A Discovery of Strangers (12 page)

“Now these snowshoes she is making,” Keskarrah adds thoughtfully, “they could carry you around it, when they are completely sewn. Then you might be able to see. If you drew the lake as it is you would have to see the fish, and you could name it correctly. That is, if you wanted to.”

Robert Hood hears the deep rumble of the old man’s voice like wind in night spruce, like aurora walking over sky. He has turned to Greenstockings, is trying to find her shape before he attempts details, and has been led astray by her exact edge, which must be … is surely, yes, under the obscuring leather and small cloths, and he wants his pencil to imagine it, yes, his fingers must imagine her shape since he cannot yet imagine physically uncovering her and actually seeing skin. How will he draw anything of her correctly if he cannot.…

“O-o-o-o,” he sings to himself out loud, Keskarrah’s bass sustaining him like a grand organ, “you are such a woman, o-o-o-o-oh, any sea captain would forget his cabin boys and the palm trees of Africa and sail through the French and Dutch navies together to see you seated with your legs aslant, your strong fingers tying leather so hard and clean over and through and into, and your hands, God to lift that leather and see all of you, draw your woman’s shape, draw it exact as feeling your skin, touching you, my fingers along every bend of.…”

And he is so suddenly, vividly happy to hear himself say all this aloud while he draws. After all, he is performing the assigned duty for which he was selected from so many applicants and appointed to this expedition — knowing no one will ever know he thought this, leave alone said aloud any English word into this north air. He peers at his hand: it moves, draws this stunning woman’s line from his fingertips over and over again; he can fondle her until he has found her body’s exact turn, until he knows it so indelibly that when he slashes the snowshoe across her lap it seems he has hurled himself, dived across her lap stretched out and pointed, become the long, fish-like shape he aches with her to be. Thrashing.

Greenstockings has no need to look up again. She can easily hear the gathering together of Hood’s body, can smell it thicken into memory while her father stands erect, speaking over the fire to protect her. Birdseye is bent beside it, hands motionless, dreaming perhaps, and Greywing pretends sleep again under the robes while she listens to this old and always new sacred story. Circled inside the lodge, Greenstockings believes Hood — who may be Snow Man, may be simply white bone — may be able to understand her fingers and her father, even if he comprehends no words and seems to be humming his own, may understand a little since he is so desperately trying to draw her, once, this instant before she is different again. But for Keskarrah speaking with such great care, she would laugh at the futility of that repeating pencil.

“The world is the way it is because it started that way,” Keskarrah speaks in the ceremony of his standing. “That was when Sky came to Earth and they lay together. Their joy began then, and all day they lay together and when they separated in
the evening the ground appeared, because ground is nothing more nor less than their happiness together, born between them with rocks and sand and water running. On the second day their happiness grew, and moss and little trees appeared, and fish in the water. On the third day birds began to fly across the sky and the caribou ran along the tops of the hills, waiting for their antlers to grow so they could stare at each other, and on the fourth they were so happy that everything else burst out, even that miserable mosquito, and man too, leaping around on his two legs to get away from the woman on four legs, which is bear. That was when the great bear caught him anyway and dragged him to her den so she and her cubs could lick and suck all the six star points of him before they had him for a meal, which was the only way left for him to help them. But he ran away from her to begin the great river, and with it the Everlasting Ice. That, however, is another story.”

Greenstockings’ hands fall motionless on the wet, knotted thongs; she has forgotten the brilliant sky eyes peering at her in the changing firelight because Hood’s sound plays a skipping harmony over her father’s chant, carrying her even farther into the birth of humanity:

“This story is not about eating each other, no. It is about woman and man lying together, for ever if they could so they will never be separate, but at least all day long every day, like bears who grow into each other for three days or maybe four, forgetting to eat or sleep, their bodies one, and you can touch them wherever you wish and they will lick you tenderly because they want no more than what they already have, and when they lick you they are doing that to each other and themselves. But unfortunately —”

And at this point in the story Keskarrah’s tone always shifts. It does so now, with such emphasis that Robert Hood looks up at him, uncomprehending but alarmed, the pencil stopping in his hand.

“Unfortunately, man does not have an endless bone like a bear; though woman could happily hold him inside her for ever, something got mixed up for the man, somewhere, and he can’t. But in that first summer when Sky and Earth lay together, there was no human woman yet, and when man escaped from the great bear he had only a shelter of brush to run to. He was alone, and lonely; he had only berries and roots and leaves to eat and when winter came he grew desperately hungry. He sank deep in the snow as he watched rabbits and caribou and ptarmigan travel so lightly on it that finally he dreamed his feet were much bigger, and he was running over snow everywhere as easily as the animals, as swiftly as wind smoothing it, whispering among birch. So at last he turned to the trees, he peeled the white, thin birch and bent them into large hoops. He stepped inside them, and he knew his feet were in the right place — but he didn’t know what to do with the centre; there was no woman to see the strings of babiche possible in animal leather and so weave the webbing to hold his feet inside the wooden frames he had made.

“The bent birch lay there, empty, and every day he travelled, hunting. But in deep snow every animal ran easily from him; every day he returned with nothing, and always hungrier. Then one day he heard a noise in his shelter, so he ran as fast as he could and a ptarmigan flew out of the opening at the top before he could get inside. The next day he hunted until dark, and then from a distance he saw smoke rising from his shelter. He rushed there and the beautiful ptarmigan flew out again, but
inside he saw a fire burning and his snowshoe frames drying beside it, their sad emptiness half woven over with babiche.

“ ‘The ptarmigan has done this,’ he said, amazed as the fire warmed him.

“So next morning before leaving he covered the roof opening and did not go far; he returned early, breathing as quietly as he could, sinking deep in the snow. And there he surprised the ptarmigan starting the fire again in his lonely shelter, the snowshoes lying almost complete with babiche webbing. The bird darted around, tried to fly out but could find no way to escape, and when he caught it between his hands it turned into what he had often dreamed: someone like himself but o so different!

“Woman, yes, who made everything beautiful happen, fire to cook meat and tanned hides for clothing and lying together hot as bears and children for ever, because she alone could fill the frames he had dreamed and bent. She changed when he held her, but her holding changed him as well: frame and woven centre, when she fastened the snowshoes to his feet he became a bird, flying over the soft, deep snow everywhere in the beautiful world, and she prepared the animals he captured, and they ate together, and lived. Long ago my mother told me this story of beginning,” sings old Keskarrah. “O my mother, long ago my mother,” he sings.

“ ‘Greensleeves was all my joy,’ ” sings Robert Hood in echo, stippling the fur on Greenstockings’ arm, her white-fringed deerskin he has captured,

Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
And who but my Lady…?

And his sudden boyish soprano joins another melody in the round lodge where the smoke frays upwards into darkness. It is Birdseye, he realizes. Like a mound of the earth itself keening in ineffable sorrow. Beside her Greywing’s head emerges from under fur, black eyes staring at him.

And then he notices Greenstockings’ face, and Keskarrah stooped out of his rhetoric — both crumpling as he looks from one to the other. And though he cannot understand a word, their wide eyes speak a gathering horror.

“The Everlasting Ice holds him,” keens Birdseye, heart broken. “It will never give him up, the Everlasting Ice.”

DOCTOR JOHN RICHARDSON

Thursday September 7th
1820
Fort Enterprise

A heavy snowstorm prevented us from observing the eclipse. Men employed in constructing Fort Enterprise, the name given to our rising buildings. Women splicing and drying meat
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Saturday September 9th
1820
Coppermine Journey

Lieutenant Franklin and I started this morning on a pedestrian excursion to the Coppermine River, under the guidance of an old Indian named Keskarrah, and accompanied by John Hepburn and Samandré, who carried our blankets, cooking utensils, hatchets and a small supply of dried meat. By noon we reached a remarkable hill named by the Yellowknives Agnaatheth, or Dogrib Rock. In the course of the afternoon Keskarrah killed a reindeer and loaded himself with its head and skin. The frozen ground and our small quantity of bedclothes induced us to sleep without undressing, but old Keskarrah stripped himself to the skin, and having toasted his body for a short time over the embers of the fire, he crept under his deerskin and rags previously spread out as smoothly as possible, and coiling himself up in a circular form, fell asleep instantly
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Friday October 6th I820 FortEnterprise

Today, the officers’ house being completed, we struck the tents and took up our abode in it. It is a log building fifty feet by twenty-four, the walls and roof are plastered with clay, the floors laid with planks rudely squared by the hatchet and the windows closed with parchment of reindeer skin. The clay froze as it was daubed on, and has since cracked in such a manner that the wind rushes in from every quarter. Nevertheless with the aid of warm clothing, and good fires, we expect to get comfortably over the winter
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Last night a thin film of ice formed across the river. The lake is now firmly frozen over, the reindeer wander out on it
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5
S
EAMAN
J
OHN
H
EPBURN

I, John Hepburn, ordinary seaman born in 1789 in Newburn, Northumberland, and lately from the Orkney Islands, speak as truthfully as I do recall of events that took place October, 1820, at Fort Enterprise, which we built on the hill above the rapids draining Winter Lake, which lies southwest by south of Obstruction Rapids on the Coppermine River in those lands far west of Hudson Bay, during the land Expedition to the shores of the Polar Sea under the command of Lieutenant John Franklin, Royal Navy.

I am a blunt seaman, but I trust my language is hereby properly composed and written for your Lordships’ consideration. In giving this confidential account of the events at Fort Enterprise, it may seem strange that I do not also tell of what took place there a year later (for myself I would never call two such log buildings, and a small storage shed, a fort), or what happened on the horrid trek we had in trying to return to it after our
summer exploration, horrid particularly when we succeeded after nine days in crossing the double rapids on the Coppermine. But that is not for me in my station to speak of. The proper officers have made their depositions long ago, and we few others who survived need only pray that God will give those who did not a sound and peaceful rest.