Free Creation by Katherine Govier Page A

and watched the traffic on the Thames. This went on for an interminable year and a half until Owen returned from Africa, found him languishing and promptly made an appointment with Lord Melville.
    The Canadian survey had given the Admiralty ideas. The survey was mammoth; it made a claim; it gave glory to Pax Britannica. They had done such a fine job with their chronometers that the Admiralty now made chronometers available for all His Majesty’s ships.
    Through Owen’s intervention, Bayfield was promoted to captain. He took on the task that, he imagines, will occupy the rest of his working life — the survey of the St. Lawrence to the sea, and theentire eastern seaboard of Canada including the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, and the islands of Anticosti, Prince Edward and Cape Breton, and Nova Scotia. This summer he will proceed into the most dangerous part of it all, the isolated and treacherous coast of Labrador, as far as the Strait of Belle Isle.
    Thousands, tens of thousands, more islands.
    He will spend his life amongst these ropes and sails. That was determined when he was a lad. He did not question it. Boys are the best warriors, unfettered by conscience, by remorse, by compassion. Or at least boys raised as he was, to be leaders of men. It was his duty to take charge of others, and, if necessary, to lay down his life on their behalf. He seemed to recall the moment when he was told this. He sat in a large chair and his feet did not touch the floor.
    Henry sits now, legs wrapped around the mast, and looks over the top of the fog into the other direction. Though grey cloud clogs the foreground, such is the perversity of this fog that he can see the shore a hundred yards away. Speaking of the devil, he spots the painter walking on shore. His posture, the eagerness and set of his step, put Bayfield in mind of Captain John Franklin, whom he met at Fort William on Lake Superior. Franklin and his party of thirty-three were on their way to the Arctic coast. It was in May of 1825. It strikes Bayfield that these men share a fiendish determination that separates them from others. Where does it come from? Is it all these hours alone in the weather and the wild? Or is it from setting oneself a near-impossible task that tempts God? Perhaps he, Henry Wolsey Bayfield, might appear fiendish himself. He prays not.
    Audubon is likely doomed, too, Henry thinks. Then he wonders why he should think that. Was it the joy and relief on his face as he thought of returning to his birds last evening?
    The Gulnare ’s figurehead emerges for a moment from the fog beneath him. Her wooden shoulders and back make Bayfield smile. If he were alone and out of sight of Bowen and all of the crew, a highly unlikely possibility in the close quarters of the schooner, he would go and stroke her shoulders. What would if be like to feel love? No doubt pleasant enough, but troublesome. Lust is that way.

    The painter climbs up on a rock and disappears into a billow of fog.
    Henry takes one last look around. The coast is out there, unmeasured, unknown, untamed. He climbs down the mast.
    “Impenetrable in all directions, save for from a distance of fifty feet up!” he announces to Bowen. “We shan’t go anywhere today. Have the men swab the deck. And scrape the boards clean in the hold.”
    “Why don’t you take a walk onshore and look at the rocks?”
    “Thank you, Bowen, for your suggestion. I’ll give it due consideration,” Bayfield says dryly.
    His lieutenant flushes.
    When Bayfield enters his cabin, the ticking assails him. It is as if the moments up in the rigging above the fog erased time for a stretch. Now that it is back, it finds an easy way to his nerves. Time pressing implacably on is not what he wishes to hear. He takes a length of chain, some lead weights and his leather book, and heads for the Owen . At least he can take a sounding.

The
KILLING
    I n the way of footing, the harbour offers two extremes: uneven eruptions of rock and an