The Dakota Cipher

by William Dietrich

  He brightened. ‘Ah, you speak the civilised tongue? Are you French?’

  ‘American, but I lived in Paris. I worked as an aide to Bonaparte.’

  ‘Bonaparte! A brave one, eh? Maybe he will take back Canada. And what do you do now?’

  ‘I’m an electrician.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘He’s a sorcerer,’ Magnus explained, using French as well.

  Now Pierre looked intrigued. ‘Really? What kind of sorcerer?’

  ‘A scientist,’ I clarified.

  ‘A scientist? What is that?’

  ‘A savant. One who knows the secrets of nature, from study.’

  ‘Nature? Bah! All men know savants are as useless as priests. But sorcery – now that is a skill not altogether useless in the wilderness. The Indians have sorcerers, because the woods are filled with spirits. Oh yes, the Indians can see the world behind this one, and call the animals, and talk to the trees. Just you wait, sorcerer. You will see the cliffs wink and storm clouds form into a ram’s horn. Wind in the cottonwoods will whisper to you, and birds and squirrels will give you advice. And when night falls, perhaps you feel the cold breath of the Wendigo.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘An Indian monster who lives in the forest and devours his victims more thoroughly than the werewolves the gypsies speak of in France.’ He nodded. ‘Every Ojibway will tell you they are real. A sorcerer – that is what we truly need.’ He looked at me with new respect, even though he clearly had never heard of electricity. ‘And can you paddle?’

  ‘I’m probably better at singing.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. Though I bet you can’t sing very well, either.’

  ‘I’m good at cards.’

  ‘Then you’re both lucky you have the mighty Pierre Radisson to look after you! You won’t need cards where we are going. But what is that you are carrying?’ he asked Magnus, staring at what was strapped to his back.

  ‘My axe and my maps.’

  ‘Axe? It looks big enough to sled on. Axe? We could hold it up for a sail, or use it as a roof in camp, or lower it as an anchor. Axe? We could recast it as artillery or start a blacksmith shop. So you might be useful after all, if you don’t let it drop through the bottom of my canoe. And you with your longrifle … that’s a pretty gun. Can you hit anything with it?’

  ‘I have impressed the ladies of Mortefontaine.’

  He blinked. ‘Well. Paddle hard enough and I, Pierre will baptize you voyageurs if you satisfy me. That is the greatest honour a man could have, yes? To win recognition from a North Man? This means, if you are so blessed, that you must buy the rest of us a round of shrub from the company kegs. Two full gallons from each of you.’

  ‘What’s shrub?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘You might as well ask what is bread! Rum, sugar, and lemon juice, my donkey friend. Are you ready for such honour?’

  I bowed. ‘We seek only the chance to prove ourselves.’

  ‘You will have that. Now. You will sit carefully on the trade bundles and will enter and leave my canoe with the utmost care. You must not tip her. Your foot must be on a rib or strake because you can step through her birch bark and I do not care to drown in Lake Superior. You will stroke to the time of the song, and you will never let my canoe touch a rock or the shore. When we camp we will jump out when she is still floating, unload the bales, and gently lift her ashore. Yes?’

  ‘We will be careful.’

  ‘This is for your own safety. These canoes are light for their size, fast, and can be repaired in an hour or two, but they bruise like a woman.’ He pointed to Aurora. ‘Treat them like her.’ Actually, the girl might already have a couple bruises, the way she writhed and wrestled, but I didn’t say that. Certain memories you keep to yourself.

  And so with a cry and a saluting gun from the American fort, we were off.

  A bark canoe might seem like a fragile craft to tackle an inland sea, but these were ingenious products of the surrounding forest, fleet and dry. Pitch and bark could repair damage in an afternoon, and they could be portaged on shoulders for miles. Pierre knelt in the bow, watching for rocks or logs and leading us in song as the paddles dipped in rhythmic cadence, up to forty strokes a minute. At the stern a steersman, Jacques by name, kept us on unerring course. The paddles flashed yellow in the sun, drops flying like diamonds to chase away the ambitious and persistent insects that buzzed out from land to escort us. The air off the lake was cool and fresh, the sun bright and hot on our crowns.

  Always we stroked to song, some French, some English.

  My canoe is of bark, light as a feather

  That is stripped from silvery birch;

  And the seams with roots sewn together,

  The paddles white made of birch.

  I take my canoe, send it chasing

  All the rapids and billows acrost;

  There so swiftly, see it go racing,

  And it never the current has lost …

  The voyageurs might be smaller than Magnus and me, but the tough little Frenchmen had the inexhaustibility of waterwheels. Within half an hour my breathing was laboured, and soon after I began to sweat despite the chill of the lake. On and on we stroked, moving at what I guessed was six miles an hour – double the speed of the fleet Napoleon had taken to Egypt! – and just as I felt I could paddle no longer, Pierre would give a cry and our brigade would finally drift, the men breaking out pipes to smoke. It was the chief pleasure of their day, occurring once every two hours, and it reminded me of the measured pauses of Napoleon’s Alpine army. The men would break off a twist of tobacco, a rope-like strand preserved in molasses and rum, crumble it in the bowl of the pipe, strike flint to tinder, and then lean back and puff, eyes closed against the sun. The quick drug made them content as babies. Our little fleet floated like dots on this vast water, the liquid so clean and cold that if thirsty we could dip our palms for a sip.

  Then another cry and our pipes were tapped clean, embers hissing on the water, paddles were taken up, and with a shout and a chorus we were on again, driving hard to make maximum use of the lengthening days. Aurora stayed prim and regal under her parasol while Cecil read his little books, of which he had a full satchel, flinging each he finished into the water with the unspoken assumption that none of his rough companions were likely to be literate. Occasionally he would spy a duck or other waterfowl, put down his current volume, and blaze away, the bark of his gun echoing against the shore. He never missed, but we never paused to retrieve the game, either. It was only for sport. As the bird floated away he’d reload, rest his piece on his lap, and go back to reading.

  We camped at sunset at a cove marked by a tall ‘lopstick,’ a pine tree denuded of its lower branches but left with a tuft at the top as a landmark. These, we learnt, were pruned on all the canoe routes to mark camping places. We drifted into a pretty point with a pebble beach and high grass under a stand of birch, Pierre jumping from our canoe into knee-deep water to halt its advance and then drawing it gently towards shore. We each in turn sprang stiffly out.

  ‘It’s cold!’ Magnus complained.

  ‘Ah, you are a scientist too?’ Pierre responded. ‘What an observer you are! Here is the trick: it makes us work all the faster to build our fires.’

  As the canoe lightened it was drawn closer, never touching the smooth pebbles of the shore, all of us lifting out the freight bales and arranging them in a makeshift barricade covered with an oilcloth. The empty canoes were finally heaved up with a great cry, flipped with a spray of water, hoisted overhead, marched up the strand, and then propped up on one side by paddles to make an instant lean-to. Fires were lit, guns primed, water fetched, and pipes smoked as peas, pork, and biscuit were cooked and served. It was dull fare that I ate like a starving man.

  ‘Yes, eat, eat, sorcerer!’ Pierre encouraged. ‘You, too, giant! Eat to lighten Radisson’s canoe, and because you will lose weight on this trip no matter how much you gobble! Yes, the work burns your body! Eat because there is no pork pa
st Grand Portage, which is why the Montreal men are called the Pork Eaters and only those of us who have wintered over are true North Men.’

  ‘What do you eat past Grand Portage?’ Magnus asked as he chewed.

  ‘Pemmican. Dried game, berries, and sometimes a mush of rice or corn. Any city man would spit it out, but it’s nectar to a working man after a day at the paddles. A pound of pemmican is worth eight pounds of bread! Of course, a few months of that and you long for a squaw. Not just for her quim between her legs, mind you, but her ability to find good things to eat in the woods.’

  ‘Why are we going so fast?’ I asked, sipping water. ‘I’m so sore that I feel like I’ve been stretched on the rack.’

  ‘Fast? We’re like snails on a carpet, so vast is this country. Do you think the sun will linger forever? At Grand Portage she will turn back south, a lover bidding goodbye, and the days will begin to shorten. Always in our mind is the return of the ice! We paddle to beat the ice! We drive hard to give the North Men time to return to their posts in Upper Canada before their watery highways freeze solid. The winter is good for travel, yes, if you have snowshoes, but not for carrying freight.’

  ‘But at this rate we’ll be there before the rendezvous.’

  ‘Don’t worry, sorcerer, we’ll have wind and storm enough on Superior to keep us penned. That lake is cold as a witch’s heart, and she never lets a man cross freely.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Each night on our canoe voyage, Aurora and Cecil and the other bourgeois pitched a small tent while the voyageurs curled under the canoes. Magnus and I, given our status as middling passengers, each had scraps of canvas and rope that could be rigged as a lean-to shelter. It was a sign of rank, my head on my bundled coat and a wool trade blanket wrapped around me, and once tucked in I lapsed into unconsciousness. But it still seemed midnight when my shelter suddenly fell, half smothering me with dew-wet fabric. What the devil?

  ‘Get up, American, do you think you can sleep all day?’ It was Pierre, kicking me with his moccasin-clad foot through the canvas.

  I thrashed clear. ‘It’s the middle of the night! You’ll wake the camp!’

  There were roars of laughter. ‘Everyone but you is awake! We North Men do not tarry in the morning! Even Pork Eaters are up before the likes of you!’

  ‘Morning?’ I rubbed my eyes. A cloudy ribbon of stars still arced across the sky, while in the east there was the faintest glow of a very distant dawn. The fire was flaring to life again, last night’s leftovers beginning to bubble. Cecil and Aurora were fully dressed, looking bright enough for Piccadilly.

  ‘Yes, eat, eat, because soon we will be paddling. Eat, American! And then come see my handiwork. I have honoured our guests on the lopstick tree!’

  So we wolfed down the remains of dinner and then followed our escort to the landmark. Its base was covered in carvings, we saw, commemorating some of the dignitaries who’d passed this way. They were mostly Scottish and English names like Mackenzie, Duncan, Cox, and Selkirk. The voyageur lit a candle and held it to the bark so we could read. ‘There, see how you are immortalized!’

  ‘Lord Cecil and Lady Aurora Somerset,’ it read. ‘Plus two donkeys.’

  ‘Donkeys!’

  ‘Paddle like men for a few days, and then maybe I will restore your name on another tree. Paddle until your shoulders don’t just ache but burn and you want to cry for your mother! But you don’t, you just paddle more! Then maybe the great Pierre will consider you!’

  We stopped a night at Fort Saint Joseph, all of us but Cecil and Aurora camping on the beach because the post was still a half-completed stockade. Huge stacks of peeled logs, chopped and dragged the last winter, lay ready for placement, and the forest was cut back for a mile or more to prevent a surprise attack. Despite the sand fleas I was quickly asleep, given that there was no chance of dalliance with the segregated Aurora. And then in a predawn fog we were roused and pushed off again, the canoes ahead and behind muffled in the mist. We’d not pass another post until Grand Portage.

  It was hard paddling against the current as we entered the thirty-mile river connecting Lake Huron and Lake Superior. At the Sault, meaning ‘jump’ or ‘rapids,’ we unloaded the canoes once again and carried the cargo in portage, me taking a ninety-pounder and Pierre and Magnus each shouldering two of the crippling loads. Then back for more. We staged the freight in mile increments, meaning we’d carry for half an hour and then get a relative respite going back for another load. Indians were gathered here to fish with spear and bark net from camps that smelt of shit and flies, so the voyageurs posted guard on our belongings because every white man believed every Indian was a thief, and every Indian believed every white man was rich and unaccountably selfish. Once we had all the freight forwarded, we went back for the canoes. Light they might be, but a wet freight canoe still weighed several hundred pounds. I felt like a pallbearer at an endless funeral. Finally it was done.

  ‘You’ll see men at Grand Portage who can do three and even four pieces at a time,’ Pierre panted. ‘When they are loaded, they look like a house with legs.’

  ‘And you will see men in Paris who lift no more than a pair of dice or a quill pen,’ I moaned back.

  ‘Those are not men, monsieur. To be an urban parasite, doing nothing for yourself, is to not be alive at all.’

  Cecil, however, was expected to carry nothing. And Aurora was hoisted high and prim on the shoulders of two voyageurs, gazing ahead like the Queen of Sheba as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world. The little children in the Indian fish camps came running when she passed, laughing with delight. They trailed her until their mothers finally called them back, but she didn’t grant them a flicker of response.

  At the largest lake of all we put in again. The water was so clear I could follow the slope of the submerged granite as if it were shimmering in air. The water seemed even a richer and deeper blue than Huron, extending to a watery horizon as we followed the north shore. The land to our right began to rise, shoulders of pink and grey granite clothed in a stone-gripping forest of stunted birch, alder, pines, and spruce.

  A warm easterly blew and we raised a makeshift sail on a pole and let it blow us westward, me sprawling gratefully to doze during this welcome recess from gruelling labour. The canoe lulled as it rocked on the waves, lapping water a quiet music.

  Then the wind veered to the southeast and strengthened, the sky in that direction darkening. The sail twisted, the canoe leaning, and we quickly took the canvas down.

  ‘Storm!’ Pierre shouted back to the helmsman.

  Jacques nodded, looking over his shoulder at black cloud. The captains of the other canoes were crying out commands of warning too.

  ‘I told you the lake does not pass us easily,’ Pierre said. ‘Paddle now, my donkeys, paddle with all your might! There’s a bay a league from here and we must reach it before the storm is at its peak, unless we want to try to swim to Grand Portage!’ He splashed some water at us. ‘Feel how cold the witch truly is!’

  Lightning flashed behind, and a low, ominous rumble rolled over the water. Light danced in the sky, the wind carrying that electrical scent I recalled from the desert. The water, now steel grey, roughened in the gust. Even Pierre gave up his scouting position and knelt in the bow to help paddle.

  ‘Stroke, if you don’t want to drown!’

  The wind began to rise and the waves steepened, pushing our brigade towards shore. We had to clear a point and avoid being dashed on granite boulders before we got into its lee and could safely land. The freshwater waves had a different pitch than the sea, slapping and choppy, and the water stunned with cold. For the first time we shipped water into the canoes and Pierre pointed at me. ‘American! The most useless one! Take our cooking pot and bail, but do it carefully, for if you strike the bark and hole us, we will all die!’

  Well, that was encouraging. I began to bail, trying to decide if I was more afraid of the water slopping over our gunwales or the water that would gus
h in if I dipped too deep and enthusiastically. More thunder, and then rain overtaking us in a grey curtain, the water boiling at the edge of the squall where the fat drops fell. I could barely see the shore, except for a line of white where breakers dashed. The rumbling sounded like artillery.

  ‘Thor’s song!’ Magnus cried. ‘This is what we came for, Ethan!’

  ‘Not me,’ I muttered. Franklin was more than a little barmy going kite flying in a lightning storm, but Bloodhammer was his match. We could easily be struck out here.

  ‘Tame the lightning, sorcerer!’ Pierre cried.

  ‘I can’t without tools. We need to get off the water before it reaches us!’ I’d seen what lightning can do.

  I glanced at Aurora’s canoe. The parasol was gone and she was bent, hair streaming, paddling with grim determination. Cecil had put away his book and fowling piece and was stroking as well, his dripping top hat rammed low and hard on his head.

  In our own vessel Magnus was paddling so strongly, the paddle digging so his hand on its shank hit the waves, that Pierre switched to the opposite side to balance the Norwegian’s power.

  ‘Maybe we should throw out some of the trade bundles and get more freeboard!’ I suggested over the shriek of the wind.

  ‘Are you mad? I’d rather lie with the witch of the lake than explain to Simon McTavish that his precious freight was at the bottom of Superior! Bail, sorcerer! Or find a way to calm the waters!’

  On we scudded like leaves in a rapid, the shadowy lee shore growing ominously closer as we strove to round the point before being driven aground. In the dimness its line was marked by the white of cruel boulders, wiry trees shaking and thrashing in the pelting rain.

  ‘Paddle, my friends! Paddle, or we’ll suck the witch’s tit on the bottom!’

  My shoulders were on fire, as Pierre had demanded, but rest was not an option. We neared the point, spray exploding on it in great fountains, and through the dimness and streak of rain I spied an eerie sight, white and angular against the wrack of nature.