A Discovery of Strangers (38 page)

“I am alive. Look, I am the King’s officer and I stand here to tell you. You will get all we have promised before and what I promise now. But I must save the Commander. He gave you medals, he gave you many presents for your hospitality, and you promised him you would —”

Twospeaker stops as Boy English interrupts himself, listens, and continues. “He means the Commander has given you all his hand and he trusts you, every one. He says, ‘Bigfoot and his People are good. They will never let me die in their country.’ ”

Bigfoot responds quietly, “We know ourselves, in our hearts.”

Boy English repeats, “He trusts you.”

Bigfoot continues, “I don’t speak for myself. I myself owe nothing to any Whites, at any fort, but my People are owed many things, as it says in those papers written by you. And if we wished to, we could punish the traders very quickly, we wouldn’t have to wait for years. But I have decided. I will give more food for your Commander. He is my friend, half of what I have.”

Greenstockings sees his hand for a moment, near Boy English’s head, gesturing. And Bigfoot’s youngest wife moves in the crowd, a tied burden of frozen tongues and fat bundled in hide dressed ready for moccasins or leggings on her shoulder. At least he has not had his Dogrib slave come carrying this gift, though of course Boy English would not understand that as an’ even subtler dissatisfaction and insult.

Other men are gesturing, and more women with bundles stand to move forwards between People even as they wail, wail gently higher and higher, as if they were mourning a child that the sky or the land or the water had taken; as they are, since it is food their children cannot eat because they must bring it here and stack it before Boy English. The stone-faced men say nothing to stop this rising keen; it is the right of sorrow to utter itself.

Greenstockings turns away. She will not watch Greywing throw down, at Broadface’s gesture, the double-rack of ribs; she will not see George Back’s exhausted eyes study her sister’s face, flicker up legs bending for an’ instant before him in tight leather.

The sun is almost gone again beyond the southern horizon when she meets him. He stands bent, silently watching his slaves who helped drag him here and several hunters tie down
the mass of meat that they with their dogs will pull to Winter Lake on four sleds. He does not straighten or turn, so she can consider carefully how he stands, curved old and even smaller than she remembers, study how hunger has chopped his face down to bone like an’ old copper axe striking clumsily, feebly, at a frozen tree. A year ago he looked so different.

After she and Greywing came into camp with the child, Birdseye gathered and saved her strength, after such a long dying, and after four silent days she walked alone into the first winter snow. Greenstockings refuses to remember the place, she will never allow anyone to name it. This pathetic White thing once laughed when Richard Sun gave her father that deadly salve; and Thick English laughed too. Did Hood? Her father will tell her, if she ever asks him.

Boy English glances around, and sees her. His eyes are black, empty. It seems to her he may have been spared the decision of having to eat his paddle-slaves — perhaps because they died too far away from him, because he could still leave them, walk away fast enough before they froze into forgotten sticks.

But under her look she sees his face change; it may be his legs remained strong enough to bring him back to them; perhaps he was a man who could demand even death as a service, and so he could reach her People, alone with the last and strongest of his slaves. She hears Birdseye’s voice speaking to her again, in that strange, abstracted tone, of what may be happening past or future, telling her everything she will encounter sooner or later. Her life already exists, everywhere, in the words with which her mother has surrounded her, so she watches Back’s ragged lips move without fear, his face peeled by hunger and by sunlight dancing its quick irony on the snow. His face
begins to thaw, to flicker a little as he stares back at her through Twospeaker’s obedient words:

“He says, the ravens guided us, and the wolves fed us on Roundrock Lake. He says I should tell you: ten days we had to rest there and ate the meat they left us; we were dying, and wouldn’t have found your camp, or reached it without the wolves.”

“Is that all you ate?”

Twospeaker stares at her a moment, but does not translate. He recovers, and says to her, “He … he says it’s … just like that, like you once told Hood.”

“What does he know? Hood is dead,” she tells Back. And considers Twospeaker, who glares at her but still refuses to translate.

“You won’t tell These English,” she says to him, “what a woman says?”

Finally he responds, fiercely, “I will not say that. You know nothing.”

“It’s true. It doesn’t matter if you won’t say it.”

“And your father’s dream almost killed us all, at the double rapids.”

“He warned you, don’t go there.”

“We had to!”

She has always thought Twospeaker was smarter than These English, but such a response to a dream is not worth laughing at. There is a gleam of implacable White rigidity, of stupid obedience in his eyes that suddenly explains why his wife has left him. He stands glaring, with an’ abrupt demand, though Boy English has said nothing:

“Are you holding his child?”

Greenstockings hears him, and sees Boy English looking from her to him urgently, but she is listening to Birdseye even as she is aware of her tiny child asleep under her clothes, their naked bodies warm against each other. It is her mother who tells her, like the straight, black flight of a raven through the trackless sky, that Richard Sun will come, and Hep Burn too, together with their boss Thick English, all dragged torturously away from death by this animal food they are giving. And it will be Hep Burn who dares to tell her without words how Hood was killed before he died, how Michel who stole her once was killed and was of necessity eaten, as the living always somehow eat those they kill, animal and person always the same. It will be Hep Burn who reveals These English for her to understand, not like Hood for ever careful with slender marks ventured over and over on paper, but drawing with a long articulate stick and using the snow as if their winter world were a page too small to explicate the tangled story of this White coming, drawing people like sticks for her along the snow doing all the kind and deadly things necessary, everything Birdseye has already told her they will do.

It is Hep Burn to whom she will reveal this sleeping daughter, her black hair and her perpetually open eyes of mystery: one deep brown and the other blue. Hep Burn will dare to draw in snow, and therefore see, and will not utter a word about either for thirty years, or forty. She already knows that.

Birdseye. Her eaten face so horrifically open, hard, crusted. A black hole of enduring. This beautiful child, who will always have a perfect, untouched face.

Boy English has said something now to Twospeaker, even as he tries to tear again at her clothes with his glittering eyes. Hunger will never kill that in him, until he is dead altogether.

But she has already forgotten Back because she knows, though she does not yet comprehend it, that she will see him again; he will return to her land somehow, again and again. He will be here with Thick English and Richard Sun again after a few summers, and on great Sahtú, where they will then winter, he will draw on paper a picture of Broadface — not daring to do what Hood has once done to her image — and years later, when this daughter is as old as Greywing now and four other children sleep in their ageing lodge, though three others will have died, he will come a third time as the only boss of his own labouring paddle-slaves, and they will meet each other at the Muskox Rapids on the River of Big Fish, a river whose tortuous and completely treeless route to the icy sea he does not yet know exists, because Keskarrah has not bothered to tell him what he is too ignorant to ask for. He will name the river after himself, and they will see each other again, laugh a little sadly, and say nothing.

A few of these her People will still be alive with her then, including Bigfoot. But sickness, strange and various sicknesses beyond anything they have ever known in the past generations of all their stories, will continue to kill so many of them, and the endless thefts and raids the few men will be so strongly tempted to increase against their nearest enemies, the Dogribs will destroy them as a People — after all, the Tetsot’ine have so many guns, so much powder and shot from trapping so many small furs, of which the traders always want more! always more! so they need less time to hunt and have more than enough time to plan wars, since there are always fewer People to feed and it is of course so much more manly and exciting to use guns to steal food and wives and clothing and dogs and territory from
enemies than to work for them in the slow, considerate ways of the living land, and they have this endless source of powerful weapons if they just kill enough animals — and those enemies they do not kill they can certainly try to enslave and force to labour for them like Whites do paddle-slaves — sickness and the men’s unrelenting aggression will destroy Greenstockings’ People.

But she cannot now ponder these recognitions. Nor think that Doctor John Richardson, the deliberate executioner who will continue to live and grow famous because of this food they are sending him at Fort Enterprise, will in twenty-seven years again pass through their land in a swift, scientific canoe and record carefully on squared paper the Dogrib stories of Tetsot’ine destruction.

Greenstockings, not looking at Back, does not consider this knowledge she already understands, though it would not surprise her if she thought of it, having of necessity watched men and women so closely with her mother dreaming, and listened to her father think, voice his scathing comments on following the male excitement of raids rather than the ecstatic dreams of good animals, the iron ignorance of guns. Who will be left to remember them in the long winter evenings? Will she be there to tell stories of when animals talked like People, or they could still sense with willow sticks the texture of footprints leading them true and deep beneath the snow, or circle sleeping into a recognition of future, will she be left to tell her last grandchildren those stories in a starry night? Her memory holds this already, and more than she can now utter into awareness of the past and the future; it has been taught to her for ever by her mother and her father. But now, at this moment.…

Greenstockings considers Twospeaker. This man who can speak with four voices and is a hunter of enormous strength; who long ago asked the ravens and wolves to teach him; who, oddly, has given two years and very nearly his life to These English. For what? His wife, Angélique, has gone away, south, where there are other men. Very nearly given his life for a few passing gifts — why would anyone bother following such bent little Whites when there is such a large land to walk on wherever the light leads? She cannot, she will never want to understand this.

Now there is nothing more she needs to tell him for Boy English. These English will always, eventually, find whatever it is they want, though it may require centuries, however many of them die.

She says, “I found this child in a caribou hoof-print.”

“That old story,” Twospeaker hisses at her. “Show him! He’ll know whose child it is, when he sees it.”

Little Boy English. All the Whitemud layers that hunger has skinned off him he will now put back on, thicker than ever, because he will be so famous when he returns to his proper place over the stinking water. But Hood will remain here, alive in every wolf and raven she sees, for ever.

She tells Twospeaker, “Maybe it fell from the sky, maybe it’s no bigger than a thumb.”

“Whose child is it!”

So she tells him: “Mine.”

Back, like Twospeaker, stares at her.

“Do you hear me?” she confronts them. “Mine.”

And she turns, leaves them both as the arctic light darkens around her in its impenetrable, life-giving cold.

Acknowledgements

Greenstockings’ story began for me in the vast land below the Arctic Circle, along the delicate treeline that emerges and vanishes between the Coppermine River and Winter Lake. On the high esker west of that lake are the stumps of white spruce, the hollows, the few fireplace stones that mark the existence of Fort Enterprise (1820–21). The site is about 250 kilometres north of the city of Yellowknife by Twin Otter; it’s much farther by canoe.

The most helpful Dene texts I found were George Blondin’s
When the World was New
(Yellowknife: Outcrop, 1990), and
The Book of Dene
(Yellowknife: Department of Education, 1976). The latter gathering is the work of Emile Petitot, O.M.I., who for twenty years (1862—1882) lived as a priest with the Dene and listened carefully to their stories. The narrative in
chapter 9
, “Geese”, comes from
Ted Trindell: Métis Witness to the North
(Vancouver: Tillacum Library, 1986), edited by Jean Morrisset and Rose-Marie Pelletier. Particularly stimulating was
the fine book
Life Lived Like a Story
, compiled by Julie Cruikshank in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1990).