River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  “Is it tea you’re wanting, John Peyton?”

  He folded his arms on the table.

  “What is it?” Cassie asked him.

  Peyton turned to look at her. “He’s going to go after them the winter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “John Senior. He’s going down the river with Richmond and Taylor to make amends. To the lake if necessary.”

  Cassie sat across from him. She was surprised by Peyton’s reluctance. “You can hardly blame him for wanting to recover the losses.”

  He stared at her. He and his father had never argued in front of her about the Indians’ thieving or talked much about the days on the shore when Harry Miller was alive. Still, he didn’t think it was possible she could be so naive about his father after so many years in his house. In his bed. He kept staring.

  She shrugged and made a face to say she thought he was being unfair. And in that wordless gesture he saw that it was true, that she knew next to nothing of the man, of what he had been party to in his day. What he was capable of.

  He shook his head. He said, “It’s Richmond and Taylor I worry about. They still carry a grudge from the last time down to the lake. And once someone gets killed the law comes into it and there’s no saying where that will take us.” He took his pipe from a coat pocket and cut himself a plug of tobacco.

  “Perhaps it would do to bring the law into it beforehand,” Cassie said.

  “Meaning what exactly?” he asked angrily. He had no idea what she was talking about.

  She spoke in a tone of mock officiousness. “His Majesty is still anxious to establish a friendly intercourse with the native population?”

  Peyton pointed with the mouthpiece of his pipe at nothing in particular. “The reward still stands.” He stared up at the rafters as her notion came clear to him. “We could ask for permission to go in. Make it an official party. That should temper the mood of anyone who might be inclined to cause trouble.”

  She tipped her head side to side. It was her way of allowing someone to claim an idea they would never have lit upon themselves.

  “I’ll need some paper,” he said. He was already out of his seat after an inkwell and a pen.

  After they finished their supper that evening, Peyton meticulously copied the final version of the letter he’d drafted on the back of bills and ledgers and then gave it to Cassie to read over.

  September 26, 1818

  Sir,

  I beg leave to lay before Your Excellency the following statements by which it will appear to what extent I have been a sufferer of depredations committed against my property by the Native Indians, which have at last driven me to seek your leave to undertake an expedition to recover said losses.

  In January 1815, Dick Richmond, a furrier of mine, came out from one of my tilts in the country on business to me, leaving in the tilt his provisions, some fur and his clothes. On his return he found that some persons had been there in his absence and carried away and destroyed the provisions and all the fur with many little things yet valuable to a furrier. The distance being twenty miles from the tilt to my residence, Richmond was obliged to sleep there that night, but came out next day to bring these matters to my attention. In the company of Richmond and a second furrier in my employ, Mr. Thos. Taylor, I visited the tilt and found all as has been described. Nearby we discovered part of an Indian’s snow racket and a hatchet, which satisfied us the depredation had been carried out by Red Indians. We after this followed their tracks to Richmond’s different beaver houses and found they had carried away seven of my traps. Damage and loss on this occasion cannot be estimated at less than fifteen pounds independent of losing much of the season for catching fur.

  In June 1816, a new fleet of salmon nets consisting of two nets sixty fathoms long were cut from their moorings on Indian Arm Brook and nothing but a small part of the Head Rope left. From the manner the moorings were cut and hackled, and the marks of Red Ochre on the Buoys, we strongly suspected it had been done by the Indians, no other persons being near at the time. The following August, some of my people discovered the cork and part of the head rope at a camp once occupied by the Red Indians. The damage done me by the loss of the nets was twenty pounds independent of the fish that might have been caught that summer.

  Other losses of nets, traps and provisions in separate incidents have set me back an additional fifteen pounds at the least.

  At the beginning of the current month of September, the Indians came to my wharf at Exploits Burnt Island and cut adrift a large boat which I had just loaded with salmon, &ct., for St. John’s market. On my missing her at half one in the morning, several small boats were readied for a search commencing at first light. About seven o’clock next evening, I discovered her ashore in a most dangerous situation. There was damage to her hull and the Indians had cut away her sails and part of her rigging and had plundered her of almost anything movable. Two rifles were later recovered from the bed of a nearby brook, but they had been deliberately broken by the Indians and were beyond repair. The damage done to the boat and some part of her cargo, and the property stolen, cannot be replaced under 140 or 150 pounds.

  All previous losses I have borne without seeking redress in light of the cruelties inflicted on the Native Indians by His Majesty’s subjects in times past. This latest, I fear, cannot be so ignored as it bodes of similar depredations ahead that would likely bankrupt myself and others. The frustrations that are sure to follow cannot but lead to bloodshed.

  I offer this deposition in hopes that Your Excellency will grant permission for a small party of my men to follow my property into the country this winter and regain it if possible. It is also my most anxious desire to be able to take some of the Indians and thus through them open a friendly communication with the rest of the tribe.

  All of these endeavours will be undertaken at my own risk and expense. From my acquaintance with the place of resort for the Indians over the winter, I am most confident of succeeding in the plan here laid down.

  I have the honour to be,

  Your Excellency’s very humble

  And obedient servant,

  John Peyton Jr.

  When she was done she passed the letter across the table. She held the lobe of her right ear between her thumb and forefinger. Peyton was folding the pages she had just read and pressing the creases flat with the palms of his hands.

  She said, “I didn’t realize there’d been so much thieving.”

  “A waste of time to bring the bloody St. John’s crowd into our affairs,” John Senior said. He was making a determined effort to muzzle his anger in front of Cassie. He said, “Permission be damned, we’ll be going in come March. You make sure you tell the governor that.”

  Cassie smiled at Peyton. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’ll do just fine.”

  When they brought the salmon to market in St. John’s they met with the recently appointed governor, Charles Hamilton, and he confirmed that the reward for bringing out a Red Indian to the coast stood at one hundred pounds sterling. Given the extent of the Peytons’ losses, he offered the blessing of his office to the proposed expedition. For a while this comforted Peyton. He even enjoyed a period of carefully concealed exhilaration, thinking he had outflanked John Senior for once, taken control of the situation. But that assurance left him soon enough. He saw again now how the expedition would take its own shape regardless of his wishes, gathering momentum until it was a careening downhill surge he would be helpless to direct or divert.

  He sat up in the lean-to and stretched, pushing his arms out at the sides as if he wanted them to come free of their sockets. He placed more stunned wood on the fire, the flame licking up around the dry surface like a living thing feeding a hunger.

  The fox was taken just above the right front foot and was lying as far from the set stake as the chain allowed when Peyton first came upon her. Fresh snow had blown in and covered the ground. He could see from the tracks around the stake that the animal had been there som
e time and had done a bit of wild dancing to pull herself clear. There were three or four bright circles of piss within the circumference of the trap chain.

  The fox raised her head and looked at him when he came into view but she didn’t get to her feet. The dummy trap in the set that he had deliberately handled with bare hands lay on top of the snow nearby. She had sniffed it out as soon as she arrived, dug it free of the ground and tripped the bed by using her paw or her nose to flip it upside down.

  He stepped off the trail to cut a sturdy truncheon of birch wood and then walked to within twenty yards of the animal, crouching there, speaking quietly across the distance. “There you are now,” he said. A medium size, maybe fifteen pounds, he guessed. A beautiful creature, the fine coat a mix of silver and red, the thick tail almost black. The perfectly symmetrical face like a sign of her craftiness, her intelligence. Bright yellow eyes sizing him up. There was no show of panic or fear, only the light of her calm stare of assessment. He recognized that stare, he thought, the sense of being observed by it. He could see a ring of raw skin above the clamp of the metal jaws where the fox had been trying to gnaw through her own leg to get free.

  Without standing he removed his gloves and pack, then picked up his rifle. Shooting the animal would ruin the pelt, which he wanted to avoid if possible, but it was best to be careful. Either the stake or the animal’s foot could have worked loose in her struggling and one last lunge might be all that was needed to finish the job.

  He stood up and walked forward carrying the gun and the stick of birch. The fox stayed low on her haunches and tried to back further away, but managed only to move slightly from one side to the other at the end of the trap chain, jerking at the clamped foot. She gave a sharp bark and rolled onto her shoulder in the snow, baring her teeth at the man standing above her. Peyton struck the skull once with the truncheon, solidly but not hard enough to draw blood, and the fox flopped completely onto her side, her tongue lolling onto the snow, her eyes half closed.

  Peyton lay the rifle aside and knelt beside the animal, placing a bare hand against the fur where he could feel the short panted breaths through the thick coat. He moved his other hand up to the neck and stroked under her ears. “There you are now,” he said again. He set his right knee just behind the fox’s foreleg and used his weight to stove in the rib cage, forcing the broken bones into the internal organs. Peyton placed his hand back against the fur then, waiting as the blood pooled in the lungs and the light leeched from the animal’s eyes.

  He removed a knife from his belt and touched the tip to the gelatinous surface of the eye, testing the blink reflex to be sure it was dead. After he released the bloodied paw from the trap Peyton used his hatchet against the trunk of a deadfall to remove the front paws above the wrists. He used his knife to cut through the fur along both thighs, from the feet to the bared flesh of the anus, then skinned out the back legs and cut the pelt free from the ankles. He tied one naked back leg to the branches of a tree about chest-high and worked the thick chimney-sweep tail clear of the tailbone, then split it open along the underside. He used the weight of his body to inch the pelt down the length of the carcass and free of the pawless front legs, pulling them from the fur like a child’s arms helped from a troublesome sweater. He clipped the ear cartilage from the skull, cut deftly around the eye sockets, then skinned out the black lips and the dark, still-wet nose.

  Peyton reached a hand into the length of the animal’s coat and pulled the fur right-side out. It was a few weeks shy of priming out, but the plush was thick and even, the colour bright as life. The heat of the body still clinging to the pelt, the fur warm against his bare hands.

  The Lake

  March month, 1819

  FIVE

  Conditions on the river were near perfect for travel: steady ice, fair weather. There were eight of them in the party all told, Peyton and John Senior, Richmond, Taylor and Reilly, Matthew Hughster and William Cull — who was nearly the age of John Senior — and the youngster, Michael Sharpe. They walked from sun-up till well past dark, and without the loaded sledges they’d hauled up the river with Buchan they made astonishingly good time, averaging more than twenty miles a day. By the fourth night they had nearly reached Badger Bay Brook and were within a day of the lake. Two men were put under arms through the night, Taylor and Michael Sharpe taking the early watch while the others settled about the fire. Peyton lay awake, listening to Taylor talk to young Michael who was new to the shore and still too green to burn. He was telling the story of the man who died of exhaustion in a whorehouse after drinking a glass of beaver pride.

  Michael Sharpe said, “A man can’t die from that.”

  There was no conviction in his voice and Taylor laughed at him. “What would a pup your age know about it?”

  “I know a thing or two.”

  Taylor gave a long, dismissive groan. “I wasn’t much above your age when I come this way,” he said. “But not half as wet.”

  “You come up to work for Master Peyton?” Michael Sharpe asked.

  Taylor shook his head. “Harry Miller was the one took us on, me and Richmond.”

  Three weeks after John Senior had carried them across to Miller’s property from Fogo Island, Tom Taylor kissed his new bride goodbye on the steps of Miller’s winter house. He and Richmond followed Miller into the woods for their first season of trapping, each man carrying packs that weighed in at eighty-five kilograms. There were two sledges hauled by dogs over the first snow of the season. The weight of the sledges and the thin snow made for heavy going and at times the men took it in turns to replace the dogs in the harness to haul over rough or exposed ground.

  For the next three months the men bunked in together as winter came on in its full strength and snow filled the woods slowly like the bilge rising in a boat shipping water. They marked their lines through the bush, long crooked spokes extending from the hub of the log tilt. They were out for up to a week at a time and they took beaver, fox, marten and an occasional wolf. Miller tutored them on the skinning of the animals and how to separate the thin layer of fat from the hides without ruining the coat and how to mix the combination of wood ash and animal lard that cured the pelt.

  Michael Sharpe said, “Did you see much of the Reds in there?”

  Taylor shook his head. “No, not the winter. I didn’t get my first look till the spring. Miller had us build a new weir on a salmon run beyond Charles Brook.”

  As soon as the thaw was well underway Richmond and Taylor began constructing a log-and-rock dam at a narrow, shallow bend in the river. For two weeks they worked waist-deep in frigid water, weighting a frame of spruce logs with stones to construct a wooden weir across the river. Each afternoon when he stripped out of his soaked clothing Taylor’s feet were white and numb, the shrivelled skin of the soles embossed with patterns like frost on glass. His scrotum was as tight as a shell, the testicles drawn up into his torso, and he had to force them back into the sac with his fingers.

  In the second week of June, a canoe carrying five Beothuk came up the brook. Siobhan was inside the tilt, Richmond had gone into the woods to cut logs to build a gallows for drying the salmon nets. Taylor was in the water, rooting around at the base of the weir and didn’t see or hear them. He didn’t know how long they had been watching when he finally took notice. They had pulled the canoe to the side of the river and stared at him in silence. They were close enough that he could count them where they sat and guess at their ages and relative physical strength.

  All at once, as if by some signal he couldn’t distinguish, the five men in the canoe began shouting and shaking paddles or bows. Taylor stumbled on the wet stones on the riverbed and once he’d regained his footing he pissed through his pants into the brook while the wild shouting and gesticulating went on and on. He bolted across the river finally and crawled on his hands and knees up the bank. He ran towards the tilt, sloshing water from his boots and the waistline of his trousers, screaming all the way. He shouted at his wife to keep inside
and ran out with a single-shot rifle and a powder horn which sent the Beothuk into a retreat, though they continued yelling as they paddled downstream towards the ocean. Taylor dropped most of the shot intended for the barrel of the gun and was shaking so furiously he couldn’t hold the powder horn still enough to pour. The Indians had disappeared around a bend in the river before he looked up from his sloppy loading and he threw the gun down in disgust. He swore at the trees as he paced. He kicked the powder horn into the river and had to wade in after it, swearing all the while.

  Taylor looked across at the face of Michael Sharpe. He was shaking his head. “You pissed your pants, Tom Taylor,” he said. He seemed profoundly disappointed.

  Taylor nodded. “That I did,” he said. “That was the summer they killed Harry Miller, not more than a month after I seen them.” They found the body on the way to the clearing in the trees behind his tilt that he used as a toilet. There were half a dozen arrows piercing the flesh, in the back, arms and legs. The area around the corpse was trammelled with recent tracks of animals and the body had been picked over for days, the bloodied clothes torn and pulled away from the torso. Most of the flesh was eaten away from underneath. Grey lengths of bone showed through, the surfaces pocked with tooth marks. Richmond had said, “That’s hardly worth burying.”

  Taylor leaned in close to the green man. “They cut off his head and left the rest of him to the scavengers, they did. Same as they did for those two marines the last time we came down to the lake.”

  Peyton sat up in his blankets. “Tom Taylor,” he said. “Don’t be poisoning the boy’s mind.”

  “Better he knows what we’ll be facing on the morrow.” This was Richmond speaking. Everyone, it seemed, was still awake and listening. “There’s no sense keeping the truth from the lad.”

  There was a giggle of laughter from the dark where Reilly lay in his blankets. “Well spoken, Dick Richmond,” he said. “Why don’t you tell young Michael Sharpe how you came to lay hands on the little Indian girl that wound up in Poole?”