Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge
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the west lay the River. Lily strained to hear its voice. The odd crow, unmated, cawed in complaint; a bear crumpled the dry brush nearby, seeking the late berries; a crab-apple dropped its sour fruit. Increasingly they passed through large natural clearings, beaver meadows or sandy patches where the hundred-foot oaks and pines had given way to clans of cherry, snow-apple, and sumac.
Mostly, though, they heard their own footfalls. Sounder, impatient with Papa’s considered pace, scooted off into the semi-dark and popped up in front of them with a red squirrel in his hand, kicking out the last of its life.
“For supper,” he explained, setting off again, guided by his own compass.
They came not to the River but to a well-established road, a fifteen-foot swath cut through the bush, the stumps pulled and the surface smoothed over with sand. Across the myriad streams trickling west towards the River, bridges of demi-logs had been crudely constructed. Lily realized that a horse and cart could travel here, though no vehicle approached them. They followed the road due north until the sun began to tilt sharply to their left. It will sink soon, right into the River, Lily thought.
“Are we near the water?” she asked, no longer able to contain her curiosity. How she wished she were Sounder, able to dance ahead and explore unfettered. Papa increased his pace; Acorn muttered his disapproval. After a while Sounder said quietly to Lily: “River of Light is just through the trees there. We been following it, but no path, even for a brave walker.” Lily looked longingly to her left but saw only the black silhouettes of trees, fluted by the sun behind them. Her disappointment was interrupted by Sounder’s cry, “Here’s the farms!”
Before them was an immense expanse of open space unimpeded by trees. To the east of the road the bush had been denuded of all timber, all brush, in typical pioneer fashion, Not even a windbreak separated one farm from another. The stumps of the slain trees had been piled lengthwise to create makeshift fences, demarcating properties, fields, gardens, and dooryards. At first such angularity seemed alien to Lily, even painful to look at. But the sight of cabins, several of them larger than any in her settlement and ranged neatly back from the road in neighbourly view of one another, was overwhelming.
The others were apparently impervious to grandeur, for they had moved well ahead and were stopped, waiting for her, in front of the third cabin. The smoke from its fieldstone chimney lingered in welcome in the still air. It was only when Lily joined them that she glanced away from the farms to the west again and discovered that the bush had been cleared for a stretch of two or three hundred yards, all the way down to what could only be the River. “This way,” Papa commanded, ushering her into the home of the Partridges.
Mrs. Partridge was surprisingly kind. She bathed Lily’s blistered feet in soda water, rubbed them with ewe’s grease, and put into her moccasins little pads of the softest cotton. “Store-bought at Cameron’s,” she said with restrained pride, “up at Port Sarnia.” After a meal of quail roasted in a genuine iron stove, potatoes, squash, corn-bread with molasses, tart apple pie and mugs of warm goat’s milk, the men slouched together by the fire, lit up their pipes, and conversed partly in English and partly in Pottawatomie. They were soon joined by two sturdy neighbours with buff red cheeks and flaming hair. Mrs. Partridge and her two elder daughters sat near the stove in the kitchen, one carding wool, the other preparing to “full” several man-sized macintoshes. Lily had many questions to ask but no words with which to express them. She listened, though, her eye never leaving the printed calico dresses of the elder daughters and the rounded bodies so restless beneath them.
The Partridges had a small shed that served as an outhouse. Lily left the door ajar, allowing the moon to pour its amber warmth through a wedge in the tree-line. She did not return to the cabin right away, instead walking past it and straight across the moon’s carpet. She heard the River just ahead in the darkness behind the beam of light. Strange sand-grasses caressed her bare legs. At last she came to the water’s edge and the voice of the River filled her ears. It roared with a hoarse breath, and in it, Lily thought she detected longing, anticipation, and the ache of seeking what always lay ahead, just out of sight. Under the circling stars, Lily listened for the language it used, but it was no tongue she had ever heard.
Later, from her cot near the board wall that separated the sleeping area from the main room, Lily tried to catch the scattered words of the men.
“Them surveyors was through here again last week, Michael.”
“I heard,” said Papa’s voice. “Rumours floatin’ about, up an’ down the line. Talk of makin’ this territory a county.”
“White fella draws lines in the bush,” said Sounder, making no attempt to disguise his disdain for the folly of the intruders.
Lily dozed, dreaming of water bigger than counties, borderless and infinitely serene.
“Went to the meetin’ down at Chatham. Things is gettin’ worse, we hear tell. Some new law comin’ in over there about returnin’ the poor devils. All legal-like, too.”
“Sun-in-bitch Yankees,” Sounder added.
“Over a hundred come across since August. We’re lookin’ for a new route, Harry. Them raiders is gettin’ smarter by the hour. Reckon things could get real bad by summer.”
“The committee can count on us.”
“Damn right. None of us forgets what it was like to be a Highlander under George’s boot. What do you want us to do?”
“Sun-in-bitch English!”
Lily was swimming, her hair fanned out like a parasol in a blue river.
Next day they rose and were well on their way before sunrise. But this time Lily knew more about what lay ahead. From various overheard conversations at the Partridges she learned that the village of Port Sarnia sat less than two hours’ walk along River Road to the north, and that one was not to be surprised by periodic farms in lee of the road, though the spread of a dozen at what the locals called Bloomfield was the largest group below the Port itself. Here and there slash-roads were cut eastward through the woods so that one could imagine not merely strips of settlement, but successive waves challenging the hidden heart at the centre of the territory, known only to the natives and the hibernating bears who were said to rule there unmolested. At the end of River Road the bush would relent and they would come to a huge clearing where the river eased into a wide bay, the site of the new town, and behind it to the south and east the Ojibwa, or Chippewa, Reserve where several thousand Indians lived in scattered equanimity. What they were there to witness, what Sounder couldn’t stop dancing about, was the arrival of the government ship for the annual dispersal of gifts given in exchange for land ‒ territory of which the native owners had already been dispossessed.
Just moments before Lily and the others emerged from the bush into the misty dawn-light, the steamer Hastingsweighed anchor and slipped from its overnight mooring in the bay towards the river bank below the town. On board was Major John Richardson, who had joined the official expedition at Windsor on October 9, 1948, and who was carefully recording the events surrounding the gift-giving ceremonies at the Reserves on Walpole Island and at Port Sarnia. The weather was flawless: the sky unscarred by cloud, the sun brilliant as a rubbed coin, the wind at ease in the sea-grasses along the shoreline. As if the whole enterprise had been choreographed, dozens of parties of Indians, large and small, materialized from the forest of their Reserve at various spots along the two-mile curve that formed the natural bend of the bay. Most walked, single file, with the women and children behind. Others, more resplendent, rode the motley ponies bred on the Island.
At some undetectable signal, the Government contingent marched down a single plank to the shore, a sort of colour guard, dazzling in blue, red and white, breaking off and standing crisply at attention while a larger platoon of regulars from the Canadian Rifles wheeled southerly just ahead of the navvies freighted with the Queen’s largesse. At the same moment, five dignified Indians, obviously chiefs, moved towards the colour guard, stopped dead-still, and waited. Major Richardson, wan and aged beyond his years but impeccably turned out, stepped forward with Captain Rooke. While Her Majesty’s gifts, neatly bound in fleece-white blankets tied at the four corners, were being carefully