Free The High Missouri by Win Blevins

human responses, like a sense of humor. Saga was tickled at his protest, Dru explained. Saga’s name, the old man went on, was not what you might think, a word meaning a long, episodic, heroic tale. It was a short version of sagamité . Because he loved the stuff. “He thinks it’s ambrosia,” said Dru, “manna from heaven. He complains when we get to Montreal and he has to eat their cooking.”
    Dylan wasn’t sure that Saga was tickled. He didn’t think the half-breed was human enough to be tickled. He could smile angelically, maybe, but not be tickled.
    Saga was beautiful, perfect, beyond the human, like a statue. He was of medium height, slender, supple as a teenager, though he was surely older than Dylan. He had black hair streaked with auburn, delicate-looking hands, and an exquisite face. He might have been an elf, or one of the six-winged angels called seraphim. Only his musculature, his eyes, and his complexion made him seem one of the earth. His muscles were hard and strong, as you could see when he lifted the heavy bundles. His eyes were restless, flitting everywhere constantly, never still. His skin was Indian-dark, and somehow that changed everything. He could have been one of the seraphim, but he looked like a devil.
    He had one more peculiarity. He didn’t speak to Dylan. He talked to Dru past Dylan, around Dylan, over Dylan, and through Dylan, but he didn’t talk to Dylan. And the Druid acted like he didn’t notice.
    It therefore annoyed Dylan that they always spoke French. Saga’s French was excellent, said Dru, but his English was hit-and-miss. Fortunately, Dylan had spoken French en famille almost from infancy. The servants were all French-speaking. Saga’s French, though, felt like a gesture of shutting Dylan out.
    Dru explained sagamité . It was corn boiled to mush in lye water, usually served with chunks of salt pork, or small game or fish, thrown in. Since they didn’t have any salt pork, and didn’t have time to hunt or fish, Dru joked that Dylan Davies hadn’t even earned the mocking term the real Nor’Westers gave the hirelings who paddled the big company canoes and lived on sagamité—mangeurs de lard , pork eaters.
    Dylan wasn’t a mangeur de lard anyway, said Dru. He was a Welsh Indian.
    My arse, thought Dylan, saying nothing.
    The Nor’West Company fed the canoe men east of the depot on sagamité almost exclusively. It was cheap because the Saulteur Indians around Lake Superior grew the corn and traded it willingly. It was easily available. It didn’t spoil. It was nourishing enough to keep the men working sixteen hours a day. And the voyageurs , as Dru put it, were too heroic to complain.
    Too dumb to complain, thought Dylan.
    Dru was full of stories of the heroism of the Nor’Westers. They could paddle, cordelle, and portage sixteen hours a day, singing lustily all the while. They could make a canoe swim up a rapid like a fish. They could whip grizzly bears one-handed, take on their weight in wolverines, and satisfy a covey of Indian women without getting tired.
    Sometimes Dru told epic stories about canoe races on the lakes. It seemed the Nor’West men loved to outpaddle the men of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Nor’Westers had bigger canoes with more weight per paddle, but that just made them more avid. They went to it with a fine, high will, and a penalty was supposed to await the first guide who lost a race to the Englishmen: His head would be the new prow ornament.
    Dru spun one about a monumental race between several boats of each company on a big lake. The voyageurs paddled all day with one Nor’West outfit only slightly ahead. Then all that moonlit night without a rest—same result. Then all the next day without a rest. Still the Nor’West men in front. Toward evening, as they were making a final sprint for the depot, one Hudson Bay man got so exhausted, he passed out and fell into the lake. Two Nor’West canoes and two from his own company passed him