A Discovery of Strangers (8 page)

But it is now clear that he must go a step farther. Ever since leaving Fort Providence they have been grumbling as if they — who were hired because they were the strongest and most highly recommended of all voyageurs — are capable only of travel on rivers familiar to them. Well, he has now had quite enough of their grumbling and petulant complaint. If they do not pick up their packs immediately for this last portage of the day, he will not hesitate — as he has every right under English law —
to blow their brains out
.

Even in basic French there is satisfaction in uttering such an unambiguous phrase. The Indian women and children and old men have carried their goods exactly as far as the voyageurs in four days, and have certainly had less to eat. They are coming in off the lake in the usual bedraggled flotilla and are preparing — in their massive confusion of children and dogs and sacks of all kinds — to commence the portage without a glance of complaint. Hood of course is sitting on his heels with his sketchpad on his knee, surrounded by landscape, but he looks about when I shout to him. At my shout the Indians turn motionless, staring
at us on the rocky beach, but Hood walks up very calmly, still holding his futile pencil.

We are five — but of course the servant carries no pistol. So Lieutenant Franklin, Doctor Richardson and I will only be able to execute three mutineers before the others reach us with their knives.

I must say I experience a strange sense of
déjà vu
, almost vertigo, as I check my priming. I know I must be intent on which man I must take — that enormous French Canadian or the skulking Mohawk? — why did we ever choose that glowering blackface? — but the absurdity of having survived the British Navy and the last of the Napoleonic wars and five dreadful years of French and Spanish captivity and traversing 113 degrees of longitude, all before I am twenty-four, and then getting my throat slit by Canadian half-breed louts on the shores of a desolate, nameless lake — sometimes we travel too fast to name or even see them all — is momentarily more than my mind can fathom. The huge voyageurs advance up the sand.

“Where’s St. Germain?” Lieutenant Franklin asks.

Hood has pulled out his useless pistol as calmly as though he is about to polish it; perhaps he is fumbling at his powder-purse.

“He said he’d go to meet the hunters,” he says.

Our translator is our most valuable man — and also a better hunter than any three Indians together — but we know his sharp and calculating mind: we instinctively think he has initated this. And even if he is not here, he may well have done so, and Lieutenant Franklin would accept the necessary responsibility of having to execute him first. But if he were here, it certainly would not end as it does: we raise and cock our pistols.
Nevertheless, the two biggest voyageurs and the Mohawk take several steps before they are aware that their sixteen
confrères
have stopped in their tracks. Dear God, they can crush us like mosquitoes between their enormous hands! But no Canadian can outface British character.

“You will all be docked three full days’ pay,” Lieutenant Franklin orders.

“Set up the camp here,” I tell them in French, and I make no attempt to hide my disdain. “You will carry the portage tomorrow.”

Dissension Lake. Lieutenant Franklin would permit no name stronger. Hood corroborated my reading of it exactly — he is well trained in mathematics — as latitude 64°, 6’, 47 “north, longitude 113°, 25’, o” west. And an hour later our translator and Indian hunters arrived with meat: the enormous irony, in the light of our near annihilation, was that they had killed eighteen deer along the shores of the next lake, at the end of the very portage the men had refused to carry!

Sight unseen we named that Hunter Lake, and the voyageurs spent the evening gorging themselves and laughing like the children they are — a mouthful of meat cures every ill. I do believe that the sternest possible warnings, docked pay and even cocked and levelled pistols — unfortunately we are in no position to have them whipped — mean no more to them than our daily reading of the Scriptures, since they understand not a word of English save curses. Lieutenant Franklin insists, however, that eventually the readings must have a beneficent effect — he alone remaining steadfast in such Christian hope.

But when he heard of the confrontation with levelled pistols, our translator did not laugh. Neither, I noticed, did the
black-faced Mohawk. He alone had dared advance so far up the sand as to almost touch us. And he deliberately advanced upon Hood.

Though it is after ten o’clock, the light over placid Dissension Lake still lies like restless gold, a molten treasure — if only this dreadful land were that, Spanish Main golden sun and golden! — bowled among these primitive rocks. And despite the inevitable clouds of mosquitoes boiling about him like the devil of this place and all his angels, Hood sketches. As usual, he refuses to show me what he has drawn, and so I will show him nothing of my assignment either, but it is obvious he is not working on a landscape now, nor was he when those cowards momentarily defied us. A woman and a girl are going down to the lake carrying water buckets. Without a sound they float down into the level light.

It seems Hood is watching them too, for he says behind me, “Those are Keskarrah’s daughters.”

“Keskarrah?”

“The old man who walked with Hearne — the mapmaker.”

“He has daughters that young?”

Perhaps my tone betrays me. Hood joined the navy at age fourteen, two years after me, and he must then have been as pretty a boy as any captain could wish for, but he will confess to me nothing but duty and Bible reading — why should I care about such a practising junior Franklin? His small cleric father could not have spoken in a more condemnatory tone:

“George, she is the merest child.”

But I am walking towards them at the molten edge of the lake. The girl has barely lifted her bucket and stands there slender as willow, dripping light back into the water — it is the
bending woman I must see. Her narrow arm reaching for water, the golden circles of her hand and bucket submerged and lapping outwards ring upon ring, her form lifting, turning, a slim darkness shaped out of blazing light. Never in my life have I seen such a stunning shape — face — if she lived in Italy she’d be burning on walls, a leather Madonna lifting water.

MIDSHIPMAN ROBERT HOOD

Sunday August
13th 1820
Yellowknife River

The woods discontinued and the rest of the country was a naked desert of coarse brown sand diversified by small rocky hills and lakes, and it was here the voyageurs gave up all hope of relief They imagined that the Indians were cajoling us, and that in leading them into such inhospitable country, we were incurring dangers of which we were ignorant, but determined to obtain experience by sacrificing them. Their discontents broke forth into threats of desertion, which Mr. Franklin silenced by denouncing the heaviest punishment against the ringleaders. Few could have borne the hardships they endured without murmuring, but these complaints were very ill timed. We had scarcely encamped before four hunters arrived with the flesh of two reindeer, and were not again censured: the Canadians never exercising reflection unless they are hungry
.

Sunday August
20th 1820
Winter Lake

We had, at length, penetrated into the native haunts of the reindeer, whose antlers were moving forests on the ridges of the hills, where they assembled to graze in security. At the western extremity of the lake we found a river fifty yards wide, which discharged from the lake in a strong rapid southwest. Haifa mile below this rapid, we landed on the north bank of the river, at the most eligible place that offered itself for our winter abode
.

4
S
NOWSHOES

On a tiny island in the lake on whose western shore Keskarrah had assured them they would find the most northerly trees large enough to build a shelter similar to Fort Providence, the English officers began to discover the nature of “our Indians”, as they labelled the Tetsot’ine in their notebooks. That August day, the air brisk as Lincolnshire midwinter, began with no more warning than an exceptionally fine paddle out into the lake, singing.

Lieutenant Franklin was deeply concerned about the trees, but he could only begin obliquely. It seemed, he confided aloud to his second in command in the centre canoe, the Hudson’s Bay Company traders were relatively new in Yellowknife country, and they had certainly been very lax in establishing any sense of duty required by a work contract. After two weeks it was obvious to him that the hunters they had been forced to hire (unfortunately no other natives lived in the area) lacked
almost completely the discipline necessary for efficient service to the Expedition. He did not believe that four pistols (one of them unloaded) and constant reminders of planning months ahead for meat would ever convince them of the steady, daily requirements of duty; only an extended and very firm experience of English order would ever achieve that — as it had for the voyageurs.

Doctor Richardson grunted, perhaps in agreement. With his trained Scottish thoroughness he was recording the temperature of the water. His notebooks were full of numbers, morning, noon, evening, including decimal points. But then, abruptly, he did speak.

“Money,” he said, registering some final numbers.

“Money?”

“You seek out the larger issues, sir,” Richardson said, smiling at his commander; at his inexorable reliability. “But most people wish to understand only what they hold in their hands. We will never control any Indians, not in this wild country, until we teach them the absolute, practical necessity of money.”

“They hardly seem to require it, since they trade for what they need.”

“Exactly. I believe that is the fundamental problem in the economic development of primitives. If they understood money, they would work harder to get more of it, in order to buy what they want.”

Franklin shook his head. “But … it seems they want so little.”

“Exactly,” Richardson murmured, closing his notebook. “They must want more than they need. That is civilization.”

On the ice-cold lake flashing with ripples that swished to the racing canoes, Lieutenant Franklin did not look happy at this analysis. It seemed to him not so much down to earth as
profoundly uncharitable, almost revealing an ungodly cynicism — though his implacable optimism told him that the kindly doctor was not at all like that. They were fifteen months out of Gravesend, though hopefully no longer that distant from a return to it; the individual and interpersonal strains of the Expedition would gradually reveal themselves as no more difficult than they must be,
Deo volente
.

Lieutenant Franklin twisted in his seat, looked ahead past the driving arms of Solomon Bélanger at his back: the Yellowknives were gone. Ahead, perhaps far over various bodies and strips of water … ahead somewhere. Their ragged flotilla, where apparently every woman and child and man paddled or carried whatever as inclination moved them, had gradually, casually, outstripped his giant canoes and the voyageurs’ contracted rhythm to vanish somewhere north over the rock shoulders of portages, across the endless hummocky, wet excretions of moss. As the sun set yesterday, August 19, 1820, the Expedition had portaged over the height of land down to this lake which, unseen, they had already agreed to call “Winter”. But the vanished Indians and the isolated, deformed pines they discovered there along the south shore valleys did not reassure them.

Had the old man actually understood what they needed? Such slim sticks, such wind-riven twists of indefatigable wood, gnarled spirals, really, could not fashion a framework for canvas, leave alone the log houses they must build. Now it was Sunday, and they had not yet performed divine service, but the voyageurs always worked with less complaint immediately after sleeping, especially if there was a calm lake to cross, and so he had ordered the launch at sunrise with the prospect of service a respite later. But despite the cheerful song of the voyageurs,
every lake vista made him more doubtful about the old man, about what they had understood him to say concerning “the last very large trees”. The vacancy of tundra, the measureless Barren Lands, was already more than a threat, here all about them.