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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

BOOK: White Desert
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He flinched when Madame du la Rochelle shot to her feet, but held my gaze as she snatched away our plates and utensils, marched to the wooden tub set beside the fireplace, and dumped them inside with a clatter. I had the thought then she wasn't entirely ignorant of English.
Women are impossible to
feature. Being the man responsible for the prospect of Fleurette and her son traveling some four hundred miles through the dead of winter from the comfort and safety of their home, I expected little in the way of welcome. Instead I was forced to conduct a fierce argument through Philippe to persuade her to let me sleep that night in my own blankets rather than surrender the bed she shared with her husband. That was the Indian side of her nature coming through, as much as the female; tribal law since before Columbus dictated that not even a mortal enemy will be denied the full hospitality of the lodge when night fell.
I awoke at first light to the smell of baking. Fleurette had biscuits baking in a Dutch oven, with coffee boiling in a blackened pot. Philippe was sitting on the edge of the bed, scratching his scalp through his spill of tightly curled hair and yawning, with his hairless legs showing between the hem of his nightshirt and the rolled tops of heavy gray woolen socks like lumbermen wore. He stood and stretched, his joints popping like small-arms fire, then stripped off the nightshirt with no concern for his
nudity or who saw it. He had the muscles of an athlete, egg-shaped and fluid, and an ugly pale oblong scar just below his right shoulder blade where a bullet had been removed years before, creating as always worse damage coming out than it had going in. I made a note to ask him about it as soon as my voice woke up; discretion went out the window when it came to the past of someone you were planning to pack along through raw country.
He dressed in the same calico shirt, leggings, and moccasins he'd had on the day before, shrugged into his ankle-length capote, and headed outdoors, presumably to visit the little slant-roofed outhouse behind the cabin. On the way to the door he nudged his son awake with a toe in the ribs. Claude, still dressed, rolled out of the buffalo robe on the floor and got woozily to his feet. He was no better outfitted for morning than I. I approved of him for that. Most of the world's wickedness is done by men who go to bed with the birds and wake up sharp as fangs.
When I put on my bearskin, I saw that the gash in the shoulder was repaired, the stitches so small and tight, I had to spread the hairs to locate them. I summoned all the French I had to tell Madame du la Rochelle
merci
.
“C‘est bien a votre service, monsieur
.” She spoke in her smooth contralto while lifting the lid to inspect her biscuits. There was no rancor in her tone. The storm had passed. Living out there, she would be accustomed to resolution.
Steam rose from a chipped enamel basin set up on a chopping block outside the door, where Philippe had hung his capote on the protruding end of a log rafter, rolled up his sleeves, and begun washing his face and hands. I used the outhouse, replenished the water in the basin from a tall kettle standing in a melted hole in the snow, washed up, and while Claude was taking his
turn in the outhouse I fed the horses and used my bowie to carve half a pound off the bacon I'd packed on the gray. This gift was met with a bright smile from Fleurette, whose bad teeth subtracted from her good looks, and very soon the smell of frying filled the little dugout. The biscuits were light, absorbing the tasty bacon grease like sponges, and the coffee was thick and strong, the way the French preferred it. I didn't, but it finished waking me up. I asked Philippe about the wound in his back.
“A remembrance of war,
monsieur le depute
. A Canada Firster shot me from the roof of the storehouse in Winnipeg during the Great Rebellion of '69.” He crunched bacon.
“Canada Firster?”
“White Protestant whiskey swindlers from Ontario. When they were through getting the Cree drunk and cheating them of the land, they decided to form their own political party. Canada First, nobody second, including Indians, half-breeds, and Roman Catholics.” He crossed himself. “We fought them. We lost.
Ce que c'est
,
que c'est.
What is, is.”
“I hear there's another rebellion brewing.”
“I have heard the same thing for twelve years. It may brew, but it must brew without Philippe. What fights I fight I fight for my family.” He helped himself to a gulp of piping-hot coffee that would have scalded my throat.
I changed the subject. “What kind of country are we heading toward?”
“The worst,
monsieur le depute
. Blizzards, ice storms, vertical cliffs, hostiles, bandits, wolves, bear, puma, buffalo, moose. It is a mistake not to take the last two seriously. They are savage when surprised or when separated from their young. My wife's brother was crippled by a bull moose in Alberta three years ago.” He lowered his voice on the last part, either forgetting or not trusting his statement that Fleurette knew no English. The woman
herself, leaning over to wipe Claude's chin with her checked napkin, gave no sign that she understood.
I wiped my own mouth and pushed away my plate. “Let's get started.”
The head of the house showed his gold teeth. “You are a man who thirsts for adventure, no?”
“Adventure thirsts for me. If I had my way I'd open a bank and die in my bed at the end of a safe and very dull life. But I'm no hand at arithmetic.” I thanked Madame du la Rochelle for another fine meal and rose.
A nomadic Indian might have found fault with the length of time it took the Métis family to gather its gear, secure the homestead, and move out, but any single white man who had observed such an arrangement take place in civilization would have been greatly impressed. From the time Fleurette cleared the plates from the table until we were in the saddle, less than twenty minutes had slid away. This included the following exchange, when Philippe returned from the river leading an enormous dun drafthorse, twenty-two hands at the inside, with a milky eye and white all around its muzzle. It bore a wooden saddle like even no Indian mount had borne since Pizarro shipped home, with three brightly colored blankets beneath it to prevent the clumsy construction from rubbing bloody sores in the beast's hide.
“If you're planning on delivering a shipment of beer to Chipewyan,” I said, “you're a little light on barrels.”
Philippe grinned from the depths of his hood and stroked the great horse's neck. “King Henry is descended from the mighty steeds of Pepin's stable. He is built to carry eight hundred pounds of armor at full gallop.”
“That will come in handy, if the war of the Roses comes back. What about that torture trap of a saddle?”
“I carved it myself from the best white pine. No other will fit his back.”
As he spoke, he impressed me by hauling himself five feet from the ground into the wooden seat and pulled his wife one-handed into the space between him and the packs he had fixed behind the cantle. Fleurette hiked her skirts and rode astride, something no respectable white woman would consider; once aboard she looked as natural and dignified as any banker's wife at a charity social. She wore a gingham bonnet and a coarse woolen cloak that left her arms free to encircle her husband's waist.
“What will Claude ride?” I asked. The boy had on a pilot's cap with a shiny black sealskin visor, lace-up boots, and a capote like his father's that looked as if it had been cut down from an old garment to fit him.
Philippe curled his lip at the question. “I said the boy can run.”
“All the way to Fort Chipewyan?”
“Even the horses cannot run that far. You Americans are always in a hurry.”
 
 
We made thirty miles the first day, a feat I would scarcely have credited when we set out; but high winds had planed the snow flat across the tableland, and whenever I looked back, Claude was always the same distance behind, stepping inside the horses' hoofprints to avoid wallowing in the snow. His face was red—but from cold, not exertion. He was built wiry like his father and had a man's idea of how to pace himself. A single drop of Indian blood is strong enough to turn a bucket of white paint bright scarlet.
The second day we made even better progress. Yesterday's
sun had melted some of the snow, and when the temperature plunged at night, it froze a crust strong enough to support even the gray and its packs, creating a pavement as hard and smooth as macadam. The weight of the big dun was too much for it, but the horse's hooves were as large as dinner plates and churned through the broken pieces of crust as if it were meringue. Claude broke into an occasional sprint across the sturdy surface, outdistancing us at times so that his father had to call him back to keep him from blundering into a grizzly or worse. Fleurette rode without complaint, speaking only when addressed by Philippe. Her general silence might have been interpreted as a protest, but I decided that she reserved the energy that might have gone into speaking for the journey. She had gone on record against the expedition, been vetoed, and left it at that. In unity lay survival.
Nights we pitched camp, built a fire, and watched Fleurette perform miracles with beans, bacon, and flour in my old skillet while Philippe hauled out a wooden flute no longer than a Sharps cartridge and played tunes going back to the first
coureurs de bois,
trappers and traders who blazed the original Canadian trails a century and more before.
“Runners-in-the-woods,” he translated the term between tunes. “Pirates,
monsieur le depute
, trespassing upon territory claimed by the Hudson's Bay Company and the Indians with whom the company traded. Death awaited them from the natives, from whose children's mouths the
coureurs
stole food whenever they pulled in their traps; death awaited them from the company when they blundered into traders. However, one can die but once. They had nothing to lose, and so they went where no white man had gone before. But for them, the whole of Canada would be an empty white smear on the map, populated by dragons and savages with two heads. Ironic, is it not, that I, who am descended from these visionary brigands, should
find myself guiding an expedition to bring to justice a band of rogues not unlike them?” He tapped the flute against the sole of one moccasin to clear it of spittle.
“Only if the
coureurs
were in the habit of murdering women and children and burning settlements to the ground for sport,” I said.
“A valid point. Those were the tactics of the Hudson's Bay Company.”
Claude, seated cross-legged by the fire, looked up briefly from
Wuthering Heights
, then returned to his reading. He had walked and run seventy miles in two days and looked as if he had just finished playing outdoors.
I drank coffee. I was becoming accustomed to the thick strong brew, which seemed to draw the pain from my damaged ribs like whiskey. “When do we reach the next settlement?”
“Three days, if this weather holds.” Philippe ran a brown finger along the rim of his delicate moustache. “I would go around it, monsieur.”
I remembered what Inspector Vivian had told me in his office in Moose Jaw of the territory beyond the north fork of the Saskatchewan. “Shulamite?”
He nodded. He seemed impressed by my information but too polite to inquire after its source. “It is, perhaps, the first community founded entirely by former slaves since Moses wandered the desert. Needless to say they are not friendly to white Americans.”
“This white American fought for the Union.”
“Ah, but they know their history. That war was not fought to end slavery, but to establish the authority of Washington City.”
“If Bliss and Whitelaw passed near there, would they know it?”
“The wilderness is not a desert, monsieur. It is filled with the noise of life. When strangers pass through it, they create disturbances in the noise, like a stick dragged across the current of a swift stream. That is the natural reality. Beyond that, the woman to whom Shulamite looks for leadership is said to possess second sight. It would not surprise me to learn that she knows of us three already.” He studied me from beneath his heavy lids. “It is possible you do not believe in this?”
“The older I get the less I know what I believe. But if this woman has news of Bliss and Whitelaw, I need to talk to her.”
“I would be of no assistance in this. Many of their grandfathers were sold to the slave traders by others of their own tribe. The color of one's skin is no guarantee of safe passage.”
“If you'll lay out the route, I'll be on my way and send you home. You have a family to protect.”
“They will spare us, I think. I would not be a good guide if I did not warn you of the danger to yourself.”
“Thank you. I need to talk to the woman.”
“In that case, perhaps you would consider giving me that second double eagle now.”
I surprised him by producing the leather sack and handing him one of the gold cartwheels. He balanced it upon his palm as if weighing it. Then he gave it to Fleurette, who bit it, studied the result in the firelight, and consigned it to a pocket in the lining of her cloak. Then she returned to her cooking. Philippe lifted his tin cup.
“
Mes compliments,”
he said. “It is a rare wise man who accepts his own mortality.”

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