The Broken Blade Read online

  CHAPTER 9

  A Long Day’s Paddle

  THE BRIGADE WAS up again at four A.M., and with the Long Sault behind them, the voyageurs were in great spirits. While Mr. McKay was still in his tent getting dressed, La Londe grinned and said, “Watch this.” Pierre’s eyes widened as La Londe sneaked behind McKay’s tent and released the support poles. To everyone’s delight, the tent collapsed. Unbothered, McKay crawled out the door opening and stood with his pants at half-mast.

  Pulling his suspenders up, he eyed the likely culprit. “Top of the morning to you, gentlemen,” the big Scotsman said, making no effort to hide his grin. “It cheers my heart to see ye all so anxious to get under way.”

  “That we are, sir,” La Londe replied, “and awaiting your good guidance.” With that they all had a good laugh. Pierre chuckled until his belly felt warm.

  The prospect of a daylong paddle was frightening, but the good humor of the morning relaxed him. And as they started upriver, La Petite and La Londe led the men in song. Old French sea chants, folksongs, and silly rhymes echoed up and down the river as Pierre dug in with his paddle.

  The sun warmed Pierre’s shoulders as it rose, illuminating the left-hand shore and finally the river. Thin trails of mist lifted off the water. Birds rustled through the dry leaves on the near bank. A stilt-legged heron stalked his breakfast in a reed bed.

  Pierre tried to follow his bowman’s advice. He sang along with the men. He studied the stately pines and the distant ridges. He imagined where the blue Ottawa would eventually lead them, but his hands still throbbed. Forgetting the effort of paddling by losing himself to other thoughts sounded simple, but his hands were so puffed and swollen that he felt as if chunks of skin were pulling loose from them.

  He thought about school, imagining Celeste in her seat by the window. He saw the morning sun shining on her silky black hair and her blue dress, patterned with tiny white flowers. About now Sister Marguerite was standing before the class, saying, “Take your places now, children.”

  Closing his eyes for an instant, Pierre could smell the chalk dust and the freshly oiled maple floor and the damp winter clothing drying on a line behind the stove. He could hear Sister reading her favorite Bible verse: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves …”

  When the brigade stopped for breakfast, La Londe checked on Pierre’s hands. “So how’s the paws holding up today?” he asked, reaching out to inspect a hand.

  “Whew,” he whistled, studying the oozing blisters. “Looks like you been leaning on a hot griddle. These are almost as bad as mine were on my first trip out. My hands blistered up and bled so bad that I whined constantly. The fellows threatened to throw me in for fish bait.” La Londe laughed. “Let me show you a little trick.”

  While breakfast was cooking, the bowman took some deerhide strips out of his pack. “It’s doeskin—the softest stuff you could ever find,” he said. Then he took Pierre’s paddle and wrapped the handle with several turns. “There, that should help—”

  “What’s this?” Beloît interrupted. “Does our puppy need padding for his little hands?”

  Pierre looked away, but the ugly man stepped closer and examined the newly wrapped paddle. “If I’d only known,” he continued in mock concern, “my mother has some pretty silk gloves she could have loaned—”

  La Londe cut him off, saying, “Stick your ugly puss in somebody else’s business.”

  As Beloît walked off cackling, La Londe said, “Consider the source. Don’t let him get to you.” But Pierre hated Jean Beloît more and more every day. He stared after him. If only he could crack the crude fellow over the head with his paddle. One hard swing was all he wanted. Pierre smiled to himself as he imagined the cedar blade splintering over the brute’s head. He was sure the other crewmen would cheer, and even if Beloît stabbed him in the heart, Pierre would die content.

  The padded handle helped, but the pain was still severe. Shortly after breakfast, it began to rain. Pierre pulled his cap over his ears and hunched down, but the other men all pulled their shirts off and stuffed them under the oilcloth tarp that protected the freight.

  Steam rose off the naked shoulders of the crew. Pierre watched the rain bead up on dark-skinned Emile, who was sitting directly in front of him. As the rain increased, water coursed down his back. Charbonneau leaned toward Pierre, saying, “If it wasn’t too late I’d tell you to shed your clothing.”

  “What good would that do?” Pierre asked.

  “You’ll see shortly,” Emile said, turning. His expression made Pierre nervous, for though Emile had only been in the brigades for two years, he knew a lot about the voyageur life.

  A short while later Pierre understood Emile’s grin. Though the other men paddled freely, his soaked shirt made it hard for him to lift his arms. The heavy fabric clung to his shoulders, and his collar channeled a river down his back and into his pants.

  Soon he began to itch. He twisted on his seat between paddle strokes, and Charbonneau chuckled. “What is the trouble, monsieur?” he asked. “Have you wet your britches, perhaps?”

  When the sun came out, the other men put their shirts back on, but Pierre took his off and draped it over the gunwale to dry. The flies swarmed over him. One bit him on the shoulder and two more left big welts in the middle of his back.

  “You must have sweet blood,” Charbonneau remarked. “The flies sing like they’ve found a honey pot.”

  Though it didn’t make sense, the pain of his bites made him forget the pain of his paddling. He didn’t even know what had happened until their next rest stop. Pierre put his hand on the gunwale and got a jolt of pain. The blisters were raw, but he couldn’t remember when he’d last felt them.

  Could those old-timers be right after all? Pierre wondered as he stepped onto the beach.

  While the crewmen lit their pipes and rested, Pierre stretched his legs and studied his swollen hands.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Confluence of the

  Mattawa

  THE DAYS ON the Ottawa River passed in a rushing blur. Life for Pierre was reduced to water and sky and the churning paddles of the bright-prowed canoes.

  “It will get easier before you know it, Pierre,” La Londe insisted more times than the boy could count. But for Pierre the days got longer and harder. A cold front moved in, and each morning there was a heavy coating of frost on the canoes and a rim of ice at the river’s edge. The voyageurs woke up cursing the cold as they brushed ice crystals from their mustaches.

  The bright chill reminded Pierre of a Christmas when Father took him and Camille on a sleigh ride. Father hitched their plow horse to an old wooden sledge, and as they started up a spruce-lined trail, Camille and Pierre cheered. On the way home they sang loud carols and giggled when Father drove so fast that the snow stung their cheeks and Camille’s hair blew straight back and tickled Pierre’s nose.

  La Londe reminded Pierre of the joy his father had shown that Christmas long ago. Every day was a holiday to La Londe. No matter how much the rest of the crew complained, he stayed cheerful. “There’s no finer weather than this,” he preached to Pierre. “No bugs. No rain. Bright mornings made for hard paddling.”

  Just when Pierre was convinced he would see no relief from the cold, the weather suddenly changed. On their first day on the Mattawa River, they awoke to the coldest weather yet. By afternoon, however, the wind shifted to the south. The men had their shirts off, and their backs were soon glistening in the sun.

  That evening, as the brigade rounded a quick bend, Beloît spotted a deer swimming across the river. “Supper off the port bow,” he sang out. The young doe saw the canoe bearing down and pumped her legs violently to escape.

  Beloît aimed his pistol and fired. Pierre winced, but there was only a click. The men, starved for meat, let out a collective groan. Recalling Bellegarde’s duck soup and trying to imagine how the cook might fit a deer into his kettle, Pierre secretly cheered for t
he animal to escape.

  Beloît tossed his gun aside and grabbed a metal-shoed setting pole. He swung hard, catching the deer flush on the head. The animal went limp, and the men howled with joy.

  Pierre shuddered when he heard the deer’s skull crack. The violence stunned him. Here was a gentle, warm day at last, he thought, spoiled by sudden blood. It wasn’t that he’d never seen a deer killed. Since he’d turned ten, he had hunted deer and rabbits and grouse with his father. Nearly everyone in Lachine depended on wild game, especially venison, to supplement their diets. But this rude killing—made worse, no doubt, by Beloît’s hands—violated the peace of the day. To Pierre it was like witnessing a murder in a church.

  The men were totally unbothered, and on shore a holiday atmosphere prevailed. Everyone whistled and sang as they gathered firewood. The only tense moment came when Bellegarde approached the deer carcass with his dirty knife and La Londe yelled, “Hands off.”

  “The cooking’s my job,” Bellegarde insisted.

  Beloît added, “You tend your soup pot.”

  The cook withdrew, grumbling, and before the fire had even burned down to coals, Beloît and La Londe gutted, skinned, and quartered the deer. Soon the smell of roasting venison was overpowering the stale odor of boiled corn. The men looked ready to bite off a half-cooked hunk. Beloît teased them, saying, “This meat’s for our canoe. You can do your own hunting.”

  La Petite said, “It’s not funny to joke with starving men.”

  “Who’s joking?” countered Beloît. “Nobody’s ever starved on a diet of good boiled corn.”

  Despite the teasing, there was meat enough for everyone. After one tentative taste, Pierre tore into a juicy slab, not even noticing that he burned the roof of his mouth on the sizzling fat.

  When he was finished, Pierre sat back and looked at the savage men around him. Emile’s face was slick with grease, and his curly head was capless for a change. The back of Beloît’s hands were still bloody from his butchering, but he sat, unbothered as always by his un-cleanliness. The rest of the crew sat in the flickering firelight, grinning like wolves sated by a fresh kill.

  La Londe stood up and patted his bulging stomach. “Looks like we have a little extra cargo to portage tomorrow, my friend.”

  Pierre smiled and wiped the grease from his own face with his shirt sleeve. Then he crawled toward the shelter of his canoe, anxious for the comfort of sleep.

  CHAPTER 11

  The French River

  THE GOOD WEATHER held, and the spirits of the crew remained high as they paddled the length of the Mattawa. At Talon Falls, the point where their upstream labors ended, the voyageurs held an impromptu celebration. La Londe started things off by slipping the metal shoe off his setting pole. He needed to save the metal part for the trip back, but the wooden pole would not be needed on the big lakes ahead. Flinging it spear-fashion into the pool at the base of the falls, he yelled, “Goodbye, and good riddance to ugly upstream poling.”

  The crew cheered as the other bowmen tossed their poles aside too. The middlemen splashed each other with their paddles, and one overexuberant fellow knocked Pierre’s cap into the water.

  The rugged portage to Trout Lake did little to dampen the spirits of the men. Pierre was amazed at how fast they covered the interlinked series of creeks and beaver ponds that led to Lake Nipissing. The bugs were horrible. Once Pierre opened his mouth to ask La Londe a question, and he swallowed a cluster of gnats in a single gulp. La Londe laughed and slapped him on the back saying, “A little extra meat will do you good, my friend, but leave a few for seed. You don’t want to eat up all the breeding stock.”

  As they began their traverse of Nipissing, the men feathered their paddles, turning them flat into the wind on each forward stroke and pulling at a quicker than normal pace without any urging.

  “What’s the hurry?” Pierre turned and asked Charbonneau.

  “Nipissing is too shallow. Easy to be degrade.”

  “The waves are worse on shallow lakes?” Pierre asked.

  Charbonneau nodded. He was in no mood to chat. Pierre knew the meaning of dégradé. His father sometimes talked about being wind-bound on Superior and Huron, but the idea of being stuck on an inland lake was new to Pierre.

  They took a pipe stop on an island near the middle of the lake, and Pierre went for a walk. At the edge of a clearing only a dozen paces from the beach, Pierre was shocked to find three red crosses made from broken paddles and tied together with rawhide thongs.

  “It’s a sad sight, eh, Pierre?” Pierre was startled by La Londe, who was looking over his shoulder at the markers. “All that’s left is a splash of red paint and a broken paddle blade. A sudden squall … a rock in the bow … and the cold does its trick.” La Londe paused and ran his fingers through his famous hair. “Then the company writes a fancy letter.”

  Pierre knew about those letters. One afternoon when he was small, he was trying to sneak up on a pigeon in the barn loft with his slingshot. Camille, who was standing at the base of the ladder, yelled to scare the bird away. When he turned to shush his sister, Pierre saw a lone courier riding toward their cabin. “Mother,” he called to the house, “a man’s coming.”

  By the time Pierre climbed down, Mother was standing in the doorway, pale and tight-lipped. Pierre was confused, since strangers were always welcome at their home. Only after his mother gave the horseman directions to a house at the far end of the village did she explain that one of Father’s voyageur friends had died.

  “I’ve seen the letters they bring, Pierre,” she said. “They come with money that means nothing, and they flower up dying with grand words like pride and service and duty. They speak of the ‘good of the company.’ But what it all comes down to is dead and drowned and never ever coming through that door again.…” Her voice trailed off as she stared in the direction of the vanishing man.

  The next morning the energy of the men reached a new level when they broke camp and started down the French River. La Londe told Pierre the seventy-mile stretch of water that led to Lake Huron would be an easy one-day run. “It’s a downhill ride all the way,” he said. “We take a few light pulls, and the river she does the rest.” Pierre was amazed at La Londe’s enthusiasm. Though he was always positive, his face revealed a special energy this day.

  Though La Londe exaggerated a bit—they did have to paddle at their normal rate—their speed was more than doubled by the swift current. When the brigade got to the first rapids, Pierre saw why his bowman was so excited to be on the French River.

  McKay and La Petite climbed onto some boulders that gave them a clear downstream view. “The left-hand channel’s clear all the way,” La Petite called out over the roaring of the water.

  “Get ready for the sleigh ride, gentlemen,” La Londe said.

  One by one the canoes rocketed down the white chute. When It was Charbonneau’s turn, he allowed for a safe spacing between his craft and the one ahead; then he yelled, “Pull!”

  The paddles flashed triple-time. Speed was the key in running white water. If they didn’t keep their craft going faster than the water racing beneath the hull, they were left to the whim of the current. Without proper speed the steersman had no control.

  Just when the big Montreal was going faster than Pierre ever thought it could, they entered the rapids. La Londe twirled his paddle above his head and cut loose with a high-pitched yell. “Hang on, hivernants!” he hollered.

  Time froze as the bow of the canoe jutted out over empty air. The four front paddlers held their blades a moment above the white spillway that fell suddenly out of reach. When the bow finally plunged down, the stern lurched skyward, nearly catapulting Pierre out of his seat. “Eeeee … the boy screamed, and the men yelled and whistled, but the roar of the water drowned them out. A fine mist filled the air as La Londe’s ghost-white hair blew straight back off his shoulders, and the hull hurtled down, down, down.

  A minute later their quarter-mile run was done. As the grinning
canoemen paddled across the pool below the rapids, Pierre’s heart was still racing. The whole way down the rapids he’d thought of nothing but the red crosses that dotted the waterways behind them. Would they place one here for me, as young as I am? he wondered.

  “So how was the ride, Pierre?” Charbonneau asked. If anyone had heard him scream, it was Charbonneau.

  Gulping a deep breath to steady himself, Pierre replied, “It was better than a carry.”

  Charbonneau laughed. “Spoken like a true canoeman. At least we start you out gently.”

  “Gently?” Pierre tried to control his astonishment.

  “Gentle is the word for this sault here,” Charbonneau said, motioning with his head as he spoke. “It is straight and deep. That’s the easy kind. Even in low water a man can run it blindfolded. But the shallow ones, and the ones with quick twists and turns—those are a dog of another color.”

  “Any tough rapids on the French?” Pierre tried to sound relaxed.

  “This is mainly clean chutes. Some are a bit tight—we may scrape our gunwales now and then—but there’s no tricky parts until we near the outlet. There we have a snaky patch of water that will take some good bow work.” He paused. “Not scared, are you?”

  “This old-timer? Scared?” Pierre scoffed, as Charbonneau laughed.

  The closer they got to Lake Huron, the more the channel narrowed. Just when Pierre thought the river couldn’t get any tighter, they shot into the yawning mouth of a gorge that quickly narrowed to only ten or twelve feet. Sheer rock walls rose up to block out the sun.

  For a hundred yards they skimmed down this rock “gut,” paddling as room allowed but mainly giving themselves over to the skill of the foreman’s steering. Once their left gunwale scraped against the side and knocked loose a moss-covered chunk of rock. Another time La Londe had to rap his paddle hard against the cliff to keep the bow from veering too far off line. Pierre edged toward the middle of the canoe, his eyes wide and his mouth open.