Into the Heart of the Country Read online

  INTO

  THE

  HEART

  of the

  COUNTRY

  A NOVEL

  Pauline Holdstock

  For my family

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  Molly Norton’s Dream

  1717

  1741

  1753

  1756

  PART TWO

  Molly Norton’s Dream

  1772

  1773

  PART THREE

  Molly Norton’s Dream

  1774

  1775

  1776

  1778

  1782

  PART FOUR

  1782

  1783

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Under the skin of the earth deep in its rocky bones all dreams are one. The dreams of the dead are but one dream in search of the blood that courses through the body’s veins flooding the dark chambers of the heart and lighting them with its fire.

  PART ONE

  Molly Norton’s Dream

  NO ONE TOLD ME THE VASTNESS OF THE land. That when a person walks out the horizon is always farther and still farther and no amount of walking will bring it near. When I was a girl the horizon was the place the Wêcîpwayânak came from and the Kisiskâciwanak. A place a man could walk to as Samuel did and see there the Far-off Metal River and the Frozen Sea and come back and tell it. I did not expect the horizon to walk away from me. The vastness of the land was beyond my imagining. All my world was the fort. Its walls contained all that I could need and until Samuel left all that I desired. It was my home. Why would I desire ever to walk away from it? Why would anyone leave her home unless to be with her husband?

  And yet I did leave and I did discover the vastness. So that it was as if my own life’s purpose after all was to supply an answer to the question I believed required none. As if all my life had been only a prelude. All our lives only ever a prelude to what is to come.

  But here is a question I did not think to ask. Why would a man any man leave his family and his home to come across the sea? When some new English man or boy stepped stinking from the boat to come and work in the house of my father I had no thought to ask why. It was what Englishmen did. And not just for my father Moses. It was what they had always done. From this great distance now I see their strangeness. How they came without their women these men these boys. How they came lonely and cold and rough with little comfort but the rum and the brandy they brought in their ships. They came onto the land and they clung about its edges so that it seemed they feared the land itself or perhaps its people and could not wait to see their ships again. They built houses of so many trees they could never be moved unless burned away by fire or carried away by flood and they fenced them round with palings as if they would themselves be caught and contained in a pound. Only a few were bold enough to walk out on the land. And there they were as children in need living on the pemmican of my mother’s people. Wearing furs sewn fine for them against the wind. Warming themselves at night with the wives and the daughters who worked for them by day.

  The rest remained in the houses they built and there they were masters. They opened and closed the gates at will and at trade they named their terms. Some of the women they took for their own. Yet when it was time for the men to return they left as they had arrived—lonely and cold. Sometimes their women wept on the shore and sometimes they delighted and danced.

  And always there were more boys and more men who came like waves washing and receding at the shore. My grandfather Richard one of them. He lay down his gunpowder in the rocks and broke apart the very land for stones to build his house. And the people were drawn there like bees to a nest. And in that house my father was raised and in that same house my mother raised me. And to that house Samuel came like any other Englishman. I should have known he would not stay forever. When he took me for a wife how did I not see? Like any other Englishman he would sail away. He would turn his back on me and he would sail away as if all those stones upon stones were no more to him than an empty shelter on the trail. As if he were a man with no family of his own.

  But my grandfather and my father and Samuel too are long dead and I am thinned now almost to nothing. A vapour rising from the muskeg a mist breathing up from the melt. Do you remember at the end of summer the swathes of white seed floss that float on the air across the land in the early morning? The breath of the dogs in the winter air? I am less. I am less than the high white smears across the blue roof of the world. Less than the faint haze round the moon in summer. I have thinned and thinned until on a still morning I shall vanish at the same moment that a hare will leap clear of the tongue of a fox.

  It has taken many years to come to this but I have been patient willing myself back into the thin soil under the moss. Willing myself out of the steel teeth of his betrayal where for a hundred years I lay ready to gnaw at my own limbs to escape the jaws of loneliness. All my people starved and broken.

  Did he know what was coming when he said for your life Molly? Saying my name through his clenched teeth? Surely he knew I would have gone with him into the boat. Wouldn’t any wife? But he said for your life Molly for your life. Did he not know the journey that lay before me? And if he did not know then did he come to learn it? Did he see it when his life was over? Did he see my corpse as I have seen it cold and alone on the trail beside the frozen lake? To lie alone beside the lake in that silence on the snow that did not melt was terror worse than death. For if I were dead where were my people who should come to greet me? My sister? My grandmother? My daughter?

  Yet the silence was trickery for a wind roared though it bent no sedge nor lifted any snow from the lake. It came from a great distance out of the hunting grounds. And the more I listened the more it seemed that the roaring was filled with the voices of all animals and all people who had lived—though they massed as one and I could distinguish none. At last I raised my voice to join them and the days and seasons rolled swiftly under me. The breath of the wind became my breath and I could quiet it.

  I lay on a trail beside my boy where the others had left us. I had taken off the last of my clothing to speed my departure. I had given my moosehide blanket to my boy had given him too the knife and had laid myself down. If I had not curled my limbs inward I would have looked like a skinned animal for I could see the bones of my hips and my shoulders the ribs of my back stretching my hide. The knife marks on my thigh made it seem that already the animals had come to test my flesh but had turned away from the bitter taste. My boy Athîkis wrapped in the moosehide sat without moving. I laid my body in such a way that he could see the cuts—would if he were driven to find the courage to make his own.

  When I had looked on all this a long while I closed my eyes on whiteness and welcomed it. A strange twinned creature I was—both in and out of this remembered world. I saw my body lying on the snow and my sight could leave my own body and see beyond to where the others lay. My aunt had not travelled more than a day from us before she too had fallen. My small cousin was holding tight still to her robe. Her fingers clutched the edge of the fur and I knew in an instant that she would lie with her mother for all time and that her fingers would hold fast long after the fur had rotted away. My mother had walked on for two days more. She had thought perhaps to find some shelter at a hollow where two pines grew close together but she had fallen just before she reached it. She was on her hands and knees and was moaning softly though there was no one to hear but she would not—I knew this for certain—go on again.
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  Strange to say my eyes absorbed these things without pity and did not see them with pain as they would in life. My own corpse on the snow was no more to me now than the carcass of an animal before it has melted back into the land. Nor were the little bones of my daughter’s body any more or any less lying where they did on the trail behind us.

  I did not enter the place where tears fall. Instead I felt the rolling of the year and began to know. If my life had no place in the seasons to come then my own days must now run backwards like a falling tide. The pull of it carried me back to the last days of my living when my mother walked away from me into the face of the storm. When my aunt too vanished in the whitened air between us. I was laying my small daughter to rest. My daughter who had refused a journey so hard and let her breath be lost to the sweep of the wind. I covered her with a blanket of snow and when I looked up the two of us my small boy Athîkis and I were alone and the world was wide. I crouched for him to climb onto my back and covered him with the moosehide. I watched my body rise from its knees and fall rise again and go on. Fall again rise. Another watching our progress might have asked why it was I would not lie down and allow the two of us to rest. Lie down and open ourselves to death. But without breaking faith I could not. I walked on. I followed the path the others had made keeping my head down keeping my feet in the trodden snow of their tracks but never did I see them waiting as I had hoped on the trail ahead. When I came near to a small lake I saw there the bundle of skins my mother had carried for our shelter and the ice chisel my grandmother had given and I began to know why my mother had walked on. I was comforted and knew that Athîkis and I were not alone.

  Those who were with us were in my heart. My aunt my mother. And the ones who had gone before them. Kôhkôhkahôw who had fished for us teaching us patience and fortitude. My grandmother with no protest or complaint suffering cold and hardship for all of us. Sharing all that she caught. Lying now where she left us. And farther back still Jane my sister bringing her husband’s geese to the fort in the sweet sad time before this journey. Still farther a woman unknown to me. And she was with me too. She was strong and stood as if at my back with her hand on my shoulder to give me strength. Where she lived or where she lay in the whole wide land I had no knowledge. I knew only what Samuel had told me one night as we lay in the great soft bed that once was my father’s. How Matonabbee and his friends had with Samuel come upon a woman of the Atimospikayak the Dog Rib people living alone on the shores of a lake in winter. How she had lived by cutting the flesh of her thigh to bait her line for fish. And the woman told me how to save Athîkis.

  I watched myself out on the frozen lake and saw how the knife trembled in my hand. How blood fell on the snow from my bitten lip. The knife skidded from my thigh. I tried again. And then again. I tried with its tip to cut out a sliver but my hands trembled so violently that it was not possible. I lay down with my face on the snow and I felt Athîkis’s tears falling hot on the back of my neck.

  I see how I had no place in the world. No father or mother no sister living. No passage to England with Samuel. No stone house. No lodge to return to. I lived only for the promise I had made to my sister’s bones.

  When I looked up the sky had darkened and the only thing to be seen was the white snow falling to cover again the face of the land. A long time it fell through that night and the day following and the next night too. In the morning it grew less and still less until an astonishing blue appeared behind it between it when I turned my face to the sky. And when I looked downward I saw that I was sleeping dropping deeper as a body sinks through water falling far below the surface where other hands take hold.

  1717

  THE WOMAN LYING AT RICHARD NORTON’S BACK leaned over his shoulder, tried to see his face but it was shielded with his hand at his neck, his forearm across his cheek, his eye, like a boy asleep, like the boy he was.

  —Are you weeping?

  He shook his head and swallowed mightily. He did not understand the word she used but he caught the tone that would mock him.

  —You’re weeping.

  He rolled over on his back and looked towards her.

  They had been travelling north out of York Factory for almost two weeks, the three of them. Governor Knight had arranged the expedition and chosen the guides—this Northern woman Iyese and the man Tudelzen, who had claimed her at once for his companion on the journey. Richard—the governor’s sixteen-year-old ambassador—had no voice of his own in the matter. But Richard had voice in very little, enthusiasm, undeniable flesh-and-blood Englishness, and dispensability being the chief qualities he brought to this expedition of uncertain outcome.

  They had paddled up the coast, winding through the rotting shore ice, parting great rafts of ducks that floated like dark yapping sea wrack. They pulled the canoes onto the flats each night and feasted on whatever they had caught that day. The waveys were nesting, and neither Richard nor the man Tudelzen had any trouble picking off the sentinels. They ate roast goose as long as their firewood lasted. Iyese could have a fire going and the goose drawn and dismembered and spitted on a bayonet above it before they had finished a pipe. When all the wood they had carried was burned, they ate the pemmican they had brought with them and eggs the woman gathered. She could walk in a straight line directly to a nest. And so they continued, always north. And then one night Richard had complained of the increasing wind from the bay and Tudelzen had offered the woman. Richard had heard of this hospitality and longed to experience it, but still it shocked him. Here was no shelter, no tent for privacy, their blankets of moosehide their only cover. But the man was insistent. He said his sister, Thanadelthur, had made him give his word to her before she died. Take good care of the boy Norton, she had said. She was a formidable woman, his sister. She would have been with them herself if she had not sickened. A man would not want to cross her even in death. So Tudelzen had promised. He registered deep offence at Richard’s hesitation. Richard read it plainly on his face. What choice did he have? Tudelzen said he was going to sleep in the lee of his canoe. It would be some shelter from the wind. Richard will not remember the wind. He will remember only the million stars and their glittering disinterest, their vertiginous wheeling behind the woman’s tattooed face as he rolled onto his back.

  Iyese laughed.

  —God in heaven, he said. Then again, God. I am destroyed.

  He was smiling now, shaking his head. He shuddered and heaved a great sigh.

  She climbed onto him and lay flat.

  She said, Do that again—and this time he understood the words and he flexed himself, making her laugh. He loved that laugh. Delight. Right up against his own agonies of desire. Already she was making him hard again. She knew exactly how to pleasure him, this woman, and he let her. It was true. Everything he’d heard about them. It was true. So he lay, floating on the sea of his desire while she navigated all its channels. He tried to stop himself from grabbing her so that he could make the pleasure last. But it was not possible. In a moment he had pushed her off and was on her, and in another minute it was over—the two of them apart again, catching their breath, her head still tipped back awkwardly on her arched neck, his fingers still deep in her hair. A sailor on the Dering had told him when he was just a lad that if you lie still you can get the women to ride you like a mount. The sailor had said the best of it was you could watch their whole bodies doing it. And then the men had descended into vulgarities the like of which his young ears had never known. But he did not stop them.

  He understood now why men volunteered so readily for details away from the factory.

  THEY PADDLED NORTH in their small canoes, negotiating the mouth of the great river by working upstream with the rising tide and waiting for the ebb to carry them over at an easy angle. Three stripped spruce poles marked the proposed site of the new post, a low point of land with a rock cliff at its back. They beached the canoes and went ashore briefly so that Iyese could get her bearings. Inland, all was an inhospitable mixture of boul
der and marsh until the woods began almost a mile away to the west. Iyese walked out a short distance to the north and to the west, fixing the location and its approaches in her memory before they continued downriver. The falling tide carried them safely round the northeast point and into Button’s Bay. They paddled on the next day past the mouth of the Seal River and on again until they reached the river the woman knew, the one she said would take them to the place where the Wêcîpwayânak, her own people, would be gathering before they headed west for the winter. Richard had more faith in this Northern woman now that he had lain with her—and now that the promised river had materialized. He had seen how her eyes glistened when she spoke about her people. Before they set out he had regarded her—purchased for goods to the amount of sixty made beaver—as a mere replacement for the governor’s first choice. Now he no longer doubted that Iyese was equal to the undertaking. When they reached her people she would act as his mouthpiece for the Honourable Company. She would explain on Richard’s behalf exactly where Churchill Factory, the new house for trade, was to be built. Richard would distribute the samples they had brought with them, the knives and the awls, the beads and the good duffle cloth. Using the words Thanadelthur had taught him, he would recite a list of every item that would be available at the new post. He would promise the very best standard of trade. And Iyese and Tudelzen would bring him safely home.

  FOR A WHILE they kept to the waterway, taking advantage of the easy paddling across its lakes, the abundant fish, but when the river became unnavigable they abandoned the canoes and continued on foot. They carried their provisions and the sleeping skins as well as all the gifts. Their progress was slow.

  Without the definition of the coast Richard began to feel disoriented. That long stain of purple and orange that had stretched away across the open country to the northeast was now on his left, to the southwest. Or was it another tract of the same plants, the same lichen? That low ridge in front of them. Hadn’t they crossed it before? And that chain of lakes, three together? This land as big as a world. Nothing to hold to. No human habitation. He could stand in one spot and turn full round on his heel and the horizon was unmarked. No end of this land in sight in any direction. He was cowed by the vastness and envied the birds, who might outfly it. Still he had faith in these guides and gave himself up to them entirely. They travelled on the land as if it were marked with signposts and milestones, and so long as the weather held he could feel secure, the world a known place, a legible page, at least to his companions. Even through the sleet and the first snows he did not lose confidence. But then came a storm like a raging beast and it was as if the very air had taken animal life, the wind become a wolf’s breath with the power to freeze the heart in the throat, turn the blood to ice. He was not able to see in the stinging snow and when he closed his eyes against it he could no longer think clearly, was barely able to place one foot in front of the other, never knowing which way to turn, which way was forward. The unearthly howling of the wind shredded the fabric of a man’s thinking. Its bitter cold wrung the flesh from the bones. He wanted only to fall to his knees and cover his head. Iyese insisted that there were trees not a day off and she refused to stop.