The seas were running eight and ten feet high suddenly, the bow of the boat lifted nearly perpendicular and then slamming down hard like a maul being used to sink a fence post. The crest of each wave broke over the gunnels, gallons of sea water sloshing around in the bilge. Peyton struggled aft and took hold of a wooden container, scooping and heaving water back over the side. They crested again and he braced himself as the boat hammered down.
“Bail ’er, Johnny,” his father yelled. He came back on the oars as they shifted into the face of another ten-footer. “For the love of Christ,” he shouted.
Peyton had never heard his father call him Johnny before and as he laced back into bailing he glanced up towards him. He froze in mid-motion, bracing himself with a hand on the gunnel. When John Senior saw his face, he looked over his shoulder towards the bow. Every seam was leaking water.
Swan Island was the nearest point of land and John Senior angled towards it, the seas calming slightly as they veered into the lee. The island’s hump of granite hills and sparse patches of black spruce reared into sight at the tip of each swell, then disappeared as the boat pounded into the trough. It seemed a capricious, teasing game, a promise of shelter offered and then withheld, offered and withheld. Peyton stopped looking up at all at the last, bailing furiously, so numb with fear and fatigue he couldn’t feel a thing in his arms but the dull levering motion he repeated and repeated. He was scooping and flinging madly when the keel came up solid on the shallows of the beach. They hauled the scull by the anchor line till it was as far clear of the water as they could manage, then dragged the anchor up onto the rocks to hold her there. John Senior picked his way up into the hills until he found a pendant cave that offered some shelter from the wind and rain. They sat there a long time in silence, both men soaking wet and exhausted and breathing heavily.
“You know where you are now?” John Senior asked him finally.
“No sir.”
“Indian country, this is.” His father’s rifle rested across his lap.
Peyton looked at him. He was still shaking.
“Graves all along this shore, in under these cliffs. We’re probably sitting on a Indian or two right now.”
Peyton had considered his father was making a joke, but it was so unlike him and his manner so matter of fact that he finally accepted the possibility they were sheltering in a burial site. He coughed into his fist to disguise the violent shiver that passed through him.
“Never mind now,” John Senior said. “Dead Indians are the least of your worries. It’s the quick you got to watch out for.”
The wind went down as suddenly as it rose but the rain continued heavy, the steady drift of it stippling the roiling ocean, and water dripped onto their necks from the damp rock cliff above them. Where the dirty quilt of cloud met the sea on the horizon it was nearly impossible to tell one from the other. The noise of the downpour was steady and soothing and eventually Peyton fell to sleep.
His father wasn’t beside him when he came to himself. The rain had slowed to a mauzy drizzle. Peyton rolled out into the open and looked up and down the shore.
“Over here,” his father shouted to him.
John Senior was crouching near a deep indentation in a cliff face about a hundred yards to the west. As he came up to him Peyton could make out a crumple of reddened material at the back of the cave under a loose pile of stones. They crawled in and knelt beside it.
“Most of them got a winding sheet of birchbark,” his father said. He reached to roll away a couple of stones and fingered the rotten canvas. The red-ochre stain came away on his hands. “This one got part of some Christian’s sail.” He set aside the rifle and began moving the rocks and stones to one side. “Give us a hand,” he said.
Once they’d cleared the grave John Senior lifted the shroud away from the bones of the corpse. They’d been picked clean by time and the brine of the salt-sea air. The body had been placed on its side, the knees fixed in the fetal position against the chest. The ribs had collapsed over the spinal cord’s shallow crescent. The left hand was missing the bones of three fingers. Only the thumb and forefinger remained, the digits extended like the stilled hour and minute hands of a timepiece. Everything was covered in a fine red dust. There was a small leather pouch beside the corpse. It was tied at the top with a plaited thong of caribou hide that John Senior cut away with a knife. Inside were several carved antler charms, a piece of iron pyrite and the skulls of two birds. He passed one to Peyton and the boy turned it over in the palm of his hand to examine the delicately fluted cavities.