At Covent Garden Market, for sixteen shillings, Mr. Campbell bought a beaver hat to give to his son. The peddler
swore that it was pure beaver, no rabbit fur mixed in between.
could not really know.
He took his hat wholesale, along with a lot of other goods, home of Greasy Harry, who lived just around the square.
Harry had two little kids who worked for him. Had bought them at the beginning of winter by a chimney sweep who did not know what to do. He had paid a pound, and had been a good investment. The two had a special talent for hats.
For a three-cornered hat as that of Mr. Campbell, who seemed brand new, they received a free ride from chicken for dinner.
The important thing was that it seemed new. If it were pure beaver or beaver half, not even Harry could understand.
When the two had stolen his hat, Mr. Devon was buying a bag of oranges to pull in the theater. He felt his head being lighter, had shot shooting, but in a crowd of Drury Lane, no one ran away with the air of the thief. Hidden inside the basket, on the shoulders of his brother, Nathaniel had patted the little felt.
even three days before, the precious hat was a fine show in the shop Amber & Sons, priced at a guinea remarkable.
Mr. Amber was known throughout London for his pieces of pure beaver worked in Russia. The Russians had long gone the raw material, but kept the secret to produce the felt the dry skin without carrots. Amber
skins annually purchased by Mr. Pond, a member of the North West Company. Paid fifteen shillings for the beaver fat and seventeen for the dry. Russia sent in the best dry skin and kept the rest for its plant in Spitalfield. At least six day laborers, assisted by their wives, clean the skin by the hair outside, tosavano fluff, they treated with mercuric nitrate. Unfortunately carroting always involves a loss of quality wool and took a clear orange cast. An alternative was the beaver fat, which did not require that step, but it was worse. The second alternative was the secret of the Russians, but between the outward journey, labor, and return the pieces of felt ended up costing three times as much. For carotari, Mr. Amber gave two shillings a day. Wives, nothing. Then there were the workers who combed the wool on the tables tunnel, steam heated to the boiling in vats of metal. Dried pieces of wood on the forms, they went with pumice, harden them with starch. Each month, Mr. Amber was paying two guineas for skilled workers, and sometimes even more, to keep them quiet, for their mattan scary.
In Montreal, the French, who worked for Mr. Pond had paid a few pounds per season. That spring, the return journey from Fort William, had caused the break back more than usual, because a couple of them had left the company to run after two squaws.
Jacques Dupont and Anton Martin wanted to change his life. Enough with the low manpower, the hiring, hernia, deadlines. Just travel two thousand miles bypassing rapids and waterfalls with canoes on their shoulders and tons of skins. Dupont and Martin wanted to marry an Indian, Métis have children, earn the right to spend the winter with the tribe. That was life. The life of Bernard Seurac.
Seurac lived with the Indians all year. At the first thaw, loaded his canoe with a thousand skins, and within five weeks he returned from Fort William with the merchandise. For each paid a pound of dry skin powder. There seven wanted a blanket, four for a gallon of brandy, a rifle fourteen, sixteen for a pound of Chinese pigment on the body. Prices were lower for the beaver just fat, that is, the fur worn for a year, soaked with sweat but wasted for use.
In the hunting season Tekanstewhere Guillaume had collected one hundred and twenty fur. One hundred and twenty rodents who had approached the trap, attracted by the smell of moss soaked castoreum, the liquid coming out from the glands of the animal. One hundred and twenty rodents drowned, legs locked in the grip of iron. One hundred and twenty
rodents that sniff the air and squeak, as a celestial river, when Mr. Campbell gave his son a pure beaver hat for her birthday.
February 5, 2007
Wu Ming
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