Read Online Kanata by Don Gillmor - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Don Gillmor
Tags: Historical
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men. Antoine conferred with them and told Thompson they had been fighting the Cheyenne to the south. They had entered an enemy village and killed everyone except three women,whom they took as prisoners and who now walked in their midst. Some of the Mandans carried leather bags. In the largest lodge they emptied their sacks and the heads of their enemies rolled out, the faces drained of blood, the mouths open and terrible.
One of the women prisoners held an eight-month-old baby. After hurried preparation, there was a war dance, and the three women stood inside a hostile circle of chanting men. Women and children banged pots. Thompson counted twenty-three heads lying at their feet. He watched as the woman with the infant picked up the head of her dead husband by the hair and kissed his drained lips and pressed the head to her babyâs mouth. Two Mandan men quickly took the head away. One of them scalped it. The woman held up her child to heaven and sang a short song. She kissed her child and placed it on the ground and took a sharp knife from her deerskin garment and plunged it into her own heart and fell among the heads. One of the Mandan women picked up the baby and held it and sang softly into its ear.
In the morning, the slain woman was buried as a warrior. Thompson stared at her face. Where does such defiance come from? he wondered. Where did you find such faith, such love?
5
à LE-Ã-LA C ROSSE, N ORTH W EST, 1799
In 1799 there was already the breathlessness of a new century. Napoleon had seized power in France, the Corsican peasant who embraced democracy, aristocracy, and the military with equal fervour, who needed to swallow the world and immersed himself in Josephine, whispering that she was his homeland, he lived only in her, her smell of drying leaves and damp mornings, leaving her wetness on his chin at breakfast. It hadnât been that longâsix yearsâsince Louis XVI had had his head removed by the heavy blade of the guillotine, held up wigless and slack-faced to a cheering crowd. Those pints of blood spraying over the rough wooden shackles and cleaned up ten hours later by atoothless woman using dirty water and a coarse broom. So ended a century of divine right.
In England, George III had lost part of an empire in America and was losing his mind. The monarch was now an amiable rustic, walking the countryside, admiring its orchards, his long hair unkempt, asking farmersâ wives to share their recipes for apple dumplings, smiling like a simpleton.
The world was shifting, ancient hatreds and new appetites redrawing the borders. North America hadnât been concisely divided; it awaited a fresh war, treaties, and cartography.
Thompson thought that he would bring the North West into existence with hard lines. The land didnât come before the map, he thought: the map creates the land. A map was knowledge. At some point, there would be claims upon that land, as there were upon all lands. Thompson believed that the North would be the only part of the continent not taken from the Indians by fraud or by force, saved by its barrenness.
Thompson saw the future arrive like a starving wolf and he saw the poverty that would follow the destruction of the beaver, its death coming from over-trapping and an equally cruel predatorâfashion, the beaver hats suddenly become barbarous anomalies in the closets of Europe. Elders already warned of a looming desert, of crows descending on a dying nation like a black wind.
T hompson needed a woman. This was Godâs purpose. What other point to this journey? He was Godâs witness, but who would be his?
Charlotte Small arrived like a revelation, as vivid as the devil at the checkerboard, tasting of earth and ashes. She wasthirteen and Thompson was twenty-nine. Her father, Patrick, was a Scot, a Hudsonâs Bay man who had abandoned his country wife and family and retreated to England. Charlotte was tiny and well formed, with the dark eyes and
One of the women prisoners held an eight-month-old baby. After hurried preparation, there was a war dance, and the three women stood inside a hostile circle of chanting men. Women and children banged pots. Thompson counted twenty-three heads lying at their feet. He watched as the woman with the infant picked up the head of her dead husband by the hair and kissed his drained lips and pressed the head to her babyâs mouth. Two Mandan men quickly took the head away. One of them scalped it. The woman held up her child to heaven and sang a short song. She kissed her child and placed it on the ground and took a sharp knife from her deerskin garment and plunged it into her own heart and fell among the heads. One of the Mandan women picked up the baby and held it and sang softly into its ear.
In the morning, the slain woman was buried as a warrior. Thompson stared at her face. Where does such defiance come from? he wondered. Where did you find such faith, such love?
5
à LE-Ã-LA C ROSSE, N ORTH W EST, 1799
In 1799 there was already the breathlessness of a new century. Napoleon had seized power in France, the Corsican peasant who embraced democracy, aristocracy, and the military with equal fervour, who needed to swallow the world and immersed himself in Josephine, whispering that she was his homeland, he lived only in her, her smell of drying leaves and damp mornings, leaving her wetness on his chin at breakfast. It hadnât been that longâsix yearsâsince Louis XVI had had his head removed by the heavy blade of the guillotine, held up wigless and slack-faced to a cheering crowd. Those pints of blood spraying over the rough wooden shackles and cleaned up ten hours later by atoothless woman using dirty water and a coarse broom. So ended a century of divine right.
In England, George III had lost part of an empire in America and was losing his mind. The monarch was now an amiable rustic, walking the countryside, admiring its orchards, his long hair unkempt, asking farmersâ wives to share their recipes for apple dumplings, smiling like a simpleton.
The world was shifting, ancient hatreds and new appetites redrawing the borders. North America hadnât been concisely divided; it awaited a fresh war, treaties, and cartography.
Thompson thought that he would bring the North West into existence with hard lines. The land didnât come before the map, he thought: the map creates the land. A map was knowledge. At some point, there would be claims upon that land, as there were upon all lands. Thompson believed that the North would be the only part of the continent not taken from the Indians by fraud or by force, saved by its barrenness.
Thompson saw the future arrive like a starving wolf and he saw the poverty that would follow the destruction of the beaver, its death coming from over-trapping and an equally cruel predatorâfashion, the beaver hats suddenly become barbarous anomalies in the closets of Europe. Elders already warned of a looming desert, of crows descending on a dying nation like a black wind.
T hompson needed a woman. This was Godâs purpose. What other point to this journey? He was Godâs witness, but who would be his?
Charlotte Small arrived like a revelation, as vivid as the devil at the checkerboard, tasting of earth and ashes. She wasthirteen and Thompson was twenty-nine. Her father, Patrick, was a Scot, a Hudsonâs Bay man who had abandoned his country wife and family and retreated to England. Charlotte was tiny and well formed, with the dark eyes and
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