Some time after midnight Peyton woke with severe stomach cramps from the nearly raw game he’d eaten and he walked a little ways into the woods to relieve himself. He squatted beside a tree facing the sail wall which billowed and snapped in the breeze. The firelight threw the men’s distorted shadows on the canvas where they lifted and fell like souls lost in a tide and a sadness that he mistook for fear came over him then. Below the tilt the frozen length of the Exploits was a wide blue scar banked by darkness. The force of the water moving underneath the ice shifted the surface and the forest echoed the hollow crack back and forth across the river. Peyton hunched there and shivered and he thought of Cassie walking alone through these selfsame woods in the fall. The voices of the men still awake in the camp moved in the trees overhead like birds calling against the cold and the darkness.
They broke camp at dawn. The morning was clear with a sharp wind out of the northwest. The men were so tired and in such a frozen state they stumbled and moved drunkenly about, their hands and feet nearly devoid of feeling until the day’s exertions returned some warmth to their bodies. They travelled for two miles, past Reilly’s trapping tilt nestled back among the trees and on to the Nutt Islands. Half an hour beyond them they reached a small waterfall and stopped to rest and trade off the sledges. Above the waterfall, a long series of rapids had ridged the ice so severely that it was nearly impossible to haul the sledges over them and a small party walked ahead of the main group to map the least treacherous route forward. The leather lashings that held the sledges together worked loose from the constant banging and they were forced to make frequent stops to rebind them.
By late afternoon the expedition had travelled a little less than seven miles. They hauled the sledges into the trees on the north side of the river and cut spruce to fence in the fireplace and cooked a meal of salt pork and meat from the second haunch of caribou that they’d collected on their way past the carcass earlier in the day. The night was no warmer than the one previous but the men were so exhausted that all but the watches slept through until dawn. Before setting out in the morning, Buchan had a cask packed with two days’ worth of bread, salt pork, cocoa and sugar buried at the campsite for use on the way back down the Exploits.
The shelvy ice conditions deteriorated as they moved upriver and the men not employed at hauling worked ahead with axes or cutlasses to level the highest ridges and fill the valleys with ice and snow to keep the sledges from coming to pieces on impact. By afternoon three of the sledges were so badly damaged that the party was forced to stop while repairs were made and the expedition’s gear was repacked. Two of Cull’s men and the ship’s boy were sent a mile ahead to set up camp and start a fire, which the rest of the party reached just after dark.
In the early afternoon of the sixteenth they arrived at the foot of the first great waterfall. Buchan travelled ahead with Cull and Hughster to search for the Indian path used by the Beothuk to portage above the falls and the rest of the party fenced in a fireplace to camp for the night on the north side of the river. Peyton and Reilly strapped on pot-lid rackets and took their firearms up a brook that met the river near the camp and half a mile in came on a beaver dam that backed the brook up into a fair-sized pond. The rattle at the head of the dam kept an area clear of ice and the two men crouched in the woods nearby. Since Cassie’s visit to Reilly’s tilt, there was a new awkwardness between the two men. Their habitual banter seemed contrived and adolescent and they hadn’t managed yet to fashion a language to suit the darkened circumstances of their friendship. They waited for more than an hour in silence until there was little enough light left in the day to see fifty yards ahead and they had almost given up on finding supper. What they shot at was no more than a shadowed movement above the dam.
The beaver’s fur was sleek and oily and it stained their gloves as they turned the hump of the animal on its back to paunch it. It lay more than three feet in length from its nose to the tip of the wide, flat paddle of its tail and weighed a good sixty pounds.
“Reminds me of the rats aboard the East India ships on the Thames,” Reilly said. He tapped the huge buckteeth with his bloody knife. “Fangs the like of that on them.”
Back at the camp, they set a large kettle of water to boil and dressed the animal and added the lean fore-haunches to the pot for broth. The back haunches were skewered and cooked undivided until the thick layer of fat was crisply roasted. The night was surprisingly mild and the men ate their fill and talked with more enthusiasm than they had managed since setting out. The Blue Jackets and marines had never tasted beaver and most pronounced it fair eating. After the meat was finished, Reilly fried the tail in pork fat and each of Buchan’s men was offered a taste of the rich marrow. The ship’s boy chewed meditatively for a moment and asked if it was true as he’d heard it that a beaver, cornered by a predator, will turn on itself and chew off its own testicles.
“True as the tides,” Richmond announced solemnly. “Eating for strength, he is. You mind to steep a beaver’s pride and drink off the liquid, it does wonders for your nature.”
The boy scoffed. “Go away with ye,” he said.
“Tom Taylor,” Richmond appealed, “am I speaking the God’s honest truth or no?”
“Gospel,” Taylor said. “Knew a man drank beaver’s pride before going out to a bawdy house, didn’t he up and die with exhaustion. Licked right out he was. And still hard as the rock of the Church when they laid him out at the dead-house.”