox had been trying to gnaw through her own leg to get free.

Without standing he removed his gloves and pack, then picked up his rifle. Shooting the animal would ruin the pelt, which he wanted to avoid if possible, but it was best to be careful. Either the stake or the animal’s foot could have worked loose in her struggling and one last lunge might be all that was needed to finish the job.

He stood up and walked forward carrying the gun and the stick of birch. The fox stayed low on her haunches and tried to back further away, but managed only to move slightly from
one side to the other at the end of the trap chain, jerking at the clamped foot. She gave a sharp bark and rolled onto her shoulder in the snow, baring her teeth at the man standing above her. Peyton struck the skull once with the truncheon, solidly but not hard enough to draw blood, and the fox flopped completely onto her side, her tongue lolling onto the snow, her eyes half closed.

Peyton lay the rifle aside and knelt beside the animal, placing a bare hand against the fur where he could feel the short panted breaths through the thick coat. He moved his other hand up to the neck and stroked under her ears. “There you are now,” he said again. He set his right knee just behind the fox’s foreleg and used his weight to stove in the rib cage, forcing the broken bones into the internal organs. Peyton placed his hand back against the fur then, waiting as the blood pooled in the lungs and the light leeched from the animal’s eyes.

He removed a knife from his belt and touched the tip to the gelatinous surface of the eye, testing the blink reflex to be sure it was dead. After he released the bloodied paw from the trap Peyton used his hatchet against the trunk of a deadfall to remove the front paws above the wrists. He used his knife to cut through the fur along both thighs, from the feet to the bared flesh of the anus, then skinned out the back legs and cut the pelt free from the ankles. He tied one naked back leg to the branches of a tree about chest-high and worked the thick chimney-sweep tail clear of the tailbone, then split it open along the underside. He used the weight of his body to inch the pelt down the length of the carcass and free of the pawless front legs, pulling them from the fur like a child’s arms helped from a troublesome sweater. He clipped the ear cartilage from the
skull, cut deftly around the eye sockets, then skinned out the black lips and the dark, still-wet nose.

Peyton reached a hand into the length of the animal’s coat and pulled the fur right-side out. It was a few weeks shy of priming out, but the plush was thick and even, the colour bright as life. The heat of the body still clinging to the pelt, the fur warm against his bare hands.

Conditions on the river were near perfect for travel: steady ice, fair weather. There were eight of them in the party all told, Peyton and John Senior, Richmond, Taylor and Reilly, Matthew Hughster and William Cull — who was nearly the age of John Senior — and the youngster, Michael Sharpe. They walked from sun-up till well past dark, and without the loaded sledges they’d hauled up the river with Buchan they made astonishingly good time, averaging more than twenty miles a day. By the fourth night they had nearly reached Badger Bay Brook and were within a day of the lake. Two men were put under arms through the night, Taylor and Michael Sharpe taking the early watch while the others settled about the fire. Peyton lay awake, listening to Taylor talk to young Michael who was new to the shore and still too green to burn. He was telling the story of the man who died of exhaustion in a whorehouse after drinking a glass of beaver pride.

Michael Sharpe said, “A man can’t die from that.”

There was no conviction in his voice and Taylor laughed at him. “What would a pup your age know about it?”

“I know a thing or two.”

Taylor gave a long, dismissive groan. “I wasn’t much above your age when I come this way,” he said. “But not half as wet.”