For the next couple of minutes, while Henry held the rifle and the man did not move, Maria carried on a conversation with him. At the end, she said to Henry, “He didn’t mean any disrespect by watching me. He was just curious about who’d come to his land.”
“His land?”
“That’s what he called it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I came with my father and my father’s friend.”
“What about me?”
“I told him you were my husband.”
Henry looked at her.
“He saw me swimming naked and you watching. I thought it was best. He’s apologized. I think you can put the rifle down, Henry.”
Henry studied the man’s face. It was old in a way that couldn’t be pinned down in years. A face worn by the wilderness and what the wilderness required. Henry had seen the same weathering in Woodrow’s face.
“He’s a Negro,” Henry said.
Maria laughed. “That’s very observant, husband, but it’s no reason to keep holding a gun on him.”
Henry and the man locked gazes. Henry indicated that he was going to lower the rifle. The man nodded. Henry pointed the rifle barrel toward the ground and shifted the weapon to his left hand. If the man attacked, it would be difficult-probably impossible-to swing the rifle up in time to be of any use. Both men understood that.
Maurice spoke to Maria, who translated for Henry. “He’s asked if we would eat with him.”
Henry said, “We should accept.”
She smiled. “I already have.”
Inside, the cabin was spare but neat. It was a single room, like Henry’s cabin on Crow Point, with a floor of hewn pine. Maurice had built a hearth and fireplace of stone. There was a bunk in one corner with a wool-blanket covering. In the center was a small table with two chairs. The man, Henry thought, had not always been alone.
They shared a meal of venison stew and, while they ate, Maria and Maurice talked.
“He has been here twenty winters,” Maria told Henry. “He came with his wife whose name was Hummingbird.”
“Hummingbird?”
“She was Odawa, he says.”
“Odawa?”
Kin. Long ago the Odawa, like the Ojibwe and other Algonquin people, had migrated west to the Great Lakes after their enemy the Iroquois drove them from their land near the eastern sea.
Henry addressed Maurice. “Anin,” he said, in formal greeting.
“Anin,” Maurice replied. In the language of the Odawa, which was very nearly the language of Henry’s people, Maurice and Henry talked.
“I am of the Iron Lake Anishinaabeg,” Henry told him.
“I am from Quebec,” Maurice replied. “I married an Odawa woman and lived with her happily for twenty years here.”
“Where is she?”
“She died five winters ago.”
“Your children?”
“We had none. Only each other.”
“What is he saying?” Maria asked.
“He is a widower. A man, I think, who still misses his wife.”
Maria spoke to Maurice, who smiled and said, “Merci.”
“Why did you come here?” Henry asked.
“Because I was a black man in a white world. Here the color of my skin doesn’t matter.”
That was something Henry understood well.
“We need to go back,” Henry finally said.
“You will come again?” Maurice asked eagerly.
“He would like us to return,” Henry told Maria.
She smiled at Maurice and said, “Mais oui.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The days passed quickly. Henry and Maria often visited Maurice, who proved to be a wonderful and grateful host. Over time, they learned his story.
His father came from Haiti, where he’d been a carpenter, working on a sugar plantation. One night he got into a fight with the plantation owner’s son over a woman and he beat the white man badly. He was forced to run. He took the woman with him and she became his wife. They fled to Canada, to Quebec, where a small colony of black Haitians was already established. Maurice was their first child.
His mother was white, and Maurice grew up with the names half-breed, mule, and mongrel thrown at him like stones. All his life he dreamed of rising to a place where he could look down on those who’d taunted him. Money, he’d believed, would be the way. He’d grown up with stories of wealth waiting to be discovered in the great, unexplored wilderness to the northwest. As soon as he was able-when he was seventeen-he left home and set out to find that wealth.
For the next fifteen years, he spent summers exploring rivers and streams he suspected no man had ever followed. Winters, he worked as a hand in a mill in Fort William owned by a French-speaking Quebecois.
One summer day he came across a village of Odawa where a young woman named Hummingbird lived. Love, he told Henry and Maria, struck him with the force of a bullet in his heart. All his loneliness leaked out and what filled its place was happiness. Hummingbird left her village and they traveled far into the wilderness, to the place beside the stream, where they’d built the cabin and lived together for twenty years. There was an Odawa village three days to the south where they traded for things they could not hunt or trap or gather-coffee, molasses, flour- which the villagers got from the government.
“It has been lonely since Hummingbird died?”
“Yes,” Maurice admitted.
“Why did you stay?”
“I came here looking for gold. I found something better. These hills, this forest, the lakes and streams, the memories of Hummingbird, all these are worth more to me than gold.”
“It must be a hard life here,” Henry said.
“It is hard.” Maurice nodded. “But I decided long ago that life among white people would be harder.”
Lima and Wellington continued to return at day’s end tired and discouraged. In the evening, they drank by the fire and discussed the next day’s plan. One evening, Maria asked why they’d even bothered to come to this place anyway.
Wellington, whose tongue was loosened by drink, said, “We heard a story.”
“Leonard,” Lima cautioned and gave him a dark, warning look.
Wellington ignored him. “We heard a story from a man named Goodkin who canoed up here on the Pipestone River two years ago. He spent a night in an Ottawa village. While he was there, he heard a story about a Negro who dressed in buckskin and came a couple of times a year to trade for goods. The Indians said the Negro always traded gold. Goodkin didn’t believe them, but they showed him a deerskin pouch covered with the residue of what looked like it could be gold dust. Goodkin bought the pouch and brought it back with him to have it tested. Sure enough, gold dust.
“A few months ago, Carlos and I flew up to the village. The Ottawa people didn’t know exactly where the Negro lived. He was always clever in his coming and going and they couldn’t follow his trail. But they told us it was generally up this way. We flew over the region and I liked the look of this lake. I did a brief preliminary survey and
