River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  He lifted his arm. “Haloo,” he shouted.

  His voice echoed back to him from the trees as the Indian woman turned to stare across at the point where he stood. Before the sound of her first alarm reached his ears he could hear John Senior cursing behind him and his party burst out of the woods at a trot.

  By the time they’d snowshoed halfway across the cove the camp of Beothuk was in flight, most of them clearing the mama-teeks and taking to the bush while a smaller group set off south across the frozen lake. Some of them were only half-dressed and they carried nothing away in their hands but infants. Peyton shouted at his men to hold their fire as he ran. The large Indian rackets they wore were awkward and nearly useless on the hard-packed snow and ice on the cove and they slipped and slid towards the shoreline beneath the camp.

  “What’s in the bush is gone,” Richmond shouted when they stopped there.

  Across the ice the smaller party was still in sight, a cluster of bodies in the lead and one straggler losing ground. Peyton tore his feet free of the rackets and set off in their direction, shrugging off his pack and powder horn and the bulk of his greatcoat as he went. He ran with a panicked, superstitious urgency, as if he felt disaster could only be averted if he was the first of his party to touch a Red Indian, to speak his name aloud to their ears.

  It was well into morning by this time and the snow and ice shimmered in the sunlight like a mirage, the figures ahead of him distorted in the brightness so that it sometimes seemed they were hovering several feet above the surface and sometimes as if they had no legs at all. The straggler was the woman he had called out to and as she fell further behind he could make out the flap of her caribou cassock and its thickly furred collar. One of the lead group came back to her and gathered up a package from her arms, but she continued to struggle and Peyton quickly closed the distance between them. “Haloo,” he shouted after her. He was close enough to see that her leggings were stitched with spruce root, bald white thread against the red-ochre stain. There were bone pendants and a bright red bird claw attached to the outside seams that rattled as she ran. “Haloo,” he shouted again.

  Ten yards in front of him, unable to run any further, she dropped heavily to her knees and Peyton came to a stop behind her to keep the distance. Her breath was ragged and uneven and she choked and coughed as the rest of her party disappeared around the point of land in the distance. She turned where she knelt to face the stranger, loosening the belt and lifting her cassock over her head to reveal her breasts in an appeal for mercy, the nipples barely visible beneath the red paint that covered her torso. Peyton looked away from her, breathing heavily to stop his body from shaking. The frost in the air had galled his throat and lungs and the dark peaty taste of blood flooded his mouth.

  He set his flintlock rifle on the ground and kicked it away, then he removed his pistol from its harness and threw it to the side so that it skittered over the ice for twenty feet, the metal barrel flaring in the sunlight. “All right,” he said, looking across at her. He held his hands out at his sides. The first of his party were making their way towards them and the woman on the ice looked past him to the approaching men. “All right now,” he said and stepped towards her.

  She looked over her shoulder to the point where she had last seen her companions, then covered herself with the leather cassock and stood to meet him. He nodded his head and smiled towards her, “John Peyton,” he said, thumping his chest with the open palm of his hand, “John Peyton.” She was still crying but nodded her head and smiled helplessly as she came up to this man with her hands extended and Peyton was struck by the evenness and uncorrupted white of her teeth.

  Michael Sharpe was the first to reach them. He stood and stared at the Indian woman with the same look of wonder and mistrust he would have turned on a tree that had uprooted itself from the shore and walked towards him across the ice. Peyton held her arm gently above the elbow and named the man for her and she took his hand and nodded and spoke her words to him as she had to Peyton. When the rest of his party arrived carrying Peyton’s greatcoat and other supplies, she greeted them as well. John Senior walked off to collect Peyton’s guns.

  Peyton explained how the other Indians had disappeared around the point of land ahead and when they turned to look in that direction they saw three figures standing at the shoreline to watch them. One of the distant figures gesticulated as if to gain their attention.

  “All right,” John Senior said then, and he removed a heavy leather mitten to reach inside his coat, taking out a long linen handkerchief that he shook free in the sunlight. The cloth snapped in the cold air. “Here,” the old man said, and he handed the handkerchief to his son.

  Peyton nodded and took the handkerchief and turning towards the three figures on the point of land ahead he waved the white cloth over his head.

  “Her hands!” John Senior snapped at him. “What a goddamn fool,” he said. The old man retrieved his handkerchief and grabbed the woman’s arm to turn her back towards him. She looked to John Peyton as her hands were knotted behind her back and he nodded and did his best to indicate everything would be all right.

  Across the ice two of the figures stepped down from the bank of the shore. The man in the lead carried a branch of white spruce and held it before him as they walked towards the party on the ice. Peyton spoke to the group without taking his eyes from the men approaching them. “No one fires,” he said, “without my say-so.”

  SIX

  After they gathered spruce branches and stones from the near point to fashion a crude burial mound and kicked snow over the blood stains on the ice, the white men retraced their steps across the lake to the Indian camp. The largest of the three shelters was big enough to sleep nearly twenty people, a circle of shallow sleeping hollows radiating around the firepit at the centre. There was a wall of horizontal logs three feet in height at the base of the structure, the chinks stodged with moss and dirt banked up on the outside. A cone of longer logs raised above it served as rafters for the thickly layered birchbark covering. The walls inside were hung with bows, hatchets, iron axes, clubs and spears, all of them covered in red ochre and all laid out in the neatest order.

  A bewildered sense of calm had settled among the men and they expressed a reverent appreciation for the objects that surrounded them. They found a birchbark container of arrows and John Senior took out a couple of samples, sighting down the perfectly straight pine shafts before passing them among the group. The ends of the arrows were fletched with two strips of grey goose feathers, the points were all of reworked iron. John Senior said most of the arrowheads were fashioned from the beds of stolen traps or square spikes flattened and moulded with a stone, and that he’d interrupted an old Indian working a trap-bed to that purpose on the river more than thirty years ago.

  A fire was revived from the coals in the centre pit as the party sniffed about the shelter. At the back of the mamateek William Cull came upon a roughly carved wooden figure and around its neck was hung the silver case of a watch. The case had been pried open and emptied and the inner workings were discovered nearby, knotted into leather thongs of various lengths, the gears polished and strung beside stolen coins and periwinkle shells on necklaces and bracelets.

  “You lose a watch on that boat?” William Cull asked, holding up the wooden figure.

  “My father’s,” John Senior said. “Brought it over from Poole my first year across with Miller.”

  Cull removed the watch case from the figure’s neck and threw the wooden carving to the floor. The Indian woman, who had settled near the fire, took offence to this and gabbled at the man in a tone John Senior found unacceptable. He picked up the figure and stood holding it over the fire with his thumb and forefinger. He tipped it gently back and forth like a pendulum, threatening to let it fall. The woman went on scolding and several of the men urged him to drop the head into the fire to see if she would be willing to pick it out with her teeth.

  “That’s enough now,” Peyton said curtly a
nd John Senior said he supposed it was so enough. Peyton took the figure from his father and set it up where William Cull had found it and the woman turned back to staring at the fire.

  “I expect she was angry with you, John Senior,” Richmond said. He crouched across from her. “At least her face is some red.”

  They roasted caribou steaks found in a storage pit lined with birch rind beside the shelters and they boiled water for tea. The woman refused to eat the meat and Peyton offered her a cake of hard tack instead, biting off a mouthful to show her it was edible, and she gnawed at the bread until her saliva had softened one end almost to paste.

  After their meal, Peyton left Michael Sharpe to watch the woman and took the rest of the men to look through the camp. There was a small smokehouse where the Beothuk jerked meat and a storage shed where they kept their dried pelts, most of them caribou. Half a dozen furs were still stretched on racks for curing.

  Inside the other mamateeks they discovered items pilfered from the Susan: two copper kettles, a splitting knife, a fishing reel, line and lead. The stolen nets had already been unknitted and the strands of twine plaited to make rope. All but the ruined nets were gathered and carried back to the larger mamateek where the men packed the items among their gear.

  By this time it was near dark and the kettle was boiled again for tea. It was warm enough inside that the men took off their coats and some removed their boots to stretch their stocking feet to the fire. Peyton sat beside the woman and made signs with his hands and drew figures on the dirt floor to indicate they would be leaving in the morning and that she would accompany them. She watched him carefully but didn’t nod to indicate she understood or shake her head to disagree.

  About eight o’clock, John Senior gathered the men outside the shelter, leaving Peyton to sit alone with the woman. The party fired three powder shots into the air and gave three rousing cheers to warn any Indians close by away from the camp. The woman’s body started with each report of the guns and she looked intently at Peyton as if for reassurance. He did his best to offer it with gestures and his useless English words. She was not much more than a girl, he decided, twenty or thereabout. He counted the years back to the trip to the lake he’d made with Buchan’s expedition. She was probably the same age as the girl who lit the fire that morning, leaning over the ball of tinder and striking sparks into it with the fire stones. Same age as the child in Poole — that sad little figure staring up at him through the gauzy layer of years, like a drowned face under ice.

  The men sauntered back into the mamateek and Peyton assigned Richmond to the first watch at the entrance. There was some talk among them once they settled in but it was subdued and sporadic. Peyton slept fitfully and in his dreams was unable to move or speak. He often woke himself with the stunted effort of raising his hand or shouting and each time he sat upright and stared in the poor light to be sure of the woman beside him.

  In the morning they breakfasted on tea and cold strips of the roasted meat. They went to the storehouse and hauled out the pelts, eighty caribou hides in all and the skins of several dozen other animals, which they divided up into equal parcels and loaded onto sealskins that were outfitted with plaited leather thongs for handles. There was talk of stripping the sail from the third mamateek, but it had been cut and stitched with sinews and ruined with the Indian concoction of grease and ochre, so it was left behind. Tom Taylor and Richmond both advocated setting fire to the shelters. Peyton told them there’d be no burning of anything but the bows and arrows and spears and when they turned to John Senior the old man simply shrugged.

  Peyton assigned Taylor and Richmond and Michael Sharpe to collecting the wooden weapons into a pyre and then went inside with his father. Joseph Reilly was sitting with the woman, mending the thongs of his Indian rackets. Peyton settled beside the fire and opened his coat, then fished in the greatcoat pocket for his pipe and tobacco.

  He said, “I don’t know about taking the woman out with us.”

  John Senior grimaced in his severe old man’s way. There was dried blood still on his upper lip, his nose was swollen and slightly askew and was most likely broken. “Those skins outside is not worth fifty pound all told,” he said. “That woman, now the governor believes she’s worth a hundred by herself. That would just about cover our losses.”

  Peyton nodded uncertainly. “Reilly?” he asked.

  The Irishman raised his head from his work and stared up at the spruce rafters. He said, “The ones in the woods won’t ever lay off your materials now unless you can recruit her to talk them out of it.”

  “And what would you guess are my chances of that after what happened yesterday?”

  “Every way’s likely,” Reilly said, but there was no conviction in his voice.

  “Well given the circumstances, I’m not sure it’s wise to have her learning how to talk regardless.” Peyton motioned outside towards the lake with his chin.

  John Senior shook his head. “There’s not a soul going to listen to a Red Indian over the word of eight of us, John Peyton.” He looked at his son and shook his head again and spat into the fire. “Am I right?” he asked.

  Peyton didn’t answer him so he turned his attention to Reilly. “Am I right?”

  Reilly stared into the fire where the old man’s spittle hissed dry on the back of a junk of wood.

  An hour later the party was ready to start north towards the river, each man dragging a sealskin sledge loaded with furs. Most of them had come away with trophies, bows and a raft of arrows or thigh-high moccasins stitched from the shanks of caribou. After a few minutes of hauling, Michael Sharpe dropped the halter of his sledge and ran to the edge of the woods where he vomited into the snow.

  “Well Jesus,” Richmond said in disgust.

  Peyton walked over to the boy. “You all right then?” he asked.

  He was leaning forward on his thighs and spitting repeatedly. “I never seen a man killed before, is all,” he said. “All that blood,” he said, and shook his head and then urged again.

  It was another fifteen minutes before they got properly underway. The Beothuk woman walked in the middle of the file, next to Peyton. Before she left the shelter she had carefully combed her hair with a carved bone comb and oiled it with seal fat, but carried nothing with her except the clothes on her back. Behind the party the small bonfire of carved spruce and pine and boxy fir went on burning late into the morning.

  A week after the altercation on the lake they made it back to the winter house and brought the Indian woman into the kitchen. The two men sat in chairs on opposite sides of the room, still wearing all their gear. Their clothes smelled of woodsmoke and frost. The woman sat on the floor near Peyton.

  John Senior held the empty silver case of his father’s watch by the chain and swung it slowly back and forth as though he was trying to mesmerize himself. “You see what they did to my watch,” he said to Cassie, opening the cover to show her the hollow inside. “Now what is that going to be good for?”

  Peyton seemed not to hear his father speaking or even register where he was. Cassie thought he seemed exhausted by grief or desperation more than simple exertion. She said, “You look gallied, John Peyton.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand but didn’t offer anything more in response.

  John Senior said the Indian woman was brazen and not to be trusted, that she had twice tried to sneak away from the party while they slept. The second time she was bound hand and foot and had crawled into the bush on her knees. She’d worked the leather cassock over her head and used it as a muffle beneath her, crawling away from the guttering fire and the circle of sleeping men a foot at a time, the leather obscuring the marks of her passage behind her as she went. She was three hundred yards into the bush when they caught up to her.

  She could not be convinced to take a chair.

  Cassie said, “What’s to be done with her?” She was boiling kettles of water to fill a wooden tub in front of the fire.

  “I’ll ask that of the governor
, I suppose,” Peyton said. He rubbed at his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “There was some shooting on the lake. Some bloodshed that’ll have to be explained.”

  Cassie turned to them from the fireplace. “What happened?”

  “We had to deal with the savages is what happened,” John Senior said.

  “Mind now,” Peyton said to his father and he looked across at Cassie. “I’ll tell you by and by.” He gestured towards the Indian woman with his chin. He said, “Is that water hot enough yet to wash this one up?”

  Investigations

  1819

  SEVEN

  The courtroom was high-ceilinged and cold, despite the fair weather and the forty spectators crammed into the tiny public gallery near the entrance. There was a simple table at the front that the presiding judge sat behind and a row of chairs along one wall for the jurors, a long polished rail in front of them. Most everyone in the room wore their dark coats during the proceedings, and when the jury left to begin its deliberations, people wandered outside to smoke and walk in the watery sunlight of late May.

  Peyton had come alone to St. John’s on a packet boat, refusing his father’s offer to accompany him. He alone had been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and there was no need, he said, to complicate matters by having his father or anyone else from the expedition there to testify as well. On his second night in town, the governor met him at the London Tavern which had risen from the ashes of the 1817 fires. “An unfortunate business, all this,” Hamilton said. “But mostly a formality.” He had a full head of silver hair, a highly formal manner that came naturally to him and that most people found appealing as a result. He talked with his hands folded beneath his chin. “You understand I had no choice but to take this route.”