River Thieves

The novel opens with a meditation on the dying language of the Beothuk, the indigenous people of Newfoundland. The narrative shifts to March 1819, presenting, from a Beothuk woman's perspective, the moment she steps outside her mamateek, a dome-shaped shelter of birchbark and caribou hide, on Red Indian Lake and sees a stranger in a long black coat. She screams a warning, triggering a panicked flight. As she runs across the ice, slowed by the pain of a recent birth, the man sets down his weapons and approaches with open hands. She lifts her cassock, a leather outer garment, to reveal her breasts in an appeal for mercy, then speaks her name and takes his hand. Before the first muffled gunshot is fired, she understands she has lost her child, her husband, and the lake.

The story moves backward to 1810. John Peyton, the son of John Senior, a prominent settler in Newfoundland's Bay of Exploits, is about to run his own trapline for the first time. He harbors unspoken romantic feelings for Cassie Jure, the family's housekeeper and former tutor, who is six years his senior. That autumn, Lieutenant David Buchan of the HMS Adonis arrives on the northeast shore, commissioned by Governor John Duckworth to contact the Beothuk, who have been driven into the interior by European settlement and violence. Duckworth offers a 100-pound reward for establishing friendly relations.

Buchan visits John Senior's winter house to secure cooperation for a winter expedition. John Senior dismisses the Beothuk as "a shameless lot of thieves" (21) and recounts how, after they killed his partner Harry Miller, he led a retaliatory raid, burning shelters and seizing furs. He reluctantly agrees to help. During the visit, Cassie reveals fragments of her past to Buchan: when she was 12, her father threw her down the stairs, breaking her tibia; after her mother died, John Senior offered Cassie a position on the northeast shore.

Cassie secretly travels to the tilt, a small trapper's cabin, where Joseph Reilly, an Irishman in John Senior's employ, lives with his Mi'kmaq wife, Annie Boss. Cassie asks Annie for help terminating a pregnancy. Annie reluctantly prepares an herbal concoction, and Cassie endures hours of violent sickness. Peyton discovers Cassie at the tilt, assumes the pregnancy was his father's, and carries her home on a makeshift stretcher. She makes him promise never to tell John Senior.

In January 1811, Buchan leads 23 men up the frozen River Exploits to the lake. John Senior is too ill to travel, so Peyton takes his place. Richmond, a volatile furrier in the Peytons' employ, clashes with Buchan over whether to leave rifles behind. At the Beothuk camp, the encounter begins well: a tall chief shakes hands with the white men, and food is shared. Buchan leaves two marines behind as a show of good faith and departs with two Beothuk guides to retrieve gifts from the sledge camp. When one guide flees at the sight of a distant campfire, the fragile trust collapses. The party finds the camp deserted the next morning and discovers the headless, arrow-pierced bodies of the two marines on the ice. Buchan insists on an immediate retreat.

Duckworth refuses another winter expedition. Buchan searches the coast the following summer without success, while tensions between Peyton and John Senior sharpen, fueled by Peyton's belief that his father and Cassie are lovers. Duckworth's governorship ends in 1812; his successor denies Buchan's petition, and seven years pass before Buchan returns.

The second part opens in 1817 with catastrophic fires in St. John's; Cassie's father dies during the crisis. In September 1818, the Beothuk steal the Peytons' sloop Susan, loaded with the season's salmon. John Senior demands retaliation. Cassie suggests they seek official permission, framing the trip as an attempt to recover property and open communication, thereby restraining the party. Governor Charles Hamilton grants permission and confirms the reward.

On March 6, 1819, an eight-man party reaches the lake and surprises a Beothuk camp. Peyton chases the fleeing woman across the ice; she falls, bares her breasts, and takes his hand. Two Beothuk men approach. One speaks at length, then tries to lead the woman away. John Senior intervenes, and the man grabs him by the throat. Richmond beats the man with his rifle butt to no effect, then shoots him in the back. The second man turns to flee; John Senior seizes the rifle of Tom Taylor, another furrier in the party, and shoots the fleeing man down. Reilly walks out, places his rifle behind the wounded man's ear, and fires.

The woman, now called Mary, is brought to the Peytons' winter house. In St. John's, Peyton reads into evidence a letter claiming only one Beothuk man was killed in self-defense. The grand jury clears the Peytons but recommends further investigation. Buchan, now a Captain, arrives to conduct it. With Cassie's help, he questions Mary and discovers two men were killed, and that Mary has a child at the lake. Through an interview with Noel Young, a Mi'kmaq trapper, Buchan learns it was Reilly, not John Senior, who fired the second shot.

The novel reveals that Cassie's lover was not John Senior but Buchan. They slept together three times during his earlier visits; the terminated pregnancy was his. When Peyton reads Buchan's stolen journal, he finds Cassie's confession scrawled in its margin. He confronts Buchan, and an unspoken deal is struck: Buchan will report the expedition justified; Peyton will not expose the affair.

Alone with Cassie, John Senior confesses to an older atrocity: in 1782, he, Miller, and William Cull, another of John Senior's men, raided a Beothuk camp, killing multiple people; Miller raped a surviving woman. Cassie asks if John Senior killed the second man on the lake; he covers his face. He admits he brought her to the northeast shore partly out of guilt, wondering whether her father had been abusing her. Cassie replies flatly, "Of course he did" (265). She announces she will stay only until Mary is returned to her people.

Mary's health deteriorates through the fall. Cassie quietly leaves the Peyton household without a note. Mary dies of consumption in Ship Cove in January 1820, asking for Peyton before she expires. Buchan resolves to carry her body to the lake.

An expedition of 50 marines departs in brutal conditions. Near Reilly's old tilt, Peyton finds Cassie living alone in the woods. She insists on accompanying Mary's body. They reach the deserted lake camp on February 11. Inside a shelter, they find the body of the man killed the previous March, wrapped in canvas stained with red ochre. Mary's coffin is raised on a tripod of spruce. Cassie places beside the body a leather medicine pouch that John Senior took from a Beothuk grave years before. The 16 pairs of blue moccasins Mary secretly sewed during her captivity, one for each sleeping pit in her family's mamateek, are set at the entrance.

Peyton tells Cassie he is thinking of getting married. He stares across the lake where he chased Mary less than a year before. "All my life I've loved what didn't belong to me," he says (327). When he turns, Cassie is already walking away toward the trees.

The epilogue describes the Beothuk ochring ceremony, in which each spring the people covered their bodies in red ochre and sang songs celebrating the natural world. No record of the lyrics or music survives.