Voyageurs

by Margaret Elphinstone

  Hugh sat meditatively smoking his pipe. There were ospreys fishing in the river, just like the pair we have on Derwentwater. For the first time – but by no means the last – I was troubled by black flies and mosquitoes, and clouds of small biting flies, bigger than our midges, but just as unpleasant.

  ‘Bear's grease.’

  ‘I beg thy pardon, friend?’

  ‘Pork fat is better than nothing, but bear's grease and skunk oil keep them off as much as anything will. They'll get worse.’

  ‘So all I need do is kill a bear?’ I said, swatting the buzzing cloud from round my head.

  ‘I'm sure if I sent you to do it you'd give it your best shot.’

  ‘I've no gun, friend.’

  Hugh gave a wry smile. ‘I think you were sent into my life for a purpose, Monsieur Greenhorn. Beware the wiles of metaphor! Tell me, have you no gun on principle?’

  ‘Nay, friend. I'd shoot a bear as soon as I'd slaughter a beast for the table, and that I know well how to do. I wouldn't use firearms against a fellow man, nor any kind of outward weapon, come to that.’

  ‘What if the man were about to kill you?’ asked Hugh idly.

  ‘Then so be it, but I would reason with him not to, if I could.’

  ‘At fifty yards?’ Hugh tapped the ash from the bowl of his pipe, and reached in his pocket for tobacco. ‘And what if it were your sister he were about to kill, or worse?’

  I had no desire for this argument; besides, I'd been waiting for an opening. ‘Did thee know my sister Rachel, friend?’

  ‘If you can't say “sir”, I suggest you call me Hugh. “Friend” makes me feel I have obligations, which is uncomfortable. No, I never met your sister, plague take her!’ He was tamping down the little twist of tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. ‘Saving your presence, but Alan Mackenzie . . . he threw away everything when he ran off with a white girl. I should know; I trained him. He was just a lad when I got him. He lied about his age to get the post; neither his brothers nor I felt it necessary to undeceive the council – but he learned fast. We got along like winking. When I heard what he'd done I thought, that's it, he'll never get back to le pays d'en haut. Then I heard she'd gone.’ He laid a sliver of birch to the fire, and got himself a little flame. ‘What'll you do if you find her? Take her home?’

  ‘I don't know. If I find her I'll talk to her, obviously. It depends what she wants.’

  ‘You won't find her.’ There was a pause while Hugh gave all his attention to his pipe. ‘But if you do, do young Alan a favour and take her back where she belongs. York, Montreal, England . . . it's immaterial. There's many a wife who's not seen her man for a few years. No harm in that. But keep her away from his work, if you will. You see the sense in that?’

  I was puzzled to give him a sensible answer. ‘I don't know. It's not our way. Man and wife work together, where I come from. The one wouldn't wish to do without the other.’

  ‘Ah, well, there are ways and ways of having “the other”,’ said Hugh, and that was the end of our talk for that time.

  As we gradually ascended the Outaouais River, I grew used to this new way of life, and fell easily into its rhythms. We seemed to be suspended outside the world, in a place where time was measured entirely in terms of our daily struggle against the flow of the river. Slowly we gained ground, and height. At night we camped in places where the canoes could be unloaded and beached, on soft sand if possible. The camping places were made smooth and the bare roots polished by the feet of many passing voyageurs. Camp was made as speedily as everything else we did: the canoes unloaded, the fire lit, the pease porridge simmering in the kettle, before a tardier soul might say ‘Jack Robinson’. The men slept under the canoes on the beach. It was my job to pitch the tent for Hugh on higher ground, and set out his belongings within: his camp bed, his wooden chest, his pewter crockery (the rest of us had wooden utensils), his lamp and writing desk.6 At night I shared the tent with Hugh. We were woken each dawn by Jean-Pierre calling ‘Levez-vous, levez-vous, levez-vous.’ We had to move fast then, hivernant and voyageurs alike, for they struck camp in no time (Hugh would say ‘and devil take the hindmost'), and we'd be on the move by sun-up. The only stops were for a breakfast of neat spirits (which I declined) and cold pease porridge, and for ‘pipes’ at intervals. Jean-Pierre would call out ‘Allumez‘ and every man but myself would take out his tobacco and light up for ten minutes, before Jean-Pierre called out ‘Allez, allez, allez’ and off we went again at the same furious pace.

  Our arrival at Les Chats was not in the least like Bartlett's picture on my wall. It was a wild day: flurries of wind kept catching us broadside, making the last few miles very tricky. At last two islands loomed ahead. I saw white water swirling round them, but the voyageurs headed between the falls into smooth water. A sudden gust caught us just offshore, and we were whirled into the edge of the rapid. In a moment all was spray and confusion. I heard a horrible rending sound under my feet like torn cloth. The canoe lurched: all of a sudden we were in smooth water again, paddling wildly. There was water round my ankles. The canoe grounded painfully on a rocky beach. We leapt ashore, unloaded as fast as we could, and carried the canoe on to the island, where the rest of the brigade joined us without mishap. When we turned our canoe over there was a great rent in the birchbark. I found myself thinking foolishly of the boatbuilders’ yards in Maryport, where they have everything needful for such an emergency. Les Chats could hardly be more different. The portage traverses the island between the two sets of falls, and apart from the voyageurs’ camping places and a few trees, there is nothing else at all.

  No one seemed anxious, merely vexed. We made camp, and once the fire was going Alban was given the hottest job of melting a lump of resin gum in an iron pot. The upturned canoe was propped up with a forked stick, and Marc and Jean-Pierre leaned over the hull and examined the tear, for all the world like a couple of farmers looking over a gate at a sodden hayfield. I watched Jean-Pierre unroll a length of birchbark, and lay out a length ofwattup, which is a twine made of spruce roots. Jean-Pierre cut away the damaged bark, until where the tear had been, there was a long rectangular hole with firm edges. He unrolled the birchbark, and asked me to hold it steady while he pricked holes with an awl, and began to lash the patch in place. It looked so simple, once I knew how; I forgot my anxious vision of the boatbuilder's yard in Maryport, and admired Jean-Pierre's skill. While he worked, we talked about canoes, then while we were waiting for the resin to cool we looked at the patterns painted on the prow, and he showed me how the circle was divided by curving lines into the seasons of human life, ‘Alors, pour vous, Marc, le printemps commence juste à devenir l'été. Est-ce que vous avez une demoiselle en Angleterre? Est-ce que vous l'avez beaucoup manquée?‘

  I affected not to understand the latter part of this speech. ‘Who are the two faces?’

  He explained that the face in the stern was always frowning, but the fellow in the bows must always be smiling. There was a story to it that I couldn't follow. But already I surprised myself sometimes by thinking my own thoughts in the French tongue. Est-ce que vous avez une demoiselle? Est-ce que vous l'avez beaucoup manquée? Quand vous regardez le feu le soir, rappellez-vous la couleur de ses cheveux?7

  1 It was Hugh who gave me this appellation. The voyageurs took it up, but pronounced it, as near as I can write it, grin-norrn. They said it meant, in their own tongue, un bleu.

  2 Marc was horrified that I knew not my own Saint's Day, as he called it. To this day I cannot let the eighth day of Fifth Month pass without holding him in the light particularly. This I know to be a vain superstition in me, but I like to think that if he lives, he may be a little warmed by my remembrances.

  3 Indeed I have always been given to levity in this respect. As a child I seldom heard a tune, or a song, but if I ever I did, I found there was something about the combination of words and rhythm that imprinted both upon my mind, however much I resisted. We have many tales in Cumberland – though not, of course, told in
our household – about the fairies who win folk away from the strait path by the wiles of music, and I can well see the kernel of truth in such legends. The story usually is how a young fellow hears the music, and is enticed away on a strange journey among the fairy people, and when he comes back, many years have gone by and all that he once knew is utterly changed. I would say I've never told my children idle tales, and yet – isn't the burden of my own story, which I have told them over and over (for is it not also the story of their own origin?) a very similar kind of tale? Except, of course, that mine is a true and rational history, in every respect as veracious as memory serves to make it.

  4 I know not; I have never resolved this matter of music, or the singing and dancing that accompany it, in my own mind. It seemed to me among the voyageurs, then later among the Indians, that these things brought joy into lives much harder than anything most Friends have to contemplate, and also kept men from fighting by providing a more harmonious outlet for their spirits. Perhaps in the innocency of the world, when civilisation was yet young, such sports were not degenerate. Sometimes I've talked of this with Friends, and I've met with varying responses. As I say, I know not.

  5 I gave thanks to God that I had started in the guiding business. I was well used to taking tourists up Skiddaw, and sometimes they had various pic-nics or easels or other nonsense that they must needs have up the mountain with them, so portaging was not an entirely new science to me. Woe betide me if it had been!

  6 I was much taken with this last, and now I have a similar one myself, with a baize-covered desk top that folds out, and snug compartments for ink, penknife, seals, quills and paper.

  7 Just now I got up from my writing, and paced to and fro for a little, stopping at intervals to study my new engraving of Les Chats which Alan sent me. Young Caleb was asking me about it the other day, and we had the map out. Caleb has always been more interested than Alan in North America. When I built my canoe at John Bristo's farm at Portinscale (for I keep it on Derwentwater, where it has become as much an eccentricity of the place as the Floating Island or the Singing Stones), it was Caleb who most wanted to come and help, though he was only a little fellow – about eight years old, I think. I got my uncle to buy the American cedarwood for me in Whitehaven. And then I cheated, in a manner of speaking, for I had my wood cut for me at the sawmill in Keswick – I had to stand over them to see that all the parts were rightly measured – and delivered in prepared lengths. We dug out the shape as Loic had taught me, in a corner of the paddock, and built the wooden mould within it. John and I steamed the cedarwood lengths, and lashed the frame together just as they do in Upper Canada, only our twine was not made of spruce root, but bought from the chandler's. It took all our patience, for we had no guide but the rough drawings in my notebook, from which I'd worked out my design. We used oiled canvas instead of birchbark, for though we have birches enough, they are nothing like the size of the Canadian trees – I would have had to denude half the trees in Borrowdale, and instead of resin gum we used tar. My canoe is heavier than it should be, and a little too broad in the beam, so it responds less well to the paddle than Loic's did. I always meant to improve upon it, and make another, but the years go by too quickly. The paddles were done to my specification by a boatbuilder in Maryport. They lack the je ne sais quoi of the Indian version, but I cannot tell how to improve them. Various local gentlemen have come canoeing with me. William Wordsworth wrote a poem about the time we paddled to Lodore. Robert Southey's children used to come with us on pic-nics to Derwent Isle, and young Hartley Coleridge borrowed it without my permission, rent a great hole in it, and left it swamped in the shallows. ‘Twas lucky I ever found it.

  CHAPTER 10

  THERE ARE EIGHTEEN PORTAGES ON THE OUTAOUAIS. There are no words in which I can convey the immensity of that river to an English reader. In mist or winter our own hills become dangerous and vast, but from a high edge in the clear light of a summer day all can be encompassed. A man is safe: though the mood of the land may vary, its lineaments are known, and maps can be made. On the Outaouais River I understood for the first time that truly the ways of God are beyond us, for he hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span. Our canoes were so little, the river so great, it seemed to me the very angels must be mocking our temerity. And yet we were preserved. Slowly we tracked that endless body of water, forcing our way stroke by stroke against its current. Sometimes the banks were low and far apart so that we seemed adrift on a great lake; other times the land came in high and closed us in, and underneath we felt the deep waters resisting us. In wild weather the shining lakes turned to fierce seas. When the fog came down we were marooned in a treacherous world of changing waters. In rough places the smooth river became a fierce white stranger, roaring over the rocks to meet us, as if daring us to force our way on.

  Undaunted, we unloaded at each portage, in stifling heat or driving rain, and carried the whole cargo. Jean-Pierre and Marc took our canoe on their shoulders, helped by a couple of milieux when the going was hard. There were as many places again where the canoes had to be partly unloaded and tracked with ropes up the rapids. I began to look for the wooden crosses on the banks wherever the water was white. So we surmounted the islands of the Chenaux, the white rocks of the long Calumet portage, the Morrison rapids and the lake of Allumettes. Then the weather turned on us, and we were dérangé – we had to sit out a storm – on a little island the men name Gibraltar, in a place where the Outaouais is wide as a lake. We seemed so far out of the world that all was like a dream. We ate our pease crouched in the lee of the canoe, while the fire under the kettle spat and smouldered in the rain. The men amused themselves by getting me to say sentences in French, whereat they laughed heartily. Hugh and I retired early, the tent being the driest place we could find. I had pitched it at the top of an outcrop above the beach, and when the wind swept through the pines a deluge of water would splatter down on our canvas roof, adding its volume to the steady drumming of the rain.

  ‘Well, well, Mark. Our halcyon days are over, for the time. Do you regret the fleshpots of Old England?’

  ‘I'm used to being on the hill in all weathers.’ Since he seemed disposed to talk, I thought I should make the most of it. I couldn't see his face; I was lying on my back looking up into the darkness under our canvas roof. ‘William Mackenzie told me Alan had done well in the North West. He said he'd dealt with some trouble with the Hudson's Bay Company.’

  ‘Don't talk to me about the Bay! But yes, that's true enough. I sent Alan up to over-winter at our northern post. Turns out there's an agent from the Bay set up within a mile of him. There's been murder done for less – but that was long ago. Still and all, it was an awkward situation.’

  ‘How did he resolve it?’

  ‘Oh, by the end of the winter they were the best of friends – in a cautious kind of way. Alan had a pack of cards with him; he said they visited now and then and played piquet. The other fellow was an Englishman, not a pig-headed Orkneyman, thank God. But initially it looked as if there might be trouble. Alan had the sense to leave it to Delkalé – that was his woman. Luckily the Bay fellow had a Chipewyan woman too – which is against the rules of the Hudson's Bay Company, though what red-blooded man could take heed of that for twenty years at a stretch? – and she and Delkalé had mothers who were cousins. In short, the men had the common sense to leave it to the women. They spoke to their elders, who arranged to divide the trade without farther fuss. It's excellent management, to know when not to interfere. When Alan told me about it I was proud of him. He was scarce eighteen, and one doesn't necessarily look for wise heads on young shoulders.’

  I lay rigid, staring into the dark. When I could command my thoughts I said to him, ‘Is thee saying that Alan Mackenzie had an Indian wife before he married Rachel?’

  ‘Oh, ay, of course he did. A man can't do without a woman in the pays d'en haut. How else would he do the work? He needs a woman to trap and fish and cook, mend hi
s moccasins and make his clothes. You need a woman to keep your tent for you, look after the fire, all that. And in your bed too, of course.’

  ‘And this woman – is she a wife?’

  ‘Oh, ay. À la façon du pays, you understand. A country wife. Marriage is easy among the Indians, and divorce too. You're married when you take your girl with her family's blessing, and unmarried just as simply if that's agreed upon. No marriage before a priest or anything like that. It's not the custom.’

  The familiar phrase jarred brutally in that context. ‘So when Alan married Rachel he had a wife . . . à la façon du pays – already?’

  ‘Had had. They parted when he left Athabasca. Delkalé went back to her tribe. But when she comes into the store she still asks after him, though she has at least two children by now, and a man of her own people.’ There was a pause. Hugh said in a different tone, ‘You're not worrying about this, are you? It means nothing. It's the way in the North West. When Alan had Delkalé for his wife he'd never heard of your sister. He and Delkalé were never married before a priest. It means nothing.’