The High Missouri (7 page)

He was possessed utterly by ropes and soaring and the terrific sound and most of all by vibration. A mad spirit had his soul. He was like a leaf skittering above the trees in a hurricane. By giving in, he gained freedom, and could dance on the treetops.

He danced not through air but through the dimension of sound. And danced, and danced, as he sprang from rope to rope.

And heard. Heard not with his ears but his whole body—skull, chest, fingers, feet. With his heart, his liver, his gut, his balls. They tingled, they vibrated, they resonated to the great pulse as the heavens resonate to the music of the spheres.

Time ceased. Society ceased. Religion ceased. Thought itself ceased. His whole being had become a tuning fork, and he quivered, he became vibration.

He had no idea how time passed. Later, after one or two eternities, he saw the Druid lying on the stone floor, resting. Dylan realized he was nearly exhausted. His fingers wouldn’t hold on much longer. On his next swoop down, he let go of the rope and dropped to the stone floor.

He lay still. The giant reverberations lifted him and dropped him like a stick borne by great waves. He lay still. He did not move, he did not think, he did not imagine, he did not feel emotion, he simply heard. Energy surged through him. And at last it began to ebb.

The great clangs subsided very slowly. DONG-DONG changed to a vigorous DONG, and kept that identity for a while. After a time you could tell it had faded a little—it was definite but no longer vigorous. Then the clangs spaced themselves further apart. The soprano and the alto, Gwynedd and Mair, became a tinkle, charming in the wind, and then fell silent. Dylan lost its manliness, or subsided to a more quiet manhood, and at last fell silent. Finally Owain was alone, an occasional soft, basso utterance, a calling of the end of time.

Then only soundless vibration, and then silence.

Time again flowed into Dylan. He had an extraordinarily vivid impression that he’d been dreaming, or having a vision. Yet he could feel the prickly grip of the rope in his hands, and feel that ferocious reverberation all through his body. No, he hadn’t been dreaming. Yet he had.

He blinked. He stretched. He clutched and unclutched his tired fingers. He shrugged and squiggled.

He acknowledged that thoughts were in his mind again. He sensed that he would soon want to move, to walk upon the earth. He would even be hungry again. He might indulge in small sounds like human conversation.

But not yet. He was dizzy, exhausted, his head reeled, he was disoriented. The bells had held sway, and now nothing did, not even himself.

“Sit up, laddo.”

The Druid’s voice.

Dylan rolled onto his side. Put one palm flat. Pushed up. Sat.

The world tilted, then righted itself.

He looked at Dru. Dru’s face—he saw now—was the face of a benevolent angel. Dylan smiled happily.

“Get to your knees.”

Dylan did. He felt clear-headed now. His world was balanced. It was the stone beneath his knees, the earth beneath the stone, the support of all. He felt the warmth of Dru’s hands on his shoulders. They were face-to-face, on their knees.

“Laddo, is your mind empty now? Like a cup with milk all spilled?”

“Aye, emptier than empty,” said Dylan, chuckling.

“Everything?” pressed Dru. “Education, tradition, religion, civilization—everything?”

“Aye, more than everything,” answered Dylan. He could still feel the stupendous vibration of the bells singing in his mind.

“In this state of emptiness will you consent to become a Welsh Indian?” His tone was both mocking and solemn.

“What…?”

“Ask not, laddo. Surrender.”

“Aye,” said Dylan giddily, “I surrender.”

“As a Welsh Indian you must undertake to seek the one true grail, life. Do you accept this quest?”

“Aye,” said Dylan.

“Do you accept me as your guide?”

“Yes,” said Dylan.

“Will you go adventuring with me into the vast wilds, or if the call comes, to the ends of the earth?”

Dylan looked the Druid in the eyes. “I will.”

“Casting aside all obligations, all ties, all previous promises, all preconceptions, all beliefs, all old ways, will you seek the grail?”

Dylan straightened, looked solemnly at Dru. “Yes.”

“As a sign that you are a new man,” said Dru, “I strip you of your old name.” His eyes were merry. “Sod Campbell.” He took out his belt knife and laid it on Dylan’s shoulder. “You will earn names aplenty, but first you will lose one. Now you must be known as Dylan Elfed Davies.” He touched his knife to the other shoulder.

“Rise, Sir Dylan,” he said stentoriously, “and go forth to adventure.”

Dylan stood up unsteadily, stumbled forward, grabbed Dru and embraced him.

Dru hugged him back.

When they moved apart, Dylan asked, “Where next, my guide?”

“You, laddo,” replied Dru, “are going into the wilds like a good Welsh Injun.”

“The wilds.”

“You are a Nor’Wester now.”

Part Two

JUMPING-OFF PLACE

Chapter Six

Dylan couldn’t believe himself. He was thigh deep in the coldest water he’d ever imagined. It made his knee bones ache.

He had his strength more or less into the cordelle, a braided rope sixty feet long. He and Dru were dragging a canoe gear and trade goods, and a full-sized human being in the boat. They were cordelling up the stream because the water was too swift and too rough for paddling.

Insane—when it’s too tough to paddle, you wade. Against the current, on a slippery bottom, with ice still lining the banks. Fall and you become an iceberg.

“Heave!” Dru shouted back at him over the roar of water. Then something about “lose it.”

Lose what, our lives? Dylan heaved mightily and resentfully.

One foot slipped and he went down hard.

He inhaled water. Bloody hell! He snorted it out hard and shook his head violently.

Now he was wet to his head. Not that he had any clothes to get wet, not to speak of. Dylan went like the others, in a cotton shirt, deerskin breechcloth, and moccasins. He was freezing now, and his nipples felt like spikes.

He heard a kind of chanting from the boat, echoed and fractured by the roar of water. Saga—the bastard Saga was singing while he and Dru heaved their guts out. Dru said Saga had to stay in the boat—you needed a steersman to keep the bow off the bank. Well, next time Dylan Davies would bloody well get to ride while the others slaved.

Bloody well.

They were eating
sagamité
. Again. Dylan couldn’t believe it. They’d had
sagamité
for every meal since they left Montreal. He’d lost track of the days, but it was more than a week—nearly two weeks, he guessed.

When Dru handed out the
sagamité
the first night, Dylan thought the old man was just muddling through because they’d had such a long day. Dylan fell asleep before they ate anyway, so he didn’t taste it. Until an hour before dawn, when they had it again, cold. A taste like corn, sort of, texture like pudding. Tolerable. When Dru served it up that night, Dylan began to wonder, and decided Dru was testing him. He refused to complain until the sixth or seventh or whatever night, and then he complained bitterly.

Which made Saga laugh at him. That was the first time Saga had laughed or otherwise indicated he had human responses, like a sense of humor. Saga was tickled at his protest, Dru explained. Saga’s name, the old man went on, was not what you might think, a word meaning a long, episodic, heroic tale. It was a short version of
sagamité
. Because he loved the stuff. “He thinks it’s ambrosia,” said Dru, “manna from heaven. He complains when we get to Montreal and he has to eat their cooking.”

Dylan wasn’t sure that Saga was tickled. He didn’t think the half-breed was human enough to be tickled. He could smile angelically, maybe, but not be tickled.

Saga was beautiful, perfect, beyond the human, like a statue. He was of medium height, slender, supple as a teenager, though he was surely older than Dylan. He had black hair streaked with auburn, delicate-looking hands, and an exquisite face. He might have been an elf, or one of the six-winged angels called seraphim. Only his musculature, his eyes, and his complexion made him seem one of the earth. His muscles were hard and strong, as you could see when he lifted the heavy bundles. His eyes were restless, flitting everywhere constantly, never still. His skin was Indian-dark, and somehow that changed everything. He could have been one of the seraphim, but he looked like a devil.

He had one more peculiarity. He didn’t speak to Dylan. He talked to Dru past Dylan, around Dylan, over Dylan, and through Dylan, but he didn’t talk to Dylan. And the Druid acted like he didn’t notice.

It therefore annoyed Dylan that they always spoke French. Saga’s French was excellent, said Dru, but his English was hit-and-miss. Fortunately, Dylan had spoken French
en famille
almost from infancy. The servants were all French-speaking. Saga’s French, though, felt like a gesture of shutting Dylan out.

Dru explained
sagamité
. It was corn boiled to mush in lye water, usually served with chunks of salt pork, or small game or fish, thrown in. Since they didn’t have any salt pork, and didn’t have time to hunt or fish, Dru joked that Dylan Davies hadn’t even earned the mocking term the real Nor’Westers gave the hirelings who paddled the big company canoes and lived on
sagamité—mangeurs de lard
, pork eaters.

Dylan wasn’t a
mangeur de lard
anyway, said Dru. He was a Welsh Indian.

My arse, thought Dylan, saying nothing.

The Nor’West Company fed the canoe men east of the depot on
sagamité
almost exclusively. It was cheap because the Saulteur Indians around Lake Superior grew the corn and traded it willingly. It was easily available. It didn’t spoil. It was nourishing enough to keep the men working sixteen hours a day. And the
voyageurs
, as Dru put it, were too heroic to complain.

Too dumb to complain, thought Dylan.

Dru was full of stories of the heroism of the Nor’Westers. They could paddle, cordelle, and portage sixteen hours a day, singing lustily all the while. They could make a canoe swim up a rapid like a fish. They could whip grizzly bears one-handed, take on their weight in wolverines, and satisfy a covey of Indian women without getting tired.

Sometimes Dru told epic stories about canoe races on the lakes. It seemed the Nor’West men loved to outpaddle the men of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Nor’Westers had bigger canoes with more weight per paddle, but that just made them more avid. They went to it with a fine, high will, and a penalty was supposed to await the first guide who lost a race to the Englishmen: His head would be the new prow ornament.

Dru spun one about a monumental race between several boats of each company on a big lake. The
voyageurs
paddled all day with one Nor’West outfit only slightly ahead. Then all that moonlit night without a rest—same result. Then all the next day without a rest. Still the Nor’West men in front. Toward evening, as they were making a final sprint for the depot, one Hudson Bay man got so exhausted, he passed out and fell into the lake. Two Nor’West canoes and two from his own company passed him by—they wanted to win. The last boat in the race, an undermanned Nor’West craft, took pity on the drowning man and picked him up.

The rivalry between the two companies was sharp in every way. Sharp and treacherous and sometimes bloody, Dru said. Men had killed each other, less from wanting more furs than from hatred.

It took Dylan some time to figure out why the men of the two companies despised each other. Hudson’s Bay was a hoity-toity outfit, supposedly given all of the country draining into Hudson’s Bay as a grant from the British king. Who had no right to grant it, according to the French. So they opposed this Honourable Company with their own outfits. Where it used its vast financial resources, they used their wit and pluck. Where it moved magisterially, they moved fast and first. Where it had legal rights, they were outlaws.

They loved it. They made close connections with the Indians, learned the languages and the ways, even married Indian women, had savage children. Meanwhile the British maintained their air of superiority, forbade their men to mingle unnecessarily with the savages, and proposed that the Indians should adopt white ways.

The French had one huge advantage. The British had to wait for instructions from London. Ships had to cross the Atlantic, and stockholders supreme in ignorance had to vote. The French, though, were on the scene. They were individual entrepreneurs, unorganized but bold. They knew the country, the forests, the streams, the Indians. They could do the right thing and beat the British to it. They pushed farther and farther into the wilderness. The best the bloody British could do was follow them a year or two later and build a fort nearby.

When England took over Canada, the competition only got hotter. Scots came to Montreal with their capital and their spirit and their daring, and organized the French outfits into the NorthWest Company to compete with HBC more sharply than ever. And whipped them, just as the French had when they were on their own.

Dru and Saga were Nor’West men. They laughed at the pretensions of the HBC fellows. Stuffed shirts. Copycats. Cowards. Ignoramuses. Prudes. And worse. Thieves and murderers, said Saga darkly. Pretending to speak to Dru, not Dylan.

So Dylan Davies would be a Nor’Wester as well as a Welsh Indian. And if he wanted to be a real Nor’Wester, to stay in the country known as the
pays sauvage
, the wild country, or the
pays d’en haut
, the high country, said Dru, he must learn to like
sagamité
, and maybe even Saga.

“Dylan Davies,” Dru always called him now, to remind Dylan that when they signed him up with the Northwest Company in Montreal, they’d left off his last name and changed the spelling of his middle one. To make it harder for his father to trace him, the Druid said. Besides, among the Welsh,
Davis
and
Davies
were all the same name.

Dylan liked his new name fine. But most days, after spending sixteen hours bending his back to the paddle, a miserable, quick meal of
sagamité
, a short sleep, and another miserable, quick meal of the stuff before dawn, he didn’t like Morgan Griffiths Morgan Bleddyn much at all.

They sang tirelessly. They sang flying downstream, they sang laboring upstream, they sang in the rain and the sunshine, they sang when they were happy and when they were miserable. They sang when Dylan didn’t feel like it. Saga, who seldom talked, and never to Dylan, never got tired of singing.

Dylan thought the songs were strange. The lyrics of this original song, for instance, were delicate, refined, beautiful:

À la claire fontaine

M’en allant promener,

J’ai trouve l’eau si belle

Que je m’y suis baigne.

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime,

Jamais je ne t’oublierai.

Even in English it was romantic:

At the clear fountain

As I strolled by,

I saw the water was exquisite

And dipped myself in it.

I’ve loved you so long—

I will never forget you.

Sometimes they sang it as beautiful and sentimental. Other times it came out bawdy. Dipping yourself did not mean bathing, and loving the lass “so long” meant not a state of the heart but a feat of the loins.

Lots of the songs had double entendres, and some of them were downright obscene. Dylan was glad Father Quesnel couldn’t hear him singing them. And if Dylan didn’t sing, Dru jokingly splashed icy water on him with the paddle. Then he apologized insincerely, and said that singing kept the stroke going strong, emphasizing “stroke” in a vulgar way.

When they weren’t singing, they amused themselves by telling Dylan lascivious stories about Indian women. Dylan would do what every newcomer to the interior did at first,
oui
, they said, rut like a rabbit. The Indian girls were free until they married, and they did as they pleased. Behind any handy bush. Or without bothering with a bush. They did things white women wouldn’t do, they surely would. It was all perfectly normal among them, not even needing discretion.

And the married women? Their husbands would lend them for a trifle, a few beads, perhaps. Not quite as pretty as the young maids, true, but more clever.

All the talk did what Dru surely intended—kept Dylan hot and bothered. So Dylan asked
le bon Dieu
, as Dru called Him all too casually, for strength of spirit. A man was not a beast. A man did not behave like a rabbit, or any other wild creature. The hallmark of a man was that he was civilized. He did not go naked. He did not sleep in holes in the ground. He did not eat his own young. He did not lie with his daughters, or his neighbor’s wife, or any other female casually—did not rut. He sought God-given love to elevate his baser feelings, and in the absence of that feeling, he abstained from sex. He did these things because he had a soul, and knew it was holy.

All these things Dylan told himself—firmly.

And Dylan would go even further. He would allow his love only paternal and fraternal expression. For he meant to come back here one day as a missionary, and it would not be right to indulge himself carnally with a people he intended to save from carnal indulgence.

This abstinence would be difficult. Dru had told him that the Indians thought one of the funniest things about blackrobes was their celibacy. So they might think the celibacy of a vigorous unmarried young man who was not a priest still funnier, or perhaps repellent. Strength of spirit would be required.

Particular strength of spirit because, God help him, he wanted it. He didn’t want to die without feeling what sex was like. He was imagining the feeling with every rhythmic stroke of the paddle. And then his mates would come up with another bawdy lyric about the thrust….

The end of it all was that he knew he wanted to taste sex before he took the cloth. It was not a sin that would put him beyond God’s love. He would confess it when he next saw a priest. But he would not permit himself that weakness here, not in front of the people whose souls he intended to save.

Despite the singing, the trip out was brutal. They had started ahead of the big freight canoes, the
canots de maitre
the company sent to the great June rendezvous every year. It had been a warm winter, and the streams were mostly free of ice. Besides, Dru had dispatches to deliver along the way, one of them well off the route. Dylan didn’t understand the Druid’s place in the NorthWest Company, but it was unconventional. For instance, he and Saga often snowshoed to Montreal in the winter, when the rivers were frozen, and only the most experienced men,
les bons hommes
, could dare that. And Dru was bloody well mysterious about his dispatches.

Since Dylan was a novice, they made him the
milieu
, the paddler in the middle. That’s where they always put the new men, Dru said. The
avant
—front paddler and guide—was Dru, and the
gouvernail
—steersman—was the damned half-breed. Up toward a thousand miles into the
pays d’en haut
, and Saga still hadn’t spoken a word to Dylan.