A Dark and Promised Land Read Free Page A

digging twin furrows with a following clatter of pebbles. At the bank, he peels off his clothes and wades into the water. It is cold but not icy, and he dives into its depths, surfacing with a splutter and cough, his long yellow hair streaming.
    By the time he emerges, the sun is over the bank and the day is already warm. He spreads himself naked on the shore to dry. His brown body is lithe and slender, with wiry muscles; a form descended from runners, more Cree than Scots. A pale flower on his left thigh bulges with a lump of loose bone. A buffalo’s horn long ago ran him through there, and it still bothers him.
    He rubs his scabby knuckles. Someone had a busted jaw or an eye that wouldn’t see for quite a good while, he assures himself. He can’t recall details, but is unsurprised at this: it is common for the fur traders to consume enormous quantities of spirits over many days, often amounting to several gallons. Some wake up in chimneys or in the holds of ships far out to sea. Sometimes they never wake, which is far from the worst fate that can befall a man in Rupert’s Land.
    The son of a Highlander — a fur trader from Albany Factory — and a Cree woman, Alexander has lived in many places, none very long. As a child, he spent much time in York Fort, an oddity in that most Half-caste bastards lived with their mothers. But unlike most Orkneymen, who only served their contracted seven years on the bay, his father had been adamant that his son be raised as a Christian despite the disapproval of many, including the Fort’s factor.
    Every fall, he accompanied the brigades to the lands south and west of Missinipi — the Big Water — the land of his mother. He was left in her care while his father traded for furs at Indian encampments along the distant Athabasca and Slave Lake systems. In the spring, he always returned, and, after collecting his son, they spent the summer at the Bay.
    Alexander loved the intense activity of York Fort, the ships arriving from England, the canoe and York boat brigades from Rupert’s Land. There was always so much coming and going, so much drinking and fighting and haggling and trading that it was easy for a child to stand unnoticed and take it all in, even though his hair made him stand out among his Indian cohorts. When things were sorting themselves out in his mother’s womb, he had received his father’s yellow hair — what little there was: his mother didn’t call him Paskwastikwân , or Old Baldy, for nothing — and his father’s passionate temper. His mother’s gift was her dark skin and deep love for the wild lands. He thinks it a fair exchange.
    Some Company employees despised Half-caste whelps, and these people he had tormented mercilessly. That he was often caught and beaten made no difference; he would sit in a birch tree all day long for the chance to shit on someone, and more than one night he spent hiding in the forest, the terror of the Machi Manitou less than that of his enraged father.
    There was a school of sorts at the factory for the servant’s and the Home Guard children, but he often managed to be elsewhere when the lessons started. He preferred to haunt the trade store, hiding behind barrels of traps or axe heads, momentarily freed from the torment of adults who thought there was always something useful for an eight-year-old to do. Secreted away and pulling the limbs off captured spiders or flies, he listened to the fur traders attempts at a better deal. They were rarely successful.
    Despite their formidable size and armament, they could never get the Company’s chief trader to change his mind. A slight man with white hair and spectacles, he never became angry, never exchanged insults or profanities, regardless how sorely provoked. The rate for made beaver was set in London and as immutable as the Commandments, he always explained to the bristling men on the opposite side of the counter, showing