September 1795
The explorer Alexander Mackenzie has stopped at Newark for three days on his canoe journey to Montreal. He sleeps in White’s bed in the loft while his host has made quite a comfortable corner for himself in the alcove off the kitchen. It’s a small space, but Yvette has provided him with a bear skin rug. It smells a bit—probably like a bear, though White has never, thank God, smelled one up close—but it shields him from the rough pine floor.
It’s early afternoon now, and Yvette serves up her whitefish stew and dandelion wine.
“Tasty,” Mackenzie says, shovelling a substantial forkful of fish into his mouth. “I call this cuisine.”
“Better than what you had on the Pacific Coast, is it?” White asks, thankful that he has not had to apologize for Yvette’s offerings.
“You may have noticed that my teeth are ground to a thin edge?” Mackenzie grins at White. His teeth look perfectly normal, a flash of white in his tanned face. “One of the Indian tribes there gave me their pièce de resistance, the bark of a hemlock tree—”
“You joke, sir!”
“Not at all. It was actually a cake of hemlock bark, fifteen inches long and half an inch thick, but impregnated with salmon oil that made it quite tasty—especially if you consider how hungry I was after a hard day’s walk over rock and through forest.”
I am to believe this? But the man spins his yarn with a perfectly straight face.
“I gather that Mrs. Simcoe liked the fine furs you presented her with?”
“She plans to sew a shoulder cape from the mink skins, so she says. She is a pleasant woman, but I know not what to make of His Excellency. What is your opinion of the man?”
“He has many good qualities, but his health is bad. Gout is his affliction. He has applied for sick leave and may return to England if his application is successful.”
“I gave him a bottle of Turlington’s Balsam. He took it, mumbling something about ‘damned quackery,’ but I mind not his insult. He is just another snot-nosed Englishman.”
“Present company excepted, I hope?”
“Too long have I been in heathen society, sir. My apologies for a stupid remark. You have been kind to me. Had I not met you on the quay three days ago, I might have had to tether my canoe and set up my bedroll within it.”
Mackenzie is now tucking into the Indian pudding, and he’s switched from fork to knife for the transmission from plate to mouth. White feels glad the knives have rounded edges. Otherwise, he’d have to find one of the local remedies for a bleeding gullet. Mrs. Jarvis’s castor oil, he fears, would not be efficacious in those circumstances.
White has noticed Mackenzie has no difficulty spinning conversation with whomever he meets. His manner of speaking is easy, but his sometimes awkward phraseology leads White to surmise he has been long without white man’s company. “This is tasty,” he says now, turning to address Yvette who’s hunkered down in a chair in the corner by the hearth. “How do you make it?”
“Milk, cornmeal, des oeufs, . . .” she answers, then she lapses into her patois, blushing at her failure to know the English words.
Mackenzie answers at length in her lingo, and she gives him a large second helping.
“You are at home in her language,” White says.
“Well, as you know, I was for many years a clerk for the North West Company in Montreal, and when I started my exploration westward to the Pacific, I often had voyageurs with me on my voyage. Expert canoe-men they are, the best in the world I thought, until we embarked one day with seven natives. Then I found that the voyageurs are actually inferior to the Indians. So I’ve picked some of the lingo from both sets of paddlers. I expect you know the dialects, White?
“I know very little of anything but the King’s English. Sometimes I don’t even understand American.” He laughs. “But I have observed those canoes you talk about. When they’re loaded, their gunwales are within six inches of the water, and the fate of the passengers has always seemed to me to be inevitable. Your own canoe, I see, rides barely above the water, and yet you and your crew are very much alive.”
“So much depends on the paddlers. I remember once a rapid stream where we were making six miles an hour. We came to a weir where the Indians landed me and my two friends. They then proceeded over the weir without taking a drop of water, received us on board again, and on we went. Glad was I to thank them with a few words in their dialect.”
To White, Mackenzie seems a creature from another planet in spite of his Scots accent, tousled red hair, and tanned cheeks. Over the three days, he’s been in Newark, he has spun tales so exotic that White has been transported into a new world.
The man is talking now about his stay with an Indian band a short distance north east of a place he calls Elcho Harbour—“not Echo, mind you, Elcho”—somewhere within sight of the Pacific Ocean. “There are four elevated houses in the village,” he says, “with floors twelve feet above the surface of the ground. Their length is a hundred and twenty feet, and they are forty feet in breadth.”
“How on earth do they get up into these places? Or perhaps I should stay, how from earth do they get up into these places?”
“Easily. At the end of each house is a narrow scaffolding, which they ascend by a piece of timber with steps cut in it. The whole length of the structure is divided by cedar planks into apartments, each with room for cooking and sleeping.” Mackenzie pauses, sees that Yvette is busy scraping the remains of her stew into a bowl, and continues, sotto voce. “They thought of everything, those so-called ‘savages.’ At each end of the structure is an opening for them to pee or shit through. Since they remove not the heaps of excrement that accumulate on the ground below, it appears that this effluvia does not bother them.”
White pushes his plate away. Pee, shit, and effluvia in two sentences. The man has a wide vocabulary. “You give me a vivid picture,” he says. “But if you intend to write up your travels for publication, as you’ve indicated to me, I suggest that you—”
“Omit these details or reword them. I have not been so long in the wilds that I have forgotten the sensibilities of English readers. Indeed, even when I come to this place you call Newark, I find it a good deal like one of your villages in England, full of gossip, teacups, and evening tête-à-têtes. A week in the wilderness of Western Canada would rid these people of their narrow concepts and customs.”
“You have obviously not sat at Mrs. Simcoe’s table and eaten her special Upper Canada treat of roasted black squirrels. A pity. That would rid you of your narrow concepts about Newark parties.
“But you may be right about your impressions of life here. We do fritter away a good deal of time in petty squabbling and picayune endeavour. I fear we are often like the fox in the Aesop fable. We want the grapes, but we tire easily and give up and excuse ourselves by saying the grapes are probably sour anyway. But you, sir, are a veritable Jason. You have discovered an overland route to the Pacific Ocean and to the great furs of that far-flung land. With your Argonauts, you have brought back the Golden Fleece. I envy your accomplishments.”
Mackenzie laughs and pours himself another glass of Yvette’s wine. “You are generous, White. But I am no Jason. I have made mistakes like any ordinary being. On my first voyage westward, no knowledge had I of compasses or chronometers, and I ended in the Arctic Ocean rather than the Pacific.” Here Mackenzie pauses and looks down at his calloused fingers. “But I went back to Britain, made myself familiar with navigational skills and tried again. Second time round, I listened to the Indians. They were the ones who knew about the overland route to the Pacific, and good use I made of their knowledge of this vast land. But true it is that when I set myself a goal, I attain it. Success comes with knowledge. And endeavour.”
He pulls out his pocket watch. “I must leave you now, sir. My paddlers wait for me on the river.” He leans over and pulls from under the table the huge canvas knapsack that carries his worldly goods. From inside it he produces two packages loosely wrapped in pelts. “For you, ma’am,” he says to Yvette, shaking off the pelts and handing her a warm-looking pair of fur-lined skin gloves. “And for you, White, a fur hat for these winter winds that will be soon upon us.”
“With ear flaps and a strap to tie under my chin,” White says. “Perfect.”
“Not made of the Golden Fleece, my friend, but perhaps warmer.”
He embraces White, waves to Yvette, and heads out the back door. White watches him from the window of his cottage. His tall figure disappears down the slope towards the river. In a moment, there is nothing left of him, only his empty glass and the gifts that he laid upon the table. But still, yes, there’s an aura that remains . . . the man’s air of successful endeavour, the way he speaks freely without inhibition . . . his joy in life.
* * *
White goes into the alcove, kicks aside the bear skin rug, and extracts a letter from one of the pigeon-holes in his desk. It’s the latest missive from that devil Hodgkinson who has badgered him—and Osgoode, too—for months for a licence to practise law in Upper Canada. He is a scoundrel with low education and even lower morals, and he and the Chief had been of one mind in refusing his insolent requests. Now that Osgoode has departed for Montreal, White must take on Hodgkinson and others of his ilk single handed.
And herein he sees an opportunity. Though I am not a Jason, perhaps I can find a quest of my own. Yes, I will put right the ignorant and inefficient legal and judicial system of this colony . . . But how? A governing agency perhaps, a society that will regulate the licensing of lawyers . . . I must write out my thoughts.
“More wine, Mr. White?” Yvette stands at the door to the alcove, a bottle in her hand.
“Thank you, no. I have work to do.”