fights an urge to shout; helpless, he looks up the beach at a palisade of dark trees roaring in the wind. As he watches, several shapes emerge from the forest. Flames from the burning frigate glitter on polished silver and beadwork.
Chapter Two
Alexander McClure opens his eyes and feels grit under the lids scrape against his eyeballs. He cannot imagine where he is, the smell of muddy pig shit, nauseating and unfamiliar. Fragments of memory whirl in his head like torpid summer fireflies.
He is on his back, his eyes taking in a thin, washed sky; the fort’s palisade glows in the first light of dawn like a line of rough-hewn nails fresh from the forge. It had rained during the night; his clothes feel like peeling, wet skin. Distant shouts of men carry from the riverbank and a cannon thuds, startling him. York Fort. He rolls over with a groan.
At this movement, an enormous hog bedded beside him begins nuzzling his hair with its wet snout. Alexander shoves at it, and pain sears through his hand; the knuckles are stiff and crusted with blood. Memories of a brawl hover at the edge of consciousness. Something about cheating at cards.
He reaches for his purse, unsurprised to find it gone. Whether he lost during the fight or an Indian stole it as he lay in filth, he would probably never know. He sees a pair of them squat against the palisade, shadowed eyes watching him. The hog thrusts its snout into his shirt with a contented grunt.
“Get away,” he mumbles as he stands up, leaning on the massive, black beast. Limping, he makes his way through the fort gates and slides down the high riverbank, his heels digging twin furrows with a following clatter of pebbles. At the bank, he peels off his clothes and wades into the water. It is cold but not icy, and he dives into its depths, surfacing with a splutter and cough, his long yellow hair streaming.
By the time he emerges, the sun is over the bank and the day is already warm. He spreads himself naked on the shore to dry. His brown body is lithe and slender, with wiry muscles; a form descended from runners, more Cree than Scots. A pale flower on his left thigh bulges with a lump of loose bone. A buffalo’s horn long ago ran him through there, and it still bothers him.
He rubs his scabby knuckles. Someone had a busted jaw or an eye that wouldn’t see for quite a good while, he assures himself. He can’t recall details, but is unsurprised at this: it is common for the fur traders to consume enormous quantities of spirits over many days, often amounting to several gallons. Some wake up in chimneys or in the holds of ships far out to sea. Sometimes they never wake, which is far from the worst fate that can befall a man in Rupert’s Land.
The son of a Highlander — a fur trader from Albany Factory — and a Cree woman, Alexander has lived in many places, none very long. As a child, he spent much time in York Fort, an oddity in that most Half-caste bastards lived with their mothers. But unlike most Orkneymen, who only served their contracted seven years on the bay, his father had been adamant that his son be raised as a Christian despite the disapproval of many, including the Fort’s factor.
Every fall, he accompanied the brigades to the lands south and west of Missinipi — the Big Water — the land of his mother. He was left in her care while his father traded for furs at Indian encampments along the distant Athabasca and Slave Lake systems. In the spring, he always returned, and, after collecting his son, they spent the summer at the Bay.
Alexander loved the intense activity of York Fort, the ships arriving from England, the canoe and York boat brigades from Rupert’s Land. There was always so much coming and going, so much drinking and fighting and haggling and trading that it was easy for a child to stand unnoticed and take it all in, even though his hair made him stand out among his Indian cohorts. When things were sorting themselves out in his mother’s womb, he had received his father’s yellow hair — what little there was: his mother didn’t call him Paskwastikwân, or Old Baldy, for nothing — and his father’s passionate temper. His mother’s gift was her dark skin and deep love for the wild lands. He thinks it a fair exchange.
Some Company employees despised Half-caste whelps, and these people he had tormented mercilessly. That he was often caught and beaten made no difference; he would sit in a birch tree all day long for the chance to shit on someone, and more than one night he spent hiding in the forest, the terror of the Machi Manitou less than that of his enraged father.
There was a school of sorts at the factory for the servant’s and the Home Guard children, but he often managed to be elsewhere when the lessons started. He preferred to haunt the trade store, hiding behind barrels of traps or axe heads, momentarily freed from the torment of adults who thought there was always something useful for an eight-year-old to do. Secreted away and pulling the limbs off captured spiders or flies, he listened to the fur traders attempts at a better deal. They were rarely successful.
Despite their formidable size and armament, they could never get the Company’s chief trader to change his mind. A slight man with white hair and spectacles, he never became angry, never exchanged insults or profanities, regardless how sorely provoked. The rate for made beaver was set in London and as immutable as the Commandments, he always explained to the bristling men on the opposite side of the counter, showing them the Official List of Exchange. None of them could read, but the list was imposing, nonetheless; you could argue with a man but not the Company.
Once an agitated Bunjee, with face blackened with grease and charcoal, had burst into the store and thrown a musket onto the counter, loudly complaining that he had been forced to live off muskrats and rabbits for months because his gun wouldn’t shoot accurately.
“Nonsense,” the chief trader replied with a smile. “The Company’s trade guns are the finest in the world. They never fail in the hands of a worthy and knowledgeable hunter.”
The Bunjee grabbed the musket and pressed the muzzle against the trader’s forehead, just above his spectacles.
“Maybe you right, let us find out …” he said.
“I see your position,” the old trader replied. “I will gladly replace the weapon with the Company’s apologies.”
It was the only time Alexander had ever seen the old man beaten.
The fur traders that came to York Factory with the brigades were enormous men with long bushy beards and clad in buffalo robes. The Half-breeds wore their distinctive red sashes and beaded and embroidered jackets. Most carried a beaded octopus bag and a powder horn and musket slung on their shoulders. The Half-breeds most often spied him, and, with a wink, gave him a candy. His presence thus betrayed, one of the junior clerks invariably chased him out with a broom.
Very rarely he was invited into the warehouse, most often when someone needed help moving something. He was always amazed at the wealth stored at the factory: guns, powder and shot, powder horns, flints and gun worms, knives, axe and hatchet heads. Pots, pans, and stacked piles of okimow, the striped Hudson’s Bay blankets; sugar, Brazil tobacco, and awl blades. Tiny brass hawk bells to sew on to clothing and harness that made a delightful tinkle with the slightest movement. Hundreds of pounds of bright glass beads of every colour. Batteries of iron kettles, traded by the pound. There were boxes of fish hooks, nets, ice chisels, lines, sword blades, and bayonets the Indians fashioned into spears.
Compared to the few possession his mother’s people carried with them, this was an unimaginable bounty. He would have undoubtedly lifted something but for the fact that the humourless clerk had always searched him when they left the warehouse. He had been too young to understand that what so awed him was merely the detritus of a distant, arrogant civilization.
But eventually autumn wound its way through the land, and heralded by the angry bellows
