The Missionary Who Burned With Yellowstone

• Chapter 1: The Black Robe’s Vow
• Chapter 2: Beyond the Great River
• Chapter 3: Smoke on the Wind
• Chapter 4: The Valley of Whispers
• Chapter 5: Sacred Ground, Burning Earth
• Chapter 6: The Shoshone Council
• Chapter 7: Signs in the Steam
• Chapter 8: The Boiling Waters
• Chapter 9: Cross and Calumet
• Chapter 10: The Gathering Dryness
• Chapter 11: Voices from the Abyss
• Chapter 12: The Spark in the Canopy
• Chapter 13: The Wall of Flame
• Chapter 14: A Prayer Against the Roar
• Chapter 15: Consumed by the Basin
• Chapter 16: The Ash and the Altar
• Chapter 17: The Spirit That Remained
• Chapter 18: Phantom in the Mist
• Chapter 19: The Eternal Ember
• Chapter 20: Haunting the Geyser Fields
• Chapter 21: The Midnight Glow
• Chapter 22: Shadows in the Thermal Frost
• Chapter 23: The Unquenched Fire
• Chapter 24: Legend of the Infernal Priest
• Chapter 25: The Burning Spirit of the Wild
• Chapter 26: The Fire That Never Goes Out

The salt pork had gone green three weeks out from Dieppe, but Father Gabriel Laurent ate it with the steady, humorless discipline of a man who believed chewing was a moral act. He had been taught at the college in La Flèche that the body was an unruly mule, best kept slightly hungry and thoroughly worked so it would not kick over the traces of the spirit. By the time the timber transport L’Espérance cleared the Grand Banks and rolled into the sullen, grey chop of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the summer of 1624, the mule was considerably subdued. His soutane, dyed the stubborn, soot-black of the Society of Jesus, hung from his shoulder blades like wet sailcloth over a pair of crossed oars.

The junior clerk of the Company of One Hundred Associates, a boy named Poncet whose face remained the color of curdled tallow throughout the crossing, had spent forty days asking Gabriel why any creature with two legs and a soul would trade the olive groves of the Languedoc for a wilderness populated entirely by biting gnats and heretics. Poncet sat on a water cask, wrapping his greasy breeches tight around his shins against the bilge reek, peeling an onion with a rusted knife.

"The King gives seigneuries to men who build mills," Poncet muttered, wiping his blade on his calf. "He gives beaver pelts to the merchants and scurvy to the soldiers. What does he give you, Father? A ditch behind a palisade and a wooden cross that will rot before your Latin dries?"

Gabriel did not pause his thumbing of the breviary, though the pages were so swollen with Atlantic fog that the vellum felt like boiled tripe. "He gives nothing, Master Poncet. The Crown does not hold the keys to the treasury I am drawing upon."

"A fine treasury," the clerk spat, flicking an onion skin into the scuppers. "Paid in cold water and pine needles. The Recollet brothers are already coming back on the fur boats with their ears frozen off, crying that the Hurons have hearts of flint. And those are the ones who trade with us. You want to go past the rapids. You talk about rivers nobody has drawn on a sheepskin. It is an expensive way to lose one’s scalp."

"The flint must be struck before it yields a spark," Gabriel said, turning a damp leaf of the office. He had an accent that smelled of dry limestone and wild thyme, though ten years in the northern novitiates had scoured most of the warmth from his vowels. "If the Recollets found it hard, it is because they used bread knives instead of iron. Our Lord did not tell the apostles to wait until the road was paved by the intendant."

The boy grumbled and chewed his bitter root, but Gabriel was already looking past the salt-stained gunwale toward the dark line rising above the grey surge. It was not land as an illiterate Norman fisherman understood it—not fields bordered by neat hedgerows of hawthorn or the slate roofs of parish tithe barns. It was a dense, unbroken bristle of black spruce, so crowded together they seemed to be competing for the privilege of choking out the light. It smelled of wet moss, turpentine, and ancient mold. It was the hem of a continent that had never heard the name of the Redeemer, and to Gabriel, that silence was an insult to the Creator that demanded repair.

The settlement at Tadoussac was little more than a dozen bark shelters huddled around a log storehouse that smelled powerfully of rancid grease and castor sacs. French sailors, their shirts stiff with seal oil, bargained with Montagnais trappers using broken words that were half Basque, half Algonquin, and entirely profane. When Gabriel stepped from the ship’s longboat onto the gravel strand, his heavy buckled shoes sank four inches into the black silt. A secular clerk might have cursed; Gabriel simply noted the cold through the wool of his stockings and offered it up for the souls currently enduring the middle circle of Purgatory.

In the small log chapel of Notre Dame, roofed with cedar shingles that leaked a yellow resin onto the earthen floor, Father Superior Le Tellier was paring his fingernails with a small bone bodkin. Le Tellier was forty-eight, with the yellowed eyes of an old fox and two fingers missing from his left hand—the souvenir of an encounter with a band of Mohawk hunters near Three Rivers five winters prior. He did not rise when Gabriel dropped his canvas sea sack by the door.

"You are five weeks late, Gabriel," the Superior said, without looking up from his knuckles. "The convoy for the upper country left with the new moon. Champlain was anxious to beat the southern raiders to the narrows. If you had arrived when the wind was from the east, you would be halfway to the Huron villages by now."

"The wind was from the south-southwest, Father," Gabriel replied, bowing his head to touch his knees in formal greeting. "The captain said God intended us to admire the Newfoundland cod banks for an extra fortnight."

Le Tellier made a dry, clicking sound in his teeth. "God has very little to do with Captain Guyot’s seamanship. Guyot was afraid of three Dutch sloops reported near Cape Breton. So instead of Huronia, you have been assigned to the storehouse inventory until the snow melts. Brother Marc needs someone who can write five hundred lines of figures without getting butter on the ledger."

Gabriel remained standing, his hands tucked into the deep cuffs of his robe. "I did not take the fourth vow to count salt firkins and bags of dry peas, Reverend Father."

"You took the vow of obedience, which includes salt firkins if I deem them necessary for the greater glory of God," Le Tellier said, his tone dropping the easy familiarity of the refectory. He set the bodkin down on the table, which was fashioned from a split pine log resting on two birch stumps. "The interior is not a garden for martyrs to pluck palms at their leisure, Gabriel. It is six hundred leagues of black water, mosquitoes that can kill a dog, and men who will listen to your sermon on the resurrection with great politeness, then burn you over a slow grease fire because their grandmother had a dream that your iron bell brought the rot into their squash vines."

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed," Gabriel recited, his voice flat and hard as a paving slab.

"The seed must fall on soil, not on granite," Le Tellier snapped. He rose, his joints popping like dry branches. He was a small man, half a head shorter than Gabriel, but he had the thick, scarred wrists of an old oarsman. "You have the Spanish disease, brother. You want to be Ignatius at Pamplona, having your leg broken by an eight-pound shot so you can lie on a velvet couch and see visions. Ignatius was sixty when he died in an office surrounded by receipts and Latin letters that smelled of sour vinegar. That is the work. Here."

He tapped a crumpled piece of paper that lay pinned under a lump of iron ore on the corner of the table. Gabriel looked down. It was not a map—no European had the lines for it—but a rough sketch drawn in charcoal on the back of an invoice for trade kettles. It showed the great lake of the Hurons, then another expanse of water beyond it, vague as a spilled inkwell, and then a series of scratches trailing off toward the setting sun into a blank emptiness labeled simply: Terra Incognita et Ignis.

"What is this?" Gabriel asked.

"A fantasy," said the Superior. "An Algonquin from the northern shore brought it down three summers ago. He called it the land of the Snake People—the Shoshone, as the western bands name them. He said that beyond the lake where the waters turn sweet, there are plains where the grass is as tall as a pikestaff, and beyond the plains, a place where the mountains smoke without fire and the earth vomits boiling soup from stone kettles."

Gabriel leaned closer. His long, straight nose almost touched the soot marks. "A place of heathens."

"A place of nothing," Le Tellier said, pulling the paper away and folding it into a tight square. "A place where no Christian has ever drawn breath, nor will they in our lifetimes. We have not yet secured the mission at Sainte-Marie. We have seven men between Tadoussac and the Georgian Bay to instruct forty thousand souls who think we are sorcerers because we can make a clock strike noon without pulling a wire. I need you on the Ottawa River. You will carry five bags of flour and three copper kettles to Father Brebeuf’s party."

"Father," Gabriel said, and for the first time his voice lost its dry neutrality, vibrating with the subterranean iron that had worried his superiors in Paris. "The Recollets go where the fur company goes. They follow the canoe routes of the traders like dogs following a meat wagon. If we only go where Monsieur de Champlain can send eight arquebusiers to guard our bacon, what are we? We are chaplains to the pelt trade."

"We are practical men who wish to keep our tongues inside our mouths," Le Tellier said coldly. "Do not lecture me on zeal, Laurent. I was digging graves in the frost when you were still writing syllogisms on the nature of grace at Clermont. You will report to the cooperage at dawn."

Gabriel knelt for the blessing, which Le Tellier gave with three hasty twitches of his two-fingered hand, then turned and went out into the gathering twilight.

The air smelled of low tide and woodsmoke from the native encampment along the mouth of the Saguenay. Gabriel did not go to the dormitory, which was a lean-to shared by four lay brothers and seven barrels of tallow that attracted grey rats from the ships. Instead, he walked along the shingle toward the spit where the dark water of the river met the grey brine of the gulf.

The sun was dropping behind the ridge of Laurentian hills, turning the sky the color of a bruised plum. In the west, far beyond the spruce horizons, the clouds were banked in strange, towering formations like the bastions of a mountain fortress. For a moment, the setting light caught the underside of those vaporous towers, staining them a dry, furnace red—the color of charcoal when a bellows is first applied to it.

Gabriel reached beneath the coarse black wool of his habit and drew out his crucifix. It was five inches of boxwood, bound at the corners with brass wire, worn smooth by the thumbs of his uncle, who had died of the pestilence in a military hospital outside Sedan. The wood was dark with the grease of many hands.

"Not where the path is made," Gabriel whispered into the cold wind that came off the river. "Where there is no path. Where the fire is not yet lit."

He did not pray for life. In the Jesuit colleges of the early seventeenth century, life was considered an indifferent matter, a short and rather muddy vestibule leading to the great marble hall of eternity. He prayed instead against mediocrity. He had seen the old priests in Paris, their shoes greased by the footmen of ladies who had murdered their husbands with white arsenic, their Latin smooth as lard, their bellies round from the sweet almond biscuits of the Queen Mother’s court. He had seen them die in four-poster beds with feather ticks, their noses twitching at the scent of lavender water while a notary waited in the hall to claim the third part of their sister’s estate. It was a death that smelled of stale linen and wax candles.

A man who went into the west would not die that way. He would die with his boots full of swamp water and his teeth loose from scurvy, his bones abandoned in some limestone cleft where no Christian would ever drop a coin into a box to shorten his time in the flame. That was the prize. That was the only thing France could not give him: a death that was entirely clean, stripped of all human comfort until nothing remained between the soul and the majesty of God but three feet of frozen sod or the ashes of an execution pit.

Behind him, feet crunched on the gravel. Gabriel did not turn around; he knew the limp of Brother Jean, the carpenter from Picardy whose left knee had been crushed by a rolling spar during the unloading of the Saint-Sébastien.

"The Superior is looking for the grease tubs," Jean said, stopping a yard off. He had an axe tucked into his rope belt, the head kept bright with bear fat. "He says if you are going to stare at the salt water all night, you might as well do it while carrying three quintals of lard to the salting shed."

"I am coming," Gabriel said.

"He is in a foul humor," Jean added, leaning his weight onto his sound leg. "One of the Huron guides ran off this afternoon. Took two brass pans and six iron awls. Said he would not go up the river with the Black Robes because he smelled sickness on the big ship."

Gabriel turned. "Which guide?"

"The one with the split ear. The one who spent the winter near the Grand Sault. He says the nations further west are moving. Something is burning their hunting grounds, or there is a great war among the nations beyond the lakes. He told the clerk that the sun rose yellow three mornings in a row, like the fat on an old dog, and that meant the world was on fire at the back."

"The pagans see omens in their own belly-rumblings," Gabriel said, but his fingers tightened on the wooden cross until the brass wire bit into his flesh.

"Aye," Jean said, spitting a dark stream of tobacco juice onto a round white stone. "They are simple folk. But they know which way the deer run when the woods start to get dry. Champlain says it hasn't rained three inches between here and the Ottawa since the feast of Saint John. The moss in the muskeg crumbles like dry toast under your shoe. If a spark gets into the brush this August, a man will have to swim to the Grand Banks to keep his hair."

Gabriel looked back once more toward the west. The plum color had died out of the clouds, leaving them a dull, charred violet. The river looked like grease in the dusk, slow and heavy, sliding out toward the salt sea as if it were trying to escape something that lay behind the hills.

"Let it burn," Gabriel said softly.

The carpenter looked at him sideways through the twilight. "You have a strange way of talking for a man who is supposed to teach people to love their neighbors, Father. Fire is bad for the trade. A burned pelt isn't worth three sous to the company."

"The pelt belongs to the merchant, Jean. The earth belongs to God."

"Well," Jean said, turning his heavy shoulders back toward the lights of the post, which flickered yellow and greasy through the spruce boughs like tallow candles in an cellar, "the merchants pay for the flour. If God wants grease for the winter, He hasn't sent an invoice yet."

They walked together across the gravel spit toward the palisade, their shoes squeaking against the wet shale. Inside the enclosure, someone was playing a three-holed pipe—a thin, sour tune from Poitou about a girl who lost her ribbon in a hayrick. A dog barked once, short and miserable, then went quiet as a boot thumped against the cedar logs.

That night, Gabriel lay on the hard-packed clay beneath his wool blanket, his sea sack under his neck. The smell of the green pork was gone, replaced by the bitter, pitchy breath of the logs that formed the walls of the storehouse. Beside him, three lay brothers snored with the rhythmic, heavy wheeze of men who spent twelve hours a day swinging broadaxes into hemlock.

He could not sleep. His brain, sharpened by ten years of Latin disputations and the cold disciplines of the novitiate, refused to idle. It spun like an escapement wheel that had lost its pendulum. He saw the charcoal marks on the back of the trade invoice—the crude loop of the western water, the scratches indicating the plains of grass, and then the words, drawn in the Superior’s neat, crabbed script: Terra Incognita et Ignis.

Ignis. Fire.

In the old books at Clermont, the doctors wrote that the earth had four corners, and that in the center was the great pit where the souls of the unbaptized suffered the cold and the heat according to their sins. But Gabriel had read the Spanish accounts from the southern sea—the letters from the Franciscans who had walked with the conquistadores into the red deserts of the south. They spoke of cities made of mud, of rivers that ran through cracks in the earth five hundred fathoms deep, of mountains that cast out stones as large as church towers. The world was not a neat garden laid out by an architect from Touraine. It was enormous, rough-hewn, and unfinished, still smelling of the first day’s labor when the waters were gathered together and the dry land appeared.

If there were people there—people who lived in the steam and the ash, who had never heard the name of the Virgin or seen the water of regeneration poured upon a child’s forehead—then they were his. Not Le Tellier’s, who wanted to build chicken coops at Three Rivers, and not Champlain’s, who was looking for an easy water route to the pepper warehouses of Canton.

A mouse rustled in the dry reeds of the thatch above his head. A drop of resin fell from the roof beam, landing with a soft, warm stickiness upon his temple. Gabriel did not wipe it away. He let it harden there, a small, dark knot against his skin, smelling of summer heat and turpentine.

"Domine, non sum dignus," he murmured, his fingers finding the third decade of the rosary. Lord, I am not worthy.

He would count the lard tubs in the morning. He would balance the clerk’s books and check the seams of the flour casks against the river damp. He would be the most humble, the most obedient, the most silent brother in the whole company of the Saint-Laurent. He would let Le Tellier believe that the Languedoc fire had been put out by two weeks of sea fog and three bowls of cold porridge.

And then, when the river opened, or when the first canoes came down from the high lakes with the autumn trade, he would find the ones who had come from the farthest reaches. The ones who did not smell of beaver grease or French brandy, but of the dry smoke of the tall grass. He would make them take him back with them. Not as an ambassador from the King of France, and not with six soldiers to carry his luggage, but as a beggar who had nothing to give them except the name of an execution victim from Judea and an invitation to burn with Him forever in the light that had no setting.

Through the chinks in the logs, he could see a single star, bright and needle-sharp between two hemlock branches. It did not twinkle; it sat there like an ember dropped from some enormous hearth far above the world, watching the black continent sleep beneath its blanket of pine needles and rotting moss.

Gabriel Laurent watched it back until his eyes burned with the salt of his crossing, his fingers locked around the boxwood cross, his vow already recorded in the only ledger that did not have grease upon its leaves.

The birchbark canoe was sixteen feet of spruce gum, cedar ribs, and peeled bark no thicker than a copper coin, yet it held three men, two brass kettles, a sack of damp peas, and forty pounds of salt pork. Gabriel sat in the waist, tucked between two rolls of dried caribou hide, his knees folded up toward his chest like the legs of a dead grasshopper. Every three strokes of the paddles, water lifted off the spruce blades and flicked into his lap, cold enough to make his teeth ache behind his lip.

They had passed the last French post four days behind them—a lean-to of green pine logs near the Sault where two men with swollen gums sat on an inverted tub, mending a gill net with rusty twine and cursing the intendant in the dialect of Saintonge. Beyond that point, the river had lost its name. On the maps in Paris, it was simply an ink line that ran out of the margin into the white skin of the page, but here it was a brown, muscle-backed flood, heavy with the melt of northern swamps and choked with the trunks of birch trees tossed down by the spring ice.

The man in the stern was named Makwa, though the French clerks at Tadoussac called him La Hache because he had once split an Iroquois raider’s skull with a iron wood-cleaver during a night raid on the lower river. He was fifty years old, his skin the color of a dry walnut shell, his left shoulder scarred by a musket ball that had healed into a raised, purple knot like a plums stone. He did not speak to Gabriel. When he wanted the priest to shift his weight to balance the craft, he tapped the bottom ribs with the butt of his ash paddle—two sharp thumps for left, one for right.

"The water is low," Gabriel said on the fifth morning, speaking in the broken, clipped Huron he had tried to master during his nights in the storehouse. He pointed at the muddy apron of riverbank where the river had retreated six feet, leaving a crust of white silt that crackled like parchment under their boots.

Makwa did not look at the bank. He reached into his leather pouch, pulled out a thumb of dried venison, and began to chew with slow, grinding motions of his jaw. "The sky has not wept since the moon of the strawberries," he said after a long silence. His tongue was thick with the western accent that Gabriel found hard to track, turning the soft vowels into hard, rasping clicks. "The grass in the south is red. The buffalo have gone into the hills to drink the white water."

"What white water?"

"The water that smokes," Makwa replied. He pushed off from the gravel with the point of his paddle. "The water that comes out of the earth when the earth is angry."

Gabriel reached into his habit to touch the leather strap of his breviary. The pages were no longer damp; they had dried in the hot, thin air of the upper river until the vellum leaves curled like horn. The humidity of the coast had dropped away three days back, replaced by a wind that came out of the west like the breath from a baker’s oven. It carried no scent of pine or wet moss. It smelled of dry silt, baked limestone, and something sharp and dry that made the back of Gabriel’s throat feel as if it had been rubbed with salt.

They spent six days ascending the long rapids where the river cut through a ridge of black slate. Here, the canoe was useless. They had to haul the gear along the bank, scrambling over boulders that had been rounded by centuries of floodwater. Gabriel carried the heavy canvas sea sack and the wooden box containing the vessel for the Mass—a small pewter chalice, two linen purificators now stained yellow by river water, and a dozen sealed lead tubes containing altar wine that smelled faintly of vinegar.

His hands, which had been white and soft from the scriptorium at Clermont, were transformed within a fortnight. The skin on his knuckles cracked into deep, red fissures that filled with black mud. The sun, striking down through the thinned canopy of dead spruce, burned the back of his neck until the skin peeled away in dry flakes. He looked into a quiet eddy near the shore one afternoon and saw a stranger staring back: a man with sunken cheeks, eyes like dark coals set into hollow sockets, and a beard that had grown in patchy and stiff, stained yellow around the mouth by the smoke of their night fires.

He looked, he thought with a grim satisfaction, like one of the desert fathers who had spent twenty years eating locusts in the Wadi Natrun. There was no vanity left in the glass of that brown water. There was only the bone, the tendon, and the iron purpose that kept the bone upright.

On the eighth day, they reached the Great River—the vast, muddy artery that the Algonquins called the water that goes everywhere. It was wide as a bay, so broad that the green forest on the far bank looked like a thin braid of silk laid along the horizon. But it was not the river Gabriel had expected. The water was low and sluggish, full of brown sandbars that stuck out of the current like the ribs of a sunken bark.

A fleet of five canoes was pulled up on a shale beach where the small tributary met the main channel. Thirty men sat around three small fires, their bodies painted with red ochre and charcoal in geometric patterns that showed they were on the move from their winter grounds. They were shorter and broader than the Montagnais of the coast, their hair shaved clean on the left side of the head and tied with snakeskin on the right.

Makwa held up his paddle twenty yards from the shore, letting the canoe hover in the brown eddy. A man stood up from the beach—an elder with a necklace of bear claws that rested against his ribs like a row of blackened teeth. He spoke to Makwa in a language Gabriel could not understand, his voice high and thin, punctuated by sudden stabs of his forefinger toward the west.

"What does he say?" Gabriel asked, leaning forward despite the warning thump of Makwa’s paddle against the boat's frame.

"He says the grass is dead," Makwa muttered without turning his head. "He says the fires came through the valley of the Illinois three moons ago and drove the deer into the rocks. He says the Black Robe should go back to the salt water before his feet turn to ash."

Gabriel stood up in the canoe. The small craft rocked violently, the gunwale dipping within an inch of the brown water, but he balanced himself with his feet braced against the wooden thwarts. He held his boxwood cross high above his head, the sun catching the yellow wire that bound its arms.

"Tell him," Gabriel said, his voice rising above the dull hiss of the river, "that I do not come for the deer. I do not come for the beaver. I bring the word of the Great Spirit who made the water and the grass. If the earth is on fire, it is because the people have not bowed before the Lord of Heaven."

The old man on the shore watched Gabriel with small, unblinking eyes. He did not look angry; he looked faintly amused, the way an old dog watches a crow screaming from a fence post. He spoke again, three short sentences, then turned his back and spat into the dry shale.

Makwa backed the paddle, turning the canoe toward a small creek mouth fifty yards upstream from the native camp. "He says your God must be very small if He needs a piece of wood to carry His voice," Makwa said as the bow ground into the dark gravel. "He says the spirits of the west do not speak French, and they do not like black coats."

"They will learn the language of the God who created them," Gabriel said, stepping out into the knee-deep water. The river was warm—not the bone-chilling brine of the St. Lawrence, but a tepid, muddy soup that smelled of decaying weeds and hot mud.

They made their camp that night on a high bluff overlooking the confluence. Below them, the Great River stretched out into the red dusk, its surface reflecting the sunset until it looked like a trail of spilled grease leading into an oven. To the west, the sky was not blue or grey; it was a pale, sulfurous yellow, smeared near the horizon with thin, horizontal lines of dark purple smoke.

Gabriel sat on his sea sack, his breviary open on his knees, though it was too dark to read the small Latin print. He did not need the book for the Office of the Dead; he knew the psalms by heart, having recited them a thousand times in the chapel at La Flèche while the snow drifted against the high stone windows.

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine...

A grey fox came out of the stunted oaks at the edge of the bluff, stopped ten paces from him, and raised its head to sniff the air. It did not look afraid. Its coat was mangy, the skin stretched tight over its ribs, its ears tattered by ticks. It looked at Gabriel with yellow eyes that had no curiosity in them—only the flat, ancient hunger of a creature that lived in a world where everything was either hunting or burning.

"Why are you going west, Makwa?" Gabriel asked suddenly, breaking his own rule of silence.

The old guide was sitting by a tiny fire of dry willow twigs, scraping the charred fat from an old bone with his knife. "My people are there," he said.

"The Recollet priests said your people live near the Great Lake of the Hurons."

"My mother’s people," Makwa said, not looking up from his scraping. "The people of the Snake. They lived where the mountains are white in the summer. They came down the river three winters ago because the snow was too deep for the elk. Now they do not go back."

"Why?"

"The ground has opened," Makwa said simply. "The hot water came out and killed the roots of the trees. The spirits are angry because the people from the south came with iron boots and took the yellow stones from the streams."

Gabriel leaned forward, his hands resting on his knees. "The Spaniards?"

Makwa spat into the fire. The spit hissed against the red willow bark. "Men who ride giant deer," he said, using the native term for horses. "Men with silver faces. They came three summers ago from the warm sea. They built house-boxes out of stone and made the people dig in the rocks for the yellow metal that does not rust. Then the great smoke came out of the hills and burned their legs."

Gabriel’s pulse quickened. The Spanish outposts in New Mexico—Santa Fe and the northern borderlands of New Spain—were hundreds of leagues to the south, according to the hydrographers in Paris. If their rumors had reached this far north, if the native trade paths crossed between the Spanish frontier and these northern rivers, then the wilderness was not an empty void. It was a vast web of paths, stretching from the ice of the northern gulf to the red deserts of the south. And somewhere in the middle, where the lines crossed in the unknown mountains, was the Terra Incognita et Ignis.

He felt a strange, cold joy rise in his throat—not the joy of a scholar who has found a missing text, but the sharp thrill of a soldier who sees the breach in the wall. The French merchants were content to sit at Quebec and bargain for three beaver skins with a handful of glass beads; the Spaniards were content to dig for gold until their slaves died in the pits. But the Church—the holy, Catholic, apostolic Church—was not bound by the price of pelts or the weight of bullion. She was bound only by the number of souls that could be plucked from the fire before the world ended.

"We will go to them," Gabriel said.

Makwa stopped his knife. He looked across the small fire at the priest, his dark face half-hidden by the red flicker of the willow twigs. "The canoe will not go there," he said. "The river becomes small. Then the river becomes nothing. Then there is only the grass that burns when the sun reaches his high house."

"Then we will walk," Gabriel said.

"You have no shoes," Makwa said, pointing his knife at Gabriel’s boots.

The thin leather had split along the outer seams during the portages, and Gabriel had bound them with strips of raw moose hide he had bought from a guide at the Sault. The soles were thin as paper, worn down by the sharp slate of the rapids until he could feel every pebble through the cracked leather.

"God will provide shoes," Gabriel said.

Makwa chuckled—a short, dry sound like two stones clinking together in a bag. "God does not make moccasins," he said. "The women make them out of elk skin that has been smoked over green oak. If you have no women, you walk on your bones."

He went back to his bone-scraping, and Gabriel did not answer. He rose and walked to the edge of the bluff, looking down into the darkness of the river valley.

The wind had shifted during the night. It no longer blew from the damp north, but came straight out of the southwest, carrying with it a strange, dry heat that did not belong to the late summer. It brought a smell that Gabriel had never encountered in the damp forests of Normandy or the pine woods of Tadoussac. It was not the scent of pine pitch or oak smoke from a hearth. It was the dry, alkaline smell of old ash, mixed with something heavy and sweet, like the oil of wild mustard that had been scorched in an iron pan.

Far off to the west, beyond the black curve of the river, he saw a dull red glow on the underside of the horizon. It was not a star, and it was not the moon, which had not yet risen. It was a thin, thread-like line of crimson that appeared and disappeared as the dust drifted across the distant plains—a fire so far away that no sound of its roaring could reach the hill, but so vast that it lit the belly of the night sky like the embers of a forge.

Gabriel raised his right hand, his thumb and forefinger forming the sign of the cross over the dark expanse of the west.

"Benedictio Dei Omnipotentis," he whispered, his voice disappearing into the dry wind, "Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, descendat super hanc terram..."

A shower of sparks rose from Makwa’s fire behind him as the old man tossed a dry oak branch onto the coals. For a second, Gabriel’s black shadow was projected forty feet out into the empty air above the river, long and thin and sharp, like a black stake driven into the heart of the wilderness.

He did not turn back toward the shelter. He stood on the edge of the red bluff until the stars began to pale in the east, watching the crimson line on the western horizon burn its way through the dark.