John Senior braced for a slap across the shoulders. He looked up when it didn’t come and then into the harbour where Miller was staring. “Those bloods-a-bitches,” he said.
All summer Miller brooded over his losses in his misleadingly cheerful manner. He whistled and hummed as he worked and composed ditties to old tunes in his head, singing them with such regularity that they came to him unbidden and almost unnoticed. Once a month John Senior rowed in to Burnt Island to spend several days helping to finish Miller’s new home and the two sat up through most of the night drinking. Late into the bottle, Miller would sing all the new songs he’d come up with since their last visit. “This one, this one,” he said to John Senior, his index finger pointed at the ceiling.
Pray, you Indians, what burned me house
you’re bound to die like vermin louse.
I’ve loaded me gun with powder and ball
I’ll hunt you down and kill you all. Hey!
John Senior fixed him with a drunken look of disgust for his childish rhymes, which Miller misinterpreted.
“Don’t pretend you’ve got religion on me, John Peyton. If it had been your house, you wouldn’t have waited till the fall to light into the bastards.”
In late September of 1782, when the summer’s business had concluded and before trapping began, Miller, John Senior and William Cull, who had stopped through on his way to St. John’s, rowed into Ship Cove and then took a jaunt up the River Exploits. There hadn’t yet been a significant fall of snow and the heart of the caribou migration was still several weeks off, so they expected to come upon Red Indians somewhere well short of the lake. Each man carried a musket, bayonet and hatchet, and a pack weighted with eight pounds of hard tack, a piece of salt pork, ammunition and a quart of rum. The weather was poor with rain and wind, and they made slow progress through the dense bush along the riverside. After three days’ travel they came within hearing of a group of Indians in the landwash of a small cove. They crept close enough to make out four mamateeks in a clearing and half a dozen Indians crouched among canoes near the water, the hides of several caribou stretched on the shoreline. Each of the white men removed his pack and loaded his musket. John Senior poured thirty-six balls into the barrel of his gun. Miller smiled his gap-toothed smile across at him. He tamped ten fingers of powder into his own weapon. “No sense saving fire,” he said quietly.
As soon as they broke into the clearing the Indians began shouting and dispersing into the woods. Miller and Cull shot at the running figures but John Senior fired directly into the mamateeks, the fan of musket balls ripping through the bark coverings. As he reloaded, men and women ran or limped from the entrances into the trees, some of them carrying children.
Within minutes the sudden confusion of noise and motion in the cove had swirled into a quiet broken only by the muffled sounds of weeping and moans from within the mamateeks. The three white men approached cautiously, two entering each shelter in turn while the third stood guard outside. In one shelter they found an old man who had taken a musket ball in the gut and was unable to stand. He held a trap-bed in his lap that he had been working against a stone. He was bleeding through the fingers of the hand that cupped his belly, and the lap of his leather cassock and the trap-bed were red with it. He stared at the two strangers standing before him and sucked air in gasps through clenched teeth. He wept and repeated a single grunted syllable between breaths.
“What do you figure he’s saying, Miller?”
“Couldn’t begin to guess. I’ll bet you two good oars that’s one of our traps though.”
John Senior stepped forward and bent to pick up the trap-bed. The Indian swung it then with a small fierce motion that caught the side of the white man’s face and sliced into his ear. Miller stepped back and levelled his musket, but John Senior had already pulled the bed from the Indian’s hand and was beating him about the head with it. The old man bent to the ground and raised a single arm uselessly against the blows until he lost consciousness, and John Senior continued striking with the sharp edge of the metal until he was too exhausted to lift it any longer. He stood catching his breath over the dead man. The battered skull showed through the long shearing wounds and tiny yellow flecks of bone had landed on John Senior’s boots. His trousers were sprayed with blood.
Miller stood in silence a few moments and then said, “That old fucker had all his teeth.” He tongued the array of spaces in his mouth. They were like palings gone from a fence. “Did you see that, John? That seems an unfair thing to my mind.”