His father gathered the bag’s contents back together and carefully retied the brittle leather thong, then held it out to his son. “Here,” he’d said. “A keepsake for you.”
It struck Peyton as a funny word to use and a peculiar gesture, given how close they’d just come to being lost themselves. It made him distrust his father in a way he was never able to articulate clearly. He disliked remembering the event and was sorry to have it in his head now, lying cold and exhausted and sleepless on the banks of the River Exploits. He shifted restlessly in his blankets, tapping his head against the rough mattress of spruce boughs. He turned onto his side then, drawing his legs up to lie in the exact same position as the dead man he’d uncovered years ago, and waited for sleep.
SIX
On the morning of the seventeenth Buchan had a cask of provisions and four gallons of rum buried at the campsite and the party began its ascent around the falls. They hauled the sledges through a winding path among high rocks until the going became too steep to continue. The goods were unloaded and the men carried the casks on their backs to the top of the falls, turning back to make two or three trips before the whole of their provisions and the sledges themselves had been conveyed up the path and across a half-frozen stretch of bog to the riverside. Around noon the wind veered to the southeast and the morning’s sleet turned to pouring rain. The group had made no more than a mile and a half all told, but the general state of fatigue and the soaking condition of their clothes and all their supplies led Buchan to call a halt to the day’s travel. A camp was prepared beneath the studding sail which was strung in the trees as a tarp. By nine in the evening the rain had stopped and the men dried their clothes over the fires and turned in for the night.
As they started up the river the following day, the forest lining the river changed from poplar and birch to a dark corridor of black spruce, pine and larch. A fire had burned off the woods from the Bay of Exploits to the falls almost seventy years before and poplar and birch had replaced the old spruce forest across the burn-over. The change in the woods they travelled beside was abrupt and complete, as if a line had been drawn to separate two worlds.
The river above the falls was so rough and wild that it ran open in the centre and early that morning one of the sledges fell through the poor ice near the shoreline. It went down on a shoal and James Carey, who was hauling it, was swept back and beneath the ice by the force of the current. There was a moment of wild shouting as Buchan cleared the rest of the party onto the shore. Richmond threw himself flat on the ice and stretched shoulder-deep into the freezing water to reach for the man, rooting blindly with his face turned to the shore, as if he were searching for stockings lost beneath a bed. Carey was caught up in the heavy leather harness of the sledge and could not get himself free even after he latched onto Richmond’s hand and was pulled into the open. His face bobbed to the surface and went under in the froth. Richmond yelled for help and Peyton crawled down as near as he dared.
“An axe,” Richmond yelled over his shoulder, “a cutlass.”
Buchan skittered a sword across the ice towards them and Peyton crawled with it to the ice edge.
“Cut him loose,” Richmond shouted.
In the drive of the current Peyton could make out only shadowed movement beneath the surface and he stabbed wildly into the river’s flow below the arm Richmond held. Water soaked through where his coatsleeve met his swan-skin cuff, so icy cold it felt like he was flaying his own skin with the blade. When Carey came free of the sledge the two men dragged him back to the shore where he lay shivering and spitting and bleeding like a gaffed seal.
They built a fire and stripped Carey free of his sodden clothes while a small group of marines used rope and grappling hooks to recover the sledge and its gear from the river. There were a number of gashes beneath Carey’s arm that were staunched with raw turpentine from a fir tree. One cut had gone so deep in the flesh that it had to be cauterized with an iron heated in the fire to stop the bleeding. Afterwards Carey was covered in blankets. Peyton sat beside him and apologized for his injuries.
Carey shivered uncontrollably, his teeth hackering from the cold and shock. “A damn sight better than being drowned,” he said.
Richmond had taken off his coat and hung the wet sleeve over the heat. He said, “You have to spill a little blood to keep body and soul together sometimes.”