The halfway tilt was a glorified lean-to facing a small red rock cliff used to reflect the heat of a fire into the open maw of the shelter. He woke early and left without bothering with a cookfire for breakfast, reaching his main tilt by noon. He packed the gear he needed there and started back down the same trail, hoping to make the halfway tilt again before it was too far gone to dark.
From the look of the beaver when he saw it again, the fox had come to the site at least once to feed since he’d been there. Peyton took what remained of the beaver’s carcass from the trap and dragged it thirty yards along the riverbank to a nearly bare patch of ground under the branches of spruce trees and placed the dead animal in front of a large stone. He held his pack on his knees where he crouched near the ground and he removed tools and materials as he worked. He used a short trowel to half-bury the meat with snow and dirt and dry bris fallen from the spruce branches. He hammered an eighteen-inch stake deep into the ground and secured the rings of a trap and chain over it, then scraped a shallow depression in the earth about six inches in front of the bait. He laid the trap and covered the pan with a piece of cloth that had been boiled with spruce bark, then covered the works with a mix of gravel and snow.
Six inches behind the first set he dug another shallow hole. He removed his gloves to handle the trap this time, setting it as he had the first, but not bothering with the pan cover or a set stake. He buried it and gathered his materials and backed carefully away.
Back at the halfway tilt, he boiled a piece of salt pork for his supper and sat a while afterwards feeding the fire at the foot of the rock face. He lay back and stared at the thickly layered roof of spruce branches angled above him. He raised a hand into the glow, making shadow animals in the firelight.
After John Senior gave him his ultimatum about going to the lake — laddie boy, he’d called him, crouched low over the fir log, the axe poised in his fist — Peyton had stalked up to the house alone. He sat at the table in the kitchen and placed his face in his hands.
“Is it tea you’re wanting, John Peyton?”
He folded his arms on the table.
“What is it?” Cassie asked him.
Peyton turned to look at her. “He’s going to go after them the winter.”
“What do you mean?”
“John Senior. He’s going down the river with Richmond and Taylor to make amends. To the lake if necessary.”
Cassie sat across from him. She was surprised by Peyton’s reluctance. “You can hardly blame him for wanting to recover the losses.”
He stared at her. He and his father had never argued in front of her about the Indians’ thieving or talked much about the days on the shore when Harry Miller was alive. Still, he didn’t think it was possible she could be so naive about his father after so many years in his house. In his bed. He kept staring.
She shrugged and made a face to say she thought he was being unfair. And in that wordless gesture he saw that it was true, that she knew next to nothing of the man, of what he had been party to in his day. What he was capable of.
He shook his head. He said, “It’s Richmond and Taylor I worry about. They still carry a grudge from the last time down to the lake. And once someone gets killed the law comes into it and there’s no saying where that will take us.” He took his pipe from a coat pocket and cut himself a plug of tobacco.
“Perhaps it would do to bring the law into it beforehand,” Cassie said.
“Meaning what exactly?” he asked angrily. He had no idea what she was talking about.
She spoke in a tone of mock officiousness. “His Majesty is still anxious to establish a friendly intercourse with the native population?”
Peyton pointed with the mouthpiece of his pipe at nothing in particular. “The reward still stands.” He stared up at the rafters as her notion came clear to him. “We could ask for permission to go in. Make it an official party. That should temper the mood of anyone who might be inclined to cause trouble.”
She tipped her head side to side. It was her way of allowing someone to claim an idea they would never have lit upon themselves.
“I’ll need some paper,” he said. He was already out of his seat after an inkwell and a pen.
After they finished their supper that evening, Peyton meticulously copied the final version of the letter he’d drafted on the back of bills and ledgers and then gave it to Cassie to read over.
September 26, 1818
Sir,