by Don Gillmor
“Who are they?” MacKay asked.
“A war party returning. The husbands.”
“I walk in peace. I’m bloody Jesus.”
“They aren’t. Be careful.”
“I will now.”
Riding ahead of the horsemen was a tall man, six foot six, lean, his skin stretched over sinew. A crowd ran to greet him.
“Who’s that?” MacKay asked.
“Kootenae Appee,” Thompson said. “The war chief. He has five wives, twenty-two sons, and four daughters. MacKay, your odds aren’t good.”
“Jesus sake, man.”
Appee’s family gathered around him, and he stood in their midst like a maypole. The blood lust of the war party hadn’t been sated; Thompson could see it buzzing around them like the nervous fluttering of a sparrow’s wings.
Kootenae Appee saw Thompson and MacKay on the rise and got on his horse and approached them. Thompson shrank slightly as he neared, clutching his notebook tightly to his chest. MacKay retreated behind Thompson, who gathered himself and took a step forward, holding out his right hand.
“I am a member of the Hudson’s Bay Company,” Thompson said, his right hand wavering in the slight wind.
Appee didn’t take the offered hand. “The hand that wields the knife,” he observed. He leaned down, looming into Thompson’s vision like something out of Gulliver, his face full of war. There were sharp markings on his face. He looked like a man constructed only for war, with no excess for any other purpose.
Appee examined Thompson, a white child clutching something to his chest, exposed on the prairie like a shining root from an uplifted tree.
“Perhaps you will bring us guns,” he said.
“We will.”
“And perhaps you will use your guns against us.”
“No.”
“A child on the plains trading guns,” Appee said, and laughed. He turned and rode back to the camp. MacKay let out the breath he had been holding for more than a minute.
4
MANCHESTER HOUSE, SASKATCHEWAN RIVER, 1788
How many men saw death approach with its careless scythe? Thompson was eighteen, dying a fool’s death. Who would mourn him? He lay on his back, drifting out of consciousness, a distant grey horizon overtaking him, small lights extinguished or blended with the snow that still held traces of the afternoon light. The thermometer at Manchester House had read eighteen below when he left, but it was colder now. His broken leg swelled horribly even in this cold. This will be my death, he thought, some painful minutes, some numbness, then a comforting sleep from which I won’t wake.
He was resigned to this death when he felt himself being pulled. The rough hand of God.
“Davy, boy, you’re fucked as a goose.”
The voice of MacKay. Thompson looked at him and saw only darkness, his eyelids frozen shut. MacKay pulled him up the bank, struggling on the steep pitch that Thompson had fallen down while hauling a sled with deer meat on it. The pain was excruciating and he screamed. MacKay piled him on the sled with the deer meat and pulled him back to Manchester House.
MacKay laid him on the table and cut off his pant leg with a knife, tearing at the frozen material, which was stiff as wood.
“You’re done for now, boy,” he said. “Don’t be looking at it.”
Thompson forced himself to look. The femur of his right leg was jutting out, trying to break through the skin. MacKay made a crude splint and tied it to Thompson’s leg with strips of a sheet and he lost consciousness. In the night he woke repeatedly, fevered, his leg feeling by turns numb (Was it gone?) or throbbing brightly. By morning, the poor limb was a sickly blue. He had a fever that lasted three days, and afterward he lay spent, able to eat only some thin broth. Days went by without any improvement.
“We may have to take it,” MacKay said.
“No.”
“It might be you or the leg.”
What could he do without a leg? Work at Churchill Factory, counting supplies? He was clever at sums. Numbers would be his only companion. “You can’t take the leg.”
“Suit yourself. That leg’ll dance on your grave, boy.”
“Promise me you won’t take the leg, MacKay, no matter what my condition. If I am fevered or unconscious. I need your word.”
“You’re asking me to kill you.”
“I’m asking you to let God make the judgment. This is no country for a one-legged man.”
“It’s no country for a two-legged man.”
Thompson clutched his Bible and drifted toward sleep. “Trust in God,” he told MacKay.
“I’d sooner trust the devil.”
After a month, Thompson was still unable to walk, or even to stand. He lay in his bed each night, his head filled with jagged dreams: he saw himself drowning, headed to the bottom alongside animals with benign smiles. During the day, the men brought him tea and he could sense their pity turning to scorn. He spent his time recording the weather in great detail in his notebook: wind speed and direction, temperature, the nature of the skies. In early July he tried to walk, but the next day his ankle was hideously swollen and he had to lie down. This country was no place for an invalid, with its plagues of mosquitoes and its heat and cold and fatal quarrels.
In the spring, MacKay took him to Cumberland House, another trading post, moving him downriver in the canoe, lying like a piece of meat. This was what he had become, a pile of tainted meat, unwanted, unusable, something to be left on the plain for the birds. He lay on his back, under the blue sky, staring at wispy clouds.
“You can’t abandon me, MacKay,” he said.
“I won’t.”
“If I take a fever.”
“You won’t.”
“If I do. If it takes me.”
“I’ll sell your coat and feed you to the birds.”
“You’ll bury me.”
“I will. Though it won’t make a difference then.”
“It does now.”
“Then you’ll be buried, Davy.”
“Do you think about what your people are doing back in Orkney, MacKay?”
“Eating oats and staring into their graves. Cursing the wind.”
“I have a brother,” Thompson said. “I wonder sometimes who he is, what he has become.” The riverbank went by in a pleasant tableau of grass and rock. The pale sky receded to white. Two hawks floated on the thermal winds. “Without a leg, I’ll be no use in this land.”
“There’s men without a brain who are managing.”
“If I can’t walk.”
“There’s worse.”
It was the last week in August before he could manage a few steps on a pair of crutches. Philip Turnor arrived at Cumberland House shortly afterward. He was the Hudson’s Bay Company’s surveyor and astronomer. Unable to do any work, Thompson became his pupil.
He hobbled to the common room where Turnor waited for him with a daunting pile of books. His teacher had an avuncular face and the manner of a missionary. Thompson sat down and waited for his lesson.
“Practical astronomy, Mr. Thompson,” Turnor said, “requires knowledge of the skies. The position and movement of the planets are the basis for calculations. Latitude is calculated by measuring the altitude of the sun, or at night using a sextant to place a star, then referring to tables and formulas. Longitude is a more difficult matter. It is calculated by comparing local time to the exact time at prime meridian, which means keeping an accurate clock set to Greenwich Mean Time.”
At sea, navigators used a chronometer, but that instrument was too delicate for land exploration, for rough travel by foot, on horse, or by canoe.
“So you must continually adjust the unreliable timepieces to Greenwich Mean Time,” Turnor said. “The skies are a vast celestial clock. You can time the emergence and disappearance of one of Jupiter’s moons, examining it through a telescope. Or you can use the Earth’s moon, measuring its position against two fixed stars.”
Thompson struggled diligently with this information, master
ing the three hours of complex trigonometry that came with measurement. Astronomy required skill, determination, patience, a mathematical nature, and the ability to stare at the skies for hours in every kind of weather. And of course every calculation was threatened by human error and had to be done several times.
He studied the stars each night, marked positions, and made the meticulous calculations. He rarely slept and worked by candlelight. During the day, he examined the sun. He noticed that his right eye was swollen, perhaps from staring upward, or from the candlelight. MacKay looked at it and pronounced, “The beginnings of leprosy I’m sure. I don’t want to think what part it wants next.”
Within a week, Thompson could see little out of that eye. The world was clear through his left eye, but through the right everything was blurred and bordered by a dark frame. When he looked out onto the prairie, it undulated slightly, as if two versions of the landscape had been inexpertly put together to form a single image. After ten days the vision in his right eye was gone altogether. When he closed his left eye, all he could see were vague shapes the colour of darkness against a background of greater darkness.
And his right leg had yet to mend properly. In the night a wound had mysteriously opened above the fracture. Perhaps a piece of bone had broken off, still causing havoc. It was as though parts of him were trying to escape. He could walk only short distances, and that with difficulty. Perhaps he would never walk properly again. What kind of explorer would he make? A half-blind cripple limping through the New World, the north obscured as he walked west, the south obscured as he walked east. He looked at his calculations, pages of them, the neat numbers moving across the lines with logic and purpose. After a month of patient tutelage and experimentation, he had established his position: latitude 53°56’44” N, longitude 102°13’ west of Greenwich, and the variation by the transits of the sun and a well-regulated watch is 11°30’ east.
His leg healed through the summer, though he had a pronounced limp that he was resigned to. He was given a brass compass, a thermometer, a case of instruments, four volumes of Dr. Johnson’s Rambler, and a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost. He could speak French, two native languages, and had a little of two others. At eighteen, he had grown to his full, unimpressive height. He could establish his own location in the world, could place himself precisely under God’s eye.
In December the air itself began to freeze, the kaleidoscopic crystals twinkling in the brittle sun. At the crude wooden table in the common room, Thompson sat in his heavy coat eating an indifferent meal of boiled venison. After dinner he went outside to view the stars through his quadrant, consulting his watch, making notes, a habit. He needed little sleep, or at least didn’t notice its absence.
MacKay came out. “Do you see Him up there?” he asked. “Do you see God?”
“Sometimes,” Thompson said.
“He talks to you, does He?”
“He talks to everyone.”
“Perhaps I was out,” MacKay said.
“I will tell you something, MacKay. I see no future with the Hudson’s Bay Company. They’ve neglected their duty to explore. I’m preparing to leave. I’ve no more patience for these men.”
“They’ll begrudge you.”
“I suppose they will. No matter. I’m going to take a position with the North West Company.”
“A Nor’Wester. You’ll be singing vile songs in French and fornicating without shame.”
“You would fit, MacKay. You should think of it as well.” MacKay had been a fine companion. He would be the only thing he missed. Was he turning his back on the British Empire? Perhaps it had turned its back on him. “They’ll allow me to explore.”
“Explore what.”
“The country.”
“I’ll save you the bother, Davy. It’s more of the same from here to China. More cold, more Indians, more mosquitoes. You can tell the Nor’Westers that.”
The North West Company was based in Montreal, and was fuelled by energetic French who paddled thousands of miles to visit the Indians, undermining the Hudson’s Bay Company’s monopoly. They gave Thompson a sextant in a cork-lined box with quicksilver and parallel glasses, an achromatic telescope, drawing instruments, and two thermometers, and ordered him to go south and make contact with the Mandans, and to find the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
Thompson had persuaded MacKay to join the Nor’Westers, and MacKay stood before him, staring at this short, half-blind, half-lame explorer.
“I hear the Mandans eat the tongues of their enemy,” MacKay said. “I hear everyone is their enemy. Watch yourself, Davy.”
“I will.”
“You’ll only find more of the same. I could draw you the map now. Save you the grief.”
“Grief is what makes a map, MacKay.”
“You’re still working for God, then? He traffics in grief.”
“God and country.”
“This isn’t a country, Davy, and it will take a lot more than you to make it one.”
Thompson left the next morning and camped beside a pine that was in the middle of the plain. There were faded red markings at the base of the tree, and beside it were the bleached bones of a horse. He fell asleep quickly and dreamed of a snake eating a larger snake in an English garden. Mice scurried among rotting vegetables. He awoke from the dream like a worm emerging from the earth. You cut a worm in half and you get two worms—two lives, twice the adventure, twice the misery. Or did all the misery stay with one half ? The sun lingered below the horizon and a coyote paced fifty yards away.
He walked for five weeks into the hostile wind that came down from the mountains, and arrived in late December. The Mandan village had orderly lines and snow-covered fields where corn had been harvested. Only a few men were in the village, and Thompson sat with an elder who, through the pantomime that accompanied the story, told him that all the men were off at war.
A man with long dark hair tied up with bird skulls sat in the hut staring at Thompson while the old man talked. He came over, a walk that was European. He spoke French.
“You have come to study the savages,” he said, and introduced himself as Michel Antoine.
“They grow corn?” Thompson asked.
“And beans, some pumpkins.”
“How long have you been here?” Thompson asked. The man was dressed as a Mandan. His dark hair helped disguise him, and his face, with its slight, spotty beard, could pass as native. But he didn’t move as they did.
“Fifteen years.”
“What brought you here?”
“Love,” he said.
“And that is what keeps you here?”
The man shook his head and laughed. “No,” he said. “Habit.”
The war party returned after dark, perhaps fifty men. Antoine conferred with them and told Thompson they had been fighting the Cheyenne to the south. They had entered an enemy village and killed everyone except three women, whom they took as prisoners and who now walked in their midst. Some of the Mandans carried leather bags. In the largest lodge they emptied their sacks and the heads of their enemies rolled out, the faces drained of blood, the mouths open and terrible.
One of the women prisoners held an eight-month-old baby. After hurried preparation, there was a war dance, and the three women stood inside a hostile circle of chanting men. Women and children banged pots. Thompson counted twenty-three heads lying at their feet. He watched as the woman with the infant picked up the head of her dead husband by the hair and kissed his drained lips and pressed the head to her baby’s mouth. Two Mandan men quickly took the head away. One of them scalped it. The woman held up her child to heaven and sang a short song. She kissed her child and placed it on the ground and took a sharp knife from her deerskin garment and plunged it into her own heart and fell among the heads. One of the Mandan women picked up the baby and held it and sang softly into its ear.
In the morning, the slain woman was buried as a warrior. Thompson stared at her face. Where does such defiance come from?
he wondered. Where did you find such faith, such love?
5
ÎLE-À-LA CROSSE, NORTH WEST, 1799
In 1799 there was already the breathlessness of a new century. Napoleon had seized power in France, the Corsican peasant who embraced democracy, aristocracy, and the military with equal fervour, who needed to swallow the world and immersed himself in Josephine, whispering that she was his homeland, he lived only in her, her smell of drying leaves and damp mornings, leaving her wetness on his chin at breakfast. It hadn’t been that long—six years—since Louis XVI had had his head removed by the heavy blade of the guillotine, held up wigless and slack-faced to a cheering crowd. Those pints of blood spraying over the rough wooden shackles and cleaned up ten hours later by a toothless woman using dirty water and a coarse broom. So ended a century of divine right.
In England, George III had lost part of an empire in America and was losing his mind. The monarch was now an amiable rustic, walking the countryside, admiring its orchards, his long hair unkempt, asking farmers’ wives to share their recipes for apple dumplings, smiling like a simpleton.
The world was shifting, ancient hatreds and new appetites redrawing the borders. North America hadn’t been concisely divided; it awaited a fresh war, treaties, and cartography.
Thompson thought that he would bring the North West into existence with hard lines. The land didn’t come before the map, he thought: the map creates the land. A map was knowledge. At some point, there would be claims upon that land, as there were upon all lands. Thompson believed that the North would be the only part of the continent not taken from the Indians by fraud or by force, saved by its barrenness.
Thompson saw the future arrive like a starving wolf and he saw the poverty that would follow the destruction of the beaver, its death coming from over-trapping and an equally cruel predator—fashion, the beaver hats suddenly become barbarous anomalies in the closets of Europe. Elders already warned of a looming desert, of crows descending on a dying nation like a black wind.