Where the River Takes Me

by Julie Lawson

  November 1849

  Fort Colvile

  Saturday, November 3rd

  At last our journey has ended!

  We arrived here last night in time for Supper, but I had little appetite. I was still trembling after the excitement of the whirlpools (for they were dangerous) and tired after a long portage up and over a hill to get around some falls. The men had to carry the boats.

  Mr. Anderson, the Chief Trader at Fort Colvile, met us and showed us our quarters. I went straight to bed and fell asleep.

  The ringing of the morning bell woke me up and at first I thought I was home in Fort Edmonton. Then I heard the sound of a waterfall and remembered last night’s portage. The waterfall sounds very close. I think it is time to explore!

  Later

  I have made a new friend! Her name is Eliza and she is 12, like me, and Mr. Anderson is her father. She has a brother called James who is 8 and many other brothers and sisters.

  Monday, November 5th

  Fort Colvile is large compared to the other posts on our route, and has a stockade and bastions like Fort Edmonton, and horses. Yesterday I sat behind Eliza on her horse and she gave me a tour of the Fort and the farm. I was afraid that the horse-riding parts of me might complain, but they were no trouble at all.

  There are acres of wheat and oats and corn as well as pastures for the cattle, and all around are high hills and mountains. Eliza showed me the mill and the dairy and the pen where the pigs are kept. She calls them “grunters,” and told me that the Fort raises them for ham and bacon.

  I asked Eliza about the waterfall and she told me it is not one waterfall, but several. The name is Kettle Falls and we’re only a mile or so above them. No wonder we can hear them so clearly! I desperately wanted to see them but Eliza said no, as it was starting to rain.

  There are not many people here, not like in Fort Edmonton, but Eliza says Fort Colvile is on the route between the interior posts and Fort Vancouver, so people pass through at different times.

  P.S. Aunt Grace is so smitten with Uncle Rory that sometimes I think she has forgotten me. So tonight I put her to a test. I took my ceinture and wrapped it around and around my head with the fringes flapping over my face. She could not help but see it — but she never said a word. Whenever I glanced up she was working at her embroidery and smiling to herself. She’s still smiling to herself!

  I’ll put her to another test another time. Right now I might as well be invisible.

  Tuesday, November 6th

  Now that we have settled in, Aunt Grace has been asked to give reading and writing lessons to some of the officers’ wives and their children, and to teach them the ways of the British, like she did at Fort Edmonton.

  The men from our party have been resting here these last three days, but this morning they continued their journey to Fort Vancouver. We saw them off and wished them well.

  Wednesday, November 7th

  I wrote a letter to Suzanne today and told her how much I miss her and Nokum. It was difficult describing my journey to Fort Colvile using simple words and sentences, but somehow I managed to keep my promise. I wrote in English though, so Lizzie will have to help her. I hope they can read my tiny writing, for I did not want to waste a single bit of paper.

  I gave the letter to Mr. Anderson and he assures me it will get to her eventually. And if Suzanne writes back (as she promised) her letter will eventually come to me — mon dieu, it could be the fall of 1850, a whole year, before I hear news of Nokum! I always knew this about the mail, but knowing is different than feeling, and she and Suzanne are so far away. I must think of them often and pray that my thoughts will travel across the mountains.

  Thursday, November 8th

  I have just sat down — Aunt Grace has put the kettle on for tea — and said, “I found this Journal with Father’s things.”

  “Dear, dear Robbie,” she said.

  “Was it wrong for me to keep it?” I asked her straight out, and added, “I suppose it was a Misdemeanor, seeing as how it was Father’s.”

  “What’s that, Jenna?” she said, looking over at me. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening …”

  She wasn’t listening! Not even when I said Misdemeanor! I hope she hasn’t had some sort of seizure. Is this what happens when a person gets married? Well, if she has lost some of her senses, they must have been the hard, bad-tempered ones. I only wish she would notice me now and then.

  Goodness, have I taken leave of my senses? I cannot believe I wrote that.

  Friday, November 9th

  Uncle Rory is not an officer so we are not as well off as before and our sleeping quarters are smaller — which makes Uncle’s snoring even more noticeable. Last night the snorts turned into the honks of geese!

  His snoring never bothered me on the brigade trail, but I was so dead weary by the end of the day I could have slept through a stampede of snorting buffalo.

  He seems to like working as a blacksmith, but I have heard Aunt Grace urging him to put in for a promotion to Junior Clerk, being good with numbers. She urges in a sweet, gentle way, not in the bossy manner I’m used to.

  Sweet urgings or not, Uncle Rory has not been moved. “All in good time,” he says. I think it is his way of saying, “Never.”

  Saturday, November 10th

  We have had several days of rain and miserable weather, but today was fine, so I rode to Kettle Falls with Eliza and James. Mr. Anderson came with us.

  The Falls are exceedingly close — and the sight and sound are spectacular! They fall some 30 or 40 feet by my reckoning, in a series of cascades, into the mouths of huge hollowed-out rocks that look like giant kettles.

  James said I should see it in the summer and early fall when the salmon come to lay their eggs — why, the river is so thick you cannot throw a stick in the water without hitting a salmon. And they leap up the falls!

  I laughed, certain he was joking, but Eliza and Mr. Anderson said it was true, for the salmon must get up the river to the place where they were hatched in order to lay their eggs. Then they die, and the place stinks of rotting fish.

  The whole business is called spawning and it happens every year, beginning in the summer. The river is teeming not only with fish, James said, but with Indians, bears, eagles, etc. etc. — all catching, trapping, spearing or feasting on the salmon.

  It was starting to sound like the aftermath of a buffalo hunt.

  Monday, November 12th

  Eliza and James spend part of each day doing lessons (at their father’s insistence) and I have been joining them. When I am not doing vocabulary exercises or parsing sentences, Aunt lets me help the younger children with their reading. I love reading and writing and am longing to advance further. If only I had some new books! I will ask Mr. Anderson if he has any books or newspapers I might borrow. Most officers have some of their own — at least they did in the posts near Fort Edmonton. They would often lend them out to people in other posts.

  Outside of lessons, Aunt Grace seems to be losing interest in my education. Last night I asked her to read over a story I had written, and she did, but not in her usual way. Why, when she handed it back this morning there was not a single correction, even though I had misspelled some words deliberately! And tho’ she said my story was “excellent,” I’m not sure if she actually read it.

  Next time I’ll write utter gibberish — and in a messy hand! That should get her attention.

  Friday, November 16th

  Aunt Grace seems to like Eliza and often mentions that she is pleased I have a friend my own age. It’s odd that she should say that, because Suzanne is exactly my age and Aunt Grace never took to her. Sometimes she would call Suzanne “a wild wee savage.” (And call me the same.)

  Eliza is the sort of “young lady” Aunt Grace was teaching the girls at Fort Edmonton to be — virtuous, polite, obedient (like Lizzie) — and Suzanne and I did behave that way, but when we were away from Aunt Grace and the officers’ daughters and in the company of Suzanne’s brothers and
cousins, I suppose we were wilder than we should have been. Oh, mon dieu, Aunt’s outrage the time she caught us having a spitting contest with the boys, and when we canoed across the river without permission, and when we snuck up to the second floor of Mr. Rowand’s house to spy on the officers — oh, how I miss Suzanne!

  Aunt Grace must have felt odd at first, being the only white woman in the district. Would she have come if she had known? Did Father tell her? One of these days I will ask her, as long as I’m not invisible at the time.

  She might have missed having a friend. But she never tried to learn Cree and spoke only a little French, and though she was polite towards the other women, she was never very friendly. In fact she acted quite uppity and superior, even towards my nokum and Maman Thérèse. Perhaps because they were not white or only part white? Or not educated and did not take to books? (I am happy that she likes books, for that is something we assuredly have in common.)

  Come to think of it, Aunt Grace is friendlier to the women here, but I think that has more to do with Uncle Rory than anything else. Some days she is like a new person.

  Tête de mouton, how did I get onto this track? This is supposed to be an Adventure Journal, not a book of thoughts and wonderings and “maybes.” I could just ask Aunt Grace about this or that, but it is more amusing to speculate. Is speculation a Misdemeanor? I forget.

  Sunday, November 18th

  I cannot stop myself from writing about another thought I’ve had — in the past three months I have seen more of Uncle Rory than I ever saw of Father during a similar time period, what with him travelling once a year between Fort Edmonton and York Factory. That took him away for five or six months, there and back, with time spent at York Factory and at various Forts along the way. Off he’d go in the spring and back he’d come in the fall. Sometimes he’d go on short journeys in the winter on Company matters. Did I ever have a long stretch of time with him? Of course it’s the same for everyone whose fathers go with the brigades …

  Oh, dear. I feel sad now, thinking of fathers, remembering the winter nights when Father was home and I was little, sitting on his lap as he taught me to read …

  Uncle Rory will not go off with the spring brigade, for there is always work to do in the smithy.

  Later

  Tonight at Supper I asked Aunt Grace what it was like in the Orkney Islands where she and Father grew up.

  She answered the same as always, that life was hard. So I said, “Is that why you came to Rupert’s Land?”

  “No, I came to meet Mr. Kennedy.” We both laughed when she said that. “But before that, I came because you were without a mother, and my dear brother asked me to come and take care of you.”

  Of course there was more to it, and she told me a few things I hadn’t known before. When Father first asked for permission to bring out Aunt Grace, the Company said no, because white women were not allowed. (So she did know ahead of time that there were no other white women here.) Father begged the higher-ups to give their consent anyway. Fortunately for him (but not for me), a number of senior officers had already been asking that a respectable woman be sent out to teach their daughters, and the Company finally gave Aunt Grace permission.

  It was three years before she got to Fort Edmonton, what with the slowness of the mail and the long journey, and by that time I was almost 7. “You were headstrong and stubborn even then,” she said, “and none too pleased at being separated from Suzanne and her family.”

  I wanted to know how she remembered my being “none too pleased,” but by then Supper was over and she was in a hurry to meet Uncle Rory.

  I remember kicking and wailing and pulling her hair! No wonder I did not take to her, tearing me away from Suzanne’s family.

  Thursday, November 22nd

  I told a lie today (a grave Misdemeanor, but no one need know).

  Eliza was wondering how my parents met. I told her that Father had gone hunting alone and been thrown from his horse and had broken his leg, and when his horse returned to the Fort, my mother was the first to gallop off and find him. She saved his life and he married her.

  The story is true, but it happened to Mr. Rowand and his wife, not to my mother and father. Everyone at Fort Edmonton knows the Rowand story. I wish my parents had met in such a romantic and adventurous way, but Father simply met my mother at a Cree camp and that was that. He could have met her at a Fort, I suppose, if her father hadn’t abandoned Nokum and gone back to England when my mother was only a baby. I’m glad Nokum had her family to go back to.

  I don’t know exactly how my parents met, but I know they were married à la façon du pays, the way the Cree women and Company men married in the old days. It was very simple — the man asked the woman’s consent, then her parents’ consent, and if they said yes, the man had to pay something, like a horse or a pile of Trade Goods, and they smoked the Sacred Pipe to seal the bond.

  When that ceremony was over they went to the Fort and he married her in the British way. (I suppose it would have been a civil ceremony, like the one Aunt Grace and Uncle Rory had.) My mother must have looked doubly radiant that day, since she was married twice.

  Saturday, November 24th

  The weather is exceedingly cold but it has not yet snowed.

  Friday, November 30th

  All week I have been thinking about Fort Edmonton, especially Nokum and Suzanne, wondering how they are faring and if they miss me as much as I miss them.

  Last night I asked Aunt Grace and Uncle Rory if they missed Fort Edmonton, and Uncle Rory gave such a vigorous laugh I was taken aback. Had I said something funny? No, he explained, it was the thought of missing “old One-Pound-One and his temper” that made him laugh. “No one’d miss that,” he says. “He was a jolly sort when he wanted to be, but that temper of his kept getting worse.”

  “Only because his limp was worse and he was in pain,” said Aunt Grace, coming to Mr. Rowand’s defence.

  Hearing Uncle Rory use Mr. Rowand’s nickname brings back the rhythm of his lopsided step — a good warning when Suzanne and I were spying, and we heard it on a wooden floor. Then we knew it was time to flee.

  December 1849

  Friday, December 7th

  Cold and rainy.

  Saturday, December 8th

  I have been thinking of our journey to Fort Colvile and how thrilling it was, compared to staying in one place day after day. No wonder the brigades are so excited when it comes time to leave the Fort, especially after being bound there all winter, for it was not only the start of spring but the start of a new Adventure. That’s how it seems to me, though I could be wrong, now that I have seen first-hand how hard they have to work.

  I am a little disappointed that we did not have a real Adventure on our journey. We were not kidnapped by hostile tribes and rescued by brave Heroes, for instance, and we did not witness an act of heroism, like an Indian fending off a grizzly attack or Uncle Rory saving Aunt Grace from drowning when our boat overturned, if our boat had overturned. But the mountains and rivers and rapids were magnificent.

  Last night I opened my bag of pemmican and had a nibble before going to sleep. The smell of fat and meat and berries, the taste on my tongue … it took me so close to Nokum I could almost hear her voice. Oh my, the tears are welling up as I write. (Here comes Aunt Grace. Will she notice, and ask why?)

  Later

  Bedtime. I had a little more pemmican to cheer me up.

  Aunt Grace did not notice I was crying. I expect I would have to commit a Misdemeanor of the Gravest Sort to get her attention.

  Wednesday, December 12th

  Yesterday the temperature dropped and it started to snow. It has not stopped snowing. It reminds me of going into the woods with Nokum to set animal traps. The quiet swish of our snowshoes.

  Saturday, December 15th

  Disappointments —

  I am disappointed in Eliza, for she is not at all like Suzanne, or any of my other friends at Fort Edmonton. She does not even like my stories.
/>
  I am disappointed in my Journal entries. Of late they are nothing but thoughts and feelings (and a bit of weather). There is no harm in that — in fact I have found the recording of such things somewhat worthwhile — but I wanted my Journal to be full of Adventures. Of course I could make up my own adventures and write them down, but what if something exceedingly thrilling and adventurous was to happen and my Journal was too full to record it? That would be crushing!

  So I have decided to put it away for a while. I will make up stories to entertain Eliza and James — well, at least James will be entertained — and concentrate more on reading the books Mr. Anderson has lent me. Even though they are dull, and mostly about Agriculture.

  1850

  June 1850

  Fort Colvile

  Wednesday, June 12th

  The promise of a New Adventure has prompted me to retrieve my Journal, for I may be going on another journey — not back to Fort Edmonton but to Fort Victoria. It’s quite a new Fort, only 7 years old — and it has a school! A real school, and it is run by real teachers, a Reverend Staines and Mrs. Staines and, according to Mr. Anderson, they have a reputation for being excellent teachers. He is sending Eliza and James, and I desperately want to go with them — not only because of the school, but because of the journey. Nokum was right when she said I was restless. Perhaps my fate is not to remain in one place but to be always on the move — like Nokum herself, before she got too old.

  I would also like to be away from Aunt Grace. Not because she is forever scolding and finding fault, like before — quite the opposite. She is so smitten with Uncle Rory that I may as well not be here at all!

  Mon dieu, could I be jealous? No, but I suppose I am somewhat out of sorts after having had her undivided attention for years. Is contrariness a Misdemeanor? At least she will not object when I broach the subject of leaving. After all, I am almost 13.