Rather than seek an explanation within her own soul, she blamed her ennui on the ritual of walking her father to the school each morning and the afternoon tea with her friends. There was the constant turning away of the boorish suitors that every mother in Stromness seemed to send to her door; the banality of the middle class was hers and she would not, could not take to it. It was not long before she found herself once again in unfamiliar alleys and hallways.
Not all of her quests were lascivious in nature. Far from it. She had quickly learned that the bodily passions, while interesting in their own right, left little in their wake besides messy hair and possessive lovers. She was driven by something deeper, more innate. Curious and insatiable was how she described herself when musing on her odd and dangerous behaviour with her friends (some of whom thought her much like a goddess); life was short and living was truly made for the young, and best to just get on with it.
The young man from Ronaldsay was the not her first aboard, but almost certainly the last. It was an impulse fired as much by risk as any real interest on her part; her father had been nearby and that was a true novelty for her as he knew nothing at all of her trysts. She rarely gave her companions much thought; they simply amused her. At best, her feelings went so far as a benign complacency, the way one might offer a stray dog an uncertain pat on the head.
But though her need had not been sated in Stromness, she at least enjoyed the luxury of her unhappiness. Though occasionally placing herself in various compromising positions, she had always enjoyed the luxury of sneaking home for a bath in the small hours (and if by unhappy chance the servants encountered her in the hall or stairwell, they discreetly looked through her in a manner she found quite unnerving, as if she had become a ghost). Father and daughter had been toppled from a comfortable station in Orkney to break bread with the wild and the savage awaiting in Rupert’s Land, and she did not much like it: hers was a sensitive heart, one that should not have to endure such trials.
After several hours of following the coast, the Indian in the bow pulls up his paddle and shouts, “Wapusk, wapusk!” They crane to look; there is something in the water, swimming parallel with them. A wedge-shaped head leaves a trailing wake.
The Indians veer closer, Rose spotting a large, pale body, indistinct beneath the blue of the water. A black nose and small, dark eyes.
“’Tis an Arctic bear,” Lachlan says in awe.
The Indian in the bow nods. “Wapusk.” He brings out his trade musket or fuke and directs them alongside the swimming animal. They see the great paws swinging as it dog-paddles; it turns towards them, but the Indians veer away, maintaining a careful distance.
“Sometime they jump at you,” the Indian says. “And then …” he makes a slashing gesture across his throat.
They follow alongside for several minutes with Rose leaning over the gunwale, admiring the animal. The bear turns to them again, and the Indian in the bow raises his fuke again; a sharp report and water fountains beside the bear’s head. The animal thrashes about, throwing blood and spray. A pall of gun smoke drifts over the canoe.
They paddle up to the bear, and the Indian pulls out a knife as long as his forearm from under his jacket. His grinning teeth white in his scarlet face, he leans over the gunwale and saws at the quivering white neck while the water blossoms red.
The sudden violence shocks Rose. She turns toward her father. Lachlan offers her a damp handkerchief.
“You have blood on your cheek,” he says. The Indians tie the floating carcass to the canoe and return to their former course.
After a couple of hours of a rhythm under which it is difficult for the passengers to keep awake, they pass a long, flat point and the Europeans are surprised to find themselves in the mouth of a large river. As they nose into the current, they see that countless scores of waterfowl inhabit these marshes: the air is shrill with the whistling of duck wings, and massive flocks of geese rise at their approach and settle in the scrub behind them. Small shorebirds wheel and circle along the shore like a moving shadow.
The bank deepens until they come upon a peeled-log wharf and a long gangway on piles leading from the high shore; the upper edge of a palisade and a tall flagstaff is just visible. The Indians turn toward shore, their keel sliding into the muddy bank.
Rose steps out of the canoe and into the cold, peaty water of the river. She sinks into the mud, feeling it squelch beneath her hide-wrapped feet. Her ankles protest the cramped seating and once on firm shore she bends down and rubs them. Her leather leggings are dark with the river.
Above them, a gull sails on the breeze, dipping and rising, but making no headway. The Highlander hurtles a rock and the gull drifts away, disappearing toward the distant, opposing bank.
Their Indians pull the bear to shore. They squat in the mud beside it, the animal’s yellow-white hide now fouled by the slime of the riverbank. They mutter something in their tongue, as if praying; one of them brings out tobacco and offers it to the animal.
“What is this?” Rose asks, pointing.
The officer from the frigate barely glances at the Indians. He is tall and thin, with sparse red hair and a large nose covered with spidery veins. He stands with his hands thrust in his pockets, eyeing the distant palisade with a gloomy look. When he speaks, his Adam’s apple seems to struggle for release.
“It is some manner of heathen ritual,” he says. “When a Savage kills an animal, he must ask it for forgiveness, or some such rot. Pay them no mind.”
“I assume we are at York Fort, Mr. …?” Lachlan trails off.
“Turr. Yes, it is York Fort, and the factor shall be in a hellfire rage at the manner of our arrival. We must get on.”
They leave the Indians to their prayers and begin the ascent up the bank. After so many hours cramped aboard the canoe, it proves hard going for all of them but the Highlander, who scrabbles up like a rat on a mooring line. He reaches the top long before the rest and peers down at them with a grin.
“I think there be three lasses following hard on me, nae one lass and two men.”
“I say!” Turr replies as he scrambles over the bank, his face red. “You affront me undeservedly, sir. This is a wretched climb.”
“Nae affront intended, Mr. Turr.”
They follow the path from the gangway to the gates of the fort. After so many weeks at sea, the exercise is hard going for Rose and she breathes heavily, covering her mouth with her hand. They pass a pair of ancient and rusting field pieces overlooking the river. Turr pats one as he passes.
“These would have been fired in honor of our arrival if fate had been kinder to us,” he says with a sigh.
A line of clouds, heavy with the threat of rain, hurry from the west as they approach the fort. They quicken their steps. Heaps of garbage are scattered about the stockade and a skinned ox carcass has been dumped just outside the fort gate. Felled by some strange disease, not even the Home Guard has touched it. The smell of carrion and smoke fills the air. A pair of ravens flap away croaking as they approach.
Several tipis squat outside the palisade. Rose points them out to Turr. “The Home Guard,” he says with hardly a glance.
“I have heard the term before. What does it mean?”
“It refers to a blackguardly band of thieves and miscreants who, when not thieving, murdering one another or lost in drink, provide the fort with meat, especially in the hungry winter months. I say, it is beginning to rain. We must hurry.”
A high stockade of sharpened spruce sunk into the boggy ground surrounds the fort. The main building — known colloquially as “the octagon” — can only be entered through an archway that