THEY PLOWED ON THROUGH the clear waters; the dark forest spilled down to the shore. The ravens sat in the tops of the trees, a pair every few miles, silent.
Make this country bloom, it needs to burn, Du Pré thought. My people used fire to bring up the grass and the game. But the paper companies see all that money on fire, they put it out pretty quick.
At midday, they heard the throb of diesel engines, came on a survey camp. A tall yellow derrick stuck above the dark trees. A big well-drill whirled.
“Lookin’ for that nickel,” said Nappy, “like the big mines down in Sudbury. For a long time there, the rainfall, it eat the clothes off the kids playing outside, eat the paint off the cars. Lots of people got the cancer. They are looking for another nickel mine.”
They paddled on until the late afternoon.
A little river came into the bigger one at the campsite, and the bars in the little river were covered with wild strawberries. Du Pré and the others gathered fresh fruit, enough to feed everyone all they could eat. Once, Du Pré bent over to pluck the berries from a runner and he looked off maybe three feet to his left and saw a fawn lying motionless, still spotted this late in the year.
Du Pré mentioned the fawn to Nappy, who said it was a too-late one and wouldn’t be strong enough to make it through the winter. The deer weren’t numerous, and something seemed wrong with the ones Nappy killed. He didn’t know what. They seemed weaker.
“Got some cousins, Wood Crees, say the deer will soon be gone; they can see it in their dreams. But they don’t know why, either,” said Nappy.
They were far off and away from the rest of the party.
“I don’t think that Chase and his friends stay,” said Nappy, “so I guess I don’t get all my money.”
Du Pré had thought the same thing. The whites barely spoke to Du Pré and the Florissants, and never to the Quebec Indians. They moved along each day, set up camps, Du Pré and the Quebec Indians made some music, and then they slept and broke camp and went on.
Du Pré was hard put to see a point to this expedition.
The next night, Du Pré took the slingshot from his violin case and walked down the lakeshore to a gravel bar. He picked up a rounded stone and put it in the pouch and whirled the thing like he’d seen Benetsee do. The rock crashed into the water at his feet. Du Pré frowned. He fiddled with the tongs for a while and tried again.
He stood there for an hour, practicing. The rocks began to go more or less in the direction he wished, but accuracy would take some time. Amazing, though, the extra velocity you could get from this. One awfully fortunate throw went four times as far as Du Pré could have managed by hand.
Du Pré rolled the slingshot Up and headed back to camp. He found Nappy sitting on a log, smoking a little curved meerschaum pipe. The fingernails he had left were flat black under the tips.
“Had me an uncle used one of those,” said Nappy. “Knock a duck right out of the air with it, he could.”
“I feel pretty good, I can hit Canada,” said Du Pré.
“Got some weather coming in,” said Nappy. He was looking toward the west. The sky had been cloudless and pale blue all day. There was no wind.
Different country and I cannot read it, Du Pré thought. At home, I can tell you when a blizzard is tree hundred miles away. I just know. But this country, it is different; I can’t read it.
Pretty boring, too.
All that dark green forest. See a few ducks, hear a loon, see a raven once in a while.
Du Pré didn’t feel like fiddling that night. He went for a walk in the moonlight on the lakeshore. The rocks were slick and large. After kneeling in the canoe all day, his legs ached, and once he had a bad charley-horse in his left calf. He had to rub it hard for several minutes before it loosened.
Goddamn, Du Pré thought before he drifted off to sleep, canoeloads of trade goods out and furs back in this country, take you six months to get to the other end of it and back, pretty crazy-making. But if that was all you knew, maybe not.
Du Pré was wakened by screams and yells, a crash of cooking utensils, and a sound like a hog rooting. Bear. He slipped out of his bedroll, pulled on his boots, took his big flashlight out, and shone it toward the noise.
Chase, wearing only underwear, was trying to climb a small tree.
The brunette woman, Susan, was screaming and holding her forehead. Blood welled out between her fingers.
Nappy and Felix were banging some pots together.
There was a little black bear sitting in the scattered contents of one of the food sacks, looking surprised. Bears can look more surprised than anything.
The bear didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds, Du Pré thought. I have shot a lot of bears and that is a very small bear there.
The bear stuck his head down in the food and hiked up his rear end. Du Pré took a few strides, like a football placekicker, and kicked the bear’s ass. The startled animal bawled, rolled a little, and took off at top speed for the night.
Everybody shut up. The hurt woman turned out to have stumbled and fallen on a protruding stub on a log lying near her tent.
Chase was up in the little tree, blinking. He began to descend, making loud noises of pain.
Ain’t this some chickenshit, Du Pré thought.
Du Pré got his little first-aid kit and cleaned the woman’s wound. Nappy appeared with a few mashed leaves in his grubby hand.
“Have her chew these and then smear this on,” he said. “It will stop the bleeding and help keep the skin from scarring.”
The woman shook her head no.
Nappy shrugged. Du Pré waited a little till the wound quit dribbling blood and then he closed the cut with butterfly stitches. Not a bad cut, but these head wounds always bled a lot. She would have a scar there among all those insect bites.
She had shaken her head no at the bug plant Nappy had offered her, too. A couple of the bites had festered badly enough that they would be pits on what had once been a creamy forehead.
Chase was cursing, or, rather, whining.
That man, he think only about himself, Du Pré thought. I don’t like him, the Florissants, they despise him, the Quebec Indians don’t like him. But he got these fool white kids need him for something, I guess.
Du Pré wished he hadn’t come. But he had.
He would see this through to York Factory.
Maybe finally that dark forest would speak to him.
Ravens.