THE CANOE PARTY WAS put up at a hotel in Lac La Ronge, which was a damn long way north. Du Pré had driven through miles of dark forest, here and there clear-cut to feed pulp mills. He thought of the voyageurs toiling through here in the fine misting rain. It must have been hard. Some men would have gone mad. No wonder when they finally made it home they celebrated so hard.
The forest would be a great weight. Du Pré saw very few birds. It seemed that there was little life here. Perhaps it came out at night. Then not. There wasn’t much to eat in an old forest, the trees held it all.
Once, he got out and walked along the verge of the road, looking for animal tracks. He walked a mile without seeing anything but the skittering prints of a shrew in some very fine mud at the edge of a little puddle.
Mean little bastards, those shrews, had to eat their own body weight each day. So tiny, big mouths and lots of teeth. He’d watched one kill a grasshopper once, still remembered the crunching, tearing noises. It was over very quickly and the tiny silver-gray shrew was gone. Du Pré had picked up the husk of the grasshopper. The shrew had more or less unzipped the grasshopper’s skin, gobbled up the fat, and gone on for another.
Them shrew weigh maybe three hundred pounds, they eat everything on the whole earth, Du Pré thought.
It was raining again by the time he pulled into Lac La Ronge. He found the hotel and parked his old cruiser across the street in a lot that had the hotel’s name on it.
The young woman at the desk directed Du Pré to the dining room. It was early evening and the party had recently gone in for some supper. Du Pré saw Paul Chase slumped in a chair at the head of a long table. There were some young people sitting near him, rich kids, looked like, and then some Indians in jeans and wool shirts. Six of them, four men and two women, all with their black hair in long braids.
Du Pré walked up to the table. Paul Chase put on a sunny smile and welcomed him and bade him sit.
Du Pré found a chair down past the Indians. They all looked at him a moment and then they smiled, and those on the other side of the table smiled, too.
One of the men rattled at Du Pré in Chippewa, but the dialect was so far from Du Pré’s little knowledge that he could only smile and shrug and say he was sorry but that the Coyote French was all he had.
Then they all rattled at him in their Bush patois. Du Pré could understand that.
“Them priests, they get around about everywhere,” said Du Pré.
They all laughed and the waitress came.
The food was superb. Whoever the chef was did what he could with what he could get that was fresh, and Du Pré had some lake trout with local wild mushrooms and a berry sauce that he thought was juniper. The trout was flaky and perfectly cooked. The butter it had been grilled in was dilled.
The table was so long that Du Pré hardly joined in the talk. The six Indians from Quebec kept slipping into that dialect he couldn’t follow, and they were between him and Chase and his assistants—two young men and two young women, expensive clothes. Chase was wearing one of those jackets Du Pré had seen in photographs of people on safari in Africa. About a hundred pockets. Looked like it was cotton and not at all treated against the wet.
Du Pré looked off, suddenly dreaming, thought of a great weight of furs on his back, a muddy trails a branch let go by the man ahead swinging back and hitting him, the water dripping and flying.
This was some wet country. Du Pré had driven through a swamp that smelled of cedar. The water, when he stopped to look, was as dark as strong tea.
Paul Chase finished a story, which everyone up there with him at his end of the table found terribly funny. Chase looked modestìy pleased with himself.
This Chase is an asshole, Du Pré thought, and there better be some one knows this country, better two someones, or I maybe just get in my car and go back home. These Indians know theirs, but they are a long way from it.
Du Pré had once gotten into some trouble down in southern Utah, a long way out in country that looked sort of like the kind he knew but turned out not to be like it at all. He hadn’t come close to dying of thirst, but he was plenty scared. He hadn’t forgotten that.
Well, I see what’s what, but maybe I not get in these canoes at all.
One of the younger Indian men on the other side of the table came over and sat by Du Pré.
“You are the Gabriel Du Pré I saw the video of, shaping the thwarts for the canoe?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Du Pré, puzzled. That video had been made only a month ago, and so fast it makes its way to Canada? Well, things did move fast these times. Too damn fast.
“I am the canoe builder,” the young man said. “My name is Henri, but everybody has always called me Lucky. Anyway, I did the best on that pair of bateaux, best that I could. You gave me some good ideas.”
Du Pré smiled. I drown now, it’s my fault. Made a bad video.
“I saw you fiddle at the festival in June, too,” Lucky went on. “You are very good. You bring your fiddle?”
“Yeah,” said Du Pré. He’d thought of buying a cheap one to bring, but he sometimes believed his fiddle was a living thing and it might get pissed off being left back on an adventure like this one, grow sulky, not play so good after that.
So he had brought it. The slingshot was in the case, under the neck, with the cube of rosin and the extra strings and bridges.
If I go, Du Pré thought, which I am not till I see maybe we got a couple people look like they grew up on deer meat they poached right around here. I will know them when I see them. I had better see them.
Chase was looking over toward the door that led from the bar to the dining room.
There was a man standing in it, a very dark man, in a red-and-black-checked wool jacket and heavy canvas pants and high boots with rubber bottoms. He had a wool cap on his head, one with a round tassel on the end of it. The man had a large glass of something brown in his left hand. The hand was missing two fingers entirely and some parts of the others. He looked for a moment at Paul Chase, then he walked toward their table. Another man looking just like the first, only twenty years or more younger, followed him. He seemed to have all of his fingers.
When they passed Du Pré, he caught an odor of woodsmoke and fish and dogs.
This is looking some better, Du Pré thought.
Paul Chase introduced the two as Nappy Florissant and his son Felix. They were guides. They would be with the expedition throughout the journey.
The Florissants eventually shook hands with everybody, smiled, and showed that they both were missing a few front teeth. They went back to the bar, and eventually Du Pré followed.
He spoke to them in Coyote French. They liked Du Pré for that, bought him a drink.
“So you been down to York Factory?” Du Pré asked casually, sipping.
“Oh, yes,” said Nappy, “I have been there. Him, too.” He jerked his head at his son.
They had another drink.
“Yes,” said Felix, “we have been to York Factory some, the both of us.”
“They fly us there to fight a big forest fire once,” said Nappy, “burning some bad, that one, couldn’t see the ground from the plane. Lots of smoke.”
“Then they fly us back Lac La Ronge. Made good money,” said Felix.
“So we both been to York Factory,” said Felix, eyes twinkling.
Du Pré laughed. These men would do, as they say in Montana, to ride with.
Or float with up here in the endless black-green forest, in the rain.