Read Online Kanata by Don Gillmor - Free Book Online Page B

luxuriant blue-black hair of her Cree mother. Thompson was observant, nondescript, his hair cut indifferently by a Cree named, through awkward translation, Kozdaw. He had the same dark eyes as Charlotte, although one of them was useless. He lacked the skills to woo her and simply asked her to be his wife.
    The night before they were married—without benefit of clergy, à la façon du pays —on Île-à-la Crosse, Thompson took a wooden chair outside and set up his telescope and scanned the night sky, happy for the gentle breeze and the solitude. He focused the glass at the moon—the Mare Nubium, Nectaris, Imbrium, and Serenitatis—and stayed up most of the night, as he often did, putting off sleep like a chore.
    The wedding was simple, a brief exchange of vows to be faithful. That night Thompson explored the soft expanse of Charlotte’s perfect skin. She looked up at him as he fumbled for an opening, her eyes filled with fear. Holding this child in his arms after he was spent, Thompson wept along with her.
    He took a bath the next day, pouring boiling water into the tin tub. Her smell was on his body, a scent both new and familiar. In the warm water, he surveyed the pale landscape of his body before scrubbing it with brisk strokes of the hard brush. His form was compact and wiry, a practical machine. His moments last night with Charlotte furthered God’s plan. He lingered over the last scent of her before obliterating it with soap.
    There had been one other before Charlotte, a hasty coupling more than a year earlier, his disappointing andlong-delayed initiation. The following morning, the woman, a Cree, stared silently as Thompson left the trading post and walked west, carrying her stare inside him.
    A t Rocky Mountain House, Thompson spent each evening with Charlotte, teaching her to read English. He read from the Bible—“For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills”—and taught her to write, guiding her child’s hand. They spent hours spelling words.
    â€œTree.”
    â€œT-R-E,” Charlotte said.
    â€œE.”
    â€œHills.”
    â€œH-I-L-S.”
    â€œH-I-L-L-S.”
    â€œDavid, my head is bad. I can’t think of more words.”
    â€œYour head isn’t bad. It will come. It takes time. We have time.”
    â€œI’ll never understand them.”
    â€œYou’ll be teaching our children,” he said. “Sky.”
    â€œS-K-I.”
    Each night, Thompson mapped her, her scent and movements, the small rises, the contours and stained hollows.
    By spring, Charlotte was swollen. In the rough hut, she began to breathe irregularly. The child came in a rush of fluid, the hard breathing of Charlotte suspended briefly, as if gathering for a scream. Thompson cut the cord with a knife heated over a flame and looked at the girl who had gushedout, black haired and down covered, alien and inevitable. She slept in her mother’s arms, and they all lay amid the wet bloody sheets. They named her Fanny.
    With Charlotte, Thompson was no longer an exile. The fourteen-year-old mother of his child. His child and their child.

6
    T HE R OCKY M OUNTAINS, 1807
    With nine voyageurs, among them MacKay, and two Iroquois named Charles and Ignace, Thompson took his family to cross the Rocky Mountains. There were three children now—Fanny, Samuel, and Emma. Thompson believed he could follow the Columbia River to its mouth at the Pacific Ocean and find a navigable route through the mountains, the culmination of three centuries of European dreams. The Americans were looking for the same thing. So, a race.
    They paddled up the North Saskatchewan River, past Kootenay Plains and over Howse Pass, and arrived at Lake Windermere in mid-July. They built two cabins near theshore and spent the winter there, trading with the Kootenay Indians.
    Thompson had heard that the