In the second week of June, a canoe carrying five Beothuk came up the brook. Siobhan was inside the tilt, Richmond had gone into the woods to cut logs to build a gallows for drying the salmon nets. Taylor was in the water, rooting around at the base of the weir and didn’t see or hear them. He didn’t know how long they had been watching when he finally took notice. They had pulled the canoe to the side of the river and stared at him in silence. They were close enough that he could count them where they sat and guess at their ages and relative physical strength.
All at once, as if by some signal he couldn’t distinguish, the five men in the canoe began shouting and shaking paddles or bows. Taylor stumbled on the wet stones on the riverbed and once he’d regained his footing he pissed through his pants into the brook while the wild shouting and gesticulating went on and on. He bolted across the river finally and crawled on his hands and knees up the bank. He ran towards the tilt, sloshing water from his boots and the waistline of his trousers, screaming all the way. He shouted at his wife to keep inside and ran out with a single-shot rifle and a powder horn which sent the Beothuk into a retreat, though they continued yelling as they paddled downstream towards the ocean. Taylor dropped most of the shot intended for the barrel of the gun and was shaking so furiously he couldn’t hold the powder horn still enough to pour. The Indians had disappeared around a bend in the river before he looked up from his sloppy loading and he threw the gun down in disgust. He swore at the trees as he paced. He kicked the powder horn into the river and had to wade in after it, swearing all the while.
Taylor looked across at the face of Michael Sharpe. He was shaking his head. “You pissed your pants, Tom Taylor,” he said. He seemed profoundly disappointed.
Taylor nodded. “That I did,” he said. “That was the summer they killed Harry Miller, not more than a month after I seen them.” They found the body on the way to the clearing in the trees behind his tilt that he used as a toilet. There were half a dozen arrows piercing the flesh, in the back, arms and legs. The area around the corpse was trammelled with recent tracks of animals and the body had been picked over for days, the bloodied clothes torn and pulled away from the torso. Most of the flesh was eaten away from underneath. Grey lengths of bone showed through, the surfaces pocked with tooth marks. Richmond had said, “That’s hardly worth burying.”
Taylor leaned in close to the green man. “They cut off his head and left the rest of him to the scavengers, they did. Same as they did for those two marines the last time we came down to the lake.”
Peyton sat up in his blankets. “Tom Taylor,” he said. “Don’t be poisoning the boy’s mind.”
“Better he knows what we’ll be facing on the morrow.” This was Richmond speaking. Everyone, it seemed, was still awake and listening. “There’s no sense keeping the truth from the lad.”
There was a giggle of laughter from the dark where Reilly lay in his blankets. “Well spoken, Dick Richmond,” he said. “Why don’t you tell young Michael Sharpe how you came to lay hands on the little Indian girl that wound up in Poole?”
“What little girl?” Michael Sharpe asked.
Richmond said, “Mind your goddamn business, Reilly.”
The two men began arguing and Peyton yelled at them uselessly, until John Senior sat up in the light of the fire and raised his pistol. He held the gun there until everyone fell silent and then he said, “I will shoot the next man to speak a word before daylight.” He looked around the circle of men watching him. “By Christ, so I will,” he said.
Everyone settled back onto their beds of spruce. Peyton covered his head with his blanket. Several times through the night he considered getting up to stand in front of his father and say something, any word at all.
Richmond hadn’t had a thought of the girl since the last time he’d come down the river with Buchan, when Peyton mentioned seeing her in Poole. He lay a while deliberately thinking of other things, but when he fell asleep he began dreaming of the summer morning he’d set out for one of the half-dozen bird islands off the coast. It was a clear day when the sun rose but there was a shroud of mist around the base of the nearest island as he pulled towards it. Thousands of birds circled the sheer cliffs and pitched and took flight again like blackflies tormenting the stoic face of a cow. He rowed into the mist and along the shoreline. The bottle-nosed divers and hagdens and skurwinks and turrs were so thick on the water around his boat it seemed possible to walk ashore on their backs.