The High Missouri (16 page)

Jack let Dylan go out with Bleu to survey a creek thoroughly to learn the technique. After several days of field work, Dylan lost himself in the tools of map-making—a set of drafting instruments, ruler, pens and pencils, camel hair brushes, sticks of India ink, watercolors, Whatman’s paper, and tracing paper. He loved making the map. It was scientific, it ordered jumbled actuality into comprehensible latitude and longitude, it let you understand, it created an abstract beauty for the mind. And you didn’t have to remember how corporeal your actual experience there was, how grossly… Indian it all felt.

He made his first big purchase on credit from the company, a pocket watch. He would carry it always, a gleaming symbol of the difference between the white man and the Indian.

Chapter Fourteen

October stretched toward November without Dru. Trading and hunting were over, so Dylan had time on his hands. He spent it wandering with his sextant. He spent it jesting with that wise fool of a jester Bleu. He spent it yearning for Dru.

He felt something happening in his soul this plains autumn, what the Indians called the moon after the leaves fall off, also called the moon when the geese fly south. It was an odd month in this vast country, as the season slid from summer to winter. Mornings were cold, evenings nippy. The wind and weather were still. In the pagan manner Bleu rose each morning with the dawn and, standing there by the bedroll in his underwear, said good morning ceremonially to the sun. Father Sun, he called it. Sometimes he seemed to make a genuine little ceremony of his greeting, and sometimes he seemed to toss it off as a burlesque. Yet even then Dylan could hear a genuineness in the salutation. The rest of the day the Frenchy was a regular sort of white man, helping Dylan willingly enough in the surveying he didn’t believe in, and complaining mostly for fun. But Dylan had heard his dawn prayer, and knew that Bleu was a barbarian in his heart.

As a purely secular matter, Dylan admired the sunshine himself. Not only did it make getting out of that bedroll tolerable, it did something… almost spiritual. It gave the days a kind of grace. It turned the grasses a wondrous color, a tawny green that glowed from the inside out. And other grasses wine-colored, and the willow bushes orange-red. It made the very air… intoxicating. It shone so strong, even this late in the season, that the profane earth at times seemed to become luminous.

Bleu was a barbarian because he did not understand that the sun did not, could not, fill the world with spirit, or put a creature with a soul thereon to apprehend it.

It was November first exactly, according to Dylan’s journal, that they saw far-off figures making their way toward the post. “Dru!” Dylan exclaimed.

“Zis be no Druid and Saga,” said Bleu. “Monsieur Troyes, the Lemieux brothers, and a woman.”

Dylan focused the telescope on the riders. How Bleu could see details across the plains at these distances, Dylan didn’t know. Even with the Dolland telescope, Dylan couldn’t be sure it wasn’t Dru. But he could see long skirts on one of the riders.

“Word de Montreal,” said Bleu.

“What word?”

Bleu shrugged.

“But where’s Dru?”

Bleu shrugged again. “Tallyho.”

It was word from Montreal, and from Mad Jack’s expression, a very strange word. The Nor’West Company was to buy no more pemmican than it needed to feed its own men for next spring only. No expeditions were to be sent into remote country, no men sent out to bring the wandering tribes in to the trading posts, no expenses not strictly necessary incurred. On the other hand, all trade goods were to be exchanged for peltries of any kind, price no object. Only enough was to be kept for bare subsistence. In short, nothing was to be spent and all assets turned into the equivalent of cash, immediately.

“
Bleedin’
partners,” cursed Mad Jack. Field partners, who saw the value long-term of establishing relationships with the Indians, were always complaining about the Montreal partners, who demanded more immediate profits.

The messenger was a Metis of great self-possession. The look on his face suggested Indian impatience with the quarrels of white men. “I know no more,” he said in French.

“So what ze bludy hell goes on?” asked Bleu calculatingly.

“Capital,” said Mad Jack disgustedly. According to him, the Nor’West Company had always outdone the HBC in enterprise, daring, and every sort of competence, especially understanding of the Indians. But the price wars verged on ruinous. The NWC partners spent fortunes on wine, women, and song when they had them, compiled no reserves, and sometimes could not compete with the vast resources of the landed and titled men who backed the Hudson’s Bay Company. This was another episode of lack of capital, said Jack. The Nor’West men, good
voyageurs
and splendid
hommes du nord
, could have won this war hands down, Jack said, except for the foolishness of the Montreal partners.

Dylan wondered if Jack really knew what was going on. He wished Dru were here to help think things out. Where the hell were Dru and Saga anyway? It was November, and the weather was already risky for traveling.

At dinner Dylan covertly studied the messenger, one Yves Troyes. He was smashingly handsome, with a finely sculpted face, yet was darker even than most Indians, and thoroughly Indian in his mannerisms. The French he spoke was more city-refined than country-crude. Dylan wondered who his father had been. Troyes was not the descendant of longtime
habitants
, Dylan was sure of that. He had a certain elegance, an aloofness, and a certain nonchalance, that lent him the style of an aristocrat. Dylan wondered where he got his sense of… sovereignty.

Perhaps it was partly his daughter, Caroline. At least her father introduced her as Caroline. Curtseying, she corrected it to “Caro.”

Caro Troyes was as handsome as her father, statuesque, with a thick braid of glowing russet hair that hung below her waist, skin of soft beige, and delicate features. She was a tall, slender girl, and had a way of carrying her body as though it was delicate and precious. She seemed as aloof as her father, in an opposite way. Her eyes burned at people. If Dylan could read body language, she was neither modest nor deferential toward men, but defiantly proud. Yet she contributed nothing to the dinner conversation. Dylan guessed she was there on paternal orders, but supremely uninterested. After dinner, while the men talked, she sat on a chair in a corner and read a book. Dylan couldn’t see what it was.

He wondered about Caro. Who was her mother? Where? Why was she traveling alone with her father, with winter approaching, through a cold and vast Canadian wilderness? If she spoke her mind, what would she say? How did a woman of French and Cree ancestry get a name such as the English “Caroline”? Throughout the evening he watched her, fascinated by her scorn for the society of traders, men of commerce. He felt drawn to her, a little foolish about her, and oddly protective of her.

Perhaps that’s why he was not listening when Yves Troyes suddenly mentioned his name. Dylan thought he’d said, “I’d like Monsieur Davies to go with us.”

Dylan looked up at the dark Metis. “Monsieur Davies,” he said in French, “you have not met the Lemieux brothers, our traveling companions. They’re busy enjoying their wives tonight, whom they haven’t seen in many months.” This was said without a hint of impropriety, but Bleu gave Dylan a licentious look.

“Interesting men, the Lemieux,” said Mad Jack cryptically.

“They wish to stay here with their families now, as they should. My daughter and I require two more men for our journey on to Captain Chick at Rocky Mountain House. Bleu has agreed to come. And that unusual chap who calls himself the Druid suggested you. By the way, he sends his greetings.”

“The Druid?” Dylan repeated stupidly.

“Yes, we saw him at Fort William.”

Why was Dru all the way back at Fort William instead of Athabasca? Or here?

“He sends you a message. He regrets to say that he will not arrive until spring. Urgent affairs. And suggests that you make the journey to Rocky Mountain House with myself and my daughter.”

Yes, the trip on to the next fort to spread the word from Montreal. The very strange word, and the strange urgency to get it to every factor.

“That would be good for you, lad,” put in Mad Jack. “Spend the winter there with Captain Chick. See another outfit. Learn.”

Dylan looked at Yves Troyes, who seemed aloof, unappealing. He looked at Caroline, who was aloof and very appealing. He eyed Bleu and got an unreadable glance. He thought of the cold, arduous trip through to the mountains. He felt a nameless dread of this wilderness.

He looked again at Caroline. Her eyes were, well, he hoped they were challenging. Foolishly, he stammered, “When do we start?”

“What’s the book you’re reading?” Dylan finally asked. It was after dinner, and nearly dark. In two days of traveling, Caro had scarcely spoken to anyone, but spent all her time in camp reading and all her time riding silent. She rode willingly but wordlessly. She took their simple meal of pemmican in silence, her eyes on her book. With her eyes she declined to help with the simple camp chores, fixing the squaw fire, putting up and taking down the tent. Her father did her part without comment, much to Bleu’s amusement. Every night she volunteered to share the men’s duty of standing guard, and every night he refused. These were almost her only words. She read, or looked around with a transported expression on her face, or occasionally walked a little, as though enchanted, murmuring to herself.

When they stopped at noon, and while the men set up camp in the evening, she sketched in watercolors. Not on a small, lap-held pad, but on big sheets of paper on an easel, as Dylan imagined a real artist would do. He was surprised at first to see a European spirit, especially a feminine one, attracted to painting these vast scenes. Yet he himself was learning to see a kind of magic in them, especially now that they were rising off the infinite plains into the foothills of the great mountain range. Dylan himself sensed magic in this landscape—a barbaric magic, perhaps, even the devil’s magic, but still magic.

She showed no one the sketches. But Dylan saw the expression on her face when she brought the easel back to camp, rapt, even transported.

He was becoming fascinated with her. Yes, she was silent. Perhaps it was refusal to stoop to participate in low society. But it seemed otherwise, it seemed elevated, spiritual. In the evening she would read by the fire with a combination of intensity and rapture, like a monk seeking God and occasionally glimpsing His face.

Dylan watched her surreptitiously as she finished reading and turned toward the tent she shared with her father. That’s when, miserable, ashamed of himself, Dylan blurted out, “What’s the book you’re reading?” He had a fleeting impression that Troyes gave him a look of alarm.

She turned, a finger in her slender book, and regarded him. Skeptically, perhaps? He could not say how. “I’m sorry I’ve not been sociable. I have not intended to be rude. I just don’t know if…” She said in the tone of a quotation,

                                             I stood

Among them, but not of them; in a shroud

Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

She let that sit for a moment. Then: “Have you heard of George Gordon, Lord Byron?” It was not a question of a lady to a commoner. It was appraising, but open to possibility.

“No,” he said regretfully.

“Spend an hour with this,” she said. “Then tell me what you see.” She handed him her book with a friendly glance.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, the title said, by this Lord Byron.

The hour was remarkable. Dylan huddled by the flickering light and meager warmth of the fire throughout the first watch, which Troyes took. Occasionally Dylan would stand up and pace, his mind on Childe Harold and on himself, trying on the mantle of the gloomy, tormented hero. He thought of his father, who didn’t love him. Of his outcast state, driven from his own home, forced even to change his name. He thought of the sins of the flesh he had committed, which were his doom. The mantle fit.

He turned back to the enchanted world of the story. And there in the night, under Troyes’s sardonic eye during the first watch, Dylan sailed into a new and better world.

Troyes finally went to bed, with a threat. “If I catch you with your nose in that book on watch,” he said, “I’ll fine you a month’s pay.” Dylan put the book down, amused that Troyes thought such a worldly threat would intimidate him.

Dylan didn’t read, but his mind was still nowhere near his watch. He paced, picturing Childe Harold and seeing himself. Like Harold, he was neglected, ignored, and shunned, mysterious to others and even to himself, uncared for, melancholy even in moments of happiness, above all lonely. Here especially he was like Childe Harold:

Yet oft-times in his maddest mirthful mood

Strange pangs would flash along Childe Harold’s brow

As if the memory of some dreadful feud

Or disappointed passion lurk’d below:

But this none knew, nor haply cared to know.

He learned something else about his life. His heart had thawed about wild nature. Something in the forests and the plains and the mountains which the party could now see, something about this wildness, this untamedness, reverberated in him, touched his soul. Something reminded him of that grand day with Dru ringing the bells. You could not say what was so sublime—you had to feel it, to put your head on the bell and let the reverberations resonate through you, to sail through the air on the ropes with the world-shattering clang in your ears. So it was with nature.

He could not have told Father Quesnel—and certainly not his mother’s husband—what was mesmerizing in nature. Yet if you let yourself, if you listened to it, smelled it, breathed it in, looked at it with the mystic eye… He was not a poet, he had no words for the grandeur, the lift of soul.

With a dark look at the tent, he picked up the book and thumbed through pages until he found the passage he wanted to read again. He whispered, but the words resounded in his head.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Bleu rolled out of his blankets and spotted the book in Dylan’s hand. Dylan was sure he saw the Frenchy’s eyes roll with disgust. Why? Dylan wondered. Surely this was the reason Caro kept this passion to herself.

“I don’t feel like sleeping,” he said to Bleu.

“We need a decent watch anyway,” the man answered pointedly.