The Shining Mountains: A Novel by Alix Christie

Author:Alix Christie
Format: epub

CHAPTER 10

FORT COLVILE

1859

They’ve come to cut a gash across the earth: a line from the sea to the mountains as thick as the height of two men. They’re cutting the trees and digging their roots to make this wound, a day’s ride to the north. Where is there anywhere such a straight line, except the lines that mother earth cuts herself—her cliffs and trees that reach straight to the sky world? Catherine remembers how the Colorado looped and swung and feels her anger growing at the way the white man with his tools divides the earth. He’ll divide her family, too.

Already Angus takes Christina to the cutters’ camp, these “Royal Engineers.” He’s overjoyed, in fact, to see his countrymen. Catherine doesn’t like the way he seeks them out. She plaited this girl’s braids and taught her how to form the dough and strip the roots. But now Christina rides in plaids and skirts, enamored of the trade and these machines. Already these children are torn between the white man’s world and hers.

It’s her own fault: she let her husband take the child. Catherine gave up her place at his table years before. Young as she was, Christina took her place, counting his furs and even helping him deliver them. And now she looks into the cutters’ star-tubes and their image-boxes, dazzled and delighted. She shines with the beauty of youth and Catherine thinks it’s not too soon to find a boy of her own kind. When they bring their box to the fort one day, she sees how the British bow and smile at “Miss Christina.” At her daughter’s urging she puts her eye to it. Her house is suddenly miniscule. She steps back, startled, and even Angus can’t persuade her to sit before it. He puts Christina and baby Alexander and even Catherine’s own half-brother Red Ox before its peculiar eye. But these white men have never really seen her, and now she doesn’t want them to—and certainly not in this terrible way, frozen for all time.

Angus is the last Chief Trader left on this side of the new border. His orders are to stay until compensation for the Company’s property has been agreed. In other words, he’s the one to lock the door and blow the lamp out when they leave. It’s assumed he’ll move north like everyone else, along with his mixed-blood brood. But he has always been contrary—insubordinate, in a word.

Quietly, he’s written to the government of Washington Territory to put in his claim for the property at Colvile. At the same time, he’s written directly to the Governors in London, asking if there’s any prospect of further promotion. He hasn’t made up his own mind what he will do. He’s not yet forty, after all. If he goes north, he’ll get his own post and keep his share of profits. If he stays here, who knows?

Lately, Catherine’s been talking more insistently about returning to her people. It’s understandable, of course—but what then, he asked recently, would he do? At least up north he could provide.

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