A Discovery of Strangers (5 page)

Bigfoot said, studying those stiff Whites one by one, “Not one of them looks as if he could say that.”

But Keskarrah had decided. “I’ve never heard anyone say such words myself, but when I saw these Whites coming I dreamed of sickness like lice crawling all over, it was coming with them, but also that one of them could keep a person from dying whenever he was there. So, will one of them dare to say he can do that?”

“All right,” Bigfoot said. “Ask it.”

Later, when they have almost forgotten Keskarrah’s question, it will be Twospeaker who explains to Greenstockings what the other young man’s name means, the very short, pretty one with hair down both sides of his face. Boy English at first does not seem to know how to draw his name in the air, and when he gets hold of her hand at last he will do almost everything else with it except that. His name is easier to say than Hood’s, and she laughs aloud because “Back” is right: his short back is much stronger than slender Hood’s. And though when she stands beside him she can look completely over his head, he is so compactly confident and without concern that he takes her between his hands and lifts her high (no one ever sees him touch the huge double packs and massive canoes the paddle-slaves walk under day after day, carrying These English over the rock and muskeg portages to the hill above Winter Lake, where they start
chopping down trees) — Back lifts her so easily over his curly head that she is forced to know, as with every man she has ever met, the power of his name: “George Back!”

But with Back she can quickly reach up, higher than his short muscled arms, and grasp two beams of the piled logs the Whites foolishly imagine will keep them warm in winter, and swing herself out of his grasp before he can finish shouting “…ack!” and kick him hard in the ribs. By then she will know where those two young English keep their names (which is dangerous), and where her mother keeps hers (which has never been dangerous for her, though it may become that), but her feet wrapped in supple moccasins are much too soft for kicking anyone memorably. Back’s busy hands grapple for her again, tug her down against himself more proud than ever, and it is then she feels him shift hard between her thighs like every man always has, hard bone.

Birdseye long ago taught her how to knead leather soft and pale as a baby’s face, softer even than Robert Hood’s, and certainly softer than Back’s. They will be wringing leather in the sunlight outside their lodge between what the Whites will call Winter and Roundrock lakes, the great trees along the esker crashing to the ground with the noise of steel axes, when her mother says to her:

“If you laugh with both of them, I think one will get killed.”

“Whites don’t fight over women.”

“U-u-u-ugh!” Birdseye snorts. “And nothing hangs between their legs either.”

Greenstockings bursts out laughing. “It doesn’t just hang!”

Birdseye lifts her head quickly from the dripping leather. She rarely looks up now, because she wants to spare everyone
the necessary recognition of seeing her. And Keskarrah has found no dream, nor has anyone else Who Knows Something a Little, who could divine what is happening to her beautiful face: what Eater is slowly, imperceptibly, eating her face away.

As winter approaches, pain draws her face more tightly into the emptiness where her cheek and part of her nose were at the beginning of summer. Soon white bone may be visible there, and Greenstockings fears her mother will hang a soft leather below her eyes, dreads that she will never be able to touch her mother’s mouth again. The Eater is eating towards her lips.

Birdseye offers, allows Greenstockings one glance, then bends quickly, spits between her fingers on the leather as she kneads pounded caribou brain into it. Once those hands fondled Greenstockings until she cried in ecstasy, cried in ways the four men who have already fought and nearly killed themselves over her cannot find anywhere in the brief duration of their manly imaginations. Often it seems to her that men’s hands are fit only to clutch knives, to claw at clubs and lances, to strip hide or flesh from dead bones, to knot into fists, perhaps — now — to grope and jerk at triggers. Broadface’s left hand has become two strips of talon, the rest torn away when the gun a trader was teaching him how to shoot exploded. What can a person fondle with such a split stick for a hand, even if he’s strong enough to carry a grizzly? No woman weighs as much as a bear anyway, nor needs such force if she wants to be lifted, or entered. Doing it that way is simply a story to be remembered; to be told and resmelled by other men, bragging.

Birdseye says, “Oh, he’s shown you that much, has he?” the faintest breath of sarcasm in her voice, and then suddenly they are both laughing. So loudly that the other women stream
about from their fires, smiling and chuckling already, crowding nearer for what they can hear.

“He has a black stick for drawing,” Greenstockings tells them, “Boy English, his name is ‘Back’ and he can draw his own short back in one line so fast you can see it exactly, the way it bends, and then he curls the bottom end of it up, pointing down at himself, he’s so proud, hooked up as he draws it almost as long!”

The women are all shouting with laughter, some behind their hands in incredulity but others open-mouthed with anticipation. For how can one know how These English will behave, so safely far from whatever land they have left that they may do anything at all as long as another English isn’t looking; or what they carry in those strange clothes, doubled up perhaps or folded in pleats, and doubtless Greenstockings will be the first to find out, if she wants to. Boy English will keep pretending in his towering black officer’s hat, which makes him almost as tall as the others, will continue to stride between their lodges, point everywhere imperially, order voyageurs to chop down that tree, flatten that log for the ridgepole, set that upright into place, may pretend for ever to own the whole world when his boss, Thick English, is somewhere else; but these women will never again see him without laughter flickering naked behind their eyes. And they offer Greenstockings whatever bits of advice or malice they please, especially since many of them know that, before she went with Broadface, their own men sharpened their knives to try to get the frightening power of her sixteen-year-old beauty into their lodge. If that happened, they themselves would become second wives, or third, and some of them might be happy for that too — after all, what woman wants to carry
alone the weight of one man’s clutching, violent necessity for attention? — so at this moment they all laugh with her:

“Such a pretty-bone Boy English!”

“You’re too young for all that pretty boy!”

“He’s dreaming he’s a bear!”

“Back, back, bone of a back!”

Birdseye says, “But that is his name, isn’t it?”

And her tone, as much as their knowledge of her ravaged face bent aside, silences them.

“Yes, it is,” Angélique answers. She is a Person from south of Deninu, but her husband is Twospeaker, the mixed-blood Pierre St. Germain who speaks Tetsot’ine and French and Dogrib and English too; what he knows about Whites, Angélique knows as well. “Yes,” she says again, “that is really his name, right up the middle, and maybe the thin young one could draw his name out of his bone too.”

They are all puzzled. “How could he do that?” someone asks.

“In English his name can mean ‘cap’.”

Someone else says quickly, “Then of course he could. Every man has a cap on his bone!”

And they are laughing again, even louder because they are all laughing at the same dangly, miserable, hard thing about men, together, however it may delight or plague them.

“No.” Angélique speaks so softly a moment passes before they know it. “No, they don’t. Some Whites don’t.”

They all stare at her. Angélique continues, “My man says sometimes Whites don’t have any cap there … just nothing at all. No one has seen These English yet, they always go behind something to piss, but some Whites, he says, because they think they’ll be stronger then, they cut that cap off.”

Into their stunned silence Birdseye says, head bent to her squishing, oozing leather, “Or it may be eaten … off.”

Everyone seems to stop breathing. Into their play of words about Whites has crept the simple and continually unfathomable burden women must carry — all men. For the strangers clearly are men; Greenstockings at least has felt it and Angélique also knows. Men. In each other’s eyes the women recognize the inescapable power and fear — sometimes joy, often brutality, even terror — that men forever carry about them like their cocks, limp or rigid, hanging somehow gently, possibly tender or abruptly lethal; which they bring to women as certain as the meat they hunt, offer them or thrust, even in their quietest moment at the flicker of a glance threaten to jerk out at them whether they would accept it or not: grab, ram, pound into them. Again and again, always, and leave with them as if it were a fleeting spasm; as if it were nothing more than something to forget and remember, and then shudder to watch out for again. And endure again; like passing sunshine and more black, pounding, bitter weather.

Birdseye undoubtedly knows that her small words have grown behind their eyes to help them see this. But she does not look up; she is merely silent, working at their endless women’s labour. Slowly one by one the women leave, back to their necessary fires. Greenstockings picks up her scraper. Her younger sister, Greywing, helps her pull the stretching-frame with its bloody hide into the low, pale light of the curing sun. In a few days the sun will not give enough warmth to lure the night ice off the lake even by noon, though it will still darken, harden the fat layered on a hide.

Greywing has returned from her solitary tent, where, for a
full cycle of the moon, she has been initiated into womanhood, and can now for the first time begin to speak among women. “Does it matter,” she asks her sister tentatively, “what their names are? You’re with Broadface, won’t he just … kill them both anyway?”

Greenstockings says nothing, so Angélique accepts her question. “English make knives, so I think they aren’t scared of them. Maybe not even guns. No one has ever seen a White die by a gun.”

Greywing chuckles a little, to cover her own daring. “Broadface wouldn’t need a gun,” she says. “Maybe a rock — or the heavy claw that stupid gun gave him.”

Birdseye murmurs, “I heard no one has ever seen an English die of sickness either, so if their … maybe … maybe.…”

She is bent so low her forehead almost touches her muscling fingers, but she stops speaking. Greenstockings grimly forces the scraper down with her two hands; the only sound is the curved bone gnawing through fat, around a hole exploded big as a fist in what was once the deer’s belly, such massive holes torn by guns. Her skin remembers the length of those two young English through their stiff cloth, her own soft leather against her thigh, her belly: so different from each other, from anything she has ever felt with Broadface’s long black eyes and copper skin glistening over her, his bending bones flattening her until she loosens, opening gladly. And yet, strangely, always the lurking threat of explosion — no warning, the second before you sense he’s there, just smash! Her belly cramps.

Angélique continues, “But Whites have never come with their own women, and they never fight for one. They just take whom they want.”

When Greenstockings looks up, Angélique is also gone. Birdseye says to Greywing,

“Perhaps there is still some water left for us in the river.”

Greenstockings watches her sister lift the leather bucket. Her small shape bending, her smooth movement around and down the rocks curved to the whistling river below, beyond the trees, is like the rainbow fin of a grayling quick as a quiver of light in bright, clear water.

“Thick English,” Birdseye says, “wants all our best hunters to kill animals for him. He says he will need more dead animals than anyone has ever counted.”

“What do the hunters say?”

“Bigfoot says they’ll hunt.”

“Bigfoot?” Greenstockings cannot understand. “What? He says what we all say.”

Within the shifting groups of Tetsot’ine for a time agreeing to live together, as necessity arises, one person decides finally where they will travel, where they will stop — but that implies nothing like boss. They have no word for “chief”, and Greenstockings is trying to think how one person could commit others to do something they might not want to do, or stop doing at some point: the way he would order a woman he could threaten or try to beat into obedience? Why would the men do it? They would just take their families and travel on the welcoming land to where others might be who would accept their living together. Perhaps all the men do want to do it now, just kill animals for Whites?

And she feels a woman’s contempt for this illogical acquiescence, this feeble agreement of all accepting what a stranger wants of them. “Soon,” she sniffs, “Bigfoot will be so bigfooted
even his youngest wife won’t listen to him!”

But Birdseye will not laugh. “Whites have so many things. And you know men — if they could, all they would do is chase animals.”

“Yes,” Greenstockings says, suddenly bitter. “So many, heavy things they already need twenty gigantic paddle-slaves to carry them, and more things we women and children will have to carry for them too. And what will it help us, all this extra carrying and all the animals our great hunters kill, so busy far away? Whatever meat they get, someone has to carry it here and cook it so These English and their slaves can eat first. If we do all that work, when will we have time to eat?”

Birdseye says, still softly, “I think Thick English will hang another shiny medal around Bigfoot’s neck, over the first one, and then give the hunters more tea and then whisky, and when they wake up in the morning there will be more nets for fishing and more guns and more bullets and powder piled up in front of each lodge, and every man stepping through his door will be happy to kill more animals so far away he can barely see them, agree to.…”

But her voice is falling away, and Greenstockings bursts out, “Things piled up! Is that what our men think should happen? My father too?”