It was well into morning by this time and the snow and ice shimmered in the sunlight like a mirage, the figures ahead of him distorted in the brightness so that it sometimes seemed they were hovering several feet above the surface and sometimes as if they had no legs at all. The straggler was the woman he had called out to and as she fell further behind he could make out the flap of her caribou cassock and its thickly furred collar. One of the lead group came back to her and gathered up a package from her arms, but she continued to struggle and Peyton quickly closed the distance between them. “Haloo,” he shouted after her. He was close enough to see that her leggings were stitched with spruce root, bald white thread against the red-ochre stain. There were bone pendants and a bright red bird claw attached to the outside seams that rattled as she ran. “Haloo,” he shouted again.
Ten yards in front of him, unable to run any further, she dropped heavily to her knees and Peyton came to a stop behind her to keep the distance. Her breath was ragged and uneven and she choked and coughed as the rest of her party disappeared around the point of land in the distance. She turned where she knelt to face the stranger, loosening the belt and lifting her cassock over her head to reveal her breasts in an appeal for mercy, the nipples barely visible beneath the red paint that covered her torso. Peyton looked away from her, breathing heavily to stop his body from shaking. The frost in the air had galled his throat and lungs and the dark peaty taste of blood flooded his mouth.
He set his flintlock rifle on the ground and kicked it away, then he removed his pistol from its harness and threw it to the side so that it skittered over the ice for twenty feet, the metal barrel flaring in the sunlight. “All right,” he said, looking across at her. He held his hands out at his sides. The first of his party were making their way towards them and the woman on the ice looked past him to the approaching men. “All right now,” he said and stepped towards her.
She looked over her shoulder to the point where she had last seen her companions, then covered herself with the leather cassock and stood to meet him. He nodded his head and smiled towards her, “John Peyton,” he said, thumping his chest with the open palm of his hand, “John Peyton.” She was still crying but nodded her head and smiled helplessly as she came up to this man with her hands extended and Peyton was struck by the evenness and uncorrupted white of her teeth.
Michael Sharpe was the first to reach them. He stood and stared at the Indian woman with the same look of wonder and mistrust he would have turned on a tree that had uprooted itself from the shore and walked towards him across the ice. Peyton held her arm gently above the elbow and named the man for her and she took his hand and nodded and spoke her words to him as she had to Peyton. When the rest of his party arrived carrying Peyton’s greatcoat and other supplies, she greeted them as well. John Senior walked off to collect Peyton’s guns.
Peyton explained how the other Indians had disappeared around the point of land ahead and when they turned to look in that direction they saw three figures standing at the shoreline to watch them. One of the distant figures gesticulated as if to gain their attention.
“All right,” John Senior said then, and he removed a heavy leather mitten to reach inside his coat, taking out a long linen handkerchief that he shook free in the sunlight. The cloth snapped in the cold air. “Here,” the old man said, and he handed the handkerchief to his son.
Peyton nodded and took the handkerchief and turning towards the three figures on the point of land ahead he waved the white cloth over his head.
“Her hands!” John Senior snapped at him. “What a goddamn fool,” he said. The old man retrieved his handkerchief and grabbed the woman’s arm to turn her back towards him. She looked to John Peyton as her hands were knotted behind her back and he nodded and did his best to indicate everything would be all right.
Across the ice two of the figures stepped down from the bank of the shore. The man in the lead carried a branch of white spruce and held it before him as they walked towards the party on the ice. Peyton spoke to the group without taking his eyes from the men approaching them. “No one fires,” he said, “without my say-so.”
SIX
After they gathered spruce branches and stones from the near point to fashion a crude burial mound and kicked snow over the blood stains on the ice, the white men retraced their steps across the lake to the Indian camp. The largest of the three shelters was big enough to sleep nearly twenty people, a circle of shallow sleeping hollows radiating around the firepit at the centre. There was a wall of horizontal logs three feet in height at the base of the structure, the chinks stodged with moss and dirt banked up on the outside. A cone of longer logs raised above it served as rafters for the thickly layered birchbark covering. The walls inside were hung with bows, hatchets, iron axes, clubs and spears, all of them covered in red ochre and all laid out in the neatest order.