The Mi’kmaq woman looked across at the officer. She rubbed her hands along the length of her thighs. “Got something on to boil, keep it close to the skin when she sleep tonight.”
If it was consumption, as everyone suspected, there was nothing to be done for her. But no one said as much.
Buchan said, “I wish my surgeon had accompanied us, he would have been interested to know what you are preparing.”
“No secret,” Annie Boss said and she laughed. She pushed herself to her feet. “Come up and see.”
They walked in together with one of Annie’s children. The tilt smelled of spruce gum and brine and potash. There was a mewling from the back of the room where a slut with a litter of new puppies lay beneath a wooden bunk. Buchan crouched to look in on them. The eyes of the pups were still closed and they nestled into the dog’s belly, fighting for the teats. The mother growled at his boots.
“She contrary today,” Annie said. She was standing next to the fireplace and looked down at her daughter who was clinging to her dress. “Know how she feels sometimes.” She laughed and covered the girl’s face for a moment with her hand. She spoke a few words in Mi’kmaq and her daughter skipped out the door.
Buchan stood and walked across the room. The pot on the crane was filled with a mixture of leaves and roots boiling in water. Annie stirred the concoction and lifted some of the lank green into the air.
“Wrap in a cloth,” she said. “Put it here.” She touched her breastbone with the flat of her hand.
“A poultice,” Buchan said, nodding. “What else do you use it for?”
“Bad head, broken bone. Burn.” Annie smiled. “Use it on Joe Jep’s hand, fix it right up.”
“Your husband?” Buchan said. His look shifted, his curiosity suddenly sharpened and focused. “How long ago was that, Annie?”
“When we meet, years now. John Senior bring him out to White Bay, his hand gone black then, bad, bad smell, whew,” she said, waving her free hand before her face.
“What did he say had happened to his hand?”
Annie’s smile flickered like a candle crossed by a breeze. She looked back to the pot of boiling leaves. “Willow leaf and Indian Cup,” she said pointing with the spoon, “bark of boxy fir.”
“Annie,” he said.
She looked back at the white man. She was still smiling, and pointed the spoon at him. “Joe Jep a good man,” she said.
Joseph Reilly cooked up a feed that evening of pan-fried salmon in pork scruncheons with boiled potatoes. The spuds had just been dug out of the ground and were served under spoonfuls of the pork fat and fried onions. There was fresh dark bread to wipe the plates clean. A large pot of black tea was kept hot over the fire. Down on the beach the marines made do with a stew of salmon tails.
Mary had no appetite and sat with the youngest children on the floor. They held blind puppies in their laps while the mother shifted on her haunches and whined beside them. She leaned her long snout into the laps of each person in turn to sniff and lick at her young and then lifted her nose as if testing the air. Mary began talking to the dog in the same way she spoke to the children, in a singsong mix of Beothuk and English, and the animal cocked her head to listen, then stood and began barking in response.
The people at the table turned to the noise for a moment before going back to their conversation.
Annie Boss was saying she ’d grown up in Red Indian country, but they kept clear of the Mi’kmaq same as they did the whites. She never saw one in the flesh before she was a girl of ten, travelling with her mother and father and her brother on a river near Grand Lake. Her father had been hunting and they had killed and quartered a caribou, the dressed meat packed between them in their canoe. Before dusk they sighted the light of a fire through the woods ahead and landed their canoe nearby. They walked through alder bush and spruce trees towards the fire and came upon a Red Indian shelter. Her father went to the entrance and pulled back the leather doorway. An old man and woman sat there, a boy almost a man, a young girl about Annie’s age. They were roasting three tiny jays on sticks over the fire and they all looked to be—Annie paused and spoke a few words to Reilly in Mi’kmaq.
“Starved,” he said. “Starving.”