Read Online Kanata by Don Gillmor - Free Book Online

everyone.”
    â€œPerhaps I was out,” MacKay said.
    â€œI will tell you something, MacKay. I see no future with the Hudson’s Bay Company. They’ve neglected their duty to explore. I’m preparing to leave. I’ve no more patience for these men.”
    â€œThey’ll begrudge you.”
    â€œI suppose they will. No matter. I’m going to take a position with the North West Company.”
    â€œA Nor’Wester. You’ll be singing vile songs in French and fornicating without shame.”
    â€œYou would fit, MacKay. You should think of it as well.” MacKay had been a fine companion. He would be the only thing he missed. Was he turning his back on the British Empire? Perhaps it had turned its back on him. “They’ll allow me to explore.”
    â€œExplore what.”
    â€œThe country.”
    â€œI’ll save you the bother, Davy. It’s more of the same from here to China. More cold, more Indians, more mosquitoes. You can tell the Nor’Westers that.”
    T he North West Company was based in Montreal, and was fuelled by energetic French who paddled thousands of miles to visit the Indians, undermining the Hudson’s Bay Company’s monopoly. They gave Thompson a sextant in a cork-lined box with quicksilver and parallel glasses, an achromatic telescope, drawing instruments, and two thermometers, and ordered him to go south and make contact with the Mandans, and to find the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
    Thompson had persuaded MacKay to join the Nor’Westers, and MacKay stood before him, staring at this short, half-blind, half-lame explorer.
    â€œI hear the Mandans eat the tongues of their enemy,” MacKay said. “I hear everyone is their enemy. Watch yourself, Davy.”
    â€œI will.”
    â€œYou’ll only find more of the same. I could draw you the map now. Save you the grief.”
    â€œGrief is what makes a map, MacKay.”
    â€œYou’re still working for God, then? He traffics in grief.”
    â€œGod and country.”
    â€œThis isn’t a country, Davy, and it will take a lot more than you to make it one.”
    Thompson left the next morning and camped beside a pine that was in the middle of the plain. There were faded red markings at the base of the tree, and beside it were the bleached bones of a horse. He fell asleep quickly and dreamed of a snake eating a larger snake in an English garden. Mice scurried among rotting vegetables. He awoke from the dream like a worm emerging from the earth. You cut a worm in half and you get two worms—two lives, twice the adventure, twice the misery. Or did all the misery staywith one half ? The sun lingered below the horizon and a coyote paced fifty yards away.
    He walked for five weeks into the hostile wind that came down from the mountains, and arrived in late December. The Mandan village had orderly lines and snow-covered fields where corn had been harvested. Only a few men were in the village, and Thompson sat with an elder who, through the pantomime that accompanied the story, told him that all the men were off at war.
    A man with long dark hair tied up with bird skulls sat in the hut staring at Thompson while the old man talked. He came over, a walk that was European. He spoke French.
    â€œYou have come to study the savages,” he said, and introduced himself as Michel Antoine.
    â€œThey grow corn?” Thompson asked.
    â€œAnd beans, some pumpkins.”
    â€œHow long have you been here?” Thompson asked. The man was dressed as a Mandan. His dark hair helped disguise him, and his face, with its slight, spotty beard, could pass as native. But he didn’t move as they did.
    â€œFifteen years.”
    â€œWhat brought you here?”
    â€œLove,” he said.
    â€œAnd that is what keeps you here?”
    The man shook his head and laughed. “No,” he said. “Habit.”
    T he war party returned after dark, perhaps fifty