Chapter Thirty-Six
In the river’s roiling middest, after he cuts the rope, Hearn is lifted up again and carried along until he manages, with what feels like the last ounce of his strength, to kick himself free of the current’s grasp and pull himself up, heaving and gasping, onto a gravel shoal.
He has lost his musket somewhere in the torrent, and the bundle with the tent and snowshoes is gone as well, but at least he is alive and breathing, whereas John Shaw, he is certain, must be drowned.
Lying there, shaking and numb, he doubts he has the power left to move again, but then slowly, inch by inch, he rolls over onto his side and pushes himself up until he is kneeling.
Dusk is settling all around, but to the south, when he looks, above the soft fretwork of the trees he can still make out a faint strand of smoke running like a dim vein beneath the sky’s pale gray flesh.
Shuddering and panting from the effort it takes, he gets back onto his feet and clambers up the red-clay bank and reenters the woods.
As he moves haphazardly through the undergrowth, crystals of frost start forming on his beard and eyebrows and settle like a thick layer of dust on the surface of his tunic and britches.
In places where the snow has drifted, he sinks down and stumbles, but then he rights himself and carries on.
Everything around him is turning faintly blue; there is a stillness and a strange ungodly beauty to the world that he fears is the beauty and stillness of oncoming death.
“Let the Indian camp be close,” he prays.
“Let it be close, because I cannot go on much longer.”
The first flicker of yellow firelight glimpsed through the trees is vague and implausible, like something half noticed in a dream, but then Hearn sees it again brighter and clearer, and as he starts to run, he hears the sound of women’s voices and the wail of a baby crying.
The Indians are wary at first when he appears out of nowhere—a strange half-frozen white man stumbling and shouting out crude, garbled greetings—but once he explains more calmly who he is and what has happened to him, they speak to him graciously and bid him welcome.
There are five women in the camp, a gaggle of children, and two men—one young, hardly out of boyhood, and one old and bent over.
The rest, the remaining husbands and sons, they explain, have gone off hunting and will be back in a day or two.
Hearn has nothing to give them as a gift except the knife, so he gives it to them and they thank him and in return offer him fresh deer meat and a place by the fire.
As he sits there eating, he remembers the moment of panic when his foot gave way beneath him and the cold water swallowed him up and thinks: I was close to death, to the end of everything, closer than I’ve ever been before.
If I’d drowned, the world outside would have continued on unaltered, but my world, the world inside my head, so sorrowful and precious, would have stopped completely, disappeared in that instant, and no one else would have noticed or cared.
That night he sleeps dreamlessly beside the old man and the youth, and when he wakes, for an awful bewildering minute, he has no idea where he is any longer, no memory at all of what he has been through or why he is here lying in this tent among strangers.
The hunters return in the afternoon, dragging two deer carcasses behind them.
They look at him distrustfully, and when he asks if one of them will lead him back to the Fort, even when he offers them lavish rewards for their trouble, they refuse.
They will be leaving tomorrow, they tell him gruffly, heading west to better hunting grounds, so he must find his own way back.
He asks them for some dried meat at least and promises that if they visit him at the Fort, he will pay them back ten times over, but they shake their heads and say that only fools would trust the promises of a stranger, and does he really think they look like fools?
Hearn, seeing they will not be moved by his pleas, and knowing he has nothing else to trade with, decides he must return to the river and search for the musket and the bundle of deerskins that he lost. He finds his own tracks in the snow from the night before and follows them back through the woods to the place near the gravel shoal.
Once there, he starts searching carefully amid the lichen-coated rocks and tangled weeds for any sign of his lost possessions.
For two hours, he pokes and prods and looks about but finds nothing and is beginning to wonder if the task is hopeless when, about a mile downstream from where he began, where the river starts to bend, he arrives at a crescent-shaped pebble bar overhung by a canopy of snowcapped birches and sees laid out upon it, face up and blanched with rime, John Shaw’s body with the bag of gold still fastened like a halter about his neck and his one good arm raised up high above his head as though in some final antic gesture of defiance and self-display.
After staring for a moment rapt with disbelief, Hearn jumps down from the bank and dashes across.
He touches the body cautiously on the thigh and shoulder to be certain, then crouches down and removes the shoes and socks and then the britches, waistcoat, jacket, and cap.
Inside the jacket he finds a skipertogan containing a knife, a whetstone, and a tinderbox, which he carefully places side by side on the shingle.
Then he unloops the knotted rope and removes the bag of gold from around Shaw’s neck.
When he stands up again, he is trembling and his heart is thudding like a drum inside his chest. Why are you here?
he thinks, looking down at the naked body, pale and forked as a mangold root.
How have you managed to show yourself again when you should rightly be sunk to the bottom?
Back at the Indian camp, Hearn trades the clothes, shoes, and whetstone for five pounds of dried meat and keeps the knife and tinderbox for himself.
The Indians ask him what he has in the sack, and he shows them the gold ore packed inside and explains that it has some value in England but none over here.
They don’t ask him where he found it or what it might be used for, and he guesses that they take it as just another sign of the white man’s general foolishness.
Before they part the next day, the old man, whose name is Wapoos and who is a good deal more companionable than the others, tells him the best way to get back to the Fort.
“Go back again and follow the river until you reach Dubawnt Lake,” he says, “then walk east along the deer trail. It will take ten days at least from where we are, but if the weather changes it may take longer.”
Alone in the frozen woods with no map or musket, Hearn knows he should still be afraid, but despite the dangers of his situation, he finds to his surprise that now that John Shaw is dead, he feels newly calm and strangely, almost reluctantly, hopeful.
He remembers the sense he had a month before when they left the Barrens behind and entered the woods again, a feeling that some great impending change was in the air, some shift from ignorance to knowledge, and he wonders if this is it, or at least a sign of its beginning.
Have I been altered by the long journey?
he wonders. Have the horrors I’ve witnessed and been part of transformed me?
And if they have, what have I newly become?
He still feels the sadness and pity of Abel Walker’s death, still remembers the agonies the lad suffered and the lost look in his eyes as he was dying, but he wonders now whether beyond anger and sorrow, or around the edges of those first instinctive feelings, something else exists that is equally true and equally possible.
Abel told me that final morning that I should keep the gold for myself, he remembers.
He wanted me to swear I would, and now, through events I could never have imagined and didn’t try to influence, what he wished for has happened.
So what does that prove? Is it sheer accident that Shaw’s body, which by all reason and logic should have been lost, came back as it did, or is there some design, some hidden law or principle at work?
Strange thoughts to entertain, he knows, beguiling and unruly, but he cannot, it seems, keep them completely at bay.
As the days arrive and leave, each one as long and wearying as the last, he begins, as a way of occupying his thoughts through the empty hours of solitary walking, to imagine what he might do with the gold if he kept it all for himself instead of giving it to Magnus Norton as agreed in their contract.
He imagines going back to England and finding the handsome house in Norfolk that Abel always spoke of, the one with the yellow brick walls and the stable block.
If I found that house, the one he loved, or something similar, I could take the lease, he thinks, and then with the rest of my wealth I could buy a part share in a Yarmouth coal-barge or a schooner.
Half the year I would spend back at sea as the captain of my own vessel and the other half enjoying my property, raising animals and tending the land.
For a long time since, almost as long as he can remember, he has imagined the future only as a necessary prolongation of the sad and painful past, but now, as he allows his mind to wander more freely, inspired and encouraged by the promise of the gold, it begins to suggest itself instead as an empty space, a silent stage upon which the unexpected may arise and take shape.
What might have seemed fanciful or absurd to him before begins to appear, in the light of his sudden good fortune, more and more like the working out of some kind of destiny.
When he reaches the coast of Hudson’s Bay at long last, after two weeks alone, and the Factory appears in the far distance, its thick limestone ramparts shadow-dark against a graying sky, his mind is made up.
He will hide the sack of treasure in the woods and claim, when Magnus Norton asks him, that it was never discovered at all.
There is no shame attached to stealing from a practiced thief, he tells himself as he pushes the sack into a cleft between two rocks, then marks the spot by carving a symbol into the bark of a nearby tree.
And if someone must enjoy the bounty of this dreadful journey, as it seems someone must, it should by rights be the poor man who has earned it by his labors, not the rich one who, like some tsar or potentate, while others suffer agonies abroad remains safe at home, snug and warm within his gilded tabernacle.