Buchan smiled at her finally. “Please,” he said.
She nodded and accepted the pencil. She turned the journal on the table several ways until it was arranged as she wished and she began fixing the drawing of the River Exploits. Her picture was minute and detailed, with a cluster of small concave strokes indicating prominent rapids on the river and a billow of vapour where each of the waterfalls was located. She dotted portage paths around each of these obstructions. She added a third mamateek to the two figures drawn by Buchan at the lake. She paused a moment and raised her head to the group of faces around her.
“Go ahead,” Buchan said quietly.
She drew something near the figure of herself on the shore, something the figure was holding at the level of her waist.
“What’s that?” John Senior asked. “Is that the bundle of clothes she drags around?”
“A child,” Cassie said. “A baby, Mary?”
“Yes, yes. Baby.”
“She has a child?” Buchan asked. He looked up at the men across the table.
“That seems to be the gist of what she’s suggesting,” Peyton said flatly.
“Did you know this?”
“There wasn’t what you would call a proper round of introductions made at the time,” John Senior told him.
“Mary’s baby,” Mary said.
“You would like to go home to your child,” Buchan said, but she didn’t understand him and simply stared. He took the pencil from her and again indicated the boat leaving the lake. Again she protested. “All right,” he said, “all right.” He returned the pencil to her and pointed to the page. “Show me what you want,” he told her.
Mary moved the figure with the child in her arms from the shoreline beside the mamateeks back into the waiting boat. Then she drew a line up the river, across the portages at both waterfalls and around rapids into the Bay of Exploits. She drew Burnt Island and then a square house on the stretch of beach where they were sitting around the table and placed herself and her child beside it. “Good,” she said obstinately, though her stubbornness seemed somehow infected with her illness, drained of energy and confidence. She placed the pencil beside the journal. “Good for Mary.”
Mary went to her room shortly after drawing her map. Cassie finished clearing up the supper dishes and then took a seat with the men who had settled into a bottle of rum. For six months in 1818 Buchan had been part of an expedition to the Arctic, attempting to reach the Pole by ship, and he was giving an account of his travels. He was in command of the Dorothea, accompanied by Lieutenant John Frankland in the Trent. They sailed out of Spitzbergen on June 7 and passed easily beyond the northwest boundary of the island. Near Red Bay they were icebound for thirteen days and then took shelter in Fair Haven. On July 6, they again headed out, reaching 80° 34’ North before they were forced to turn back due to the ice conditions. The weather was so cold and inclement at times that the ship’s canvas and rigging was encased in ice. Cauldrons of water were boiled and the steam used to free knots sufficiently to allow sails to be set. Men chopped the bows and decks free of thick galls of ice with axes and cutlasses.
Cassie watched him from her chair across the room. His face seemed to be lit from within as he talked, like a man recounting an encounter with God. He used his hands to indicate the position of ships, the angle of rafted ice, the distance from ship to land. Their constant motion added to the distractedly busy air that rarely left him in the company of other men. The Peytons and Corporal Rowsell leaned forward on their thighs to get as close to the story as they could manage, as if they were drawing heat from a fire.