A Discovery of Strangers (31 page)

Only English Hepburn can carry that beautiful English copper, no savage can be entrusted with this civilized mysterium, this floating spirit whose pointer, when properly followed through the delicate labyrinth of numbers, leads always to the
ridiculous play fort where their salvation sleepeth. Unless the ravens and the wolves come wandering here for lack of food, and they have not seen a track for seven days, the animals would now have to come driving an entire herd of caribou through the western notch of the eskers and offer to kill them at their feet if they were to have enough

robbin-a-bobbin
he bent his bow
shot at a pigeon and killed a crow
shot at another
and killed his

“What?” Michel roars behind him. “You say what?”

Robert Hood can almost turn his head; for a moment he finds the strength to look back.

The Mohawk is directly behind him in the tent entrance, his body bent to him as if to take him in his long arms as he holds the rifle in both hands high across his chest. Perhaps he expects an attack; with a slight twist he could thrust the weapon against Hood. But Michel is not doing that, not yet. He leans closer and closer, hissing a small circle of English words that abruptly explode like a black January memory:

“I tell you, I kill you, all the time, I tell you, I kill you, before you die, I tell you I kill, you.…”

But Hood cannot hold it. Neither that January night nor the words that have whispered themselves into this landscape week after week through winter and spring and the exhaustion of summer, until he recognizes them like starvation, the penitence of his fast eating him cell by cell down to the last frayed
whisper of what he once knew he could not possibly have dreamed in this land of goodness, of beauty, of tenderness and love
I will kill you
For nine months these words have eaten him
before you die
When you have exhausted the last jot and tittle of suffering, when it is no longer possible for you to feel either God or country or duty, just before you die, at the instant of your last despair I
will kill you

a sighing and sobbing
To hear the bell toll
For poor Cock Robin

Why? Why? Oh-h-h-h-h-h, he cannot even groan himself, the sound he hears Birdseye groaning somewhere is his skeleton body sinking to this earth, bowed under the heavy, heavy memories that have always pulled him, he realizes now, down; those follow-my-leader memories rooted and growing in him all his life — he was such a silly, gullible child, a child who thought he knew everything because he knew only the confident, simple world of English games, and endlessly elaborated, confident duty, words

robbin-a-bobbin a bendy bow
shoot at his brother and kill a crow
shoot again and kill a wren and

There is a spot of round, hard ice against the back of his head, so round and small, surely the fine, reassuring solidity of English steel against his hair
just when you die I will
as comforting as a child’s prayer of forgiveness, and he leans back hard
into it, pushes himself up against it harder with his last bit of fervent strength, perhaps that at least can be properly, firmly fixed

and that will be all for gentle

The last syllable may be floating, trying to float, there
men … men … men
And young Robert Hood never able to complete it.

DOCTOR JOHN RICHARDSON

October
24th
& October
25th
1821
Brush Shelter

On the two following days after Michel’s death we had mild but thick snowy weather, and as the view was too limited for us to preserve a straight course, we remained encamped among a few dwarf pines about five miles from the tent. Hepburn found a species of cornicularia, a kind of lichen, that was possible to eat when moistened and toasted over the fire; and we had a good many pieces of singed buffalo hide that had belonged to Mr. Hood remaining
.

Up to the period of his attack upon us, Michel’s conduct had been good and respectful to the officers, and in a conversation between Lieutenant Franklin, Mr. Hood, and myself, at Obstruction Rapids, it had been proposed to give him a reward upon our arrival at a trading post. His principles, however, unsupported by a belief in the divine truths of Christianity, were unable to withstand the pressure of severe distress. His countrymen, the Mohawk-Iroquois, are generally Christians, but he was totally uninstructed and ignorant of the duties inculcated by Christianity; and from his long residence in this part of the country seemed to have imbibed, and retained, the rules of conduct which the Indians here prescribe to themselves
.

11
O
UT OF THE
L
AKE

Greenstockings kneels in her small shelter, the pad of moss between her knees. When hard pain swells through her again she tilts forwards, arms braced, her stomach mounded immense and heavy holding her erect against her doubled thighs. Will this stubborn, powerful child ever deign to let go of her?

The lowering sun rises into the second day. She has stared down hour by hour at this moist lace of matted green and brown stems beneath her, her forehead propped exhausted on the stone ground. When she can think, she hears the lake of the great bear, Sahtú, breathe against the rocks below, and she feels her happiness multiplied by the length and depth of that deep, black water she knows she has climbed out of, at last.

The water is with her, snuffling between the split erosions of Sahtú’s cliffs, the mountainous bristle of grey stone that looms above her. Called Forbidden Rock since the prophecy — which not even her father is old enough to have heard the Prophet tell People, though he says he once saw him as a little boy, looked
up and saw bent over him an ancient man with both eyes blind, so enormous and deep from a lifetime of looking inside himself that along the blade of his nose his face had grown into a skeleton cross. Since that prophecy of vision, no one dares to paddle a canoe in front of the Rock where it thrusts itself out of the lake, glistening like diluvial ice spired upwards into granite. So two days ago, when the Tetsot’ine came paddling south along the east side of the lake, they camped for night at their usual place in order to carry the long portage behind Forbidden Rock and thus avoid the deepwater danger before it; that night this child within her gave its first great heave of intention.

But why choose this dangerous place? “Why,” she asks, her fingertips tracing its curl once more, and feeling reluctance flutter like breath through her distended skin, “why if you truly wish to cry here first, why now abuse me and refuse to be born so I can comfort you?”

Keskarrah smiled at her when she left, and she understood him: it seems your child is like you — contrary.

And she smiles, remembering; eases herself down again, onto the length of her left side and pulls the marten-skin robe Greywing brought over her nakedness. The small animals are always ready and warm, their soft tenderness a wrap of comfort. The camp with all her People is beyond a ridge; they are living as easily as they can, this waiting a mere hesitation in their continual travel as they follow the animals, and she cannot hear them, only the slim trees whispering into the sigh of the lake. She is surrounded by waiting, and abysmally alone. If a she-wolf came now, delicate furred feet silent from rock or deep water — as she did for Copperwoman, yes come, come — she would greet her with happiness,

“Come my sister, come my mother, you have birthed so many children, come and welcome this one fearful of the world, come sing it into courage.”

The strength of the she-wolf fondles her, the wolf’s long tongue wipes away the tears along the edges of her eyes, and she feels through the ground a faint, steady beat; she is two bodies curled in and around, tight together, and gradually taken into the rhythmic, sacred power of drum. They are there, they are here, Birdseye can no longer walk, but in their veneration for her the People are carrying her, out of the exhaustion of her year-long travail, south into the winter trees to wherever she wants to stop breathing even while this little one begins; and Keskarrah is a man, he cannot help Greenstockings, nor can Broadface, hunting and hunting. But their care and love for her beat like blood in the land. Especially here in this place of fearful vision, in the beaked shadow of Forbidden Rock.

And she thinks continuously of the child, a soft heavy stone turning inside her, refusing and refusing so stubbornly hard. That too is its good and separate will, hers no longer, and her mind flares into light, she sees it already running down to water, where waves curl forwards and race back, or through flowers on tundra, and leaping over worn round rocks and tussocks of moss, such long legs and belly tight with caribou meat, mouth open in breath and laughter. She can see that, land and child and sky, carrying her, as the rigid, battering pain heaves her up onto her knees again, rocks her groans into a piercing vision of — is it herself? running as she once did? is it Greywing? is it this hard child of living stone? already grown after it has been carried for several years more at her breast and on her back? and running free in a strength possible only because she
has given to it her own continual work, her intense and willing slavery? After this difficult but ultimately mere moment of birthing.

Like the moment her blood told her she was becoming a woman. “Don’t hide that, when it comes,” Birdseye warned her. “You’ll be shy, but don’t ever hide it, it’s too powerful and dangerous, men can die if they touch you.” But it came so quickly and she had to retreat into her place of separation, wait alone where the women told her to hide under a tree, two days without eating, until an old woman came laughing with a great cape of fur to cover her sitting with her knees pulled tight against her stomach — so hard and flat then, she couldn’t do that now! — and she clasped herself, sat looking over her knees for days inside that tent of fur, so warmly hooded — patience then, and wonderful rest, waiting while her body travelled within itself in its own indelible way, and other women brought her water to drink through a bone straw, but spilled most of it to make her life strong, and Greywing and other small children came with food — dry meat, but no berries whose juice is too close to blood — and she took a single bite and gave them the rest so she would always be generous — she was so patient then, at rest while the moon went through its whole cycle, and happy at the dark slip of her unstoppable womanhood. When Birdseye’s face was still beautiful, and whole.

Below her the waters of Sahtú brush dark in a long wedge under wind, swift as clouds streak towards the horizon where there is no shoreline; she has no fear of this immense lake, even when the shoulder of the rock beneath her trembles.

Not like drum, but a solid shudder. As if Forbidden Rock had spoken to the massive water, and earth which alone can
contain the bottomless lake, were alert and listening too. Were considering flood, or perhaps explosion. Can a lake melt like a mountain and rain water like rocks from the sky? Greenstockings is suddenly afraid in her exhaustion. If Keskarrah were with her, he would tell her that story too, the difficult story of final deluge or volcano being spoken beneath her. What can flood them? overwhelm them? their land held so firmly in bowls of water and ice?

Before this child insisted that this was its place, she has never dared kneel here to feel this sound, nor heard this subterranean beat through her body. Though she has heard her father tell the prophecy many times:

“The Prophet was so old when I saw him, and I was only a little boy, that he had already seen everything twice, everything in the world with the one milky eye nearest his heart, and his right eye was closed, he never opened it because that way he could look inwards most clearly. When you have been given power to do that, you often see more than you want to know. It scares you to know something a little. Once, long before we had even heard of Whites, he knew something one night, here, when People stopped to continue their journey next morning, and he sang to his drum all night so that they had to stay up without sleep and listen. And in the morning he told them.