A Dark and Promised Land

by Nathaniel Poole

  “Rose!”

  Lachlan runs over and embraces his daughter. “Oh, my wee bairn, I thought I’d lost thee … God’s blood, you’re freezing.” Too cold to reply, Rose slides into her father’s arms, hiding her face from death. He wraps her with his wet coat.

  Overheated cannon aboard the burning frigate ignites, blowing out the side of the ship and sending several balls whining over the water to smash into the forest, shattering several trees. In unison, all the watchers ashore jump back.

  Spotting a Company official, Cecile Turr, Lachlan seats his daughter on the beach and hurries over to him. “We must find shelter for these people, Mr. Turr,” he says, grabbing the man by the arm and blowing frost clouds into his face. “We must start a fire!” The man turns his sad, heavy eyes toward him, pulls his arm away and sits on the beach, lowering his face into his hands.

  Lachlan fights an urge to shout; helpless, he looks up the beach at a palisade of dark trees roaring in the wind. As he watches, several shapes emerge from the forest. Flames from the burning frigate glitter on polished silver and beadwork.

  Chapter Two

  Alexander McClure opens his eyes and feels grit under the lids scrape against his eyeballs. He cannot imagine where he is, the smell of muddy pig shit, nauseating and unfamiliar. Fragments of memory whirl in his head like torpid summer fireflies.

  He is on his back, his eyes taking in a thin, washed sky; the fort’s palisade glows in the first light of dawn like a line of rough-hewn nails fresh from the forge. It had rained during the night; his clothes feel like peeling, wet skin. Distant shouts of men carry from the riverbank and a cannon thuds, startling him. York Fort. He rolls over with a groan.

  At this movement, an enormous hog bedded beside him begins nuzzling his hair with its wet snout. Alexander shoves at it, and pain sears through his hand; the knuckles are stiff and crusted with blood. Memories of a brawl hover at the edge of consciousness. Something about cheating at cards.

  He reaches for his purse, unsurprised to find it gone. Whether he lost during the fight or an Indian stole it as he lay in filth, he would probably never know. He sees a pair of them squat against the palisade, shadowed eyes watching him. The hog thrusts its snout into his shirt with a contented grunt.

  “Get away,” he mumbles as he stands up, leaning on the massive, black beast. Limping, he makes his way through the fort gates and slides down the high riverbank, his heels digging twin furrows with a following clatter of pebbles. At the bank, he peels off his clothes and wades into the water. It is cold but not icy, and he dives into its depths, surfacing with a splutter and cough, his long yellow hair streaming.

  By the time he emerges, the sun is over the bank and the day is already warm. He spreads himself naked on the shore to dry. His brown body is lithe and slender, with wiry muscles; a form descended from runners, more Cree than Scots. A pale flower on his left thigh bulges with a lump of loose bone. A buffalo’s horn long ago ran him through there, and it still bothers him.

  He rubs his scabby knuckles. Someone had a busted jaw or an eye that wouldn’t see for quite a good while, he assures himself. He can’t recall details, but is unsurprised at this: it is common for the fur traders to consume enormous quantities of spirits over many days, often amounting to several gallons. Some wake up in chimneys or in the holds of ships far out to sea. Sometimes they never wake, which is far from the worst fate that can befall a man in Rupert’s Land.

  The son of a Highlander — a fur trader from Albany Factory — and a Cree woman, Alexander has lived in many places, none very long. As a child, he spent much time in York Fort, an oddity in that most Half-caste bastards lived with their mothers. But unlike most Orkneymen, who only served their contracted seven years on the bay, his father had been adamant that his son be raised as a Christian despite the disapproval of many, including the Fort’s factor.

  Every fall, he accompanied the brigades to the lands south and west of Missinipi — the Big Water — the land of his mother. He was left in her care while his father traded for furs at Indian encampments along the distant Athabasca and Slave Lake systems. In the spring, he always returned, and, after collecting his son, they spent the summer at the Bay.

  Alexander loved the intense activity of York Fort, the ships arriving from England, the canoe and York boat brigades from Rupert’s Land. There was always so much coming and going, so much drinking and fighting and haggling and trading that it was easy for a child to stand unnoticed and take it all in, even though his hair made him stand out among his Indian cohorts. When things were sorting themselves out in his mother’s womb, he had received his father’s yellow hair — what little there was: his mother didn’t call him Paskwastikwân, or Old Baldy, for nothing — and his father’s passionate temper. His mother’s gift was her dark skin and deep love for the wild lands. He thinks it a fair exchange.

  Some Company employees despised Half-caste whelps, and these people he had tormented mercilessly. That he was often caught and beaten made no difference; he would sit in a birch tree all day long for the chance to shit on someone, and more than one night he spent hiding in the forest, the terror of the Machi Manitou less than that of his enraged father.

  There was a school of sorts at the factory for the servant’s and the Home Guard children, but he often managed to be elsewhere when the lessons started. He preferred to haunt the trade store, hiding behind barrels of traps or axe heads, momentarily freed from the torment of adults who thought there was always something useful for an eight-year-old to do. Secreted away and pulling the limbs off captured spiders or flies, he listened to the fur traders attempts at a better deal. They were rarely successful.

  Despite their formidable size and armament, they could never get the Company’s chief trader to change his mind. A slight man with white hair and spectacles, he never became angry, never exchanged insults or profanities, regardless how sorely provoked. The rate for made beaver was set in London and as immutable as the Commandments, he always explained to the bristling men on the opposite side of the counter, showing them the Official List of Exchange. None of them could read, but the list was imposing, nonetheless; you could argue with a man but not the Company.

  Once an agitated Bunjee, with face blackened with grease and charcoal, had burst into the store and thrown a musket onto the counter, loudly complaining that he had been forced to live off muskrats and rabbits for months because his gun wouldn’t shoot accurately.

  “Nonsense,” the chief trader replied with a smile. “The Company’s trade guns are the finest in the world. They never fail in the hands of a worthy and knowledgeable hunter.”

  The Bunjee grabbed the musket and pressed the muzzle against the trader’s forehead, just above his spectacles.

  “Maybe you right, let us find out …” he said.

  “I see your position,” the old trader replied. “I will gladly replace the weapon with the Company’s apologies.”

  It was the only time Alexander had ever seen the old man beaten.

  The fur traders that came to York Factory with the brigades were enormous men with long bushy beards and clad in buffalo robes. The Half-breeds wore their distinctive red sashes and beaded and embroidered jackets. Most carried a beaded octopus bag and a powder horn and musket slung on their shoulders. The Half-breeds most often spied him, and, with a wink, gave him a candy. His presence thus betrayed, one of the junior clerks invariably chased him out with a broom.

  Very rarely he was invited into the warehouse, most often when someone needed help moving something. He was always amazed at the wealth stored at the factory: guns, powder and shot, powder horns, flints and gun worms, knives, axe and hatchet heads. Pots, pans, and stacked piles of okimow, the striped Hudson’s Bay blankets; sugar, Brazil tobacco, and awl blades. Tiny brass hawk bells to sew on to clothing and harness that made a delightful tinkle with the slightest movement. Hundreds of pounds of bright glass beads of every colour. Batteries of iron kettles, traded by the pound. There were boxes of fish hooks
, nets, ice chisels, lines, sword blades, and bayonets the Indians fashioned into spears.

  Compared to the few possession his mother’s people carried with them, this was an unimaginable bounty. He would have undoubtedly lifted something but for the fact that the humourless clerk had always searched him when they left the warehouse. He had been too young to understand that what so awed him was merely the detritus of a distant, arrogant civilization.

  But eventually autumn wound its way through the land, and heralded by the angry bellows of rutting moose, his father loaded the gear required for a season of trading, returning Alexander to the land of his mother at the forks of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers.

  A free, enviable life. But that was before Selkirk came.

  “McClure!”

  He looks around. Standing at the top of the bank, one of his brigade is looking down at him. “Aye?”

  The man gestures with a thumb over his shoulder. “Chief trader wants to see you, and he’s the devil this morning.”

  Alexander nods and waves to the man, who stares a moment and disappears. The summons is expected; the peltries Alexander had traded were mostly miserable summer affairs neatly wrapped with a few prime ones as disguise. The ruse lasted long enough to collect credit and get drunk. Now the reckoning has arrived — as it always did.

  He craves a pipe, but can’t recall where he has stowed his gear. No doubt it followed his purse. “Piss on it,” he says.

  The morning is becoming hot, although his thick clothes remain sodden. The feeling as he tugs them on is distasteful, reminding him of how skin slid off a corpse turned liquid by sun and flies. His boots squelch water as he climbs his halting way up the bank to the fort.

  William Spencer, chief trader, is tall and lanky with a scrawny, loose neck with skin hanging off it like a turkey. His fingers are knobby and he stinks of the sour tallow with which he smears himself to ward off blackflies and mosquitoes. He has a habit of constantly digging his tongue at either corner of his mouth.

  “There you are, McClure. It’s about time,” he says in his irritating whine, sounding as always as if something cold was squeezing his testicles. The chief trader’s office is in a flanker, a small triangle-shaped closet high above the central courtyard. Originally intended for cannon, but the guns never arrived from England, so the embrasure behind Spencer is pasted over with Company handbills.

  “Aye,” Alexander replies, not bothering to remove his hat. “You wanted to see me?”

  “I asked for you over an hour ago, McClure. You seem to think that Company time is yours to piss away as you see fit.”

  “Get to the point, man.”

  “The point is that you have been living beyond your means, living off the Company’s good graces, in fact.”

  Alexander crosses his arms and says nothing. Spencer’s colour rises. Sucking in his breath, he twitches a ledger sheet across the desk.

  “What do you say to that?”

  Alexander doesn’t bother looking at the paper, but continues to stare at the chief trader.

  “I’ll tell you what it says, you illiterate bugger,” Spencer shouts. “You delivered a bundle of made beaver, or so you told my ass of a clerk. But there were no more than a dozen pelts worthy of the name and the rest is flyblown shit.”

  “Is that so?” Alexander says, cocking an eyebrow. “I could have sworn …”

  “And you helped yourself to several pounds’ worth of trade liquor, bought on what is now shown to be almost worthless credit!”

  Alexander shrugs. “I will pay with next season’s furs.”

  “Not good enough, McClure. I have shown this to the factor, and he wants to talk to you.”

  “Eh?”

  Spencer leans back in his chair and smiles up at the trader in front of him. “Yes. You’re more trouble than you’re worth, Half-caste. When Himself is finished with you, your balls will be flying from the Company’s flagpole.

  “You’re a prick, Spencer.” Alexander says. Furious that shooting the chief trader is not a recommendable option, he strides over and kicks the desk. It careens back, sending the man crashing against the wall.

  “McClure!” The factor has entered the room. He is a large man, with florid cheeks and sunken eyes carrying heavy bags. Although a gentleman, he gives the impression of having spent a great deal of time brawling in taverns. His habitual cravat, neatly pressed frock coat, and tailored trousers seem incongruous at York Fort. He is the most powerful man on the frontier — more powerful than a governor — and accountable only to the board of the Company of Adventurers in London. “Get up, you fool,” he says to Spencer, still tangled in his chair and scrabbling on the floor. “McClure, you come with me.”

  Without a word, Alexander follows the factor out of the flanker. It is warm on the ramparts and fat blue bottles gather, lifting and buzzing and settling again on the sharpened posts of the palisade wall. They swirl about each other as if driven by unseen cyclones. A hum fills the air.

  They walk slowly, the factor pausing occasionally, looking out over the walls into the distance. Time and again, he looks southward toward the roadstead, to the Hayes River scalloped by wind. In all other directions, the landscape is scabby swamp brush, a featureless black-green stretching to hazy distance. To the far west, Hudson’s Bay is barely visible, a silver herring on the edge of sight.

  There are no ships at anchor, but they are due. Every year they arrive with the season, to take back furs to England and deliver trade stuff, equipment, and supplies. It had been that way since he was a boy, and even wars, local and distant, did not stop the trade. At the first sight of masts, he and his friends used to run to the cannon to wait the salute; the factor’s secretary came from the fort, and when the ship at last dropped anchor, the gun was touched off and the children running away squealing. A long time ago.

  “I don’t need these kinds of petty annoyances, McClure,” the factor says, startling Alexander out of his memory. He searches the young man’s face and turns away. “You look a lot like your father,” he says. “No, don’t thank me! You’re not even a shadow of him. That man was as strong as bull and yet as honest as the day. He was a great friend of mine.”

  “He spoke often of you, sir.”

  The factor grunts in reply and mops his forehead with a greasy kerchief. “But nothing stays the same. Not for him, not for me, not even for you. You aren’t your father, but you will have to do. Do you know what’s out there, McClure?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nothing less than the fate of the Company. The Nor’westers have us by the throat. There are three ships overdue and if they are lost, I fear the Company of Adventurers is bankrupt. But it’s more than that. Do you know what one of those ships is carrying?” McClure shakes his head. “Colonists. More of those goddamned colonists that we have had to deal with these last seasons. Starving, desperate, ignorant Highlanders shipped here by Lord Selkirk for his fucking colony. They should be transported to Van Diemen’s Land, but the Lords will not listen. And so they have become my problem.”

  Alexander knows about the colonists. For the last two years, boatloads of desperate peasants fleeing the Highland Clearances had arrived unbidden on the shores of Hudson’s Bay. Last year’s lot had been mistakenly delivered to Fort Churchill, which could not possibly accommodate them, and they were forced to make a starvation trek south to York Fort. Their arrival was not cheered, and, as soon as possible, they were sent on their way to Selkirk’s new colony at Fort Douglas, deep in the heart of Indian, Métis, and Nor’wester territory.

  Although unbidden and despised wherever they went, Alexander had to hand it to them: they were one hell of a tough lot. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t be sorry for me, McClure. Because I am making them your problem.”

  “I don’t understand?”

  “I will not countenance their staying a day longer than absolute necessity at York Fort. Once they arrive — if they arrive, God help us — you will immediately guide them to F
ort Douglas. The very next day, in fact. Take what supplies and men you think you need, but I will want them gone, y’hear me? When that cannon over there fires, that’s your signal to pack.”

  “But, sir, I was hoping …”

  “I don’t care what you were hoping for, McClure.”

  “I’ve never guided a brigade before. And I don’t know how to deal with Scottish peasants. No one can understand their chatter, their tongue.”

  “Then you will learn how. I’m not giving you a choice, man, your father’s son or no, you will do this for me. Or you will never again set foot in York Factory or any other Company post for the rest of your days.”

  Alexander begins to sweat. While he can easily trade with the Nor’westers if he chooses, he holds a superstitious awe of the London-based company and feels almost a filial duty to her. Exile from York Factory would be to lose his only contact with his dead father’s world.

  But to guide a brigade of foreigners! He knows the route between York Fort and Fort Douglas better than most, but has been content to travel as part of a brigade lead by others, limiting his role to trading furs and manning the sweeps. This is something else entirely.

  The fort below them is subdued, too quiet for the time of year. In that the Factor is truthful — nothing will be right until the field pieces by the river are let off in honour of the ship’s arrival. It was a cause for celebration, with feasting and heavy drinking following the emptying of the ships. As a boy, he frequently took advantage of the drunken adults, lifting their purses or other personal effects to trade for sweets. Once at twelve years of age, he had stolen a trader’s pistol, but when the man awoke, he accused someone from another brigade of the thievery. A deadly fight was in the making, forcing a terrified Alexander to confess his guilt to his father, who hauled him before the furious trader. The man was shaggy and dark, bristling with weapons, and he whipped Alexander’s behind and legs with a sharp willow until it broke, while Alexander’s Indian friends laughed at him. He ran off in shame and did not return to the fort for three days, forced at last by hunger to apologize to his father.