Free The High Missouri by Win Blevins Page B

sentimental. Other times it came out bawdy. Dipping yourself did not mean bathing, and loving the lass “so long” meant not a state of the heart but a feat of the loins.
    Lots of the songs had double entendres, and some of them were downright obscene. Dylan was glad Father Quesnel couldn’t hear him singing them. And if Dylan didn’t sing, Dru jokingly splashed icy water on him with the paddle. Then he apologized insincerely, and said that singing kept the stroke going strong, emphasizing “stroke” in a vulgar way.
    When they weren’t singing, they amused themselves by telling Dylan lascivious stories about Indian women. Dylan would do what every newcomer to the interior did at first, oui , they said, rut like a rabbit. The Indian girls were free until they married, and they did as they pleased. Behind any handy bush. Or without bothering with a bush. They did things white women wouldn’t do, they surely would. It was all perfectly normal among them, not even needing discretion.
    And the married women? Their husbands would lend them for a trifle, a few beads, perhaps. Not quite as pretty as the young maids, true, but more clever.
    All the talk did what Dru surely intended—kept Dylan hot and bothered. So Dylan asked le bon Dieu , as Dru called Him all too casually, for strength of spirit. A man was not a beast. A man did not behave like a rabbit, or any other wild creature. The hallmark of a man was that he was civilized. He did not go naked. He did not sleep in holes in the ground. He did not eat his own young. He did not lie with his daughters, or his neighbor’s wife, or any other female casually—did not rut. He sought God-given love to elevate his baser feelings, and in the absence of that feeling, he abstained from sex. He did these things because he had a soul, and knew it was holy.
    All these things Dylan told himself—firmly.
    And Dylan would go even further. He would allow his love only paternal and fraternal expression. For he meant to come back here one day as a missionary, and it would not be right to indulge himself carnally with a people he intended to save from carnal indulgence.
    This abstinence would be difficult. Dru had told him that the Indians thought one of the funniest things about blackrobes was their celibacy. So they might think the celibacy of a vigorous unmarried young man who was not a priest still funnier, or perhaps repellent. Strength of spirit would be required.
    Particular strength of spirit because, God help him, he wanted it. He didn’t want to die without feeling what sex was like. He was imagining the feeling with every rhythmic stroke of the paddle. And then his mates would come up with another bawdy lyric about the thrust….
    The end of it all was that he knew he wanted to taste sex before he took the cloth. It was not a sin that would put him beyond God’s love. He would confess it when he next saw a priest. But he would not permit himself that weakness here, not in front of the people whose souls he intended to save.
    Despite the singing, the trip out was brutal. They had started ahead of the big freight canoes, the canots de maitre the company sent to the great June rendezvous every year. It had been a warm winter, and the streams were mostly free of ice. Besides, Dru had dispatches to deliver along the way, one of them well off the route. Dylan didn’t understand the Druid’s place in the NorthWest Company, but it was unconventional. For instance, he and Saga often snowshoed to Montreal in the winter, when the rivers were frozen, and only the most experienced men, les bons hommes , could dare that. And Dru was bloody well mysterious about his dispatches.
    Since Dylan was a novice, they made him the milieu , the paddler in the middle. That’s where they always put the new men, Dru said. The avant —front paddler and guide—was Dru, and the gouvernail —steersman—was the damned half-breed. Up toward a thousand miles into the pays d’en haut , and Saga still