Cassie stopped him with a hand to his arm. “I can’t give you what you want.”
He pulled his head back slightly, surprised. “What is it you think I’m looking for?”
Cassie turned back to the fire. She shook her head. “I don’t know. Absolution.”
“A very Catholic sentiment, Miss Jure,” Buchan said. He hoped she would smile, but she did not.
They sat without speaking a few moments and then she said, “I would ask one favour of you, Captain. When this is over.”
“Of course.”
“I would like to come to St. John’s in the spring when you leave.”
“As you wish,” he said.
“There’s a trunk of mine at the Peytons’ winter house.”
“I will send the cutter to retrieve it.” Buchan pushed himself slowly to his feet and turned away from the fire, then stopped. He lingered a moment with his back to her, waiting. Even two steps out of the circle of light the air was cutting, relentlessly cold.
Cassie said, “I didn’t intend anyone to know of what passed between us.”
A crow spoke in the trees, a harsh ratcheting sound like the dark turning a notch closer around them.
“I never expected less of you,” he said.
In the morning a portion of the remaining bread, pork and rum was buried for use on the return journey and the expedition continued upriver with only four of the original twelve sledges. Members of the party carried what couldn’t be loaded onto the sleighs in knapsacks.
The ice conditions improved with the cold weather over the next four days and they made good progress up the river. On February 6, Buchan and Peyton came upon the tracks of Indian rackets during a late afternoon reconnoitre, but soon lost them on hard ice. Two days later they reached a storehouse constructed near three mamateeks, all of which gave the appearance of recent use and a hasty departure. One of the firepits, they guessed, had been used within the previous two or three days. Nearly everything of use or value had been stripped from the dwellings and from the storehouse as well. The tracks of the sledges used to cart away the food and furs were still evident. They found several paunches, liver and a quantity of caribou skins concealed in the snow. A raft of asp logs that was thirty feet in length and nearly five feet broad was abandoned beside the storehouse.
“What do you make of it, Mr. Peyton?”
“I’d say they know we’re coming.”
Buchan pawed at the snow with the toe of his boot. “Clearly they do not expect we are bringing good news.”
The marines milled about the site. Cassie sat at one end of the raft, her head bowed almost to her knees.
“Do you think she’ll make it to the lake?”
Peyton turned his head in the direction Buchan indicated with his chin. “Yes,” he said.
At the base of the second waterfall additional stores were put away for the return trip, and two miles short of Badger Bay River everything but food for two weeks’ travel, the neat-deal coffin and the gifts intended for the Beothuk were left behind. Above Badger Bay River water flowed freely over the ice and obscured all sign of the Beothuk retreat towards the lake, although there was no indication they had left the river for the forest at any point short of it.
On February 11, they reached the head of the lake, twenty-two miles distant from the second waterfall. They stopped there to refresh themselves with food and tea and then set out across the lake. At three o’clock in the afternoon they reached the camp the Peytons had surprised on a bright March morning the previous spring. There was no sign that anyone was on the lake but the party of white men themselves.
The naked frames of two of the mamateeks still stood. The third had been taken down and its materials used to construct a smaller shelter nearby. Buchan was the first to go inside, along with Peyton and Cassie. It was a tomb of sorts, a body on a raised dais wrapped in a shroud of canvas rubbed with red ochre and surrounded by spears, a bow and quiver of arrows, pyrite stones. There was a piece of linen that Cassie picked up and unfolded. The name Peyton was sewn into the cloth. The corpse was that of a large man by all appearances, easily six feet in height.
“This is your man, Mr. Peyton,” Buchan said.
“I imagine so.”
“I wonder what they’ve done with the other body?”