The Expedition
THE NEXT DAY, Bull came around with papers to sign and brought him over to Colonel Poolcaugh’s establishment, where his outfit garments were being sewed and where, also, two Icelandic women were completing an enormous blanket of thickly quilted wool batting made expressly for the nine men to sleep together underneath. Emil Buckendorf was there, dark-haired, with fanglike teeth and eyes so pale that there seemed to be a light burning in his skull. He was a quiet, efficient young man; he was helping the women sew and doing a nice job of it, too. The two guides were very much unlike each other. Lafayette was fine-made and superbly handsome, with a thin mustache, slick braids, and sly black eyes. Henri was sturdy as Bull, though shorter and with an air of captivating assurance. There was also the cook, English Bill, a man whose brown muttonchops flew straight out from his face and would soon droop to cover his neck. Joseph had developed a suspicion of grand whiskers, but he liked English Bill’s riveting energy as he dickered with and worried Colonel Poolcaugh. Bill was adamant about the necessity of provisioning the outfit well. He also insisted on bringing his dog, a stubby little brown and white short-haired terrier, and he made Joseph try on each garment. There were so many that Joseph was inclined to simply accept the pile, but when he put on the three woolen shirts and three woolen drawers, the three pair of stockings and moccasins over them, there were adjustments to be made. There was an overcoat of Kentucky jean to repair and his elkskin overshoes needed additional lacings as well. A grand-looking helmet made of lambskin came down over his shoulders with flaps to each side to draw over his nose and, last, there was a pair of fur mitts. When it was all on, Joseph was so hot he could hardly breathe, as it was a warm day for December. But, by the end of the month, when the party started out, the weather was already being called the worst and coldest in memory.
When he left Dorea Swivel, she gave him a picture of herself. He almost gave it back, thinking it unfair of him to accept it when he loved the heated bolster of her body but did not see a future with someone who didn’t know how to read and could write little more than her name, though she was good at adding and subtracting. But something made him keep the small locket photograph of her, so plain and steadfast, her broad face symmetrical beneath a severe middle part in her hair. It was as though he had an intimation that he was embarking on a journey that would bring him to the edge of his sanity, and that he’d need the solid weight of her gaze to pull him back.
The Great Drive
WITH FIVE YOKE of oxen and two sleds built for rough haul, the men started from St. Anthony. The only personal possessions Joseph brought were the locket and the book that contained the writings of Marcus Aurelius. One sled was loaded with corn and cob for the oxen and the other with provisions for the men, plus all of the tools that Bull, Emil Buckendorf, and Joseph Coutts would need to garden and live out a year. The other men were to be fetched back as soon as the prairie dried out in the spring, and at the same time those who stayed would be reprovisioned. Within two days, the road disappeared and Joseph, Henri, and Lafayette broke the trail with snowshoes before the oxen, who either foundered in the deep snow or cut their fetlocks on the burnt-over prairie where the wind had swept a vicious crust. By placing one step before another, they progressed about eight miles a day. At night, they raised their tent, built a good blaze, cut slough grass for bedding, piled it on the snow, then spread their buffalo coats and oilcloths over the grass and got into their huge communal bed fully clothed. The two guides took turns sleeping with their most important possession, a fiddle, which they kept in a velvet-lined case and kissed like a woman. Once they lowered the great woolen comforter over themselves, the men began to steam up under the batting, and they slept, though every time one rolled over so did the rest. The nights were lively that way, but not, at first, unbearable, thought Joseph. But this was only January and there wouldn’t be a chance for any of them to bathe before spring. He had never been an overly fastidious person, but the food that English Bill prepared sat heavy on the gut and one night the men grew so flatulent they almost blew the quilt off. Halfway through the concert, Henri Peace began to laugh and cried out in the dark, praising the men for playing so loudly on their own French fiddles. Joseph started laughing too, but Emil Buckendorf took offense.
“Gawiin ojidaa, ma frère,” said Henri, who spoke the French-Chippewa patois as well as either English or pure Chippewa, or Cree, “I am sorry to have insulted you. For you were playing the German bugle, were you not?”
Emil went silent and ground his teeth. Joseph could hear his molars and jaws working. But it was too cold to fight. No one wanted to get out from under the quilt.
When Joseph rose the next morning and looked out over the great white bowl of the universe, he saw the sun had two dogs at either side and was crowned by a burning crescent. It was a sight so immediate, so gorgeous, so grim, that tears started into his eyes as he stood transfixed.
“Oui, frère Joseph, weep now while you have the strength,” Henri said, handing him a tin cup of boiling hot tea, “we shall be hit hard by afternoon.” As with everything Henri said, this proved true.
They ran into heavy drifts on the unburned prairie and had to shovel all the way. Foot by foot, they made five miles. Henri and Lafayette found elk sign and went after the creatures, hoping to supplement English Bill’s cured hog. No sooner were they gone than the blizzard swept down and the men set about making camp, hauling wood, trying to raise the tent. But the wind drove the snow in horizontal sheets, slapped out their fire, sucked the tent into its nothingness, confused and battered them until they stumbled uncertainly this way and that. Henri returned and shouted for them to make the bed where they stood and get in quick. As they spread the buffalo coats and oilcloths the snow drifted into the fur but the men got in, Lafayette on one end and English Bill on the other end, as he always was on account of sleeping with his terrier. For a long time the men shook so hard that Henri called something out to Lafayette in Chippewa that Joseph was to recognize, later, when he understood them better, as a reference to a sacred method of divination in which spirits entered a special tent and caused it to tremble. The shaking ceased gradually. The men relaxed against one another and Joseph, held fast between two Buckendorfs, drifted off wondering if he might not waken but too tired to really care.
A little before dawn, Joseph did wake to the sound of men singing. Edging his face from the bed, he realized that the blanket was covered entirely by a great and glowing white drift. Steam rose from the cracked snow at the edges. The wind had ceased and a steep cold now gripped them. Henri and Lafayette had built up the fire and were drying themselves before it. Henri was playing a jig of stirring joy. Lafayette was beating a hand drum and jumping up and down, singing a song loud and wailing wild as the blizzard. The Buckendorfs cursed and screamed as they emerged, damp, into the horrible cold, but the music, which Henri told Joseph was meant to pluck up their spirits, had an effect. Something in the song, which Joseph began to repeat with the guides, worked on him. As he turned himself to each direction before the fire, and sang, a startling awareness came over him. The violence of the storm, the snapping and growling of the fire, the flame reflected on the dark faces of the guides and on Bull’s sweet features and in the strange white eyes of the Germans, struck him with indelible force. A sudden, fierce, black happiness boiled up in him. He laughed out loud and looked into Henri’s eyes, glittering over the roan body of violin, and saw how narrowly they had escaped. If the drift hadn’t covered them, they’d have iced up in this extremity of cold and frozen to death in their sleep, welded fast to one another by ice, a solid mass until spring allowed the weird human sandwich to loosen and rot.