Settlement. Ann Birch
and tell me your story. I want to know why you have been hungry in this land of deer and moose.” Sam took two pipes from the rack near the cupboards and passed a pouch of tobacco to his friend. He filled his own pipe, tamped down the tobacco, lit it and puffed. Jacob did the same.
Cook pushed open the small window beside the hearth. A blast of icy air blew in. Sam turned to her, “Close the window, damn it. If you don’t like the pipe smoke, go sit in the scullery.” And out she went, banging the kitchen door behind her.
“Now, Jacob...”
“I tell you once before about the Governor. Not this new Governor, but the one who comes before...” He paused and took another puff on his pipe.
“Governor Colborne. Yes, I remember.” Colborne had ordered three Indian bands from different islands in Lake Simcoe to move north to the Narrows and live together. There, so Colborne reasoned, he could monitor the Indians’ movements more closely. But then he grew frightened of the “threat”, as he called it, of all those “savages” in one place. Some of the Indians had moved back to Lake Simcoe, with Colborne’s blessing.
“All that moving back and forth, it is disaster, Nehkik. When we move to the Narrows, we leave behind crops on the land. But we do not worry, there are many moose at the Narrows, so we have plenty to eat. But when we go back home again to Snake Island, we find nothing but weeds. Nothing to eat there but mushrooms and berries.”
“But there is game, is there not? Do you not have moose there, too?”
“Many white men settle on the lake, shoot deer, shoot moose, shoot partridge. A moon ago, old white man points a rifle at me when he sees me stalk deer. ‘Go away, savage,’ he says, ‘this is my land and my deer’.”
“Like Windigo,” Sam said, remembering the story Jacob had told him on one of their hunting trips. Windigo was the cannibal hunter with a heart of ice, tall as a towering white pine, who ate every living creature that walked upon the earth. “Himself only for himself,” was Windigo’s cry.
“Yes, like Windigo.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Jacob was a quiet man, and he and Sam had often sat by their campfire in the wilderness for hours, each deep in his own thoughts. Now, glancing at his friend as he smoked, Sam noticed the black marks on his face. They were not the dirt that came from a long trek across country, but something quite different.
“The black paint on your cheeks, Jacob—you are in mourning? Who has died?”
“My wife.”
And now in his voice there was such sorrow mixed with anger that Sam was at first afraid to question him further. He got up and poked at the fire. He wound up the clock jack and set the roast of beef turning once more in the hastener.
“And your children, friend?” he said finally, as he remembered that Jacob had once mentioned two small girls, perhaps four and five years of age, and two boys of nine and twelve.
“With the grandmother. But she is old and sick, too. She is a good woman, does what she can...” Jacob tapped the contents of his pipe onto the empty plate and stood up. “But children need a mother.” He looked at Sam, one man to another. “And I need a wife.”
“You and I have had good times together, Jacob. I will go with you this day and talk to our new Governor. I will tell him of the plight of your people and ask what can be done. Do not despair.”
Jacob smiled. It deepened the lines in his sunken face, yet his eyes shone in the gloom. “I tell my father, Chief Snake. I say to him, ‘Maybe Nehkik can help’.” Jacob took Sam’s hand in his long bony fingers. “May the Great Spirit who rules our world guard and protect you.”
As Jacob moved towards the kitchen door, Sam suddenly remembered Mrs. Jameson’s request. “Jacob,” he said, “I have a friend who is writing a book on Upper Canada. She wants to let Europeans know about the life of the country’s original inhabitants. Would you, your father, and your friend consider spending an hour with her now? She would offer some food, if I asked her, and we should still have plenty of time to see the Governor.”
“Yes, Nehkik.”
Sam got into his coat and the moccasins which Jacob had given him months ago. He and his friend put on their snowshoes and moved into the pine trees behind the house. As they went forward, their tracks disappeared in the swirling snow.
Anna sat at the pine table in her bedchamber rereading the letter she had written to Ottilie von Goethe. Perhaps it was the type of letter that Mrs. Hawkins would label “Written by Lady Snob”, but Anna thought it was clever, exactly the sort of thing her friend would enjoy. After all, Ottilie, in her free-spirited way, was always on the search for a new man in her life.
Dearest Ottilie:
Are you growing weary of your lover, le beau Charles? Do you yearn for a new objet d’amour? Come here, my dear, and I will present you with an Indian chief.
He will be tall and muscular, and you will grow accustomed to the stink of his sweat and the filth of his deerskin leggings. He will be a man of few words, and those he speaks, you will not understand. So you will not have to converse with him, nor will there be tiresome preliminaries to your love-making. He will simply throw you over his broad shoulders and carry you off to his wigwam deep in the pine forest. On a comfortable mat of boughs and branches, he will make you his very own... squaw.
There will be household tasks you must learn, of course, but these will be easy. You must skin a bear or two to make a warm covering for the nuptial mat. You must snare a rabbit, skin and gut it, and boil it over your campfire into a tasty stew. He may need a gallon of cheap whiskey each day, but that you can bargain for from a greasy trader.
When your handsome chief tires of you, or you of him, there will be no lingering heartache. He will strike off your head with his tomahawk. Or you may do likewise. White man’s courts will pay no heed. Indians have their own marital customs and their own solutions for dissension.
When I contemplate my marriage to Mr. Jameson, I may envy you. We have our meals on a table, but I hear only the clink of the stopper on the wine decanter and the rustle of his newspaper. Sometimes I long for a bear to skin. Or a tomahawk to wield.
I have asked the Superintendent of Indian Affairs—a rather good-looking white man—to bring some of his Chippewa charges to meet me. So far he has not complied, but if he does, I shall pick the perfect specimen for you. In the summer I travel into the Canadian wilderness, where I shall find out more, and pass on my wisdom to you.
From your loving friend cum marriage broker,
Anna
She gave the letter to Hawkins to post. Somewhat to her surprise, she had discovered on one of her walks about town that there was a post office. She had heard so much from her European friends about the backwardness of Canada. This office was in fact an imposing three-storey red brick structure in the Georgian style. Hawkins told her that the postmaster had to pay for staff, fuel and candles from his own pocket, and she suspected that he rolled some of the letters he received into spills to light his hearth fires. Who could blame him? Few of the populace could afford to pay the postage on the letters addressed to them, and there were piles of unclaimed correspondence. She had seen how one old man abused the system. He claimed he could not read, had asked the postmaster to read the letter to him, then said, “Don’t know none of the folk mentioned. Won’t pay for nothing that’s not mine.”