“I’m sorry, Pierre. It appears we’re outvoted, three to two. I think I’d better go on to keep watch on Magnus. We both know he’s a lunatic.”
“So are you, if you keep marching toward the Dakota!”
“I’m in your debt for saving us. Take the canoe, go back to Grand Portage, and if we find something worth keeping I’ll share it with you anyway. I promise. Go back to your friends.”
“But you’re my friends, now!”
“Well, your friends are going that way.” I pointed after the others.
“Mon dieu, you are not donkeys but jackasses! When the Dakota stake us all to the plains, do not blame me!”
“It will be entirely the women’s fault, but every lady I meet seems to have a definite mind of her own.” I shouldered my rifle. “You’ve done enough.”
He groaned. “Merde, you will starve without me. Or drown. Or be drained by mosquitoes. Or trampled by a moose. No, Pierre must look after his donkeys. Very well. Help me sink our canoe to hide it, because the markings make clear it is Red Jacket’s. We’ll pray he doesn’t discover we went this way. And hope we can find another river, and another canoe, and the women’s village, and this stone tablet, and paradise. Somewhere off the edge of the earth!”
By hurrying, we caught the others in a few miles. “How far to your medicine man and his stone tablet?” Pierre asked Namida, who accepted matter-of-factly that we’d followed her.
“Many days. We have to go to where the trees end.”
“Well, my friends, there it is.” Pierre looked gloomy. “We’re at the edge of the blank spot on your old map. So I will go on your goose chase and watch you search the prairie for hammers. If you find nothing, it will make a good joke for my voyageur friends, and if you do find something, then you will share with your great friend Pierre. I will be rich and unhappy, like the bourgeois.”
“Oh, we’ll find it,” Magnus said.
“And why do you still carry your map case, when we no longer have a map?”
“Because it carries more than a map.”
“But what, my friend? What is so precious?”
He looked at the four of us for a long time. I was curious too, of course. There was something more to his quest he hadn’t shared with me. “I’m taking something to Yggdrasil, not just taking something away,” he said. “You might think me crazy.”
“We already think you crazy!”
“I prefer not to share it yet, because my hope may be futile. All I can tell you is that if we can find Thor’s hammer, I may find peace—and if not peace, then at least acceptance. I carry the blood of kings, and also their old stories of that time before time, when miracles could still happen.”
“Miracles now?” Pierre cried in exasperation.
“Have faith, Frenchman.”
“I’d rather have a canoe.”
Chapter 34
WE TRAMPED INTO THE WORST COUNTRY YET, THICK WOODS and meandering swamp. The nights were growing crisper, but the days were still hot and buggy. There was no direct path, so we used the sun to strike west as close as we could.
“The swamp will discourage pursuit,” Magnus said.
“That is good,” Pierre said, “because we make one mile of progress for every three hours of circling, wading, and meandering.”
Indeed, it took us three days and forty miles of marching to make what I guessed was at best twenty miles in our desired direction, following hummocks across wetlands and moose trail through eerily quiet forest. Twice I saw water snakes undulate away and thought again of Apophis, the Egyptian serpent god. We shot and butchered a deer, but our hasty meals never caught up with our persistent hunger. I felt lean as rawhide.
Finally the still water seemed to show a slight current, waterweed bending, and we sensed we were nearing the path of another river. The marsh seemed to be tilting west. A final belt of woods and we reached broad water running south. This new river was too wide to easily swim, and the idea of struggling up its brushy banks was unappealing.
“I hadn’t dreamed dry land could be so wet,” I said.
“A canoe remains the only way to travel in this country,” said Pierre. “If we found a stand of birch and some spruce root we could build one, but even the least excuse for a canoe would take a week or more.”
“Spring is the time to take the bark, not now,” Namida said.
“So we bushwhack? Swim?”
“We build a fire, have a proper meal, and wait,” she advised. “White men hurry too much. Start doing things the Indian way.”
I was hesitant to advertise our presence, but Namida reasoned that if Red Jacket was pursuing us across the swamps we’d have seen sign by now. So we roasted venison, boiled wild rice, and almost as if expected, an Ojibway hunting party drifted down on us after smelling our smoke and food.
“See? Wait for help,” said Namida.
By now I feared red strangers, but by extending the normal hospitality of Indians we got the same in return. These men were as different from Red Jacket’s band as a hotelier from a dungeon keeper: shy, curious visitors who accepted our food matter-of-factly because of the mutual aid expected in the wilderness. It is the poorest who are the most generous. There were four men hunting in two canoes, which left room for game and furs. The women interpreted and they informed us that upstream this new river turned west. So we purchased one of their boats with four of the last silver dollars I’d hidden in my moccasins. Pierre had a steel awl and we drilled holes in the metal so that they could be hung as medallions. The Ojibway were so pleased that they gave us extra food and explained how this river upstream led to a series of lakes, streams, and portages and finally yet another river, that one flowing west.
So we set off again, happy to be paddling now that we’d suffered the alternative. We’d been converted to voyageurs.
“This may be the beginning of the Mississippi, but I’m not sure,” Pierre said.
“This country is a maze of rivers and lakes and I’ve not been here.”
“Even the maps at Grand Portage were blank in these parts,” I recalled.
The Frenchman pointed to the western bank. “If so, there’s your Louisiana, Ethan. We’re at the edge of Napoleon’s new empire.” Our course along it led north and west.
Now there were no forts, no maps, no certainties. If a woolly elephant had poked its head from the trees along the riverbank, I wouldn’t have been the least surprised. We did see moose feeding in the shallows, great jaws dripping, and armadas of ducks on pewter-colored lakes. In truth it did seem like an Eden, with the animals we saw not yet frightened by gunshots.
We passed villages of Indians as peaceful as Red Jacket was warlike, the children running along the bank to point at our white skin and Magnus’s red beard as we glided to a rest. The women streamed down to see us, curious, while the men hung slightly back with their bows, watchful but not unfriendly. Namida and Little Frog would ask, interpret, and then direct us on our way, always coming away with a gift of food. I left a coin at each one until I had no more.
When we camped, our Norwegian would sometimes climb a tree to survey the country in hopes of finding sign of Norse habitation. But all was simply an undulating expanse of forest and lake, endless and empty in all directions.
We healed and began to relax as each day passed with no sign of pursuit. Red Jacket’s band seemed increasingly remote. I’d almost certainly wounded or killed Cecil Somerset and perhaps dissuaded Aurora with my hard blow, and Pierre had winged the Indian chief. Maybe they’d been stung enough. Meanwhile, thanks to the women, the wilderness became a cornucopia, my rifle barking and the ladies gathering fruits. Magnus used his ax to whittle cooking spits, canoe braces and a dozen other useful tools as we traveled. Twigs yielded a crude tea. The inner bark of the basswood tree made strips to stitch birch into useful containers. Spruce gum was boiled to caulk leaks. The women taught us how camping near clay banks with swallows’ nests would provide us a zone almost free of mosquitoes, so voraciously did the
little birds dine on them.
Little Frog had given up trying to attach herself to Magnus, who remained resolute against female attention. She instead made partners with Pierre, who took her attention as nothing more than his due for rescuing and accompanying us. He made no pretense of love, but instead initiated that cheerful sexual companionship that was the free and easy manner of the fur trade.
Namida, without request or negotiation, made herself a partner to me and, in the simple manner of that country, a potential wilderness bride as well. I knew there was a gulf of centuries between us, but could it be bridged? There was a limit to what we could talk about—she had no concept of cities or kings—but she began to educate me about survival in her world, showing how to find a simple root or make a simple shelter.
As for romance, for days she treated me with affectionate reserve, but finally she came to some decision, and one evening, as the sky where we were going went aflame from the sunset, she abruptly stood before the log where I was sitting, cleaning my rifle. “Come with me to gather wood,” she suggested.
Pierre’s eyebrows rose. He’d told me once that wood-gathering time was the favorite period for the young to sneak off and make love in the forest, away from the disapproval of their elders. “Yes, go find some fuel, Ethan.”
“Capital idea. Don’t want to get too chilly!”
She led me rapidly through the trees, light as an antelope. Namida was slightly pigeon-toed, in the Indian manner—their habit of walking with their feet straight or slightly turned in seemed to help their stealth and speed—and as confident in this green forest as a Philadelphia matron in a market. I followed in anticipation, neither of us picking up so much as a twig for a fire.
In a mossy glen she turned suddenly, smiled, and encircled my neck. I pulled her against me, marveling at the smoothness of her cheeks, the startling blue eyes, the copper of her hair. She was an alloy mix, as alien as a goddess. Finally we kissed, lightly at first, her nose and face rubbing against mine, and then more urgently.
“You rescued me,” I murmured when we broke. “That was brave, to demand us for husbands. It gave Pierre time and space to open fire.”
“You came to save me,” she said, “and now you’re taking me home.”
“Some women I know believe in fate, Namida. Do Indians believe in that?”
“I do not know that word.”
“That the Manitou or destiny wanted us to meet so we could help each other. That our partnership was supposed to happen.”
She shook her head. “What good is that? Then our choices mean nothing. No, I chose you. I decided you were good man.”
“And why is that?” It’s true, I think, but I always like to hear the reasoning of others.
“No one obeys you. No one fears you.”
That’s not quite the impression one wants to leave with a woman, but it seemed to work with Namida. “Well, I am affable.” And I kissed her again.
Her lips responded, sweetly and then passionately. She pressed herself against me, coiling with arm and leg, and we sank into a bed of sweet moss, warm and earth-smelling after the day’s sun. I lifted her tunic off her head and she tucked the doeskin under herself, raising her hips slightly, her coloring like honey. If we were headed to Eden, surely this was Eve. She reached up to loosen the laces of my shirt and trousers. I was more than ready.
“Pierre said you enchanted me,” I told her. “That you fed me seeds to attract me.”
She lifted her knees. “Do you think I need charms?”
“It appears not.”
“But it’s true, I did cast a spell. Women must do so to make a man sensible. Now we will give each other power.” She smiled, her blue eyes startling, and I was so struck by her sweetness that I literally lost breath.
To give! So different than the greedy grasping of a Pauline or an Aurora. Despite my own poor judgment, I’d found a woman who saw me as a partner. I was falling in love.
And so we entwined while the others waited, in vain, for firewood.
By the time we got back they’d fetched their own.
Chapter 35
WE PADDLED AS FAR WEST AS WE COULD, PASSING FROM RIVER to broad lake and back to river again, through a flat, forested landscape untouched by time. Mist hung on the reeds in early morning until the sun condensed it into evaporating diamonds, the warmth loosening our muscles as we stroked. The lakes were a perfect blue, clean enough to drink, with fish so plentiful they would boil in the shallows. We used the fat of our kills to grease ourselves against the insects, and their hides to patch our clothing. It was crowded in our single craft but sometimes Namida would lean against me and Little Frog would do the same with Pierre, resting as we glided. Instead of a pipe, we’d haul out on grassy islands to lie and look at lazy clouds. Only Magnus was impatient. The days were shortening.
When the river became no more than a stream and its channel turned south, Pierre guessed it was time to strike more directly west. We met another hunting party of Ojibway, these lithe and confident Indians as different from the wretches we’d seen in Ohio and Detroit as a duke from a debtor, and as again helpful as Red Jacket’s band had been hostile. Muscled, bronze, and at perfect ease in the wilderness, they had an easy, enviable manner that at first I couldn’t put my finger on. Why did they seem so different from the great mass of civilized men?
But then I recognized their quality: they were free. Oh, they were conscious of the cycling seasons and the daily arc of the sun, but they had no schedule and no destination, no ambition and no bosses, no dogma and no cause. They simply were alive. Their church was sky and forest, their loyalty was to family and clan, their destiny was as whimsical as the weather, and their science was magic. They were fierce about only one thing: their independence, their ability to roam where mood or need took them. True, they were hungry and cold and in pain at times, but how I now envied their presence in the present, in a world with no real history and no anxious future! Yet I could never capture that because I hadn’t been born to it; even out here I could never quite forget the tug of Washington and Paris, of distant armies and ambitious generals and a future with Zebulon Henry and compound interest. Why would I ever go back to such a world?
Because I was also frightened of this one: the endless space, the yawning silence, the reality of never making any material advance and of being suspended in a cottony now. I was, in the end, me. The Indians of Detroit and Grand Portage had been corrupted, but I understood their corruption. My kind had traded freedom for security, the simplicity of animals for the predictability of civilization. I’d been cast out of Eden, but I had the promise of compound interest! I longed for this native freedom, but feared it, too. I was all for possession of Louisiana, but only if it could be tamed. There was no familiarity here. I sometimes heard spirits moving in the woods at night. I had little sense of direction away from the river by day. A wild thing could burst from the bushes at any moment.
I dared not confess this to Pierre.
At the advice of the Indians, we portaged our canoe a full day’s march to another stream, this one flowing west. The country was opening up into a savannah of wood and prairie, untrammeled and brimming with game. Our first bison came two days later. The animals drifted with insouciance, huge hump and shoulder tapering down to a sprinter’s hindquarters, as if two separate animals had been assembled to make one. Their brow was matted with dark, curly hair and wicked-looking horns, and their great dark eyes regarded us warily as we drifted past, the wind making the aspen shimmer.
“Dakota territory,” Pierre said.
Seeing the buffalo, I could almost imagine woolly elephants across the next ridge. Sometimes I stood on the bank’s high, sweet grass and pretended I was in Africa. The country and sky were opening, great white clouds sailing by like tall ships, the grass humming with locusts that skimmed ahead like flying fish when we stretched our legs.
The weather was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Many days we journeyed west under an endless bright s
ky, but occasionally black clouds like smoke would suddenly appear on the horizon and rise like a midnight curtain, blotting out the sun. The temperature would plunge as the wind rose, the prairie grass flailing frantically, and it would grow difficult to hear. Thunder would rumble, lightning flash, and Magnus and Pierre would look at me expectedly.
“I have no equipment!” I’d shout. “Science is about instruments and machines!”
They wanted sorcery.
Then rain or hail would lash as we crouched like humble animals, the storm boiling overhead in shades of gray, green, and purple. Once we watched a tendril of black reach down like an ominous finger and form a curious funnel, like a ram’s horn. Then the storm would pass as quickly as it had come, grumbling behind us. The sun would reappear, grass steaming, and soon we’d be hot again, insects rising in clouds.
So we were alternately soaked and sweaty, hungry and then gorging saltless meat before it could spoil, tired from trudging and restless from sleeping on hard ground. Namida would cup against me for warmth at night, and when we snuck away to make love, she’d buck and cling with fierce ecstasy, not wanting to let me go.
But I knew, always in the back of my mind, that it couldn’t last.
Namida and Little Frog were becoming excited as the country opened to remind them of home, but Magnus was troubled.
“There are no great trees here; this can’t be right.”
“You must read the ancient words,” Namida insisted. “What you call the cipher. Come, come, we must find my old village and the stone!”
THE FIRST REALIZATION THAT WE’D NOT LEFT TROUBLE BEHIND came after we crossed the Red River of the North.
Pierre recognized the waterway because it flowed the direction of its name. Its cottonwood bottomlands had grass so high it reached above our heads.
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