Specimen Song

by Peter Bowen

  He was helping Du Pré set up a tent. The village was poor and the shacks were crowded.

  Far off in the woods, someone was playing a flute.

  Grave children watched them put up the tent.

  Du Pré felt at home.

  It was like this around the fur posts, he thought. God, people must have been poor back then. We can’t imagine.

  Eloise, Lucky’s wife, brought them coffee, hot and thick with sugar. She laughed.

  Lucky looked at her.

  “I am just happy,” she said.

  “She’s like that,” said Lucky.

  Du Pré pounded in a stake.

  He ate with them that night, some good white fish and vegetables, homemade bread and preserves. He rolled a smoke.

  Lucky took Du Pré’s pouch and made himself a cigarette.

  “We got the same people we had last time ’cept for Françoise, who is going to have this baby.”

  Du Pré nodded. Women did that.

  “Also this Bart,” said Lucky, “he called and said he would be here in a week or ten days.”

  “Good,” said Du Pré.

  “It’s such a bad thing Hydro-Quebec wants to do,” said Lucky. “The young people have worked hard to set up their little communities, ban drugs and alcohol, go back to the old ways that were good and use the new ones that are good. Now these dams could destroy that all.”

  “The mercury will kill off Hudson Bay,” said Eloise. She had lost the hesitant bad grammar of the poor Indian. Du Pré could hear much education in her voice. Poor little Indian girl, indeed.

  “There’s too much brush where the water backs up,” said Lucky, “too expensive to grub out. So they flood it, and the brush chemically will fix mercury into methylmercury compounds. Very lethal, and they concentrate in the food chain. In us. You know about the stuff?”

  “Yeah,” said Du Pré. He remembered he’d read something. Heavy metals. Mercury was very poisonous.

  “New York City needs electrical power,” said Lucky. “So they are happy to take our land and lives for it.”

  “How did you meet Chase?” said Du Pré suddenly.

  “Him.” Lucky laughed. “Oh, you know us Chippewa don’t allow any publication of our religious beliefs, sue you right now, but we get these people want to find out things. So we tell them a lot of shit, but they can’t get any two Chippewa to tell them the same stuff, and if they say anything, we say, That’s right, and we sue.”

  “Anthropologists,” said Lucky. Same tone of voice a housewife uses with the word cockroaches. “When I was a kid, they came to dig up an old burial ground, so old, we didn’t know who was in it. What kind of Indians, you know. We think we have been here forever, but our history is brief, if not short. Not much to write in it, you know. My committee at Brown was even half-hoping I’d tell them true Chippewa religious tales.”

  Okay, Du Pré thought, Brown is one of the places Maria is thinking of going. Backwoods canoe builder. Sure.

  “These anthros dug it up. End of the season, they had a party. All of them wore a human vertebra on a ribbon in their lapel or pinned to their dresses. Disgusting. So they left. So we dug up all the bones and moved them. Buried them simply out of sight.”

  “They came back and had a fit,” said Eloise, “but no one knew anything. We didn’t know if they were Mishtawayawiniwak or not, but they deserved to sleep.”

  “What’s Mishtawa …um?” said Du Pré.

  “Canadian Chippewa, Cree, Ojibwa,” said Lucky. “Our American cousins get pissed off, think we look at them as second-class.”

  “So we are going down the Rivière de la Baleine,” said Lucky. “Brave Indians going up against powerful interests. Actually, Hydro-Quebec is so scared, they have tried to buy us off. They don’t want us asking why screw up the River of the Whale? Very bad publicity.”

  “Asking it sadly from bark canoes,” said Eloise. “In good sound bites.”

  Du Pré howled with laughter.

  “You remember when Chase rejoined the expedition for the last mile?” said Lucky. “And we didn’t do anything?”

  “Not much, anyway,” said Eloise.

  “We got a couple of reporters really curious,” said Lucky.

  “We talk to them once in a while.”

  “They smell a story,” said Lucky.

  “We only waved it under their noses a little,” said Eloise.

  “And Bart has helped a lot,” said Lucky.

  Oh, Du Pré thought, so he is not sitting half-dead with love all of the time. Good.

  “He owns some TV stations,” said Eloise.

  No fucking doubt, thought Du Pré. He has been sober now for a few years and I bet he is just finding out what all he owns. Michelle says, yes, he will own heaven, too.

  Which he deserves.

  “That Bart, he is something,” said Du Pré.

  “Come on,” said Lucky, “I will show you these canoes. They got left out by mistake and the porcupines chewed them so bad I had to build new ones.”

  Lucky led Du Pré to a huge wall tent set on a puncheon floor, up on pilings. He fiddled with the tent ties and went inside. Du Pré waited until a gasoline lantern flared. He stepped in. The two big freighters were up on forms, struts and braces pinned and partly lashed. Long coils of braided spruce roots hung from the side poles. Birch bark was stacked cup-down at the far end.

  Toolboxes filled with carefully organized shaves and chisels and drawknives. Expensive tools, all with beechwood handles and precise bright grindings on the cutting edges—well-used and well-kept.

  “We got about three weeks, and this lacing and steaming the bark takes time,” said Lucky. “I could sure use some help.”

  “You know these murders?” said Du Pré.

  Lucky nodded.

  “The police think it is Chase. I don’t think so. I think that it is someone uses Chase, only strikes when Chase is around.”

  Lucky looked at Du Pré. He seemed very sad.

  “He may come after me,” said Du Pré.

  I hope he does anyway.

  “Well,” said Lucky, “don’t worry about here. We know everything. Who said he would come after you?”

  “Old man I know sees things,” said Du Pré. “He’s never been wrong.”

  “I would like to meet him,” said Lucky.

  Du Pré nodded. Me, I would just like to know where the old bastard is.

  Lucky turned down the lantern and they left as the light died.

  Du Pré slept deep.

  He dreamed of owls and fire, black waters and endless ice, great bears and white wolves, piles of soft furs.

  Some fiddle music.

  A mountain with a hole in it, like the eyesocket of a skull, something moving back in the mountain, a flash of black eyes in black.

  CHAPTER 32

  DU PRÉ SPENT HIS DAYS in the pale light and cedar smoke, helping Lucky pitch and fit and lace the canoe skins together. The village pulsed around them. Children stuck their heads under the tent wall to stare solemnly, flitting away like chipmunks at any glance from Du Pré. Lucky could look at them directly, but Du Pré was alien and alarming.

  They worked well together, so well that they could ask questions of one another merely by holding up a piece. The other would look at it and nod, or perhaps walk over and point at some confusion.

  They ate fish and drank clear water tart with cedar. No alcohol was allowed in the village, but sometimes a drunk would come back from his sad journey to a roadhouse, reeking and eventually ashamed. The people said nothing to the offender. They didn’t have to.

  Lucky showed Du Pré how to carve the breaker rolls from birch logs, to fit under the scalloped stern. He wouldn’t say where he had come upon this design. Du Pré thought it might lessen drag. It might not, too. He didn’t know. The freighters were big and clumsy and it was likely enough the breaker rolls were merely cosmetic, but if Lucky’s ancestors used them, well, that was a pretty good reason.

  Me, I bake my own rosin
from spruce pitch from a tree on the south slope. That tree is smart enough to find a spring or it couldn’t live. Same way to look for music.

  Du Pré liked the fish. The Chippewa were a fishing and trapping culture. They needed vast lands and good waters. He liked the people. They walked pigeon-toed. Some unfortunates were crippled by hip dysplasia. They lived in another time.

  Rain. It began as a patter of sleet and little pellets of ice, then rain. Du Pré lay curled in his sleeping bag, the hypnotic sound of the drops on the cloth lulling and gentle.

  He woke. He had heard something.

  Light danced through the wall of the tent.

  The canoe shop was on fire.

  Du Pré struggled into his pants and pulled on his pants and he ran out, shirtless. The cold rain stung his skin.

  Flames boiled twenty feet in the air for just a moment, then fell, and the tent cloth was gone. The canoes burned brightly for a while, shed slabs of burning bark, the struts weakened and the canoes fell flaming into the burning floor.

  Nothing to do.

  Du Pré tried to remember the sound, a whoosh or a whump.

  Someone had poured gasoline in there. The fire went up too fast for anything else.

  He went back to his tent and got dressed, put on his jacket and hat. He took a good flashlight and started casting about beyond the circle of footprints made by the people who had come to watch helplessly.

  “The bastards,” said Lucky, “those rotten sons of bitches.” He sounded plenty Anglo-Saxon when he was mad.

  Du Pré didn’t wait to find out who Lucky thought had done it. He moved off into the trees on a trail, stabbing the beam at the bushes to see if anyone had moved through them. He found where a man had come through the brush to the trail and moved off toward the big lake to the east. Du Pré followed the footprints. The man wasn’t running, just striding purposefully down to the water. The rain had masked the boat’s engine. There would have to have been a plane over there somewhere out of sight, and now it was above these leaking clouds, heading back.

  Somebody with a lot of money didn’t want this trip to happen. Du Pré wondered if the Hydro-Quebec people could be such fools. Or had their dealings with the quiet and seemingly despairing Indians given them blinders of contempt?

  Lucky and Eloise would go down that damn river on logs and Du Pré on an inner tube if they had to.

  Nothing to be done right now, Du Pré thought. I don’t got a plane in my backpack, and anyway, I hate to fly.

  Lucky and Eloise were smiling, happy, whistling when Du Pré got back. They couldn’t have been more joyful.

  “We are getting to them,” said Lucky. “We are getting to them real good, you bet.”

  Du Pré squatted on his wet heels. He felt the cold on his ass. He wiped his hands on his shirt, got out his makings, and rolled a cigarette.

  “Okay,” said Du Pré. “So I guess you had made these canoes to be burned, yes? And you got others?”

  Lucky grinned.

  “You sure it was them?” said Du Pré.

  Lucky’s face got hard and then bewildered.

  “Who the fuck else would it be?” he said.

  “Chase,” said Du Pré, “maybe. Maybe someone you haven’t thought of.”

  Lucky looked down, lost.

  “You got people, you got politics,” said Du Pré. “What are your Chippewa politics?”

  “We got some traitors want to sell this place, all of our land,” said Lucky, “but they don’t live here. They are apples—red out, white in—but I don’t think they would do it now. Wait till later. This maybe jacks up the price, you know.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “The canoes are hidden a few miles downriver from where we take off,” said Lucky, “hidden well. Hervé and Guillaume are there and they are armed and very good in the woods. They seem to be fishing, drying fish, anybody sees them. All winter, they were there trapping. We fly to where the canoes are, you see. We won’t be stopped.”

  Du Pré sighed. He thought he should have been told, then he thought it didn’t matter. Or was he here because of Bart and Bart’s power?

  Hmm, Du Pré thought, am I being used or being spared?

  Either way, I don’t much like it.

  Lucky stood up. He peeled off his leather gloves and dropped them carelessly on the big round of wood the maul was buried in. He turned and walked away toward the outhouse.

  One glove fell off.

  Du Pré picked it up and tossed it on its mate.

  He rolled a smoke.

  When he lifted the match to his cigarette, he smelled gasoline, very faintly, and the tobacco bloomed with smoke.

  CHAPTER 33

  LUCKY LOOKED HAGGARD IN the TV light. Cameramen elbowed one another viciously for prime shots. Reporters yelled questions.

  Burn two canoes in the Canadian bush and you’d think a rock band’s plane crashed here or something, Du Pré thought.

  Lucky said the expedition would proceed as planned.

  Some RCMPs were around, asking questions headed toward blaming the fire on a drunken Indian.

  Bart had showed up.

  And, while Lucky was being pestered by the reporters, so had Paul Chase.

  Du Pré had seen two floatplanes come in and had assumed that they bore more reporters.

  “ ’Lo bro,” said Bart, behind him.

  They stood watching Lucky. The guy was good. He managed to look both oppressed and fearfully determined.

  The other woman from the first trip Du Pré had been on, Françoise, had showed up with the newspeople. She spent her time speaking softly into a small tape recorder.

  Bart looked up and stiffened, like a dog at the sight of another on its turf.

  Paul Chase was walking toward them, wearing a gleaming white smile nicely set off by his UV parlor tan.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Du Pré wanted to strangle him.

  “You’re wrong about me,” said Chase. He smiled again. It was a smile blank as a clouded moon. His eyes were open too wide.

  Bart and Du Pré just stared at him till his smile shriveled and he walked dejectedly away, one more little man cruelly misunderstood by everyone.

  Lucky quit talking. The reporters fanned out and began jabbering at anyone who’d stand still for it.

  The young woman from the paper who had talked to Du Pré the last time came stalking.

  “Who did this?” she said.

  Du Pré shrugged.

  “Someone who doesn’t want this trip to succeed,” said Bart.

  “Hydro-Quebec?” she asked.

  Bart and Du Pré looked at something very interesting very far off. “Thanks,” she said, leaving to grasp more garrulous prey.

  “This trip, it will be wet and cold,” said Du Pré.

  “Yes,” said Bart.

  “Why are we doing this?” asked Du Pré.

  “Yes,” said Bart.

  “Why are you saying yes yes?” said Du Pré.

  “Yes yes,” said Bart.

  They walked over toward Lucky, who was talking earnestly to the woman from the newspaper. He had a long braided thong in his hands, one with a piece of antler at each end. The leather was smooth and a deep red. He kept running the thong through his hands.

  Du Pré and Bart stopped and waited.

  “What is that cord made of?” said the reporter.

  “Eel skin,” said Lucky, “best kind of babiche. Very strong.”

  “Shit,” said Bart, whispering, “that’s the stuff the killer used on the second victim.”

  Du Pré nodded. His people hadn’t made eel-skin babiche. They were a long damn way from eels. He remembered stretching the rawhide and slicing the reins from the hide, lacing up the snowshoes Catfoot made. Varnishing the babiche so that it wouldn’t get wet and stretch.

  I wonder that shit Chase is going to follow along, Du Pré thought.

  Probably.

  “Did Hydro-Quebec do this?” said the reporter.

  “Ask
the mountains,” said Lucky dryly.

  “Why did you choose the Rivière de la Baleine?” said the reporter.

  “It’s very important to my people,” said Lucky.

  “Do your people worship whales?” she said.

  Lucky stood silent.

  “Do they?”

  Lucky didn’t move.

  She scribbled something.

  “Du Pré, Bart,” said Lucky, suddenly smiling, “let’s go get something to eat.”

  “I have a couple more questions,” said the reporter, as though Lucky owed answers to her.

  Lucky walked round her. She did not exist.

  The three of them headed away from the ruck of people, heads down, each with his own thoughts. The reporter asked a couple more questions, but she got no answers and she gave up.

  “Very smart,” said Bart. “The River of the Whale. Isn’t there a way you could get baby harp seals and the rain forest in on this, too?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Lucky. “And I never saw a harp seal in a rain forest on a whale’s back. I’d like to.”

  “Among the primitives,” said Bart.

  “Chase isn’t competent enough to follow us,” said Lucky, “so he’d have to hire paddlers, have to have flunkies. What a strange man.”

  “He may have killed several of your people,” said Bart.

  Lucky shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “He is too weak, too frightened.”

  Du Pré pulled out his pouch. The slingshot came with it. He wadded the thongs and pocket back up and stuck them in his jacket. I must practice where no one can see me, he thought.

  Eloise was sitting in the front of the shack. She looked very angry.

  Lucky went to her. He put his hand on her shoulder and she covered it with hers.

  They murmured in Cree.

  Bart and Du Pré walked away.

  “We can carry rifles, at least,” said Bart. He was always ready to go to war.

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Michelle sends her best and says if you drown me, she won’t have you to supper for at least a month,” said Bart, “and she means it.”