Burned Bridges | Page 6

together, on the upper reaches of the river, Mike Breyette and Donald MacDonald had, after the normal habit of their kind, greeted the several contingencies and minor mishaps such a journey involved with plaintive oaths in broken English. Mr. Wesley Thompson, projected into an unfamiliar environment and among a--to him--strange manner of men, took up his evangelistic cudgel and administered shocked reproof. It was, in a way, practice for the tasks the Methodist Board of Home Missions had appointed him to perform. But if he failed to convict these two of sin, he convinced them of discourtesy. Even a rude voyageur has his code of manners. Thereafter they invariably swore in French.
They bore on in a northerly direction, keeping not too far from the lake shore, lest the combination of a sudden squall and a heavy-loaded canoe should bring disaster. When Mike Breyette's "two-tree" hour was run Mr. Thompson stepped from the canoe to the sloping, sun-blistered beach before Fort Pachugan, and if he did not openly offer thanks to his Maker that he stood once more upon solid ground he at least experienced profound relief.
For many days he had occupied that midship position with ill-concealed misgivings. The largest bodies of water he had been on intimate terms with heretofore had been contained within the dimensions of a bathtub. He could not swim. No matter that his faith in an all-wise Providence was strong he could not forbear inward tremors at the certain knowledge that only a scant quarter-inch of frail wood and canvas stood between him and a watery grave. He regarded a canoe with distrust. Nor could he understand the careless confidence with which his guides embarked in so captious a craft upon the swirling bosom of that wide, swift stream they had followed from Athabasca Landing down to the lake of the same name. To Thompson--if he had been capable of analyzing his sensations and transmuting them into words--the river seemed inexplicably sinister, a turbid monster writhing over polished boulders, fuming here and there over rapids, snarling a constant menace under the canoe's prow.
It did not comfort him to know that he was in the hands of two capable rivermen, tried and proven in bad water, proud of their skill with the paddle. Could he have done so the reverend young man would gladly have walked after the first day in their company. But since that was out of the question, he took his seat in the canoe each morning and faced each stretch of troubled water with an inward prayer.
The last stretch and this last day had tried his soul to its utmost. Pachugan lay near the end of the water route. What few miles he had to travel beyond the post would lie along the lake shore, and the lake reassured him with its smiling calm. Having never seen it harried by fierce winds, pounding the beaches with curling waves, he could not visualize it as other than it was now, glassy smooth, languid, inviting. Over the last twenty miles of the river his guides had strained a point now and then, just to see their passenger gasp. They would never have another chance and it was rare sport, just as it is rare sport for spirited youths to snowball a passer-by who does not take kindly to their pastime.
In addition to these nerve-disturbing factors Thompson suffered from the heat. A perverted dignity, nurtured in a hard-shell, middle-class environment, prevented him from stripping to his undershirt. The sun's rays, diffusing abnormal heat through the atmosphere, reflected piercingly upward from the water, had played havoc with him. His first act upon landing was to seat himself upon a flat-topped boulder and dab tenderly at his smarting face while his men hauled up the canoe. That in itself was a measure of his inefficiency, as inefficiency is measured in the North. The Chief Factor of a district large enough to embrace a European kingdom, traveling in state from post to post, would not have been above lending a hand to haul the canoe clear. Thompson had come to this terra incognita to preach and pray, to save men's souls. So far it had not occurred to him that aught else might be required of a man before he could command a respectful hearing.
Back from the beach, in a clearing hacked out of the woods, stood a score or more of low cabins flanking a building more ambitious in scope and structure. More than a century had passed since the first foundation logs were laid in the name of the Hudson's Bay Company, to the Company's glory and profit. It had been a fort then, in all that the name implies throughout the fur country. It had boasted a stockade, a brass cannon which commanded the great gates