A Dark and Promised Land Read Free Page B

them the Official List of Exchange. None of them could read, but the list was imposing, nonetheless; you could argue with a man but not the Company.
    Once an agitated Bunjee, with face blackened with grease and charcoal, had burst into the store and thrown a musket onto the counter, loudly complaining that he had been forced to live off muskrats and rabbits for months because his gun wouldn’t shoot accurately.
    â€œNonsense,” the chief trader replied with a smile. “The Company’s trade guns are the finest in the world. They never fail in the hands of a worthy and knowledgeable hunter.”
    The Bunjee grabbed the musket and pressed the muzzle against the trader’s forehead, just above his spectacles.
    â€œMaybe you right, let us find out …” he said.
    â€œI see your position,” the old trader replied. “I will gladly replace the weapon with the Company’s apologies.”
    It was the only time Alexander had ever seen the old man beaten.
    The fur traders that came to York Factory with the brigades were enormous men with long bushy beards and clad in buffalo robes. The Half-breeds wore their distinctive red sashes and beaded and embroidered jackets. Most carried a beaded octopus bag and a powder horn and musket slung on their shoulders. The Half-breeds most often spied him, and, with a wink, gave him a candy. His presence thus betrayed, one of the junior clerks invariably chased him out with a broom.
    Very rarely he was invited into the warehouse, most often when someone needed help moving something. He was always amazed at the wealth stored at the factory: guns, powder and shot, powder horns, flints and gun worms, knives, axe and hatchet heads. Pots, pans, and stacked piles of okimow , the striped Hudson’s Bay blankets; sugar, Brazil tobacco, and awl blades. Tiny brass hawk bells to sew on to clothing and harness that made a delightful tinkle with the slightest movement. Hundreds of pounds of bright glass beads of every colour. Batteries of iron kettles, traded by the pound. There were boxes of fish hooks, nets, ice chisels, lines, sword blades, and bayonets the Indians fashioned into spears.
    Compared to the few possession his mother’s people carried with them, this was an unimaginable bounty. He would have undoubtedly lifted something but for the fact that the humourless clerk had always searched him when they left the warehouse. He had been too young to understand that what so awed him was merely the detritus of a distant, arrogant civilization.
    But eventually autumn wound its way through the land, and heralded by the angry bellows of rutting moose, his father loaded the gear required for a season of trading, returning Alexander to the land of his mother at the forks of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers.
    A free, enviable life. But that was before Selkirk came.
    â€œMcClure!”
    He looks around. Standing at the top of the bank, one of his brigade is looking down at him. “Aye?”
    The man gestures with a thumb over his shoulder. “Chief trader wants to see you, and he’s the devil this morning.”
    Alexander nods and waves to the man, who stares a moment and disappears. The summons is expected; the peltries Alexander had traded were mostly miserable summer affairs neatly wrapped with a few prime ones as disguise. The ruse lasted long enough to collect credit and get drunk. Now the reckoning has arrived — as it always did.
    He craves a pipe, but can’t recall where he has stowed his gear. No doubt it followed his purse. “Piss on it,” he says.
    The morning is becoming hot, although his thick clothes remain sodden. The feeling as he tugs them on is distasteful, reminding him of how skin slid off a corpse turned liquid by sun and flies. His boots squelch water as he climbs his halting way up the bank to the fort.

    William Spencer, chief trader, is tall and lanky with a scrawny, loose neck with skin hanging off it like a turkey.