The Last Crossing (46 page)

The old man gropes for his hand, and Addington must take a few steps forward to clasp it. Horse Tail pumps Addington’s arm up and down vigorously, muttering something.

“What is he saying?”

“He says goodbye,” Potts tells him.

“Goodbye to you too, old fellow.”

Potts and Addington set off, the scout cradling a repeater in the crook of his arm, Addington with a quiver of arrows on his back, an unstrung bow in his hand. Addington struggles along, flinging out legs that do not feel any longer as if they belong to him. After a mile of this, he is covered in sweat, but wills himself to soldier on. There is very little time left before full light breaks. Already the east shows a ruddy and saffron glow, the colour of a well-polished pippin.

“Not much farther now,” Potts encourages him.

Ahead, the land slopes down to the Belly. Addington can see the fish-hook gleam of a bend in the river in the brown surround.

A few minutes more and they reach a vantage point that presents an unobstructed view of a wood a hundred yards distant. The effort of covering the last stretch has left Addington exhausted, and when Potts motions him to keep down, not show himself, he gratefully drops to his belly and into the embrace of the soaked, chill grass.

There the two men lie, their gaze fixed on the stand of trees and the river. Addington consults his pocket watch. It is now fifteen minutes past five, shapes and colours are growing distinct. He can make out the poplar crowns, sallow in the burgeoning light, a single blue cloud. The full-faced moon is still up in the sky, courted by a retinue of wan stars.

Time passes, moon and stars fade. Potts touches his arm, points. At first, Addington cannot locate what he is supposed to see, but then his straining eyes find a quaking, a ripple in the tall grass near the river, like the disturbance roused by a loaded barge passing sedately through calm water.

Out of it a grizzly emerges, the high hump of his shoulders rolling in time with his pigeon-toed shuffle. The bear pauses, rises erect on his hind legs, towers with his front paws drooping before his chest, head leisurely swinging as he samples the air, sniffing for danger. Finding nothing to alarm him, he drops back on all fours, shambles into the wood, disappears.

The sight of his magnificent quarry has robbed Addington of his breath, left him choked, strangled. Silence deepens as he fights to govern his breathing, the thump of his heart. He says to Potts, “I shall
go into the wood from the landward side. Push him up against the river. Deny him all avenues of escape.”

Unsteadily, Addington rises to his feet, and Potts stands too.

“In a half-hour you shall be a rich man, Mr. Moses,” Addington remarks. Potts offers his hand to shake. Addington smiles. “To seal our bargain? My word is my bond. You shall get your money.”

A shower of black birds falls into the wood where the bear has vanished, then shoots skyward, an explosion of jet fireworks. A meadowlark practises scales. A muskrat writes his signature in the water of the Belly.

“I do not want your money,” Potts says suddenly.

Impulsively, Addington grips the scout’s hand. The clamminess of the half-breed’s palm is unexpected. “Very well then.”

And, with that, Addington bends and strings his bow, then quickly moves off in the direction of the wood, heading to the point farthest from the river. There he enters the trees with circumspection, placing his faltering boots down as softly as he can in the leaves that litter the ground. Feeling the wood close round him, thicken behind him, he stops and listens for some sound of the grizzly, nocks an arrow to the bowstring. Everything is perfectly quiet. A morning breeze combs the treetops, and a sweet rustling presages a gentle shower of pale-yellow leaves that flicker down around him. In that sound, he hears his mother’s voice, and for the first time in years, sees her clearly.

He is walking with her. She always loved to take his hand when they strolled the grounds of Sythe Grange. They amble through a copse. Little Addington wears knickers and a linen blouse. His mother wears a bonnet fastened with a broad silk ribbon tied in a giant bow. The bonnet frames her countenance. He discerns a shocking pallor in her face, her dark eyebrows are etched starkly above haunted blue eyes. A realization stabs him. Mother was ill even then, long before she was pregnant with Charles and Simon.

Mother is her usual self, utterly composed. She speaks kindly to him of a recent misdemeanour. Last night he cast his lead soldiers into the fire, melted Napoleon, Napoleon’s Old Guard, the Duke of Wellington, into slag on the grates. “Some day, Addington, you will
be a man of property, and with property comes responsibility. Property is a sacred trust, and is not yours to dispose of as you will. It is a gift of God, just as the lead soldiers were a gift from your father. Property entails a duty to preserve it, to husband it. Surely, you can see that.”

Mother does not understand that it is exactly because the toy soldiers were a gift from Father that he consigned them to the fire. Yesterday, he heard Father speak to Mother unkindly, his voice a dull roar behind the door of the study, only interrupted by Mother’s sobs. So he had thrown Father’s gift into the fire, watched it melt and sizzle there.

He and Mother move along, his hand clasped in hers, his eyes on the ground because he knows she wants her best boy to show contrition. Suddenly, he feels her stiffen beside him, hears her gasp. Alarmed, he glances up and sees Mother’s mouth pucker with revulsion, her brows furrow. “Horrible!” she says. “Ghastly!”

A grey, weathered outhouse stands aslant in a clearing amid the beeches. The side of it is covered with the corpses of scavengers and predators, rooks, crows, owls. Caitlin, the gamekeeper, whom Addington admires more than anyone but Mother, shoots offenders and nails them up on the wall, wings fanned as a caution to all their kind to give Sythe Grange a wide berth. A warning not to molest the pheasant chicks carefully raised on a diet of grain and chopped hardboiled egg. The marauders must understand there is a penalty to be paid for spoiling Father’s hunting. Addington had passed Caitlin the spikes the day he had crucified this menagerie.

His mother’s distress is unbearable to Addington, and he charges the outhouse on his chubby legs, grabs one of the crows within reach of his short arms, tears the half-rotten body from the boards. It comes apart in his hands, a mess of feathers, maggots, putrefying meat. His mother sweeps him into her arms, presses his face to her breast. She heaves, sobs, repeats over and over, “No one can say my boy hasn’t a good heart! No one!”

And he weeps too as his mother wipes the awful carrion stench from his hands with her skirts, telling him he is brave, and kind, and
tender-hearted, that no one feels for her as he does, or for the suffering of the birds. “My best boy,” she murmurs, “my own sweet boy.”

He smells the carrion fetor now, oozing from his own body. He wrestles out of the quiver, tugs at his clothes, rips buttons, unloops his suspenders, shucks his trousers, flings off all his garments in single-minded frenzy. Rolling up his shirt, he sponges the foulness from his chest, his legs, wipes down every inch of his skin.

Gradually he grows calmer under the canopy of bustling leaves. The smell is gone and he is nakedly white. The crisp morning air rinses him spotless. Now that he is wholly cleansed, Addington is ready to accomplish what he has come to do. He gathers up the bow, slings the quiver of arrows on his back.

He glides among the trees, wades through weeds, heedless of the scrape of bark, the sting of thistles. The old excitement of the hunts in the deer park is back, but larger, made grander by a more pressing jeopardy than what he braved facing his father’s mantraps, the swan shot of the gamekeeper’s gun.

This is real and he is clean. His feet move with assurance; for the first time in weeks he does not have to will them to do his bidding, they carry him without thought. He stalks forward soundlessly, creeping towards the river.

A smothered ripping noise, the snapping and cracking of a bone, brings him up short. He presses himself against a shielding tree until he recovers his breath, then slips off, circling the muffled sounds of the bear’s feeding. The river is very close now, he can see it glinting between the trees, a stutter of brightness blinking at him. He marks a heap of brush and fallen poplar, something half-hidden behind it, something massively huge, something earnestly at work. He bounces up and down on his toes, alive with an excitement he cannot keep his body from expressing. He feels the blood running in his veins, light and sweet, all the mercury gone. As he struggles to descry the shape of what awaits him, he wants to call out his joy to it. Tenderly, he strokes the goose vanes of the arrow’s fletching, smoothing them for a true flight. He catches a low, dull cough, a sucking, gulping frenzy of feeding.

Shifting his position, stealing to the right of the deadfall, Addington edges ever close to the river, the insistent rub of the current on the shore. He looks up at the twirling yellow leaves. They set him drifting among the tree trunks, aimless as the bits of gold swirling down all around him. The beauty of it is almost too much to endure. A leaf alighting on his shoulder sticks to his sweat. He brushes it away, mesmerized, watches it join the others already heaped on the earth.

Addington lifts his eyes and there is the grizzly. Powerful haunches, long hair like the quills of a porcupine that tremble as the bear rises from the carcass to stand on its hind legs with a startled “Whuff!”

Addington takes two decisive steps to the right to present himself with a lung shot. The bear swings its dished face, its bloody muzzle towards him. Addington draws the bow, feels the fletching touch his cheek, looses the arrow. It hisses, gives a sharp click as it nicks a twig and deflects deep into the shoulder of the grizzly.

The bear grunts with surprise, bites at the shaft. It snaps in the grizzly’s jaws. Addington draws a second arrow and nocks it.

The grizzly charges, a roaring, quivering, rolling wave of fur and muscle. Addington’s head fills with the storm, the crackle of breaking branches, the yellow leaves spiralling down in a whirlwind. He fires blindly into the golden tornado.

And the bear rears, saliva drizzling from its jaws, red mouth yawning. For an instant, the memory of a small mouth, gasping, panting for air flickers in Addington’s mind. The image expands in an explosion of pain as something bats his head, rakes his scalp. He turns, stumbles for the river, steps into air, plummets down the slope. A flap of bloody skin dangles in his eyes. He leaps into the water.

From the rise, Potts sees Addington naked, white as a fish belly, spring off the riverbank and into the shallows. He wades a few yards, water splashing and foaming about his thighs before the bear overtakes him in a swell of boiling water and swats him off his feet. Addington
lurches up, stabbing at the grizzly with an arrow in his fist. Another slap bowls him over. The bear’s mouth closes on the nape of the Captain’s neck, shakes him. He flops limp in the jaws, legs thrashing back and forth like a trout’s tail. The grizzly releases his hold; leaves Addington floating face downward in the river, motionless.

Even from a hundred yards, Potts can see the pink stain spreading from the body as the bear rises, pounces on the man’s back with his front paws, striking it so hard the body disappears under the water. The corpse squirts up. The bear pummels it furiously. Each time the mangled body bobs to the surface the grizzly batters more red out of it, turns it to pulp with his claws.

Potts’s hand finds his quirt; he raises it high above his head. The bear smashes the body one more time. As he does, Potts flashes the quirt down. This time the red water closes over the Captain. It is finished.

LUCY
It took three weeks before Charles and me found a way out of Fort Edmonton. Then some men who been prospecting gold on the North Saskatchewan had their fill of chilblained hands, leg cramps, and pans without a fleck of colour in them and agreed we could travel back to Fort Benton in their company. Without wagons to slow us up, we arrived right smart three days ago by saddle horse and riding mule.