The Company came to the islands every year to recruit. The young men of the islands made good Company employees because they could endure the privations of loneliness and exposure and because they had been well trained to obey orders even when those issuing them could not know if they were obeyed.
So the Company sent their boats to each island harbor and Company men signed the boys to a long apprenticeship in far America. And the boys became clerks and trappers and factors and teachers and blacksmiths and cooks and tanners and they joined the French and Spanish and Metis and Indians who thronged the Company houses and contributed to the great work of making good and sure that middle class Englishmen had smooth, water resistant beaver hats to put on their urban heads.
And sometimes the boys from Orkney would return home with their Indian wives and a school was set up for their children and in a few generations the people of the islands, descendants of sea-marauders, now added another strand to their inheritance.
The Factor at Spokane House sat at his desk in the biting cold of deep winter. A fire burned, but the house was of single wall construction and the walls and floors and ceilings were white with ice. The Factor was completing a report for the Company detailing the number and quality of beaver trapped along each river and creek in his domain. He was wondering if he should mention that a certain brigade had encroached on American Fur Company territory and found the Indians there most receptive to the Company offers for their furs.
Then his clerk was at the door.
``A person,'' he said, ``a person in distress wishes to see you...''
The person was an island boy all wrapped in furs and still clutching the snow shoes that brought him. The person collapsed in the light of the fire and proceeded to groan most piteously and in a surprisingly high tone. It quickly became obvious that the person was in the process of giving birth. A boy child was born in front of the Factor's fire and the Factor's Arapahoe wife wrapped the child and comforted the mother and the Factor heard the story of a boy leaving for America with the Company, leaving an island girl to face the unforgiveness of her people alone. And so she too had joined the Company and worked as long and hard as any man with the child growing within her. She thought she could find the father of the child, but the Company had people at work two thousand miles across the mountains and the forests and the plains.
It was twenty years later at Fort Vancouver that she saw him again. She was a housekeeper there, her son long drowned. Their eyes met for a surprised moment, then his Indian wife cuffed him alongside the head for looking too long at another woman.
He did not look again.