The Tenderness of Wolves

by Stef Penney

  Knox takes the trap and drives himself to Dove River to visit Angus Ross. He has failed to locate the source of the rumour, and chastises himself for believing it so readily. Since it broke he has heard increasingly wild stories: that the Maclarens have been butchered in their beds; that a child has gone missing; even that the prisoner tied Knox himself up while he made his escape. So he has a reasonable hope of finding Mrs Ross at home.

  He finds Ross mending fences in the fields beyond the house. Ross keeps working as Knox approaches, only straightening up and acknowledging him when he is a few paces away. The man is known for his taciturnity, as his wife is known for her disregard for convention, but he greets him cordially enough.

  ‘Angus.’

  ‘Andrew, I hope you’re well.’

  ‘Well enough.’ He is one of the few people in Dove River who have no apparent difficulty in using Knox’s Christian name. ‘I know why you’re here.’

  Ross has pale eyes and hair and a stolid demeanour. He reminds Knox of weathered granite: a typical Pict. He and his wife share the same stubbornness, although she is rather elegant and English-looking, if flinty. Granite and flint. The sort of people it is impossible to imagine in intimate circumstances (Knox turns his mind from this with a mental shudder and guilty self-admonition.) And they are both so different from Francis that no one could ever mistake him for their natural child.

  ‘Yes. We’ve heard some wild rumours today. Everyone is in turmoil with the prisoner getting out. It is most unfortunate.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. She has gone, but she hasn’t gone against her will.’

  Knox waits for a moment for more information. But Ross is not that forthcoming.

  ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘To look for Francis. She said she would. She couldn’t bear the worry.’

  Knox is astonished at the man’s coolness, even if he’d expected as much.

  ‘I expect she’ll run into the Company men.’

  ‘She’s alone?’

  Ross shrugs minutely, watching his eyes. ‘If you’re asking me whether the prisoner went with her, I can’t say. I can’t imagine why he would want to help her, can you?’

  ‘Aren’t you worried, man? Your wife, out there … at this time of year?’

  Ross picks up his axe and mattock and heads towards the house. ‘Come and have a tea.’

  Knox realises he has no choice.

  What Ross shows Knox in his kitchen suggests that he need not worry unduly over the immediate welfare of Mrs Ross. She is, apparently, well equipped. He even reads the note she left, which is terse but expressive. The phrase ‘Pay no mind to what you will hear’ might allude to the prisoner’s escape, but it might not. Ross makes no comment on this. Knox wonders if Ross feels any jealousy, any concern of a husband whose wife might have run off with another man, however peculiar the circumstances. He can detect no sign of them.

  As he sips the tea–unexpectedly subtle–he finds himself speculating on the state of the Rosses’ marriage. Maybe they can’t stand each other after all these years. Maybe he’s glad she’s gone. And the son.

  ‘Perhaps it would be best, at the moment, if you said nothing of this to anyone else. I will say that I have spoken to you and that there is no immediate cause for concern. We don’t want any more … hysteria.’

  He envisages more and more men setting off on the journey north, and feels a bubble of wild laughter rising in his throat at the thought. An inappropriate reaction that is becoming more and more prevalent in him with increasing age. Perhaps it is the onrush of senility. He swallows it down–this is a serious business. But perhaps more men will not be necessary, since Donald Moody and Jacob are already, hopefully, on the spot–wherever that spot is.

  Ross nods. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Am I … right in thinking that you don’t intend to go after her yourself?’

  A tiny pause. With most men, his question would be construed as a slight.

  ‘Where would I go? In this weather I can’t know for sure where she has gone. As I said, she will most likely run into the Company men.’

  Is he now trying to justify himself? Knox feels a stab of antipathy. He is beginning to find this stoicism unnerving, not to say repellent.

  ‘Well …’ Knox stands up, giving in to the urge to leave. ‘Thank you for being so frank with me. I sincerely hope your family will both be restored to you very shortly.’

  Ross nods and thanks him for coming, seemingly untroubled by either concern or enthusiasm.

  Knox feels a certain relief on leaving Angus Ross. He has experienced similar feelings over some of his dealings with the natives, who don’t express their emotions in the same profusion as whites, and it is wearing to spend time in the company of those around whom a spontaneous smile feels like a childish weakness.

  Sturrock, dressed in a borrowed winter coat, picks his way through the new snow, examining the ground for traces of flight. To his right a man called Edward Mackay is doing exactly the same. On his left, a youth with an alarming Adam’s apple pokes the ground with a long stick. It is, Sturrock is aware, a hopeless task. Everything was done wrongly from the start. When the warehouse holding the prisoner was found empty, the news leaked out like quicksilver, simultaneously in every house in Caulfield, and people rushed out to stare and theorise, obliterating any tracks immediately outside. The powdery snow had started to fall in the night, probably covering all traces in any case, but the numbers of people involved made gleaning any information from the scene impossible.

  By the time Sturrock arrived, the ground around the warehouse was a sea of mud and slush, and no one had any idea where to look. So the able-bodied men were divided into bands and each took a different direction, scouring the ground in lines ten abreast. In this way they swept across the land around Caulfield, destroying any message the ground might have held for them. Sturrock protested mildly that this was the likely outcome, but since he was an outsider he was listened to politely and ignored. There have been several false alarms, as people shout that they have found a footprint or some sign of passage, but it always turns out to be a naturally occurring kink in the ground, or the trace of animals, or each other.

  Sturrock’s mind wanders back to the Scott house, where he has papers stashed under the mattress (he first checked for pests that might breakfast on them). He is prepared to stay as long as it takes, confident in the belief that he can ask Knox for more money, waiting for the reappearance of Mrs Ross’s son and the bone tablet. No one here has, he is certain, any idea of what it might be. He himself does not know, and it is a rare mind, like his, that can conceive of something so extraordinary.

  When Sturrock first met Laurent Jammet, it was a dull, gusty day in Toronto a year before. Sturrock had, as usual, allowed his obligations to outstrip his resources, and had been harangued at length by his landlady, Mrs Pratt. She was one of those people–sadly numerous–who did not recognise that Sturrock was a man meant for the finer things in life, and that he was favouring her by gracing her shabby premises. To recover from the galling experience, and think about how he was going to remedy the situation, he had entered one of the coffeehouses where he was still confident of squeezing some credit. He was spinning out his cup of coffee when he caught snatches of conversation from the men in the booth next to his.

  One of them, French by his accent, was saying he had traded with a man from Thunder Bay and been given a peculiar and probably worthless object that he didn’t notice until much later. It was an ivory tablet with markings on it, ‘like something from the Egyptians,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not Egyptians, they’re pictures, like birds and such,’ said another, from the sound of him another of those worthless Yanks who had taken advantage of the long border to escape the war. They were clearly passing the thing round their table.

  ‘I don’t know what that is,’ said a third. ‘Perhaps it’s Greek.’

  ‘Could be valuable, then,’ said the Frenchman.

  At this poi
nt Sturrock stood up and made himself known to the men in the next booth. It is his greatest skill, insinuating himself into all sorts of company from miners to earls, and he is one of the few white men to have earned the trust and liking of several Indian chiefs on both sides of the border. It was why he had made such a good searcher, and the Yank had heard of Sturrock, which helped in this instance.

  He said he had made a study of archaeology, and could perhaps assist them. The Yank regaled him with requests for stories, which Sturrock gratified while examining the thing in his hand. He made a play of not holding it of much account, and in truth he could not make head or tail of it. From the little he knew of Greek and Egyptian culture–his studies were a slight exaggeration–it was neither. But he was intrigued by the tiny figures surrounding the angular marks that seemed to be writing. They reminded him in style of the naive figures on Indian histories he had seen embroidered onto belts. Finally he handed the piece of ivory back to the Frenchman, whose name was Jammet, and said he did not know it, but knew that it was neither Egyptian, Latin, nor Greek, and therefore not one of the great old civilisations.

  One of the other men commiserated with Jammet, saying, ‘Maybe it’s ancient Indian then, that would be just your luck, eh?’

  The men laughed loudly. Shortly after that they went their separate ways, and Sturrock stayed another hour, sipping the cup of coffee the Frenchman had stood him.

  For the next couple of days the idea grew in his mind and would not be shaken out. Sturrock would be walking down the street (he could not afford to ride) when the sight of the tablet and its strange markings would swim up in front of his mind’s eye. Of course, everyone knew that the Indians had no written culture. Had never had.

  And yet. And yet.

  Sturrock went back to the coffeehouse and asked for the Frenchman, and found him again, as if by chance, outside a lodging house–in a better district than his own, he was careful to note. They chatted for a while and Sturrock said that he had spoken to a friend of his, a man who knew a lot of ancient languages, and would be interested in seeing the tablet. If he borrowed it for a day or two, to show him, perhaps he could help settle the matter of its value. Jammet revealed himself then as the hard-nosed trader he was and refused to part with it, except for a considerable sum of money. Sturrock, who thought he had been careful to mask his interest, was wounded by the lack of trust, but Jammet laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and said he would keep it for him, until he came up with the money. Sturrock pretended indifference, then hummed and hawed and begged a chance to copy the markings, just to be sure the object was of interest. Jammet produced it, amused, and he scribbled them down on a scrap of paper.

  Since then he had taken the transcribed copy to museums in Toronto and Chicago, to university professors and to men known for their scholarship, and had found no one who could disprove his theory. He didn’t say what he thought it might be, just asked if it was one of the Indo-European languages. The scholars thought not. They eliminated, between them, all the languages of the Ancient World. It might have helped if he knew where it came from, but he was wary of alerting the trader to his interest. Somewhere in the intervening months, it ceased to be an interest. It became an obsession.

  He fell into searching, as he told Moody, by chance. Sturrock had made a name for himself as a newspaperman, having previously tried his hand at the law, the theatre and the church. The last was the most successful of an unfortunate trio: his church developed a congregation of several hundred, drawn by his wit and eloquence, and he thrived–until his affair with the wife of a leading parishioner was exposed, and he was run out of town. Journalism suited his maverick tendencies better. It was varied, sociable, and allowed him to express his opinions in colourful language. But more than that, he discovered in himself a real campaigning spirit. Initially stirred by romantic ideas of noble savagery, he began to write about Indian affairs, and although he was quickly disabused of picturesque fancies, he was equally stirred by the reality he came to know. In particular he befriended a man called Joseph Lock, an octagenarian living in dire poverty near Ottawa, who told him stories of his tribe, the Pennacook, and how they had been forced off their land in Massachusetts. He was one of only a handful left, if not the very last remaining member of his tribe. Sturrock wrote brilliantly–he was often told, and he believed it–about Joseph’s plight, and he found himself becoming a sought-after guest in fashionable drawing rooms of Toronto and Ottawa. He felt he had found his niche.

  However, as he had found with all his other endeavours, nothing was meant to endure. His fame led to introductions to more Indians, younger, angrier men than Joseph, and his articles, instead of vividly describing poverty and lamenting past injustices (there were only so many ways you could say it), became increasingly polemical. Suddenly Sturrock found that editors were reluctant to publish his work. They made vague excuses, or blamed the fickleness of readers’ interest. He argued that people should be made aware of native feelings. The editors mumbled about affairs in England being more important, and shrugged. Doors closed to him. The invitations dried to a trickle. He felt the injustice, and felt he had been treated as the Indians had been treated.

  It was round about then that he was contacted by an American family who had lost their son in an Indian raid. Though this was south of the Lakes, in Michigan, the father had been told about Sturrock and was intelligent and desperate enough to believe he could help. Sturrock was now close to fifty, but he threw himself into the task with imagination and vigour. Partly, perhaps, because of his outsider status, the Indians welcomed him, trusted him. After several months he found the boy living with a band of Huron in Wisconsin. The boy agreed to go back to his family.

  Once again, Thomas Sturrock became respected. After that first satisfactory outcome he took on several more cases of abducted children and was successful in two-thirds of them. Usually the problem lay not so much in locating the missing children, as in persuading them to return to their previous life. He was good at persuasion.

  Then, after a couple of years, he received a letter from Charles Seton. The Seton case was different from most he had known, seeing as it was more than five years since the girls had vanished, and there was no evidence to say that they had been kidnapped by Indians in the first place. Still, his confidence boosted by success, Sturrock was unwilling to turn down what could, he felt, turn out to be the crowning glory of his career. He was making a living, but no one was going to get rich by finding the children of poor settlers.

  He had not noticed when it first began to get out of hand. Charles Seton still, after five years, burned with grief. His wife had died of it, compounding his loss. He no longer worked, and dedicated his remaining resources to finding the girls. The search for his lost daughters had become the only thing he had left. Sturrock should have recognised the signs of a man for whom no explanation could suffice, no outcome recompense for all he had suffered. Sturrock’s hope that the girls would be found dwindled. Many believed that they must have perished instantly, their remains carried off by wild animals. After a year of searching, Sturrock himself began to lean towards this view, but Charles Seton would not hear of it. It was impossible even to mention such a thing in his hearing.

  During this time, when Sturrock was travelling frequently between Lake Ontario and Georgian Bay, he met a young Indian called Kahon’wes, a militant journalist who was writing about the political plight of the natives. Kahon’wes was eager to meet Sturrock and gather newspaper contacts, and though Sturrock felt he could not help him much, having drifted out of those circles, they became good friends. Kahon’wes called him Sakota:tis, meaning Preacher, and Sturrock was flattered by the attention, and by the way the young man idealised him. They had long talks into the night about the wars south of the border, and about the politicians in Ottawa. They talked about culture, the perception of Indians as a Stone Age people, and the prejudice a written culture holds against an oral one. Kahon’wes told him of excavations on the Ohio river w
hich uncovered giant earthworks and artefacts dating from before Christ. On finding such things, the white archaeologists refused to believe that Indians could be the same people as this civilisation of builders and carvers (and, therefore, the Indians could be ruthlessly supplanted by the whites, just as the Indians had, supposedly, supplanted these others).

  It was these conversations, a decade on, that came back to Sturrock as he trod the streets of Toronto making his enquiries into the bone tablet. He started to imagine the monograph that he would write on the subject, and the shock wave that would sweep through North America on its reception. Publishing such a monograph could give incalculable help to the cause of his Indian friends, and, incidentally, would make him famous. Sadly he could no longer seek out Kahon’wes for his opinion, as the man had succumbed to drink and drifted across the border. Such a fate often befalls men who step off the path they are born onto.

  *

  So, as Sturrock plods through the snow, he ignores the stunning, sombre landscape, and his blundering fellow searchers (amateurs, all of them), his thoughts turning again to Kahon’wes, and his own, long unrealised ambition. For such a prize, any amount of waiting, any amount of inconvenience, will be worth it.

  Other than with my husband, I have spent relatively little time alone with a man, so I find it hard to judge what’s normal and what isn’t. The third day out from Dove River I walk behind Parker and the sled and reflect that he’s spoken all of five sentences to me, and wonder if I’ve done something wrong. Of course I know that the circumstances are unusual, and I am a more than normally reticent person, but even so, I find his silence unnerving. For two days I have not had the inclination to ask questions, and have needed all my strength to keep up with the punishing pace, but today it seems a little easier; we hit a stretch of path that is relatively smooth, where the cedars shelter us from the wind. We move through a permanent twilight under the trees, the only sound the creak of footsteps and the hiss of willow runners on snow.