Free Kanata by Don Gillmor Page A

pleasantly. “Not like the grasses where you can see your enemy approach.”
    Thompson turned his men around. They would have to find another route in.
    T hey went north and tried again. With him were MacKay, Ignace, Charles, Coté, Valade, Pareil, Grégoire, Bouland, DuNord, and a few others. Thompson had hired a Cree guide whom he didn’t trust. Appropriately named the Rook, he had brought his wife, a silent, suffering woman whose face had the deepening lines of a rotting vegetable. On a night when the sky was partially clear, Thompson sat with his journal, making entries and marking their position through his instruments. The Rook came over, drunk on brandy, and sat heavily on the scrub, cross-legged, sweetly curious, his upper body listing in the mountain breeze.
    â€œThey talk to you, the stars?”
    â€œThey talk to me.”
    â€œWhat do they say about me?”
    â€œThat you will sleep badly and wake with two heads.” The Rook laughed and fell over and stared at the stars briefly and then fell asleep and snored heavily.
    In the morning, the Rook sat blurry and quiet by the fire. He took his wife’s arm and drew a sharp flint along the vein in her forearm, leaving a widening red line. His wife made no attempt to pull her arm away and didn’t change her expression. The Rook drained some of her blood into a bowl and drank it in three long gulps.
    Thompson looked at him with disgust.
    â€œIt’s for my head,” the Rook said.
    Thompson got up and slapped him on the side of his head, and he fell over.
    â€œThat is for your head too,” he said.
    Thompson cut a piece of linen to bind her arm. They packed up the camp and walked west through a deadfall forest, the grey stalks angled in the half-light. The weather was turning colder, and the snow was deeper and more difficult to walk through. They moved along the Athabasca River, along the shoals and on ice that was crusted with snow though occasionally opened up to smooth, shiny sections thick enough that they looked black. The banks held stunted pine and willow. The dogs struggled in their traces and Thompson lightened their load, taking out food and making a crude wooden hoard to store it for when they returned. Eight sleds moved into a west wind that came over the peaks in violent gusts, and they came to the end of any grass for the horses. There were tufts that ringed a frozen pond, but the fields were bitten down by bison and half covered in snow. Thompson followed a line up to high land, through patches of dwarf pine. They needed snowshoes to move through the deepsnow. It became clear to Thompson that the Rook was unfamiliar with the country, and in the morning he sent him and his wife away.
    T hey needed firewood, and Thompson and MacKay spent the morning gathering it. In the afternoon they ventured farther, taking advantage of decent weather, to make caches of wood that could be retrieved later. Thompson narrowed his one good eye against the sun and avoided the horizon. He kept his head down. MacKay trudged, staring into the snow that reflected the sun with renewed intensity. When the sky began to darken in late afternoon he rubbed his eyes.
    â€œIt feels like there’s hot sand in them,” MacKay said. Ten minutes later, he was howling in pain.
    Within an hour it was dark and MacKay was snowblind. He sobbed and stumbled, and tried to run, to escape his affliction. Thompson ran after him and tackled him in the snow. He looked at the Orkneyman’s face, his lips drained of colour and eyes red as fire, the devil’s face. MacKay began to scream and Thompson slapped him, the frozen glove leaving a mark on his face. A cruel thing to strike a blind man, Thompson thought, but necessary. MacKay lurched awkwardly to his feet and punched the air instinctively and wheeled into the needles of a blue spruce and collapsed. He struggled to his feet and stood there like a chastened schoolboy awaiting