Murder Point: A Tale of Keewatin

by Coningsby Dawson

When, having said good-bye to Strangeways, he had followed the Man with the Dead Soul back to the store, he had made up his mind to the inevitable, and had been prepared to greet Peggy with a certain display of joy. Before ever he could put his thought into action, his intention had been repelled. As he had drawn nearer to the crazy wooden pier which ran out from Murder Point, he had seen the shadowy shapes of the trapper and his daughter, bending down, unloading their canoe, moving slowly hither and thither through the night. As he had come up, he had hailed them. To his call Beorn had made no reply, had only turned his head and nodded, while Peggy, stooping over a pile of furs, had thrown him the customary salutation of the Cree Indian to the white man, used both on arrival and departure, "Watchee"—which is a corruption of "What cheer." No other words of greeting had passed between them, and he, when he had landed, had set to work at once to help them with their unlading. When that was finished and the furs had been carried up to the store, they had raised their tent, kindled their fire, brewed their black tea, cooked their bacon, and gone to rest. Granger had so far intruded on their reserve as to ask them to spend the night in his store, but his invitation had been ungraciously refused with a shake of the head.

Next day Père Antoine had married them, after which he had departed, promising, however, to return before the summer was out. Granger had said nothing more to him either concerning Spurling or the death of Strangeways, except to insist that the warrant for the arrest, together with the letters and locket which had been found, should be left with himself; nevertheless, he had been well aware that these things were largely responsible for the hurry of the priest's departure. At first he had not been surprised at the silence of Peggy, for he had grown accustomed to the shy modesty of women who are Indian-bred. The women of Keewatin accept it as their fate that they are born to be subservient to men—to be their burden-bearers. But at the end of a few days, when her demeanour had shown no sign of change, he had become a little curious. In the early part of the year the white blood that was in her had been more manifest, and because of it she had been proud. When she had insisted that he should marry her, if he would live with her, the reason she had given him for her demand had been because her blood was white. Since then she had journeyed into the winter-wilderness with the menfolk of her family, like any other Indian or half-breed girl, and in the primeval solitariness of the land the red blood of her mother had asserted itself; the hand of her native deity had been laid upon her mouth, staying her flow of words, the shyness of the forest-gods had entered into her eyes, and the Lord God of Women had stooped her shoulders, causing her to carry her head less bravely, binding the hereditary burden of the red woman upon her back. She had unlearned in those few months all the conceits of self-respect which she had been taught in the school at Winnipeg, and had reverted to the ancient type from which she was sprung,—the river Indian. Granger, as he watched her, guessed all this, for had not he himself been parted from his old traditions?—and he had not known Keewatin till he was a grown man. Well, these people had lived there longer than he had! They should know what was best suited to their circumstance, he told himself; and so, without questioning or combatting their social methods, he resigned himself to accept their modes of life.

It was a strange wedding that he had had—very different from the kind he had planned for himself in the heat of his passion, when he was a younger man. And this was a strange woman whom he must call his wife—one who worked for him tirelessly with her head and hands, but who appeared to crave for none of his affection, and with whom he could have not a moment's conversation; the exchange of a few monosyllables and signs in the course of a day seemed to be the most that he might expect. Yet, because of her meekness and faithfulness, and her ready willingness to serve, he was conscious of a growing protective quality of love for her. If he could prevent himself from adopting her reticence, he promised himself that he would gather her whole heart into his own by and by.

He did not as yet realise that the mere fact that he could feel thus towards her, when no speech had passed between them, was an indication that she was communicating herself in a more vigorous and sincerer language than that of words. This difference between them, that he expected her to use her lips to explain her personality, and that she, far from imagining that she was silent, believed herself to be in her deeds most eloquent, was one of the few traits remaining to him of the street-born man.

As an example of their reservedness was the fact that, though Eyelids, Peggy's brother, had set out on the winter hunt and had not returned, no explanation of his delay had been forthcoming, nor had Granger summoned up the energy to inquire for himself. On their first arrival he had felt distinctly curious as to his whereabouts. Had he come across traces of Spurling and gone in pursuit of him? Had he heard from some stray Indian that Spurling was an outlaw, with a price upon his head? Had Beorn, having found that his cache at the Forbidden River had been broken into, dispatched his son to follow up the thief and exact revenge? Or was Spurling dead, and had Eyelids killed him, for which reason he was afraid to come back?

For the first few days after his marriage these questions and answers had been continually running through his head; but since he had learnt the lesson that nothing was of much importance, he had almost ceased to care. Why should he trouble to inquire? If he did, he might get no reply; and if he was answered, the probability was that his only gain would be something fresh to worry about. The unreturning of Eyelids was one small detail of the total unreality, the dream which he had once taken so seriously, which in former times he had called life; and of that dream the arrival and flight of Spurling were the nightmare. No one of all these happenings had ever been—they were unactual: and the chances were that even he himself was no reality.

Beorn Ericsen, the Man with the Dead Soul as he was called, was a fitting tutor to a pupil of this philosophy. Compared with him, his daughter was a whirlwind of words; the lesson of silence, which she taught by her behaviour, she had first learnt from her father on the winter trail—in the presence of his stern taciturnity she appeared a garrulous amateur.

Whence he had originally come, no one had ever persuaded him to tell. On his first arrival in the district, which was reported to have taken place nearly forty years ago, for the first two years he was said to have conducted himself more or less like a normal man. At that time he must have been near mid-life, for he was now well past seventy to judge by his appearance. Even then, on his first coming, something had happened, which he did not care to talk about, which made him glad of the dreary seclusion of Keewatin. It had been generally supposed that he was badly wanted by Justice, for having shot his man in a border hold-up, or for deeds of violence in some kindred escapade.

At any rate, he had set about his living in Keewatin in earnest, as though he had determined to stay there. Having attached himself to the Hudson Bay Company, he soon proved himself to be an expert trapper, and a man who, for his reckless courage, was to be valued. Promotion seemed certain for him and, despite the fact that he had joined the Company late in life, the likelihood of his attaining a factorship in the end was not improbable. It was then, after he had won the confidence of his employers, that he had taken that journey to the North, through an unexplored country, from which he had come back dazed and dreary-eyed, so that it seemed as though he must have met with some dire calamity in the winter desolation, one from which few men would have escaped alive, which had robbed him of his reason. When they had asked him where he had journeyed, "Far, far," was all he would reply. And when, hoping to satisfy their curiosity by a less direct method, they had questioned him, "What did you see up there?" "Blackness—it was dark," was the most that he would answer them.

Because of these answers there were some who supposed that, emulating Thomas Simpson, he had penetrated into the Arctic Circle and had gazed upon the frozen quiet of an undiscovered ocean. He had wrested from God the secret which He was anxious to withhold, they said, and God in vengeance had condemned him to be always silent. But the Indians explained his condition more readily, speaking in whispers about him around camp-fires among themselves. The last place at which he had been seen by anyone on that journey was at the mouth of the Forbidden River, along whose banks it was commonly believed stretched the villages and homes of manitous, and souls of the departed. The Crees asserted that this was not the first man who, to their knowledge, had wandered up that river and had thus returned. Some few of their boldest hunters had from time to time set out and, roving further afield than their brethren, had likewise trespassed all unaware within the confines of the spirit-land. So they said that Beorn had been to the Land of Shadows, and that, by reason of his surpassing strength, he had contrived to escape; but that he had left his soul behind him there, and it was only his body which had come back.