Читать книгу The Flying Years - Frederick Niven - Страница 12

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Within the palisades were two or three cabins from an earlier period, uninhabited, and in one of these, new-caulked in chinks between the logs, with a Franklin stove from the trade-room, Angus took up house with Minota, making the third at that time in the Fort with an Indian woman. He had moved, as it were, another step away from Loch Brendan. This log cabin was not like those at Red River, thatched, but had a roof of split cedar—cedar shakes.

Speedily his Cree talk improved. He discovered that there was not only pidgin-English but pidgin-Cree, and that many white people who imagined that they spoke Cree spoke only that. Minota unfolded for him the tenses of the verbs, and he learnt how pliant were the sentence formations, how full the vocabulary, and that often with one word could be conveyed what necessitated the use of half a dozen English to express. He came to respect les sauvages more and more.

As she taught him her language his mind often went back to Sabbath evenings in Scotland, Sabbath evenings at Red River, and the voice of his father (or of Fraser) would be with him again, reading in the Scriptures. For to the same simple, elemental, eternal things did the Crees go for imagery as the Hebrews. The winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing birds is come and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land, might have been one of Minota’s songs. Like as a hen gathering her chickens under her wings was pure Cree, it struck him. When she taught him the sign language even more did he recall the voice of his father rolling out the Hebraic metaphor in the candlelight at Brendan. If one would signify in the sign language I am happy, so Minota showed him, one made the signs for day and my heart, meaning: The day is in my heart. There seemed to be no giving of orders in the talk of the hands. There was no Do that, no Do not do that. Instead there was I think it good for you to do that, or I think it not good to do that.

The names of the months, the moons, she told him, beginning with the moon before winter; the moon when the leaves fall; the moon when deer rut; the moon when deer shed their horns; the moon that is hard to bear; the moon when the buffalo cow’s foetus is large; the moon of sore eyes (because of the sunlit snow then); the moon when the geese lay eggs; the moon of growing grass; the moon when strawberries ripen; the moon when the buffalo bulls are fat; the moon when the buffalo cows are in season; the moon of red plums. She showed him games, gambling games with little pegs, peeled wands; and one that was simply cup-and-ball Indian fashion.

Well though she could speak English she could read neither print nor script, nor did she know the Cree syllables devised at Norway House by the Methodist missionary there, James Evans, for her people. Pictograph she could have translated, with the symbolic colourings among the figures represented, but not these symbols. The Woods Crees speedily learnt them but the Plains Crees, roving about in bands, buffalo hunters chiefly, had not the same need to leave missives behind as those who split up into small parties and families for their hunting and trapping in the Land of Little Sticks. The day was to come when Angus would regret that he had not taught her to write.

Like most white men he had looked upon savages as signifying something ceaselessly vindictive and treacherous. Red River had corrected that. Like most white men he had looked upon the religion of his people as the only true faith—and discarded that view while living with Minota. Very tenderly he came to think of her as she lost her shyness before him and revealed what lived behind these dark, deer-like eyes, behind that soft-moving and graceful exterior. She reminded him at times, by reason of her innocence, her naïveté, of his mother, and occasionally, with her heresies, of his father. She could not understand, for example, simple though it is to the civilized mind, how the company that sold firearms to the Crees was the same that sold firearms to the Blackfeet, Blackfeet and Cree being hereditary enemies. The shareholders in armament firms that gaily, in our days, manufacture lethal weapons for any who will buy she could not have understood.

There were moments when, in place of feeling that he had condescended, or descended, in this alliance, he felt that he was in the presence of something far superior. She was credulous, pathetically so, he thought often, but that credulity, he realized, was from her honesty and truthfulness. She told him of the Blackrobe that came to the Piegans southward with what was called the seventh day ceremonials.

“And one day,” said she, “a Piegan went out to hunt, and the Blackrobe saw him going and called to him that it was the Rest Day. The Indian laughed at him and——” her eyes were solemn as she continued, “he was killed that day by a grizzly bear. So the Blackrobe stood up before all the people and told them that God had sent the bear to punish that man, and the next time he rang his bell and called that it was the Day of Rest he had a great gathering in his lodge for the ceremonial. Do you think,” she ended, “that God would send a grizzly to kill the man for not resting on His Day?”

Angus shook his head slowly, saying nothing.

“After that Blackrobe left them he went through the Flathead country and there he baptized a great many, all under the water in a river. And after he had baptized them they went on a war party against the Crows and got many horses, without any being killed. The Blackfeet heard of it and waited for him to come back and got him to baptize a lot of them, and then they went out horse-stealing into the Gros Ventre country, and it was the most successful raid they had had for many snows.”

She looked into his eyes.

“You think there is nothing in it?” she asked, trying to read his thoughts.

He was in a quandary similar to that of parents who have had formal religious upbringing and wonder, grown to years of questioning, whether they should bring their children up to a belief in all the old stories or not. She pressed the point.

“You think there is nothing in it?” she repeated.

“I do not know,” he said.

It was clear to her he would not say any more than that.

Of her own people’s medicine-men she had been rendered somewhat skeptical. They demanded much when they came to shake their rattles, beat their drums, blow their whistles and sing over sick people. She thought that many men and women could do more for illness with herbs and certain roots made into plaisters. Not but what she herself knew of a medicine-man who did a wonderful thing. He cut with a flint a crack in the side of an ailing woman, sucked some of the bad blood there, spat it forth, and lo, he had sucked a little frog from her inside.

“Did she recover?” Angus asked.

“Yes, she recovered at once, and her man gave the medicine-man ten ponies, for he was very fond of her.”

She told him the medicine-men were paid chiefly with ponies and buffalo robes. But when anyone was dead their powers ended. The good Father Lacombe at Fort Edmonton had power even after men died. That beautiful black horse he rode he had received from a widow for getting the soul of her dead husband out of purgatory.

“All round us is mystery,” said Minota.

Angus nodded slowly, listening.

“Yes,” he replied.

“We have the same belief,” she said.

There came to Rocky Mountain House news of the Sepoy Mutiny. What was it all about? they wondered. The first emotion was, no doubt, that whatever its cause, enemies of Britain, and rebels, must take their punishment. But soon there was sympathy at the Fort with the mutineers when they heard more. Living among a people prone to superstitions, and respecting these if for no other reason than that the amenities might continue and Trade go well, the general view was that British arrogance had made a mess among the Sepoys. Angus, after hearing the talk, explained to Minota thus: Much as in the way that the Crees will eat dog, a dish that is abhorrent to the Blackfeet, it was bad medicine to some of the people away off there to touch pig and to others the cow was sacred. A new sort of rifle was issued to these people, the cartridges of which needed to be greased, and they had found out that the grease used was that of pig and cow. They objected, and their objection was unheeded—hence the Indian Mutiny.

“Could they not have let beaver fat, or some other fat, be used?” asked Minota. “That would have put the matter well.”

“They would never think of that,” replied Angus, deep in him a hatred of tyranny, of the arrogant.

He would talk to her of his early home on Loch Brendan, of how his people had been driven first from fruitful soil to barren soil by the salt-water edge, and then harried even from that. Her eyes had fear in them.

“There are some of my people,” said she, “who think that the day will come when we will be treated that way by yours, but I cannot think so. I think there are many more good than bad white people, enough good to keep the bad from doing that to us. I think if they tried to my people would die fighting. Did your people fight?”

“Not where I was. Our medicine-men said we were to go and that if we offered resistance we would sizzle in hell.”

“You do not believe in hell-fire?”

“I—do—not!” he replied.

The year slipped past. There came the moon when the deer shed their horns, December, and preparations were made for Christmas Day (Big Sunday) with Oregon grape branches in place of holly. The doings of Big Sunday somewhat puzzled the innocence and directness of Angus’s woman. According to an old usage of his Highland home he set a lit candle in the window on Christmas eve, and hearing the significance of that—a light for the dead to see—Minota took it much more seriously than he. All night she was hushed, thinking of, as she called them, the shadows seeing that signal—his father, his mother, his brother who had been drowned in the big water. Angus had difficulty in explaining to her that he was not sure if the shadows would really see. She thought they would—and they left it at that.

At the Fort the Nativity was celebrated in the usual way. Braw claes were worn as they had been worn on high-days and days of celebration all across that land, from the Great Lakes and from Hudson’s Bay to the Pacific, from the beginnings of the fur trade. A prospector from the mountains (there were many such in the land, much gold having been found the year before far west in the Cariboo Country, by white men who had wandered all that way from California) drank so much rum that he died of alcoholic poisoning next day. Minota was troubled over that.

“Did they get drunk,” she asked, “at the last feast before He was nailed up on the cross?”

“I should hardly think so.”

“My father once got drunk and spewed in the lodge and was very much ashamed. I think Jesus Christ would not like His friends to get drunk and be sick on their last feast together. It was a cruel way to kill Him,” she added. “That is a sad story.”

The new year came and the new year slipped along. The moon of the sore eyes was none too bad because of a warm wind (the Chinook) which wiped the snow away. The moon when the geese lay eggs came, geese and ducks honking over, driving their wedges into the north; and Minota sang:

“The ice has broken in the rivers,

The geese and the ducks fly over,

All day—and even at night.”

But with the spring she grew restless. Her people were moving out of their winter camps, setting up sweat lodges by the river sides and taking baths both wet and dry, as she explained—that is to say, steaming themselves in the low brush cages (the sweat lodges), with hot stones thrust into them, and then either cooling outside wrapped in blankets (a dry bath) or plunging into the river afterwards—a wet bath.

The desire to move was agony to Minota. One morning she asked Angus if he would object if she went on a visit to her people who were going from the woods to the plains soon.

“Why, no,” said he.

She was troubled lest he should think she loved them more than she loved him, but after more parley and mutual assurances of devotion, and assurance of understanding from him, she took off her white woman’s clothes, attired herself in the deerskin kirtle and leggings, wrapped herself in a blanket, and prepared to go. On the point of departure almost she remained. Her people, said she, would come into the Fort some day, and she could see them then. So it was his part to beg her to go and tell her he knew how she felt. As he spoke she looked long in his eyes, loving and troubled.

After she had gone, Tom Renwick must needs chaff him about his woman.

“Well, your woman has gone back to the blanket!” he said.

Angus felt he had either to take that remark as friendly jest, or to fell him. He wished that Tom’s smile had been pleasanter as he spoke, to make the acceptance of his speech as a joke more easy.

“That’s it,” he answered, “that’s it,” and lightly laughed as one does when humouring another with whom for this or that reason he has to associate and would bide with amicably, though at heart he would fain see far.

Minota came back within a month, after many sweat-baths, smelling of sweet-grass which she carried in a little sack hanging from a thin rawhide string round her neck.

In the moon when the strawberries ripen there was a suggestion by Buchanan that they might soon have finished all their work there and have to go to Fort Edmonton; and then arrived at Rocky Mountain House—Sam Douglas. He had been far beyond Edmonton into the mountains by the Howse Pass and the Tête Jaune Cache Pass. He had made thorough survey of the foothill country between the ranges and Edmonton, wintering (for his first year) with Macaulay at Jasper House and (for his second) with Colin Fraser at St. Ann’s. He was well content. There was coal “almost anywhere,” said he. He was going back to the Old Country to “interest capital,” and had come to Rocky Mountain House because he had been told there might be those there who could convoy him to Fort Benton on the Missouri River.

No! Impossible! Attempts had been made to open a transport route that way—and failed. The Blackfeet to the south contested the passage of all. Even in midsummer when they would be out on the plains none could risk that traverse. Angus could see, at that, that Douglas was perturbed. He evidently had no desire to cross the thousand miles to Fort Garry alone. The Crees were friendly, but there was always the risk of coming on some Blackfoot raiding party in their country. He smoothed a hand over his head, meditating. Angus laughed, surmising Douglas’s cogitations.

“Yes,” said he, “you have a fine, fair scalp-lock trophy there to deck the lodge of a Blackfoot on the South Saskatchewan!”

“That’s just the trouble,” said Sam, “that and the loneliness. I am not a man that can live alone. I’ve been alone enough of late, since last we parted. I was alone in the mountains till I heard voices there. Oh, man, man, I have heard the water-kelpies—and no use to assure me it was but a boulder rumbling down in the spate, or the freshets, as some of them say here, or the rise and fall of a wind that made the creeks cry loud and then hush. No, I canna thole the loneliness.”

“When the voices of the dead are heard,” explained Minota, “those who have been to the Catholic Mission make this sign,” and she showed him. “The Methodist ones just pray without a sign. We pray and make the sign of I pity you to them, like this—or like this, I bless you.”

The grace of her motions held Douglas’s eye with admiration, and then——

“Aye,” said he. “Well, I think I would make all the signs.”

She agreed to that suggestion.

“The more signs the better,” said she.

“Would you,” began Sam, turning again to Angus, “think of accompanying me across the plains? In fact, I was wondering if you would come all the way with me, seeing the boat-building is nearly finished. Since seeing the coal fires here I have been thinking that evidence of a person living here would be of great help. They might look upon me as a mere promoter, ye ken, but if I had one of the men of the land wi’ me——”

There came to Angus what, in Minota’s absence with her people that spring, had often come to him. He saw, he heard, he smelt the old land. Often, while she had been away, he had looked at the Rockies to west and seen a peak there like Ben Chattan that stands over the head of Loch Brendan. The forests along the slopes he had, by half shutting his eyes, turned into heather and moors. At Douglas’s suggestion he saw, in memory, the seaweed fringe of Scotland undulating to the tides that pound in from the Atlantic, in his reverie saw the silver reflection of the weaving gulls in the dark waters of the loch. The wood smoke and coal smoke odours of the Mountain House were changed to the smell of smouldering peat.

“I would pay all expenses,” said Douglas. “We could even arrange something in the manner of a stipend. You have conned your book”—(it was his father’s phrase, too)—“and you could be of great service secretarially, too, I have nae doot.” He always broadened his speech when he was engaged upon a special pleading.

Angus turned to his woman.

“Minota,” said he. “It is as you felt in the spring when you had to go and see your people.”

“I know it,” she replied.

“If I went, what would you do till I came back?” he asked her.

She did not answer at once and Sam, with a manner as of stealth, clearing his throat, stepped to the door, looked out, the girl’s dark eyes gazing after him—reproachfully, it seemed.

“I could arrange for you to have everything here you would want while I was away,” said Angus.

She shook her head.

“No. It would be easier with my people. Here——” she hesitated.

Douglas went strolling out, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Some of the white men while you were away,” she began, then hesitated again. “I could wear a protection string,” she said, “though with my people I think my conduct would be enough; no one would ever learn that I wore one. With the white men—some of them—especially on Big Sunday, or at the new year, well, they would not then respect even a protection string. No, I would go to my people until,” she looked at him with doubt in her eyes, he thought, “you come back.”

Angus wondered if among her people would be some, like Tom Renwick, who would jest at her that her white man would never return. That look of doubt on her face hurt him. He had an inspiration how to wipe it away. On the impulse he withdrew the collet ring of his forebears and, taking her hand in his, put it on her third finger. He had compromised between a Blackrobe ceremony and the less ritualistic Indian ceremony of marriage—which was none at all, unless the delivery of a string of horses at the father’s door be called ceremony. He had only had the union entered in the Company’s books. If she had desired more, now did he abruptly atone.

She was surely his by the light in her eyes then. Had he never before realized how deep was her devotion—her fealty—he knew it at that moment.

“I will wait for you,” she said, “till you come back from the country of your people. I will wait for you—with my people.”