Burned Bridges | Page 6

take us to reach Port Pachugan?" Thompson
made further inquiry.
"Bout two-three hour, maybeso," Breyette responded.
He said something further, a few quick sentences in the French patois
of the northern half-breeds, at which both he and his fellow-voyageur
in the stern laughed. Their gayety stirred no response from the midship
passenger. If anything, he frowned. He was a serious-minded young
man, and he did not understand French. He had a faint suspicion that
his convoy did not take him as seriously as he wished. Whether their
talk was badinage or profanity or purely casual, he could not say. In the
first stages of their journey 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