The High Missouri by Win Blevins

hadn’t spoken a word to Dylan.
    Not that there had been time to talk. The canoe road had been mostly upstream. Often up rapids and waterfalls. Or down them, which was even more dangerous.
    The canoes of the NorthWest Company that were headed for the bit interior depot, Fort William, the center of the company’s operations on Lake Superior, went up the Ottawa River from Montreal, through a network of rivers and lakes to Georgian Bay, across the bay—Dylan’s first look at what the French called the sweetwater seas—along the northern edge of Lake Huron, and across the entire northern shore of Superior to the depot.
    You not only paddled the canoe against the current, you poled it. Sometimes you cordelled it (pulled it with a long rope). When things got really tough—because there were big rapids, or you had to cross a divide—you portaged.
    Dru told Dylan these portages were easy, laughably easy, because the outfit bore almost no freight. They seemed unpleasant enough to Dylan. The three of them beached the canoe, unloaded the four bundles, or pièces , of goods they were taking along, and then loaded up Saga—two bundles packed on his hips and held in place by a tumpline across his forehead, 180 pounds of weight altogether. Saga just grunted and moved out—at a trot. Dru and Dylan put the canoe upright, not bottom up, on their shoulders and followed him. Then Dylan and Dru went back and hauled the other two pièces , one each to make it easy on a beginner like Dylan, said Dru.
    It was done quickly but not easily, because Dru and Saga portaged at a pace full of fury, for reasons that were never explained. At the far end of the portage they’d get seated, Dru would mutter something about Dylan having it too easy, and push off.
    They worked like brutes every day. They moved the canoe—paddling, poling, cordelling, portaging—from daylight to dusk. As they came into the longest days of the year, this meant sixteen hours a day. The only respite was a stop every hour for a pipe. And a little time at dawn and sunset, for the wretched sagamité .
    If Dylan had come to the wilds for freedom, this seemed more like slavery.
    “Where are we going?” he asked.
    “After the grail,” replied the Druid.
    Dylan couldn’t remember what grail he’d pledged to pursue.
    Dylan staggered sideways. He lurched into a birch tree, and it propped him up before he could fall to the ground. He sank to his knees.
    He had never felt so awful in his life. His legs were shaking. Not just quivering, actually shaking. He was grateful to be on his knees, so they couldn’t clatter against each other.
    His back ached. His neck was screaming at him. He eased his head back against the tumpline, but it followed him, and that made pain shoot up his neck at a new angle.
    He cursed the two ninety-pound pièces strapped onto his back. He cursed portaging. He cursed the distance he’d come, slowly and painfully, across the path, the rocks, the duff, the muskeg of the portage. He cursed the stumbles, the rocks that hurt his feet, the mud that sucked at his moccasins, and most of all the steepness of the route—not only the climbs, which strained his legs mightily, but the parts that looked flat and were uphill, and especially the parts that were downhill and made his thighs labor to keep man and burden from rollicking down the trail.
    If only he could fall and roll like a rock to the end of the portage.
    He cursed the cache they’d raised, which made four extra pièces of ninety pounds each. He cursed the Nor’Westers who invented this so-called heroic tradition—to either make pork eaters into real men, hommes du nord , or break them. He saved his most bitter curses for those said to carry three of these pièces , 270 pounds, to show off. He profaned the tradition of running portages at a trot, fully loaded. He swore at the NorthWest Company. He blasphemed the Hudson’s Bay Company, which made this tactic necessary. He cursed the Welsh Indians, if