Something was following John Peyton through the bush.
He was moving down-country, tailing a line that meandered through rattling brooks and shallow reservoirs backed up by beaver dams before it vented into the Exploits within a few miles of Reilly’s old tilt. All day the back of his neck prickled, as if his habits were being slyly scrutinized from the trees. He’d tried to ignore it a while, the way he refused to acknowledge the first symptoms of illness, hoping the headache or cough or slight fever would come to nothing. But the sense he had of being trailed and appraised would not leave him.
It wasn’t yet quite gone to winter, which made travel in the woods difficult. The snow was spotty and what was down was often dead and heavy. None of the rivers were quite fast with ice and three feet off the shoreline it was too unpredictable to chance walking on. They were only two weeks back from taking the Susan to St. John’s with the salvaged load of salmon. It was, as his father pointed out to him, a fortnight too soon to make a sensible start at furring.
John Senior had long since given up working his own traplines. For years he had been slowly divesting himself of responsibilities in the family enterprise and Peyton had taken them on with the same single-mindedness, the same myopic drive as his father. He pushed himself relentlessly, spending weeks alone on the water each summer inspecting the salmon weirs and the quality of the cure, working a trapline in the backcountry each winter. The immersion in work was a divestment of his own, a conscious withdrawal from his father, from Cassie. And this fall in particular he ’d been chafing to get away from them as soon as he could manage it.
In the years since John Senior had passed the oversee of the fishery to his son there were half a dozen instances of pilfering and thievery by Red Indians he wanted to put right, but Peyton had refused any suggestion of sending a party up the river. It was an ongoing source of frustration to the old man. “I didn’t realize when I passed off to you,” he said, “that it was all to go to leeward to keep them cock Indians in gear.”
It was the only dispute Peyton ever had with his father that hadn’t ended in capitulation. He’d heard stories enough of raids on Beothuk camps in the old days to know what could come of it. When he played the possibilities out in his mind, it was the Indian child displayed on the table in Poole who was carried screaming into the woods while the guns went off and the shelters were set alight. It was the young girl he’d watched strike sparks into the down tinder that morning on the lake, her dark hair sheened with oil, who suffered the pawing attentions of Richmond or Taylor. When traps went missing from a tilt, when a fleet of new salmon seines were cut from their moorings, when John Senior ridiculed and browbeat him, he’d managed somehow to hold fast.
Until the Susan. The day after salvaging and bringing her into the cove at Burnt Island, they’d fought about the proper course of action to follow, circling and circling the question like two men rowing oars in opposite directions. There was a lull in the argument in the early afternoon and they turned away from each other, both thinking they had settled the issue in their favour. On the shore next the stage, John Senior was limbing and rinding a fir tree. Richmond, who was working on the deck of the Susan, shouted across to say, “We ’ll bring them Indians a proper weight of gifts this time around, won’t we, Master John?”
“We’ll get our own back, and then some,” John Senior said without looking up from his work.
Peyton walked across to his father and squat down beside him. The fluid skimming motions of the axe-head took the bark off the white flesh of the log with a precision that made his stomach roll. John Senior was working with a reckless speed that reminded Peyton of a man running downhill and just managing to keep his feet. His thinning grey hair was raked across a liver-spotted scalp, twin wattles of flesh shook under his chin. My father, Peyton thought. But he couldn’t make himself feel it.
John Senior lifted his head and stared, the warm axe-head raised in a temporary truce with the fir tree. Peyton could see in his father’s appraisal of him the same moment of tormented puzzlement. The pale grey eyes looked washed out, depleted of colour.
John Senior said, “Don’t lap back at me on this one, laddie boy.” He wagged the axe-head in his son’s direction.
The other men had stopped their work to watch, Richmond and Taylor, Reilly, the green man, Michael Sharpe.
“Father,” Peyton said.
“You can come with us or stay back with the woman, that’s your choice.”