Beneath a Hunter's Moon

by Michael Zimmer

  “Baptiste! And Charles! Jules, and René, ye scoundrel! I would have thought Hudson’s Bay had hung ye by now! And Joseph! By the Lord, Joseph, will ye be comin’ with us again? Good, man, good! Antoine! And Etienne, and John McKay, ’tis good to see ye! Aye, laddies, ’tis a fine hunt we’ll have, with most of the best of us already here, and the rest soon to follow!”

  Maybe thirty men were crowded around the tall Scotsman, their voices lifting as one in a polyglot of French, English, and what Pike thought must be at least a couple of different Indian dialects. But they all turned silent when Pike rode into the yard and dismounted. They stepped back and fanned out, their gazes shifting questioningly to Big John.

  “An American,” McTavish announced loudly, “and a friend. Pike is his name.”

  Big John’s proclamation released a quick prattle from the half-breeds, and several of them stepped forward.

  “I am René Turcotte,” said one, a short, barrel-chested man with a thin mustache and a narrow goatee. His skin was dark, his straight black hair cut square at the top of his shoulders in what Pike was beginning to realize was a common fashion among the Métis, and his eyes were quick and bright. “You are a friend to Big John, then you are a friend to René.” He took Pike’s hand and shook it vigorously.

  “Oui, and I am Baptiste LaBarge,” said another, shouldering Turcotte aside to grab Pike’s hand in his own. LaBarge wasn’t as broad-shouldered as Turcotte, nor did he sport a goatee, but there was little difference otherwise—between any of them. A few wore short beards, others went clean-shaven or cultivated trimmed mustaches, some had hair or eyes that were lighter than the norm, although still generally dark. But mostly they were the same, made that way by the blood of their mother’s people, Pike guessed. Even their dress was similar—smoked leather and brightly colored cloth, moccasins, and broad knit sashes, lots of quill- and beadwork.

  When LaBarge stepped back, another took his place, and in that manner Pike eventually exchanged greetings with all of them, each introducing himself as he grasped Pike’s hand, making him welcome. Several of them proclaimed their friendship for all Americans, and a few asked if he intended to open a trading post or tavern. Throughout it all, McTavish looked on, grinning broadly, until the last man had stepped away. Then he said: “Welcome to me home, Mister Pike, and ye own, as long as ye’re willin’ to stay.”

  Turcotte called to one of the boys standing nearby and a youth of ten or twelve stepped forward.

  “Give the lad ye pony, Mister Pike,” McTavish instructed as he handed the boy the reins to his stallion. “He’ll be cared for properly, and ye tack will be brought back soon enough.”

  Pike handed the kid the bay’s reins and the boy led both animals away. A few of his friends went along to help, but most of them stayed, their faces as eager as their fathers’.

  “The buffalo, Big John, did you find them?” a half-breed asked.

  “Aye, Etienne. Not personally, but Mister Pike saw ’em on the Mouse River. They were heading south for the Dogden Butte.”

  “The Maisons des Chiens?”

  “Aye.”

  “The heart of the Sioux hunting grounds,” Turcotte added darkly, and Joseph Breland shouted: “And where else, René?”

  “You are afraid of the Sioux, René?” LaBarge asked with a mock gravity that caused several of them to chuckle.

  “Non! René Turcotte is afraid of no one!” the half-breed protested, but the others were already jumping in to join the fun, their hoots and gibes quickly overriding Turcotte’s denial.

  Then McTavish roared: “Lies, all! René Turcotte is afraid of no man! So says Big John McTavish, and who’s to argue that?”

  “Isabella!” Etienne Cyr offered in feigned innocence, bringing forth another peal of laughter. McTavish, too, was laughing, taking the ridicule onto himself, Pike noticed, and away from Turcotte, whose face had grown dark with indignation.

  “Or the girl,” LaBarge added, but the laughter faded when McTavish’s face slowly changed. “Celine,” LaBarge appended.

  “Celine?” McTavish’s voice was soft with confusion. “Are ye… are ye tellin’ me the lass is here, Baptiste?”

  “Ho, listen to this one!” a half-breed shouted, but no one else responded. Soon, their expressions sobered.

  “I brought her,” Charles Hallet explained. “She came with a Hudson’s Bay dispatch canoe as far as Fort Douglas, but I brought her here.”

  “Then ’tis me thanks I’m owin’ ye, Mister Hallet,” McTavish said, although his words sounded hollow and uncertain. “And where would she be now?”

  “The house,” Hallet replied. “She is… beautiful, Big John. Like her mother.”

  “Aye, and what else would she be?” McTavish forced a grin that looked almost hideous from the strain, then turned toward the house with a drag in his step.

  “We thought you’d sent for her, Big John!” LaBarge called after him. “We thought you knew.”

  Chapter Four

  Celine.

  How long had it been? Big John tried to remember the last time he had seen her. On the canot du nord, of course, the big freight canoe that had taken her away, but when? How many years ago?

  Casting back into his memory, he saw a fleet of slim, birch-bark freighting canoes riding the choppy waters of the Red River offshore from Fort Douglas. A drifting mist had been falling that day. He could still remember the grumbling of the voyageurs as they glided slowly away from shore, damp and chilled by the inclement weather and the journey not even begun.

  And alone among the nearly two score of rough, hardy canoe men, a girl of just six tender years, a frightened, tiny child crammed in among the sacks of pemmican and bales of meat and buffalo robes that were bound for Fort William and the great annual rendezvous of the North West Company. Isabella had tearfully wrapped the child in a patchy summer robe before placing her in the canoe, and the vision of her huddled there, her cramped oval face, the dark, spiritless eyes locked on his from beneath her shaggy cowl, tore at him like bloody fangs.

  But his heart had been like stone then, impenetrable. He hadn’t even waved good-bye.

  The cabin’s front door unexpectedly flew open and Big John jerked to a halt. Fear welled up within him, but it was only the boy, Alec.

  “Big John!” Alec cried happily. “Did you find the buffalo? Are they far?”

  “On the Mouse, and waitin’ for ye,” Big John replied. His fingers itched to grab the boy, to lift him high until he shouted in delight. But Alec had outgrown such coltish displays of affection. Sometimes Big John wondered if he was the only one who missed them.

  Alec was Gabriel’s brother, and for most of his life he had been little more than a shorter version of the original, always tagging along whenever Gabriel permitted it. Yet even from the beginning, there had been disparities between the two, contrasts that had sharpened over the years, and especially of late.

  There was a passion for quick laughter and high adventure in Alec, coupled with an ability to shrug off misfortune the way most people shrugged off a jacket on a hot day. Life was a celebration for him, and in that regard he was like many of the Métis who resided in the valley, taking what came, turning his back on that which could not be changed.

  There was a capacity for irreverence within Gabriel, too, although it had never been of the same free-wheeling, devil-may-care bent that guided Alec. For Gabriel there was always a tempering of impulse, a sense of responsibility that seemed to stifle pure recklessness. He was like his father in that regard, Big John mused, and wondered how well Gabriel remembered Angus Gilray. Gabriel never spoke of him, although for that matter, neither did Big John. In his mind the death of Gabriel’s father had always been tied to his memory of Angelique’s passing.

  “Then I will go with the men to run buffalo this year?” Alec asked.

  The question caught Big John off guard. Then he recalled his last remark to the boy, and nodded sadly. “Aye, ye be thirteen, lad. That’s old enough, I’m thinkin’.
Sure, ye can run ’em this year.”

  “Ai, ai, ai, ai, ai!” Alec’s voice rose lustily, and he skipped back in an impromptu dance, knees pumping, arms flapping above his head. But Big John didn’t smile, not even then. Side-stepping the gyrating youth, he left him to his revelry.

  In his haste, Alec had left the cabin door open. Now it seemed to yawn ominously, like a gaping wound. Big John hesitated at its entrance, then took a deep breath and stepped inside. He paused to take in the room but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There was the same old table and benches, shelves cluttered with pots and pans and jars of spices. Bricks of tea were stacked one on top of the other alongside a pile of woven tobacco. In the big, arched stone fireplace a kettle of soup bubbled above a small blaze, a blackened teapot hanging from an iron arm at its side. The walls were whitewashed and the moccasin sole-polished oak floor gleamed as if freshly waxed. In the low plank ceiling, the opening to the loft gaped like an empty eye socket.

  At the fireplace, Isabella rose stiffly, a short chunky woman with almond-shaped eyes and a broad, flat nose. A full-blooded Cree, she wore the simple blue wool strap dress of her people; there was a cape that went with it that covered her bare shoulders, with removable sleeves, but she kept those on the shelf above the door when she was inside or when the weather was warm.

  On her chin were the traditional tattoos of a Cree woman, barely visible in the dim, early evening light—a straight line that ran from the center of her lower lip downward to a point just below her chin, then two flanking lines that flared outward as they descended toward her neck. Heavy brass earrings stretched her lobes and her fingers were encircled with thin rings of brass and copper, some spotted with glass rubies and diamonds. No hint of emotion altered the wooden cast of her face, but there was warmth in her eyes, and relief for Big John’s safe return. It was a thing only a man who knew her well would notice, and he smiled to see it now. Isabella was Gabriel’s and Alec’s mother, and sometimes she was Big John’s woman as well.

  “Bon jour, McTavish,” she said, then switched to English, which she knew he preferred. “You are well?”

  “Aye, I am.” His gaze circled the room.

  “There is soup, and water for tea,” Isabella offered.

  “The lass,” Big John said softly. “Where is she?”

  “She went for water.”

  He turned and sucked in his breath to find her standing behind him, a wooden bucket hanging from one slender fist. She hadn’t changed was his first stunned impression, but then he realized that she had, that she had grown and blossomed and become a woman in the years since she’d been away, and that it wasn’t Celine he had momentarily seen, but Angelique. The resemblance was disconcerting, and it made him catch his lower lip between his teeth to keep from crying out.

  Celine.

  She stood only a few inches above five feet, slim and darkly beautiful, her eyes solemn in a dusky face. She wore a voluminous drab brown dress pulled in at the waist by a plain red factory sash that she must have picked up at one of the forts. The sash emphasized the swell of her breasts and the flare of her hips in a way the dress itself was never meant to. Square-toed black shoes peeked out from beneath the dusty, mud-splattered hem of the frock. A blue shawl had fallen back on her shoulders to reveal coal-black hair that was wavy and full, glinting with soft shades of amber in the weakening light. Framed by the V of the shawl where it crossed over her breasts was a heavy silver crucifix, suspended from a braided horsehair cord. It was her only ornamentation.

  “Big John?” she queried uncertainly.

  “Aye,” he replied, feeling a pounding in his temples, a fuzzing at the edges of his vision.

  “Father?”

  “Aye,” Big John breathed.

  Celine.

  * * * * *

  In the bright, early-morning light her name came easily to his tongue, as natural as the flight of birds or the haunting, half-human cry of a loon. It had been different last night, though. Last night, while Isabella washed and put away the supper dishes and Alec knelt before the fire casting round balls for his fusil, Big John and Celine had sat at the table talking hesitantly. He thought she had been ready to make amends, to forgive or offer repentance, whichever he preferred, but the warmth she had reached for—his own forgiveness—had evaded her as it had him. Inexplicably he had found himself growing stiff and cold-shouldered, his words clipped with unwarranted bitterness, until their conversation had eventually faltered, then died.

  Isabella had continued her chores without comment, but Alec had put away his casting tools and left the house. He hadn’t returned until nearly dawn. Meanwhile, Big John had taken to his rocker, retreating into a stony silence of confusion, anger, guilt, and, above it all, shame. The ghost of that summer was twelve years gone now, yet it still tormented him. He supposed it always would. He would never know the whole truth of what had happened that day, but he knew he couldn’t continue to blame Celine for it. She had been a child then, beyond fault. As much a victim as he or Angelique, if not more so.

  His grip tightened on the roan’s reins, his jaw rigid.

  “Pembina?”

  Big John looked up as Pike jogged his bay close. Pointing ahead with his chin, Pike said: “Is that Pembina?”

  He glanced ahead to the bustling activity on the plain before them. Though still small in the distance, the sprawling, transient community was closer than it should have been before he noticed it. “Aye, it is,” he said.

  The Métis were gathered on the north bank of the Pembina, within the angle of land between that and the Red River. From here it looked as if there were already seventy or eighty lodges set up. There would probably be another twenty or thirty before the rendezvous broke up—two hundred or more hunters, and growing every year. The prairie northwest of the camp swarmed with close to one thousand head of cart ponies and oxen, grazing under the watchful eyes of several older boys.

  “A fair-size outfit,” Pike observed.

  “Aye, though not half as many as will go on the summer hunt in June.”

  “I was talking to René Turcotte last night. He says the ones who have gathered at your cabin will hunt separately from this bunch, that you’ll have no more than a handful of men.”

  “Better a small hunt than the likes of this.” Big John swept a hand toward the distant encampment. “Aye, we’ll be smaller, but we’ll be more than a handful, too. Maybe sixty or so hunters by the time we leave, and good men, all of ’em.”

  Spotting a flurry of motion at the western edge of the camp, a knot of horsemen taking shape under a rising cloud of dust, he said: “Prepare yeself, Mister Pike, for ’tis a rare sight ye’re about to behold.”

  The horsemen came at them in a run, their tough little Indian ponies stretched low to the ground, manes flapping like pennants. Big John could see the bright reds and greens and blues of the Métis’ clothing even from here. As they drew closer, he began to pick out the feathers and bits of trade silver that danced from men and animals alike. Grouped together, they seemed to bristle with the long, blued barrels of their trade guns, but, as they came within fusil range, they began to spread out, yipping their shrill war whoops.

  Big John glanced at Pike, curious to see how he would handle this feigned attack. The amused half grin that notched the trapper’s face and the bright sparkle in his eyes told Big John what he wanted to know. It was good, he thought, that Pike wasn’t intimidated by such displays of ferociousness. It would bode well for him in the weeks ahead.

  “It appears they’ve heard of ye, Mister Pike, and aim to see what mettle ye’re made of.”

  “So it would seem,” Pike agreed, laughing.

  “Shall we ride to meet them?”

  “Wagh!” Pike cried, the sound amazingly similar to a grizzly’s warning snort. Touching the bay’s ribs with his spurs, he shouted: “Come on, McTavish! Let’s show them some real riding!” And with that he began a wild ki-yiing, the equal of anyone’s.

  Big John let the dancing roa
n have its head. The stallion bolted after the bay as the Red River Métis began to converge on the two Tongue River hunters. Lifting his rifle overhead, Big John fired his right-hand barrel into the sky over the Pembina, while the Métis touched off a ragged volley of their own.

  Still in the lead, Pike slipped down the bay’s offside, hooking a heel behind the cantle of his saddle while curling an elbow around its knobby horn. Stretching forward, he pushed the barrel of his rifle under the bay’s neck and fired at the prairie about twenty yards in front of the charging Métis. Big John half expected to see the bay come undone at the rifle’s thunder, but the pony kept on doggedly, more intent on keeping its lead on the rapidly gaining roan than spooking and bucking.

  The Métis roared their approval. Some of them slipped off the far side of their own horses as the party split to either side of Pike, firing into the dirt to the fore and aft of the bay. Others stood upright, their moccasined toes digging into the soft leather of their pad saddles, lifting their fusils overhead in a rigid salute.

  They were among the Métis for only a second. Time enough for Big John to fire his second barrel into the air, to note a few familiar faces. Then they were through them and the Métis were wheeling their horses and coming back. Pike slid back into his saddle and reined alongside the roan. They both slowed to a trot.

  “A fine showin’, Mister Pike,” Big John said, grinning broadly. “Ye ride like a half-blood, and there’s damn’ few who can make that claim.”

  Before Pike could reply, one of the Métis caught up, shouting—“McTavish!”—in a booming baritone.

  Others arrived, flanking them, adding their own greetings to the good-natured insults and laughter. These were French mixed-bloods for the most part, the children of Canadian or French-Canadian fathers. Many of them spoke limited or no English at all. It wasn’t by accident that at Big John’s cabin the Métis were split about evenly between French, English, and Scottish patrimony, but that they all spoke passable English.