River City by John Farrow Page A

of colours across the hills vibrated in the breeze. Wind snatched leaves from their branches, crimson and oranges, a myriad of yellows sashayed down to the riverbank to float among the dabbling waterfowl. Upon this threshold he would cast his fate. Meeting a newer, more powerful band of Indians, he could not foresee how events would unfold. Still, he would endeavour to execute his plan, to perform a feat of magic, to extract a gift from the chief for his king so beguiling that future journeys would be well financed. To do so would require his cunning while meeting a people who no doubt possessed great cunning of their own.
    Like a gopher’s, Donnacona’s head poked up through the fo’c’sle. The Iroquois chief from the village downstream, known as Stadacona, inhaled great breaths of fresh air, a relief from the calamity of rancid pale-skins’ stink and other wretched emanations from the crew’s quarters. Men shat in a bucket overnight and breathed the fetid reek through their sleep. They dozed above and below one another, as entangled as nesting squirrels, oozing sweat, their raucous gasps whistling and mournful, the air humid with the pong of fusty breath.
    The chief was dismayed by his experience with the pale-skins, by their rituals and giant canoe. To sleep aboard such a vessel had been humiliating. Previously, he had slipped away from his berth and, under the stars, slept on deck as the Émérillon slowly plied the river waters. How such a fortress floated on its belly without sinking remained incomprehensible to him. How it rode so high above the waves without toppling perplexed him. As it rolled from side to side, death was surely imminent.
    Donnacona had sighted the ship the previous year as, ghostlike, it plodded north off the Gaspé coast within the horizon’s broad rim. He had brought his people to fish and draw mussels from the ocean’s shores, and the men and women had stood in wonderment. Stymied by fear. They looked to the sky as though this weird creation had dropped through a rip there, and finally they sat upon the beach in silence. Donnacona felt the claws of a crow dig into his back. He was being lifted into the sky, in pain—it felt that way. A few women wept. The youngest children danced and occasionally threw stones inthe direction of the giant canoe. The lips of an older man trembled, yet soon, everyone’s capacity to be surprised or frightened was eclipsed by a true and profound apprehension. They saw the world, the whole of the universe, as different. Who were these sea beings? From what other place had they descended?
    As chief, Donnacona accepted the responsibility to act, lest the people squat upon the shore forever. He called upon the tribe to gather old wood from the beach and forest, and by twilight he had ignited a huge fire that stopped the boat’s progress and lured the sea beings ashore. As the leader clambered out of his longboat, the chief walked down alone to the rocky waterline to meet Cartier for the first time.
    In the firelight of the traveller’s torches, he gazed into the eyes of the sea being and conceded that he resembled a man. A stinking man, with a ghost’s skin and frightful black fur upon his face. A strange creature in ridiculous clothing, yet this man-like creature possessed a giant canoe, which carried smaller canoes with giant paddles that brought more man-like beings ashore. Ghosts, these men, white-fleshed, whose odd clothing had not been cut from animal pelts. This pale-skinned man indicated that he had come from a land across the sea. An incomprehensible story. Cartier had been shocked to learn that Donnacona and his people had also come to this shore from far away.
    The women kept looking for women among the pale-skins, but there were none. Such a strange people. How did they fornicate? With whom? But what women could fornicate with men who stank so foully? Someone deduced, “It’s a war party. That’s why no women go with them.”
    Donnacona needed