Specimen Song (4 page)

People began to arrive, bringing hot dishes and salads and jugs of wine or big plastic thermoses of iced tea. Father Van den Heuvel came with Bart. The big, clumsy priest with the sweet smile and the former rich drunk who was now for some time just rich. Bart had bought a huge dragline some time ago and had found he sort of liked moving earth, and he had a little business digging stock ponds. He had a backhoe, too, and he dug basements, though there weren’t many new houses going up. Not like in the western part of the state, which was turning into one big suburban resort.

“You didn’t get Benetsee?” said Du Pré to Bart. “I will go and get him, then.”

“He wasn’t there,” said Bart. He looked past Du Pré to the knots of people milling around the tables. “But he’s here. Maybe he changes himself into a bird and flies here and then ducks behind a bush and changes back.”

“No bird could carry all that bullshit,” said Du Pré. They laughed. Sometimes Benetsee was an eerie singer and prophet, and sometimes they had to make bail for him when he got too drunk and did something foolish. Once the sheriff, Benny Klein, had tried to take the old man home, but all Benetsee did was fumble a minute at his flies and then piss all over the sheriff’s new boots, which was more than even patient Benny Klein could stand.

Another time he had swiped the sheriff’s car and spent a pleasant fifteen minutes weaving down the county road with the lights flashing and the siren going. He put the car off a steep bank and Bart had to buy the sheriff a new one.

Benny Klein tried hard to like Benetsee, but he found it tough going.

“I don’t guess jail would do him any good or anything else,” Benny had said mournfully, looking at Bart’s check, “but, goddamn it, I
am
supposed to enforce the law, and he broke about six of them.”

But nothing had come of that. Once, though, years before, Benetsee had been arrested in Miles City and jailed. And the story went, the old man howled out the barred window of his cell. There was an answer. And soon coyotes began to come into town, a lot of them, and the police were getting a lot of calls. The coyotes collected beneath the window of the jail and they howled back.

A couple cops took shots at the coyotes, but the coyotes didn’t notice. This was strange.

The judge was old and smart. When they called him at home, he said to take the old man a few miles west of town and let him go. They did, and the coyotes left, too.

So Du Pré had heard.

The party picked up some speed early on. Most of these folks were little ranchers and this was a busy time, so it wouldn’t go on too late. Du Pré fiddled some and there was some dancing and the food was hot and good and plentiful.

Du Pré was taking a leak out behind the lilacs when old Benetsee shuffled up to him. The old man took a little bundle out of his rags and pressed it into Du Pré’s hand.

Leather. Du Pré unrolled it. A slingshot. Two long, thin straps of deer skin with a pouch in the middle for a rock. The Métis had used them to hunt birds, Du Pré knew.

“Learn how to use this sling here,” said the old man. Then he took it back, put a stone in the pocket, wrapped the thongs around his right hand. He swung the slingshot around his head. It whirred.

Benetsee let go of one thong and the rock shot straight and true toward a magpie perched on a branch in the tag alder. The stone slammed into the bird, which crumpled. Benetsee went to the dead bird and pulled some feathers out of the tail.

“Nothing on these,” the old man mumbled. He acted drunk. “Ah, here,” he said, holding a tail feather like all the others up.

“See?” said Benetsee.

T
HE CANOE PARTY WAS
put up at a hotel in Lac La Ronge, which was a damn long way north. Du Pré had driven through miles of dark forest, here and there clear-cut to feed pulp mills. He thought of the voyageurs toiling through here in the fine misting rain. It must have been hard. Some men would have gone mad. No wonder when they finally made it home they celebrated so hard.

The forest would be a great weight. Du Pré saw very few birds. It seemed that there was little life here. Perhaps it came out at night. Then not. There wasn’t much to eat in an old forest, the trees held it all.

Once, he got out and walked along the verge of the road, looking for animal tracks. He walked a mile without seeing anything but the skittering prints of a shrew in some very fine mud at the edge of a little puddle.

Mean little bastards, those shrews, had to eat their own body weight each day. So tiny, big mouths and lots of teeth. He’d watched one kill a grasshopper once, still remembered the crunching, tearing noises. It was over very quickly and the tiny silver-gray shrew was gone. Du Pré had picked up the husk of the grasshopper. The shrew had more or less unzipped the grasshopper’s skin, gobbled up the fat, and gone on for another.

Them shrew weigh maybe three hundred pounds, they eat everything on the whole earth, Du Pré thought.

It was raining again by the time he pulled into Lac La Ronge. He found the hotel and parked his old cruiser across the street in a lot that had the hotel’s name on it.

The young woman at the desk directed Du Pré to the dining room. It was early evening and the party had recently gone in for some supper. Du Pré saw Paul Chase slumped in a chair at the head of a long table. There were some young people sitting near him, rich kids, looked like, and then some Indians in jeans and wool shirts. Six of them, four men and two women, all with their black hair in long braids.

Du Pré walked up to the table. Paul Chase put on a sunny smile and welcomed him and bade him sit.

Du Pré found a chair down past the Indians. They all looked at him a moment and then they smiled, and those on the other side of the table smiled, too.

One of the men rattled at Du Pré in Chippewa, but the dialect was so far from Du Pré’s little knowledge that he could only smile and shrug and say he was sorry but that the Coyote French was all he had.

Then they all rattled at him in their Bush patois. Du Pré could understand that.

“Them priests, they get around about everywhere,” said Du Pré.

They all laughed and the waitress came.

The food was superb. Whoever the chef was did what he could with what he could get that was fresh, and Du Pré had some lake trout with local wild mushrooms and a berry sauce that he thought was juniper. The trout was flaky and perfectly cooked. The butter it had been grilled in was dilled.

The table was so long that Du Pré hardly joined in the talk. The six Indians from Quebec kept slipping into that dialect he couldn’t follow, and they were between him and Chase and his assistants—two young men and two young women, expensive clothes. Chase was wearing one of those jackets Du Pré had seen in photographs of people on safari in Africa. About a hundred pockets. Looked like it was cotton and not at all treated against the wet.

Du Pré looked off, suddenly dreaming, thought of a great weight of furs on his back, a muddy trails a branch let go by the man ahead swinging back and hitting him, the water dripping and flying.

This was some wet country. Du Pré had driven through a swamp that smelled of cedar. The water, when he stopped to look, was as dark as strong tea.

Paul Chase finished a story, which everyone up there with him at his end of the table found terribly funny. Chase looked modestìy pleased with himself.

This Chase is an asshole, Du Pré thought, and there better be some one knows this country, better two someones, or I maybe just get in my car and go back home. These Indians know theirs, but they are a long way from it.

Du Pré had once gotten into some trouble down in southern Utah, a long way out in country that looked sort of like the kind he knew but turned out not to be like it at all. He hadn’t come close to dying of thirst, but he was plenty scared. He hadn’t forgotten that.

Well, I see what’s what, but maybe I not get in these canoes at all.

One of the younger Indian men on the other side of the table came over and sat by Du Pré.

“You are the Gabriel Du Pré I saw the video of, shaping the thwarts for the canoe?” he said.

“Yeah,” said Du Pré, puzzled. That video had been made only a month ago, and so fast it makes its way to Canada? Well, things did move fast these times. Too damn fast.

“I am the canoe builder,” the young man said. “My name is Henri, but everybody has always called me Lucky. Anyway, I did the best on that pair of bateaux, best that I could. You gave me some good ideas.”

Du Pré smiled. I drown now, it’s my fault. Made a bad video.

“I saw you fiddle at the festival in June, too,” Lucky went on. “You are very good. You bring your fiddle?”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré. He’d thought of buying a cheap one to bring, but he sometimes believed his fiddle was a living thing and it might get pissed off being left back on an adventure like this one, grow sulky, not play so good after that.

So he had brought it. The slingshot was in the case, under the neck, with the cube of rosin and the extra strings and bridges.

If I go, Du Pré thought, which I am not till I see maybe we got a couple people look like they grew up on deer meat they poached right around here. I will know them when I see them. I had better see them.

Chase was looking over toward the door that led from the bar to the dining room.

There was a man standing in it, a very dark man, in a red-and-black-checked wool jacket and heavy canvas pants and high boots with rubber bottoms. He had a wool cap on his head, one with a round tassel on the end of it. The man had a large glass of something brown in his left hand. The hand was missing two fingers entirely and some parts of the others. He looked for a moment at Paul Chase, then he walked toward their table. Another man looking just like the first, only twenty years or more younger, followed him. He seemed to have all of his fingers.

When they passed Du Pré, he caught an odor of woodsmoke and fish and dogs.

This is looking some better, Du Pré thought.

Paul Chase introduced the two as Nappy Florissant and his son Felix. They were guides. They would be with the expedition throughout the journey.

The Florissants eventually shook hands with everybody, smiled, and showed that they both were missing a few front teeth. They went back to the bar, and eventually Du Pré followed.

He spoke to them in Coyote French. They liked Du Pré for that, bought him a drink.

“So you been down to York Factory?” Du Pré asked casually, sipping.

“Oh, yes,” said Nappy, “I have been there. Him, too.” He jerked his head at his son.

They had another drink.

“Yes,” said Felix, “we have been to York Factory some, the both of us.”

“They fly us there to fight a big forest fire once,” said Nappy, “burning some bad, that one, couldn’t see the ground from the plane. Lots of smoke.”

“Then they fly us back Lac La Ronge. Made good money,” said Felix.

“So we both been to York Factory,” said Felix, eyes twinkling.

Du Pré laughed. These men would do, as they say in Montana, to ride with.

Or float with up here in the endless black-green forest, in the rain.

T
HE MASS OF GEAR WAS
monstrous. Du Pré walked around it, looked at the canoes, some fiberglass and the others bark, the big freighters. They looked crude, and they were. Bark and pitch, fir for struts and thwarts and ribs, laced with woven spruce roots.

Oddly beautiful. Even had the roll of birch under the stern.

“Got maybe a disco in here, roller rink?” said Nappy. He was used to greenhorns; they always brought ten times as much stuff as they needed, and the wrong stuff at that. “Maybe this big tent has a hot tub, maybe a nice deck.” He kicked a huge bag.

“Papa, he has the big head this morning,” said Felix. He looked at the piles of duffel and laughed.

“Where’s yours?” said Nappy.

Du Pré pointed to his sleeping bag—a cheap Dacron one, but if it got wet, you could wring it out and still be a little warm—and two duffels with his clothes and few possibles in it.

Compass—didn’t need one of those in Montana, since the mountains stuck up so high—some fruit leather and jerky; clothes, jacket and dew pants and rubber-bottomed boots, plenty of wool socks; some detergent and salt and tea; aspirin; six bottles of Canadian whiskey, full liters, none of this dinky little fifth business.

Du Pré had poured the whiskey into a six-liter gasoline can, a plastic one. Had a neat little spout you could unscrew. It had been made to hold gasoline for chain saws, but Du Pré had seen its other possibilities.

A knot of people was headed their way. Some TV camera people and a couple reporters. Paul Chase was in the center. One of the reporters broke off and trotted over to Du Pré and the Florissants.

“Mr. Chase said to ask you when you would embark.”

“Soon as we get all this shit loaded,” said Nappy. “I say maybe two weeks.”

The pile wasn’t that bad, though, everything had been duffeled or put in dry bags. Du Pré asked about food, and Nappy said the Smithsonian had a whole department got good food together for expeditions.

“Somehow that don’t make me feel much better,” said Du Pré.

“We got a whole bunch in our two canoes, too,” said Felix, laughing, “and there’s plenty fish and a couple rifles. Deer and moose along the river and not too many them game wardens, you know. Lots of porcupines.”

Du Pré had eaten porcupine. The meat was horrible, what there was of it. The flabby animals moved slowly and didn’t need much muscle. But the liver, which was large, was delicious.

The gear was laid in the canoes; the members of the expedition got in and paddled off before noon. The day was calm. Lac La Ronge was big enough to have good-sized waves on it. They would hug the shore for the first couple of days, until they came to the lake’s outlet and went down the river to the next lake.

Du Pré asked Nappy what river. He was riding in Nappy’s canoe and helping the man paddle.

“All Red River,” said Nappy. There were a lot of local names for the little stretches—had to be so the voyageurs would know where they were and what they were talking about. Du Pré took out a notebook and began to list them. The first was a twelve-mile stretch between Lac La Ronge and a small and unnamed lake called the Le Vieux.