A Discovery of Strangers (28 page)

“Ah-h-h-h,” Hood sighed, “the fat pigs.…”

“I think Orkney women always prefer a man hoisting sail, sir, to any amount of pigs.”

“I’d gladly forgo pigs for a great hot fire. If this tent was on fire, I’d dance your fling.”

“Aye, so we would, all the three of us!”

Hood was chanting some scrap of memory: “Three men bound in the midst of the burning fiery furnace, walking loose in the midst of the fire — set the tent on fire again, Hep Burn, according to your glorious name, as you did on the shore of the lake, the one they call Like a Woman’s Breasts, and we three Shadrack, Meshack and To Bed We Go will walk loose in the midst of it, nor was an hair of our head singed, nor the smell of fire passed on us!”

Even Doctor Richardson, carefully Presbyterian, could join what seemed to him such biblical cheeriness: “My friend, we then need a fourth — there were
four
men in the fiery furnace.”

“Yes! Also an angel, I pray, sweet angel, come! Carry us into the great, fiery furnace, the Yellowknives call it ‘Like a Woman’s Breasts’, o, soft breasts, blessed be God!”

Yesterday Hood could play that aloud; today with a mouthful of food he cannot count four, and his debilitated mind drifts, shimmers, trying to focus on Michel; he looms somewhere in his past like some mountain, but he cannot find it, the winter so endless at Fort Enterprise, it seems more a blackness already exploded long ago, and for an instant his mind focuses — yes, Michel is the only Indian voyageur.

What induced a Mohawk to hire himself into such miserable drudgery as year by year paddling furs up the unmerciful rivers of Canadian rocks and plains? With his axe of a face he should be staring down another warrior somewhere in
I adore Thy eternal and inscrutable designs I submit to
this frozen desert, his courage as naked as the hatred on his full and twisted
lips. And somewhere he exposed that hatred, during a winter, Hood is certain, though whatever it was straggles away in the present instant of freezing — yet here he is, an Indian shouldered up out of the frozen earth and offering small meat, scrawny juices, to ruin once again Hood’s accepted somnolence of starvation.

He is not a Yellowknife.

And again Hood’s mind trips against some anger, a lurch of what must have been rage. To destroy his peace Michel has destroyed his fast — Michel did it before in winter too, yes, in an earlier winter, he certainly destroyed something that Hood cannot now quite remember, he has avoided every thought of it for so long, but this is a devil and he has returned, forced him to this renewed sacrilege of EAT. Meat in his mouth, shreds to feebly suck at but never uncatch between loosened teeth, sinning his stomach into a grotesque memory of longing for satiation. His teeth seem to shift, for his spastic tongue, pushing them tastes sweetly of blood. Can you live sucking your own teeth for their blood?

Before the Coppermine River, ten days, fourteen days, all of September or whatever — before they finally arrived here at the double rapids, which they have called Obstruction, which destroyed their last bits of strength — then Michel was a good hunter — or was it J-B. Bélanger, who should now be here too, with all his small prayers and charms luring the animals out of their unwillingness, to offer themselves a sacrifice for their pathetic hunger? But now Michel’s apparent strength is not enough, so he says, to hold a wavering rifle into steadiness, hardly enough for a ptarmigan, which will sit until you step on it, and to kill a caribou — well, since Obstruction Rapids not a
single one has shown itself, not even on the skyline of the farthest esker, though once herds moved like distant mirages of forests, always fading when pursued — he would have to be close enough, he declares so loudly, to lean forwards and break a caribou’s neck with an axe
we’ll shoot at a wren says Robin to Bobbin
but the note says Belanger was coming too.

Jean-Baptiste Bélanger,
“le rouge”
for his skin, crossed himself so swiftly, praying open-mouthed while he paddled in terror, the canoe smashing across or into the ridges of the sea, ice sailing by like knives, his clothes tattered with charms, his enormous hands clenched ready for death on the birch paddle bending. Did Bélanger
le rouge
begin to follow Michel back to them, and stagger into motionlessness like the three others — or four — who have already stopped walking, somewhere after Obstruction Rapids? Those who still rest where they stopped — rest how? With the ravens or the wolves? Yes, “rest”, Lieutenant Franklin told them, never “wait”, but “rest, wrap yourself tight in your sleeping-hide and rest, we will return with help … help” — Hood remembers that very distinctly. Rest for help.

He lies in his sleeping-hide. Buffalo, rigid with cold, but pliable, with the heavy smell of prairie he has never seen. Someone once suggested he should not have had this warmth carried for him so far on forlorn seas and tundra; also, never wear caribou and seal skins at the same time — superstitious natives — was a curse carried for him into this north, lying under prairie hide in this barren land?

Rest, o rest. It was said, so gently, sadly, to each one, Mathew Péloquin, Régiste Vaillant, little Junius the other Esquimau translator, who served them at table so proudly at the Fort. And now Ignace Perrault too. Rest, we will return. With help.
Presumably they are all somewhere — like Bélanger too? — still resting, breathing in the official Expedition decision of an expectation of strength and of food. What happens to them when their arms, their eyelids, stop moving like their feet? Will the animals come? Yes. Always too late, but the warm animals are certain to come. Someone once told him that too.

And did the solicitous animals show Michel this hollow of gnarled trees, this larger possibility of fire? Why did Michel carry him here away from their brush shelter; Michel hates all the officers, he has at least since the long winter certainly hated Hood, about something, something so enormous he may never again be able to remember
we will go to the woods says Michael to Robin
why did he not continue walking with Lieutenant Franklin’s group — or are they already all dead before they ever got a glimpse of the great monolith, Dogrib Rock, those eternal enemies of the Yellowknives?

No, he brought the Bible note, that was certainly the commander’s starvation writing. When Michel left it, that group must still have been struggling to reach Fort Enterprise — o, Greenstockings will be there! the fire burning in that endlessly warm round lodge, with caribou heart and brain bubbling in her kettle, stuffed stomach turning in smoke there and the heat of her long brown body
dear God my God nothing can happen to me which Thou hast not foreseen ruled willed ordained from all eternity bless her bless her that woman more gentle and tender
Why has he, so powerful, come?

Perhaps they are already all dead.

And Michel, of course, does not know how to find the Fort from the tundra, and the necessary Yellowknife food that alone can save them all. He is the wrong kind of Indian, from far too
far away, there are great differences in Indians — this one knows no directions here if he cannot see Dogrib Rock.

Michel squats at the tent opening, beside the green miserable fire, his rifle in his lap. He was always somehow lost crossing treeless rivers — sea coasts and rivers without trees were a White curse, he told them. When the Expedition stumbled upon the first bristle of waist-high spruce after finally leaving the ocean, it was Michel who walked to them, kneeled, pulled their needles against his emaciated face burned even blacker. Breathed them in like a child.

Trees, these tufted sticks! A single English oak contains more wood than all the twigs bundled together from here to the Polar Ocean. In the blur of his starving eyes floating with blotches, Hood sees through the tent doorway a convulsion of stringy erectiles trying to be green in the blasted withering of wind and snow that tears at them; sees a blister of grey snakes frozen upright.

Robin and Bobbin two big-bellied men
They ate more meat than threescore and ten
They ate a cow they ate a calf
An ox and a.…

The spruce-twig flames slowly, slowly burn themselves down through early October and long September snow, sink towards the permafrost, frozen since before time. Michel lugged him here like any weary ox, though he hates him — why? Robert Hood’s shredded mind shimmers over hatred scattered like ash upon his past. They will insist on his trying to stand again, perhaps even walk. He grasps with a sudden clarity: we must force this Mohawk to carry me all the way, I can still see the compass,
I would read it backwards on his back pointing back along the trail we have travelled, the needle wouldn’t waver any more that way than the daily compass point shivers through his mind, it will guide him backwards into gentle summer, all the numbers and calculations shredding away, and he remembers and forgets again that Richardson can calculate true north as well as he, this infallible point on which their lives swing erratically, as if it too were staggering across the magnetic landscape without destination, a discovery of direction from the abysmal height of the stars. Michel can drag him on his buffalo robe — they could freeze it solid in water like the Esquimaux and say it is a sled and harness Michel like any black dog and he will write out the calculations, fill all the pages he still has, they are all somewhere safe, pages with numbers and formulas and the exact mathematical sequences of magnetic declension he knows better than the beat of his blood, numbers upon and over numbers until Dogrib Rock is forced to emerge out of those precise numbers, its grey plateau exact as distance, and beyond that the black treeline is drawn along the esker that for ever shelters the cone of Keskarrah’s lodge — Keskarrah!

The old man blazes in Hood’s memory, branches piled in warm green bedding over his lodge and under the hides, where smoke drifts up and arms fold him into the warmth of breasts the apple taste of her nipples, o sweetest sweetest

How sweet the name of Jesus feels
In a believer’s ear

the huge green trees flaming with heat, the great numbering trees! If he could only draw Lieutenant Franklin there, and
Back with the Yellowknives — Greenstockings! her arms, her everlasting arms.

An ox and a half
They ate a church and they ate a steeple
They ate all the

There they are, the tall spars of trees left against the sky beyond Dogrib Rock. Hepburn bends over the smoky fire of twigs trying to heat the horrible
tripe de roche
that scours Hood’s mouth and throat bloody. Perhaps in his relentless, solicitous effort to feed him, Hepburn will now cure him with smoke — only the lichens do not hide themselves from their ponderous search. If he swallows them smoked, his bowels will at last tear themselves completely out of his anus, their final convulsion rip them loose from his twisted skeleton. When he touches himself he feels bone; and pain everywhere, like snow.

Is there skin? He can see a little, sometimes, on what must be his own hand. He can smell it, he has never stunk like this, strong as urine running the gutter of manse stable. He can no longer feel lice; perhaps they have fled like rats from a dying ship. And Hepburn is there sifting through smoke, stinking stronger than smoke, and Michel is gone, always gone. Hunting. They three grow steadily colder while they wait, motionless, or search for something edible in a land where whatever it is they know, or do not know, is killing them.

All he can see and feel beyond snow and wind is rocks — so eat rock broth, cooked or fried and impossible to burn black, skim the thick, yellow stonefat off a lovely soft-boiled rock. When Michel returns from his hopeless hunting he will lie
down against him again, naked, that huge Mohawk back still muscled, so much warmer than Richardson’s, if only he dared to take it in his arms
who said that to me? I will kill you who is saying it?
Hood’s lips are crusted-over crusts of sores, something jagged as crushed paper drifts in his torn mouth, what he can swallow is a faint slip of blood along his throat; his own blood, he is swallowing himself from that dangerous place in the mouth he has heard of. He feels nothing of feet.

But there is a small bump, down the length of woolly hide, he can still make that out — but he feels nothing. His long green woolly feet, his wrong sealskin feet — they have gone away. His all-a-greenwood feet were left behind. Ah-h-h-h, they are useless anyway, all useless: books, instruments, smashed canoes, feet, whole bodies on a trail of uselessness sprawled over tundra, too bony to eat. Where do they rest without him?

Little Robin Redbreast went for a walk
He sat upon a little pole and ate his little

Until Greenstockings kneads them supple as the caribou leather covering her breast and tongues them, each toe warm as milk, into the haven of her nest and body

 … and the storm of life is past
Safe into that haven guide
O receive my soul.…

“Mr. Hood.”

Doctor Richardson’s voice. From beneath the other buffalo hide carried for two years from the North Saskatchewan River
plains by Canadians. Richardson can still walk, or crawl a little, but mostly he lies beside Hood; he may never recover from attempting to swim the Coppermine River with a line for them to cross on. That was when George Back first seemed to realize — Back never understood anything unless he said it aloud and, since Lieutenant Franklin’s structure of naval command permitted them very few spoken words, though in desperation they might write more on notes, where they could be lost or by mutual consent or order destroyed before they were fully copied into their daily journals, a thoughtless, wordless Back was Franklin’s perfect officer — “We could all die here,” Back said
sotto voce
, astonished into discovery by the voyageurs trying to warm Richardson back into life, “on the wrong side of this bloody rapid.”