River Thieves (23 page)

By noon she was clear and in tow, on her way back to Burnt Island. There was at least a week of work to be done on the damage to the hull and mast, repairs to the rigging and fitting up new sails, before she would be ready for the trip to St. John’s. But most of the year’s work was salvaged.

Something was following John Peyton through the bush.

He was moving down-country, tailing a line that meandered through rattling brooks and shallow reservoirs backed up by beaver dams before it vented into the Exploits within a few miles of Reilly’s old tilt. All day the back of his neck prickled, as if his habits were being slyly scrutinized from the trees. He’d tried to ignore it a while, the way he refused to acknowledge the first symptoms of illness, hoping the headache or cough or slight fever would come to nothing. But the sense he had of being trailed and appraised would not leave him.

It wasn’t yet quite gone to winter, which made travel in the woods difficult. The snow was spotty and what was down was often dead and heavy. None of the rivers were quite fast with ice and three feet off the shoreline it was too unpredictable to chance walking on. They were only two weeks back from taking the
Susan
to St. John’s with the salvaged load of salmon. It was, as his father pointed out to him, a fortnight too soon to make a sensible start at furring.

John Senior had long since given up working his own traplines. For years he had been slowly divesting himself of responsibilities in the family enterprise and Peyton had taken
them on with the same single-mindedness, the same myopic drive as his father. He pushed himself relentlessly, spending weeks alone on the water each summer inspecting the salmon weirs and the quality of the cure, working a trapline in the backcountry each winter. The immersion in work was a divestment of his own, a conscious withdrawal from his father, from Cassie. And this fall in particular he ’d been chafing to get away from them as soon as he could manage it.

In the years since John Senior had passed the oversee of the fishery to his son there were half a dozen instances of pilfering and thievery by Red Indians he wanted to put right, but Peyton had refused any suggestion of sending a party up the river. It was an ongoing source of frustration to the old man. “I didn’t realize when I passed off to you,” he said, “that it was all to go to leeward to keep them cock Indians in gear.”

It was the only dispute Peyton ever had with his father that hadn’t ended in capitulation. He’d heard stories enough of raids on Beothuk camps in the old days to know what could come of it. When he played the possibilities out in his mind, it was the Indian child displayed on the table in Poole who was carried screaming into the woods while the guns went off and the shelters were set alight. It was the young girl he’d watched strike sparks into the down tinder that morning on the lake, her dark hair sheened with oil, who suffered the pawing attentions of Richmond or Taylor. When traps went missing from a tilt, when a fleet of new salmon seines were cut from their moorings, when John Senior ridiculed and browbeat him, he’d managed somehow to hold fast.

Until the
Susan.
The day after salvaging and bringing her into the cove at Burnt Island, they’d fought about the proper
course of action to follow, circling and circling the question like two men rowing oars in opposite directions. There was a lull in the argument in the early afternoon and they turned away from each other, both thinking they had settled the issue in their favour. On the shore next the stage, John Senior was limbing and rinding a fir tree. Richmond, who was working on the deck of the
Susan
, shouted across to say, “We ’ll bring them Indians a proper weight of gifts this time around, won’t we, Master John?”

“We’ll get our own back, and then some,” John Senior said without looking up from his work.

Peyton walked across to his father and squat down beside him. The fluid skimming motions of the axe-head took the bark off the white flesh of the log with a precision that made his stomach roll. John Senior was working with a reckless speed that reminded Peyton of a man running downhill and just managing to keep his feet. His thinning grey hair was raked across a liver-spotted scalp, twin wattles of flesh shook under his chin.
My father
, Peyton thought. But he couldn’t make himself feel it.

John Senior lifted his head and stared, the warm axe-head raised in a temporary truce with the fir tree. Peyton could see in his father’s appraisal of him the same moment of tormented puzzlement. The pale grey eyes looked washed out, depleted of colour.

John Senior said, “Don’t lap back at me on this one, laddie boy.” He wagged the axe-head in his son’s direction.

The other men had stopped their work to watch, Richmond and Taylor, Reilly, the green man, Michael Sharpe.

“Father,” Peyton said.

“You can come with us or stay back with the woman, that’s your choice.”

Peyton stood up and leaned towards his father. He gestured helplessly. “John Senior,” he said.

The old man went back to skimming out the log, his arms repeating the same relentless and delicate motion along the length of the fir. Peyton watched the bark curl away in thin uniform strips. “You bastard,” he whispered. But his father didn’t look up from the stroke of the axe. The hired men turned back to their work. Ocean surf lapped blindly at the shore.

Trap season in the backcountry was usually the only time Peyton felt clear of all that tormented him. It was a less complicated place, to his mind. Or a place where the complications were balanced by compensations. The warmer weather might slow him down, but it also meant he was able to place simple drowning sets in open water near beaver slides and he took a fair number in dry sets on riverbanks.

Being out this early in the season also allowed him to scout the mounds of tender alder and birch that were carefully stacked in shallow pools to feed the beaver through the winter. Once the rivers froze over completely he would axe holes above them, slip the trap and chain rings over a long stake hammered firmly into the lake-bed, then lash a cross-stick above the ice in case the animal worked it free below. If the water was shallow enough, the carcass would sometimes be frozen into new ice by the time Peyton came back to the trap and he had to be careful not to damage the pelt by tearing it free. He worked bare-handed with a small axe and sometimes just the blade of a knife, chipping away chunks of ice attached to the fur before hauling the animal clear. It was cold, frustrating work. But it
was a problem with a simple, concrete solution, something he could manage without confusion or embarrassment. He understood the backcountry, the habits of animals, the patterns of weather. And it was this knowledge that made him feel he was closest here to belonging, to loving something that might, in some unconscious way, love him in return.

But this year his anxiety followed him into the woods and would not leave him. Peyton couldn’t countenance allowing John Senior to take his men after the Indians without being there himself to keep a leash on their anger, and he had agreed to mount an expedition to the lake in March. Reparation was what John Senior spoke of, but he could see it was revenge that animated his father. He was burnished with anticipation, like a blade freshened on a whetstone. Peyton could feel the appointed month grinding towards him, inexorable as a Labrador icefield chafing its way south, ruining the few weeks of peace he enjoyed each year.

There was also that sense he had just now of being watched. Not concrete at all, he admitted to himself. He trudged on, deliberately not looking over his shoulder, not flicking sidelong glances into the trees to the left or the right. He was at a loss, for the moment, as to how to shake it.

He decided to walk the extra two or three miles to Reilly’s tilt on the River Exploits instead of kipping down in the lean-to at the end of the trapline. The sky was still grey with the day’s last reflected light when he reached it, but along the river it was dark, the forest unremittingly black and without definition. The tilt had been abandoned by Reilly years before when the
rapidly expanding size of his family made the trip from Charles Brook unwieldy and he decided to run traps nearer to home. A gloom of light filtered through the broken roof, through the door hanging on by a single hinge. Peyton felt his way to the fireplace where a pile of rotten wood was stacked on the stone. He set about making a fire and once it was well alight he stopped a minute to listen as the dark gathered outside, trees swaying in the wind. Whatever had been with him most of the day, he decided, he had left behind.

It was a long, restless night. His body felt swollen and dull with fatigue, but he slept only in troubled snatches, the tiredness on him like a weight of water. The spruce logs of the tilt ticked steadily in the wind —
the death clock
, his father called it, a foreboding of someone’s dying. Several times he got up from his blanket to stoke the fire or to piss through the door into the snow and afterwards could not be sure whether he had actually done these things or simply dreamt them. He’d heard stories of men losing their minds in the backcountry. At some point through the night it occurred to him he might be suffering the first signs of that affliction.

In the morning he woke to several inches of fresh snow on the floor under the broken roof. A blue jay called from the woods outside. It was a fierce, lonely sound to Peyton’s ears, as if the bird was warning comfort away from itself.

He looked around the dilapidated shelter. The glass was gone from all four panes of the single window. He stared at the corner of the room where he once sat beside Cassie, her face ashen, one eye dark with blood. The pregnancy aborted to preserve the rules of her clandestine relationship with John Senior, to spare him siring a moss child, a merry-begot, a
moonlight child. A bastard. “You’ll not say a word of this to your father,” she’d said. She was afraid of losing her position, he thought, of being sent away like the fallen servants in her books.

In all the years since her visit to Annie Boss, Cassie had never spoken of it to him. If anything, she became more insular, settling further into what he thought of as an iron-willed surrender, an obstinate, opinionated state of abdication. She had her books, the daily litany of chores to complete. She had John Senior’s bullish silence, his habit of indifference, which she preferred to anything Peyton might have been able to offer.

When Peyton was a boy of six or seven, John Senior abandoned his marriage bed and began sleeping with his son when he wintered in Poole. His mother saw Newfoundland as a vortex into which some additional portion of her husband disappeared each year. The months he was away were a relief to them both, a time when the emotional and physical facts of their lives achieved a kind of equilibrium. The relationship between his father and Cassie was something else again, but it had the same peculiar, monastic balance. He couldn’t imagine them as lovers now and he doubted there was ever much of a physical relationship between them. What Cassie chose was the old man’s distance, Peyton thought. She wanted to marry it to her own detachment from the world.

Out of loyalty to her he had kept his mouth shut about the pregnancy and he spoke to Reilly to make sure the story didn’t spread beyond their circle. But it galled him. He had no notion of what he wouldn’t do for her if she asked. He felt owned in sections, as if parcels of himself were under Cassie’s name,
others under John Senior’s. And the prickle at the back of his neck that dogged him yesterday was like the itch of a brand healing. As if the place itself was laying claim to its piece of him.

He looked around the room before getting up from his blankets. A sparse row of Annie’s dried flowers and herbs still hung upside down over the hearth. They were grey with age and moved in each draught of wind like silent chimes.

The light fall of snow had blown in his tracks, the marks of his Indian rackets barely discernible where he’d passed through hours before. It looked like he had come this way years ago, almost in another life altogether. The wind soughed in the trees. Reilly’s tilt was the end of the line and he had no choice but to go back the way he’d come, tempting the panic he’d kept down all the day before.

He stopped on a small vale over the last set he’d made and looked down. The oval dimples of his rackets under fresh snow like a delicate pattern of lace on a tablecloth. And something else. A line of small regular depressions, nearly buried. Tracks. He breathed a short, tight sigh of relief.

Every one of his sets had been visited by the same animal and it looked as if it had turned and backtracked down the line as Peyton was now doing. Two hours shy of his halfway tilt he found a beaver in one of his dry sets turned on its back. The soft underbelly was eaten into, the cod, the liver and gizzard and a large chunk of the intestine picked out like delicacies. The fall of snow made it impossible to identify the tracks but he guessed it was fox. A cat wouldn’t have trailed him so
brazenly. The animal was obviously used to the presence of men like himself and probably familiar with traps. He left the carcass as it was and went on his way. The snow was still coming down softly and it covered his head and shoulders in a thick spotless pelt of white.

The halfway tilt was a glorified lean-to facing a small red rock cliff used to reflect the heat of a fire into the open maw of the shelter. He woke early and left without bothering with a cookfire for breakfast, reaching his main tilt by noon. He packed the gear he needed there and started back down the same trail, hoping to make the halfway tilt again before it was too far gone to dark.

From the look of the beaver when he saw it again, the fox had come to the site at least once to feed since he’d been there. Peyton took what remained of the beaver’s carcass from the trap and dragged it thirty yards along the riverbank to a nearly bare patch of ground under the branches of spruce trees and placed the dead animal in front of a large stone. He held his pack on his knees where he crouched near the ground and he removed tools and materials as he worked. He used a short trowel to half-bury the meat with snow and dirt and dry bris fallen from the spruce branches. He hammered an eighteen-inch stake deep into the ground and secured the rings of a trap and chain over it, then scraped a shallow depression in the earth about six inches in front of the bait. He laid the trap and covered the pan with a piece of cloth that had been boiled with spruce bark, then covered the works with a mix of gravel and snow.