My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur

by Phyllis Rudin

  What do you call it when you have a need that matches up perfectly with someone else’s supply? Kismet? Capitalism? Whichever. This was a perfect example. Nana had the wool and I needed tuques. Lots. I wanted every kid who came to our voyageur open house to put on a tuque to get them in the mood. They’d have to give them back before they left the museum of course, so there’d be enough there for the next group. Yes, I was aware that the sharing of hats was frowned upon in the world of kindergartens and daycares who operated under the shadow of the big L. I’d seen the commercials on TV for those special combs. But if the kids left the museum itching and scratching, at least I’d be sending them out into the world with a real sense of what it was like to be a voyageur. And wasn’t that the point of it all?

  I found Nana a free pattern on the web. It was for a Santa cap actually, but the tip drooped authentically, and minus the pompom and white trim it looked pretty well right. She absorbed the instructions through her pores, seemed like, and the tuques started coming off her needles so fast she could have outfitted the whole North West Company given half a chance. She fixed me up with a stash that more than covered what I had in mind, filling my empty rum barrel to the brim. I was ready. In theory that is.

  You know those recurring dreams people have? Or nightmares I guess they’d more accurately be. The ones where they’re running down the street being chased? Or they’re endlessly falling, falling, falling? Or they walk into class one day, look down, and see that they’re completely naked? Those ones? Well I’d been having one lately. Different from those though. Personalized. It had me waiting at the museum door on Nuit Blanche, all expectant and welcoming, and no one showing up. All night long. Not a single solitary person. Discounting, of course, the Bay’s big guns standing by, taking in my nonsuccess with what-did-you-expect expressions on their faces. Well I was about to see if it was nightmare or prophesy. The time had come to boogie or get off the pot.

  18

  You’d have thought we were giving the merchandise away, judging by the crowds. The store was packed to the gills. Way fuller than I’d ever seen it. More crammed even than on Boxing Day when shoppers streamed in by the truckload to exchange Christmas gifts that were too long, too short, too tight, too plaid, didn’t heat up, didn’t turn on, didn’t shred, didn’t froth, didn’t liquefy, didn’t fast-forward, didn’t crimp, didn’t exfoliate, didn’t whatever. Mum dreaded that day like no other. Lines were long and tempers short. But the mood of the store was different for Nuit Blanche, that is if a store can have a mood. Everyone seemed bouncy on both sides of the counter.

  It didn’t hurt that the Bay had put on its party shoes for the event, really tricked itself out. The window dressers and the stylists rose to the challenge considering they didn’t have any set theme to fall back on, not like Donner and Blitzen at Christmas or Cupid on Valentine’s Day, although if they’d really wanted to go thematic for the night they could have just decorated with dollar signs. None of the designers jumped for that idea. Go figure. I guess they didn’t want to get themselves sacked. So instead they stuck with the literal, all stars and moons and constellations, some enchanted evening with fairy lights and disco balls. And it worked, I thought. Didn’t look sow’s earish at all. The place sparkled.

  I was in my finest voyageur apparel for the event. Authentic from tip to toe. Okay, I stand corrected. Authentic style from tip to toe. I’d even gone so far as to tuck my glasses away for the duration. I didn’t want any present day accessories spoiling my look. Besides, I figured it would blunt some of my stage fright if my audience was a bit hazy out there in front of me. My team was outfitted in my image. I’d issued a fatwa on anachronisms for the night and the guys cooperated by cobbling together outfits that passed my take-no-prisoners modernism inspection. We were four awesome looking voyageurs. IMHO.

  At five minutes before the festivities were slated to begin, just coming up on nine, I forced myself to head towards the door of the museum to fling it open to the hypothetical masses. I’d been holed up inside all day with Sam, Renaud, and Nick putting the finishing touches on our moves. “You look like you’re off to your own execution, Bennie boy,” Sam said while I hesitated with my hand on the door. “Forget that stupid dream of yours. They’ll be there, the rug-rats, all fired up to be entertained by that world renowned theatre troupe, the Wannabe Voyageurs. Go. Open up already. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  I couldn’t put it off any longer even though my stomach was petitioning for an eleventh-hour reprieve. I understood from its gassy toots that all it wanted was for the two of us to crawl into the canoe, hide ourselves away with a hot water bottle under a Hudson’s Bay blanket and wake up when it was all over. Sam had no patience for our squeamishness. He was stoked. “Move it,” he said taking charge. “It’s time.” He reached past me to push the door open and gave me a good shove out into the world of Nuit Blanche. And there lined up before me was a straggly row of kids stretching out as far as the eye could see, which granted was only as far as the Luggage Department across the floor, but still. I could let out my breath. If they kept showing up at that rate, we’d be packing them in all night long.

  Per plan, I handed the kids tuques as they trickled in all giggles, their parents playing paparazzi with their iPhones. What really blew me away as they filed past was that most of them had taken the trouble to dress up special for the event, like it was a Harry Potter opening night or something, but instead of Voldemorts and Dumbledores I had voyageurs, Amerindians, and beavers. There was even one kid outfitted as a missionary, his ex-bathrobe soutane swishing against the floor like he genuinely had a vocation. I don’t mind telling you the scene got me all choked up. These kids were keeners, the re-enactors of the future, keepers of the voyageur flame. I hoped to hell we wouldn’t let them down.

  The guys started singing “La Belle Lisette” right on cue as the kids settled themselves on the floor in a horseshoe facing me, with their mums and dads hugging the edges. The tune was a fur trader classic. My fellow voyageurs were lined up side by side behind me, in profile to the kids, each one plying a single paddle in rhythm to the music like they were my personal doo-wop girls. It was Nick who’d pushed for the musical intro. He was lead drummer in a spectacularly unsuccessful and tone-deaf band called Heisenberg Express, but he insisted that even the lousiest music, performed live, earned you bonus stamps on your loyalty card. I knuckled under even though I was afraid the kids would find their a cappella warbling too cornball. But there they were the little nippers, sitting goggle-eyed and expectant and we’d hardly even gotten under way.

  When the song trailed off, my three glee club members sat down tailor style and made themselves quietly busy around the voyageur camp so I could take over. I looked out over my audience in their hand-knitted tuques. I felt calm suddenly, sure of myself, like I was Grand Marshal at an elf convention. I was ready.

  “Missi picoutau amiscou,” I said, deliberately low, so the kids would have to lean in to catch it. I said it again, a little louder. “Missi picoutau amiscou.” I had them chant it after me like it was our secret password into the past. They didn’t have a clue what they were saying but it didn’t matter. I could have been asking them to repeat kish mier in tuchis, Grandpa’s favourite posterior obscenity, and they would have belted it out loud and clear. I had them in the palm of my hand.

  “Hundreds of years ago,” I began, “not so very far from where you’re sitting, when there was nothing at all around here but forests and rivers, the Montagnais trappers used those very words. In their language it meant the beaver makes everything. The beaver makes every thing. Now I want you to tuck that idea away in your brain where you can get at it. And tonight, what we’re going to do you and me, we’re going to go back in time together, to let you see first-hand what they meant. How the beaver really was at the root of it all, how the beaver really did make everything happen.” That was Renaud’s cue to come up and tap me on the shoulder. He’d performed one of the few wardrobe changes slated for
the night so that now he was dressed up like a well-to-do British bloke of the eighteenth century, cape, cane, and a top hat on his head. He preened in front of the kids, smarming it up something fierce, until I snatched the hat off his head and held it up to them.

  “It was fashion that did it,” I said, putting on Mum’s storytelling voice, all low slung and warm like a mug of cocoa. “This simple hat, made out of beaver felt, is what set off the European frenzy for furs from our side of the Atlantic that shook up everything. And we voyageurs, if I may say so, we were the most important link in the supply chain that led from the beavers to the hat shops of merry old England.” My two fellows at the canoe nodded vigorously at the truthfulness of my statement. “Without us,” I continued, “those dandies in England would have had to wear this.” Renaud reached under his cape and pulled out a cowboy hat which he put it on his head. “Or this.” He replaced it with a pith helmet. “Or this.” A beanie copter. “So you can see how crucial our job was. To fashion, to commerce, and to the world.

  “Which brings us back around to our friends the beavers, because we all know,” and here I spread my arms out like a choir conductor and my wee charges came back in perfect unison, “missi picoutau amiscou.” Ah, the headiness of power! I hadn’t been planning on it, but since I had a pair of mascot-sized rodents in the audience, twins from the look of it, I invited them up to the front for my demo instead of using the stuffed beaver I’d planned on. In my current pumped state I could handle a little improv. Piece of cake.

  “You might not think it, but it wasn’t the long outer hairs, the guard hairs we call them, that were so valuable in producing hats.” I stroked the front of the plush beaver costume one of my twin volunteers was wearing. “Oh no. It was actually the under-felt that the hatters used, the ground hair as it’s known. The ground hair is softer and easier for the hat-makers to mould into shape.” I rubbed the plush upwards against the grain on beaver number two to give them the idea of where the ground hair came from. While I was rubbing the tummies of my two beavers, it flitted through my mind that I might have made a strategic mistake. Would the parents accuse me afterwards of diddling with their little cherubs? Well, I’d know better for the ten p.m. show. I’d go less pedophilic, totally hands free.

  “Now just at the point that demand for hats like these was exploding in England, when anyone who was anyone absolutely had to have one, the European beavers were dying out from overhunting and disease.” My two beavers, a pair of hams who had their twin telepathy going, clutched their throats in slow but showy death throes and sank to the floor where they enjoyed a few last-ditch convulsions, real floor-thumpers, before croaking. It was sweet of them to accommodate me. It so suited me to have them dead. I thanked them for their buck-toothed participation and dismissed them back to their places while the audience clapped their appreciation and rubbed them up within an inch of their lives. I forged ahead solo.

  “So what happened then was that our fat, healthy New France beavers stepped up to the plate. They were trapped by the various tribes and stripped down into pelts like these.” I passed a few around. This was a risky move but I decided to go for it. Some kids didn’t have the stomach to handle pelts that still had heads and tails attached. These were the same kids who cried bloody murder when their parents put a whole fish on their plates. But this night not a one of them squawked so I moved right along. “The pelts were traded to the Europeans in exchange for manufactured goods like beads, knives, hatchets, guns, and ammunition. The Indigenous peoples thought the Europeans were missing something upstairs, trading eight nice sharp knives or twenty metal fish hooks for one beaver skin. That was the going rate. The Europeans, well, they had similar doubts about the sanity of the native peoples. But both sides had their particular needs, and the fur trade, for many years, benefited them both.

  “Now we voyageurs, where did we fit into all of this? Well, it was our job to transport the pelts by canoe from the interior to the trading posts and to ferry trade goods back in the opposite direction. If you think it was easy work, a quick zip down the waterslide, then you better think again. There were dangers lurking at every turn. Raging rapids that could rip the bottom right out of our canoe sending us to a watery grave. There were grizzlies the size of houses, and wolves who were anxious to take a chomp out of us to see if we tasted like chicken. We had to put up with fever, disease, and swarms of black flies so thick you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. Being a voyageur wasn’t for sissies my friends. It took a certain kind of man.”

  I signalled to Nick. He ducked behind the foresty backdrop and came back out wearing a white smock with a stethoscope round his neck and rolling a tall doctor’s scale which he parked beside me. “There were height limits,” I informed my audience. “Too tall and you were out of the running.” Nick directed Sam onto the scale, pulled the height-measurer stick down onto his head, studied it, and put a giant check mark on his clipboard. “And weight limits too. No blubber butts accepted.” Nick balanced the weight marker on the scale, bobbed his head yes, and marked another check on his paper. “See the ideal voyageur couldn’t be so big that he took too much room away from the trade goods. The more freight we could cram into the canoe the better.”

  Nick motioned Sam off the scale as if to continue the examination but they froze in position while I kept up with the commentary. “Okay, so on top of coming in at the right size and shape, there was another, slightly more unusual test you had to pass before you could join the voyageur fraternity. And that was, you had to be able to sing. Yes, you heard me right. A halfway decent singing voice was way up there on the list of necessaries for a would-be voyageur. I know it might sound silly to you. I mean it wasn’t the opera these guys were wanting to sign on with. But we voyageurs, we sang for a reason. Did you know that we paddled our canoes for sixteen long hours a day? Think of it. More than two school days put together. And we had to keep up the pace if we expected to reach our destination before winter closed us down for business, one stroke per second, no slacking off.”

  I clapped my hands to give them a feel for the tempo. They all joined in, and repeated my refrain to the beats.

  “From dawn (clap) to dusk (clap).”

  “From dawn to dusk.”

  “From dawn to dusk.”

  Oh, we were into it. “Now imagine yourself not just clapping at that rate, but paddling, paddling, paddling.” My arms made the switch to match my gestures to my words. The kids on the diapered end of the age spectrum figured that if Herr Leader was up there paddling away then they should be too, as if we were all playmates in some flaky mashup of Simon Says and Pattycake. They jumped up and imitated my row-row-row-your-boat movements, but on overdrive, which had the unfortunate spillover of blocking the view of the kids in the back and whapping their neighbours on each side who got cranky as a result.

  Things were starting to get a bit shaky control-wise. Among the underage spectators in the room there was clapping, there was paddling, there was pushing and there was shoving, all of it overlaid with a veneer of shouting and whimpering. The little red tush-cushions that I’d set out so carefully were threatening to become projectiles. The kids were reverting to a state of nature and we weren’t even half-way through the program. From my vantage point up front it looked to me like I had a budding insurrection on my hands and I didn’t have a flaming clue how to go about quashing it. But luck was on my side that night. The group turned out to be self-policing. Before things could go completely Lord of the Flies on me, the older siblings swooped in to my rescue and yanked the little ones down and out of the way. Then they silenced them with glances that foreshadowed all manner of tortures back at home if they didn’t settle down stat. My enforcers saved the day. The show could go on.

  “So like I was saying, you’re out there in the canoe. All the livelong day. In the rain, in the wind. You’re cold and you’re damp and you itch and you ache and you’ve got bugs between your teeth. The only relief you get is a ten-minute break every h
our to smoke your pipe and do your um … personal uh … well, you know what I’m trying to get at. And then back to it. How are you supposed to keep up the rhythm under conditions like that? Well, we voyageurs, we figured out the answer to that one pretty quick, which was to row in time to music. Our hands weren’t free to play an instrument. We didn’t have an iPod. So what did we do?”

  “You sang,” a bunch of them cried out.

  “Right you are. We sang. If you couldn’t sing, you didn’t make the cut.” I snapped my fingers at Nick and Sam to pop them back to life. Nick pulled a pitch pipe out of his pocket, blew into it for a G, and stood ready with his clipboard. Sam launched into a wild and woolly rendition of “My Baby Does the Hanky Panky,” his hands flying over his air guitar. He had the kids rolling in the aisles.

  Sam reached out to accept the tuque and sash Nick had dangling from his hand, the tokens that marked his acceptance into the tribe, but he dropped them pronto when he heard me yell out, “Hey you! Wait. Not so fast!” The kids all gave a jump at my stop-thief tone. “Sorry,” I said as their little bottoms dropped back down to the floor, “but here we are running through all the qualifications to be a voyageur, and I nearly forgot to mention the most important one. More important than how high and wide you were, more important than carrying a tune, more important than being able to put up with the kinds of hardships that would break a lesser man. To be an A-1, crack voyageur, more than everything else put together, you had to have the strength of a superhero.” At this Sam swung into a series of Hercules poses behind me that tipped the scales in his favour and allowed him to graduate. “But maybe all this was obvious to you. You strike me as a very intelligent audience.