Anson stared at the water and tried to imagine so much animal energy below the surface. But it was unimaginable. The river was dark, roiling. As the minutes passed, the surface grew lighter, became a rich brown, and moved faster, judging by the branches and what sometimes seemed to be whole trees on its surface. Anson stepped back from the edge. This was no eastern river; its wildness was far beyond the ken of his experience. His resolve to find a boat and row upriver in the direction of Crescent Slough weakened.
He looked nervously up the bank. Somewhere in that short grey distance, Dare was sleeping. The idea was no more fathomable than the idea of millions of fish pouring themselves against the river’s flow. How rarely Anson had known his friend to sleep! In fact, he couldn’t recall Dare’s face in repose—always he had been awake, taking things in, helping, moving before being asked. It had been the same during those few days after the war, when Dare, at once grateful for Anson’s friendship and restless to be on his way again, seemed never to relax. And to think of how much he had travelled since Anson had first lost news of him—a few months after Antietam, when ill health had forced Anson to resign his commission, though not before Dare was safe, as safe as a man could be while fighting a war. Anson did not even know all the places Dare had gone—south and west with the Army of the Potomac, then afterwards to Kansas, San Francisco, Victoria, and now the mouth of the Fraser River—no doubt there had been other stops along the way. Anson wondered how heavily those years of constant motion would be mapped on his friend’s face. Dare would have aged; he could not have discovered any way to stop the progression of the suns. No, not even Dare could have learned that.
Faint voices swirled out of the grey. Anson tensed. Rapidly the voices grew louder—a harsh, guttural tongue suddenly exploded in the air. A wide, flat skiff filled with men emerged out of the half-light and drifted rapidly toward him. One man stood, hunched over, in the centre of the dark heads—like a flower with its petals torn off. Anson rallied to the panic in the voices; the shouts had turned to cries as the river hurled the skiff along the bank.
In a moment the faces took on definition. All were upraised, open-mouthed. They belonged to yellow men, Chinese, judging by the long pigtails dangling from their dark canvas slouch hats. Briefly, and for the first time, Anson had encountered the race and its language in San Francisco, but this shock meeting on the Fraser River transcended race and speech.
The skiff sped toward him. The faces, young and old, gap-toothed and darkly shadowed, loomed so close that Anson could attach the flung gutturals to individual mouths. The man hunched over in the centre of the skiff held a long pole and swung it toward the wharf. He shouted continuously, his lips peeled back, his hat fallen to the back of his skull and staying there by means of a string around his throat. Each time he swung the pole, the hat jumped up, as if he had a small monkey clutched to his back.
Anson suddenly understood the reason for the terror. The tide was running so fast, and the skiff was just far enough out in the main current, that the man with the pole could not secure a landing. The end of the pole bounced futilely on the first planks of the wharf, each contact threatening to upset the man’s balance and plunge him into the river. Two of the other men grasped the pole man’s coat tails, flailing instructions with their free hands, shouting words as harsh as retches. Another man had scrambled into the stern, where he held his arms out to the east, as if to embrace the sun he didn’t expect to see again. His movements only increased the terror. Two others leapt to their feet and stepped, bent over, toward the bankside of the skiff.
Afraid they planned to jump, Anson shouted, “No! Don’t!” and waved his arms frantically, at the same time looking around for a spot where he could plant his feet. To grab the pole would not be difficult, but how could he keep himself from being yanked into the river? The pole hit the wharf a few feet above him and he squatted, ready to drop backwards, his boots braced against the slightly raised crossbeam at the wharf’s edge.
The Chinese had seen him now. A few words of English exploded out of the strange consonants and vowels, the surprising clarity and force of them almost as great as that of the skiff when Anson finally seized the pole.
“You hold! Swing the bow around!”
A few seconds of slack followed as the pole swung in front of Anson like a scythe. He drew in a deep breath, tightened the muscles in his thighs. In the skiff, the men who had been holding the coat tails now wrapped their arms around the pole man’s lower body. He, in turn, crouched even lower.
With a jolt, Anson jerked forward, his arms tearing at their sockets. But his boots held firm to the raised beam. Second by second, the pole slid through his hands. He felt a stab of pain in his wrists, felt the skin of his palms tear. He lowered his head and hoped his muscles would not snap like weak rope.
The bow turned. A thump sounded on the wharf. Anson looked up to see one of the Chinese scrambling onto the dock and reaching out his hands to the others to pull the skiff safely in. The tension in the pole decreased. Another pair of boots struck the planks. The strange words were still loud but no longer panicked. The tension decreased again. Anson’s shoulders and chest straightened. He drew several deep breaths. The familiar, enticing smell of opium engulfed him. He stared into his hands. Splinters were driven into the bloodied palms.
English again reached his ears. The Chinese surrounded him and grinned so widely that their faces threatened to crack like vases. One man said, “Thank you. You saved us. Thank you, sir.” Another man bowed, then reached out and shook Anson’s hand in both of his. He did not appear troubled by the blood, but Anson grimaced at the contact.
Heavy boot steps pounded across the wharf. Anson looked behind him to see Henry Lansdowne approaching, his face as sad as it had been the night before.
To Anson’s amazement, the thin Englishman barked out a few words in Chinese. All of the men but one cringed at the sound and turned away, busying themselves with the moored skiff. The remaining man’s grin quickly vanished. He was about to speak when Henry Lansdowne held up a hand and silenced him.
“Are you all right, doctor?” he said with genuine concern.
Anson nodded and wiped his bloody palms on his trousers.
“I saw what happened from the window. You’re stronger than you seem. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get here in time to help.”
“I’m only glad that I was here myself.”
“These damned Orientals. I don’t know why they choose to work near water when they’re so afraid of it. Not one of them knows how to swim.”
Henry Lansdowne scowled at the remaining Chinese—Anson recognized him as the one who’d held the pole. Alone of the group, this man did not wear a pigtail, and his face was fuller, healthier; the others had the emaciated, bone-showing, and skin-slack faces of nutritional deficiency so familiar to Anson from his war years.
“Why would you get it into your heads to travel on such a tide? You should have all been drowned or washed out to sea. Were you trying to get home to China? That’s no way to do it.”
The lone Chinese almost jumped in his eagerness to explain. “Not our fault. He’s crazy. He’s gone crazy. Not like other white men. He used a gun!”
Lansdowne narrowed his eyes. Briefly, he looked beyond Anson, upriver. It was an almost imperceptible glance, but the silence that followed it could not be mistaken.