A Discovery of Strangers (36 page)

“Long pig.” It’s a good name. The Fiji Islanders with their curly hair sticking out call it that, an’ English sailors too, since they started talking about it after Captain Cook. That’s the exact taste of it, I tell you we’re closer to the suffering beasts than you’d think, an’ plenty of Englishmen know it; more than may tell you. An’ they’ve drunk each other’s piss too in the rotten tubs they sail off in, that bust up so easy in all the storms an’ rocks of the whole bleedin’ world. You want principles? The big world’s bloody harder than any “principles”.

Listen to me, I been on every ocean in the world, ships good an’ ships bad an’ ships worse than that, an’ even in canoes in the worst of all, the Polar Ocean. Meat is … meat. If I have to I’ll eat anything. Even bacon, though I can’t stand the smell of it, always stinks too Mohawk to me, ha-ha! “Long pig” — stand an’ English tar to a few pints an’ he’ll tell you that, long pig it is. An’ any officer’ll tell you the same, if he don’t lie.

DOCTOR JOHN RICHARDSON

Wednesday November 7th
1821
Fort Enterprise

In the morning we heard the report of a musket, and soon after a great shout, and on looking out beheld three Indians with sledges below on the river. I imparted this joyful intelligence to Lieutenant Franklin, who immediately returned thanks to the Almighty, but poor Adam could scarcely comprehend it
.

The Indians, The Rat, Crookedfoot and Boudelkell, had been sent from Bigfoot by Mr. Back with dried meat and fat. We devoured their food, and they incautiously permitted us to eat as much as we could; in consequence, with the exception of Adam, we suffered dreadfully from distention of the abdomen, and had no rest during the night. The Indians were unwilling to remain in the house where the bodies of our deceased companions remained exposed, but Hepburn and I were now able to drag them out a short distance and cover them with snow
.

Friday November 16th 1821 Travelling

Our feelings on being at last able to quit the Fort, where we had formerly enjoyed much comfort, if not happiness, and latterly experienced such a degree of misery scarcely to be paralleled, may be more easily conceived than described. The Indians treated us with the utmost tenderness, gave us their snowshoes and walked without themselves, keeping by our sides that they might lift us when we fell
.

About three miles distant from the house we encamped, as I was unable to continue. The Indians cooked for and fed us as if we had been children, evincing a degree of humanity that would have done honour to the most civilized of nations
.

13
T
HE
S
PLIT-FOOTED
C
ARIBOU

Then, suddenly as always, the caribou appeared like the wandering wind they were upon the shores of the lake beyond the Tetsot’ine camp, and in the sky between stones along the high ridges. When all the hunters went to them, quickly and with great care, they were welcomed by so many bodies steaming open in the darkening winter that everyone knew they could eat for at least four days, and sleep full-gutted for another four. And they sang:

How glorious to see,
How unutterable, the great animals
Who live by voices we may never hear.
Another People like ourselves, splendid
And complete, always travelling, always held
Like we are in the magnificence and travail
Of the long land.

But the very next morning, the men ordered the women to take half the meat they hadn’t yet eaten and go, pile it up in Bigfoot’s lodge.

Why? Because Boy English had appeared out the north. Even more abruptly than the animals, more or less dead from hunger, with Twospeaker and an’ emaciated voyageur half-carrying him, and starving as well — and obviously, wherever and whenever Whites appear they always need food, right now, food! When the women heard what the men said they cried aloud in protest; all the children, with most of the dogs, soon joined them.

Every woman had gone out the day before in such laughter and happiness, praying gratitude with singing, onto the lake to bring in the considerate animals the men had hunted. Draping ribs in pairs over their shoulders, the legs and hides, barely frozen, stacked carefully on their sleds, the children pushing caribou heads by their giant racks before them over the windswept ice, steering them with shouts of laughter to the crested tops of drifts, riding them down. And the feasting all night, at last everyone was again stuffed tight with heart, liver, intestines, the marvellous sponginess of brains and cooked stomach — and the men and larger boys had eaten their fat, bloody fill of penises and scrotums and udders and wombs, torn them apart with laughing teeth and swallowed them as thick as they could to make sure no woman came near these special gifts from the animals and so destroyed the next hunt — for who could say, today and tomorrow and the day after, when there might again be nothing on the lake, not a caribou anywhere within dreaming. But now all these racks of ribs, these haunches like massive frozen clubs striated with fat, these tongues — why must an
English with his two bony slaves come again from the dead and receive all the delicious tongues?

Fifty-nine tongues, someone counted through her enraged tears, many of them taken from caches to celebrate the tender returning-winter concern of the animals. Why could These English, even when hunger twisted their guts tight and chopped their faces down to bone, eat nothing but the tastiest, the most celebratory parts? Always returning, these Whitemuds, how often could that happen, every year now for ever returning and returning; if they were fed now and went south to the traders, would they blunder back north next summer again only to come starving again a winter later? The women had thought they were rid of them last summer when they trudged off, their overburdened slaves hauling canoes across rotting ice north and east to where every person knew the Raw-Meat Eaters lived on the Everlasting Ice of the stinking water, whatever it was they wanted to do when they got there — look at its endlessness? Any fool could see the limits of that in one turning glance, had they no eyes, how long did it take them to see?

And they said then they wanted to go away east, east, not come back here — so why hadn’t they? Because there were no animals to eat there, and no People to hunt for them while they travelled — but they had been told that! Couldn’t they hear what they were told?

But that doesn’t matter now, because here they are again. Just as the long darkness closes in, one of them comes staggering back, somehow, though most of their slaves, he admits, are already dead — but every English is still alive, yes! — well, everyone knows why These English will live longest — but we must hurry, food, quick!

What child doesn’t know, the women cry to the air blazing in the brief noon sun, that in winter everyone needs food? How stupid can you be?

And everyone dies. We ourselves are always dying. When the caribou and the rabbits vanish, to whom can we run and cry pathetically, “I am here, feed me or I die!” Who pulls us out of vicious rapids or sews our clothes? Who kills himself carrying us around portages and over snow?

But These English come staggering out of the winter and announce, “Look! We’re here! Behold how we suffer, we’re almost dead! We’ve eaten the pants you sewed us, our hairy legs are freezing, quick, Thick English is naked, his name is become He Cannot Walk Because He Has Eaten His Boots! Feed us!”

But Broadface says to Greywing, “You, carry this good meat to Bigfoot.”

“What I once heard,” Keskarrah says to them all, “I found hard to believe, then, but now I know it is wrong. These English can’t keep death from us, nor from themselves.”

Greywing looks at Broadface, laughing. “Those Whitemud mouths are too stupid,” she says, “they can’t chew good brains,” and she jerks forwards, her hand catching, as it were, her own vomit; Broadface laughs with her. Greenstockings thinks: they do that best together, laughing at someone.

“We couldn’t, of course,” Keskarrah continues, eyes closed, as if he had heard nothing, nor any wailing outside, “withhold food from anyone if we have some, especially from those to whom we have already given hospitality. And accepting a gift is an’ obligation as well, even after you recognize it has become dangerous. Richard Sun’s gift — dangerous or not, I accepted it — we all accepted and gave hospitality.…” He opens his eyes
to Greywing, who is no longer laughing; as if he were about to enter a memory of weeping. Then he looks at Greenstockings.

“Perhaps,” he concludes, “you accepted something once too, from this Boy English who has now arrived starving so well.”

Broadface stiffens, and Greenstockings says deliberately, “No. I accepted nothing but a little laughter from him — I thought about more, but only once.”

“Ah-h-h-h,” and Keskarrah sighs heavily. “Doing is very simple, we all do things. But thinking — even once — that offers many more possibilities.”

And it may be that Birdseye is still in the lodge with them, her body still taking a breath at such long intervals that, bent closely over her and watching intensely, Greenstockings is convinced: yes, surely now, with this lengthening pause her mother will at last, mercifully, forget completely how to breathe. But Birdseye is not there; there is no one to answer Keskarrah if Greenstockings will not.

Broadface stirs his big body with impatience, as always, but it will be a long time before he dares to interrupt the father of his wives. He can only order the youngest, even more loudly,

“You will carry meat!”

and gesture with as much dignity as he has at the share of animal bodies he hunted. What of it Greywing will pick up is her decision.

While outside the wailing dialogues of the women move on towards Bigfoot’s lodge, the shrilling of dogs excited by so much passing meat drifts along the ice of the lake the English will later name “Greenstockings”, where the Yellowknife River (they already named that the summer before) continues its long, stony descent, now chewing its paths through ice towards distant
Tucho. And already Crookedfoot and The Rat and Boudelkell have left; Bigfoot sent them immediately in the night when Boy English arrived, with a sled of meat in case Thick English really was still alive in the log and mud house they lived in last winter, but several People have been suddenly lost in both Bigfoot’s and The Hook’s camps during the past month and they are all quite destitute, so impoverished that Keskarrah has almost stopped dreaming the hunt of the animals altogether.

“Where do the animals go? Where will their trails be for our snares?” The Hook and Bigfoot have kept urging him.

Keskarrah has responded very deliberately, lying as it seems comatose in his bare furs whenever the large winter camp is not moving.

“We have always dreamed, praying as the drum speaks,” he says finally. “That is our way. But now someone has to think as well. There may be others now who must start to dream; it has come to me after this hard beginning winter that I must dare to think only.”

And they understand that he says this because of Birdseye; why, when they wait for him silently, he suddenly speaks of something else, as if their present hunger were no more than a mere hesitation in their lifelong travel.

But despite their mournings and Keskarrah’s refusals since they joined Bigfoot travelling from great Sahtú, the many People all gathered together now have been eating no more poorly than they often do after a slim summer, when the caribou rut and can still dig easily through the first snow. However, since they arrived severally with The Hook, Bigfoot has continued moving steadily south, towards the traders’ fort on Tucho. There, he reminds them, promises are waiting from Thick English, promises
he wrote down to stand for ever on paper before he left north: there they are to receive every White thing they want for all the food and clothing they have already given the Expedition. That promise is there, he insists, waiting to help them, and they must get it before the traders hear that Thick English is dead.