Free The High Missouri by Win Blevins Page A

by—they wanted to win. The last boat in the race, an undermanned Nor’West craft, took pity on the drowning man and picked him up.
    The rivalry between the two companies was sharp in every way. Sharp and treacherous and sometimes bloody, Dru said. Men had killed each other, less from wanting more furs than from hatred.
    It took Dylan some time to figure out why the men of the two companies despised each other. Hudson’s Bay was a hoity-toity outfit, supposedly given all of the country draining into Hudson’s Bay as a grant from the British king. Who had no right to grant it, according to the French. So they opposed this Honourable Company with their own outfits. Where it used its vast financial resources, they used their wit and pluck. Where it moved magisterially, they moved fast and first. Where it had legal rights, they were outlaws.
    They loved it. They made close connections with the Indians, learned the languages and the ways, even married Indian women, had savage children. Meanwhile the British maintained their air of superiority, forbade their men to mingle unnecessarily with the savages, and proposed that the Indians should adopt white ways.
    The French had one huge advantage. The British had to wait for instructions from London. Ships had to cross the Atlantic, and stockholders supreme in ignorance had to vote. The French, though, were on the scene. They were individual entrepreneurs, unorganized but bold. They knew the country, the forests, the streams, the Indians. They could do the right thing and beat the British to it. They pushed farther and farther into the wilderness. The best the bloody British could do was follow them a year or two later and build a fort nearby.
    When England took over Canada, the competition only got hotter. Scots came to Montreal with their capital and their spirit and their daring, and organized the French outfits into the NorthWest Company to compete with HBC more sharply than ever. And whipped them, just as the French had when they were on their own.
    Dru and Saga were Nor’West men. They laughed at the pretensions of the HBC fellows. Stuffed shirts. Copycats. Cowards. Ignoramuses. Prudes. And worse. Thieves and murderers, said Saga darkly. Pretending to speak to Dru, not Dylan.
    So Dylan Davies would be a Nor’Wester as well as a Welsh Indian. And if he wanted to be a real Nor’Wester, to stay in the country known as the pays sauvage , the wild country, or the pays d’en haut , the high country, said Dru, he must learn to like sagamité , and maybe even Saga.
    “Dylan Davies,” Dru always called him now, to remind Dylan that when they signed him up with the Northwest Company in Montreal, they’d left off his last name and changed the spelling of his middle one. To make it harder for his father to trace him, the Druid said. Besides, among the Welsh, Davis and Davies were all the same name.
    Dylan liked his new name fine. But most days, after spending sixteen hours bending his back to the paddle, a miserable, quick meal of sagamité , a short sleep, and another miserable, quick meal of the stuff before dawn, he didn’t like Morgan Griffiths Morgan Bleddyn much at all.
    They sang tirelessly. They sang flying downstream, they sang laboring upstream, they sang in the rain and the sunshine, they sang when they were happy and when they were miserable. They sang when Dylan didn’t feel like it. Saga, who seldom talked, and never to Dylan, never got tired of singing.
    Dylan thought the songs were strange. The lyrics of this original song, for instance, were delicate, refined, beautiful:
    À la claire fontaine
    M’en allant promener,
    J’ai trouve l’eau si belle
    Que je m’y suis baigne.
    Il y a longtemps que je t’aime,
    Jamais je ne t’oublierai.
    Even in English it was romantic:
    At the clear fountain
    As I strolled by,
    I saw the water was exquisite
    And dipped myself in it.
    I’ve loved you so long—
    I will never forget you.
    Sometimes they sang it as beautiful and