River Thieves Read online

  He held the candles out to her. They were an extravagant gift and would be wasted on him. “I never packed any reading,” he said.

  Cassie smiled at him and shrugged. She said, “The light is good for close work, if you’re mending your rackets or sewing a rent in your clothes.”

  Peyton nodded. A quiver nearly buckled his legs. His feet felt heavy, as if he had just overtopped his boots in water. He looked at her steady and said, “You look after John Senior while I’m away.”

  Cassie turned away from him, retying her dress around her thighs. “I always do,” she said. She knelt on the floor, leaning all her weight on the brush to scrub at the boards as he pulled the door closed behind him.

  Cassie stood at the window to watch the two men move down to the landwash and away along the water. She followed their progress until they disappeared around the line of the beach and then turned back to scrubbing the kitchen floor. The boards were already spotless, but there was a knot of anxiety she was working against with the weight of her torso on the brush, the motion of her arms repeated and repeated until they burned. Sand grating against the bare grain of the wood.

  She thought of John Peyton in the doorway, watching her. The naked emotion on his face that made her pity him and wish him away. He was a man who always and only wanted the best for everyone around him, which in Cassie’s mind meant he was fated to be disappointed. And likely to hurt a share of the people he cared for besides. It was a mistake to have given him the candles, she knew, there was that to worry about. And there were the weeks ahead of her, alone with John Senior.

  Cassie was accustomed to having two months and more on her own in the winter house during the trapping season, the darkest time of the year. By December there were barely seven hours of light to the day to see her through the chores about the property, feeding the animals not slaughtered for meat in the fall and cleaning their stalls, carrying in her supply of wood, fetching water. Long evenings of pitch black outside the circle of her reading light and the fire tormented by wind in the chimney. Not a soul on the shore within a day’s hard travel. It was something she anticipated with equal measures of exhilaration and dread, the loneliness of relying on no one but herself.

  When she first heard John Senior wouldn’t be trapping this year she was relieved at the thought of having his company through the winter, but now the idea distressed her. As if she was being cheated somehow.

  After she had scrubbed every inch of the floor she swept it clear of sand. She packed bread and cheese into a pouch and collected a pair of Indian rackets, a rifle, powder horn and shot. She pulled on a heavy overcoat and followed the track of the sled down to the landwash. She turned in the direction opposite the one taken by the men, walking along the beach a mile and a half, then following a brook inland to where the country opened into a clearing of bogland studded with clusters of bare alder. There was plenty of snow down to cover the ground, but it wasn’t cold enough yet to have frozen the hidden pockets of bog-water solid and Cassie skirted the clearing, keeping close to the treeline to avoid stumbling into them.

  Half an hour into the bush she came upon the tracks of partridge in the snow, the distinct prints overlapping in wide arcs, as if the birds were incapable of walking in a straight line. She took off her heavy leather mittens and moved slowly forward with the rifle at the ready. The birds would have moulted their summer camouflage for the coat of white feathers that made them nearly invisible against the snow. It was movement she looked for, white against the dark background of spruce, white in motion on a field of white.

  She came upon a cluster of three or four ahead of her. She aimed just above them, the birds bursting off the snow when the gun fired, a dull explosion of down in the blue air. One of the partridge fell back to the ground gracelessly, like a bag of sand, then scrambled into the undergrowth trailing a useless wing and a string of feathers spotted with blood. Cassie removed her rackets and laid aside the bag of food and the powder horn to push her way into the spruce. The bush was thick and heavy going, the ground under the canopy of branches almost bare of snow. When she came upon the partridge it was lying at the base of a tree, as if it had run blindly into the trunk and dropped there unconscious.

  There was always a pinch of sympathy she had to set her teeth against, seeing the creature this close. She took a breath through her nostrils and reached for the bird, but it jumped again, thrashing wildly under the branches. Cassie fell backwards, then struck at the partridge with the rifle butt until it lay still. She placed a boot on the bird’s broken wing to hold it against the ground and then twisted the neck backwards.

  She laid a fire just above the beach, in a washed-out alcove of peat and tree roots that kept her clear of the wind. The sun was warm enough that she could take off her coat. She plucked the bird clean and singed off the pin feathers in the fire, then gutted the naked carcass and propped it over the coals on a stick.

  When she was left on her own during the winter, she came down to this spot once or twice a month to hunt or just to sit by a fire for an afternoon. There was something stripped and pitiless about the land that she envied. The wind in the spruce trees, the surf muttering on the beach were hypnotic, so empty of meaning they could be mistaken for silence. A scatter of islands teetering on the ocean’s horizon. The sea a blue just this side of darkness, the colour of the sky when the first evening star appears. Out of sight of the winter house she could imagine the entire coastline was uninhabited but for her, and she found some comfort in that notion.

  She reached for that feeling now, but couldn’t move past the anxiety she’d been trying to ignore since starting out. She turned away from it and away from it, like the partridge moving in wide overlapping arcs, and each time came back to that sullen heaviness. She leaned closer to the heat and turned the bird on its stick. Fat dripped into the fire, the smell of it darkening the air like a bruise.

  All that day, the two men travelled along the bank of the River Exploits without speaking of more than the conditions of the snow or the temperature. Peyton stood to the back of the sled and worked it over bald patches of rock, holding it upright over angled layers of beach ice. He was happy for the physical labour of it, the steady immersion into fatigue that released some of the tension in his body, but it wasn’t enough to keep him from going over his conversation with Cassie in his head. The candles like an afterthought or was she playing her feelings as close as he was? The light good for needlework and whether that meant anything like he hoped. How quickly she turned away then and her saying, “I always do,” when he spoke of his father. It seemed to Peyton there was a note almost of defiance in her voice as she said it.

  John Senior stayed beside the bitch most of the day, using a hand in the harness to help haul or steady the animal when needed. Where the path or stretch of beach was too narrow to allow them to walk abreast, he travelled ahead and the dog adjusted her pace to keep close to his heels. She nearly bowled him over as they came into sight of Ship Cove, John Senior stopping suddenly in the dusk of late afternoon. The dog sat on her haunches behind him and whined.

  Peyton said, “What is it, now?”

  John Senior pointed with his mittened hand. “There she is,” he said.

  The HMS Adonis was a bulk of shadow in the distance. They couldn’t see the chains about her waist that secured the vessel to the shoreline, but it was clear the sails and all the rigging had been taken down for the winter, the bare masts rising over the ship like a row of crucifixes atop the spires of a church.

  “Never been a navy man on the shore this late in the season,” John Senior said. “Not in all my years.”

  Peyton couldn’t discern the drift of those words, whether they were wistful or angry or fearful. All that summer they had heard stories of the commander of the Adonis, a Lieutenant Buchan, travelling across the northeast shore in a cutter. Mapping the coastline was the explanation that had come to them, a notion John Senior was suspicious of almost out of habit. When word reached the Peytons th
at the vessel was going to winter-over, it was like a confirmation of the worst, though nothing said between them acknowledged any specific concern.

  “What is it this Buchan is after?” Peyton asked.

  John Senior shook his head. He was squinting into the light of the sun as it fell into the forest. “Leave me worry about the navy man. You worry about keeping your powder dry. And minding the ice.”

  Peyton nodded and they pushed on towards Ship Cove as the darkness seemed to rise out of the countryside around them, the sky turning black overhead by imperceptible degrees. They didn’t speak of the Adonis or Lieutenant Buchan again, although in his head Peyton was already running through the possibilities. He had another full day’s travel to face in the morning. And he could see, exhausted as he was, he had little chance of sleeping through the night again.

  For much of July and August and through the month of September, Lieutenant David Buchan had been commanding a cutter from the HMS Adonis, searching the harbours and coves of Notre Dame Bay for the small bands of Red Indians reported to frequent the area during the summer months. He and his crew of marines had covered almost two hundred miles of coastline, steering up dozens of rivers and narrow gullies, marching for hours through bush and across marshes when a mooring stake was discovered near a trail. The blackflies and mosquitoes over the water were so thick that a used handkerchief came away blackened. The insects crawled into the mouths and ears of the marines and necklaced them with blood. When his men complained about the useless effort and the choking flies, Buchan ordered them to ship their oars and sat the boat still on the water so long they begged him to set to rowing for the relief that only the breeze of movement offered.

  There was no lack of evidence of a Beothuk presence — abandoned mamateeks, recently used firepits, well-marked trails. Twice Buchan and his men approached camps in which fires were burning and birds on wooden skewers were angled over the coals, but the occupants had seen or heard them approach and disappeared into the woods. The marines spoke of it among themselves as otherworldly, the work of fairies or the Old Man himself, their enthusiasm for the search waning as their fear and distrust increased. To Buchan, it seemed almost a deliberate seduction, a teasing game that strengthened his determination to carry on.

  It was Governor John Duckworth, newly appointed to the office in Newfoundland, who first offered the undertaking to Buchan. They had met on an April evening at the London Tavern in St. John’s. It was cold and miserable outside and heavy sleet tattooed the windows with each gust of wind. There was one double-burner Argand lamp to light the entire room and the near dark and foreboding weather gave a clandestine air to their discussion. They sat beside the flagstone fireplace over plates of mutton and peas. “Marie is well, I trust,” Duckworth said.

  “Fine, yes.”

  “And the girl?”

  “Thank you, yes. By the latest news I have.”

  “Good,” Duckworth said without enthusiasm. “Good.” He looked at his plate of food and sighed heavily. “In my experience,” he told the officer, “public service is submission to discomfort.” He ticked off his ailments on the fingers of his right hand. The dull pall of headaches, attacks of the night sweats, nausea or constipation or the trots. It was a physical expression of the sense of impotence that arose from one’s inability to please everyone. He was only a fortnight into his appointment to the position of governor and the Society of Merchants in St. John’s was agitating for the removal of the chief justice, Thomas Tremlett. Illegal building on the waterfront had, according to a long-established custom, gone on through the winter in the absence of the governor and would now have to be dealt with. And there was, closest to his heart, for no reason of consequence to his office or the Crown, the matter of the Red Indians.

  In preparation for his posting to Newfoundland, Duckworth had done a meticulous review of the literature. He burrowed through letters, reports and ledgers, correspondence from previous governors to the Privy Council and the Board of Trade, the short and invariably disastrous histories of plantations established in the colony during the seventeenth century. As he read through the paperwork, he began taking note of the infrequent asides regarding the natives of the island, christened Red Indians for their practice of covering skin and clothing, shelters, canoes and tools in a pigment of red ochre. The Indians were a shadowy presence in the colonial literature as they were on the island itself. They surfaced as a minor category in descriptions of the landscape, weather, animals and fishing conditions of the country. They once occupied the entire coast of Newfoundland and there were infrequent but promising contacts with Europeans in the early 1600s, some symbolic acts of trade, ritual exchanges of gifts. Then several pivotal misunderstandings. There were incidents of pilfering from English establishments prompting acts of violence in retaliation. Bloodshed. The Beothuk began to withdraw from those areas overrun by strangers, surrendering the Avalon Peninsula, then Conception and Trinity bays to the rapidly expanding English shore fishery. The French Shore was abandoned to the itinerant presence of the French and their Mi’kmaq allies who migrated from Cape Breton Island. The Mi’kmaq also moved inland to hunt and trap around Grand Lake and the countryside as far north as White Bay.

  Duckworth stared across at Buchan. He said, “I hope I’m not boring you, Lieutenant.”

  According to the evidence of the literature Duckworth had read, the displacement of the Beothuk took place with a curious lack of concerted resistance. The Red Indians seemed almost to dissipate, like a dream that resists articulation, becoming increasingly elusive as the Europeans occupied and renamed the bays and points and islands that once belonged to them alone.

  The scattered references to them fascinated, then obsessed Duckworth, like an unfamiliar word that begins to recur in a way that seems loaded with import. He had written letters and attended informal meetings with members of the Privy Council in London before beginning his appointment. He wanted some action taken to protect the Indians, to establish a formal relationship. He argued, quoted statistics (manufactured out of the air to lend weight to his opinions), bullied and harangued to the point that people began avoiding him, coming down with sudden illnesses that made it impossible to keep their appointments. He was gaining a reputation, he was told by friends, as a quack. Each month his appetite decreased. The crick in his neck tightened like a body on the rack.

  Duckworth sat back from his meal. The Privy Council, he told Buchan, had been made aware of the dire situation of the local natives by most of the colony’s governors in recent memory. A series of ineffectual proclamations had been issued in response to reports that attacks of inhuman barbarity were being perpetrated against the Indians by settlers. The decrees placed the natives under the protection of the Crown and exhorted settlers to “live in amity and brotherly kindness” with the Red Indians. There was a report from an officer of the navy in 1792, the state of the tribe was discussed at a commission of inquiry, there were official recommendations. There was talk of a reservation in Notre Dame Bay, of making an example of some of the worst offenders in the Bay of Exploits. All of these suggestions the Privy Council took under advisement and proceeded to ignore, unwilling to risk alienating the growing population of settlers by appearing to side with local natives. The English cod fishery on the Grand Banks was the richest in the world, Duckworth reminded Buchan, and the revolt in America had not been without its lessons.

  They washed their food down with tankards of a dark molasses beer brewed on the premises and Duckworth lifted a hand to signal for more. Despite the chill in the air, the effort of eating raised beads of perspiration on the governor’s forehead. As far as he could determine from his own inquiries, he continued, no one had ever succeeded in building a sustained relationship of trust with the Red Indians. The remnants of the tribe had retreated to the northeast shore, wintering seventy miles inland on the Red Indian’s lake. During the warmer months they scavenged a living among the sparsely populated maze of islands in the Bay of Exploits. From May
to September they hunted for eggs on the bird islands and harvested seals and took salmon from the rivers not yet occupied and dammed by English settlers. They dug for clams and mussels on the shoreline and pilfered ironwork and nets from the settlers’ tilts and they sometimes cut the English boats from their moorings in the dark of night in a useless display of bravado or protest.

  The settlers responded to their constant stealing and vandalism by shooting at them on sight or raiding and looting their camps in retaliation. An old man named Rogers living on Twillingate Great Island had boasted of killing upwards of sixty of them. Several people Duckworth knew personally — he leaned dangerously low over his plate of food — had seen Red Indian hands displayed as trophies by furriers in the Bay of Exploits.

  Buchan was vaguely familiar with much of the information Duckworth was relating, but he saw the governor’s need for a naive audience, his desire to find a convert. He shook his head in disbelief. He nodded, he made small disgusted noises in his throat, he offered pained expressions where appropriate.

  Duckworth had tucked a linen napkin into his waistcoat to protect the white silk. He leaned his bulk back from the table and methodically wiped his hands clean with the napkin before removing a folded sheaf of letters from the waist pocket of his frock coat.

  “One of my predecessors,” he said, wiping at the corners of his mouth with his thumb, “consulted a magistrate by the name of Bland for advice on this issue.” He flipped through the pages for a particular passage and turned a letter up to the poor light of the lamp when he found it. “‘Before the lapse of another century,’” he read, “‘the English nation, like the Spanish, may have affixed to its character the indelible reproach of having extirpated a whole race of people.’” There was a noticeable tick in the pale jowls of his face. He folded the papers and laid them on the table at the officer’s elbow. “My dear Buchan,” he said.