Chapter Eleven
After a fortnight of lolling about in camp, John Shaw is becoming impatient.
April is almost ended, but there is still no sign of the birds, and although Datsanthi has advised him again to wait until they appear in the sky, he’s starting to think there is only so much chattering and loafing about that a man can stand and, what is more, the longer they spend here, the less time there will be for digging up the gold later on.
They have plenty of food—the hunting nearby is good and the lake is well stocked with tittemeg, pike, and burbot—so it occurs to him that they should let the women pound and dry enough to last a week or so, then continue onward to the Barrens in the expectation that by the time their supplies have run out, the geese and ducks are very likely to be flying.
He shares his plan with Datsanthi, who reminds him that the Indians are well used to periods of cold and hunger, and can survive, if they have to, on shoe leather and tree bark, but the English complain if they go a day or more without victuals, so they will be the ones to suffer most if the birds don’t appear, a warning that, although he knows it has some truth to it, Shaw in his eagerness dismisses as an expression of unwarranted gloom.
“There may be some small chance of hunger or bad weather if we go too soon,” he admits later on when he discusses his intentions with Hearn and Walker, “but then again, if we wait here too much longer the snow might all be melted before we reach the White River, and so our sledges won’t run and that will slow us down even more.
” Hearn thinks the plan unwise, a gamble not worth taking, but can see that Shaw has made up his mind already and is not likely to listen to any contrary advice, however polite or well-intentioned, so he does not try to disagree, while Walker, seeing that the other two men, for once, seem to be in accord, assumes that all is well and there is nothing to debate.
After four days of steady walking, they leave the woods behind completely and enter at last onto the Barren Grounds.
Aside from the few ragged patches where dark screes of granite peer through the windblown snow like spatters of ink across a page of crumpled foolscap, the land is as white and edgeless as a winter sky, yet Shaw greets it nonetheless with delight and celebration, as if instead of an icy wilderness of drumlins, lakes, and frozen bogland, he sees ripe vineyards and sunlit fields of wheat.
“Be of good cheer, my lads!” he tells his two companions.
“And just you remember—every day out here on the Barrens is another day closer to our prize.”
There are no deer to be seen, of course, and no birds in the sky, so when the hunters go out, all they bring back to eat are a few partridges and once or twice a hare.
It would be most prudent to strictly ration the dried meat and fish to make it last longer, Hearn knows, but such self-control is unknown to the Indians, who always eat what they have and give no thought to the future, while Shaw remains as confident as ever that the geese and ducks will appear in a few days anyway, and so gives such sensible measures no serious consideration.
In consequence, after a week they have eaten through all their stored provisions and must rely entirely on what little they can scrape from the frosty and impoverished land.
So long as the skies are clear and the weather continues fine, they make fair time and the hunger is bearable, but then one morning the rain begins to fall in torrents, and after the rain come fusillades of hail and then soon afterward driving snow.
For two days and nights together, they huddle in their deer-hide tents as a blizzard rages outside, without food to sustain them or enough black moss and twigs to even make a fire.
In the roaring darkness, as their frail shelter flaps and shudders and the wind wails like a beast in pain, the three Englishmen, weak with hunger now, crouch beneath their blankets, clench their jaws against the bitter cold, and fervently wish themselves elsewhere.
Hearn doesn’t fear the storm’s power—he has known much worse at sea and lived to tell of it—but to be confined so long in the bland and monotonous dark is a sore encouragement to his habit of melancholy.
It throws him back upon himself and forces his mind to turn inward and brood upon old injuries and lacerations that, ancient though they are, still ache when he recalls them.
He remembers, in the house on Blackfriargate, his mother and sister lying dead side by side like waxen images of themselves, the frantic grief that followed, and then his own misguided show of faith and all the sorrow and confusion that flowed from it.
He remembers leaving home that early morning filled with fear and his sense, as the ship weighed anchor and slid out into the broad Humber, flat and gray as a cellar floor, that everything he had learned and believed was useless now and he would have to find, somehow, a way to remake himself again from almost nothing.
He remembers, most of all, his sickness and clumsiness those first few weeks at sea, and the rough, impatient way he was treated by the other crewmen and how he might have fled the ship and sought some other occupation when they first reached Narva had it not been for Stephen Cowper, the deckhand who became his friend and close companion and who told him that the first voyage was always the hardest and he would be sure to get better in time.
While the other sailors lost no opportunity to scorn or upbraid him for his many failings, Cowper, who was no older than Hearn but had been at sea since he was a lad of thirteen, found simple ways, with a quick nod and smile or a subtle guiding hand, to correct and encourage him.
Such instinctive sympathy, Hearn soon realized, was all of a piece with Cowper’s general liveliness and good humor.
Although their life at sea was often difficult and sometimes dangerous, Cowper found the ship to be an amusing place and the people on it, Captain Barnstable especially, to be suitable fodder for a hundred sly jokes.
Nothing, in Stephen Cowper’s cheerful opinion, however infuriating or calamitous it seemed at first, was to be taken too much to heart, since the sun would likely rise again tomorrow, and the breakfast biscuit taste as stale.
In another, more ordinary man, such ease and lightheartedness might have implied a matching moral frailty or indifference, but in Stephen Cowper’s case, Hearn soon realized, it was marvelously combined with strength.
Though slow to anger, if provoked by some display of ignorance or oafishness, Cowper would not hesitate to confront the offender and, putting aside his usual carefree manner, would curse just as fiercely and even, if required, use his fists just as aptly as any other fellow aboard.
For Hearn, who had become accustomed in his years of training for the priesthood to thinking of charity and courage as outgrowths of a carefully nurtured faith, this homegrown combination of vigor and mildness seemed strange at first, but then the more he examined it, the more pleasing it became and the more he started to enjoy, admire, and even wish to emulate his new friend’s character.
As the weeks and months went on, charmed and delighted by Cowper’s continuing attentions, Tom Hearn found himself being changed, improved, simplified in certain ways, perhaps, but also made more solid, robust, and real.
Cowper in his turn found Hearn, with his cautious, gentlemanly manners and lack of simple common sense, to be an intriguing change from the average tar.
When he discovered, halfway through that first voyage, the true reasons Hearn had run away to sea and realized at the same time how many books he had read and that he knew both Latin and Greek, he began to refer to his new companion fondly as Saint Thomas, the Archbishop of Hull, and liked to tell him with a grin that he was without doubt the clumsiest genius and the very cleverest scatterbrain he had ever met in his life.
Hearn knows very well that he should not allow himself to think too much on Stephen Cowper and the precious, irretrievable time they spent together, that the agony of doing so always outweighs the pleasure, but he cannot help himself now.
In the cold darkness, he thinks of his friend’s narrow face and cheerful eyes, his strong, pale limbs and quick, eager movements.
He recalls their long days of shared labor—lading and unlading, climbing and hauling—and their boisterous, joy-filled nights, and then, because one memory leads unstoppably onto the next, although he does not wish to, although he would rather, indeed, that his bedraggled and wavering mind go almost anywhere instead, he remembers Yarmouth Roads in April and the day of their impressment.