The High Missouri (10 page)

“You, however, come to the wilderness to bear the truth and let it shine forth. The truth you uncover in the good, black book.” He repeated, “
Black
book,” and snorted. “You ask me for a job to send you deep, deep into the heart of darkness that you may illuminate it with your beacon of truth. Foolishly, you do not fear for your soul.” He cast a look like a shaft at Dylan.

Now Stewart spoke softly and gently. “You do not understand the nature of darkness.” He regarded Dylan sympathetically. “No, you surely do not understand darkness, and what it will do to men.

“I was like you, young Mr. Davies. I brought here an idealist’s mind. Once.” He lost a moment to memory, or simply to silence. “Oxford by God University, yes, All Souls College.”

Stewart brought his mind back to the present. “I wonder if you wish to know.” He pondered, then felt himself speak in a tumbling rush. “I shall tell you anyway. I shall give you the last chance to save your soul. You will know the truth, and it will set you free.”

The hard, snorting laugh again. “But you do not know what free can mean.” Stewart looked into his past—yes, yes, in the name of all devils, it did mesmerize him. He forced himself back to the present. “Free to become… what?

“I’m told you know the Cree a little, Mr. Davies. They are hardly Indians. And Mr. Bleddyn’s people are half white in their ways, of course. So you know nothing of
Indians
.

“The job I might have for you is at Fort Augustus, near the foot of the Rocky Mountains. To get there you must travel as far from here, Mr. Davies, as you have come from Montreal. And spiritually farther, much, much farther.

“There you find real Indians, young man, not these half-creatures of the eastern and middle wilderness. The Piegans.” He chuckled low. “When the Jesuits first came among these half-creature Crees, they too were real Indians, Mr. Davies. And do you know what the Jesuit missionaries felt, so far back there in the seventeenth century, when they looked upon this new, unredeemed continent of the spirit? I commend to you a book named
Relations
, their own account of their insights. It’s in our library here, which is surprisingly good. They felt, Mr. Davies, that they were looking into a wilderness of the human spirit. And they saw there the ultimate horror—the human soul untouched by God.”

Stewart felt himself shiver. He looked at his hands. He felt his lips move toward rictus. Then he picked up the thought: “It terrified some of those worthy priests, Mr. Davies. It caused crises of faith. It even cost holy men their faith, and their souls.

“They came to light the darkness, and the darkness extinguished their light.

“Lord, I believe,” Stewart intoned mockingly, mocking himself especially. “Oh, help thou mine unbelief.”

The candle was dimming, and they were sitting in near darkness. Stewart rose, got the candle, lit another one from it and set both candlesticks on the floor on either side of his chair. Dylan was struggling to stay awake. It was very late, and he had difficulty following Stewart’s words. Yet he was intrigued by the man’s manner. His face was full of… Dylan didn’t know what.

“Can your idealist’s mind imagine what real Indians such as the Piegans are like, Mr. Davies? No, not yet. I must tell you.” His voice was still gentle, but tinged with ironic, bitter acceptance.

“I began to know what they are when I saw the women butchering buffalo. The Piegans are mass slaughterers of buffalo, of course—that’s how we get our vast quantities of pemmican; they trade it to us. Their most successful method is to create an open-ended vee from brush, ending upon a cliff. Then they drive the brutes into the vee pell-mell, and they fall over the cliff to their deaths.”

Dylan disregarded this account of the Piegans—Stewart was simply describing someone as yet untouched by God’s grace. His own interest was not in the story, but the storyteller, Stewart himself, his soul half revealed by the strange face and the soft, uncanny voice.

“One senses that their favorite device, though, is to stampede the creatures into rivers at flood stage. They drive them relentlessly, one after the other, and buffalo are like sheep—they panic and run where the others run. I have seen them, Mr. Davies, so thick in the river that they walked on each other’s backs. All being swept downstream, the ones on the bottom merely drowning first. By the end of the day, a man could have walked five miles downriver on buffalo carcasses and scarce have gotten his feet wet.

“They do not even butcher them all. They kill for the love of killing.

“It was one afternoon when I really watched them skinning and butchering that I began to understand. The women do all such work, and do it with relish. I saw scores of them among the carcasses at the bottom of the buffalo jump, up to their elbows in blood and up to their knees in viscera. For a moment I was repulsed, and felt sorry for them. Then I realized that they were exhilarated. Woman after woman would cut off a slice of the liver, dip it in the bile, and eat it, raw. Many would drink the blood, and it ran down their faces and necks and bosoms. Some cut open the stomachs of the great beasts and drank, unaltered, the stomach contents.

“Even that was not the heart of the matter. The truth was, they enjoyed it, relished, gloried in the gore.

“So I was less surprised, later, when I saw the women torture captives.

“Yes, Mr. Davies, women. Nurturers, yea, those who suckle the children. When warriors of other tribes are captured, or sometimes white men, the women, not the men, become their tormentors. They torture the poor wretches slowly, with unimaginable patience, savoring each infliction of pain. I have seen them stick a dozen long splinters into a man’s skin, and light them and watch them burn the flesh. I have seen them flay a human being, bit by bit. I have seen them cut off a man’s eyelids, sever a man’s penis and stuff it in his mouth. Even I, Mr. Davies, who am the blackest of the black, quail at giving you further details.

“Unto death, of course. But the point is, death can be delayed for days, to augment the savage entertainment.” Stewart was silent for a moment, perhaps looking into dark shadows. “I could tell you more.”

He regarded Dylan with his lightless eyes. “And what about us, Mr. Davies? Does it matter how one treats such creatures?” Stewart seemed to look down at his hands, then jerked his head up toward Dylan. “But I see I’m a poor storyteller—I’ve lost your attention. And a poor host—I failed to notice that you’re falling asleep.” He stood and carried a candle to an alcove.

“You will stay here, of course. It’s much too late for you to return to Mr. Bleddyn’s camp, and ruffians are about this time of night. I insist. You may use this cot.”

Drowsily, Dylan followed toward the cot. He knew he’d fall asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.

“Perhaps you’d like to fold your clothes over that chair,” Stewart offered.

Dylan shook his head. He didn’t care, he would sleep in them.

Before he laid his head down, though, he wanted to see Stewart’s eyes—Dylan felt that he hadn’t seen them clearly in all these hours. He peered up toward the tall man. Now Dylan was far below the great shelves of eyebrows, and the candle cast light into the deep recesses.

Strange, very strange. The eyes didn’t seem to catch the light, as eyes always do. They were dark, flat, opaque, without life. Empty.

Dylan felt the need to say something, he didn’t know what. He must show he’d been paying attention. He stretched out on the cot and closed his eyes. Appeasingly, he asked, “What you discovered, then, is that Indians are beasts, animals without souls, and beyond redemption?”

“No, young Mr. Davies,” said Stewart mildly. “They’re human. Entirely human.”

“Then what is the point?” asked Dylan querulously. As consciousness dimmed, he felt a little annoyed.

“That you discover their darkness in your own heart. But perhaps you must find that out for yourself.”

Chapter Nine

“You want something to eat?” Dru wore a knowing smile. But what could he know about the phantasmagorical journey Duncan Campbell Stewart had put him through? Dylan wondered.

Were Indians really like that? Did the
women
torture captives? Probably Stewart was mad.

“You want something to eat?” Dru repeated. He was pointing at the inevitable
sagamité
. Maybe the knowing smile was about the way Dylan walked. Every step made loud crackles, like a popping fire, in his head. He would never drink so much again.

“I ate,” he said curtly. Talking turned the popping into a roar.

He actually had eaten. Stewart had coffee and hot rolls brought to the rooms, and Dylan took coffee and one bite of buttered bread. As they breakfasted, Stewart had been impeccably polite and remotely formal, as though last night’s revelations had never taken place.

Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe his own disordered imagination, previously inflamed by Ian Campbell, had run wild.

Stewart had asked Dylan to come back in a couple of days about the job. His manner announced clearly that Dylan was not to inquire further right now. Dylan wasn’t up to asking about anything anyway.

“Where is everybody?” he asked now.

“Wait a little,” said Dru with a secret smile.

Wait? How about, Lie down by the wigwam and be still until the head stops roaring?

When he stirred, he had half memories. A rotund French Canadian moved into and out of his mind, a merry, agile fellow he’d shaken hands with. Or was it a dream?

“Did you introduce me to someone?” he asked Dru.

“A trader, Louis Rémy.”

“Plump?”

Dru nodded. “Well-girded, a raconteur, a scalawag, and master of two wives. Or is it two among each tribe?”

Dylan wasn’t sure what the joke was. Did white men really take two wives? He wasn’t sure of anything. He shook his head, and regretted it.

“Come look,” said Dru.

Dylan sat down next to Dru in front of the fire. The Druid handed him a horn of gunpowder, a small horn of primer, a shooting pouch, and a rifle cover sewn from a piece of blanket. In the pouch were a bar of lead, a mold for making balls, a handful of flints, and some patches. Last, Dru handed Dylan the rifle itself.

“A J. Henry Northwest gun,” explained Dru.

Dylan dared not hope. It was a proper rifle, not a musket or a fowling piece, oiled and polished until both the wood and the brass glowed. He tested the lock. It had a good, firm action. He saw that the sighting style was a blade in front and no rear sight. For a side plate it had an undulating serpent cast in brass. Surely a fine weapon.

“If you go to buffalo country for Stewart,” Dru said, “you’ll need better than an old fusil.” The gun he’d been letting Dylan practice with, the model the company traded to the Indians.

Dylan looked eagerly into Dru’s one eye. “It’s yours,” Dru said with a smile. “My
au revoir
gift to you.”

“Au revoir?”

“Saga and I have a trip to make to Athabasca now. I suspect you’ll be going to Fort Augustus. Unless you choose to go back to your family. You’ve already had a fine adventure.”

“I’ll never go back to my father,” muttered Dylan. He felt a pang of loneliness. He hadn’t thought…

“You’ll need a good rifle to shoot buffalo, then. That’s what they do at Fort Augustus in the autumn. Make pemmican.”

Make pemmican. Right, as Stewart said. Dylan wondered if they really did it by drowning them en masse. “The job isn’t promised,” he said.

“I believe the decision is yours,” said Dru.

“Before, I thought you said
we
make pemmican at Fort Augustus.”

The Druid smiled enigmatically. “Saga and I will be along,” he said. “We have to go to Athabasca first.”

Why don’t we go to the High Missouri instead? thought Dylan. The grand, untouched country? Looking for the Welsh Indians?

Instead of asking, Dylan pretended indifference. He hefted the Henry rifle and held the sight on a slender birch fifty yards away. He wondered if he could become an excellent shot. He checked to see if the ramrod was straight and moved easily. The rifle was in good condition.

So that’s why Dru sent him to Stewart. The Druid didn’t want him around on the trip to Athabasca, wherever that was.

“I have a motto I’d like to inscribe on the powder horn for you. Would you like that?”

Dylan hesitated.

“The rifle and accoutrements are yours whether you stay in the
pays d’en haut
or not.”

“I’d like that,” said Dylan.

“I’ll do it.” The Druid thought a moment. “Dylan,” he said in a tone of significance, “I rang the bells and you heard them and came here. Now you and you alone must decide whether to stay.”

“Why did you ring those bells?”

Dru smiled and shrugged. “It’s my blood and breath mysticism, laddo.”

“Let’s try the rifle,” said Dru.

Dylan lolled his head about, then shook it no. “I don’t think my head will stand loud noises yet,” he answered.

Dru smiled teasingly. Dylan hung the pouch over his right shoulder to feel the fit of it on his flank. It seemed good.

“Why did Louis give it to you?” Dylan asked.

“He didn’t give it, he traded it,” answered Dru.

“What did you trade him?”

Dru looked Dylan in the eye. “Marguerite,” said the Druid. “As a second wife.” He grinned. “Got a good price for her too.”

Marguerite? The girl of his own fantasies?

Dylan sat on the hilltop and watched them load the canoes in the mouth of the river, this Rémy Dylan had met but not met, and his crew and family. The family apparently included two teenage boys, a younger girl, a first wife—real wife—and Marguerite.

Dylan was amused at himself. He felt jealousy and shame, yet he had committed sins with Marguerite only in his mind.

He felt betrayed. By Dru. Irrational but true.

How could they treat women this way—buy and sell them?

Rémy beamed a broad smile toward everyone. It looked lascivious, loathsome.

“There was no way around it,” Dru said, sitting down. “Her husband died.”

The glance Dylan threw him looked like contempt. Why was the laddo so hot?

“It’s the only way for her,” Dru explained gently. “There’s no life for a woman without a family. Not in these parts.”

Dylan ignored him.

Dru let it sit awhile.

“It’s customary, you know,” said Dru. “A man of position has more than one wife. It’s expected, if you can afford it.”

Dylan seemed to keep himself from quivering with anger by an act of will.

Oh, well, thought Dru, the laddo is conventional sometimes. He went down to the water to say good-bye.

Dylan dreamed.

Restlessly, helplessly, hopelessly, tossing and turning, he dreamed. His mind transported to him lurid images of every kind imaginable. Rémy and Marguerite, yes, and himself and Marguerite, and the three of them in acts either repugnant or impossible, yes. But worse than this. Creatures half man, half beast, mobs of them, fornicating foully in obscene positions, performing obscene acts, eating dung, pissing on creatures who until their degradation were human beings, and worse.

At the library of his College de Montreal, Dylan had seen engravings of paintings of the New World by a Dutch painter named Hieronymus Bosch. The librarian said they were based on the tales sailors brought back shortly after Columbus discovered the new continent and its peoples. They were full of horrific man-beasts and devils, hideous creatures, monstrously deformed and distorted, engaged in bizarre and grotesque practices. At the time Dylan and the librarian chuckled about Bosch’s absurd misrepresentation of the New World.

Now, in his dream, he remembered the Bosch paintings and saw that his dreams were their progeny. That was no comfort, for his dreams were also like the tales he’d heard of the doings of Indians, the tales Stewart brought him, the tales that now might be all too true. Maybe Bosch’s images of the New World were not an absurdity, maybe they were the real
pays sauvage
, and he was trapped in a nightmare both sleeping and waking, walking through a dreamscape of horror both day and night.

He slipped from the strange double reality of dream—dreaming while knowing it’s a dream—back into the pure singularity of the dream illusion.

He was fornicating lasciviously with an Indian woman, a striking-looking creature. She had four white stripes on her face, two scars slashing from the outside corner of each eye to her earlobes, like giant cat’s whiskers, and two thin streaks of white hair diverging back from her widow’s peak. She had a wickedly sensual face and a voluptuous body. As they made the beast with two backs, they rolled over and over on hot coals of hell, and the skin of each was blistered and suppurating and pocked with deeply burned craters.

Yet even more painful than the horrible burns was what he felt as he rolled over and over fornicating—the agony of spirit, the utter absence of love, the unreachable, inviolate darkness of soul.

“Anastasie dit il est temps de donner à manger les Christiens au lions.”
Anastasie says it’s time to feed the Christians to the lions. Which was the way Anastasie announced every meal.

It took Dylan a moment to register that the voice was speaking French in the inimitable accent of the Indians. And he didn’t recognize the voice. He pulled his blankets over his eyes. He was afraid he’d wake to a reality even more appalling than his dream.

A hand shook his shoulder.

Dylan opened his eyes and looked into the face.

He choked back bile.

It was the face of Fornicating Woman in the dream. It even had one of the four white stripes. A thin pink-white scar ran in a straight line from the corner of her right eye to the right earlobe.

It was a sensual face, a face that spoke of strong weathers—desire, anger, hatred, temper, passion.

“Tu t’appelle comment?”
Dylan asked hesitantly. What’s your name?

She seemed amused at his hesitation. She was a woman who would demand boldness, and give it.

“Fore,” she said with a beguiling smile. For a gut-squeezing moment he thought she was going to say Forenicating Woman. But she only smiled that smile.

The temptations of the flesh rose in Dylan. Fore stood up and started walking away from his lean-to, the site of his fantasies of Marguerite, and now of Fornicating Woman. He watched the undulating hips of Fore, and his body stirred.

“Allons,”
she called back. Let’s go. Then in clumsy and almost indecipherable English, “Tahm to feed the Chrees-tee-ons to thee lah-ohns.” Her laughter made a brittle, tinkling, discordant music in the air.

“Fore can teach you snares,” said Dru, eyeing Dylan across the fire.

“Whose idea is that?”

Dru chuckled. Saga, Lady Sarah, Anastasie—everyone smiled over their bowls of stew.

“Ma ideé,”
Fore put in saucily. My idea. She gave Dylan a so-what look.

“It’s a good idea,” said Dru, “if you intend to stay in the
pays d’en haut
.”

“Maybe,” said Dylan.

Dru ate a little, chewed, spoke casually. “With or without a woman?”

“Without,” Dylan said with some heat. He thought he heard Fore snort, but he didn’t look toward her. She was eating near Saga.

“Hard to do,” Dru said mildly.

“You’ll die,” Saga said sardonically.

Dylan jerked his head toward Saga. It was the first time the half-breed had ever spoken to him. Dylan would remember those first words.

“Women’s work,” said Anastasie, mediating. She gave Saga a mind-your-manners look.

“Actually,” said Dru in a reasonable tone, “you can live in the
pays d’en haut
without a woman. It’s just hard.” He flashed a grin at everyone. “The jackasses of Hudson’s Bay do it, which shows how smart it is.” That got a little laugh.

“We need women. Gather the wild rice. Find the onions, Jerusalem artichokes, mushrooms, and berries. Dig the roots. Make the clothes. Build the wigwams. Cook. Other such.” He smiled. “Keep your blankets warm.”

“I can take care of myself,” Dylan said. He felt like this immoral talk was making his testicles ascend.

Dru shrugged. “If you stay almost entirely in the fort. But that would be robbing yourself of what you came to experience, the
pays sauvage
, and the people
sauvage
.” Dru didn’t look at anyone—was he hinting at experiencing Fore?

The Druid resettled himself on his haunches. “You know Sage and I make a trip to Montreal lots of winters. We take expresses, for a good price.

“We go by snowshoe. Who makes the snowshoes?” He paused significantly. “Anastasie and Lady Sarah do. Who makes the pemmican we take? Women. Who makes the
sagamité
? Women.” He spread his arms eloquently.

Dylan was consciously not looking at Fore. Why? he asked himself. I just met her. He said to Dru, “I can learn.”

“Then learn,” said Dru. “Learn how to make snares and set them. Fore will teach you this afternoon.”

Dylan didn’t want to go anywhere with Fore alone. To him she was still Fornicating Woman of his dream, and it made him feel eerie. “She’s so young.” She was probably his age.

“She learned from her grandmother, who taught me. Already she’s better than either of us.”

Dru got up. Motioned Fore up. Jerked his head at Dylan. “So let’s go.”

Fore spoke in French, teasingly throwing it all at him fast. He couldn’t learn it at this speed, but could merely be impressed by her expertise. He might have been tickled, might have been offended, but in fact she just gave him the willies.

From time to time the Druid would add something, a bit of lore that let Dylan see into the ways of the rabbit better. Or the raccoon, or the marmot. There were so damned many of them. So many habits and habitats to learn, so much… And all of this traditional knowledge, Fore said, would be different in winter.

“Now we trap a marmot,” she said. “You see.” She smiled provocatively, and gave her head a follow-me jerk.

“Why are you acting spooky?” asked the Druid as they walked.