Читать книгу The Flying Years - Frederick Niven - Страница 8

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Ian Fraser had fancied that Buchanan was so fuddled at the funeral that his promise to call and see Angus would be entirely forgotten by him, but there he was, next day, speiring, as he would say, for the lad.

Angus was out by. He was dimly at work on some tinkering, alone in the tool shed, and there Buchanan found him, coming in at the door very sober and sedate, looking as though he had suffered personal loss, but managing, with gaze on the floor or in distance, to come speedily to the business that brought him there. He had received an offer, he explained, sitting down on a keg of nails and filling his pipe with deliberation, to go to the far end of these plains that lay to west of them—“to the boat-building there,” said he.

Angus thought for a moment that his caller was not sober as he seemed. Boat-building away inland on those prairies! Then he remembered that through that West country rivers ran, and that they were great enough and sufficiently free of rapids for long distances for heavier craft to ply on them than the canoes of the company—these buoyant canoes that were paddled and portaged from Hudson’s Bay and from Fort William (by Rainy Lake and Lake of the Woods) to Fort Garry, and by Portage la Prairie away into the chain of rivers toward remote Swan Lake and beyond.

Buchanan was to take a man or two with him, he explained, able at the work; the pay, he added, was good.

“It would be a change for you,” he declared, with a nod and a quick glance. “It would take your mind from—aye,” he ended. “What say ye?”

Angus told him he appreciated his thought and his kindness. At that Buchanan rose, and staring out of the window remarked that he would like fine if they could start on Thursday morning.

“Here’s Tuesday,” said he, wheeled, and walked to the door.

Angus followed him. They stood there a moment or two.

“Yes, I’ll be ready,” said Angus.

“That’s fine, then,” replied Buchanan, and departed, leaving the young man to his tinkering and his thoughts.

With his employer going away from Red River he—were he to remain—would have to seek a new job, and there had always been a spell for him in that curve of sky over the space to west, as if with a still small voice it called him. He would be sorry to leave the Frasers. He had come to look upon them as close kindred rather than as the “forty-second cousins” that they were. The children had called his father uncle. He liked the callant Hector. He liked the baby Flora, and very greatly he liked Fiona, who would come to him in the evenings, book in hand, and say “Will you hearken me my lessons?” There was a Sunday when she had asked him to hearken her a psalm.

“Thus spake the sheriff——” she began.

“The seraph,” Angus had corrected.

“Thus spake the sheriff——”

“The seraph.”

“Oh! Thus spake the seraph and forthwith appeared a shining throne——”

“A shining throng—throng.”

“Oh! Thus spake the sheriff—I mean seraph—and forthwith appeared a shining throng. Perhaps I had better know if you please, what a seraph is. That might help.”

Yes, he would miss the family life of the Frasers.

There was a ring that Mrs. Munro had worn on her third finger, in the collet the hair of her husband’s mother. Daniel’s father had had it made, a fine piece of work by an Edinburgh goldsmith after his wife’s death—on its inner surface the initials of his and her Christian names in monogram—and Daniel, inheriting it, had given it to Kate as wedding ring. When she died Mrs. Fraser had taken it from her hand and kept it to give to Daniel later. He, however, had not worn it, put it away; but alone in the world, Angus—finding it among his father’s few treasures—put it on his little finger. He had no near kin left, but the sight of that ring, the feel of it, to turn it round sometimes on his finger in those days of desolation, seemed to help, mitigated the sense of solitariness somehow. It gave him two generations of his folk for secret company.

The party consisted of Mr. Buchanan, two half-breeds (of French and Saulteaux blood), who were known only by their Christian names of Pierre and Aloysius, Tom Renwick, a fellow-worker on the flat-boats with them, Sam Lovat Douglas, and Angus.

Douglas—he who was later to become Sir Samuel Lovat-Douglas—had just arrived at Fort Garry on his way to Fort Edmonton, with a wallet of letters of introduction to factors and such throughout the land (to William McTavish, the governor of Assiniboia for the company, Mackay of Fort Ellice, Lillie of Fort Carlton, Chantelaine of Fort Pitt, Hardisty of Fort Edmonton, Macaulay of Jasper House, and Colin Fraser of St. Ann’s), and hearing that Buchanan was westward bound had made arrangements with him to go with them. Douglas, in his early twenties Angus judged, was heavily built at that time, with a powerful frame—and a geniality of manner somehow suggesting rather the plausible than the candid. Clearly he was in the country on business bent, but to ask direct questions of a man was not the usage in those days. As a matter of fact Angus was not curious. If a man had no desire to disclose his affairs—then it was nothing to do with him. Yet it was to Angus that Douglas revealed the object of his journey. It was on the night they stopped at the Touchwood Hills post—that shortly afterwards was abandoned by the company and left to crumble in the weather and the seasons.

“I’m verra glad,” said Douglas in that friendly way of his, “to have your company on this odyssey—and I hope you mak’ weel at the boat-building. Some folks tell me that in a new land a man should take the first job that turns up. Well, there may be something in that; but I’m no’ eager to take the first job lest I stay in it. You see what I mean? Man, I’m ambeetious!”

The others were over at the post for company and a chat there (to the official in charge at the Touchwood Hills House, Douglas had no letter), and they were alone at the night fire. Its flames illumined the heavy forehead, the heavy jowl, the dancing and genial eyes of Sam Douglas.

“Do you know what I’m here for?” he asked. “I’ll tell you. You haven’t tried to pump me to find out, so I’ll tell you,” and he laughed. “This country is going to open up—to develop. What have we seen so far? Buffaloes by the hundred, and these two half-breeds whooping Voila les boeufs! Voila les boeufs!”

“An odd fellow,” thought Angus. “He seems to be acting.” (Not but what he had already a liking for Sam.) “Even his Scots burr he seems to accentuate deliberately at times—as now, when we are alone together, for example. Something a trifle humbugging about him, is there? Something of insincerity in his ingratiating manner? And yet, isn’t it easier to get along with one who would fain be a good fellow than with one who is sulky and taciturn?”

Thus was Angus thinking as Douglas paused there by the fire beside him on a buffalo robe, gazing into the flames.

“Aye, buffaloes,” Sam went on after a pause. “And antelope loping over the prairie, and a few bit villages of the Crees in their leather tents. But consider how the buffalo are being killed off. They are no’ just for the sustenance of the Indians now. The trade that has sprung up in their robes, as they call these pelts,” and he stroked the one on which he sat, “is going to exterminate them; and the railroad builders down in the States are feeding the navvies on buffalo meat. Mark my words. Man, man, my mind is of the kind that is aye just a jump ahead—maybe twa jumps. There’s going to be cattle grazing on these buffalo pastures before long. And there are going to be fixed habitations—fixed habitations. But what are the folks going to burn to keep them warm in wintertime? It’s a cold winter here. Buffalo chips? Na. And there’s not sufficient wood in the river bottoms to last them long when they come in here in great numbers, as come they will. I’m looking for coal. My mind is of the kind that goes jumping ahead! Aye, burning rocks. I heard of burning rocks from an Indian on the Missouri. They have coal there; and he told me there were burning rocks up here to north also. But it’s no’ safe to travel up through the Blackfoot country, as ye ken, so I went back doon the Missouri and over to the Red River and Fort Garry, and I’m going to see these burning rocks in the north. That’s what I’m here for, sir. I’m thinking of the future. I’m planning big.”

It was young man’s talk, perhaps, and as the years passed he might be more minded to keep his own counsel; but many were the young men in the land, then, engaged on affairs onerous and dangerous—factors and explorers of the company hardly more than striplings. All the difference between them and him was that they were in the service of others, and he already was, as they say, playing a lone hand.

Doubt in him suddenly intruded unhappily into Angus’s liking for him when, after a lull in talk during which they but sat smoking there by the fire, the talk resumed came somehow to the subject of the stipends paid by the Hudson’s Bay to its factors and clerks.

“A small stipend,” declared Douglas, as though he were an aged promoter and experienced financier, “and the promise of a fair pension is the idea. You see, it makes a man work well to know his old-age is provided for if he behaves himself—and, actually, he may never live to have the pension. If I was head of a big company I’d run it on those lines. It would be benevolent, you see, to arrange for the pension—and, as I say, only a percentage would get one. That’s to be considered.”

“You would not, then, pay the pension to widows of your employees?” asked Angus.

Sam Douglas rubbed a hand over his face.

“That would have to be thought over,” he replied, and dismissed the subject by rising to prepare his blankets for the night, the sound of the fumbling steps and the voices of the others drawing near them from the direction of the post.

Rumours of Blackfeet raiders in the region when they reached Fort Carlton ordained a continuance together toward Edmonton, with the intention of passing southward, thence, to the Mountain House; but at Fort Pitt there was a dark-eyed young man, the half-breed son of one of the factors, who was setting out across country for Rocky Mountain House. He was known to the Blackfeet. (His mother was, in fact, a Piegan woman—which is to say Blackfoot, the Blackfeet being, as Angus had it explained to him, a tribe in three parts: the Blackfeet proper, the Bloods, and the Piegans, all speaking a common tongue.) So there they said farewell to Douglas and the half-breeds, striking out west, south of Beaver Lake, by the Dried Meat Hills, Buffalo Lake, the Red Deer River’s upper waters, and Gull Lake—new names to Angus, with the life of the land in the sound of them.

For some reason or another Douglas’s parting remark remained hauntingly in the young man’s ears.

“I hope you mak’ weel at the boat-building,” said Sam.

“And I hope you find your coal that you are going to make a fortune over—by and by,” replied Angus.

“Oh, sooner than you think!” Douglas told him.

There seemed at the time and in the remembrance as he rode on to be an ironic note in the words, I hope you mak’ weel at the boat-building. Did Douglas want, all friendly at parting, to spur Angus on, to make him think further than the day’s board and bed? “Some folks tell me that in a new land a man should take the first job that turns up, but I’m no’ eager to take the first job lest I stay in it.” That also Douglas had said. He may have intended, at parting, a jog to his new friend toward looking ahead, planning big.

It was a little way beyond Gull Lake, coming to an eminence, that Angus had one of his experiences, these experiences that he told to no one but that went (more than other ones apparently less airy, less unsubstantial) to the making of what he was to become in the drift of the years. It was an experience of the spirit kin with that which had privately befallen him over a year before when the odours of the new land, before they had sighted it, came out to meet them through a white vapour over the sea, into which the steamer’s siren bleated. By the olfactory nerves had come that one. By the eyes came this, with the gift of a secret ecstasy.

Before him the Rocky Mountains were suddenly revealed beyond belts of colour that were of woods, parklands, wedges of sky-reflecting water, twist of river, fragment of distant lake. Very much as it was with him when listening to music was it with him then, gazing on the scene before him. Music would pick and choose through the past years of his life, recover and toss to him this, that and the other: the tone of a voice, the light on a pebble, a forgotten wail of wind in a chimney from a winter storm of years back, the glance of eyes (Jessie’s, no doubt), the gleam through water of a herring shoal—and leave it to him to make something of the medley.

He thought of his father’s remark—Scotland, a kingdom of the mind. Scotland was not his. They would not have him there. Well, he had Scotland still, the bark of seals on the Black Rocks, the remembered smell of sun-scorched bracken, of peat-smoke beaten down in the gales. He thought of the vast Atlantic swaying like a compass disc betwixt the rise and fall of Scotland’s seaweed fringe and the scent of pines, firs and cedars in the mists off Newfoundland. Of the curve of the Milky Way he thought, seen from their prairie camps at night, a whirl of sparks from the Arctic shores to the Caribbean. Of the columns and whip-lashes of light, up to the zenith and gone, of the Aurora Borealis, seen after hot summer days of their journey (not only in winter as many believed), he thought as he reined in his horse and sat motionless staring from that butte beyond Gull Lake at the revelation of the Rocky Mountains.

Something happened to him beyond his power to express; something happened, wordless, like music. As though the blue of the sky had run and thickened roughly at the base, there lay the ranges, low in contrast with the height of that space of blue but—he aware of how far off they were—majestic in their serene extent. They dropped away to south, they dropped away to north, as into a quiet eternity. Here and there slashes of white showed among their purple. Here and there rocky gables twinkled like mirrors, and at one place, far in, there was a dun seething, peaks turning to cloud and clouds solidifying into peaks. A lightning flash was drawn in quick gold on that portion where peaks and clouds fused, and then came a distant sound, the faintest rumble.

But he could not stay there all day, his spirit and the sighing of the wind in the grass blending as sky and mountains blent in that section of storm on the ranges. Men and horses ahead were dwindling to the size of ants, passing away in a steady jig-jog with the rhythmic swing of long tails, the slight sway of the riders’ shoulders and of the balanced packs. After that vision they would soon be at journey’s end.

It was, in fact, next morning, just one calendar month from the day they started out from Red River that, cresting a knoll, they saw beyond a twist of river the towers of Rocky Mountain House.