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I heaved the pelts into the hard-packed clearing and she lifted soaked pelts from a basin and hung them on a wooden beam and put the first of my pelts, hardened and stiff, into the basin. Then she took one of the soaked pelts and sat on a smoothed log and stretched the pelt onto a willow hoop, affixing it with deer sinew and a curved wooden hook. She saw me watching, and said, "My father was a voyageur for the Northwesters. I learned from him."
"Is he with Hudson's Bay now?" I asked, but she shook her head, and by the way she did it I knew he was not with that company, or any other.
"Consumption," she said. "Two winters past. He battled the Ree with Ashley. Went on the winter march to the Medicine Bow. But it was the elements in St. Louis that took him." She made a drinking motion.
"The same ailment's taking my father," I said. "A farmer and man of property in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Least it was two years ago when I last spoke with him."
It was a maudlin way to put it, but I said it in a careless tone, as I wanted her to think I was rugged and indifferent to the gales of life, and that we were two of a kind. If she saw the connection, she did not remark on it.
She finished with that first fur and when she reached for the second I knew I was meant to leave. I started back around the cottage and when I did she set her pelt aside and went through the doorway and I saw her writing out a ticket on a little pink slip of parchment. There was no need to give a ticket and, later, I thought she went through that bit of theater because she'd heard the sound of education in my voice and wanted to show she could read and write as well as any college professor—that neat cursive hand, the polite, precise sound of her voice, that Frenchified way of hers. She mistook me for a gentleman and didn't want me putting on airs, which, if she'd known me, she need not have worried about, as I worked as a laborer in a warehouse along the river.
I went on my way and seven days later I was back in front of her little cottage with my pink ticket. She met me at the door hauling a neatly bound pack of furs, rocking her slight body back and heaving the pack and carrying it, duckwalking, to the porch. I'd been thinking of conversation all week and come up with nothing but banalities. As I paid she said, "You won't be long for St. Louis. Les vrais gentlemen ne restent jamais ici."
"Où est le vrai gentleman?" I said, and she laughed, and said, "Ici même, j'espère. C'est bien ce que je crois, oui."
"Not all would call me a gentleman," I said. "Talk to Professor Stanton at Temple. I put a fish with a pickle in its mouth in his desk. I won't be let back. So it's into the savage country for me. My education will be in the notable wonders of the far west."
"You'll join a brigade to the fur country?"
"Up to the Green River," I said boisterously. I did not believe I'd join a brigade at the time. I said it to be gallant, but I saw disappointment settle. She'd imagined I was a gentleman hunter with a carriage and a fortune, not some cast-off ne'er-do-well with no family or home to speak of. Something in her closed off to me.
"It's a hard life," she said.
"But an exciting one."
"The excitement ends quickly. The difficulties don't," she said.
I considered countering with some saucy remark, but she had been born to the life and undoubtedly knew it better than I did.
"Thank you, ma'am," I said, and slung the furs on my back and thought that was that. I was not a gentleman and she had decided against me in her mind.
I walked out the gate and when I looked back I saw that she'd gone through the cottage and was out behind collecting the willow hoops and stacking them with a clacking sound that followed me down her dusty street.
Excerpted from Into the Savage Country by Shannon Burke. Copyright © 2015 by Shannon Burke. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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