Before first light they roused themselves and packed up the camp. They gnawed on cakes of hard tack to quiet their bellies and then shook out the old priming of their muskets, pricked the touch holes and fresh primed. Most of the party’s ammunition consisted of slugs or quarter shot or drop shot, but Tom Taylor and Richmond and John Senior loaded their pieces with balls. After they’d laced on their rackets Peyton reminded them that no one was to fire on any account without his permission. Richmond allowed he was just a hired man, but thought it an awful thing to be ordering your father about in such a fashion. John Senior said, “He knows my mind well enough,” and Peyton repeated his order to wait on his word. They tramped single file out of the gully, turning south on the bank of the river towards the point of land that intersected the lake.
The forest along the shoreline was dense with underbrush and they were forced to skirt the edge, but stayed as close to the trees as they could. Loose snow had drifted heavy against the shore and they struggled forward two and a half hours before stopping a hundred yards shy of the clearing where the shelters stood. They hunkered among a stand of trees on a small finger of land pushed out into the lake. John Senior was breathing in short laboured whiffs beside Peyton. He shook his head. “Panking like the devil,” he said. “Haven’t got neither bit of wind like I used to.”
Peyton glanced across at his father. His own feet were galled, his knees and ankles were swollen and stiff with the cold and exertion, and it was painful just to crouch there. He’d been worried about his father’s stamina before they set out, but John Senior had been the first from his blankets each morning and urged the men on past dark. Peyton shook his head and turned back to the clearing.
Two of the mamateeks were shingled with sheaves of birch-bark stitched together with spruce root or sinews. The third was wrapped with a canvas sail that had been stained with a mixture of red ochre and grease. Richmond lifted his bearded chin towards it and said, “She’d be ours, I imagine.”
John Senior nodded. “Won’t be more than fifteen or so to a wigwam,” he said, “so fifty at the outside.” He looked across at Peyton who had pulled out his pocket Dollard and was squinting through it to study the clearing. “Well?” he said.
He closed the glass and shook his head. “Nothing doing.” He could feel the intensity of anticipation around him, the hum of it in the air like the noisy heat of green wood laid on a fire. Joseph Reilly touched his shoulder then and pointed where a figure had just stood clear of one of the shelters. He lifted the glass back to his eye.
Richmond offered they should get a move on before any more of the Indians started the day and there was a general mutter of agreement that Peyton ignored. He stood up and walked out of the trees towards the clearing. Several of the party followed up behind him and he waved them back into the woods. There was still only the one figure moving outside the mamateeks, and there was such an immense quiet in the valley and across the frozen surface of the lake that Peyton imagined for a moment the woman was alone in this place but for him. Through the telescope he had seen the well-kept sheen of her black hair, her face darkened with the same red stain they had used to mark the stolen sail.
He lifted his arm. “Haloo,” he shouted.
His voice echoed back to him from the trees as the Indian woman turned to stare across at the point where he stood. Before the sound of her first alarm reached his ears he could hear John Senior cursing behind him and his party burst out of the woods at a trot.
By the time they’d snowshoed halfway across the cove the camp of Beothuk was in flight, most of them clearing the mamateeks and taking to the bush while a smaller group set off south across the frozen lake. Some of them were only half-dressed and they carried nothing away in their hands but infants. Peyton shouted at his men to hold their fire as he ran. The large Indian rackets they wore were awkward and nearly useless on the hard-packed snow and ice on the cove and they slipped and slid towards the shoreline beneath the camp.
“What’s in the bush is gone,” Richmond shouted when they stopped there.
Across the ice the smaller party was still in sight, a cluster of bodies in the lead and one straggler losing ground. Peyton tore his feet free of the rackets and set off in their direction, shrugging off his pack and powder horn and the bulk of his greatcoat as he went. He ran with a panicked, superstitious urgency, as if he felt disaster could only be averted if he was the first of his party to touch a Red Indian, to speak his name aloud to their ears.