Design by Gray 318

Outside an isolated Ojibwe country trading post in the year 1839, Mink was making an incessant racket. She wanted what Mackinnon had, trader’s milk—a mixture of raw distilled spirits, rum, red pepper, and tobacco. She had bawled and screeched her way to possession of a keg before. The noise pared at Mackinnon’s nerves, but he wouldn’t beat her into silence. Mink was from a family of powerful healers. She had been the beautiful daughter of Shingobii, a supplier of rich furs. She had also been the beautiful wife of Mashkiig, until he destroyed her face and stabbed her younger brothers to death. Their eleven-year-old daughter huddled with her now, under the same greasy blanket, trying to hide. Inside the post, Mackinnon’s clerk, Wolfred Roberts, had swathed his head in a fox pelt to muffle the sound, fastening the desiccated paws beneath his chin. He wrote in an elegant, sloping hand, three items between lines. Out there in the bush, they were always afraid of running out of paper.

Wolfred had left his home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, because he was the youngest of four brothers and there was no room for him in the family business—a bakery. His mother was the daughter of a schoolteacher, and she had educated him. He was just seventeen. He missed her, and he missed the books. He had taken only two with him when he was sent to clerk with Mackinnon: a pocket dictionary and Xenophon’s “Anabasis and Memorabilia,” which had belonged to his grandfather, and which his mother hadn’t known contained lewd descriptions.

Even with the fox on his head, the screeching rattled him. He tried to clean up around the fireplace, and threw a pile of scraps out for the dogs. As soon as he walked back inside, there was pandemonium. Mink and her daughter were fighting the dogs off. The noise was hideous.

Don’t go out there. I forbid you, Mackinnon said. If the dogs kill and eat them, there will be less trouble.

The humans eventually won the fight, but the noise continued into darkness.

Mink started hollering again before sunup. Her high-pitched wailing was even louder now. The men were scratchy-eyed and tired. Mackinnon kicked her, or kicked one of them, as he passed. She went hoarse that afternoon, which only made her voice more irritating. Something in it had changed, Wolfred thought. He didn’t understand the language very well.

That rough old bitch wants to sell me her daughter, Mackinnon said.

Mink’s voice was horrid—intimate with filth—as she described the things the girl could do if Mackinnon would only give over the milk. She was directing the full force of her shrieks at the closed door. Part of Wolfred’s job was to catch and clean fish if Mackinnon asked. He went down to the hole he kept open in the icy river, crossing himself as he walked past Mink. Although of course he wasn’t Catholic, the gesture had cachet where Jesuits had been. When he returned, Mink was gone and the girl was inside the post, crouching in the corner underneath a new blanket, her head down, still as death.

I couldn’t stand it another minute, Mackinnon said.

Wolfred stared at the blanketed lump of girl. Mackinnon had always been honest, for a trader. Fair, for a trader, and showed no signs of moral corruption beyond the usual—selling rum to Indians was outlawed. Wolfred could not take in what had happened, so again he went fishing. When he came back with another stringer of whitefish, his mind was clear. Mackinnon was a rescuer, he decided. He had saved the girl from Mink, and from a slave’s fate elsewhere. Wolfred chopped some kindling and built a small cooking fire beside the post. He roasted the fish whole, and Mackinnon ate them with last week’s tough bread. Tomorrow, Wolfred would bake. When he went back into the cabin, the girl was exactly where she’d been before. She hadn’t moved a hair. Which also meant that Mackinnon hadn’t touched her.

Wolfred put a plate of bread and fish on the dirt floor where she could reach it. She devoured both and gasped for breath. He set a tankard of water near her. She gulped it all down, her throat clucking like a baby’s as she drained the cup.

After Mackinnon had eaten, he crawled into his slat-and-bearskin bed, where it was his habit to drink himself to sleep. Wolfred cleaned up the cabin. Then he heated a pail of water and crouched near the girl. He wet a rag and dabbed at her face. As the caked dirt came off, he discovered her features, one by one, and saw that they were very fine. Her lips were small and full. Her eyes hauntingly sweet. Her eyebrows perfectly flared. When her face was uncovered, he stared at her in dismay. She was exquisite. Did Mackinnon know?

Gimiikwaadiz, Wolfred whispered. He knew the word for how she looked.

Carefully, reaching into the corner of the cabin for what he needed, he mixed mud. He held her chin and spread the muck back onto her face, blotting over the startling line of her brows, the perfect symmetry of her eyes and nose, the devastating curve of her lips.

Mackinnon spoke to the girl in her language, and she hid her muddy face.

All I did was ask her name, he said, throwing up his hands. She refuses to tell me her name. Give her some work to do, Roberts. I can’t stand that lump in the corner.

Wolfred made her help him chop wood. But her movements displayed the fluid grace of her limbs. He showed her how to bake bread. But the fire lit up her face and the heat melted away some of the mud. He reapplied it. When Mackinnon was out, he tried to teach her to write. She learned the alphabet easily. But writing displayed her hand, marvellously formed. Finally—at her suggestion—she went off to set snares and a trapline. She made herself well enough understood. She planned to buy herself back from Mackinnon by selling the furs. He hadn’t paid that much for her. It would not take long, she implied.

All this time, because she knew exactly why Wolfred had replaced the grime on her face, she slouched and grimaced, tousled her hair, and smeared her features.

She picked up another written letter every day, then words, phrases. She began to sprinkle them in her talk. For a wild savage, she was certainly intelligent, Wolfred thought. Pretty soon she’s going to take my job. Ha-ha. There was nobody to joke with but himself.

The daughter of Mink brooded on the endlessly shifting snow. I will make a fire myself, as the stinking chimookoman won’t let me near his fire at night. Then I can pick the lice from my dress and my blanket. His lice will crawl on me again if he does the old stinking chimookoman thing he does. She saw herself lifting the knife from his belt and slipping it between his ribs.

The other one, the young one, was kind but had no power. He didn’t understand what the crafty old chimookoman was doing. Her struggles seemed only to give the drooling dog strength, and he knew exactly how to pin her, how to make her helpless.