Kanata (10 page)

The river was wide and muddy with runoff. Past the mouth of the Snake River there was a village of twenty huts and no sign of life. Thompson put the boats ashore to survey the huts, which were crude and sat on dark volcanic soil as fine as dust. Two old men emerged from the pine forest, crawling naked over the rock. Behind them were three women on their knees, their hands lifted in supplication. Ignace spoke briefly to them. They had seen a white man (Meriwether Lewis, Thompson later discovered) shoot a sandhill crane out of the sky. They didn't know if Lewis was human. They didn't know what Thompson was.

Ignace told Thompson they had to leave, and when they were on the water, he refused to answer any of Thompson's questions.

The cedar boats moved downriver in an ethereal parade, the late-morning sun framing fifty men along the crest of a two-hundred-foot ridge, staring down at them, arrows poised in their bows. Thompson and his men moved slowly, glancing up at the painted faces as they passed.

“What do they want?” MacKay asked.

“I don't know,” Thompson said. “I don't think they know, either.”

“If they let those arrows go, we're done. There's no refuge.”

“Don't look at them. Paddle steadily. They won't fire without cause.”

“And what would bloody cause be, do you imagine? We reach for a drink? We paddle too slow? Too fast? We talk like the devil?”

They camped downstream, and Coté ate a red mushroom and became feverish. He began roaring, and waded into the river, screaming he was a fish, that he would fish for himself.
Pêche pêcheur ma pêche
. They dragged him out of the water and laid him near the fire. The fever faded and he slept for twenty hours.

Thompson wanted to see the ocean, to gaze toward China sitting invisible on the horizon.

The next morning, he saw a harbour seal sitting on a rock.

T
he Americans had gotten to the Pacific first. The
Tonquin
had left New York in September, provisioned by John Jacob Astor and crewed by adventurers, some of them former Nor'Westers, and they had sailed around the Horn and up the west coast. They arrived in spring and built Fort Astoria. Thompson came ashore and introduced himself, and he and the Americans stood at the edge of the Pacific, assessing one another as civilized men and enemies.

Thompson recognized one of the Indians at Fort Astoria. It was One-Standing-Lodge-Pole Woman, who had been Pareil's wife briefly. She was witchy and loose, and Thompson had ordered her out of the camp in the Flat Bow country after he found her naked, entertaining Bouland and Coté. He feared she would set his men against one another, less a moral decision than a strategic one. Thompson had heard that she'd since declared she was a man, and a prophet no less. She took a wife and left for the Oregon Country. And
now here she was, dressed as a man in blue pants with a red sash, shells in her nose and a tattoo under one eye. She gave Thompson a look of recognition and disdain. The Americans told him that her name was Qanqon and that they wanted her out of camp—she was spooking the Indians and jeopardizing their trade. MacKay suggested sewing her into a bag and drowning her like a pup.

Qanqon walked over to Thompson. “A disease will move into your heart,” she told him. “And live there forever.”

LOST

1840 –1857

What is a child? A simple question, you'd think. But there were nine-year-olds working sixteen-hour days in English factories. Such was childhood. Thompson was fifteen when he sailed off to the New World to work. He never knew his father—not that there was any model for fatherhood then. Children were sent away: to school, to work, to die. Thompson had thirteen children with Charlotte, and then there was Tristan. Fourteen children. He travelled with them, showed them the natural world, taught them how to write. He wanted to invent fatherhood, like everything else.

When Thompson was living among the Peigans, a young man announced he intended to eat his sister. He repeated this thought for several days. His parents became worried and sent his sister away and the young man said he would still need human flesh to eat. He said this calmly, as if deciding on fish for dinner. The council met and decided that a Weetego—an evil spirit—had entered the boy, and he was sentenced to death. The father was to be his executioner, not out of a sense of cruelty but to avoid any possibility of
retaliation. The next day the father told his son of this decision and the boy received the news without emotion. “I am willing to die, Father,” he said. He sat in a circle of men, and the father stood behind him and wrapped a cord around his son's neck and strangled him, his tears falling onto his son's head until he stopped moving.

How to protect your children? From the natural world, from strangers, from each other? From themselves.

Michael looked at Billy. Was he a child? A teenager, that twentieth-century invention. The concept of childhood revolved around innocence, a state that didn't last long in previous centuries. Perhaps not in this one either. That idea of an innocence uncorrupted by civilization was what Rousseau had embraced. Who knew how innocent Billy was? Not much was known about the evening he got hurt. He was out with others, drinking. A small-town Saturday night. His father was an oil worker, a big, sullen man who was home rarely and when he was, he made people nervous, including Billy, Michael guessed.

He had seen Billy's mother visiting, a small woman with blue-black hair who hovered over her son. She might have been chanting something. She didn't drive and lived twenty miles away and it would be hard for her to visit. She had other children and her husband was gone most of the time. She would come when she could, unsure of whether she was visiting or mourning him.

Thompson had some money when he came to Montreal. This was when you made your money in the country then retired to the city. Now, of course, it's the opposite. Montreal was a city of brilliant divisions: English/French; Protestant/Catholic; the Scottish elite living in mansions on the hill while the Irish suffered on the choleric floodplain below. It was a romantic place, though, even then, and it drew restless villagers and young people who want that sense of possibility that cities sell.

Thompson flourished in the wilderness, where he made his own path. But he didn't have much luck in the city. Those paths had already been laid out. The city didn't offer possibility for Thompson; the wilderness did, with its epic space. The city was a narrowing of possibility. Cities were glorious if you were wealthy, hell if you were poor. Thompson had money when he arrived in Montreal and then lost it all. Like people, cities lurch toward oblivion even as they grow, the stones crumbling, systems failing. It's sometimes hard to tell progress from decline.

1

M
ONTREAL,
1840

Thompson rose early and uncertainly, his bad leg brittle in the cold. It had been bothering him more than usual lately. He dressed quickly, not waking Charlotte, who was asleep under the heavy covers. Her hair was still black at fifty-four. He couldn't remember the last time they had made love. Two years ago, perhaps. He left their small apartment, carefully negotiating the iron stairs. It was April, though there was still a foot of snow on the ground.

He had retired to Montreal in 1812, the year of the war. A war where both sides claimed victory, a modern idea. Thompson had seen the clash with the Americans coming, the lack of clarity about the border, the chafing of interests at the Pacific, the growing ambition in the American
Congress. It wasn't the numerical difference between the two countries that had worried him (Canada had only half a million people, some of them Americans, while the United States had seven million). No, the problem was that Canada had yet to become a country. It was still an idea, forming slowly. Who would fight for it? What would they be fighting for? The unarticulated nation that sits sublime and separate in each head.

That year he drew his map. In the rented home in Terrebonne (a blissful time, wondrous and almost incomprehensible now), he had approached his masterwork, drawing the imagined nation as the Americans marched over the border with their guns, their imperial hopes meeting with disaster at Crysler's Farm. Each section of rag linen paper was two feet by eighteen inches. He had stretched each one taut and fitted it into the frame and then scaled the outline. He made ink from oak apple galls boiled with iron sulphate and gum arabic and it went onto the paper in a rich oily stream and dried to a softer shade.

The flow of rivers was indicated with a feathered pattern and mountain elevations were noted. More than two million square miles of country laid out in a form that could be understood, settled, sold. He worked at night, by candlelight, for seven months. The twenty-five separate sheets glued together with mucilage, assembling the country even as it was being invaded. Was he mapping something that didn't exist?

In August 1814, as he was finishing the map, an army of four thousand British soldiers marched on Washington, setting fire to all that would burn, and like Moscow when Napoleon tried to take the city, it lit the night. The Library of Congress was burned to the ground, those pages of recent
history floating softly like black snowflakes on the summer breeze. The White House was burned too, but President James Madison's wife, Dolley, had the presence of mind to save the original Declaration of Independence and a lifesized portrait of George Washington, aware, even as the Capitol burned, its written deeds obliterated, that nations are built on symbols, not history. The map had brought him satisfaction—the culmination of a life's work. But it hadn't brought profit.

There weren't many people about on the streets. A few horses moved along McGill Street, pulling coal and wood in the dark. He found it comforting to walk in the snow; it made the city more humane. There is equality in adversity, he thought. He walked briskly, his bad leg moving with a slight swing to it. His good eye was failing, and in the dawn light, images occasionally became muffled and indistinct, as if he was walking in a dream. A seventy-year-old man moving carefully in the dark.

The row houses of Griffintown were beginning to erupt. Behind each peeling door was a large family, sometimes two, desolate Irish who had fled famine. They had stayed in the immigrant sheds on Grosse Isle on the St. Lawrence River, herded like cattle into quarantine, and they died by the hundreds of cholera or typhus, pressed against each other in those rooms, staring into one another's doomed faces. The children of the dead were delivered to the city like dark gifts, raised by nuns or relatives or worse.

Thompson walked up the hill, past the mansions built by tobacco and fur and beer fortunes. He knew some of these men, had met them in the North West. The city had grown up around them like Nineveh, suddenly formidable, stupid with money.

The April snow was heavy and he pulled his leg through it with some effort. He saw a child bundled in dark clothes sitting on the back of a coal wagon, a girl whose face was dusted black. She might have been six, out with her father to make the morning deliveries. He thought about his daughter Emma, dead at seven, as innocent a being as ever walked this earth, and he was surprised to find himself crying. Her death remained incomprehensible to him, the severest test of his faith. For a week he held her, giving her calomel and castor oil, trying to kill the fever. Her small body was limp and then felt weightless, and finally, cold. She returned to him in a handful of images that had become like etchings, worn from so much use.