The High Missouri (25 page)

The Balmat’s horse reared, and Dylan saw Mad Jack tumble off backward.

Dylan jumped off his mount, gripped the reins desperately, and made two strides, feeling shoulders and legs and hooves buffet him. He grabbed Jack and hoisted him over one shoulder. By a miracle, he flung Jack over the withers. Using the mane, he catapulted himself astride. The horse went out the gate with the others, in a stampede.

Dylan had no control of the horse. It ran with the others, a mile, two miles, he didn’t know. The Balmat seemed to have some control but followed alongside. Finally the herd tired and slowed. The men got their horses to a trot, then to a stop.

They pitched off onto the ground. They huffed and puffed. They laughed. “We did it!” they yelled, and pounded each other’s back.

Except for killing Lemieux, thought Dylan.

“We did it! Jack, we did it!” Dylan took Jack’s limp arm. Shook it a little. Anxiously took his pulse.

He looked into the Balmat’s puzzled eyes, and gave him the dead hand.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Dylan lived in anxiety. It bubbled up his gullet like relentless heartburn. From minute to minute he wondered what the Lords and Ladies would do, how they might strike back. He felt like the fox while the hunters are getting mounted. There was nothing he could do but wait.

He acknowledged to the Balmat that the rescue of Mad Jack had been a disaster. Two men dead, including the one they intended to rescue, the NWC post left leader-less, except for himself, and his leadership proven worthless.

To the men of the fort he acknowledged nothing. The clerk had now become the factor, and he had a trading post to run.

Courtney showed up before noon the second day after the rescue, in front of the main gate, with every man and gun he could muster. Dylan and the Balmat went to the blockhouse to hear him out. The man simply raved. On and on about how Dylan had left the HBC post vulnerable to Indian attack by blowing up the main gate, about how there were certain things white men just didn’t do, and so on, and such balderdash. He shook his rifle and promised terrible revenge after his men had the palisade back up.

Knowing the history of the HBC men and the Nor’Westers, Dylan paid no attention to talk about how white men should behave. He knew that those civilized fellows at HBC would do worse than he’d done, given an excuse.

While the Lords and Ladies’ factor shouted his threats, Dylan watched Bleu. The interpreter just sat his horse impassively. When Courtney finished, Bleu seemed to give an ironic shrug and rode off. Someone dumped the body of Lemieux in the snow.

The Lemieux families didn’t want Ceran held for burial after the thaw. They took the body away somewhere and didn’t come back with it. Probably built a burial scaffold and left it, said the Balmat.

After a couple of weeks, Dylan realized that Charles Lemieux had taken his brother’s widows as his own wives, and adopted the children. Dylan wondered, with sick humor, whether the wives and children noticed the difference between the twins, or gave a damn.

Dylan hired a fellow from the Cree camp as interpreter, one Marcel Henry. A half-breed, of course. One curse of the country, it seemed, were these half-breeds in infinite supply, the sign of the white man’s carnality. Dylan would have been quicker to find fault had he not lain with Fore and Caro and other women. Caro was different, he told himself, a special case.

Henry made secret contact with Bleu, who was his friend. What revenge did Courtney mean to take?

Bleu said he couldn’t give such confidential information away.

Dylan gave Henry a pistol to salve Bleu’s conscience.

No revenge yet, said Bleu. It will come through the Sarcees, who will be bribed to cause whatever trouble they can. He didn’t even say thanks for the pistol.

But the Sarcees didn’t trade with Dylan during the spring. Henry said they always came in the fall, when they came at all, after the buffalo hunt.

In the fall Dylan didn’t expect to be the acting factor of Fort Augustus. Thank God. He knew the routine. Captain Chick would send men to the great rendezvous at Fort William. They would stop at Augustus to pick up the furs and the year’s reports. Desperate reports, thought Dylan. And from Fort William, NWC would send a new factor, surely.

He was glad, and he wasn’t. He liked being the boss. He liked trading—he was scrupulously fair and profitable enough. He liked the feel of running the enterprise, and nothing escaped his attention. But he was damned tired of being afraid for his life every day.

Where in the hell was Dru?

So Dylan lived in a simmer for more than a month.

In May, the moon when the buffalo calves are yellow, men did arrive from Rocky Mountain House. They bore no message for him from Captain Chick. Dylan had been imagining wonderfully sarcastic communications, complete with elaborate assurances of how well Caro was being taken care of.

Instead there was Monsieur Troyes, imperturbable as ever. He bore a letter from Caro, in her spidery, feminine hand:

We have pitched our tent a mile up the river, at the top of the Cottonwood grove. I cannot bring myself simply to come to the fort uninvited. Please come to me at once. I need you.

Love,

Caro

She was pregnant. Not huge yet, but unmistakably pregnant.

He stood there, holding the reins of the winded horse, feeling like an absolute arse.

She stood in front of the tent, her eyes world-weary, her smile warm, altogether gorgeous. His mother’s ring was dangling from the slender gold chain around her neck. Dylan could have melted into the warm spring afternoon.

“I’m sorry I hurt you.” These were the first words she said.

He felt it again. His body softened. He felt like the earth broke open within him and the sweetest water welled from the crusty ground of his innards and an elixir gushed forth.

You are my touchstone, he thought. Truly.

He took her hand. They sat on a rock. She brought it up immediately. “I’m six months along,” she said, “almost seven. The child is yours.” She touched his cheek and looked into his eyes. “I know without doubt,” she said. She held his eyes. “The child is yours.” She hesitated. “I’m so glad.”

He found himself unable to say anything. He remembered a moment in one of Dru’s Celtic stories, of two young lovers. The Irish girl is promised to the Welsh king. A young knight has been sent to escort her from her home to his liege’s castle. There is a magic potion brewed by the bride’s mother, a potion that will make the bride and groom love each other deeply. Mistaking it for wine, the bride and young knight drink it, and are thunderstruck by love for each other.

According to Dru, their servant said, “You have drunk your death.”

The young man answered, “If you mean the love I feel, that is my life.”

So it was for Dylan.

They talked of other things. Dylan told her about the verse he’d been writing. She said she’d been learning to paint on hides with dyes made from local plants. She modeled a painted elk hide for him. It was tanned very soft and white, the hair removed, and a great sunburst pattern painted on it. It was in the tradition of the ones he had seen the Piegans paint, yet very different—the big geometrical pattern of diamond shapes had been transformed into a giant ornament like a brooch made by a master jeweler, many diamond shapes of gems of many colors, some large and some small, each beautifully cut, polished, and faceted. The colors were vibrant, brilliant, dazzling as a sunrise. She wore it as a cloak, and it looked wonderful.

They talked of commonplace things, like brother and sister, as though they had known each other all their lives. It struck Dylan forcibly, as he sat beside Caro on that boulder in the sun of that balmy May afternoon, how strange it was to feel that someone you’d known only for a month or so was your oldest and truest friend, your sister, lover, wife, mother, and mother to your children, all at once. All of woman. Impossible but true.

She did say, sweetly and truly and without pretense, some things of consequence:

She regarded that time, well, about last Christmastide, as an episode of madness. Some day she might have more to say about it, but not yet.

She was uncomfortable being with child, uncomfortable physically. As a result she could not sleep next to Dylan, or anyone, and could not make love. He felt two stabs, of longing and of relief.

She detailed her physical complaints—she could not lie on her back to sleep, had lots of pain in her lower back, woke up with headaches, suffered from heartburn—all aches of the body that seemed so out of place for the flaming spirit that was Caro.

He said that to her.

“No,” she answered, with her sad, world-embracing smile. She took his hand and put it on her belly. “This anchors me to the earth. I need an anchor.”

She tired in the middle of their talk. He put a blanket over her and she napped on her side in the sunshine, Dylan sitting quietly beside her. He watched her tenderly as she dozed.

Her face had changed, subtly but unmistakably. It was less vibrant but more understanding, her eyes less sparkling but more compassionate, her demeanor less scintillating but softer and more sympathetic. There was nothing he would not have done for her—nothing, great God in heaven, nothing.

What he did that afternoon was to pack up the camp and move her and her father to the fort. He installed the two of them in his own quarters, which used to be Mad Jack’s, the best-furnished rooms the fort offered. He himself moved in with the Balmat.

The next day Monsieur Troyes went downstream with the canoes toward Fort William. Dylan wondered that the man would leave Caro when her time was approaching. To him Monsieur Troyes was an enigma, and an uninteresting one.

Dylan sat with Caro all afternoon the day her father left. He read
Childe Harold
to her. They recited nursery rhymes. They laughed a lot. They settled on names for the child—Harold if a boy, Lara if a girl, both in honor of Byron. Caro was sure their child was a girl, and she loved the name Lara.

Dylan noticed that she said nothing of marrying, now or later. He didn’t know what she intended. To be a mother without a husband was difficult anywhere, impossible in the wilds. But he knew: Now she was his—she would bring the child to its father.

Dylan would wait, as he had been unable to wait the first time. He would be present for her, available, willing, nurturing. Being near her would be more than comfort, more than gratification, more than fulfillment and fruition. It was life. His head had been underwater for months, his life the nasty dream of a drowning man, and Caro was sweet air itself, sucked hugely in.

Oddly, it would seem to him later, he thought only of the woman he loved, and little of the child growing in her belly.

Friendly Crees brought Dylan word of the canoes—more than a dozen of them, painted on the prows in the bright NorthWest Company fashion. So Dylan was ready when they came around the last bend and within sight of the fort—he fired the six-pounders as a greeting. He meant this gesture as a salute to the newly arriving factor of Fort Augustus, whoever he might be. And to the Druid, master woodsman. And a perhaps farewell salute to Dylan Elfed Davies, factor pro tempore, who had tillered the post through a difficult spring and summer for the bloody NorthWest Company and against the sodding Hudson’s Bay Company.

The blast of the two cannons sounded thrilling to Dylan. He opened the big gate and walked out to meet his mentor and his new boss. He wanted Caro by his side at this moment, and sent word to her room, but she didn’t appear.

Then, for once, he forgot about her. Courtney was coming out of Edmonton House with his clerk and riding toward the canoes. They appeared to be unarmed, but Dylan took no chances. He went back inside, got the Balmat and Henry and two others with rifles, and headed again for the river.

Immediately he saw that there was no man who could be the new factor. Only Dru, Anastasie, Saga, Lady Sarah, and a lot of
voyageurs
. Dylan’s stomach knotted.

Dru came up to Dylan with a grave face and embraced him solemnly.

“I quit,” said Dru. These were his first words. Dylan felt unshed tears blister his eyeballs, he didn’t know whether from hurt or anger. Dru turned and spoke clearly to Courtney: “I quit the goddamn NorthWest Company. I quit the goddamn fur trade.” He looked older than Dylan had ever seen him. Anastasie and Saga watched Dylan’s face for his reaction.

Mr. Courtney sat his mount, sneering down with a look of triumph. The Druid took an envelope in one hand and sailed it at the factor. It hit him in the chest and fell into the mud. “It’s yours, Courtney, the whole sodding lot.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bleddyn,” Courtney said with sarcastic courtesy.

Dru looked Dylan in the eyes. “They’ve bought us out. The whole NorthWest Company, sold out.”

Courtney spoke imperiously. “My men and I will take possession today, Mr. Davies. This afternoon. Starting now.”

He turned his horse toward Fort Augustus. Dylan saw HBC men trooping toward his post already. Courtney reined in and turned back to Dylan. “Is that rifle you’re carrying your own, Mr. Davies? Or the company’s—
my
company’s? I shall require you not to take company property. You may demonstrate what is yours personally through your books—in one hour.”

Courtney kicked his horse, which cantered a dozen steps, wheeled and reared. “You will be out of the fort by nightfall. On foot. The horses are not yours. Nor are these canoes. It would be a shame to see you naked on the prairie.” He laughed sardonically.

“Bastard,” said Dru. “We ought to kill him.”

“No,” said Anastasie, “send him a woman with syphilis.” They all cackled.

Dru told Dylan the story on the way to the fort. At Fort William the partisans out from Montreal told them that the Nor’West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company had merged. But everyone soon saw that the merger was phony. The owners of NWC got a lot of money and were out of the fur trade. HBC owned every post, every plew and otter and muskrat and wolf skin, every parfleche of pemmican, and every blanket, bead, and pound of powder.

Worse, it owned the employees. The Nor’West men were to work for the Lords and Ladies. They were probably the key to the purchase, said Dru, for they knew how to trade, how to deal with Indians, how to live in the country, all that the sodding HBCers had never learned. Hudson’s Bay needed the
voyageurs
,
hivernants
, and
hommes du nord
of NWC. And had them by the short hairs. Most Nor’Westers owed the company money, advanced in trade goods against next year’s wages. If they quit, they’d be thieves, liable to arrest, trial, and punishment.

They stood in the open gate of the fort, the two couples and Dylan, and looked around. The HBC clerk was standing in the courtyard taking inventory on ledger sheets. “Bastards,” said Anastasie. Dylan looked at her agape. He’d never heard a woman cuss before.

“Sold us out,” said Dru. He sighed. “This boyo will never work for the Lords and Ladies. How about you, lad?”

Dylan felt his friends—his family—looking at him for a response. He opened his mouth to say he would bloody well stick with them, but he didn’t get it out. Madame Lemieux came up running. “Mademoiselle Caro asks for you, monsieur,” she blurted out.