An old Indian woman — with hair as long and white as her robe and with a face the texture and colour of old boot leather — leans sideways and farts. She opens a toothless mouth in a broad grin. Everyone begins giggling.
Rose turns to the woman with the infant and hesitatingly introduces herself. The child suckles with great vigour. Its mother stares into the fire. After a long pause she replies, “I am Isqe-sis.”
“Thank you for helping us, Isqe-sis. We would not have survived on the beach.”
Isqe-sis looks up at her. “No good you die there. Tomorrow take to fort. Much …” she thinks a moment, “gifts for your lives: knives, pots, blankets. This why we do.”
“You mean a reward?”
The woman nods.
“I see.” Rose frowns. “Is this fort very far?”
“No far. One day’s journey.”
Rose thinks the utilitarian motives for the Indian’s help far from Christianlike, and though it gives her a vague sense of being a hostage, she realizes their value is in being kept alive, therefore it is unlikely that any of them will be murdered or eaten. She had expected to see scalps hanging from the poles of the tipi and is surprised that there is only a few ermine, a white goose, and a pair of skin bags containing the dried meat and the strange tea. Despite herself, she feels vaguely disappointed at how crudely prosaic it all seems.
“Rose? Is that you?” Her father taps on the outside of the tipi.
Standing outside, huddled in their borrowed skins and blankets, they stare with fear at the encircling forest. Twisted black spires leaning this way and that, hung with pale green epiphytes that flutter like nightmarish cobwebs in the thin wind. Shadows lie heavy beneath the trees. The bright skulls of slaughtered animals hang on several boughs, and the clearing looks even more disturbing by day than it had by night.
Another fire had been started, and the old Indian woman walks over to a carcass hanging from a tree. She saws off chunks of meat, impales them on willow twigs, and places them over the fire. The roasting smell is glorious.
The colonists gather around, ravenous. Lachlan asks how Rose is feeling, and she affirms that she is well enough, all things considering.
“Indeed?” Lachlan replies. “Well, my neck’s very sore. But after last night, praise the Lord that we are still drawing breath.”
Rose agrees with him, though she has no idea where they are and is still uncertain of the outlandish people who have rescued them. With a lowered voice, she informs Lachlan that they spoke English. He looks at her with arched eyebrow, but does not respond.
The wind seems to pass through her robe. She doesn’t need to climb a tree to know that the ranks of brush and bole go on for endless leagues. There is something about the chill of the wind, the immutability of it that gives the impression that the surrounding forest is breathing, and is a beast of unimaginable size.
There were the odd winter days in Stromness when the weather turned to the south and the thermometer almost burst in the sudden warmth; she could smell the lush green of distant tropical lands on that breeze, hear the chatter of brightly plumed birds as they swooped from palm to palm.
The air now moving past has that sense of space and distance, but unlike that delicious equatorial ghost, this air whispers of barrenness, speaks of a land cold and empty of anything warm.
After a breakfast in which Lachlan watches the Indians closely, but does not address them beyond a cautious “Thank you, ma’am,” when he is handed a spear of meat, the survivors don what remain of their rags and the Indians give Rose a stained capote and a pair of moose-hide leggings. They are much too large for her and she is required to cinch them high up under her breasts with a length of hemp. The Indians have no moccasins to spare, and she is forced to tie rotten and discarded pieces of hide around her feet.
Several colonists return to the beach. Wreckage is scattered far down the strand, and there are many bodies half-buried in gravel or shrouded in kelp. Of the two ships that accompanied them, there is nothing to be seen.
Rose stands listening to the hush and roar of surf. On the blurred horizon, the grey water blends with the equally sombre sky, making her feel enveloped on all sides by the same empty waste. Somewhere out there is her home, countless leagues east. The ship that had died on these shores had been her only connection with everything she has ever known, and it feels as if a part of her has perished with it.
She feels a sudden tumble of emotion — grief, fear, and anger at her father for bringing them to this terrible place. She had been awed by the enormity of the Northern Sea, and struck dumb by the mountains of blue-green-grey ice through which the Intrepid had attempted to navigate, but any sense of adventure she carried with her from Orkney — a delicate bird it had proved to be — had perished on the night’s killing strand.
Most of all she feels overwhelmed by the emptiness. Her life has been a safe one; she had the time and comfort to believe in adventures filled with courage and extravagant heroism. But their arrival in Rupert’s Land changed everything: wonder and hope becoming meaningless, ignoble death. There is no page to turn or cover to close; she is trapped within a story not of her choosing, facing a future utterly beyond her control. Even now, the men gather to decide the course of action, her voice unimportant and unwanted.
“Damned, unnecessary tragedy,” her father says, standing beside her in his wrinkled coat and breeches. She is startled to see how gaunt he looks, with shadowed cheeks and purple fans below his eyes. His hands tremble. “That captain was a fool,” he says.
“It was an accident, was it not, Father?”
“Yes, Rose, but preventable — ah, look at that damned whitemaa there. Get, get, I say!” He runs waving his hands at a gull that had approached a corpse. The bird spreads its long white wings and floats off, screeing down the beach.
“We must bury these poor folk,” Lachlan says.
“Aye, but with what?” someone replies.
“York Fort will have the tools that we need.”
“Perhaps the other ships, they will find us?”
“They have been scattered by the tempest. But perhaps they will take us south.” Lachlan waves a hand at the Indians.
“Aye,” replied a grizzled Orkneyman. “Ah spoke with their chief, the big buck standing there. He says they can paddle some o’ us down the coast to the fort. It’s nae far, he says, though I dinna much trust him.”
“Pray, lower your voice, sir, they understand English.”
“So kin me dog, but I dinna worry about it.” Several men share a nervous chuckle.
Lachlan looks down at the body. A middle-aged man, naked but for a wrapping of polished green seaweed over his belly and legs. He is on his back, eyes open and staring. Tiny puddles of seawater had collected over his shrunken orbits, and he appears to be studying the sky through spectacles. Lachlan wonders if he had met the man, had spoken to him. He does not remember the face. He reaches over and closes the eyes, wiping his wet fingers on his breeches.
“We cannot leave them here to the whitemaa or be washed out to sea. If we have no means to bury them then we must bring them above the tide, cover them with boughs, and stand watch. This much must be done.”
“But which of us will go with the heathen?”
“I shall go. And my daughter shall go with me as she has lost her habiliments. The Company officer will know from whom at York Fort we should procure assistance. I do not know whom else. You, perhaps.”
The man, a muscular Highlander with a black scraggly beard and weary eyes, nods at him.
The task of gathering the dead is a grisly one, as scavengers have already defiled some of the corpses. At least half of the ship’s complement has died, though most are not accounted for in the pale