the centuries.
CHAPTER 12
T HE C REES SANG AS THEY paddled. They hadn’t before. The songs were sad, the melodies on a strange tonal scale.
Early one morning, as they were loading the canoes, the Crees began a ballad, one in English, the words so burred Du Pré couldn’t make them out. The song was about the burning of the Highlands.
“Where you learn that?” he asked Lucky.
Lucky shrugged. One of the Cree women, Françoise, said that the Hudson’s Bay factors were usually Highland Scots. Their blood was commingled with that of the Cree/Chippewa, and many of the people scattered across the length and breadth of the Canadian fur trade had Scottish surnames.
“Mine’s Roudedge,” said Françoise. She was a pretty woman. The light of the fire shone red in her black hair.
The Scots and the French, Du Pré thought. Them Jesuits must have been the hell and gone to the Rockies before we lost the war with the English. The one in the 1760s.
“Do you know ‘Brave Wolfe’?” Du Pré said.
They nodded and sang it. Brave Wolfe dying on the Plains of Abraham. But the English took Quebec. And the Cajuns were removed to Louisiana.
The day was blustery, with high stratocirrus cloud and vees of geese flying in huge circles, to toughen the young birds for flying over half the continent to winter in the swamps of the Gulf Coast. They passed a flock feeding on wild rice in a shallow backwater. An old admiral goose honked contemptuously at them, bidding them be gone, and soon.
Fall came early this far north. Already a few times, there had been a thin skim of ice on the shores. The insects had pretty well died off, all but the infernal no-see-ums. Bart had brought along a cure for them; he said he had gotten it on a fishing trip to Alaska. White tequila rubbed on the face kept the fierce, tiny insects at bay. He would not use it himself.
That night, the Quebec Indians talked sorrowfully of their homes, how a few thousand of them had gone back to the old ways in the vast forests far from the whites and alcohol, one as disorienting as the other. They tried to live as their ancestors had done before the whites came, but that was impossible.
“It’s hard to give up nails and twist drills and tea,” Lucky said, laughing, “and why spend a day braiding spruce roots when you can pay a dollar for a big ball of twine?”
The Jesuits and Anglicans still moved among them, welcomed by most.
There were those, however, who would destroy everything they had. New York in its hunger for electricity and Hydro-Quebec, the giant electrical-generation company, proposed $20 billion worth of dams in the far north country.
Cities, they are vampires with very long fangs, Du Pré thought.
Bart shyly brought forth a harmonica one night and added lonesome notes to a slow sad song Du Pré was fiddling. Du Pré looked at him in surprise.
“When you learn to do that?” he said.
“Uh,” said Bart, “Booger Tom. He told me I was shoveling shit so good, I’d probably make a mouth-harp player, and he showed me a few things. It’s pretty simple, really.” He slapped the harmonica against his palm to clear it of spittle and put it back in his duffel.
“If it is your country,” said Bart, “and I seem to remember that the Canadians gave it back to you, why can’t you just say no?”
Lucky explained that the long legal process hadn’t extinguished rights and interests and there were so many that the courts would be full for a century. The government of Canada was treacherous about its gifts. After all, they were English.
Yeah, Du Pré thought, I hear that joke once, Frenchman going to kill you, he explains it logically; the German weeps a lot; and the Englishman just does it and says, “What knife?”
A crowded world growing more hungry and cold.
Du Pré was beginning to like this long, dark wood, though, the loon cries, the water everywhere. Montana was a tough desert till you got to the mountains. It was the winter that made
CHAPTER 12
T HE C REES SANG AS THEY paddled. They hadn’t before. The songs were sad, the melodies on a strange tonal scale.
Early one morning, as they were loading the canoes, the Crees began a ballad, one in English, the words so burred Du Pré couldn’t make them out. The song was about the burning of the Highlands.
“Where you learn that?” he asked Lucky.
Lucky shrugged. One of the Cree women, Françoise, said that the Hudson’s Bay factors were usually Highland Scots. Their blood was commingled with that of the Cree/Chippewa, and many of the people scattered across the length and breadth of the Canadian fur trade had Scottish surnames.
“Mine’s Roudedge,” said Françoise. She was a pretty woman. The light of the fire shone red in her black hair.
The Scots and the French, Du Pré thought. Them Jesuits must have been the hell and gone to the Rockies before we lost the war with the English. The one in the 1760s.
“Do you know ‘Brave Wolfe’?” Du Pré said.
They nodded and sang it. Brave Wolfe dying on the Plains of Abraham. But the English took Quebec. And the Cajuns were removed to Louisiana.
The day was blustery, with high stratocirrus cloud and vees of geese flying in huge circles, to toughen the young birds for flying over half the continent to winter in the swamps of the Gulf Coast. They passed a flock feeding on wild rice in a shallow backwater. An old admiral goose honked contemptuously at them, bidding them be gone, and soon.
Fall came early this far north. Already a few times, there had been a thin skim of ice on the shores. The insects had pretty well died off, all but the infernal no-see-ums. Bart had brought along a cure for them; he said he had gotten it on a fishing trip to Alaska. White tequila rubbed on the face kept the fierce, tiny insects at bay. He would not use it himself.
That night, the Quebec Indians talked sorrowfully of their homes, how a few thousand of them had gone back to the old ways in the vast forests far from the whites and alcohol, one as disorienting as the other. They tried to live as their ancestors had done before the whites came, but that was impossible.
“It’s hard to give up nails and twist drills and tea,” Lucky said, laughing, “and why spend a day braiding spruce roots when you can pay a dollar for a big ball of twine?”
The Jesuits and Anglicans still moved among them, welcomed by most.
There were those, however, who would destroy everything they had. New York in its hunger for electricity and Hydro-Quebec, the giant electrical-generation company, proposed $20 billion worth of dams in the far north country.
Cities, they are vampires with very long fangs, Du Pré thought.
Bart shyly brought forth a harmonica one night and added lonesome notes to a slow sad song Du Pré was fiddling. Du Pré looked at him in surprise.
“When you learn to do that?” he said.
“Uh,” said Bart, “Booger Tom. He told me I was shoveling shit so good, I’d probably make a mouth-harp player, and he showed me a few things. It’s pretty simple, really.” He slapped the harmonica against his palm to clear it of spittle and put it back in his duffel.
“If it is your country,” said Bart, “and I seem to remember that the Canadians gave it back to you, why can’t you just say no?”
Lucky explained that the long legal process hadn’t extinguished rights and interests and there were so many that the courts would be full for a century. The government of Canada was treacherous about its gifts. After all, they were English.
Yeah, Du Pré thought, I hear that joke once, Frenchman going to kill you, he explains it logically; the German weeps a lot; and the Englishman just does it and says, “What knife?”
A crowded world growing more hungry and cold.
Du Pré was beginning to like this long, dark wood, though, the loon cries, the water everywhere. Montana was a tough desert till you got to the mountains. It was the winter that made
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