“What do you make of it, Mr. Peyton?”
“I’d say they know we’re coming.”
Buchan pawed at the snow with the toe of his boot. “Clearly they do not expect we are bringing good news.”
The marines milled about the site. Cassie sat at one end of the raft, her head bowed almost to her knees.
“Do you think she’ll make it to the lake?”
Peyton turned his head in the direction Buchan indicated with his chin. “Yes,” he said.
At the base of the second waterfall additional stores were put away for the return trip, and two miles short of Badger Bay River everything but food for two weeks’ travel, the neat-deal coffin and the gifts intended for the Beothuk were left behind. Above Badger Bay River water flowed freely over the ice and obscured all sign of the Beothuk retreat towards the lake, although there was no indication they had left the river for the forest at any point short of it.
On February 11, they reached the head of the lake, twenty-two miles distant from the second waterfall. They stopped there to refresh themselves with food and tea and then set out across the lake. At three o’clock in the afternoon they reached the camp the Peytons had surprised on a bright March morning the previous spring. There was no sign that anyone was on the lake but the party of white men themselves.
The naked frames of two of the mamateeks still stood. The third had been taken down and its materials used to construct a smaller shelter nearby. Buchan was the first to go inside, along with Peyton and Cassie. It was a tomb of sorts, a body on a raised dais wrapped in a shroud of canvas rubbed with red ochre and surrounded by spears, a bow and quiver of arrows, pyrite stones. There was a piece of linen that Cassie picked up and unfolded. The name Peyton was sewn into the cloth. The corpse was that of a large man by all appearances, easily six feet in height.
“This is your man, Mr. Peyton,” Buchan said.
“I imagine so.”
“I wonder what they’ve done with the other body?”
Peyton shrugged. He looked at Cassie as she carefully folded the linen and placed it back as she’d found it. “I couldn’t say, sir.”
Outside Buchan had two marines unpack a canvas tent from the sledges, and while it was erected next to the burial site of the Beothuk man, he had the coffin unpacked as well. The canvas and red-cloth covers were removed and Buchan inspected it carefully for signs of damage. The lid, which had been nailed shut, was pried free and they stood silently about the body of the woman. Twine had been used to secure the corpse in its place and the freezing temperatures had preserved her features throughout the trip up the river. There were a number of trinkets placed about the body, two wooden dolls that Mary had been fond of, gifts of jewellery and other things given to her by visitors who had come from across the northeast shore to see her.
Buchan motioned to have the lid replaced, but Cassie touched his arm.
“I have something I would like to leave with her,” she said. She unbuttoned the outer coat she wore to get at the pockets of a lighter coat underneath. Peyton watched as she leaned over the body. When she stepped away he could see it was the medicine bag his father had stolen from the grave of a dead Beothuk on Swan Island — the gift he had tried weakly to refuse and then passed on to Cassie. He could name the contents still: carved antler pendants, a pyrite fire stone, two delicately fluted bird skulls.
If he’d thought of it at that moment, he would have placed John Senior’s silver watch case beside the corpse as well, but it hadn’t entered his head since finding Mary dead in Ship Cove. Two marines stepped forward to nail the coffin shut. The watch case was carried back to the coast and he discovered it sitting in a coat pocket months later. Turned it over in his hands then. Held it to his ear, listened a while to the endless nothing of it.
The casket was draped in a brown pall and raised six feet off the ground from a tripod of spruce sticks to keep the body out of the reach of scavenging animals. The cassock and leggings Mary had been wearing when she was taken were laid beneath it along with the materials that had been carried up as gifts for the Indians: blankets, knives, linen, several iron pots. The sixteen blue moccasins Mary had sewn of stolen cloth in her bedroom were placed in a row just inside the entrance.
The entire expedition stood about the tent after these gifts had been arranged and the flaps pulled closed and tied. There was a silence among them born of awkwardness, of an awareness they stood together in a moment they were at a loss to articulate, that even the importance of the moment was somehow beyond their understanding. Someone coughed. Snow complained under the shifting of feet as the silence crept on.
Buchan stepped away finally and orders were given to lay a fire and to cover the frames of the two shelters still standing. Peyton stood beside Cassie in the loud clap of movement that followed and he turned to stare out across the lake where he had chased Mary down and taken her hand in his own less than a year before. The sun was falling into the trees on the opposite shore and the pale moon was already visible above the horizon.
“I was thinking,” Peyton said. “I thought it might be time I got married.” After a few moments of her silence he nodded to himself. He wanted to ask if she would have had him if things were different, if she had come to the northeast shore from another life. But he was afraid of what her answer might be. He gestured towards the far hills, to the forest so green under the sun that it was nearly black. He shaded his eyes against the light, the white of snow on the lake. He said, “All my life I’ve loved what didn’t belong to me.”
He turned to face her then but Cassie was already moving away from him towards the trees.
The red ochre used by the Beothuk to cover their bodies, to decorate their tools and shelters and their dead, is a mudstone with the wet texture of clay. It occurs most frequently in tertiary deposits that are not common on the island of Newfoundland. The Red Indians gathered it from Ochre Pit Cove in Placentia Bay and Ochre Pit Island in the Bay of Exploits. There is a deposit between Barasway River and Flat Bay, close to St. George’s Bay, which may have been used as a source. The ochre was mixed with oil or grease to make a stain that was applied directly to the skin and hair, to birchbark, to leather and wood, to stolen ironwork and canvas. When the ochre was unavailable in sufficient quantities, the Beothuk substituted a paste made of soil with a high iron content or a reddish dye extracted from alder bark.
Each spring before they dispersed into small bands on the coast, the Beothuk held an ochring ceremony on Red Indian Lake. Infants were initiated into the band with the sign of fire on their bodies, the dark light of blood. And at the day’s end there was a time set aside for food and for singing.
There is no indication the Beothuk used drums in their ceremonies. They sang nakedly into the darkness from a deep well of songs that each man and woman had learned as a child and knew by heart. They celebrated what was simplest in their lives, the plain things that lived beyond them, the sun, the moon and stars, beads, buttons, hatchets, the rivers, the sea. They sang creatures through the forest around them, the caribou and bear, the crow, the beaver, the silver flicker of fox.
There is no record of the lyrics of these songs or the music to which the words were set. What remains of them now is the property of brooks and ponds and marshes, of caribou and fox moving through the interior as they were sung two hundred years ago. Of each black spruce and fir offering up its single note to the air where not a soul is left to hear it.
Acknowledgements
Anyone familiar with the history of interactions between European settlers and the Beothuk will see the debt owed to James P. Howley’s The Beothuks or Red Indians and Ingeborg Marshall’s A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk. Events as recorded in these two seminal sources had a huge influence on the physical and emotional geography of River Thieves. However, the novel makes no claim to factual or literal truth. Historical events have been shifted, conflated or otherwise altered and they stand side by side with events that are wholly invented. The names of m
any of the novel’s principal characters can be found in Howley and Marshall, but the lives and motivations of each as presented here are fictions. River Thieves is a work of imagination.
There were other sources that helped shape the story as it developed, far too many to list. But I want to acknowledge in particular The Dictionary of Newfoundland English, which was an indispensable resource, and The Newfoundland Journal of Aaron Thomas, 1794, which I pilfered from freely.
Many people commented on earlier versions of River Thieves and I can’t think of one who didn’t contribute something that now feels essential to the book.
My agent, Anne McDermid, has been a tireless source of support, encouragement and advice, from first vague notions to final draft. Other friends read the book at varying stages and I’d like to thank (in chronological order) Helen Humphreys, Janice McAlpine, Marney McDiarmid and Mary Lewis.
I’m also grateful for the insight and editorial acumen of John Pearce at Doubleday and Anton Mueller at Houghton Mifflin. The novel would have been something different, and lesser, without their suggestions and questions.
Martha Kanya-Forstner has been both editor and, for lack of a better phrase, guardian angel of the novel at Doubleday. It’s her reading of River Thieves, more than any other but my own, that I’ve trusted in most.
Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for being there.
A Note on the Beothuk
The aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland, a race of hunter/gatherers we know as the Beothuk, occupied or made use of most of the island’s coast before the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s. While there is no way to place it with any certainty, anthropologists using a variety of measures now estimate the pre-contact population at somewhere between 500 and 5,000 people.
Before the second half of the 17th century, European settlement was concentrated on the Avalon Peninsula. Contact between the Beothuk and Europeans was consequently limited, although records suggest relations were precarious and often involved mistrust, pilfering and violence. With the spread of British and French communities throughout the island’s coastline, the Beothuk lost access to much of their traditional territory. A combination of violence, exposure to diseases such as tuberculosis, and loss of coastal resources essential to their survival, decimated the Indian population. By the last half of the 18th century, the surviving Beothuk were confined to Red Indian Lake, the River Exploits and its watershed, and parts of the coast and islands of Notre Dame Bay on the northeast shore of Newfoundland.
The last known Beothuk died in St. John’s in 1829. As Ingeborg Marshall writes, “Some individuals may have continued to lead a sequestered existence [afterwards], but as a cultural group the Beothuk had vanished.”
About the Author
Michael Crummey is the author of four books of poetry: Arguments with Gravity, Hard Light, Emergency Roadside Assistance, and Salvage; and a collection of short stories, Flesh and Blood. He is a winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award and was nominated for the 1998 Journey Prize. River Thieves was shortlisted for the 2001 Giller Prize and the 2002 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Born in Buchans, Newfoundland, growing up there and in Wabush, Labrador, Michael Crummey now lives in St. John’s.
Copyright © Michael Crummey 2001
Doubleday Canada hardcover edition 2001
Anchor Canada paperback edition 2002
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National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Crummey, Michael
River thieves
eISBN: 978-0-307-37488-2
I. Title.
PS8555.R84R58 2002 C813’.54 C2002-900516-7
PR9199.3.C717R58 2002
Map: CS Richardson (adapted from map of the Diocese of
Newfoundland, 1839)
Published in Canada by
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