Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - "Der Freigeist"

Edward Gibbon - "The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. II"

Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof - "Dua Libro de l' Lingvo Internacia"

Austin Dobson - "De Libris: Prose and Verse"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Lords of the North

A >> A. C. Laut >> Lords of the North




"See here, Little Fellow!" I cried, "Let's hunt that thing out!" and I
wheeled about so sharply the chunky little man crashed forward, knocking
me off my feet and sending me a man's length farther on.

That fall saved my life. A flat spear point hissed through the air
above my head and stuck fast in the bark of an elm tree. Scrambling up,
I promptly let go two or three shots into the fern brake. We scrutinized
the underbrush, but there was no sign of human being, except the fern
stems broken by my shots. I wrenched the stone spear-head from the tree.
It was curiously ornamented with such a multitude of intricate carvings
I could not decipher any design. Then I discovered that the medley of
colors was produced by inlaying the flint with small bits of a bright
stone; and the bright stones had been carved into a rude likeness of
some birds.

"What are these birds, Little Fellow?" I asked.

He fingered them closely, and with bulging eyes muttered back, "L'Aigle!
L'Aigle!"

"Eagles, are they?" I returned, stupidly missing the possible meaning of
his suppressed excitement. "And the stone?"

"Agate, _Monsieur_."

Agate! Agate! What picture did agate call back to my mind? A big squaw,
with malicious eyes and gaping upper lip and girdle of agates, watching
Louis Laplante and myself at the encampment in the gorge.

"Little Fellow!" I shouted, not suppressing my excitement. "Who is Le
Grand Diable's wife?"

And the Indian answered in a low voice, with a face that showed me he
had already penetrated my discovery, "The daughter of L'Aigle, chief of
the Sioux."

Then I knew for whom those missiles had been intended and from whom they
had come. It was a clever piece of rascality. Had the assassin
succeeded, punishment would have fallen on my Indians.




CHAPTER VII

THE LORDS OF THE NORTH IN COUNCIL


Beyond the Sault, the fascinations of the west beckoned like a siren.
Vast waterways, where a dozen European kingdoms could be dropped into
one lake without raising a sand-bar, seemed to sweep on forever and call
with the voice of enchantress to the very ends of the earth. With the
purple recesses of the shore on one side and the ocean-expanse of Lake
Superior on the other, all the charms of clean, fresh freedom were
unveiling themselves to me and my blood began to quicken with that
fevered delight, which old lands are pleased to call western enthusiasm.
Lake Huron, with its greenish-blue, shallow, placid waters and calm,
sloping shores, seemed typical of the even, easy life I had left in the
east. How those choppy, blustering, little waves resembled the
jealousies and bickerings and bargainings of the east; but when one came
to Lake Superior, with its great ocean billows and slumbering, giant
rocks and cold, dark, fathomless depths, there was a new life in a hard,
rugged, roomy, new world. We hugged close to the north coast; and the
numerous rocky islands to our left stood guard like a wall of adamant
between us and the heavy surf that flung against the barrier. We were
rapidly approaching the headquarters of our company. When south-bound
brigades, with prisoners in hand-cuffs, began to meet us, I judged we
were near the habitation of man.

"Bad men?" I asked Little Fellow, pointing to the prisoners, as our
crews exchanged rousing cheers with the Nor'-Westers now bound for
Montreal.

"_Non, Monsieur!_ Not all bad men," and the Indian gave his shoulders an
expressive shrug, "_Les traitres anglais_."

To the French _voyageur_, English meant the Hudson's Bay people. The
answer set me wondering to what pass things had come between the two
great companies that they were shipping each other's traders
gratuitously out of the country. I recalled the talk at the Quebec Club
about Governor McDonell of the Hudson's Bay trying to expel Nor'-Westers
and concluded our people could play their own game against the commander
of Red River.

We arrived in Fort William at sundown, and a flag was flying above the
courtyard.

"Is that in our honor?" I asked a clerk of the party.

"Not much it is," he laughed. "We under-strappers aren't oppressed with
honors! It warns the Indians there's no trade one day out of seven."

"Is this Sunday?"

I suddenly recollected as far as we were concerned the past month had
been entirely composed of week-days.

"Out of your reckoning already?" asked the clerk with surprise. "Wonder
how you'll feel when you've had ten years of it."

Situated on the river bank, near the site of an old French post, Fort
William was a typical traders' stronghold. Wooden palisades twenty feet
high ran round the whole fort and the inner court enclosed at least two
hundred square yards. Heavily built block-houses with guns poking
through window slits gave a military air to the trading post. The
block-houses were apparently to repel attack from the rear and the face
of the fort commanded the river. Stores, halls, warehouses and living
apartments for an army of clerks, were banked against the walls, and the
main building with its spacious assembly-room stood conspicuous in the
centre of the enclosure. As we entered the courtyard, one of the chief
traders was perched on a mortar in the gate. The little magnate
condescended never a smile of welcome till the _Bourgeois_ came up. Then
he fawned loudly over the chiefs and conducted them with noisy
ostentation to the main hall. Indians and half-breed _voyageurs_ quickly
dispersed among the wigwams outside the pickets, while clerks and
traders hurried to the broad-raftered dining-hall. Fatigued from the
trip, I took little notice of the vociferous interchange of news in
passage-way and over door-steps. I remember, after supper I was
strolling about the courtyard, surveying the buildings, when at the
door of a sort of barracks where residents of the fort lived, I caught
sight of the most grateful object my eye had lighted upon since leaving
Quebec. It was a tin basin with a large bar of soap--actual soap. There
must still have been some vestige of civilization in my nature, for
after a delightful half-hour's intimate acquaintance with that soap, I
came round to the groups of men rehabilitated in self-respect.

"Athabasca, Rocky Mountain and Saskatchewan brigades here to-morrow,"
remarked a boyish looking Nor'-Wester, with a mannish beard on his face.
Involuntarily I put my hand to my chin and found a bristling growth
there. That was a land where young men could become suddenly very old;
and many a trader has discovered other signs of age than a beard on his
face when he first looked at a mirror after life in the _Pays d'En
Haut_.

"I say," blurted out another young clerk. "There's a man here from Red
River, one of the Selkirk settlers. He's come with word if we'll supply
the boats, lots of the colonists are ready to dig out. General
Assembly's going to consider that to-morrow."

"Oh! Hang the old Assembly if it ships that man out! He's got a pretty
daughter, perfect beauty, and she's here with him!" exclaimed the lad
with the mannish beard.

"Go to, thou light-head!" declared the other youth, with the air of an
elder in Israel. "Go to! You paraded beneath her window for an hour
to-day and she never once laid eyes on you."

All the men laughed.

"Hang it!" said the first speaker. "We don't display our little
amours----"

"No," broke in the other, "we just display our little contours and get
snubbed, eh?"

The bearded youth flushed at the sally of laughter.

"Hang it!" he answered, pulling fiercely at his moustache. "She is a bit
of statuary, so she is, as cold as marble. But there is no law against
looking at a pretty bit of statuary, when it frames itself in a window
in this wilderness."

To which, every man of the crowd said a hearty amen; and I walked off to
stretch myself full length on a bench, resolving to have out a mirror
from my packing case and get rid of those bristles that offended my
chin. The men began to disperse to their quarters. The tardy twilight of
the long summer evenings, peculiar to the far north, was gathering in
the courtyard. As the night-wind sighed past, I felt the velvet caress
of warm June air on my face and memory reverted to the innocent boyhood
days of Laval. How far away those days seemed! Yet it was not so long
ago. Surely it is knowledge, not time, that ages one, knowledge, that
takes away the trusting innocence resulting from ignorance and gives in
its place the distrustful innocence resulting from wisdom. I thought of
the temptations that had come to me in the few short weeks I had been
adrift, and how feebly I had resisted them. I asked myself if there were
not in the moral compass of men, who wander by land, some guiding star,
as there is for those who wander over sea. I gazed high above the
sloping roofs for some sign of moon, or star. The sky was darkling and
overcast; but in lowering my eyes from heaven to earth, I saw what I had
missed before--a fair, white face framed in a window above the stoop
directly opposite my bench. The face seemed to have a background of
gold; for a wonderful mass of wavy hair clustered down from the
blue-veined brow to the bit of white throat visible, where a gauzy piece
of neck wear had been loosened. Evidently, this was the statuary
described by the whiskered youth. But the statuary breathed. A bloom of
living apple-blossoms was on the cheeks. The brows were black and
arched. The very pose of the head was arch, and in the lips was a
suggestion of archery, too,--Cupid's archery, though the upper lip was
drawn almost too tight for the bow beneath to discharge the little god's
shaft. Why did I do it? I do not know. Ask the young Nor'-Wester, who
had worn a path beneath the selfsame window that very day, or the hosts
of young men, who are still wearing paths beneath windows to this very
day. I coughed and sat bolt upright on the bench with unnecessarily loud
intimations of my presence. The fringe of black lashes did not even
lift. I rose and with great show of indifference paraded solemnly five
times past that window; but, in spite of my pompous indifference, by a
sort of side-signalling, I learned that the owner of the heavy lashes
was unaware of my existence. Thereupon, I sat down again. It _was_ a bit
of statuary and a very pretty bit of statuary. As the youth said, there
was no law against looking at a bit of statuary in this wilderness, and
as the statuary did not know I was looking at it, I sat back to take my
fill of that vision framed in the open window. The statuary, unknown to
itself, had full meed of revenge; for it presently brought such a flood
of longing to my heart, longings, not for this face, but for what this
face represented--the innocence and love and purity of home, that I
bowed dejectedly forward with moist eyes gazing at the ground.

"Hullo!" whispered a deep voice in my ear. "Are you mooning after the
Little Statue already?"

When I looked up, the man had passed, but the head in the window was
leaning out and a pair of swimming, lustrous, gray eyes were gazing
forward in a way that made me dizzy. "Ah," they said in a language that
needed no speaking, "there are two of us, very, very home-sick."

"The guiding star for my moral compass," said I, under my breath.

Then the statue in a live fashion suddenly drew back into the dark room.
The window-shutter flung to, with a bang, and my vision was gone. I left
the bench, made a shake-down on one of the store counters, and knew
nothing more till the noise of brigades from the far north aroused the
fort at an early hour Monday morning. The arrival of the Athabasca
traders was the signal for tremendous activity. An army returning from
victory could not have been received with greater acclaim. _Bourgeois_
and clerks tumbled promiscuously from every nook in the fort and rushing
half-dressed towards the gates shouted welcome to the men, who had come
from the outposts of the known world. They were a shaggy, ragged-looking
rabble, those traders from mountain fastnesses and the Arctic circle.
With long white hair, hatless some of them, with beards like oriental
patriarchs, and dressed entirely in skins of the chase, from fringed
coats to gorgeous moccasins, the unkempt monarchs of northern realms had
the imperious bearing of princes.

"Is it you, really you, looking as old as your great grandfather? By
Gad! So it is," came from one quondam friend.

"Powers above!" ejaculated another onlooker, "See that old Father
Abraham! It's Tait! As you live, it's Tait! And he only went to the
Athabasca ten years ago. He was thirty then, and now he's a hundred!"

"That's Wilson," says another. "Looks thin, doesn't he? Slim fare! He's
the only man from Great Slave Lake that escaped being a meal for the
Crees,--year of the famine; and they hadn't time to pick his bones!"

A running fire of such comments went along the spectators lining each
side of the path. There was a sad side to the clamorous welcomes and
handshakes and surprised recognitions. Had not these men gone north
young and full of hope, as I was going? Now, news of the feud with the
Hudson's Bay brought them out old before their time and more like the
natives with whom they had traded than the white race they had left.
Here and there, strong men would fall in each other's arms and embrace
like school-girls, covering their emotion with rounded oaths instead of
terms of endearment.

All day the confusion of unloading boats continued. The dull tread of
moccasined feet as Indians carried pack after pack from river bank to
the fort, was ceaseless. Faster than the clerks could sort the furs
great bundles were heaped on the floor. By noon, warehouses were crammed
from basement to attic. Ermine taken in mid-winter, when the fur was
spotlessly white, but for the jet tail-tip, otter cut so deftly scarcely
a tuft of fur had been wasted along the opened seam, silver fox, which
had made the fortune of some lucky hunter--these and other rare furs,
that were to minister to the luxury of kings, passed from tawny carriers
to sorters. Elsewhere, coarse furs, obtained at greater risk, but owing
to the abundance of big game, less valuable for the hunter, were sorted
and valued. With a reckless underestimate of the beaver-skin, their unit
of currency, Indians hung over counters bartering away the season's
hunt. I frankly acknowledge the Company's clerks on such occasions could
do a rushing business selling tawdry stuff at fabulous prices.

Meanwhile, in the main hall, the _Bourgeois_, or partners, of the great
North-West Company were holding their annual General Assembly behind
closed doors. Clerks lowered their voices when they passed that room,
and well they might; for the rulers inside held despotic sway over a
domain as large as Europe. And what were they decreeing? Who can tell?
The archives of the great fur companies are as jealously guarded as
diplomatic documents, and more remarkable for what they omit than what
they state. Was the policy, that ended so tragically a year afterwards,
adopted at this meeting? Great corporations have a fashion of keeping
their mouths and their council doors tight shut and of leaving the
public to infer that catastrophes come causeless. However that may be, I
know that Duncan Cameron, a fiery Highlander and one of the keenest men
in the North-West service, suddenly flung out of the Assembly room with
a pleased, determined look on his ruddy face.

"Are ye Rufus Gillespie?" he asked.

"That's my name, Sir."

"Then buckle on y'r armor, lad; for ye'll see the thick of the fight.
You're appointed to my department at Red River." And he left us.

"Lucky dog! I envy you! There'll be rare sport between Cameron and
McDonell, when the two forts up in Red River begin to talk back to each
other," exclaimed a Fort William man to me.

"Are you Gillespie?" asked a low, mellow, musical voice by my side. I
turned to face a tall, dark, wiry man, with the swarthy complexion and
intensely black eyes of one having strains of native blood. Among the
_voyageurs_, I had become accustomed to the soft-spoken, melodious
speech that betrays Indian parentage; and I believe if I were to
encounter a descendant of the red race in China, or among the Latin
peoples of Southern Europe, I could recognize Indian blood by that
rhythmic trick of the native tongue.

"I'm Gillespie," I answered my keen-eyed questioner. "Who are you?"

"Cuthbert Grant, warden of the plains and leader of the _Bois-Brules_,"
was his terse response. "You're coming to our department at Fort
Gibraltar, and I want you to give Father Holland a place in your canoes
to come north with us. He's on his way to the Missouri."

At that instant Duncan Cameron came up to Grant and muttered something.
Both men at once went back to the council hall of the General Assembly.
I heard the courtyard gossips vowing that the Hudson's Bay would cease
its aggressions, now that Cameron and Cuthbert Grant were to lead the
Nor'-Westers; but I made no inquiry. Next to keeping his own counsel and
giving credence to no man, the fur trader learns to gain information
only with ears and eyes, and to ask no questions. The scurrying turmoil
in the fort lasted all day. At dusk, natives were expelled from the
stockades and work stopped.

Grand was the foregathering around the supper table of the great dining
hall that night. _Bourgeois_, clerks and traders from afar, explorers,
from the four corners of the earth--assembled four hundred strong,
buoyant and unrestrained, enthusiastically loyal to the company, and
tingling with hilarious fellowship over this, the first reunion for
twenty years. Though their manner and clothing be uncouth, men who have
passed a lifetime exploring northern wilds have that to say, which is
worth hearing. So the feast was prolonged till candles sputtered low and
pitch-pine fagots flared out. Indeed, before the gathering broke up,
flagons as well as candles had to be renewed. Lanterns swung from the
black rafters of the ceiling. Tallow candles stood in solemn rows down
the centre of each table, showing that men, not women, had prepared the
banquet. Stuck in iron brackets against the walls were pine torches,
that had been dipped in some resinous mixture and now flamed brightly
with a smell not unlike incense. Tables lined the four walls of the hall
and ran in the form of a cross athwart the middle of the room. Backless
benches were on both sides of every table. At the end, chairs were
placed, the seats of honor for famous _Bourgeois_. British flags had
been draped across windows and colored bunting hung from rafter to
rafter.

"Ah, mon! Is no this fine? This is worth living for! This is the company
to serve!" Duncan Cameron exclaimed as he sank into one of the chairs at
the head of the centre table. The Scotchman's heart softened before
those platters of venison and wild fowl, and he almost broke into
geniality. "Here, Gillespie, to my right," he called, motioning me to
the edge of the bench at his elbow. "Here, Grant, opposite Gillespie!
Aye! an' is that you, Father Holland?" he cried to the stout, jovial
priest, with shining brow and cheeks wrinkling in laughter, who followed
Grant. "There's a place o' honor for men like you, Sir. Here!" and he
gave the priest a chair beside himself.

The _Bourgeois_ seated, there was a scramble for the benches. Then the
whole company with great zest and much noisy talk fell upon the viands
with a will.

"Why, Cameron," began a northern winterer a few places below me, "it's
taken me three months fast travelling to come from McKenzie River to
Fort William. By Jove! Sir, 'twas cold enough to freeze your words solid
as you spoke them, when we left Great Slave Lake. I'll bet if you men
were up there now, you'd hear my voice thawing out and yelling get-epp
to my huskies, and my huskies yelping back! Used a dog train, whole of
March. Tied myself up in bag of buffalo robes at night and made the
huskies lie across it to keep me from freezing. Got so hot, every pore
in my body was a spouting fountain, and in the morning that moisture
would freeze my buckskin stiff. Couldn't stand that; so I tried sleeping
with my head out of the bag and froze my nose six nights out of seven."

The unfortunate nose corroborated his evidence.

"Ice was sloppy on the Saskatchewan, and I had to use pack-horses and
take the trail. I was trusting to get provisions at Souris. You can
imagine, then, how we felt towards the Hudson's Bays when we found
they'd plundered our fort. We were without a bite for two days. Why, we
took half a dozen Hudson's Bays in our quarters up north last winter,
and saved them from starvation; and here we were, starving, that they
might plunder and rob. I'm with you, Sir! I'm with you to the hilt
against the thieves! There's a time for peace and there's a time for
war, and I say this is a very good time for war!"

"Here's confusion to the old H. B. C's! Confusion, short life, no
prosperity, and death to the Hudson's Bay!" yelled the young whiskered
Nor'-Wester, springing to his feet on the bench and waving a
drinking-cup round his head. Some of the youthful clerks were disposed
to take their cue from this fire-eater and began strumming the table and
applauding; but the _Bourgeois_ frowned on forward conduct.

"Check him, Grant!" growled Cameron in disapproval.

"Sit down, bumptious babe!" said the priest, tugging the lad's coat.

"Here, you young show-off," whispered Grant, leaning across the priest,
and he knocked the boy's feet from under him bringing him down to the
bench with a thud.

"He needs more outdoor life, that young one! It goes to his head mighty
fast," remarked Cameron. "What were you saying about your hard luck?"
and he turned to the northern winterer again.

"Call that hard luck?" broke in a mountaineer, laughing as if he
considered hardships a joke. "We lived a month last winter on two meals
a day; soup, out of snow-shoe thongs, first course; fried skins, second
go; teaspoonful shredded fish, by way of an entree!"

The man wore a beaded buckskin suit, and his mellow intonation of words
in the manner of the Indian tongue showed that he had almost lost
English speech along with English customs. His recital caused no
surprise.

"Been on short, rations myself," returned the northerner. "Don't like
it! Isn't safe! Rips a man's nerves to the raw when Indians glare at him
with hungry eyes eighteen hours out of the twenty-four."

"What was the matter?" drawled the mountaineer. "Hudson's Bay been
tampering with your Indians? Now if you had a good Indian wife as I
have, you could defy the beggars to turn trade away----"

"Aye, that's so," agreed the winterer, "I heard of a fellow on the
Athabasca who had to marry a squaw before he could get a pair of
racquets made; but that wasn't my trouble. Game was scarce."

"Game scarce on MacKenzie River?" A chorus of voices vented their
surprise. To the outside world game is always scarce, reported scarce on
MacKenzie River and everywhere else by the jealous fur traders; but
these deceptions are not kept up among hunters fraternizing at the same
banquet board.

"Mighty scarce. Some of the tribe died out from starvation. The Hudson's
Bay in our district were in bad plight. We took six of them in--Hadn't
heard of the Souris plunder, you may be sure."

"More fools they to go into the Athabasca," declared the mountaineer.

"Bigger fools to send another brigade there this year when they needn't
expect help from us," interjected a third trader.

"You don't say they're sending another lot of men to the Athabasca!"
exclaimed the winterer.

"Yes I do--under Colin Robertson," affirmed the third man.

"Colin Robertson--the Nor'-Wester?"

"Robertson who used to be a Nor'-Wester! It's Selkirk's work since he
got control of the H. B."

"Robertson should know better," said the northerner. "He had experience
with us before he resigned. I'll wager he doesn't undertake that sort of
venture! Surely it's a yarn!"

"You lose your bet," cried the irrepressible Fort William lad. "A runner
came in at six o'clock and reported that the Hudson's Bay brigade from
Lachine would pass here before midnight. They're sooners, they are, are
the H. B. C's.," and the clerk enjoyed the sensation of rolling a big
oath from his boyish lips.

"Eric Hamilton passing within a stone's throw of the fort!" In
astonishment I leaned forward to catch every word the Fort William lad
might say.

"To Athabasca by our route--past this fort!" Such temerity amazed the
winterer beyond coherent expression.

"Good thing for them they're passing in the night," continued the clerk.
"The half-breeds are hot about that Souris affair. There'll be a
collision yet!" The young fellow's importance increased in proportion to
the surprise of the elder men.

"There'll be a collision anyway when Cameron and Grant reach Red
River--eh, Cuthbert?" and the mountaineer turned to the dark,
sharp-featured warden of the plains. Cuthbert Grant laughed pleasantly.

"Oh, I hope not--for their sakes!" he said, and went on with the story
of a buffalo hunt.

The story I missed, for I was deep in my own thoughts. I must see Eric
and let him know what I had learned; but how communicate with the
Hudson's Bay brigade without bringing suspicion of double dealing on
myself? I was turning things over in my mind in a stupid sort of way
like one new at intrigue, when I heard a talker, vowing by all that was
holy that he had seen the rarest of hunter's rarities--a pure white
buffalo. The wonder had appeared in Qu'Appelle Valley.

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