River Thieves Read Online Free PDF

altogether.”
    Buchan said, “I came across some signs of them on the coast this past summer, but had no luck meeting with a soul.”
    John Senior picked at the remnants of food on his plate.
Luck
, this man was thinking of. He wasn’t the first naval officer to come nosing around, asking questions about the Reds. “From what I hear talk of,” John Senior said, “you’re meant to be drawing maps of our coastline, is that right?”
    Buchan smiled at him and nodded. He had made efforts towards mapping much of the northeast shore as they’d travelled through it. The tightly packed offshore islands were an impossible puzzle, they hid and mirrored and nearly overran one another. The granite coastline was so deeply abraded with harbours and bays his drawings resembled a ragged saw-blade. He thought of the countryside first as untidy and wild, then as something less than that, devoid of any suggestion of design, of intent. In the Bay of Exploits the only English habitations they’d encountered were half-hearted little clearings at the edge of forest, or a collection of flimsy outbuildings on promontories of bald stone. The fishermen lived in single-room tilts roofed with bark, as if the land was already in the process of reclaiming them. It was as if the country existed somewhere beyond the influence of humanindustry, of human desire. He had moments when he thought a map was somehow beside the point.
    “Mapping the coast is part of my undertaking,” Buchan said, “Word gets around, I see.”
    “I think you’ll find it’s nigh impossible to hold any story close on the shore,” John Senior told him.
    They stared at one another for a moment then, the silence between them for all the world like a struggle of some kind.
    “I suspect then,” Buchan said, “you already have some notion of the expedition I am planning to undertake this winter. To the Red Indian’s lake.”
    John Senior shrugged. “Corporal Bouthland made some mention of it. The Reds is not to be trusted,” he said. “Mind I didn’t warn you.”
    Buchan leaned away from his plate and brushed at his breeches. “What I’m proposing, Mr. Peyton, is the only way to end the thieving and vandalism you complain of.”
    “With respect, sir, it’s not the only way.”
    “Yes well,” Buchan continued, “if I read you correctly, may I suggest that what I propose is the only humane way to end the thieving. Christian charity, Mr. Peyton —”
    “You may read me any way you like,” John Senior interrupted. “The Red Indians are not like the Canadians. The Micmac are Christians of a sort and they’ll listen to reason if you mind to speak to them. Our lot haven’t got but a civil bone in their bodies and there’s no amount of charity will teach them any manners.”
    John Senior lifted his empty tumbler and Cassie refilled it from the bottle provided by their guest, then proffered the rum across the table. The smell of salt beef and boiled greenspermeated the kitchen and made the heat of the fire feel close and stifling. Buchan was already feeling somewhat unpleasantly drunk. He shook his head almost imperceptibly and Cassie set the bottle down.
    Buchan leaned forward and spoke into his folded hands. “I am well aware,” he said, “that those who have lived amongst the Red Indians have had to take extraordinary steps to protect themselves and their property.”
    John Senior made a small disgusted sound in his throat. “What you are aware of amounts to a piece of dun fish. You didn’t have to bury what they’d left of Harry Miller belly down in the woods. Waited for him in the bush behind his tilt and pierced him in the back like a crowd of cowards. And then run off with his head.”
    Buchan considered the man across the table. There was a passage from one of the letters the governor had passed to him at the London Tavern he recalled now.
Perhaps to expel Mr. Peyton from the Bay of Exploits
, Bland had written,
would be an essential point gained in