Chapter Twenty-Two
After Nabayah walks away, Datsanthi declares to all the others in a loud voice that he won’t waste a minute chasing after his so-called son and, what is more, if the lad ever dares to show his face in the camp again, he will drive him off because after what has just been said, the sacred bonds between the two of them are forever shattered.
“I’ve forgiven that boy a lot of things in the past, I’ve bitten my tongue a hundred times or more, but a show of pure ingratitude and disrespect like that is too much for any decent man to bear,” he confides to Shaw later on when the two of them are alone together.
Shaw accepts that on this occasion the father can hardly be held accountable for the cowardice and lunacy of the son.
He assures Datsanthi that he bears no grudges despite Nabayah’s attempt on his life, and that so long as the lad disappears for good, he will put the sorry incident behind them and concentrate on the more pressing tasks still at hand.
Although they both acknowledge Nabayah’s skills with musket and bow, the two of them agree that, in hindsight, his character was too brittle and flighty for a long and testing journey such as this, and that, all in all, if Datsanthi can take up the slack and keep them well fed for another month or two, they will likely be better off without him.
Keasik’s feelings on the matter of her husband’s departure are more uncertain and contradictory.
She soon realizes that her life is easier now that she doesn’t need to concern herself with Nabayah’s moods or invent new ways to calm him down and keep him happy, yet even so, there is something about his presence that she misses.
Attacking Shaw was a wild and foolish act, but the fact that he cared enough to try it makes her pity him and feel, in private at least, more than a little sorry that he failed.
After a few more days pass with no sign of Nabayah’s return, Pawpitch takes her aside and promises that when they get back down to the woods, they’ll find her a better, more even-tempered husband—one who’ll treat her well and won’t care about where the child she’s carrying may or may not have come from.
The thought of this other, happier life makes Keasik feel lighthearted and hopeful, yet at the same time, like a sour taste hidden inside a sweeter one, faintly and uncomfortably disloyal.
Nabayah has been gone for five days and Keasik is sitting alone in the camp at dusk, stitching shoes from a piece of moose skin with a metal awl and length of rawhide, when she looks up and sees him standing there watching her. Alarmed, she jumps to her feet and drops her handiwork on the ground.
“You took me by surprise,” she says. “I didn’t expect to see you here again. Have you come back to stay?”
He shakes his head dismissively, as if the question is hardly worth the trouble of answering.
“Where are the Englishmen? Why aren’t they working at the vein?”
“They’ve gone down to the lake to wash themselves. Datsanthi is hunting and Pawpitch is gathering wood.”
He nods and peers about for a moment, then takes a piece of deer meat from the drying rack, tears off a strip with his teeth, and starts to chew.
“Your father is still very angry,” she says. “Those things you said really hurt him.”
“I only told him the truth. If he was a real man, he wouldn’t spend his whole life playing nursemaid to the English.”
“So you’re not here to try to make peace?”
Nabayah shakes his head, then finishes the meat and takes a draft of water from the wooden pail. Something about him is changed, Keasik thinks. When he left here before, he looked lost and confounded, but now he seems clear-minded and confident.
“Has something happened to you? You look different.”
“Last night I had a dream. The wolf that attacked John Shaw came to me and told me that the best way to hurt him now is not to kill him but to steal his gold. That’s why I’m here.
We’re going to take the gold and then go south together.
You and me.” He pauses for a moment to allow her to admire the boldness of this scheme, then carries on.
“When they realize that it’s gone, they’ll chase after us, but they won’t catch us because I’ll steal the birch-bark canoe as well.
We’ll walk all night tonight, then cross the White River in the morning, and they’ll be stranded, helpless on the other side. ”
He smiles to himself at the thought of such magnificent trickery and then starts to laugh.
Although she can see why he is proud of the idea, Keasik knows instinctively that the scheme won’t work the way Nabayah imagines it will. There’s something unlucky about him, she thinks. That’s the sad truth. Whenever he gets excited and makes a grand plan, it almost always goes wrong.
“Maybe you should do it on your own,” she says. “If I come along, I’ll only slow you down.”
Nabayah stops smiling and suddenly looks offended.
“You’re still my wife,” he reminds her sharply. “Or did you think you were free of me at last? Is that why you have that proud little smirk on your face, because you thought I’d gone away for good?”
Those long days and nights alone on the moor must have affected his mind, she thinks. There was something half mad in the way he was laughing before, and now the stare he’s giving me is full of hate, as if he blames me for all his sufferings and wishes I was dead.
“I know I’m your wife,” she tells him calmly. “How could I forget? All I’m saying is if you’re trying to get away and being chased, you’ll move a lot quicker on your own.”
Instead of answering, he takes a step forward and grabs her by the throat.
“You want to betray me like the others have betrayed me,” he says, tightening his grip so she can hardly catch her breath. “But the wolf is my friend now and he won’t allow it. You’re mine for as long as I want you, so do as I say and get ready to leave.”
An hour later, when the three Englishmen return from swimming in the lake, they notice that the birch-bark canoe is gone, but they assume that Datsanthi is using it to fish.
It’s not until Pawpitch starts searching about for the old copper kettle but can’t find it anywhere, and then Datsanthi returns without the canoe or any knowledge of its whereabouts, that they realize they must have been robbed.
Their first thought is naturally to blame the Esquimaux, and it’s only when Hearn goes inside the tent to look about and finds that half their supply of powder and bullets has been taken, along with the deer-hide sack containing their entire store of crushed and sifted gold, that he understands, with a sickening feeling, who the true culprit must be.
When Shaw finds out, he turns pale for a moment and then starts quivering with fury.
“Keasik’s gone with him,” Hearn explains, “so they must be heading south. If they use the canoe to cross the White River, we won’t be able to follow, but they only have an hour or two’s head start, so if we give chase now we might stop them before they get that far.”
“If we have to walk all night and all day tomorrow, we’ll catch them,” Shaw vows.
“I won’t let that conniving bastard get away.
He has no earthly use for the gold but takes it out of spite alone, for the pleasure of knowing that decent men like us have been deprived of the thing they have labored so hard and long to obtain.
I should have seen this coming when he raised his knife against me.
I should have finished his effrontery right then and there. ”
“He feels he’s been abused and this is his way of striking back against us, I suppose,” Hearn says. “But if we catch him quickly, then he’ll give it all up, I’m sure. There’ll be no need for any bloodshed.”
“You should save your understanding and sympathy for them who most deserve it,” Shaw replies.
“I’m the one who’s been maltreated in this matter, not the Indian.
I save his wife for him at Crow Lake and instead of giving thanks, he first tries to kill me, then has the audacity to steal my treasure.
I swear such a grand display of insolence and jealousy is beyond my understanding. I can’t fathom it at all.”
“I don’t seek to defend what he’s done,” Hearn says. “He’s acted out of malice and resentment, that’s certainly true, but if you’d only kept your hands off the girl, none of this would have happened.”
Shaw stiffens and looks amazed by this unheralded rebuke. He steps much closer to Hearn and fixes him with a fearsome stare.
“Tom Hearn,” he hisses. “So high and fucking mighty with your shiny brass quadrant and your precious book full of esquimaux gobbledegook. You may think you can stay apart from the rest of us, flap your wings and glide above the world untainted like some priest or celibate, but you can’t do it anymore.
You need to choose whose side you’re on. ”
“I’ll help you catch him,” Hearn says, “but I won’t help you kill him.”
“Such fine lines, such casuistry. I swear you should have been a London lawyer, not a common tar.”
Even now, with one arm hacked off and having just absorbed such a sudden, dizzying blow to his ambitions, John Shaw speaks with a level of crude but unalloyed self-certainty that Hearn knows very well he cannot hope to emulate.
Shaw will be swayed from his course not by mere logic or reason, Hearn understands, but only by the application of a moral force as massive, brutish, and unyielding as his own.
And there is no one here in this ungodly and benighted canton, me least of all, he thinks, who has such a force at their command or the power to conjure one.
After Shaw has finished at last with his ranting and his insults, Hearn waits for a moment, and when he speaks again his voice is deliberately calm and restrained.
“If you want the gold back, then it’s time for us to leave now,” he says. “Every minute we stand here prating is another minute thrown away.”