Going Home

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “It’s that all right,” Nutmeg said. “When I see Wyeth at Vancouver, I’ll try to make amends.”

  They had made good time down the Umatilla River, reached its confluence with the mighty Columbia, and headed along the left bank through an arid and depressing land. Skye and Nutmeg traded seats on the horse, while Victoria ranged ahead hunting and scouting. No Name had taken to scouting with her and had proven to be a valuable bird dog, retrieving an occasional goose or duck she pierced with her dwindling supply of arrows. The meat helped extend the shrinking supply of dried salmon.

  There was not enough to feed them to the Hudson’s Bay post, but there would be fishing villages en route, and Skye still had a handful of trade goods from the cache he had acquired at rendezvous. Somehow they would make it.

  They discovered a fishing camp of a people they could not identify, snugged into a wooded ravine that debouched on the river. As was the custom of the northwest tribes, this people welcomed the visitors and fed them. Skye noticed the large river canoes beached along the bank, and for a while played with the idea of trading his three horses for a ride to Fort Vancouver. It was certainly a temptation, letting the current of the great river, and the strength of the oarsmen, take them swiftly to their destination.

  And yet he hesitated, and as he thought about it, he realized why he would not do that: nothing was certain. He might not like McLoughlin’s proposal. And if he rejected it, he and Victoria would need those horses to return to the interior. Without those horses he would have nothing. He could even trade the packhorse for a rifle and supplies and still have a pair of them to ride. No, as seductive as the idea was of floating to the post, he would resist.

  This time, No Name didn’t vanish as he had during other visits. He stuck close to Skye, as if finally attaching himself to his new comrade. Skye knew the dog would never accept a master, but welcomed a friend. The thought of abandoning the mutt at Vancouver disturbed him, but there would be no help for it if they wouldn’t let him ship the dog to England.

  He remembered that fateful moment when the Cayuse boys had merrily divested Nutmeg of his botanical materials and scattered through the complex village. The dog had appeared out of nowhere and traced the passage of the boys through longhouses and huts and drying racks, his yellow coat a flag enabling Skye to keep track of the scampering boys—until he faced a wall of spears. How had the dog known to do that? What intuition did it possess? It was an intelligent creature that had survived on its own for some indeterminate time, avoiding fights, disappearing, and yet willing to war if war was thrust upon it, and eager to serve Skye for reasons that no mortal could ever know.

  Now, in the failing light, he surveyed the dog. He could not even guess its age. Its ears had been cut and shredded by a hard life. One bent forward unnaturally. Its face was seamed with scars. But those brown eyes, which seemed to anticipate Skye’s every thought, were what touched Skye. He swore the dog seemed to be following his very train of thought. Somehow No Name knew that this evening, more than any that had passed before, Barnaby Skye had accepted the friendship, nay, love, of the hound and had marveled at the dog’s uncanny wisdom.

  The dog squirmed closer until it could press its muzzle into Skye’s lap as he sat cross-legged before the coals. Skye gingerly stroked its head, still fearful of a sudden, snarling explosion of snapping teeth. But that did not happen.

  Victoria watched closely, her face a mask. She had long since made her peace with the dog and formed a hunting alliance with him.

  They reached the Dalles of the Columbia a few days later, and headed around the rapids and looming cliffs. Tribesmen fished and loitered through the whole area, ready to portage canoes and boats, or demand tribute for passage past the great obstacle in the river. Skye, unarmed, knew he was at great disadvantage and tried to bluff his way past the alert and treacherous Indians. The bandits wanted a horse and everything in the pack for safe passage. Skye countered with a handful of awls and knives. He would not surrender the packhorse. The impasse lasted until a headman found himself staring at Victoria’s drawn bow and realized that this small party was not without weapons after all. That gave Skye the moment he needed to draw his Arkansas toothpick. They ended up traversing the well-worn paths around the narrows without harassment. But it had been a close thing.

  Victoria finally returned her arrow to its quiver and unstrung her beautifully crafted double-reflex bow, which compounded the force of her arrows. She rode ahead again, through an arid grassland, scouting and hunting, often with No Name rooting out small game for her.

  On the western horizon, like a black wall barring them from a future, lay the Cascades, gloomy and forested. And rising into the misty heavens was the forbidding cone of Mount Hood, aloof, frosty, and arrogant. It did not comfort Skye that the volcano had been named for a British admiral, Lord Hood, some four decades earlier. He knew of Lord Hood, and knowing of him was enough to darken his day. The imperious and frigid mountain reminded him of all he wished to forget about England, and every time his gaze was drawn to it, he felt a renewed dread. Was he doing the sensible thing or merely throwing his life away?

  They progressed gradually into the Cascade foothills, and now the mighty river ran between gloomy slopes heavily forested and forlorn. They came to the Hood River and found no way across except to swim the horses in the icy water. Skye hewed a small raft for the pack goods, and put Professor Nutmeg on the pack-horse, and hoped for the best. They made the west bank, but only after being chilled to the bone. Increasingly, Skye wondered how he would cross the vast Columbia, running a quarter-mile wide and cruelly cold. He wished he had tackled the river far upstream, where its breadth wasn’t so formidable and it seemed friendlier. He had little choice now but to ride opposite Fort Vancouver and try to summon help.

  The September nights turned starkly cold in the dripping Cascade Mountains, and suddenly the trip was no longer a summer’s lark. Often the trail catapulted upward, negotiated cliffs and promontories, ran hard against the riverbank, and was hemmed by dense, dark forest. In the rare clearings, the travelers often found fishing sites where one or another of the river tribes harvested the salmon that was their food and wealth.

  When they reached the west slope it rained continuously, making fires impossible and drenching them to the skin until they were so chilled that Skye feared they would sicken. They holed up under a rock ledge for an entire day trying to avoid the pelting rain, which still found its way to them whenever a breeze whipped the droplets under the ledge. The shelter had been much-used, and not a stick of firewood lay anywhere nearby. But at least they could huddle up. He was increasingly worried about Nutmeg, who shivered unceasingly and looked ashen. The man’s few duds had vanished along with his knapsack in the Cayuse camp and not even his stiff English resolve could conceal the blueness of his face, or his suffering. Victoria, unused to such deluges on the plains, was suffering almost as much.

  Skye realized that his stores of goods had dwindled almost to nothing and that he could turn a canvas pack-cloth into ponchos for Nutmeg and Victoria, so he set to work with his knife, sawing the canvas into two rectangles and cutting head holes in it. Both of them donned their ponchos, and both soon stopped their shaking. Once Nutmeg had warmed he was able to repair his sodden boots, which were falling apart again.

  They were out of most staples and hadn’t come to a village in many leagues, and Skye worried about how to feed three mortals and two dogs the remaining distance. Vancouver was not far, but if the bad weather persisted, it could as well be five hundred miles as one hundred.

  Brutally, he pushed westward even though the drizzle had not yet halted, and they splashed along the dreary bankside trail, sometimes making only a few miles a day. Shelter was hard to find, and the mist or rain rarely let up. Skye could not remember any time he was so cold, not even on the North Sea, up in the rigging of a warship during a blow.

  Sometimes Victoria magically found dry wood and they could make a fire; more often, there was not
hing dry enough to burn. Skye cut them back to half-rations and they all fought the gnawing emptiness of their bellies.

  Then one day the clouds lifted and they discovered themselves emerging from the vast dark canyon of the Cascades and into a sunlit plain densely foliaged with brush and leafy trees. They paused on a rocky flat to dry out and let the late September sun bake the winter out of their bones. The dogs, hunting together, scared up some geese, which gave Victoria an opportunity she took good advantage of, with her next-to-last arrow. There was just enough meat to feed the mortals sparingly, and the dogs a little better.

  Skye had weathered worse, and should have been happy. Instead, he felt taut and irritable, snapping at Nutmeg, glaring at Victoria, and mad at himself. He admitted he was afraid, and that he might be making the most terrible mistake of his life. But there was nothing he could do but go on, his fate not really in his hands.

  twenty–two

  Skye found himself in an Eden, but it didn’t feel at all like paradise. He and Victoria and the redoubtable professor toiled westward through a bountiful land, brimming with wild fruits and nuts, with abundant vegetation and the mildest of climates.

  Nutmeg was enthralled and busied himself studying the flora, even though he had no means to preserve or describe or sketch any of it. He was like a bright butterfly, alighting on one bloom after another, drinking of its pollen before rushing off to the next delight.

  He got lost one day, wandering afield in his old manner, oblivious of his traveling companions, intent on finding more of a berry bush he had never seen before, and for which he had no name. By dusk he was out of sight of the river and his friends, and hungry. He was also guilty, knowing he had betrayed the trust that the Skyes had placed in him. And yet he could not help it: something as new and exciting as an unknown fruit had raptured his mind until nothing else mattered. This greenish berry was sweet, had lobes, and didn’t disturb his digestion, and he wanted various samples, taken from various sites, for closer examination in camp.

  He was wandering through some grassed and rocky hills when night fell and he scarcely knew which way to turn. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t mean to lose track of the Skyes, but his obsessions got the best of him.

  That’s when the no-name dog found him and Dolly, and moments later Skye loomed out of the dark, the clop of his horse’s hooves announcing his approach.

  Nutmeg expected rebuke but Skye’s voice was gentle. “I’ll take you back, Professor,” was all he said, but there was a certain tautness in his words.

  “Mister Skye, I’ve strayed and I proffer my sincere apologies,” he said.

  Skye nodded but said nothing. It took them half the night to reach the camp Victoria had made beside the mighty river. Neither Skye nor Victoria uttered a rebuke, but he knew that the silence itself was reproaching him.

  The next morning the sun shone sweetly and all was well.

  Even Victoria, who had been melancholic this long journey, had been lifted into smiles and joy as she steered her pony through belly-high grasses and exclaimed at the shimmering blue river rolling gently to the sea.

  But Skye felt anxious. His muscles were taut. His temper irritable. His humor liverish. He knew himself not to be an anxious person. In the wilds of the Rockies, he had never let dire circumstance worry and abrade him. That had been one of his strengths. For Skye, there was always a way. So the emotion that inhabited his soul surprised him.

  He was not comfortable with the constant worry that exhausted him even as the threesome and the two dogs rambled across the benign plains that formed the heart of the empire of Hudson’s Bay. Sometimes he turned around and beheld the strange cone of Mount Hood and thought that the very eye of the Royal Navy was upon him, even in this remote corner of the New World. Admiral Hood stood over him, and had him in his clutches.

  They were hand-to-mouth now and yet remained fed, for every bush bore fruit: huckleberries, plums, wild grapes, and a dozen more delights Skye couldn’t identify. They had passed several fisheries but all on the north side of the mighty river. And he remembered how he had fled along that bank, six years earlier, fled for his life, fled for his liberty, determined to escape or die. By the grace of God he had lived.

  They came at last to a broad valley, which shouldered a great pewter river from the south that he could see from the hill where he stood. That, he concluded, was the Willamette, and this was the place. He gazed across the waters, seeing nothing at first, and then just maybe, the hand of man, on the north bank of the Columbia. Was it a stockade? At such a great distance he could not be sure. It sat well back from the Columbia, and well east of the Willamette.

  The place wrought powerful feelings in him. On a cold night in 1826 he had slid overboard, leaving a Royal Navy frigate behind him, and worked swiftly inland, never pausing, knowing he would not be safe for a hundred miles. That proved to be a serious underestimate. He had starved his way east for five hundred before he began to breathe easily.

  “Here,” he said gently, pointing across the enormous river. “That’s Fort Vancouver.”

  “I don’t see a thing,” Nutmeg said.

  Victoria said nothing. She was as taut as he, and he could well imagine what thoughts flooded her mind just then.

  Here indeed was an odd thing: he had no means to get across the river. He did not even have a rifle with which to signal the post. The horses and dogs probably could not swim such a vast flood and would drown. Neither he nor Victoria could swim it, nor could Professor Nutmeg.

  He studied the hazy fort closely, and discovered another thing: a vessel lay anchored beside it, its masts barely visible and its sails furled. That would be the ship that Peter Skene Ogden had urged him to catch, the ship of passage to England—if he chose to go to England, which he was not sure he would do even if it meant visiting his family, seeing his father, and clearing his name.

  He could make out that it was a schooner, a two-master with fore-and-aft sails rather than square rigging. Had so small a bark traversed the Atlantic, rounded Cape Horn, and then made its way to the Sandwich Islands and across to this misty place? Could that fragile vessel carry the treasure of Hudson’s Bay Company, in the form of furs, clear to England?

  He didn’t know how to cross to the north bank of the Columbia. He hoped to run into a fishing village where he could find a ferry. After that the HBC could come and get the rest, and the horses. But they had passed none as they traversed the last few miles to a point opposite the post. And then it came to him to wait until night and build a signal fire, and that surely would bring a canoe or barge across the waters to investigate.

  “All right, mate, we’ll camp here,” he said to Nutmeg. “Tonight we’ll signal. They probably won’t start across before dawn.”

  “Couldn’t we try some smoke right now?” Nutmeg asked.

  “We could see. But there’s a fresh breeze and I think it’ll just dissipate.”

  Even as they talked, Victoria was looking for dry wood, which was scarce in this rain-soaked land. But soon she was pulling driftwood from the shores, and breaking dead branches from trees, and shaving the slimmest imaginable kindling that would form a tiny nest for the embers that would catch under her flint and steel.

  Skye helped her. They would need plenty of wood, for only a giant fire would attract attention at such a distance. Then, when all was ready, she crouched over the tiny nest, sheltering it from the breeze, and deftly struck her steel across the flint, raining sparks down on her flammable thimbleful of fuzz. The first strikes seemed futile, but then a tiny ember burned in one spot. She struck more sparks until several burned, and then crouched over the kindling and blew gently.

  That always seemed the agonizing moment to Skye, the moment that would spell life or death in the dead of winter, the moment that would tell whether they would eat raw and vile food, or cook a meal and warm their flesh and feel the life of the fire secure their own perilous lives.

  The flame flickered, smouldered, and caught, tiny, fragile, but
real. She fed hairlike bits of tinder into it until it bloomed into a three-inch-high blaze. He sighed. They were still a half hour from a fire that would boil smoke, generated by moist grasses, into the air high enough to be spotted from that hazy shore so far distant.

  The professor perched himself on a boulder and stared across the empty river. It was the end of a failed journey for him, and yet he had somehow risen above the disaster. Here he would await the arrival of Wyeth in a few days or weeks, and then ride home in Wyeth’s ship.

  Nutmeg was at ease, but Skye wasn’t. He could not sit at all, but paced restlessly, waiting for the fire to build. He headed down to the river bank and watched the innocent waters purl by. He felt a terrible temptation to turn the horses east and flee once again. He was still wanted by the Crown, and the Hudson’s Bay Company was the long arm of the Crown. And yet he stayed. He was not a man of little faith, but one of hope and courage. He would see what the White Eagle, McLoughlin, was made of, and what would be laid upon the table.

  If he fled now they would be helpless. Victoria had but one arrow, and that was the extent of their weaponry. And yet Skye had endured worse times, over and over, drawing from some singular courage and determination to weather the worst that the wilds could throw at him. He would endure now. As he stood gazing across those shimmering waters, his courage stole back into him, and the anxiety faded. He had left the Royal Navy still a boy; now he was a man, and a man among men.

  He turned to observe the flame on the slope behind him, and discovered a fine gray plume, wrought by moist grasses. Surely the men at Fort Vancouver would see it. And yet for the better part of an hour, nothing happened. He watched the far shore alertly, watched the distant ship, watched the hazy stockade, and yet saw nothing.

  But at last, late in the day when the westering sun was lighting one side of Victoria’s plume of smoke, he saw some movement. It took ten minutes before he knew that a canoe was heading across the waters. They had been discovered at last.