YEAH,” SAID LUCKY, “I tried to call you, but your Madelaine, she said that you had already gone. Good that you are here. I need some help to finish this last canoe.”
He was helping Du Pré set up a tent. The village was poor and the shacks were crowded.
Far off in the woods, someone was playing a flute.
Grave children watched them put up the tent.
Du Pré felt at home.
It was like this around the fur posts, he thought. God, people must have been poor back then. We can’t imagine.
Eloise, Lucky’s wife, brought them coffee, hot and thick with sugar. She laughed.
Lucky looked at her.
“I am just happy,” she said.
“She’s like that,” said Lucky.
Du Pré pounded in a stake.
He ate with them that night, some good white fish and vegetables, homemade bread and preserves. He rolled a smoke.
Lucky took Du Pré’s pouch and made himself a cigarette.
“We got the same people we had last time ’cept for Françoise, who is going to have this baby.”
Du Pré nodded. Women did that.
“Also this Bart,” said Lucky, “he called and said he would be here in a week or ten days.”
“Good,” said Du Pré.
“It’s such a bad thing Hydro-Quebec wants to do,” said Lucky. “The young people have worked hard to set up their little communities, ban drugs and alcohol, go back to the old ways that were good and use the new ones that are good. Now these dams could destroy that all.”
“The mercury will kill off Hudson Bay,” said Eloise. She had lost the hesitant bad grammar of the poor Indian. Du Pré could hear much education in her voice. Poor little Indian girl, indeed.
“There’s too much brush where the water backs up,” said Lucky, “too expensive to grub out. So they flood it, and the brush chemically will fix mercury into methylmercury compounds. Very lethal, and they concentrate in the food chain. In us. You know about the stuff?”
“Yeah,” said Du Pré. He remembered he’d read something. Heavy metals. Mercury was very poisonous.
“New York City needs electrical power,” said Lucky. “So they are happy to take our land and lives for it.”
“How did you meet Chase?” said Du Pré suddenly.
“Him.” Lucky laughed. “Oh, you know us Chippewa don’t allow any publication of our religious beliefs, sue you right now, but we get these people want to find out things. So we tell them a lot of shit, but they can’t get any two Chippewa to tell them the same stuff, and if they say anything, we say, That’s right, and we sue.”
“Anthropologists,” said Lucky. Same tone of voice a housewife uses with the word cockroaches. “When I was a kid, they came to dig up an old burial ground, so old, we didn’t know who was in it. What kind of Indians, you know. We think we have been here forever, but our history is brief, if not short. Not much to write in it, you know. My committee at Brown was even half-hoping I’d tell them true Chippewa religious tales.”
Okay, Du Pré thought, Brown is one of the places Maria is thinking of going. Backwoods canoe builder. Sure.
“These anthros dug it up. End of the season, they had a party. All of them wore a human vertebra on a ribbon in their lapel or pinned to their dresses. Disgusting. So they left. So we dug up all the bones and moved them. Buried them simply out of sight.”
“They came back and had a fit,” said Eloise, “but no one knew anything. We didn’t know if they were Mishtawayawiniwak or not, but they deserved to sleep.”
“What’s Mishtawa …um?” said Du Pré.
“Canadian Chippewa, Cree, Ojibwa,” said Lucky. “Our American cousins get pissed off, think we look at them as second-class.”
“So we are going down the Rivière de la Baleine,” said Lucky. “Brave Indians going up against powerful interests. Actually, Hydro-Quebec is so scared, they have tried to buy us off. They don’t want us asking why screw up the River of the Whale? Very bad publicity.”
“Asking it sadly from bark canoes,” said Eloise. “In good sound bites.”
Du Pré howled with laughter.
“You remember when Chase rejoined the expedition for the last mile?” said Lucky. “And we didn’t do anything?”
“Not much, anyway,” said Eloise.
“We got a couple of reporters really curious,” said Lucky.
“We talk to them once in a while.”
“They smell a story,” said Lucky.
“We only waved it under their noses a little,” said Eloise.
“And Bart has helped a lot,” said Lucky.
Oh, Du Pré thought, so he is not sitting half-dead with love all of the time. Good.
“He owns some TV stations,” said Eloise.
No fucking doubt, thought Du Pré. He has been sober now for a few years and I bet he is just finding out what all he owns. Michelle says, yes, he will own heaven, too.
Which he deserves.
“That Bart, he is something,” said Du Pré.
“Come on,” said Lucky, “I will show you these canoes. They got left out by mistake and the porcupines chewed them so bad I had to build new ones.”
Lucky led Du Pré to a huge wall tent set on a puncheon floor, up on pilings. He fiddled with the tent ties and went inside. Du Pré waited until a gasoline lantern flared. He stepped in. The two big freighters were up on forms, struts and braces pinned and partly lashed. Long coils of braided spruce roots hung from the side poles. Birch bark was stacked cup-down at the far end.
Toolboxes filled with carefully organized shaves and chisels and drawknives. Expensive tools, all with beechwood handles and precise bright grindings on the cutting edges—well-used and well-kept.
“We got about three weeks, and this lacing and steaming the bark takes time,” said Lucky. “I could sure use some help.”
“You know these murders?” said Du Pré.
Lucky nodded.
“The police think it is Chase. I don’t think so. I think that it is someone uses Chase, only strikes when Chase is around.”
Lucky looked at Du Pré. He seemed very sad.
“He may come after me,” said Du Pré.
I hope he does anyway.
“Well,” said Lucky, “don’t worry about here. We know everything. Who said he would come after you?”
“Old man I know sees things,” said Du Pré. “He’s never been wrong.”
“I would like to meet him,” said Lucky.
Du Pré nodded. Me, I would just like to know where the old bastard is.
Lucky turned down the lantern and they left as the light died.
Du Pré slept deep.
He dreamed of owls and fire, black waters and endless ice, great bears and white wolves, piles of soft furs.
Some fiddle music.
A mountain with a hole in it, like the eyesocket of a skull, something moving back in the mountain, a flash of black eyes in black.