‘It’s cold!’ Magnus complained.
‘Ah, you are a scientist too?’ Pierre responded. ‘What an observer you are! Here is the trick: it makes us work all the faster to build our fires.’
As the canoe lightened it was drawn closer, never touching the smooth pebbles of the shore, all of us lifting out the freight bales and arranging them in a makeshift barricade covered with an oilcloth. The empty canoes were finally heaved up with a great cry, flipped with a spray of water, hoisted overhead, marched up the strand, and then propped up on one side by paddles to make an instant lean-to. Fires were lit, guns primed, water fetched, and pipes smoked as peas, pork, and biscuit were cooked and served. It was dull fare that I ate like a starving man.
‘Yes, eat, eat, sorcerer!’ Pierre encouraged. ‘You, too, giant! Eat to lighten Radisson’s canoe, and because you will lose weight on this trip no matter how much you gobble! Yes, the work burns your body! Eat because there is no pork past Grand Portage, which is why the Montreal men are called the Pork Eaters and only those of us who have wintered over are true North Men.’
‘What do you eat past Grand Portage?’ Magnus asked as he chewed.
‘Pemmican. Dried game, berries, and sometimes a mush of rice or corn. Any city man would spit it out, but it’s nectar to a working man after a day at the paddles. A pound of pemmican is worth eight pounds of bread! Of course, a few months of that and you long for a squaw. Not just for her quim between her legs, mind you, but her ability to find good things to eat in the woods.’
‘Why are we going so fast?’ I asked, sipping water. ‘I’m so sore that I feel like I’ve been stretched on the rack.’
‘Fast? We’re like snails on a carpet, so vast is this country. Do you think the sun will linger forever? At Grand Portage she will turn back south, a lover bidding goodbye, and the days will begin to shorten. Always in our mind is the return of the ice! We paddle to beat the ice! We drive hard to give the North Men time to return to their posts in Upper Canada before their watery highways freeze solid. The winter is good for travel, yes, if you have snowshoes, but not for carrying freight.’
‘But at this rate we’ll be there before the rendezvous.’
‘Don’t worry, sorcerer, we’ll have wind and storm enough on Superior to keep us penned. That lake is cold as a witch’s heart, and she never lets a man cross freely.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Each night on our canoe voyage, Aurora and Cecil and the other bourgeois pitched a small tent while the voyageurs curled under the canoes. Magnus and I, given our status as middling passengers, each had scraps of canvas and rope that could be rigged as a lean-to shelter. It was a sign of rank, my head on my bundled coat and a wool trade blanket wrapped around me, and once tucked in I lapsed into unconsciousness. But it still seemed midnight when my shelter suddenly fell, half smothering me with dew-wet fabric. What the devil?
‘Get up, American, do you think you can sleep all day?’ It was Pierre, kicking me with his moccasin-clad foot through the canvas.
I thrashed clear. ‘It’s the middle of the night! You’ll wake the camp!’
There were roars of laughter. ‘Everyone but you is awake! We North Men do not tarry in the morning! Even Pork Eaters are up before the likes of you!’
‘Morning?’ I rubbed my eyes. A cloudy ribbon of stars still arced across the sky, while in the east there was the faintest glow of a very distant dawn. The fire was flaring to life again, last night’s leftovers beginning to bubble. Cecil and Aurora were fully dressed, looking bright enough for Piccadilly.
‘Yes, eat, eat, because soon we will be paddling. Eat, American! And then come see my handiwork. I have honoured our guests on the lopstick tree!’
So we wolfed down the remains of dinner and then followed our escort to the landmark. Its base was covered in carvings, we saw, commemorating some of the dignitaries who’d passed this way. They were mostly Scottish and English names like Mackenzie, Duncan, Cox, and Selkirk. The voyageur lit a candle and held it to the bark so we could read. ‘There, see how you are immortalized!’
‘Lord Cecil and Lady Aurora Somerset,’ it read. ‘Plus two donkeys.’
‘Donkeys!’
‘Paddle like men for a few days, and then maybe I will restore your name on another tree. Paddle until your shoulders don’t just ache but burn and you want to cry for your mother! But you don’t, you just paddle more! Then maybe the great Pierre will consider you!’
We stopped a night at Fort Saint Joseph, all of us but Cecil and Aurora camping on the beach because the post was still a half-completed stockade. Huge stacks of peeled logs, chopped and dragged the last winter, lay ready for placement, and the forest was cut back for a mile or more to prevent a surprise attack. Despite the sand fleas I was quickly asleep, given that there was no chance of dalliance with the segregated Aurora. And then in a predawn fog we were roused and pushed off again, the canoes ahead and behind muffled in the mist. We’d not pass another post until Grand Portage.
It was hard paddling against the current as we entered the thirty-mile river connecting Lake Huron and Lake Superior. At the Sault, meaning ‘jump’ or ‘rapids,’ we unloaded the canoes once again and carried the cargo in portage, me taking a ninety-pounder and Pierre and Magnus each shouldering two of the crippling loads. Then back for more. We staged the freight in mile increments, meaning we’d carry for half an hour and then get a relative respite going back for another load. Indians were gathered here to fish with spear and bark net from camps that smelt of shit and flies, so the voyageurs posted guard on our belongings because every white man believed every Indian was a thief, and every Indian believed every white man was rich and unaccountably selfish. Once we had all the freight forwarded, we went back for the canoes. Light they might be, but a wet freight canoe still weighed several hundred pounds. I felt like a pallbearer at an endless funeral. Finally it was done.
‘You’ll see men at Grand Portage who can do three and even four pieces at a time,’ Pierre panted. ‘When they are loaded, they look like a house with legs.’
‘And you will see men in Paris who lift no more than a pair of dice or a quill pen,’ I moaned back.
‘Those are not men, monsieur. To be an urban parasite, doing nothing for yourself, is to not be alive at all.’
Cecil, however, was expected to carry nothing. And Aurora was hoisted high and prim on the shoulders of two voyageurs, gazing ahead like the Queen of Sheba as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world. The little children in the Indian fish camps came running when she passed, laughing with delight. They trailed her until their mothers finally called them back, but she didn’t grant them a flicker of response.
At the largest lake of all we put in again. The water was so clear I could follow the slope of the submerged granite as if it were shimmering in air. The water seemed even a richer and deeper blue than Huron, extending to a watery horizon as we followed the north shore. The land to our right began to rise, shoulders of pink and grey granite clothed in a stone-gripping forest of stunted birch, alder, pines, and spruce.
A warm easterly blew and we raised a makeshift sail on a pole and let it blow us westward, me sprawling gratefully to doze during this welcome recess from gruelling labour. The canoe lulled as it rocked on the waves, lapping water a quiet music.
Then the wind veered to the southeast and strengthened, the sky in that direction darkening. The sail twisted, the canoe leaning, and we quickly took the canvas down.