Читать книгу Canadian Adventurers and Explorers Bundle - John Wilson - Страница 26

Within ten days the Prince Rupert was loaded and ready for London. She could not delay. A cold arctic front was blowing its icy breath over the river. Northward, sea ice was already starting to block navigation out of Hudson Bay. From the rocky headland, David watched Prince Rupert’s longboat tow her into the out-flowing current where the ship drifted quietly downstream to the sea. My ship could be off Dover’s white cliffs , he thought, within the number of weeks counted on one hand, but I’ve no chance of leaving this place for seven years at least, maybe never. When the Prince Rupert was finally out of sight, he felt he had lost all hope of contact with England, with his school friends, with his childhood.

He wandered back to the unfurnished bunkhouse and pulled a rough wool shirt from under the wooden planking of his new bed. The morning sun seemed to give him little warmth, and he buttoned on another layer under his coat and joined his new workmates, two company clerks, who were collecting firewood. The three of them had been scouring the river for days, hauling driftwood up the bank, chopping it into stove-size pieces, and stacking it inside the factory’s stockade, which was nearly four metres high. Wood was scarce. Over one hundred years of occupation at the fort meant even the smallest of the stunted trees had been stripped away. The already naked landscape had become lunar-like, emptied of all wood and scrub. The river floated a fresh supply of driftwood downstream each week, but that was still not enough, and the work parties trudged many kilometres each day in search of more firewood.

For David, the weary chore of wood collecting was interrupted only by joyless clerical duties. With ink and quill he made entries into the Hudson’s Bay Company ledger: 7 forks, 12 balls of twine, 118 small bags of gunpowder, 20 eight-lb. bags of bird-shot, 4 one-lb. packets of salt, and on it went until every item in the multitude of items unloaded from Prince Rupert were packaged and stored into the company’s inventory.

Pelts of muskrat, fox, and beaver brought in by Chipewyan trappers would be exchanged according to strict standards established in London. One blanket had the trade value of forty muskrat, or two black fox, or seven prime beaver. The post’s chief trader, called the factor, added his own markup, which in some cases doubled the number of furs required by London for a trade item. This was called the Factor’s Standard. Each night the inventory from the previous day’s trade was tallied and recorded in the company’s books. The factor’s take was recorded in a separate book.

“Still at it this late at night?” a voice called through the storeroom door as David sat reading a borrowed book. Through the dark room he watched a slim-built man approach and reach his open hand into the dim light surrounding David’s candle.

“Hello. I’m Hodges, company surgeon, pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Thompson,” David replied, shaking the surgeon’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, sir.”

“Mr. Prince and I are off hunting grouse tomorrow. We could use a third if you’d care to join us?”

“I’d like that, sir, very much so Mr Hodges, but I have firewood to collect and the factor gave me his maps and journal to edit.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve already cleared it with the factor. A lad can’t spend all his time bent over books.”

“But I don’t know how to shoot,” David admitted, then wished he hadn’t. The offer to get away from the boredom of the post was too good to miss.

“Well, then, it will be my pleasure to teach you. You won’t be of much use in this country if you can’t shoot. Meet us at the stockade gate at sunup,” said Hodges cheerfully as he left.

The day broke grey and cold. The first snow of the year drifted lazily on the wind and covered the rock-strewn peninsula with a dusting of drifting white powder. David followed Hodges and Mr. Prince from the factory gate to a dinghy beached on the riverbank. They rowed past the small HBC sloop Charlotte, anchored in a quiet back eddy out of the main current. Mr. Prince, the captain of the HBC boat, had brought her in a few days earlier. The Charlotte and her three-man crew would be wintering at Churchill, as they usually did upon completing their trading duties with the Inuit people in the North. The hunting party nudged the dinghy’s keel into the sand of the far bank and hauled the little boat high up to the grass. Here, Hodges handed David a long, slender musket and explained, “This is a flintlock, Master Thompson. You pour exactly this much gunpowder down the barrel,” he said, tipping a powder horn into the gun’s muzzle, “and then ram a cloth patch, like this one, down to hold the powder in place.”

Hodges helped David pull the long ramrod from under the gun barrel and with it push the patch deep into the barrel. “Now,” said Hodges, as he put a cluster of small lead pellets in David’s hand, “pour a little bird-shot down the barrel and ram down another patch to hold the shot in place.”

David followed the instructions carefully. “Good,” said Hodges. “Now you need to put a small powder charge in the pan on the side of the barrel and pull the hammer back like this. When you pull the trigger, the hammer holding a piece of flint will strike the frizzen. This makes a spark, which will ignite the pan. The pan’s powder will burn through the flash-hole and ignite the main charge in the barrel, which will explode and force the lead pellets out the front end of the barrel.”

David’s eyes were beginning to glaze over when Hodges added, “But don’t pull the trigger just yet unless you want to shoot Mr. Prince in the foot, which you happen to be aiming at.”

David sheepishly pointed the musket away from the captain’s muddy boot. He raised the stock to his shoulder, aligned the sights with the distant horizon, and pulled the trigger. A flash of fire and smoke arose from the pan, and an instant later the gun’s recoil slammed into his shoulder when the charge roared out the barrel, leaving a second cloud of black smoke.

“Good!” shouted Hodges, as David staggered to regain his balance. “Now you know how to shoot. Just repeat the procedure, but next time, hold the musket steady while pointing in the general direction of a grouse. We’ll have lunch in no time.”

Fortunately for David there were plenty of grouse to practise on. By day’s end he had managed to bag two ptarmigan, or grouse as they called them. That was his contribution to the day’s total take of thirty-five birds.

Samuel Hearne, the chief factor at Churchill, was waiting on the river’s bank as the hunters returned. Hearne was just entering middle age, but was more than ready for retirement. His long hair had begun to grey, his shoulders sloped forward, and he stood as if being pulled toward the ground by a force of gravity stronger than that felt by other men.

“Gentlemen,” greeted Hearne. “How went your day?”

“Thirty-five birds in all,” answered Hodges.

The factor nodded. “We’ll need all the game we can store away. Our beef supply from London is not generous this year. How did the apprentice do?”

“Damned fine,” beamed Hodges, “He’s a natural for shooting.”

“Then have him hunt with you, and if he’s good enough with that fowling piece by the time the geese are migrating south, take him to the marshes and stock up on as many geese as you can shoot,” he ordered.

David hardly had time to enjoy the good news when he noticed Samuel Hearne staring at him in the way one might look at a badly behaved dog. David suddenly felt very uncomfortable.

“See me in my quarters tonight at eight, Master Thompson,” said Hearne sharply.

Some days before, the factor had given David a scrawled journal and some rough maps to edit. The untidy manuscript was Hearne’s first attempt at describing his extensive journeys to the Arctic. He wanted his journal to be readable and his maps made ready for publication. But David’s editing made it clear to Hearne, and to others at the trading post, that the boy’s education, his grasp of map-making, and his ability to write was superior to that of the chief factor.

David hunted the next day with Mr. Prince and Hodges, but he was sullen.

“How was your meeting with the factor last night?” asked Mr. Prince as they sat on the crumbling stone ruins of the old fort, resting from the morning’s hunt.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said David, who knew it was not his place to find fault with the factor. He never did disclose what happened between them. Did Hearne berate the new apprentice for daring to criticize the geographic accuracy of the factor’s journals? Had Hearne, known to indulge heavily in liquor and keep a number Chipewyan girls in his residence, shocked young David’s sensibilities? Did the factor, who dismissed Christian beliefs as dogma, threaten the boy’s deeply held religious values? The answers to these questions will never be known, but from that time on David Thompson would harbour a lifelong dislike of Samuel Hearne.

“Old Hearne, he’s a changed man these days and I fear not for the better,” said Mr. Prince, surmising that there had been trouble with the factor the night before. “His defeat two years ago, at these ruins we now sit upon, seemed to unravel him. He’s never been the same since. He had settled into the comforts of the fort after years of hard travel. He made three remarkable expeditions north, as you may know by now from reading his journals. His last foray was all the way to the Arctic Ocean. It was 3500 miles round trip. He covered unexplored territory nearly the size of Russia to look for new sources of fur for the company. He proved there was no Northwest Passage to the Pacific out of Hudson Bay, but the authorities in London wouldn’t believe him and further insulted him with a measly two-hundred-pound bonus for his troubles.

“Then came La Pérouse, the French commander. He put the fort to the torch, burned everything, and looted a fortune in furs. The French plundered nearly eight thousand beaver and four thousand marten skins from the fort.” Prince shook his head as if in disbelief at the loss of precious fur. “Hearne,” he continued, “with only thirty-nine men, had little choice but to surrender everything without a fight. La Pérouse had two ships and four hundred men. Still, we were at war with France then, and some thought Hearne should have fought, and died if necessary, to defend his King, country, and the fort. At least the French were kind to him, and took him and all his men as prisoners to England where they were ransomed. But since being sent back to Churchill last fall, the factor has been forced to live in the shadow of his defeat. These ruins are now a bitter and relentless reminder to him.

“He lost his new wife, Mary Norton, too,” Prince added sombrely. “He truly loved that half-breed girl. She was left behind with the Chipewyan when the HBC men were taken prisoner. Mary was the daughter of Moses Norton, the previous factor here at Prince of Wales. She had been raised at the fort and was not used to the hard ways of the Chipewyan. They left her to starve. He never forgave them and seems to blame all Indians.

“If any Indian could have changed his mind it would have been old Matonabbee. He was chief of all the northern Chipewyan tribes and Hearne’s most trusted ally. Matonabbee guided Hearne on his explorations and organized all the Chipewyan trade for the factor. But Matonabbee hanged himself when the French took Hearne and his men. The chief thought his white friend had been taken out to the Bay and drowned by the French. The old chief had allied himself so closely with Hearne and the British that when the British were believed defeated and all dead, the chief had no more authority over his people, and he was shunned. All his family, his wives and children, having lost their status, starved during that same cruel winter of 1783.

“Now our factor is losing himself in brandy. He’s been holed up in that den built from English boards most of the time. I think he’s slowly losing his grip. Since he’s come back he’s done little to rebuild company trade with the Chipewyan, who are selling more and more furs to our competition from Montreal. The Board of Governors in London knows of it and will soon remove him. Too bad – he was one hell of a fur trader in his day.”

By October, the river was frozen over and there was little to do but wait out the long winter. The wood they collected was enough for only two fires a day, one in the morning and another in the evening. Most of the time the bunkhouse was unheated. By November, ten centimetres of ice coated the inside walls. On the coldest days David wore a large beaver coat and paced the floor in a vain attempt to stay warm. During mild spells he slipped on his snowshoes and followed Hodges and Prince as they trudged over two-metre snowdrifts and hunted ptarmigan. Most often it was so cold their fingers would nearly freeze before they had time to pull the trigger.

Spring, when it finally came, brought little improvement. With the warm weather, a plague of mosquitoes and blackflies descended. Clouds of insects swarmed around any warm-bodied thing. The tormented HBC men smeared oil and tar on their exposed skin, but no amount of oil, smoke, or clothing could keep the bugs off. Even the wildlife, stung and bitten incessantly, were desperate. Some animals were unable to eat due to the constant harassment. Caribou and foxes alike swam into the river as they searched for even temporary relief. By midsummer the swarming insects had abated, and the apprentice was again occupied with company business, although trading was much reduced from previous years.

David opened his eyes to the bright cold light of late morning. Dew still glistened on the single blanket covering him. He sat up from the patch of ground and knotted roots that had tormented his sleep. Two packet Indians, the name given to Aboriginal People who carried dispatches between the HBC forts, lay near him, asleep. The part-empty gallon of grog that had kept the two men staggering around the campfire late into the drunken night lay beside them. These two were his guides. For the next ten days their job was to take David from Churchill to York Factory, 240 kilometres on foot along the shore of Hudson Bay.

David had been given the barest of provisions as he was told to follow his two Chipewyan guides. The factor’s instructions were clear on how his Grey Coat apprentice was to be relocated. While David’s provisions for the journey were meagre, Hearne’s men had supplied an overly generous amount of grog to the packets. The effect was predictable. The journey would take days longer than needed. But it was the end of the summer of 1785, and David was now fifteen. Nourished in the past months by an abundance of fresh game and clean air, David had fortunately developed a sturdy build. If he had been sent a year ago, when he first arrived from London, his chances of surviving such a journey would have been far from certain.

He waited hungrily for his guides to rouse themselves and make breakfast. He had no food of his own in his small pack. On hearing their charge get up, the heavy-eyed men stuffed the blankets and the bottle of grog into a pack. They half-heartedly motioned for David to follow, and started on a slow, steady walk. There was no breakfast and no lunch either.

The small party climbed over drift logs, waded through tall shore grasses, and skirted their way around marsh pools and rivulets as they struggled across the vast salt marshes of the coastline. Shorebirds and waterfowl took noisy flight, and in the distance, great white bears turned their heads to watch the intruders pass.

Just before sunset the guides set their packs down on a dry stretch of sand near a meandering stream and wandered off, leaving David with the gear. Within minutes the air erupted with the sound of gunfire and the guides returned, dangling three ducks and a goose. Working with a steady and quiet efficiency the packets piled dry driftwood, and a fire was soon sending its sparks into the darkening sky. The birds were plucked and cleaned. The ducks, roasting on sticks, dripped fat into the sputtering flames. The goose was set sizzling into the fire’s roasting embers. Now in full darkness, each man gnawed hungrily until the bones were picked clean. The rich oily meat satisfied Davids daylong hunger, and it was enough to fuel his body and warm him for the night as he drifted into a deep sleep on the sand.

In the following days the routine continued – long days of slogging along the wet mud near the high-water line. When the mud ended, the ground became uneven. Tufted hummocks and waist-deep channels slowed their march. Seaward, the flats extended to a horizon so distant the sea was hardly visible. Large boulders studded the flats like mute monuments marking the halfway point between low tide and high water. Patches of glistening drift ice still remained trapped among the boulders. Inland, a boggy moor, pockmarked with small ponds, stretched for kilometres before the stunted trees of the sparse woodlands began.

During these days they often passed twelve to fifteen bears a day.

“Don’t look at them,” cautioned the guides.

David was told to keep a steady pace, as if he didn’t notice the bears. When he did sneak a glance, he could see the great white beasts lift their heads to look at them. Often the bears were resting on the flats, with four or five lying in a circle formation with their heads facing the centre.

Avoiding these large predators was not always possible and eventually they came across a bear that was blocking the trail at a stream crossing. It had killed a beluga whale and dragged the carcass onto the bank. They waded in to cross, but the bear gave a threatening growl and showed its fearsome teeth. It would protect its kill from any threat. They moved upstream and crossed at a safer distance.

Several days out of York Factory the guides, now out of grog, decided to take a polar bear hide in for trade. It would fetch them three pints of brandy. David sat on a drift log and watched. Their target, a sow some distance out on the flats, seemed unconcerned by the approaching hunters. When she finally resolved to move away, it was too late. David saw puffs of smoke and heard shots as the bear staggered under the musket fire. The brave animal twisted and turned defiantly towards the shots as the lead musket balls entered her body. When she finally fell, the hunters fired a last shot into her head. That done, they unsheathed their knives and began the long skinning process.

By the time the hide was removed, the tide on the flats had risen to knee level and was soon threatening to engulf the hunters in the frigid water. They quickly severed the head and, dragging it by the ears, waded to shore, leaving the floating hide behind. They placed the head facing seaward on a grassy hummock, and rubbed its nose with red dye. Then the two packets chanted. All of this, they told David, was meant to please the spirit, Manito, so he would cause the hide to drift ashore and not be lost. But it didn’t work. I guess the Manito wants them sober, David reasoned.

Buffalo meat dried in the sun was made into pemmican, the staple food that fuelled the fur trade.