the crusty snow. He trudged past some good fire logs and mentally noted their location. Get them on the way back, he thought, no use hauling them both ways. Finally, he stopped at a promising pile of fallen trees. They were down a steep bank. Carefully leaning his weight on a tree branch, he stepped over the edge. The branch snapped and he began to slide, almost playfully, until his leg became wedged under a fallen log. His leg was stuck but his momentum continued to propel him forward. He heard a sickening snap and felt searing pain pulse through him as his face hit the snow. He tried to get up, but a rush of pain and nausea overcame him, and he fainted into a nightmare of suffering. His leg was badly broken.
He regained consciousness to an acrid smell and opened his eyes to find a puddle of brown vomit melting the snow by his mouth. David tried to move, slowly pushing with his good leg, until the pain became too great. He waited, then pushed again, gradually working his way up the bank. The others wouldn’t notice him gone until dinner. By then it would be dark and too late to find him. David doubted he could survive through the frozen night. He pushed to the edges of pain, then with growing desperation, pushed harder into the very core of his pain, into the red blinding flashes that thundered through him. He pushed until he heard voices, felt hands lifting him, then darkness.
David awoke at Manchester House. The events of the previous day began to take shape in his mind as he found himself lying on a bed near the fire. He pulled back the stale buffalo robe covering his leg and surveyed the bindings that had been wrapped around it. The men at the post had done their best for him when they found him crawling, half conscious, toward the post. They knew vaguely how to bind his broken leg with a bandage and splint, but none had any medical training, and the injury was severe.
For months, David was unable to stand and was still unable to walk by spring thaw. Tomison was angry. If there had been a surgeon to set young Thompson’s leg, he would not have lost one of his best young prospects. The brigade leader went out of his way to speed David’s recovery, and any doubts that David had about Tomison’s sincerity vanished. The brigade leader showed him the kind of tenderness David thought a father might give a son, but in the end, Tomison was forced to send David downriver to Cumberland House.
Here David fared even worse. He was left in the care of the two men stationed at the now inactive depot. They had little understanding of nursing the ill, and soon David became weak and unable even to feed himself. He was emaciated and nearing death when a kind-hearted Cree woman took him into her care. Using fresh berries and healing herbs, she nursed him back to life. He was thankful to her for his restored health, but he still could not use his leg.
As the darkness of winter came again, David began to face his bleak future. With a bad leg, his only option was the dreary duty of a trading post clerk. He missed old Saukamappee, and he longed to ride back to the open plains and the Bow River and to feel again the prairie wind.
6
Cumberland House
The sun had left the sky for many hours when David limped onto the frozen surface of Pine Island Lake. The ice-crusted hem of his buffalo robe dragged in the snow, leaving a track of brush-marked footprints that led far out from the dim lights of Cumberland House. He wanted to see all of the night sky. He cast the heavy robe fur-up onto the snow and lay upon it, gazing skyward. The stars in the immense blackness captivated him. Some were just faint imaginings, more like speculations than stars. Others, like beacons from a nearby shore, were brilliant and dazzling in the heavens. These were his signposts, especially Polaris, the gleaming North Star, and the two guiding constellations of Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, which flank Polaris east and west. “These stars will tell you latitude,” Philip Turnor had explained with enthusiasm early that morning.
David Thompson Taking an Observation. His trail by stars. Using a sextant, compass, and the stars in the sky, David Thompson mapped Canada’s vast wilderness.
David could hardly believe his turn of fortune. He had been a trading clerk for only two months and Tomison’s brigade had just recently departed when two canoes arrived unexpectedly at the post. Among the arrivals was Philip Turnor, the famed HBC surveyor and prominent man of science. He had helped compile the Nautical Almanac used by mariners around the globe for celestial navigation. Part of Turnor’s assignment in Rupert’s Land was to map the route to Lake Athabasca, but he was also to train a select few Hudson’s Bay men as company surveyors. These new surveyors were to meet the growing need for maps of the ever-expanding trade routes. If his leg continued to improve, David could be one of them.
“One of the greatest scientific advancements of our time is being able to describe where we are on the earth’s surface. James Cook’s voyages are celebrated not so much because of where he went, but because he was able to chart his voyage in latitude and longitude with exceeding accuracy. His charts help Britain dominate the world’s oceans,” explained Turnor, as the middle-aged scientist and David warmed themselves by the afternoon fire.
“If we wanted to send someone to Montreal, it would not be difficult because people know where Montreal is. It’s up the St. Lawrence River, one thousand and seventy-four miles from the river’s mouth. Or, it’s a two-day paddle east of the last portage on a well-travelled trade route. Closer to town, they could follow signs and roads. But what if, like us now, one sits on the edge of a vast wilderness with no roads, signposts, or maps? We can follow the rivers, which is what you and I have mostly done, or we could hire an Indian guide to take us to the next big water. But how do we tell the world how to retrace our steps? Well, we look to the stars.”
David knew all this, but somehow, with Turnor, it was like hearing it for the first time, and it filled him with a hunger to know more.
“The moon travels across the sky like the steady hand of a clock,” continued Turnor. “It moves approximately its own width every hour. Behind the moon like numbers on the clock’s face, are the stars. When the moon passes a known star, the time is told.”
The Astronomer Royal, Sir Nevil Maskelyne, had worked tirelessly at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich compiling tables that predicted the path of the moon and other heavenly bodies. Turnor had assisted him, as both scientists painstakingly tabulated the exact time at Greenwich when the moon passed certain stars. The tables were updated every year with new and more complete information and published as the Nautical Almanac. Earlier that day, Turnor had handed David his own first copy.
As David lay in the snow, he observed the moon on its journey, and he knew he would learn to calculate the time at Greenwich by referencing Maskelyne and Turnor’s tables. He could find the exact local time by resetting his watch each day by the noon sun. The difference in time between zero longitude at Greenwich, England, and where he lay in the snow, would determine the longitude of Cumberland House. This is because the earth also turns like clockwork, as it rotates around its axis fifteen degrees of longitude for every hour.
It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. He thanked his old teacher Thomas Adams for drilling enough trigonometry into him so he could struggle through hours of exacting calculations. Performing the mathematical corrections for refraction and parallax that Turnor demanded was tedious work, but it was worth it. Surveying would be his escape from the company store, especially since his leg was getting stronger each day.
“Latitude is less problematic,” Turnor told him,
