Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  The trading post was dark and cool and smelled of furs and new cloth and coffee and paraffin. Its walls were lined with wooden shelves stocked with tins and blankets and knives and all the blessings of southern civilization. Cooking pots and bolts of cloth and coils of rope and wire hung from nails driven into the rafters. Kegs of flour and sugar and oatmeal and chests of coffee and loose tea sat on the bare wooden floor. There was a rack of rifles and shotguns by the counter, secured by a steel bar which ran through their trigger-guards. To the child it looked exactly like the Hudson Bay store in Aklavik, the one that he and his mother had left empty-handed before setting out on their long paddle south.

  The trader, a rangy man with a black beard and black eyes, was in his shirtsleeves at the counter. He pretended to read his ledger while keeping an eye on someone in the corner. The boy recognized the stranger from the raft; he was examining a leg-hold trap, opening and closing it to try out its action. The man looked at them with no more apparent interest than he’d shown before, then went back to flexing the spring on the trap. But the trader closed his ledger with a snap and smiled at the boy and his mother; he seemed oddly pleased to see them.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said, spreading his weight on his hands on the counter. ‘What can I do for you? Or would you like to look round first?’

  He was not, thought the boy, like the trader in Aklavik.

  His mother nodded wordlessly and turned away from the counter. She needed wire traces for her snares and a couple of new traps to replace the ones taken by wolverines; it had been her first winter trapping alone, and she’d had to learn the hard way how to anchor her leg-holds. But the stranger loitered in the corner where the traps were displayed, hung by their chains from hooks in the wall. So she went to the other side of the room and pretended to look at tins of fruit and vegetables and condensed milk, although she didn’t need them, couldn’t afford them, and wasn’t in any case able to read.

  ‘So,’ the trader said loudly, addressing the room, ‘two new ­customers in one day. It’s not normally so busy here in summer.’ His voice sounded hollow in the big wooden room. The boy saw him glance at the man in the corner. But he too had his back turned, and he too kept his silence.

  The trader persisted. ‘You’ve come up the river from Aklavik? What brings you down here?’

  His mother, though mortified by the white man’s attention, could not politely ignore it.

  ‘I have pelts,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘Oh,’ said the trader, and he raised his eyebrows and nodded his head, as if struck by the novelty of what she had said to him. He nodded a couple of times more, then looked at the man in the corner. ‘And yourself, sir,’ he ventured. ‘Where have you come from today?’

  The man hung the trap back on its hook and turned and looked at the trader. His eyes moved on past the counter to the gun rack. He came across the room, skirting the dried goods piled up in the middle, and tried to pick up a single-barrel shotgun. But the bar through the trigger-guard held it in place, and when he tried to speak he could only rasp. He coughed, cleared his throat, then managed some words.

  ‘Open this, please.’

  The trader made no move. He nodded at the weapon. ‘Nice piece, that. From the States. I’ve got it in sixteen-gauge too, if you prefer something lighter . . . You thinking to buy in cash, sir, or are you here to trade?’

  The stranger ran a finger down the barrel of a squirrel rifle, then turned and looked at the boy and his mother. ‘Cash. You can serve these people first.’

  He had an odd way of speaking English, more up and down than the teachers in Aklavik. It sounded like the words hurt his throat.

  ‘Okay,’ the trader said slowly. He turned to the boy’s mother. ‘So, you have pelts.’ His tone was now brisk. ‘Why didn’t you sell them to the Bay in Aklavik?’

  ‘The price was not fair.’

  ‘The Bay sets the same price for pelts wherever you go. It goes by the grade. I don’t control it.’ He tapped the ledger, claiming its support.

  His mother was unswayed. ‘Some traders don’t grade fair. My husband told me that. He said that he heard that McPherson was better.’

  The trader stared at her, mulling this over. Was it a compliment, or a suggestion of weakness on his part? He glanced at the listening stranger.

  ‘Who is your husband? He an Eskimo too? Or did you marry up the river?’

  ‘His name was Peter Isaac.’

  ‘Oh.’ Standing by his mother, his arms rigid at his side, the little boy felt proud of his famous lost father. ‘He was the one on that broken-off floe . . . ?’

  The boy’s mother said nothing. The trader tapped the ledger a couple more times, as if coming to a decision, then opened it again. ‘Fetch your pelts into the storeroom next door and we’ll break them out and have a look at them. I promise you’ll get a fair grade for them. You won’t get a fairer.’ And he shrugged, almost helplessly, because they all knew that after Fort McPherson she had nowhere else to go.

  The boy’s mother left him by the counter and dragged her pelts into the storeroom which occupied the back half of the post. The trader came out from behind the counter and slid out the bar which held the guns to the rack; it hadn’t been locked.

  ‘Help yourself. The rod’s just to stop kids messing about when I’m in back in the storeroom. Nobody’s going to steal ’em. Not up here.’

  The stranger picked up a lever-action rifle, racked the lever and eased the spring. ‘Savage thirty-thirty,’ said the trader approvingly. ‘Feather-weight trigger. That one’s a—’

  ‘I’ll take it.’ The stranger leaned his purchase against the counter and pointed at a .22 squirrel gun. ‘This one too. And the shotgun. In sixteen-gauge.’

  The trader was taken aback. This was no way to buy weapons. There were rituals, decencies. ‘There’s no hurry. If you want, I’ll give you a few shells and you can go out back and try them first.’

  ‘I’ll take a hundred-fifty rounds for each of them.’ The stranger turned away, scanning the room. ‘Can you sell me a canoe?’

  ‘We don’t sell canoes here. But I think Abe Francis might have one for sale. He’s camped a mile or two up the river. The Snowshoes boys, outside on the porch there, can take you to see him. But if you don’t mind me saying, you seem to need a lot of stuff.’

  The boy could see his mother through the storeroom door. She had broken out her pelts and was on her knees, spreading them across the floor.

  The man unslung the burlap sack he had tied to his back, rested it on the floor and unknotted the twine that held its mouth shut. From inside it he took out an oilcloth bag folded over several times to make a water-tight package. He had to get down on one knee to unwrap the oilcloth on the floor, and as he did so he exposed for an instant a neat wooden box, a spidery black gadget made of metal and glass and a dented old baking powder tin. Selecting the tin, he folded away the oilcloth and its other contents and put them back in the burlap sack. Then he unscrewed the lid of the tin, fishing carefully inside it, as if to make sure he didn’t accidentally pull out any more of its contents than he chose to reveal.When his hand came away from the tin it was holding a fat roll of currency. He peeled off some Canadian notes and laid them on the counter.

  ‘I’ll need grub too. And an axe, matches, hammer, chisel, needles and thread. A bolt of medium duck. A whip saw and a bow saw. A wood stove and a stove-pipe and an elbow. A twelve-inch window glass and some nails. Wire and wax.’

  The trader looked at the money but made no effort to count it. ‘It sounds like you need a whole new outfit. You planning to spend the winter up here?’

  ‘I lost my boat in some rapids. My outfit too. All except that sack.’

  ‘Ah . . .’ The trader nodded wisely. ‘You were travelling alone?’

  The stranger showed his teeth. They were straight and almost white. The trader turned away and began tak
ing out boxes of bullets and counting them out on the counter.

  ‘They never did find any gold this side of the mountains,’ he remarked, though seemingly absorbed in his task. ‘You should have stayed in the Yukon if it’s gold you’re after. You’ve come from the Yukon, right? Down the Peel?’

  The stranger said nothing. He had taken some coffee beans from an open sack and was chewing one thoughtfully.

  The trader went on: ‘If you want to trap, you’ll need to go to the police post in Aklavik and get yourself a fur licence. Inspector Eames will want to take a look at you anyway. He likes to be sure that any white men who come into the Arctic will be able for the winter.’

  The stranger’s mouth twitched at the corners. ‘Sure. I’ll see him when I pass through Aklavik.’

  The trader had stacked up the boxes of bullets and shotgun shells. He was admiring his handiwork. ‘Passing through . . . ? You sure you know where you’re headed? There’s not a lot downstream of Aklavik. That’s pretty wild country.’

  ‘I heard there’s an old trail there, back west into the mountains. Are there any white men trapping there?’

  The trader blew into his cheeks. ‘You mean the old Rat River trail? The Indians used to use it to smuggle with the Russians in Alaska. Kept it secret from the Company for a hundred years.’

  ‘Are there any white men trapping there?’

  ‘It’s no place for a white man . . . You’re going to want cleaning gear for your guns. I’ve got pull-throughs for all calibres and four-by-two lint and gun oil. You have to go easy with the oil in winter though, otherwise—’

  ‘Why do you say it’s no place for a white man?’

  The boy saw the trader blink a few times. He didn’t like being interrupted. But nor did he like the stranger’s flat stare. Ducking under the counter, he fetched out an empty biscuit box and began stacking the bullets inside it.

  ‘Because,’ the trader said, ‘during the Klondike rush a bunch of stampeders thought they’d steal a march on all the others. Instead of going through the Alaska panhandle, they figured it’d be easier to come by boat through the north, from Edmonton over to Lake Athabasca and then across the Slave Lake and down the Mackenzie. They figured they’d hand-line their boats up the Rat River, then down to the Yukon on the other side. But they got stuck for the winter up there on the Rat.’ The last of the bullets were inside the biscuit box. The trader looked up at his customer. ‘You want a lid? I could find one out back.’

  The stranger shook his head. ‘The stampeders,’ he said.

  ‘The stampeders? They called their camp Destruction City. Only a handful of them ever made it to Dawson, too late to stake any claims. The rest of them either turned back or starved or got lost in the woods. Every few years some Indian’ll come in with a story about finding a cabin in the forest with one or two skeletons, and maybe the skeletons shot themselves, or maybe they shot each other, or maybe they just starved.’

  The stranger nodded, disposing of this line of conversation. ‘I’ll take the pull-throughs, the lint and the oil. Do you have anything for pains?’

  ‘I’ve got Beecham’s pills. They’re good for most things. Anything stronger you’d have to get from Dr Urquhart in Aklavik . . .’ The trader lowered his voice. ‘I’ve got whisky and gin too, if that’s good for what ails you. But it’s only for white men. I have to keep it in the back.’

  The stranger grinned. ‘No whisky. I’ll take the pills now. And some bacon, some flour, some oil and a pan. For the rest, I give you a list. I’ll come back and get it when I’ve found a canoe.’

  The trader turned to the shelves behind him, a honeycomb of little compartments used to store his smaller, more valuable wares. Then he turned back, reluctantly struck by a thought. ‘You’re hungry . . . ? You’d be welcome to join my wife and me for dinner. We eat at my house.’

  ‘No.’ The stranger turned and went back to the traps.

  The trader blinked hard, as if he’d been slapped. But instead of getting angry, he stared at the stranger’s back for a few moments. The boy saw him shake his head and look confused, and then he looked sad. He backed away, searching about him, until his eyes settled on a small wooden crate on the end of the counter. Reaching into it, he took out two small round objects wrapped in wax paper. He laid them on the counter beside the box of pills.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Something for you on the house. I’ve still got a few oranges, came down the river on the Distributor. I have to give them away before they go bad. There’s no one around here to buy them.’

  ‘Put them with the other stuff.’ The stranger didn’t look round. Then after a few moments: ‘Thanks.’

  The trader nodded to himself, somewhat propitiated. Then he noticed the child, standing silent by the door of the storeroom. He took a pencil and a block of paper from under the counter and set them down beside the bullets and the pills. ‘You make me that list. I have to go in back and take a look at that Eskimo squaw’s pelts.’

  He was halfway through the door when a thought struck him. He turned and spoke to the stranger’s back. ‘Hey, mister. I didn’t get your name. Mine’s Firth. William Firth. Born and raised in Fort McPherson. My father was an Orkney man, my mother was from here: Gwich’in Indian.’

  The stranger, who was turning a stove-pipe elbow in his hands, didn’t take the bait. The trader waited a moment and then tried again.

  ‘Your name, mister. I need to ask it. Inspector Eames likes to know who’s been buying our guns.’

  The stranger muttered something which the boy, still unused to white man’s names, couldn’t make out. Neither could the trader. ‘What’s that you said?’

  The man put down the pipe and turned his back so that now they could hardly see his face at all. He muttered again, only a little louder.

  ‘Johnson?’ said the trader. ‘Albert Johnson? Is that what you said?’

  ‘Sure,’ said the stranger. From what the boy could see of his face, he might have been smiling. ‘That’s right. Albert Johnson.’

  The trader paid his mother a fair price for her pelts. She could buy bullets for the rifle and shells for his big sister’s shotgun and fish hooks and flour and sugar and beans and cloth for new dresses. They were good for another year, and his mother sang quietly as they stacked their purchases on a toboggan borrowed from the store. Together, they dragged it past the watching Snowshoes brothers and down the muddy trail to the beach. When they got to the beach his mother stacked their goods by the water and then she dragged the unloaded toboggan back up the trail to return it to the store, leaving the boy to watch over their purchases. She would come back to him by water, having fetched their canoe from its hiding-place under the willows. Before she left, she shucked the three bullets from the rifle, put them in her pocket and left the rifle with the boy. He was upset at first, but then he reflected that he could still mount a ceremonial guard, so he stood over the boxes and sacks with the rifle grounded as before, the butt beside his right foot, muzzle pointing skywards, and watched the water flies skimming the current, the ripples broadcast by the rising trout. A breeze had got up, enough to drive off the blackfly, and he began to feel drowsy. After a while he sat on the sacks with the rifle between his knees. He would sleep in the canoe. His mother wouldn’t need help with the paddling; it was downstream all the way home.

  A branch cracked on the edge of the beach and he opened his eyes and looked around. The Snowshoes brothers were coming towards him, followed by Albert Johnson. He had the Savage hung on one shoulder and his burlap sack over the other. The boy could hear the clink of cups and pans inside the bundle. Johnson was eating something he held in his free hand. The two Gwich’in boys walked stiffly, eyes wide, as if afraid to look behind them; their faces reminded the child of his first day at school, when the teacher had caught two older boys speaking their own language and had marched them off to to be thrashed.

  He ported
his unloaded rifle but the procession moved past him without taking notice. The two Gwich’in boys, still taking care not to look back at Johnson, pointed to their canoe. Johnson put his bundle into it and watched as the Indians launched the boat. They waded knee-deep out into the current then climbed in and waited for their passenger to join them, backing water with their paddles. Johnson turned and looked at the boy.

  ‘Here,’ he said. And he handed the boy a soft round object wrapped in wax paper.

  Inuvik, North West Territories

  The old man was still talking about Banks Island. His mother had told him not to go out there. There was nothing on Banks Island, she said. She had been born there, in the old days. No trees, not even willows, she had said. But there were willows there now, a hundred years later. He’d seen their shoots two summers ago, in a river-bed north of Sachs Harbour, and then he got sick and had to come stay near his niece in Aklavik. The Barrens were getting much warmer. Where the willows grew, there would soon be alders, then spruces. A hunter had shot a strange-looking bear out there, a couple of years before, and the scientists did tests and said it was a cross between an ice bear and a grizzly. There were never grizzlies up there before.

  ‘Was it him?’

  The old man paused, drew a breath, then asked Nelson politely, ‘Was what who?’

  ‘The man in the photograph that my brother showed you. Was it Albert Johnson?’

  ‘You mean the photo from the Yukon or the one from the city?’

  So he was keeping track of this after all. ‘The Yukon.’

  The old man nodded a few times, wrapping his hands round his stick.

  ‘It’s hard to say. It was a long time ago. The one in the Yukon I would say maybe. It could have been Albert Johnson.’

  ‘And the man in the other photograph? The guy in the American uniform?’