River Thieves (44 page)

By the time Peyton crawled up off the ice, Rowsell was out of sight around a slight bend in the river and he moved in that direction as quickly as he could in his wet boots. He found the corporal sitting on the riverbank, staring across at the opposite shore.

“Are you all right, Rowsell?”

The man looked up at him, his eyes hooded by the large brow of his forehead. “You’ll pardon me for speaking freely,” he said.

Peyton nodded.

Rowsell shook his head. “What a bastard country you live in, sir.”

The ice had moved them more than half a mile down the river while they crossed and left them only several hundred yards to walk to reach the camp where they sat wrapped in blankets beside the fire while their pants and boots dried over the heat. The force of pent-up water bursting through the ice had flooded the shore on both sides of the river, and the sledges which had been pulled up onto a bed of alders close to the bank were nearly washed away before the marines hauled them to safety further in the woods. Some of the expedition’s bread was ruined with wet in the process. The catamarans they had built were by this time battered to the point of uselessness and it became clear that not enough supplies could be hauled
into the lake for the entire party. Buchan decided that a midshipman and thirteen marines, including two men who had developed badly frostbitten feet, would turn back to the coast the following day with packs of supplies to get them there.

Late that evening he found Cassie sitting apart beside one of the fires built up in the camp. She had wrapped her back and her head in a blanket and had thrown open her coat at the front to let the heat of the fire reach her body. He stood over her.

“I’m sending a small party back to Ship Cove in the morning. I think it would be best if you joined them.”

Cassie motioned to indicate he could sit with her if he wished. “I prefer to stay with Mary.”

“These are not conditions for a woman —”

“Have I slowed you down, Captain?”

Buchan said, “There is likely to be worse than this ahead of us.”

Cassie nodded slowly and stared into the fire. “I have endured worse than this,” she said.

Buchan felt a heavy turning inside him, as if his heart was shifting, settling into an unfamiliar position. He said, “I had no idea about the child, Cassie.”

“I wasn’t speaking about the child,” she told him. And then she said, “I will stay with Mary.”

He nodded a moment and then sat still. He said, “You were not the only woman.”

She looked at him.

“Since I’ve been married,” he said. He stared directly into the fire. “There have been others.”

“A navy man, Captain. Surely your wife could have expected as much.”

“Perhaps,” he said. There was a harsh note of ridicule in Cassie’s voice, but he ignored it and went on. “Early on, perhaps she might have. But it seems I am very convincing. Over the years she has learned to think better of me.” Buchan looked up into the darkness over the fire. “I’ve almost lost her twice now. In childbirth. Her constitution has become very delicate. I’m not sure how well she would survive knowing me for who I am.”

Cassie said, “Men should be what they seem.”

Buchan nodded and smiled briefly. He said, “I lost two marines on the Red Indian’s lake, I’m sure you know.”

“I’ve heard the story.” She shrugged. She seemed too tired to maintain her animosity.

“I’ve started to dream about them recently. About their bodies on the ice.” Buchan shook his head. “A friend warned me at the time that regret would find me eventually. I didn’t believe him.” He turned and waited until Cassie was looking directly at him. “I wanted to say —”

Cassie stopped him with a hand to his arm. “I can’t give you what you want.”

He pulled his head back slightly, surprised. “What is it you think I’m looking for?”

Cassie turned back to the fire. She shook her head. “I don’t know. Absolution.”

“A very Catholic sentiment, Miss Jure,” Buchan said. He hoped she would smile, but she did not.

They sat without speaking a few moments and then she said, “I would ask one favour of you, Captain. When this is over.”

“Of course.”

“I would like to come to St. John’s in the spring when you leave.”

“As you wish,” he said.

“There’s a trunk of mine at the Peytons’ winter house.”

“I will send the cutter to retrieve it.” Buchan pushed himself slowly to his feet and turned away from the fire, then stopped. He lingered a moment with his back to her, waiting. Even two steps out of the circle of light the air was cutting, relentlessly cold.

Cassie said, “I didn’t intend anyone to know of what passed between us.”

A crow spoke in the trees, a harsh ratcheting sound like the dark turning a notch closer around them.

“I never expected less of you,” he said.

In the morning a portion of the remaining bread, pork and rum was buried for use on the return journey and the expedition continued upriver with only four of the original twelve sledges. Members of the party carried what couldn’t be loaded onto the sleighs in knapsacks.

The ice conditions improved with the cold weather over the next four days and they made good progress up the river. On February 6, Buchan and Peyton came upon the tracks of Indian rackets during a late afternoon reconnoitre, but soon lost them on hard ice. Two days later they reached a storehouse constructed near three mamateeks, all of which gave the appearance of recent use and a hasty departure. One of the firepits, they guessed, had been used within the previous two or three days. Nearly everything of use or value had been
stripped from the dwellings and from the storehouse as well. The tracks of the sledges used to cart away the food and furs were still evident. They found several paunches, liver and a quantity of caribou skins concealed in the snow. A raft of asp logs that was thirty feet in length and nearly five feet broad was abandoned beside the storehouse.

“What do you make of it, Mr. Peyton?”

“I’d say they know we’re coming.”

Buchan pawed at the snow with the toe of his boot. “Clearly they do not expect we are bringing good news.”

The marines milled about the site. Cassie sat at one end of the raft, her head bowed almost to her knees.

“Do you think she’ll make it to the lake?”

Peyton turned his head in the direction Buchan indicated with his chin. “Yes,” he said.

At the base of the second waterfall additional stores were put away for the return trip, and two miles short of Badger Bay River everything but food for two weeks’ travel, the neat-deal coffin and the gifts intended for the Beothuk were left behind. Above Badger Bay River water flowed freely over the ice and obscured all sign of the Beothuk retreat towards the lake, although there was no indication they had left the river for the forest at any point short of it.

On February 11, they reached the head of the lake, twenty-two miles distant from the second waterfall. They stopped there to refresh themselves with food and tea and then set out across the lake. At three o’clock in the afternoon they reached the camp the Peytons had surprised on a bright March morning the previous spring. There was no sign that anyone was on the lake but the party of white men themselves.

The naked frames of two of the mamateeks still stood. The third had been taken down and its materials used to construct a smaller shelter nearby. Buchan was the first to go inside, along with Peyton and Cassie. It was a tomb of sorts, a body on a raised dais wrapped in a shroud of canvas rubbed with red ochre and surrounded by spears, a bow and quiver of arrows, pyrite stones. There was a piece of linen that Cassie picked up and unfolded. The name
Peyton
was sewn into the cloth. The corpse was that of a large man by all appearances, easily six feet in height.

“This is your man, Mr. Peyton,” Buchan said.

“I imagine so.”

“I wonder what they’ve done with the other body?”

Peyton shrugged. He looked at Cassie as she carefully folded the linen and placed it back as she’d found it. “I couldn’t say, sir.”

Outside Buchan had two marines unpack a canvas tent from the sledges, and while it was erected next to the burial site of the Beothuk man, he had the coffin unpacked as well. The canvas and red-cloth covers were removed and Buchan inspected it carefully for signs of damage. The lid, which had been nailed shut, was pried free and they stood silently about the body of the woman. Twine had been used to secure the corpse in its place and the freezing temperatures had preserved her features throughout the trip up the river. There were a number of trinkets placed about the body, two wooden dolls that Mary had been fond of, gifts of jewellery and other things given to her by visitors who had come from across the northeast shore to see her.

Buchan motioned to have the lid replaced, but Cassie touched his arm.

“I have something I would like to leave with her,” she said. She unbuttoned the outer coat she wore to get at the pockets of a lighter coat underneath. Peyton watched as she leaned over the body. When she stepped away he could see it was the medicine bag his father had stolen from the grave of a dead Beothuk on Swan Island — the gift he had tried weakly to refuse and then passed on to Cassie. He could name the contents still: carved antler pendants, a pyrite fire stone, two delicately fluted bird skulls.

If he’d thought of it at that moment, he would have placed John Senior’s silver watch case beside the corpse as well, but it hadn’t entered his head since finding Mary dead in Ship Cove. Two marines stepped forward to nail the coffin shut. The watch case was carried back to the coast and he discovered it sitting in a coat pocket months later. Turned it over in his hands then. Held it to his ear, listened a while to the endless nothing of it.

The casket was draped in a brown pall and raised six feet off the ground from a tripod of spruce sticks to keep the body out of the reach of scavenging animals. The cassock and leggings Mary had been wearing when she was taken were laid beneath it along with the materials that had been carried up as gifts for the Indians: blankets, knives, linen, several iron pots. The sixteen blue moccasins Mary had sewn of stolen cloth in her bedroom were placed in a row just inside the entrance.

The entire expedition stood about the tent after these gifts had been arranged and the flaps pulled closed and tied. There was a silence among them born of awkwardness, of an awareness they
stood together in a moment they were at a loss to articulate, that even the importance of the moment was somehow beyond their understanding. Someone coughed. Snow complained under the shifting of feet as the silence crept on.

Buchan stepped away finally and orders were given to lay a fire and to cover the frames of the two shelters still standing. Peyton stood beside Cassie in the loud clap of movement that followed and he turned to stare out across the lake where he had chased Mary down and taken her hand in his own less than a year before. The sun was falling into the trees on the opposite shore and the pale moon was already visible above the horizon.

“I was thinking,” Peyton said. “I thought it might be time I got married.” After a few moments of her silence he nodded to himself. He wanted to ask if she would have had him if things were different, if she had come to the northeast shore from another life. But he was afraid of what her answer might be. He gestured towards the far hills, to the forest so green under the sun that it was nearly black. He shaded his eyes against the light, the white of snow on the lake. He said, “All my life I’ve loved what didn’t belong to me.”

He turned to face her then but Cassie was already moving away from him towards the trees.

Anyone familiar with the history of interactions between European settlers and the Beothuk will see the debt owed to James P. Howley’s
The Beothuks or Red Indians
and Ingeborg Marshall’s
A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk.
Events as recorded in these two seminal sources had a huge influence on the physical and emotional geography of
River Thieves.
However, the novel makes no claim to factual or literal truth. Historical events have been shifted, conflated or otherwise altered and they stand side by side with events that are wholly invented. The names of many of the novel’s principal characters can be found in Howley and Marshall, but the lives and motivations of each as presented here are fictions.
River Thieves
is a work of imagination.