Far North (2 page)

And yet I was still a little surprised when I rode back in at lunchtime to find my locks intact, and the firewood still stacked neatly, and the chickens pecking, and the cabbages and apples in the root cellar undisturbed. There was no sign of Ping, though, and I confess that at that moment, I felt sad at the thought that he might have left.

 *

I clattered up to the second storey in my boots, hallooing on the stairs. No sign of him. I burst into Charlo’s room and was taken aback by the scene I found.

There was Ping, with a looking-glass in front of him, and my ma’s old embroidery case, and the spirit lamp burning away, and he was taking the old steel needles one by one, cauterizing them in the flame, and sticking them into the flesh of his ears.

He smiled to see me, and laughed at my consternation. His whole ear bristled like porcupine quills. It must have pained him dreadfully, but he didn’t seem put out by it. In fact, he just went right on sticking them into his ears. And when he’d done that, he put one or two in his nose, and one or two in his shoulder for good measure.

I’ve a strong stomach. But the sight of that made me come over a bit queer. Ping gave me to understand that he wasn’t crazy, that the needles were intended to do him some good for the wound in his shoulder. But what white or black magic that was, I’m afraid I can’t tell you.

2

P
ING
HAD
OTHER
strange habits. When the arm healed, he became an earlier riser even than me, and was up in the wintry darkness in the courtyard. It took me a while to catch him at it, but I finally stole down one morning and saw him out there, dancing.

He moved awful slow and straight-up, as if there was a jug balanced on his head. Ten or fifteen minutes it went on, as he danced around the courtyard, waving his arms in the air, balancing on one leg at times, swooping down onto his haunches as well.

He didn’t seem put out that I’d seen him when he’d finished. ‘What the hell was that?’ I asked him.

‘Gong foo. Gong foo.’ He said. And that was it. He tried to show me a few steps of his gong foo, but I didn’t really take to it. It went so slowly I’d start thinking about what a fool I looked, and then pretty soon, I’d start thinking about other things, my mind wandering all over the place, thinking about Charlo, and Anna, and my ma and pa, and by then I’d have my feet all in a tangle, and Ping would be laughing at me. But it didn’t do me any harm. And to tell the truth, I had some good ideas while I was doing it. Having Ping there had given me a notion to go travelling.

There were caribou herders in the northern mountains who were happy to trade meat for whiskey. The trouble was their pastures were way up high and far off, across miles of boggy ground.

To get there in summer took a month, and even if I made it, the meat would spoil before I’d had a chance to bring any of it home. And in winter, I never liked to leave the house empty for too long. It was travelling weather, and there were desperate hungry people on the move.

But with Ping in the house, it would be a different matter. I could take a sled along the winter roads and bring back all the meat I could carry. It would stay deep-frozen, and Ping and I could eat it until the thaw. My mouth watered at the thought of all that fresh meat. And Ping looked like he could use the iron. His face was all pale and washed out.

Once a week, after Ping finished his dancing, he’d take my straight razor and shave his head. He had a cute touch with it, because I never once saw him cut himself.

A few days after the idea came to me, I went to him while he was shaving and used a piece of charcoal on the whitewashed wall of the pantry to show him what I was planning.

I hitched Ma to the old sled and loaded it with bottles of whiskey. How I came by those is another story.

I took a tent and bedroll. I ate so much the night before I set off that I began to sweat and had a stomach ache. And in the morning, I left at first light along the frozen river that led out of town.

Naturally, I packed my guns and ammo and a few other bits and pieces, and before I went I showed Ping how to use the rifle.

There was a bunch of dirty tents along the river bank, and the stink of smouldering rubbish.

I passed a skinny woman gathering frozen berries on the edge of town. She was the first I’d seen in a while. She smiled at me and pulled open her coat to show me her lank titties but I gee-upped the mare and kept moving.

Human beings are rat-cunning and will happily kill you twice over for a hot meal. That’s what long observation has taught me. On the other hand, with a full belly, and a good harvest in the barn, and a fire in the hearth, there’s nothing so charming, so generous, no one more decent than a well-fed man. But take away his food, make his future uncertain, let him know that no one’s watching him and he won’t just kill you, he’ll come up with a hundred and one reasons why you deserve it. You slighted him, you looked at his woman wrong, you wouldn’t lend him a hatchet, you got more land than him, your beans have took and his didn’t, and you know what else? You just never wrote to thank him when he gave you that hot meal that time. I heard that in the days when there were proper law-men, and judges, and trials, and you could enter a plea when you were charged, people were fond of saying, ‘Your Honour, I acted in self-defence.’ But everyone acts in self-defence. That’s the one certain thing. The man scalping you, the rowdies firing your corn, the gunman separating your from your cheap turnip-watch.

There was a bed of fresh snow on the top of the ice, which gave the mare’s hooves something to bite into. I’d dismount and walk beside her for spells. There were a few last signs of human settlement along the riverside – a burned-out cabin, a wooden cross on a grave, some tumble-down walls – but then we were in the high country, nothing but trees as far as the eye could see, and the mountains behind. Isn’t it strange that after so many years we never made a bigger dent on the land?

My heart lifted to have left the last of so-called civilization behind me. And just before sunset, I bagged a pair of snowy-white partridges for my supper. The first was a clean shot, the second fell, still fluttering, off his perch, and I gave him his quietus on my boot.

*

In the morning, I broke down the tent and we were off moving again before first light. My mind started to wander in the half-dark wondered what Ping was doing. And I thought of my life in that godforsaken place, doing a job that I hadn’t been paid to do for years, for a citizenry that was determined to take each other to hell as soon as possible, and I wondered why I still bothered with it. I was enough of a frontiersman to live well outside the town. I didn’t need to plunder, or steal food, or kidnap, to stay alive. I went through it a few times in my head, and it seemed to me that the only thing keeping me there was that house, that I was still keeping a part of the old life alive, in the hope that one day ma and pa and Charlo and Anna would come back to it. How lucky we are when we don’t know we’re lucky. Not to live among desperate people. Getting paid. Worrying about roof-slates and why the bread won’t rise. I thought about the woman in the woods, with her titties and her broken teeth. What might she have been if things had turned out different? When she was a babe-in-arms, her father never thought she’d end up picking frozen berries and pleasuring strangers for food. That’s why I say we live in a broken age.

 *

It was five days’ travelling before I reached the mountains.

The caribou herders have been in those mountains for thousands of years, way before any of the white men got here. They always lived a simple life, following their herds up to the summer pastures and back down in winter, and it’s stood them in good stead.

My father always preferred to do his work by hand, even when there were plenty of machines to make the work easier. We were always pushing him to get newer things, because like all children we were in love with what’s new, but he wouldn’t be told. ‘More things to go wrong. Just another thing to break.’

The more complicated a thing is, the more badly it breaks down. He was certainly right about that.

The caribou people, on the other hand, they kept things simple: followed the seasons, never used anything they couldn’t fix themselves. No engines to break down. Eat, ride and wear the same animal. I couldn’t live like them for any length of time. I like to sleep on a sprung mattress, between sheets, in a night-shirt. I like milled flour when I can get it, fresh vegetables. But more and more, I had begun to think I was the last of my kind, and my children, if I ever had any, would have to be more like the caribou people if they were to raise any children of their own.

In the old days, the caribou herders were trappers too, back when there was a call for fur and it fetched high prices out west. The winter roads were busy in those days, and traders were up and down them as soon as they’d frozen in November, and kept on travelling until the thaw. It was ghostly deserted now, but right where the river described a sharp bend back on itself, on the fringe of the caribou country, just on that knuckle of land overlooking the frozen river, stood a hut, and, judging by the plume of smoke coming out of the tin pipe in its roof, an occupied one.

There were half-built sleds worked out of larch all round the yard. A big caribou carcass, skinned and frozen, dangled off the stoop, and a half-dozen skins were tanning on a frame behind the hut. A dog came out of a little lean-to, pulling itself tight on its chain, and barked itself silly as soon as it heard our runners scraping along the ice.

The hut door banged open, and a tall Tungus fellow hailed me from his porch with a raised hand. I could see the hut was emptyish, because there was only one coat on the stoop.

It was always my plan to get the trading over with as soon as I could, without going any deeper into the mountain country than I needed to, so this suited me just fine.

In I went to the hut, which was dirty but warm, and by the looks of things home to four or five herders, all, save my host, out at that moment with the herd.

He boiled up some tea and fried some caribou meat for me, which tasted fine after that long journey, and I told him my business. His name was Solomon and he was the camp cook, he said. He told me to bide my time with him and the other fellows would be home presently. He was sure they’d be keen to trade.

Up on a shelf in the hut was a dead, three-legged wolf, wrapped up in string and parcel paper. Solomon said it had been preying on the herd for months, and had been a sonofabitch to catch. In the end, they had put down poison to get him, which they weren’t proud of, being hunting people. They were intending on carrying it back to the village with them, because their headman paid a bounty for wolves.

One by one, the herders trailed in as the sun set, banging through the hut door and, without a word, sitting down at the filthy table for some food. Solomon served them hunks of caribou, which they cut into thin shreds with their own knives and dipped in salt before they ate it. Then he gave them a soup of caribou tripe which smelled vile to me, but I guess it’s the closest they had to greens in the winter months.

As soon as one had finished eating, he would wipe the crumbs off the oilcloth with his hands and onto the floor, and get up to make way for the next one in.

One stretched out on his ragged bed with a battered old guitar and sang a song to himself.

I’d eaten a heap, travelled a long way, and the stove was pumping out heat, so I soon found myself drifting off to sleep on the cot they’d let me have. But I woke up in the middle of the night with the guitar player standing over me, asking me if I wanted to make him a trade for one or both of my guns. I let him know plainly that the only way he’d be getting one of my bullets was in his head, and very shortly, if he didn’t back off.

He shrunk back, complaining that I was being unfair to him. I said he should know better than to trouble someone when they’re sleeping, and that we would talk about trade in the morning.

First thing after breakfast, I showed them a bottle of my whiskey. They were keen for it, I could see immediately, but they tried to play it off, in their simple way, as though they weren’t too impressed with it. I knew otherwise, but I indulged them so they wouldn’t lose face.

We haggled for a while over the price of the meat. I had been thinking that the smart thing for me would be to take the caribou live. I could hitch them to the cart, they’d travel under their own steam, eating lichen from under the snow, and I could butcher them whenever I wanted, but the herders were adamant that in that case I’d have to pay for the skins as well. So we fixed on a price, spat and shook hands on it, and drank a tot of whiskey together.

Then they brought four caribou out of the herd and butchered them. They killed them one by one out behind the hut, gentling them until the last minute so the fear wouldn’t taint the meat and make it stiff. The animals’ eyes rolled as their throats were cut, and blood sprayed onto the snow. Then they dragged the carcasses away to flay the skins off and gut them, steam rising up from their innards as their eyes glazed. I let the herders keep the tripe since they were so keen on it.

The butchering was done, the sled was loaded up, and I was ready to leave by mid-morning. I had no desire to stick around there while those fellows binged on the whiskey. If they had sense, they would trade it on, but I wasn’t sure they did, and the guitar-playing fellow, whose name was Gustav, looked like he was fixing to go on a holy bender.

 *

It turned out that he was much smarter than that. And I must have let my guard down, thinking that there was no one within fifty miles but a dead wolf and a half-dozen drunk caribou herders. Because after leaving the hut, and travelling all day, I broke my journey to make camp. And when I woke up in the morning, I found that someone had lifted my guns as I slept. My rifle, both my sidearms, and a great box of shells that had taken a great slice of my life to cast, all gone.

I cursed heaven for my being idiot simple, and my mother for raising me a fool, and the reindeer herders for their criminal cunning, and a good many other curses, none of which in the least succeeded in bringing my guns back to me. I had one old shotgun back at home and the rifle which I’d left for Ping to use, but nothing else.