They crossed from the schooner to Little Peter’s Point in an onshore gale and drifting snow that needled the eyes of the men. They walked single file and bent into the wind, their heads bowed low to protect the exposed skin of their faces. They wore creepers over their boots to help keep their footing but the ice on the bay was so tightly packed it had cracked and buckled into the air. Long stretches of pressure ridges and pinnacles made hauling the sledges a tricky, exhausting business. The men who carried only their knapsacks followed behind those dragging to keep the heavy sleds from tipping. They had been ordered to stay close to one another but the poor light and the blowing snow made it difficult to see a man ten yards ahead or behind. Buchan scampered back and forth along the line to ensure everyone was accounted for.
Peyton was partnered with Richmond and shouldered the back of the sledge through rough patches and heavy snowdrifts and stepped in with all his weight to keep the sledge from tipping over as it crested a ridge of ice. By the time they rounded a point out of the wind Peyton’s shirt and undergarments were soaked through with sweat. The men spelled off the sledges and chewed hard tack and sucked at handfuls of snow. Buchan made his way through the milling group with the air of a busy man who is about to put something down to get to more pressing concerns. There was a relentless, wiry energy about him that struck the furriers and fishermen as incongruous and almost ridiculous in such a short, slight figure. He tugged nervously at the lashings on the sledges to make sure they were secure. “The ice is calm on the Exploits,” he told his crew. “We’re out of the worst of the wind for now, we’ll make good time from here.”
“If he’s so goddamned hearty,” Richmond said to Peyton, “maybe he should take a sledge and we could play sheepdog for a while.”
Peyton picked up the harness where Richmond had let it fall. The sweat against his skin was already cold and he wanted to get moving again before the chill settled any deeper. He watched Richmond walk across to Tom Taylor and repeat himself. Taylor turned his face up to the clouds and laughed. The two men continued talking and Peyton could see the nature of the interaction shift in their darkening expressions. They began to argue about something and fell into a shouting match, cursing one another with a practised ease that attracted the attention of the entire party. Buchan made his way across to Peyton. “Should I intervene in this?” he asked.
Peyton shook his head. “It’s just their way.” He leaned into the harness, resting against the weight of the sledge and staring at his feet. In the ten years Peyton had known them he had never seen Richmond and Taylor carry on a conversation that didn’t involve insults and disagreement. The rancour between them was so habitual it was possible to dismiss it as harmless, even affectionate. He found it an embarrassingly intimate thing to watch. “We’d best get started,” he said. “If we wait for them to simmer down, we’ll be here till dark.”
Buchan began issuing orders and as the caravan trudged into motion Richmond turned away from Taylor to catch up with Peyton. His massive shoulders sloped like a barrel stave, his face hidden under a full beard of curly black hair. He was shaking his head and smiling to himself. He looked to Peyton like a man who had just quenched a thirst.
For two miles they travelled well in the lee of a heavy forest of birch and poplar growing right to the waterline of the river. When they reached Wigwam Point, the Exploits veered northwest into the wind and each man shouldered into the weight of it as if the sledges had twice the heft of a moment earlier. A mile further on they passed Hughster’s upper salmon station and carried on from there to the remains of a tilt William Cull had used while trapping the previous winter. It was near 3 p.m. with not much more than an hour of light left in the day and Buchan ordered the caravan to a halt. He took Cull and Hughster to reconnoitre the stretch of river ahead while camp was struck.
The tilt’s ceiling had caved in and one wall fallen and the snow had drifted six feet deep against the others. Most of the men were engaged digging out the shelter while Richmond and Taylor took the ship’s boy to cut fresh spruce for bedding and they gathered several turns of young birch and scrag for firewood. A studding sail was unpacked from the sledges and rigged up across the space left by the downed wall and folded across to form something of a ceiling along one side. Two rifle shots reported in the distance.
“Red Indians?” Corporal Bouthland asked.
“Not likely this far down the river,” Peyton said. “If we’re lucky, they come upon some fresh craft for our supper.”
The party hung their wet stockings on sticks near the fire. Half an hour later the advance party returned, dragging the haunch of a caribou. Buchan announced there was clear ice and fair travel for at least the first two miles in the morning. The sleeves of Cull’s coat were laced with blood where he had paunched the animal and severed the back leg from the torso. Large strips of flesh were cut from the haunch and roasted over the fire. The men had not had a proper meal since before dawn and they ate the meat nearly raw.
Buchan made a point of sitting with Peyton. After they had finished eating, both men took out pipes and tobacco, drawing the heat of the smoke into their bodies. “Richmond and Taylor now,” Buchan said quietly. “Should I be keeping them apart?”
Peyton said, “You’d have an easier time parting the waters of the Red Sea.”
“Is that right then?”
“Like an old married couple,” Peyton said, nodding. “Their families fished together on the French Shore, then in Trinity Bay before they came our way.”
“They’ve been with your father how long now?”
“It was Harry Miller hired them. Long before my time,” Peyton said. And then he told Buchan the story as he’d heard it from others on the shore.
Richmond first met Miller on a schooner carrying goods and passengers north into Conception and Trinity bays and on to Fogo Island. He was not more than twelve years old. His family and the Taylors were just returned from a winter in England and heading for new fishing rooms in Trinity Bay. The weather blew hard as soon as they sailed into open water and forced the passengers to keep to the shelter of the steerage quarters. Richmond’s father fell into conversation with a heavy-set man sprawled on the bunk opposite. He had unruly grey hair and bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “There’s land for the taking on the northeast shore,” Miller said. “Salmon galore and as fat as a whore’s leg. Traplines through the backcountry and not enough people to run them all.” He leaned back onto the bunk where he ferreted bed lice out of the straw and nipped them dead between his fingernails. “If you find Trinity not to your liking, you come down to the Bay of Exploits and look for Harry Miller. I’ll set you up.”
Richmond was sitting beside his father during this exchange. John Senior was on the bunk next to Miller though he never spoke a word through the entire conversation.
When Richmond and Taylor were in their twentieth year, their families suffered through a poor season that ended with a month of almost ceaseless rain from August into September that made it impossible to properly cure the fish. Most of it went green and mouldy with the wet and was fit only to feed their dogs. Even their garden was ruined, the potatoes and turnips rotting in the ground. Richmond’s father was barely forty at the time but he looked old enough to have fathered a man nearly his age. He walked with a permanent stoop and a list to one side, as if he was just able to resist letting his body topple over altogether. His mother was convinced that another season like the one they’d just suffered through would be the death of her husband. They had no choice but to look for poor relief in St. John’s or to return to England for the winter and she enlisted the support of Mrs. Taylor in lobbying their husbands to abandon the island for good. As the year darkened, the two couples spent their evenings arguing among themselves while they drank glasses of a potent potato alcohol Richmond’s father brewed in a still at the back of the tilt. It was clear the women had more stamina and would win out in the end. Both Richmond and Taylor made up their minds to stay behind regardless.
Neither Richmond nor Taylor had ever seen the northeast shore when they left St. John’s that week to look for Harry Miller. Richmond spotted John Senior on the wharf when they disembarked in Fogo. He didn’t recognize Richmond or remember meeting him. He was about to sail into St. John’s enroute to Poole for the winter, but he delayed his trip long enough to carry them across to Miller’s winter house.
Miller was already three-parts drunk when he came down to the wharf, his head cocked suspiciously at the three young strangers coming ashore in the company of John Senior. He didn’t remember meeting Richmond as a boy either. He didn’t recall the harsh weather during the trip out of St. John’s or the way his business partner had sat next to him without speaking a word the entire journey. “Although that sounds like the contrary bastard, hey?” he said. He nodded at John Senior where he sat and laughed. He scratched wildly at his hair as if it wasn’t untidy enough to suit him. “You didn’t just make that bit up now, did you? I promised you work, did I?”
John Peyton had never heard Miller speak but his voice changed when he quoted these words to Buchan, borrowing the tone of contented surliness that those who’d known Miller used when telling the story.
Buchan shook his head. He said, “I’m sorry not to have had the chance to make Mr. Miller’s acquaintance. He was quite the character it seems.”
“It was Richmond and Taylor that found him. The body,” Peyton said. “After the Reds got to him.”
Buchan nodded. “And they stayed on with your father.”
“Yes sir. And scrapping all the while.” Peyton watched the fire. His feet were so close to the heat that steam rose from his boots and still he was shivering with the cold. “As long as they don’t turn on any of the rest of us, they can snipe at one another as much as they like, is my opinion.”
Buchan tapped the bowl of his pipe against his boot. “All right,” he said.
The wind had gone down with the sun and the temperature dropped as the sky cleared overhead. A second fire was kindled and the men huddled between the two under blankets or furs, but the cold was so intense that no one was able to cobble together a proper stretch of sleep. Peyton managed to fall off only a few minutes at a time before the aching woke him and he stamped his feet or slapped his hands to bring the tingle of feeling back into his limbs. Men got up to fuel the fire or simply to pace the length of the camp to ward off the frost.
Some time after midnight Peyton woke with severe stomach cramps from the nearly raw game he’d eaten and he walked a little ways into the woods to relieve himself. He squatted beside a tree facing the sail wall which billowed and snapped in the breeze. The firelight threw the men’s distorted shadows on the canvas where they lifted and fell like souls lost in a tide and a sadness that he mistook for fear came over him then. Below the tilt the frozen length of the Exploits was a wide blue scar banked by darkness. The force of the water moving underneath the ice shifted the surface and the forest echoed the hollow crack back and forth across the river. Peyton hunched there and shivered and he thought of Cassie walking alone through these selfsame woods in the fall. The voices of the men still awake in the camp moved in the trees overhead like birds calling against the cold and the darkness.
They broke camp at dawn. The morning was clear with a sharp wind out of the northwest. The men were so tired and in such a frozen state they stumbled and moved drunkenly about, their hands and feet nearly devoid of feeling until the day’s exertions returned some warmth to their bodies. They travelled for two miles, past Reilly’s trapping tilt nestled back among the trees and on to the Nutt Islands. Half an hour beyond them they reached a small waterfall and stopped to rest and trade off the sledges. Above the waterfall, a long series of rapids had ridged the ice so severely that it was nearly impossible to haul the sledges over them and a small party walked ahead of the main group to map the least treacherous route forward. The leather lashings that held the sledges together worked loose from the constant banging and they were forced to make frequent stops to rebind them.
By late afternoon the expedition had travelled a little less than seven miles. They hauled the sledges into the trees on the north side of the river and cut spruce to fence in the fireplace and cooked a meal of salt pork and meat from the second haunch of caribou that they’d collected on their way past the carcass earlier in the day. The night was no warmer than the one previous but the men were so exhausted that all but the watches slept through until dawn. Before setting out in the morning, Buchan had a cask packed with two days’ worth of bread, salt pork, cocoa and sugar buried at the campsite for use on the way back down the Exploits.
The shelvy ice conditions deteriorated as they moved upriver and the men not employed at hauling worked ahead with axes or cutlasses to level the highest ridges and fill the valleys with ice and snow to keep the sledges from coming to pieces on impact. By afternoon three of the sledges were so badly damaged that the party was forced to stop while repairs were made and the expedition’s gear was repacked. Two of Cull’s men and the ship’s boy were sent a mile ahead to set up camp and start a fire, which the rest of the party reached just after dark.
In the early afternoon of the sixteenth they arrived at the foot of the first great waterfall. Buchan travelled ahead with Cull and Hughster to search for the Indian path used by the Beothuk to portage above the falls and the rest of the party fenced in a fireplace to camp for the night on the north side of the river. Peyton and Reilly strapped on pot-lid rackets and took their firearms up a brook that met the river near the camp and half a mile in came on a beaver dam that backed the brook up into a fair-sized pond. The rattle at the head of the dam kept an area clear of ice and the two men crouched in the woods nearby. Since Cassie’s visit to Reilly’s tilt, there was a new awkwardness between the two men. Their habitual banter seemed contrived and adolescent and they hadn’t managed yet to fashion a language to suit the darkened circumstances of their friendship. They waited for more than an hour in silence until there was little enough light left in the day to see fifty yards ahead and they had almost given up on finding supper. What they shot at was no more than a shadowed movement above the dam.
The beaver’s fur was sleek and oily and it stained their gloves as they turned the hump of the animal on its back to paunch it. It lay more than three feet in length from its nose to the tip of the wide, flat paddle of its tail and weighed a good sixty pounds.
“Reminds me of the rats aboard the East India ships on the Thames,” Reilly said. He tapped the huge buckteeth with his bloody knife. “Fangs the like of that on them.”
Back at the camp, they set a large kettle of water to boil and dressed the animal and added the lean fore-haunches to the pot for broth. The back haunches were skewered and cooked undivided until the thick layer of fat was crisply roasted. The night was surprisingly mild and the men ate their fill and talked with more enthusiasm than they had managed since setting out. The Blue Jackets and marines had never tasted beaver and most pronounced it fair eating. After the meat was finished, Reilly fried the tail in pork fat and each of Buchan’s men was offered a taste of the rich marrow. The ship’s boy chewed meditatively for a moment and asked if it was true as he’d heard it that a beaver, cornered by a predator, will turn on itself and chew off its own testicles.
&n
bsp; “True as the tides,” Richmond announced solemnly. “Eating for strength, he is. You mind to steep a beaver’s pride and drink off the liquid, it does wonders for your nature.”
The boy scoffed. “Go away with ye,” he said.
“Tom Taylor,” Richmond appealed, “am I speaking the God’s honest truth or no?”
“Gospel,” Taylor said. “Knew a man drank beaver’s pride before going out to a bawdy house, didn’t he up and die with exhaustion. Licked right out he was. And still hard as the rock of the Church when they laid him out at the dead-house.”
“It’s all bull you’re talking,” the boy said.
“Beaver or bull, I could care less about,” Corporal Bouthland interrupted. “But who here has seen one of these Red Indians we’re after?”
It was the first time since they’d left Peter’s Arm that anyone had deliberately pointed in the direction they were heading. Buchan had been sitting with a pipe, making notes in his journal by the light of the fire as he did at the end of each day’s travel. He seemed not to be following the conversation, but sat suddenly forward. He tucked the journal into a satchel. “Yes,” he said. “How about it?”
Peyton glanced across at Reilly. The Irishman was staring into the fire, but seemed to sense Peyton’s look and he shook his head slightly without taking his eyes from the flames. The others fidgeted where they sat.
Buchan said, “John Peyton?”
Peyton cleared his throat. He said that before he came across to Newfoundland he’d seen a young girl put on display in Poole who was said to be a Red Indian. She was outfitted in a dress and shoes and looked nothing much more than an English girl, though someone had painted her face and tied a feather in her hair.
Tom Taylor was stroking his blond beard with both hands and he jumped in then to say that according to what he knew the Reds were a race of giants by and large, and that many of the Indians he ’d heard spoken of by others were said to be over seven feet tall.
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