Читать книгу The Flying Years - Frederick Niven - Страница 10

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It was as the summer changed into autumn in the year ’57 that Angus came to Rocky Mountain House and already the place had its history, though the signs of it were splintered in wood instead of being chiselled in more ancient stone. Here were no granite peel towers, only those wooden watch bastions. Here was no Roman Wall such as crumbled through the centuries betwixt Clyde and Forth, no ruined keep such as sat by the side of the Wee Cumbrae, gazing hollow at its double on the mainland. But in the logs of Rocky Mountain House already, when young Munro came there, was a silver-gray veneer of the weather that silently told him dead men’s hands had hewn them and set them up. The scene in which the fort sat—with its history, recent in comparison with the history of his homeland—spoke beyond record, it seemed, spoke from the beginnings of the world, prehistoric days, the early ages. There lay the eternal mountains—higher than Grampians, if obvious comparisons were to be made—and in the twilight the bay of a timber wolf came as it were from a time before Bruce, before Hakon, of whom his mother had known the legends.

Here had come one Pangman, and on an old pine close by had cut his name and hewn the date: Peter Pangman, 1790. Here, in the days before the amalgamation of the Hudson’s Bay Company (the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay) and the Northwest Fur Company, Alexander Henry of the latter (known as Alexander Henry the Younger, to distinguish him from his roving uncle) had fuddled a party of Piegan Indians with whisky into which he decanted laudanum, making them incapable of going on toward the Rockies to intercept David Thompson, who was then on his way to trade with their enemies through the passes. And what would David Thompson, Angus wondered, have thought of these methods, listening to it all and hearing, anon, of that curious man of brain, heart, and sinew who refused to serve liquor to the natives?

The factor of the house entertained them often with these old stories as the evenings drew in, telling of how Thompson once, importuned by his friends to take kegs of rum to trade away off in the land of the Kootenays, stampeded the horses so that they dashed under tree branches, smashing the barrels, then wrote a letter—that would get back to his partners he knew not when, nor by what hands—telling of the accident and, glad that he had found a way not to debase the natives with fire-water, sat down to his lonely evening fire in the glow of resinous pine-knots to read a chapter from the pocket Bible he carried along with him. There was a legend of him having arrived at the Mountain House once from one of his expeditions beyond the mountains, that had been in winter, downcast greatly at the treatment accorded to the sledge-dogs—a humane man.

“What was he like to look at?” Angus asked, and was given a description of him—broad shoulders, deep-set eyes, high forehead and across it his fair hair cut bang-fashion.

The ghost of David Thompson, the shadow of David Thompson, moved for him always thereafter against the background of these silver-gray logs. There was also a peppering of history in them, gouged holes that had been made by no woodpeckers’ beaks but were souvenirs of occasions when Cree and Blackfeet, unhappily arriving simultaneously, fought round its walls.

At the fort they had fires of coal—which Douglas had gone seeking; and there were men whose duty was to go to the outcrop a little way back and pick it out, pack it to the House. As for the burning rocks: Angus discovered that the Indians called them so not because they at any place, so far, mined and burned coal themselves, but because there were certain areas ignited no doubt by bush fires, that smouldered away, glowing by night in deep crevices and raising their pillar of smoke by day. Had Sam Douglas read more in the journals of the old explorers he would not have needed an Indian’s account of burning rocks to send him on his quest. That coal was in the land had been known and noted by travellers long ago—Franklin, Peter Fiddler and Mackenzie among them. Seams had been smouldering to the knowledge of white folk for a hundred years, and according to the legends before that, time out of mind.

Less was Angus impressed by any feeling of lack of history in the land than by the sense of the prehistoric there.

News of the outer world—near and far—they heard and discussed. The territory of Kansas was still, it seemed, a troubled place to live in with the settlers from the free and those from the anti-slavery states at loggerheads, drawing their guns over their differences. There was trouble in Europe, as always. There was war between France and Sardinia, France and Austria. There were wranglings over the provinces of Nice and Savoy. They heard of that fracas and, anon, that it was over; then that another was brewing in Sicily; and Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi were discussed on the banks of the Saskatchewan. More distant, sometimes, seemed to Angus the people of these discords and bloodshed than the folk of Venus (if folk there were on that planet), setting in a clear sky beyond the Rockies.

When the Blackfeet came north to trade there was ceremonial, the factor going out to meet them with a gift of tobacco. As sharing salt to the Arab was whiffing from the same pipe to them. The chief would accept the gift, fill his sacred pipe, and the sub-chiefs and the factor would smoke, with a dignified observance in the pointing of the stem, even in the manner of handling it and in the direction of its circuit—with the sun—“Much as we white men,” remarked the factor, “have a ritual in the birling of the wine round the table.”

In the earlier days—of the Northwest Fur Company, when rum was much used in trade—there was great care exercised in letting the Indians, of whatever tribe, into the Fort. A few at a time they passed into the trade-room and up in the galleries company employees were secreted with primed rifles at hand. When the rum was in the tomahawk was often out. The Indian had to be taught to like the spirit, and when the extensive use of it was discontinued he had a grievance—that he was not given it. He would demand, with murder in his eyes. Dreadful and dowie doings there had been in that place of lonely grandeur. To avoid these clashes of tribes at enmity the company’s officers tried to keep the trade of the Plains Cree to Forts Edmonton. Pitt and Carlton (the woods Crees went chiefly to Carlton and à-la-Corne), of the Eastern Assiniboine to Qu’Appelle, of the Saulteaux to Forts Ellice and Pelly. Rocky Mountain House, by the company’s desire, was for the Blackfeet confederacy and for the Sarcees (who seemed, by their speech, to be a southern band of the Chippewyans—the Tinnhes—of the northern lakes), and the Western Assiniboines, generally called the Stonyes. But Crees still came there at times, even as roving Sarcee and Blackfeet would dare to go as far as the core of their northern enemy’s lands—Fort Edmonton.

Never, so far, either at Red River or at the Mountain House, had Angus been homesick for Brendan, because of the melancholy of crushing conditions of the life of his people there. Yet a day came on which, at the sound of a place-name, he had—if but for a moment—a pang at his heart, a realization of being far from home, and he understood how his mother would ache for Scotland despite their misery there. There arrived at the Fort a man with a marked Highland accent who, on being asked whence he came, replied “Dunvegan,” which Angus took for Dunvegan in Skye, and had a vision as of all the Hebrides with trailing mists, quiet glens, and sea lochs huzzaing with a homing tide.

“Dunvegan,” said he—homesick.

“Yess—north of Fort Edmonton, on the Peace River it iss.”

“Oh, I thought you meant Dunvegan in the Isle of Skye.”

“No, no, I’ve never been in Scotland. I was born in Glengarry—Upper Canada,” he added quickly, with a laugh, noting a look of puzzlement on Angus’s face.

He was descended, no doubt, from others cast out of their homes as his folk had been—and the brief homesickness passed.

In talk of those who had been before him in these parts he learnt much of their marital affairs—their blanket marriages, their prayer-book marriages, their registered unions: the varieties of marriage observances and plain concubinage. High-placed men, he heard, in the service of all the trading companies—the old Northwest Fur Company, the X.Y. Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, had taken Indian women as wife or as concubine—and some, when their time of living in the west was finished, left women and half-breed weans behind, while others took theirs east with them.

Tom Renwick voiced plump and plain the view that if a man must have a woman he might as well visit the Indian camps and find some temporarily obliging and clean squaw without any legal proceedings whatever. There were older men present and Angus wondered how such a suggestion struck them. There was a marked silence—and it occurred to him that perhaps they were considering that Tom’s view was a sound one, but that it would have been better for a junior not to have expressed it.

“This young man’s dogma,” said the factor, wagging his head at Renwick, “is apt to lead to trouble. You be careful, Tom, of acting upon that conception in some of these Indian villages.”

“I wasn’t thinking of it personally, sir,” replied Renwick.

“Hum!” said the factor.

“I believe that with a white-man marriage,” Buchanan remarked, “a squaw has a tendency, as time slips along, to be dictatorial. Marry one according to their own rites and it’s no’ so bad, I’m told. She’ll be aye a wee bit uncertain if the white man feels wholly bound. Give them a ceremony before a priest or a clergyman and there is, I doot, that tendency. A squaw with a marriage certificate in her hand is apt to become heap big chieftainess.”

“That applies,” the factor pointed out, laughing, “to some white women, too. I doubt if it is typical.”

“They are, of course, savages—les sauvages,” said Buchanan.

“Daniel William Harmon said——” began the factor.

Daniel William Harmon: Angus had never so much as heard the name, yet the factor spoke it as though almost to quote an authority. Some, in Angus’s position, might have damned Mr. Harmon and his opinions at a venture, but instead of that he reminded himself that little did he know of this west to which he had come; and desiring to know more he was all ears and his gaze was eager on the speaker’s face.

“Daniel William Harmon said that hospitality to strangers he had found to be among the Indian virtues, and that he had been treated with more real politeness by them than is commonly shown to strangers in the so-called civilized world.”

“Well, Harmon certainly knew both,” said one of the clerks.

The factor went on to talk of one and the other—giving them their names, Harmon and Sir Alexander Mackenzie among them—who had married Indian women, and these not eastern Indians long in touch with white people, but Indians of the Great Plains; and that talk sooner than he had any premonition (premonition, in fact, he had none) was to be turned over and over in Angus’s mind.

When the snow was beginning to creep down on the range of the Rockies westward with that amazing straight line as though ruled along the mountains where upper whiteness and lower green met, Buchanan, Renwick and Angus went off to the hunting of white-tailed deer in the wooded country.

Over gray and brown pebbles a stream came down through the forests. The place belonged to antiquity. The stands of deciduous trees among the evergreen conifers were yellowing, autumn having come, and Indian summer might hold all in exquisite trance for a month or more. As they rode down to that stream, their pack horses laden with the kill of deer, there was an odour of burning wood, red-willow smoke. There, in a natural meadow, a green gusset by a curve of the hurrying water, was an Indian encampment, a cluster of tepees, the leather ones of that epoch.

There had, by the signs, been a meal recently eaten in the open. No smoke came from the tepees, but a fire crumbled into ash before them, sending up, as is the way of red-willow well alight, more of odour than of smoke into the air. A mere sift of blue, a haze of blue, ascended from that natural meadow in a thin long wisp, and was caught by the draught of the stream’s passage, drawn away trembling above its flow, a pennant of blue twining above the twinings of the creek so that its further course could be traced some distance by that gauzy riband among the tree-tops. Little did Angus realize how even that, remembered in days to come, would importune him till it was as though a voice called in his dreams, Come back.

He and his two companions rode down to the water’s edge. The Indians had been hunting also and in the creek-bed were many hides held down by stones. Others, pegged to the ground, or stretched upon upright wicker frames, the women were scraping clean. By the lodges sat the men, some idling after the hunt, one making arrows—running the shafts back and forth, to assure them straight, through a stone in the centre of which was a circular hole. The horses of the white men whinnied to the horses of the Indians. The horses of the Indians answered back, looking up from their grazing, displaying white splashes on broad foreheads and Roman noses—these descendants of Arab sires.

The Indians scarce looked up. They might, by their manner, have been unaware of indication that anyone was coming, going on with the straightening of arrow shafts, the chipping of fat from hides. The three men paused at the creekside, their pack string loping ahead and craning necks to drink, then the saddle horses craning down, so that the riders sat forward, hands extended with the reins. They knew these people and, as the animals drank, when one or another of the band glanced toward them they raised their hands in the customary signs of greeting, either the palm held upward—the sign of peace (a hand with no weapon in it)—or with the first two fingers elevated and slightly oscillated, the sign for two people, friends, together.

The pack horses, having drunk, waited with dripping muzzles for direction, and were driven by Tom Renwick through the stream on to the meadow and across it, past the camp to the further ford. Buchanan reined in a moment to hail an elderly man, Chief Red Shield.

“Hullo, Chief!” he called. “You get deer?”

“You bet!” replied Red Shield, his face wrinkling in a smile.

Buchanan rode on, pointing a finger at two children then balanced at the lodge door sucking their thumbs, staring at him, and—“Boo, boo!” he chanted at them, an old squaw looking from the solemn children to the jocund white man and rippling laughter.

That was the day when Angus first saw Minota.

In some impulse he glanced round and there, a little way up the creek, was an Indian girl dressed in the manner of the time, which was part native, part white, with fringed deerskin kirtle over deerskin leggings, and a print flower-patterned bodice from the company’s trade-rooms. Her head was bound with a blue bandana, thick plaits of hair hanging on either side. Hand on hip, head canted, she was watching him; and when their eyes met she did not look away.

Angus smiled at her and after a moment, when it seemed she was not going to respond, she did, then looked toward one of the elder women at work upon a hide. To her, then, Munro turned and was just in time to realize she had seen and was pretending utter engrossment in her task.

Quiet he was, following Renwick and Buchanan through the forest that flounced these slopes, aware of the smell of balsam in the dusky hush, seeing the tree shadows rippling over the backs of the two in front, rippling over the horses’ haunches, keenly alive to scent and sound, the click of a hoof on a stone in the dust of the forest floor. The roar of the creek had fallen away. Surely the silence of that forest was older than the Roman Wall. As he rode he thought of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, of whom he had often heard with his Indian woman, and of Harmon, whose name was new to him, with his.

Next day when they were in camp the horses, tearing grass close by, became restless, raising their heads, snorting.

“Somebody coming,” said Buchanan.

There between the tree boles above them was a movement. Laughter came down, rippling laughter of Indian women, the deep brief laugh of a man. It was their friends again, Red Shield’s band. Pack ponies tittuped past, laden with rolled hides. Young men following them, swaying loose in their saddles, gave response with a waggle of two fingers to the salutes of the white men. A squaw rode slowly by on a deliberate piebald that had no doubt been as it were the nursery horse of many children. She smiled. Looking after her they saw a cradle hanging on her back, a small face there, eyes staring out at the receding landscape.

Anon came Red Shield, a fine figure, sitting erect, foursquare. He not only was a chief—he looked a chief in his fringed buckskins, and with his plaited hair (the braids), bound at the ends with little brass rings. He halted to talk to Buchanan, and as he did so the horses of those behind behaved as usual when one stopped ahead—immediately took the opportunity to turn aside and snatch at the special herbage of their fancy.

There was the girl of Angus’s admiration and considerations—swinging out her rein-hand to ride past Buchanan and Red Shield.

“Your horse wants to stop and eat,” Angus said.

“Yes,” and she showed white teeth in a smile.

That was all. He wondered if that was all she knew of white-man speech, yes and no.

“Your people seem to have got plenty deer for moccasins,” he remarked.

“Yes—and the skins are very good this year,” she replied.

The clarity of her voice, the precision of her utterance, made him glad he had not spoken to her with the usual sort of pidgin-English.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Minota,” said she. “My father is Chief Red Shield,” and she inclined her head toward him.

“Oh, your father is Chief Red Shield. I have seen him once or twice at the Mountain House.”

He was suddenly aware of a young man manoeuvring a half-broken horse past them. It seemed to him that there was anger on the rider’s face. He stepped aside to give more room, said “How-do,” but the Indian was surly.

“He does not speak English,” explained Minota.

“Where did you learn it?” Angus inquired.

“My father taughted me,” she answered, and then in her eyes was shadow of a doubt of her pronunciation.

To him it was well enough. Red Shield, he had been told, was one of the ablest chiefs of the Crees thereaway.

The old lady who had observed their exchange of smiles the day before was upon them then. Minota flicked the rein ends over her horse’s haunch and it moved on.

“How do you do?” said Angus to the old lady.

“How—do—you—do?” she responded, stately.

“I hope we will meet again,” Angus said, turning to Minota.

“I expect so,” she said.

The chief shook his lines and the cavalcade passed, leaving an odour of new-tramped, new-crushed pine, fir and tamarack needles, an odour of horse-flesh.

“A fine old fellow that,” said Buchanan.

“And Angus is thinking a fine young lass,” said Tom Renwick, sitting on his heels by the fire. “Eh?”

“Yes. Not bad,” admitted Angus.

I expect so: what, precisely, did she mean by that? Had she seen in his eyes what Tom Renwick had evidently seen? Did she mean only that wide though the land through which they roamed they would no doubt forgather again? He was surely in love to be probing for deep implications in casual remarks.

They did meet again, at the Fort, several times before the snow fell, and on each meeting the deeper was Angus enamoured of his copper-coloured maid with the dark, lustrous, candid and somehow pathetic eyes.

A letter from Ian Fraser, received just the day before one of these visits of the Indians, for some reason—he could not tell how or why—had the effect of restraining him, though but temporarily. He was back, in memory, with that happy family, saw the plates in their racks round the kitchen that was like an old Scots interior, heard again Ian at his work singing in his fine natural voice the old ballads; hearkened Fiona her lessons—and her psalm!—and was doubtful if he should act as he was here moved to. He had seen enough of Minota to believe that all he had to do was to ask her, and she would be his woman. He turned about and about on his finger the ring that had been his mother’s, the hair of his grandmother in its collet, and asked himself (asked, almost it seemed, the ghosts of his people) if he was wise.

He did indeed believe that, by an Indian’s view, by an Indian’s ways of courtship, he had gone far already. He had seen the young men at the preliminaries of their courting, which was but making eyes at the girl of their choice till she either too often turned her back with a finality of disdain or indifference and it was realized as hopeless to proceed, or raised her eyelids in passing and smiled, when the next step was to waylay her in the dusk and cast a blanket round her. There they would stand, these young lovers, by the hour, no one paying any heed, not even the wild striplings of the village.

Yes, in all the meetings he had had with Minota her eyes (after the first talk) had told him with a lovely darkening or misting in them, like the darkening of pools of water under a passing cloud. She gave herself to him in that misting of her dark eyes.

The end of it all was that in the spring young Angus Munro (just nineteen then) took his woman—it was never my wife; my woman it was—to the factor, her father and mother with them, to have an entry made of his union with Minota Red Shield in the company’s books.

He did not ask himself insistently why that was all, why he did not go to the mission and have a white-man’s marriage. He silenced the inquiry by telling himself that some white men took their woman to wife without even the formality of an entry in the books, no more formality than the present of a gun or a few horses to the father.

What was the depth of his love? What was the depth of hers? Her eyes had clouded when, her promise to be his woman given, he had said that they had better have it written down at the Fort; but she had not asked, instead, for a prayer-book ceremony. Minota would have gone with him even without that. He offered neither gun nor horses to old Red Shield. She did not want that; her father, she said, did not want that. That savage, Chief Red Shield, and his squaw looked upon it as an honour to have their daughter wed to a white man. Minota’s mother was a sonsy woman, coming to the age when those of her race have a tendency to broaden in a very definite “middle-age spread,” a sonsy woman with genial eyes and a happy laugh. She was a Stony (which is to say an Assiniboine of the west, a Rocky Mountain Assiniboine) whom Red Shield had met once at the House when both her tribe and his were camped close by there to trade.

No—no gun, no horse for the girl but, not as the purchase price, merely as a gift—as the phrases went, a prairie gift, a gift cut off, a gift in itself, meaning not given in hope of any return or exchange—he presented Chief Red Shield (on the sober advice of Captain Buchanan) with a silk hat, a second-hand top hat, with a second-hand ostrich feather round it, for the trade-room at Rocky Mountain House had a queer miscellaneous stock of goods.