Chapter Five
Often in his dreams, Abel Walker goes back again to England.
Sometimes he finds himself in London at the narrow, creaking house on Thames Street where he grew up with his parents and his sister, Agnes, and sometimes in Norfolk, where he went to school for six years before his uncle, acting in his father’s stead, brought him out here to Hudson’s Bay.
These dreams, or at least the ones that he can remember afterward, are wistful and pleasing; there is nothing sad or frightening in them, no sense of doom or worry.
Perhaps his mother is singing softly to herself as she darns by the fire, or perhaps he is walking with a friend through winding country lanes under a sky of perfect cornflower blue.
Afterward, when the dream is over and he wakes up in his narrow room in the men’s house, with the rough sound of coughing and yelling outside and the walls and window caked with ice two inches thick, there is a moment (he cannot help it) of disappointment and dread as he remembers all that he has lost and left behind.
And he must be quick to recollect, before such maudlin feelings have any chance to establish themselves, that time has passed as it always does, that he is not a child any longer, and that, as his uncle always reminds him, nothing worth having was ever won without a fight.
Seven years earlier, when Abel was only twelve years old, his mother died, and his father’s mind became unbalanced.
Henry Walker had always been a moody and unsettled man, and the weight of his loss proved too much for him to bear.
Soon after his wife’s death, he sank into a deep and unreachable gloom broken only occasionally by lightning bursts of animal fury.
No one could help or soothe him, though many tried.
When friends and relations arrived to offer their sympathy and encouragement, he would either sit before them stupefied and silent, or else fly into a great rage and, cursing, drive them away.
The two old servants, Ruth and Mary, who had been fond of the children’s mother, held on as long as they could for her sake, but eventually, insulted and ignored, they left, and Abel and his sister became ever thinner, dirtier, and more disheveled as a consequence.
Instead of going to school, they would walk the London streets hungry and helpless while their father, instead of pursuing his trade as a clockmaker, lay in bed all day, or else sat at his workbench immobile, mumbling to himself and staring at his fingers as if he had forgotten what they could be used for.
How it might have ended if Magnus Norton had not arrived one day fresh from the Company’s supply ship and taken things quickly in hand, no one knew.
As it was, he saw right away the woeful depths his brother-in-law had sunk to and realized what was required.
Within a week, despite Henry Walker’s wild complaining and foul insults, the arrangements were all made, and the children were dispatched away to safety—Abel to a school in the countryside, and Agnes up to Boston in Lincolnshire to live with Mrs. Bourne, a distant cousin.
His uncle had promised then to bring his nephew out to the Bay and teach him the fur trade when he came of age, and he had proved in that, as in all things, true to his word.
Abel Walker has been the assistant clerk at Prince of Wales’ Fort for a year and a half now.
Although the life is sometimes hard, he works diligently and makes sure never to complain.
He strives to please his uncle as best he can, to make him believe that the brave actions he took in the family’s time of sorrow and difficulty were worthwhile and justified.
Sometimes, of course, he fails at his work or shows some small defect of character, and when this occurs, his uncle rebukes him sternly, or even (as has happened once or twice) threatens to send him back to England to fend for himself.
The thought of being so quickly cast aside is a dreadful one for Abel, but Magnus Norton (as his nephew reminds himself if he feels his spirit waver) is a passionate and hard-driven man who insists on the highest standards, so such outbursts are only to be expected now and then and should not be taken too much to heart.
When his uncle and John Shaw first showed him the rock and told him about Ox Lake and the pedlar’s gold, Abel didn’t believe any of it could be real.
He thought the older men were playing games with him as they liked to sometimes, so he waved it all away and told them he was not so foolish or softheaded as to believe such a far-fetched tale.
Even when they insisted, he only shook his head and smiled back knowingly, and it took his uncle’s raising his voice, and Abel Walker’s recognizing the irritation in his eyes, to make him realize that they must be telling him the truth—that what looked like a seam of gold really was gold, and that the expedition north was not some flummery to mock him with but rather a solid and serious intention.
He was flattered, when he understood, to think that they would want to make him so large a part of their plans; it was an act of faith that pleased him and made him proud.
Now that the day of departure has arrived, however, as he stands with Hearn and Shaw outside the ravelin at dawn with the cocks calling out from inside the walls and the sunrise palely banding the eastern sky, instead of pride he feels a cold nervousness edged with dread spreading across his chest and stomach.
The others have warned him that the journey ahead will be long and difficult—he knows that no Company man has ever ventured so deep into the Barrens before—and as he thinks of the vast unhallowed emptiness waiting for him, his mind slides backward, and he suddenly feels once again like the child of twelve wandering the London streets hungry and grief-struck.
Though he pushes the memories away, the same panic that filled his mind in those long-ago days as he thought of his mad father raving at home and of his own feebleness in the face of such a grand calamity comes back again just as strong as before and grips his heart so that he shudders visibly and, without wanting to, gives up a groan.
John Shaw hears the noise and turns to look.
“What is it, Abel?” he asks. “You look pale and clammy. Are you sickening?”
“I expect the lad’s a little nervy,” Hearn says. “It’s a long journey ahead of us and none of us can be sure what dangers we’ll face.”
“Nervy?” Shaw looks surprised and gives Walker a slower, more appraising look. “Are you nervy, Abel?”
“I’m a little tired, that’s all,” he says. “I usually stay another hour or two in my bed.”
“And you lay awake as usual past midnight tugging on your yardarm, I suppose?”
“I did no such thing.”
John Shaw snorts and reaches down to nip him on the balls.
“Don’t you lie to me,” he says, laughing. “You’re a horny little devil, I can tell.”
John Shaw, the deputy, is full of high jinks and knavery this morning, Hearn thinks as he listens to their talk.
Shaw is well-known about the Fort for his gruffness and quick temper, but the prospect of gold has evidently lifted his spirits.
Abel Walker, on the other hand, whatever excuses he makes, looks scared half to death.
They would have been better advised to bring along one of the laborers in his place, Hearn believes, someone a good deal older and more robust. The boy is willing and eager to please—that’s obvious enough—but he spends most of his days sitting inside, writing, tallying figures, or chatting with his uncle, and the soft and easeful life is hardly a good preparation for a hard journey such as this one.
In contrast to Walker and Shaw, the four Indians who make up the remainder of their party—Datsanthi, the captain; his son Nabayah; and their wives, Pawpitch and Keasik—seem neither pleased nor troubled by whatever is to come, as if this day for them, Hearn notes, is hardly different from any other.
In that way, he thinks, they merely follow their own peculiar natures as we follow ours since for the Indians, who have no fixed habitation, movement is the usual state and permanence or stasis the unusual one.
Unlike us, they have no special attachment to any place, so to leave or arrive makes no great difference and stirs no strong emotion either way.
The Englishmen wait a few minutes longer, while the two women, who will pull the sledges, adjust their leather yokes and Datsanthi unties his piebald hunting dogs from the wooden stake and calls them both to heel.
John Shaw, seeing that they are all finally ready to depart, hefts his canvas pack onto his back and tightens his snowshoes, and Norton, after wishing them all good luck and godspeed for the third or fourth time, calls out to Haycock the gatekeeper, who is standing up on the southeast bastion, to fire the parting salute.
As the party turns to the west and starts to walk away across the drifting swaths of unmarked snow, the grand concussive roar of a six-pound cannon fills the empty air and lingers on afterward, echoing faintly, smaller and smaller until it is hard to know, Hearn thinks, whether the sound they are hearing is real any more or just imagined.