Dawn on a Distant Shore (26 page)

I wonder if you took
that bear yet and if you hunt with my uncle Otter. If your leg is bothersome
you might ask my Grandmother for a poultice. If I was there I would bind it for
you.

We have met a man
called Hakim, which means Doctor. He wrote his whole name down for me on a
scrap of paper, it is Hakim Ibrahim Dehlavi ibn Abdul Rahman Balkhi. He comes
from India where I think they must know very much about healing. He is a
surgeon on a great ship called the
Isis
, which sails tomorrow for
Scotland. His skin is not so brown as Curiosity's and not so red as mine. I think
my Grandmother would like to meet him. I wish that you could, too.

  Your Friend Hannah
Bonner,

  also called Squirrel
by the   Kahnyen'kehâka

  of the Wolf
Longhouse, her mother's people

Across the river from
the cliffs that served as a natural palisade for Québec's upper city, the
voyageurs and fur traders had established a town of their own, and it had an Indian
heart. Even before Nathaniel and Hawkeye and Runs-from-Bears had managed to
best the tide and the ice floes and get the canoe to shore, the sound of drums
came across the water. For Hannah it was like a homecoming.

They beached the
borrowed canoe on a grassy slope where fifty others like it dried in the afternoon
sun. Hawkeye hired a Huron boy to watch over it and Hannah followed the men
into the confusion, her hand firmly in her father's and Runs-from-Bears walking
behind her. Her attention shifted constantly, for there was a great lot to see,
and she wanted to remember it all to tell to Elizabeth and Curiosity.

The North West Company
was hiring for the Montréal brigade, looking for voyageurs to paddle their
cargo canoes inward to the great lakes. There they would meet the trappers who came
out of the northern forests with beaver and mink and fisher furs. Hannah
wondered if someday she would see the great white north. She would not mind hard
paddling, if it took her someplace worth seeing. But there were no women around
the man in dirty nankeen breeches and a rusty leather jerkin who was doing the
hiring. He was talking in a big voice to a crowd of Abenaki and Cree in a combination
of English and French and
Atirondaks;
it was a language stripped to the
bone, just enough to conduct business: money and distances to be covered, rations
of pemmican and pea-and-pork soup. Hannah had never seen any Cree before,
although she had heard stories. Her father tugged on her hand before she could
make out very much about them beyond the earbobs of silver in large circular
shapes.

They walked past men
and women with wares spread out on blankets: breeches and leggings, shirts of
red-checked cotton, dull homespun, butter-yellow deerskin; hard-tack, venison
jerky, and cakes of maple sugar; dried sausages as wide around as a man's
wrist, but harder; bundled tobacco and stubby clay pipes to smoke it with. A
woman of mixed blood with one eye as milky white as a wampum bead crouched
before bowls of dried cranberries and blackberries, stringing them onto long
threads.

Now and then someone
would call out to them, raising an arm in greeting
: long time
no see,
or
by the Christ you're far from home!
But they did not stop to talk or
even slow down. Hannah could feel her father's urgency in the way he held on to
her hand. So far they had seen one redcoat, but he had been arguing over the
cost of a ragged bundle of second-grade beaver pelts and hadn't taken any note
of them. They were counting on the crowd, and on the voyageurs' dislike of the English,
to keep them out of trouble.

They passed an Abenaki
camp where some boys not much older than Liam were roasting a dog over a smoky,
spitting fire of green wood. One of them looked at her hard; he had a nose ring
that shimmered against his upper lip and a panther tattoo on his forehead. She
looked away and still felt his gaze like a stick prodding at her ribs.

Then Bears' hand on
her shoulder pointed her toward a small camp under an outcropping of cliff. And
there they were, her mother's people. Ten or twelve traders, all of them
hunters but warriors, too, their scalps shaved clean around topknots shiny with
bear grease. They were from Kayen'tiho, the village to the south of Montréal
where Stone-Splitter was sachem; many of them were Wolf clan, and blood kin. Hannah
felt completely safe for the first time since they had come to Sorel, and she
wished that they hadn't left the women and babies behind in the protection of
Robbie and Will Spencer. Surely they would be better off here than they were in
port. This morning Hannah had counted two redcoats for every five men out of
uniform from her perch on the window seat in the transom.

They were given corn
soup in hollow gourds. Hannah ate and listened while the men talked first of
family, of the hunting season, the season's trapping and how much money the
furs were fetching, and whether it was worth the long trek to Albany for better
prices. When those formalities were done, heads bent close together and newer stories
were told, and nothing held back. All the men made a natural circle around her grandfather
as he talked. Somerville, the gaol, the fire, the young man called Luke,
butchers and farmers, Wee Iona ... Hannah followed the flow of the story again
and the comforting rhythm of her grandfather's voice wove itself into a cradle
that she could not resist. She fell asleep and woke with a start just a few
minutes later to find the youngest son of Spotted-Fox standing over her.

He was gnawing on a
knucklebone, his face glistening with fat. His belly had the last roundness of
a younger child, but there was a quickness to his eyes. His nose wrinkled as if
she smelled bad, and his eyes trailed over her dress of spotted calico.

"You look like
one of the People, but you dress like an O'seronni," he said in
Kahnyen'kehâka, as if to test her.

In the same language
she answered him, "My grandmother is Made-of-Bones who is
Kanistenha
of the Wolf longhouse where you were born. Don't you remember me, Little-Kettle?
I'm Squirrel. I wiped your nose for you more than once a few winters ago."

He flushed. "Aya.
You have your grandmother's sharp tongue." And then, after a look over his
shoulder to the circle of men around the fire, he said, "Come. There are
things to see."

Hannah's hesitation
lasted only for a few heartbeats. For as long as it took for him to challenge
her with his eyes: was she one of the Real People, or was she O'seronni?

She followed
Little-Kettle into the crowds.

No one took note of
them, two red-skinned children among so many. Neither of them had a coin to
spend and so they skirted the cook fires where pinfeathers filled the hot air
and hungry men bought corn bread and squash stew and blackened duck on long skewers,
sprinkled with pepper and maple sugar. For a shilling a Cree woman in a curious
cape and hood painted with designs in red and black would cut a hissing slice
of venison from a spit, to be juggled from hand to hand and eaten hot enough to
scorch the mouth.

On a trampled spot
under a triangle of wild plum trees in first blossom people crowded around to
watch a man with bloody fists take on all comers. Little-Kettle's eyes grew,
but the smell of cheap rum was heavy in the air and Hannah pulled him away, ill
at ease. They stayed longer to watch the Huron playing
Guskâ'eh
,
polished peachstones rolled in a wooden bowl: white, black, white, black. Four
of either at once and coins shifted from one dusty pile to another. But here
too the smell of liquor could not be ignored, and Hannah began to think of her
father, and to look around herself for the quickest way back to the Kahnyen'kehâka
camp.

Little-Kettle had
wandered off to look at a man who sat on a shabby blanket.

"Moccasins,"
the man called out to anyone who passed. "Fine buckskin moccasins. Cured 'em
myself."

"Look at
him," whispered Little-Kettle. "The Huron must have done that to
him."

Hannah looked. Clumps
of dark hair streaked white and pulled back in an uneven queue, as if to show
off his ears, or what remained of them. They had been notched hard, leaving
behind nothing more than frayed strips. It was true that before the priests had
got the best of the Huron they had been known to take ears and fingers and more
from their war prisoners, but this man had a brand on his cheek, a crooked t
faded to a bright pink against his graying stubble.

"Not the
Huron," she said.

He had the look of the
wanderers about him, the ones who had never found a place to settle after the
war, too much a colonist for England, too American for Canada, and not welcome
anymore by Yankee or Yorker. She had heard the stories around the hearth in
Anna's trading post, how loyalists had been stripped of their property and
turned out to make their way to the Crown's protection in Canada, or starve.
Tar and feathers, split noses and jugged ears and white-hot branding irons. Or
worse, if you were a woman. They were soldier's tales and never meant for
little girls to hear, but Hannah always had a talent for making herself small
and listening hard, and she forgot very little.

She looked at his
ruined face and at his moccasins: lopsided, the leather poorly cured, uneven in
color and pieced so badly that no woman would claim such work. He made her
uneasy, but his moccasins made her sad.

"He's a
Tory," she told Little-Kettle, already turning away. Hannah used the
Kahnyen'kehâka word for Englishmen,
Tyorhenhshâka
.

But the man's head
snapped around toward her as if she had called his name. He squinted in the sunlight
and his eyes were as brittle and shiny as rocks heated red hot again and again.

"Wahtahkwiyo,"
he croaked.
Good shoes
. The hair rose on the nape of Hannah's neck and
all along her spine there was a sparking, but she could not walk away as she
knew she must; he had used her language and pinned her to the ground with it.

He laughed, his tongue
a pale pink snake among blackened stumps. "Come along, then, missy,"
he hissed, in English now. "Don't run away. Buckskin moccasins. Took the hides
myself, down Barktown way. Your corner of the world, by the sound of you. Two
big Mohawk bucks, oh yes. Maybe your kin, eh? One of 'em had a turtle tattoo on
his cheek. He looked something like you, so he did."

Little-Kettle had no
English and he opened his mouth to ask her what it meant, the look on her face.
But Hannah grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him away. The man's laughter
clung to them like smoke from an unholy fire.

It was late afternoon
when they started back to the
Nancy
. Hannah slipped into the canoe
between her father and Bears, and wrapped herself in the striped blanket they
had bought for her, glad of its prickly warmth: the wind was coming up cold, setting
the new leaves on the oaks that surrounded the Cree lodge to shivering.

The blanket was well
woven, but still Hannah could not quite stop shaking. She wanted to talk to her
father, but he was so far away from her and his worry so close to the surface.
She didn't know if she had the right words, anyway.
Are men so cruel?
she wanted to ask him, but she feared his answer. She hugged her knees to her
chin and stared at her moccasins, worn thin now across the toes. Last fall she
had helped her grandmother cure the hide, and then she had pieced and sewn them
under Many-Doves' careful eye. They were lined with the fell of a rabbit she
had snared herself. The beadwork was uneven, but she had been very proud of them
when they were done. Hannah tucked her feet harder under herself and took her
lip between her teeth to keep them from chattering.

The
Nancy
and
the
Isis
were docked side by side like a hen and chick. Hannah stared
hard at the
Nancy
but could make out nothing behind the transom windows,
where Elizabeth and Curiosity would most certainly be sitting with the babies.
She wanted to climb onto a lap where she could be sure of a calm voice and a
close ear and no one would remind her of her age or her color. Maybe words
would come to her then, and she could let them go in a flood and wash the
trouble out of her head.

In mid-river a boat--a
ship
, Hannah corrected herself--crossed their path. It had two masts,
and was running slow with only some of the smaller sails up. This close, Hannah
had a view of the Royal Navy that surprised her. Captain Pickering's crew had
been well dressed in neat jackets and breeches, but here were men in blue coats
faced with scarlet and trimmed with gold braid, the late sun sparking off gilt buttons.
Even a young sailor up in the rigging wore a gaudy red neckerchief, a blue jacket
over a checked shirt, and loose, red-striped trousers. He reminded her of the juggler
she had seen once at a fair in Johnstown, tossing balls in a circle in the air.
It was almost enough to lift her spirits, if it hadn't been for the
officer--she thought he must be an officer, for his uniform was even frillier
than the others, and there was a great deal of gold looping and lace on his
hat--staring down at them from the quarterdeck.

Her grandfather made a
clicking sound with his mouth and all three of the men lifted their paddles
while they rode out the wake, the fragile canoe heaving beneath them. And the
little officer with the silly hat still watched, his head craning around as the
ship slid past. Behind her Hannah could feel her father's tension spiral up and
then fall off when the man finally looked away, blank-faced.