The High Missouri by Win Blevins Page B

failed.
    He heard the scraping of canvas.
    Saga stood there with the pièces in his arms and a quizzical look on his face. No one lifted 180 pounds easily, but Saga had done it in a matter-of-fact way.
    Dylan submitted to his fate. He turned his back to Saga and accepted the weight of the bundle on his hips and shoulders, the pull of the tumpline on his forehead.
    Without a word he turned down the trail, ordering his legs not to collapse, at least until he was out of sight of Saga, who was sitting there, puffing his pipe contentedly.
    Dylan thought, I’m going to die before I make half of the first trip. On my gravestone, a miserable wooden slab, they’ll write with a burnt stick, “Not a true Nor’Wester.”
    Then Dylan realized. The bastard Saga still hadn’t spoken to him.
    Upstream, downstream, across lakes no one had ever heard of, every which way Dylan could imagine, off the regular canoe highway, for reasons Dylan didn’t know. Twice they stopped near forts somewhere, Dylan had no idea where. He and Saga would stay in camp several miles from the fort while Dru went in to talk to someone. He never said who, or why, or what he told them. It was the bloody war with HBC, but that’s all Dylan knew.
    HBC had a prior claim on nearly everything, it seemed. Some king long dead had made things difficult for everyone by giving the company a grant of all the land which drained into Hudson’s Bay, which the nabob couldn’t even point to on a map. So the Nor’Westers were intruders, if the grant was valid.
    Which according to the Nor’Westers, it wasn’t. We French were in all this country before you bloody British heard of it, they claimed, and even beyond into Athabasca, so we have prior rights.
    But, said the Hudson Bay men, you Nor’Westers are mere pedlars, chasers after money, while we British have a noble and imperial vision.
    Bloody hell, said the Nor’Westers, we know the Indians, we understand them—hell, we are them. You want to make them into proper little lords and ladies.
    And so it went. Each company resented the other, fought bitterly for the furs, competed with maniacal intensity. The HBC, though, didn’t have the expertise of the Nor’Westers—the knowledge of the country, of the Indians, their languages and ways. Nor did they have the enterprise. So they always followed the Nor’West men into new country and set up a post a mile or so away. Imitators and leeches, the Nor’Westers called them.
    Habitually, and gleefully, the outfits bribed Indians loyal to the other. When convenient, they stole from each other. Occasionally, they murdered. Sometimes they took each other’s forts by force of arms. Once in a while, hypocritically, they got warrants and arrested each other for these various crimes.
    So what messages was Dru delivering? He wouldn’t tell. Just wartime intelligence, he murmured.
    He got Dylan utterly lost. All Dylan knew was that they were somewhere in Rupert’s Land, the vast area of fine fur country in the watershed of Hudson’s Bay. He didn’t know where within two hundred miles. All he really knew was that he wanted to stop paddling.
    “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye.”
    It was the Druid, grinning at him and beaming at him with his lamp of an eye.
    Then he saw what was wrong. It was morning, not night, and he was waking in the light, for a change. Dru had let them all sleep in.
    It didn’t mean much to Dylan. He was always exhausted. Always thirsty. Always hungry. He felt needy in ways he hadn’t known he could need. And he was continually humiliated by his weakness on all the portages. Saga never mentioned it. He only smiled, mockingly. Dylan looked often at the scalp dangling from his sash, and wondered why on earth he kept it. It made the crown of his head itch.
    “I said, ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to ye,’” repeated Dru. A Welshman acting the Irishman. Dru had many faces, many roles, many guises, which he interchanged playfully. One of his games was keeping