We passed villages of Indians as peaceful as Red Jacket was warlike, the children running along the bank to point at our white skin and Magnus’s red beard as we glided to a rest. The women streamed down to see us, curious, while the men hung slightly back with their bows, watchful but not unfriendly. Namida and Little Frog would ask, interpret, and then direct us on our way, always coming away with a gift of food. I left a coin at each one until I had no more.
When we camped, our Norwegian would sometimes climb a tree to survey the country in hopes of finding sign of Norse habitation. But all was simply an undulating expanse of forest and lake, endless and empty in all directions.
We healed and began to relax as each day passed with no sign of pursuit. Red Jacket’s band seemed increasingly remote. I’d almost certainly wounded or killed Cecil Somerset and perhaps dissuaded Aurora with my hard blow, and Pierre had winged the Indian chief. Maybe they’d been stung enough. Meanwhile, thanks to the women, the wilderness became a cornucopia, my rifle barking and the ladies gathering fruits. Magnus used his axe to whittle cooking spits, canoe braces and a dozen other useful tools as we travelled. Twigs yielded a crude tea. The inner bark of the basswood tree made strips to stitch birch into useful containers. Spruce gum was boiled to caulk leaks. The women taught us how camping near clay banks with swallows’ nests would provide us a zone almost free of mosquitoes, so voraciously did the little birds dine on them.
Little Frog had given up trying to attach herself to Magnus, who remained resolute against female attention. She instead made partners with Pierre, who took her attention as nothing more than his due for rescuing and accompanying us. He made no pretense of love, but instead initiated that cheerful sexual companionship that was the free and easy manner of the fur trade.
Namida, without request or negotiation, made herself a partner to me and, in the simple manner of that country, a potential wilderness bride as well. I knew there was a gulf of centuries between us, but could it be bridged? There was a limit to what we could talk about – she had no concept of cities or kings – but she began to educate me about survival in her world, showing how to find a simple root or make a simple shelter.
As for romance, for days she treated me with affectionate reserve, but finally she came to some decision, and one evening, as the sky where we were going went aflame from the sunset, she abruptly stood before the log where I was sitting, cleaning my rifle. ‘Come with me to gather wood,’ she suggested.
Pierre’s eyebrows rose. He’d told me once that wood-gathering time was the favourite period for the young to sneak off and make love in the forest, away from the disapproval of their elders. ‘Yes, go find some fuel, Ethan.’
‘Capital idea. Don’t want to get too chilly!’
She led me rapidly through the trees, light as an antelope. Namida was slightly pigeon-toed, in the Indian manner – their habit of walking with their feet straight or slightly turned in seemed to help their stealth and speed – and as confident in this green forest as a Philadelphia matron in a market. I followed in anticipation, neither of us picking up so much as a twig for a fire.
In a mossy glen she turned suddenly, smiled, and encircled my neck. I pulled her against me, marveling at the smoothness of her cheeks, the startling blue eyes, the copper of her hair. She was an alloy mix, as alien as a goddess. Finally we kissed, lightly at first, her nose and face rubbing against mine, and then more urgently.
‘You rescued me,’ I murmured when we broke. ‘That was brave, to demand us for husbands. It gave Pierre time and space to open fire.’
‘You came to save me,’ she said, ‘and now you’re taking me home.’
‘Some women I know believe in fate, Namida. Do Indians believe in that?’
‘I do not know that word.’
‘That the Manitou or destiny wanted us to meet so we could help each other. That our partnership was supposed to happen.’
She shook her head. ‘What good is that? Then our choices mean nothing. No, I chose you. I decided you were a good man.’
‘And why is that?’ It’s true, I think, but I always like to hear the reasoning of others.
‘No one obeys you. No one fears you.’
That’s not quite the impression one wants to leave with a woman, but it seemed to work with Namida. ‘Well, I
Her lips responded, sweetly and then passionately. She pressed herself against me, coiling with arm and leg, and we sank into a bed of sweet moss, warm and earth-smelling after the day’s sun. I lifted her tunic off her head and she tucked the doeskin under herself, raising her hips slightly, her colouring like honey. If we were headed to Eden, surely this was Eve. She reached up to loosen the laces of my shirt and trousers. I was more than ready.
‘Pierre said you enchanted me,’ I told her. ‘That you fed me seeds to attract me.’
She lifted her knees. ‘Do you think I need charms?’
‘It appears not.’
‘But it’s true, I did cast a spell. Women must do so to make a man sensible. Now we will give each other power.’ She smiled, her blue eyes startling, and I was so struck by her sweetness that I literally lost breath.
To give! So different than the greedy grasping of a Pauline or an Aurora. Despite my own poor judgment, I’d found a woman who saw me as a partner. I was falling in love.
And so we entwined while the others waited, in vain, for firewood.
By the time we got back they’d fetched their own.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
We paddled as far west as we could, passing from river to broad lake and back to river again, through a flat, forested landscape untouched by time. Mist hung on the reeds in early morning until the sun condensed it into evaporating diamonds, the warmth loosening our muscles as we stroked. The lakes were a perfect blue, clean enough to drink, with fish so plentiful they would boil in the shallows. We used the fat of our kills to grease ourselves against the insects, and their hides to patch our clothing. It was crowded in our single craft but sometimes Namida would lean against me and Little Frog would do the same with Pierre, resting as we glided. Instead of a pipe, we’d haul out on grassy islands to lie and look at lazy clouds. Only Magnus was impatient. The days were shortening.
When the river became no more than a stream and its channel turned south, Pierre guessed it was time to strike more directly west. We met another hunting party of Ojibway, these lithe and confident Indians as different from the wretches we’d seen in Ohio and Detroit as a duke from a debtor, and again as helpful as Red Jacket’s band had been hostile. Muscled, bronze, and at perfect ease in the wilderness, they had an easy, enviable manner that at first I couldn’t put my finger on. Why did they seem so different from the great mass of civilised men?
But then I recognised their quality: they were free. Oh, they were conscious of the cycling seasons and the daily arc of the sun, but they had no schedule and no destination, no ambition and no bosses, no dogma and no cause. They simply were alive. Their church was sky and forest, their loyalty was to family and clan, their destiny was as whimsical as the weather, and their science was magic. They were fierce about only one thing: their independence, their ability to roam where mood or need took them. True, they were hungry and cold and in pain at times, but how I now envied their presence in the present, in a world with no real history and no anxious future! Yet I could never capture that because I hadn’t been born to it; even out here I could never quite forget the tug of Washington and Paris, of distant armies and ambitious generals and a future with Zebulon Henry and compound interest. Why would I ever go back to such a world?
Because I was also frightened of this one: the endless space, the yawning silence, the reality of never making any material advance and of being suspended in a cottony now. I was, in the end, me. The Indians of Detroit and Grand Portage had been corrupted, but I understood their corruption. My kind had traded freedom for security, the simplicity of animals for the predictability of civilisation. I’d been cast out of Eden, but I had the promise of compound interest! I longed for this native freedom, but feared it, too. I was all for possession of Louisiana, but only if it could be tamed. There was no familiarity here. I sometimes heard spirits moving in the woods at night. I had little sense of direction away from the river by day. A wild thing could burst from the bushes at any moment.
I dared not confess this to Pierre.
