‘Go to hell,’ whispered Alan weakly.
Loic looked at my makeshift splint, and suggested we also strap Alan's legs together while we moved him. With two pairs of hands it was much easier. We made a stretcher round him, rolled him in blankets, half launched the canoe, and lifted him in amidships on the two poles and the extra paddle. It was a desperate journey home, but the birchbark patch had only leaked a little when we got back to our camp, and the blankets took up the water. I could tell Alan was conscious by the deep line between his brows, and the rigidity of his mouth. His shoulder had stopped bleeding. I decided it was better to leave the shirt be than pull the wound open again.
‘Loic.’
’Oui.‘
‘His leg will have to be set.’
’Oui.‘
‘Have you ever done this?’
’Non.‘
I had the phial of laudanum my mother had given me. I'd carried it wrapped in flannel, along with my razor and toothbrush. I gave about a quarter of it to Alan on a spoon, and waited for him to grow sleepy. Loic said, ‘We should give him brandy.’
‘We have none.’
‘I have this.’ He reached among his own things and took out a small barrel I'd not seen before.
‘Where did thee get that?’
‘I brought it, bien sûr. It is foolish to travel without.’
‘Alan said we'd take no spirits!’
‘And I said nothing. He will need it now.’
I couldn't deny it. ‘Not with laudanum. But later, yes.’ Alan's breathing was changing; the laudanum was taking effect. ‘Thee'll need to hold him firmly.’
‘Do you know what to do?’ asked Loic.
‘I know with animals,’ I said, ‘And what's a man, if not an animal?’
I lied. It was not the same at all. ‘Hold him firm. Ready?’
I pulled the leg straight as hard and steadily as I could. Alan lost consciousness at once. I couldn't tell if I'd set the bone right. I could only pray. We cut wooden splints, and bandaged them to him with the last of our trade calico. Presently Alan fell into an uneasy sort of sleep, and began to snore. I'd never known him do so before: either it was the drug, or being laid flat on his back like that.
Loic took a swig of brandy himself. ‘Here, Mark!’
‘I thank thee, no.’
Loic shrugged, and went back to the canoe. Later, when we were eating our pease – and regretting the goose – we talked about what we should do. ‘We can't move him,’ I said. ‘He must keep still. We can't keep him warm on the water, either. If he gets too cold he'll die.’
‘We can't stay here,’ said Loic. ‘Bad weather is coming. We must get off the island.’
‘We can't move him.’
‘Then the winter will come, and we will die. We must go home. But I am worried now, because look!’ He pointed north-west.
I'd already seen the grey line of cloud rolling in towards us as the day waned. ‘The weather's going to break, isn't it?’
‘This will be a bad storm.’
He was right. The wind came in at dusk, and rain began to fall in torrents. By that time we'd rebuilt our shelter, dug a channel round it to drain off the rainwater, and weighed the canvas down with extra stones. We spent three nights huddled under our canoe and canvas shelter. Alan took up most of the room, and as the rain drummed on the canoe just above where we crouched, he was at first very cold, and then feverish, which frightened me. An open wound in a beast usually means it has to be shot, but a man must take the death that comes to him, and no help given. Alan wasn't conscious enough to keep quiet – for his courage was indisputable – and after a while he began to talk incoherently in some foreign tongue. I asked Loic what he was saying.
‘I don't know,’ said Loic. ‘It's not any language I know.’
I gave Alan water to drink, piled the blankets over him, and dosed him with the rest of the laudanum to make him sleep. When the laudanum wore off he grew restless, throwing off the blankets and muttering incomprehensibly. I wouldn't let Loic give him brandy because of the fever. We lit a tallow dip in the lantern – we'd managed without using it all through the summer – so I could watch over Alan, but when that burnt out I could do little but feel for the blanket and try to keep it over him. I couldn't hear him because of the rain.
Loic went off before dawn. While I was boiling up water – I managed to make a little fire within our shelter – he came back with a bunch of long brown roots that he said were sarsaparilla. He set about making a poultice; from what he said the plant had the same effect as comfrey. When I sniffed the wound there was no taint of corruption. Perhaps I should have tried to dig the ball out, but I flinched at the very thought, and decided – Dr Day at Mackinac told me later I was right – it was safer to let it be.2 I cleaned it and used Alan's spare shirt to make a clean bandage.
Loic and I were soon soaked to the skin, as the rain blew in at both ends of our shelter. We couldn't avoid touching the canvas, which made it leak. Loic mostly sat with his back to us, hugging his knees – Alan had all the blankets – and staring out at the swathes of rain as they swept over us. I'd never nursed a sick person, but I found that if I thought of him as a two-legged animal, rather than another man, it made it easier to do what was needed. I hoped he'd forget the violation; for the moment he was beyond caring.
‘We should have moved into the clearing,’ I remarked to Loic, after we'd gone out to batten down our canvas for the umpteenth time.
‘When?’ said Loic.
I'd never known Loic in such surly humour. In the end I asked him right out what was upsetting him.
‘Because you're right. It is impossible to get Alan back to Mackinac. We should never have come back to South Manitou island. Unless we have a spell of fine weather, we cannot get home for winter. Even if we do, the lake will already be very cold. Even now it may be too late.’
‘Then we'll have to spend the winter here.’
‘No, we cannot. If we are here when winter comes we will die. The Indians don't stay. They go where there is hunting. In winter there must be meat.’
‘There are deer.’
‘How many deer? There is no hunting here. You don't know what it will be like! That is one thing! And there is also my family! What will Pakané be thinking, do you suppose? And my father? I told Pakané – I promised her – I would come back in winter, and now I cannot. She will think me drowned. This is why I am angry, since you ask.’
Rain pelted on the canvas in a sudden cloudburst. I could barely hear myself speak. ‘If thee left us on the mainland here, in one of the villages, could thee get home then?’
‘The canoe is too big for me to go alone. And after this there will not be many days when the lake is calm enough. And I keep telling you, at this time of year there are no villages. In any case, I said I would go with Alan. I will not leave him. I will not leave either of you. If I leave you now, you will both die. How can I go to la messe de Noël with that upon my conscience? I cannot.’
That night I lay awake, huddled in my wet coat, while desperate plans revolved in my head. Alan couldn't be moved. When the storm ended, the water might take days to calm. Tenth Month was almost over, and we were stuck on South Manitou, either with or without six armed and hostile warriors for company. They might, I supposed, fall upon us at any moment and add three scalps to their collection for very little effort. I wouldn't choose a night like this for that, or any other, expedition, myself, but still, it was an uncomfortable thought.
All this – or so it seemed in the dead hours before the day – was my fault. I'd dragged Alan back into a fruitless search for Rachel, who had probably been dead these two years and more, and because I'd done so, Alan now lay close to death himself. And we'd failed. In three months we'd found nothing. Rachel was lost. I should have accepted that when Judith's letter first came. She was lost, and I'd been a fool not to believe it.
The perils of the lake in autumn had been impressed upon me again and again. The water was alread
y too cold to survive an accident, and too cold for an injured man to lie in a canoe. And there was another problem: if Alan had to lie flat – or even sit propped up with his splinted leg stretched out – how then would we load the cargo? It would be madness to leave anything behind, and yet madness to take it all . . . I thought out various schemes for loading our gear, and rejected every one. We'd be down to two paddlers anyway; a badly trimmed boat would make things twice as hard. There was no knowing from one day to the next – nay, from one hour to the next – what weather the winds might bring. The ten miles to the mainland seemed endless leagues away. It was the longest open water we had to cross, but when I thought of the weary miles north to Mackinac, my heart failed me. Besides, we couldn't move Alan. But if we stayed? We had – I laid them out in my mind's eye – less than ten pounds of pease, even less flour, a birchbark container of dried fish, one pound of salt, maybe less. The strips of dried meat were all gone. There were berries in the woods, but how would we preserve them? We could fish if the weather got better, until the ice came. The geese would move on. We had no winter clothes – Alan no longer had even a shirt to his back – though we had furs if we had the means to sew them. We could make shelter. We had guns – I still had to clean the sand out of Alan's musket – but too little powder and lead. The axe was big enough to split kindling, but not to cut logs. No saw, no snowshoes, no sledge, no birchbark . . . If the winter caught up on us, we were dead men. But if we set out . . . and there was a war out there. The Americans might even now be between us and Mackinac, or at Mackinac itself. We hadn't time to be wary . . . I tossed restlessly to and fro.
Then – which was a fatal mistake – I began thinking about Pakané and Waase'aaban, and Loic's promise to Pakané; he wasn't the only one: I'd told Waase'aaban I'd come back. It would be terrible if she were waiting for me, and I did not come. It would also be terrible if she did not wait for me, and I did come. Perhaps it would be worst of all if she did wait for me, and I did come . . . But even as I contemplated the evils resulting from my sin, my baser part began to re-live that sin, even as I first committed it. And it was that memory – not prayer, repentance, nor a considered solution to the problems that beset us – that finally soothed my brain and let me drift into a dreamless sleep.
1 In Cumberland we have field mushrooms, puffballs and ink-caps, all of which are edible. I also know where to find chanterelles in the woods. My mother showed us the places when we were children, but we keep that information strictly within the family: I have passed it on to my sons accordingly. It surprised me that the Indians made no use of their plethora of fungi, and seemed unable to teach me anything about them. My wife was unfamiliar with either harvesting or cooking mushrooms of any kind, and nervous in the eating of them. This took her many years to overcome, and to this day. when I bring home a feast of fungi, I must perforce turn cook to boot. I have no objection to that, though there are Friends who might be disconcerted to see my handiness with a frying pan and skillet. In the wilderness a man must fend for himself in all ways, and I have never quite forgotten the culinary skills I acquired thereby.
2 That ball is in Alan yet. I asked in my letter a year or two back if it ever troubled him. He said that, since I asked, his left shoulder was a touch rheumaticky in winter, but not half so bad as his leg, and that otherwise he was pretty hale, and reckoned to make old bones yet.
CHAPTER 21
NOTHING IS EVER SO BAD AS IT SEEMS IN THE DEAD hours before the morning. The storm passed. We moved our camp into the clearing, where the mosquitoes were all gone. We built a shelter, protecting our square of canvas with green cedar saplings and moss with earth packed over it, and we covered the floor with a thick mattress of cedar boughs. We were never so wet again, though more bands of rain came sweeping through. Alan's wound did not putrefy, which is what I'd dreaded, but slowly began to heal. I think his collar bone was broken too, but I durst not meddle any more than I had to, so I let it be. I went out alone, and shot a goose as it flew over the little lake. I had to swim to retrieve it: the water was very shallow, but I sank into mud so deep I couldn't wade. The nights were cold, and day after day Lake Michigan was grey and yeasty, with white-capped waves in the open water. The forest had turned to yellow and gold, all but the sombre cedar groves, which seemed the more dim and chill as the sun sank lower.
The sands of time were running out fast. The fever left Alan very weak, but deprived him of neither wit nor courage. I'd liked him for a long time; it was only now that I learned to respect him. I knew when he was in pain by his silence. There was no more laudanum, so I let Loic dose him with brandy, and we made tisanes of wintergreen, which was better than nothing. As the wound healed I grew more concerned about the broken leg. I made a support for it, and weighted the end. When Alan realised I'd, as he put it, ‘ruined all his clothes’ he borrowed my needle and thread and sat propped against the support I'd rigged for him, painstakingly sewing up his rent breeches with the kind of huge stitches one sees on the edge of blankets. He was too tired to work at it for more than a few minutes at a time. I gave him my spare shirt, and put off worrying about our lack of winter clothing.
The day came when we woke to a grimin of snow and when I went to fill the kettle I found the lake clear grey, and as flat as a pond. The sky was bright and chill, without a wisp of cloud. I broke the film of ice, and washed my face in freezing water. When I turned to go back with the full kettle, there was Loic at the top of the beach, scanning the horizon.
‘What does thee think?’
‘I think now, or die,’ said Loic.
It was already past dawn. Loic had finished mending the canoe; its birchbark covering was as seaworthy as it could possibly be. We had so little food now that everything fitted. We lifted Alan in amidships with his back against the bales, and one blanket under him and two over him. I'd made a sling for his arm with twine and a handkerchief. I'm sure he neglected to use it when I was not by; by now he could use his left hand almost as well as ever.
We set a course for the great sand dunes the Indians call Sleeping Bear. Slowly the Manitou Islands faded into faint humps on the horizon behind us, and the land ahead took shape. I was in the bow, with only the water in front of me. It was very cold, and very quiet. I fancied I could hear the lake breathing around us, in a long faint rise and fall. Otherwise there was only the rapid swish and dip of the two paddles. We stopped once. I could see that Alan was shivering uncontrollably. There was nothing I could do about it. He took a swig of brandy from Loic; I was doubtful whether it would help for long. I wiped the sweat from my face with my sleeve, dipped my tin cup, and took a long drink of water.
’Allez allez‘ called Loic from behind me, and we fell into our fast rhythm again. My shoulders ached; we'd been too long ashore. I thought of Marc and Jean-Pierre, Jacques and Alban, doubtless all at home in Montreal by now. With a dozen voyageurs the few miles to the mainland would be nothing on a day like this.
We paddled in past the north point of the dunes, and into the wide bay where we'd camped before. There wasn't much daylight left, so we made a voyageurs’ camp in our old place at the edge of the pine trees. Alan was chilled right through, so we built a big fire. The night was still and clear; I thought our luck might hold. I was wrong. When I looked out the next morning, it was snowing.
Our good fire had done its work, though. Just before noon we heard voices. Alan flung aside the sling and reached for his musket. Loic took up the other gun – we kept both loaded at half cock – but it was I that scrambled out of the shelter first. Through the swirling snow I saw three people, clad from head to foot in furs and buckskins. They had no guns, and to my relief the middle one was a woman.
’Boozhoo,‘ I said. ‘Biindigen.‘
Loic crawled out after me, and I let him do the talking. ‘They say this is their hunting ground – I tell them we had no choice but to come here – I say how we could not leave South Manitou because we have a wounded man – they say we cannot stay here – if we want we can
make a camp on the other side of the little lake – I ask if they will trade with us – they have furs and birchbark – but not food – I say we have furs, we need food – they say they will trade some rice and birchbark for my gun, and half the powder and shot. The fact is, Mark, I think they have many trade furs still from last year's hunting. They've not been able to sell because of the war. That's why they're anxious to trade with us.’
‘For thy gun! But we must hunt!’
‘We must have clothes and shelter first. I think we have no choice.’
We looked at each other, while snowflakes whirled in the air between us. ‘We'd better do it at once, then,’ I said.
I listened hard to the rest of the talk, and caught the gist of it. When Loic told me he was going to their lodge now, taking the trade goods, I said, ‘Ay, I understood that. Will they help thee carry the things back?’
I lost track of the quick words that followed. ‘For the rest of our tobacco they'll bring everything to the place by the little lake. There was a wigwam there before. It's a good place, they say. Then I'll come back and fetch you both.’
‘Loic.’
’Oui?‘
‘Thee won't mention that we have another . . . of those?’
’Je ne suis pas fou!‘
While Loic was gone I gathered wood, while the snow showers came and went. It was a thick wet snow that melted almost as fast as it came. I didn't bother with the little axe, but used my weight and strength to break up dead branches. By the time Loic came back I had a big cache of wood under a shelter of boughs. I set up our trap, and the very first night I caught a porcupine. Beginner's luck, Alan said. I agreed it was true my success owed more to Providence than to my particular skill. I saved the quills carefully and roasted the meat on a wooden spit. Alan, to my surprise, took my rebuke about luck to heart, for he said a grace over our meat in the Episcopalian fashion, giving thanks where it was due.
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