A Discovery of Strangers (18 page)

“That Mohawk,” Little Marten says softly, “from many rivers away, he’s deciding to steal you.”

Greenstockings considers it. “But he’s a paddle-slave, to Thick English.”

“What does he know? That Mohawk watches you, and has sharpened two knives.”

“Does he have friends?”

“No. But he’s strong enough.”

Greenstockings glances up and Little Marten adds quickly,

“Bigfoot is trying to walk like Thick English now. He might not fight for a woman.”

Greenstockings smiles her thanks, though it seems very odd. She has felt nothing from the Mohawk, who seems not to care about anything enough to steal it, even a woman. But now she has been warned and she says, gratefully,

“When you pick the nits out of Broadface’s hair, fondle his ears. He’ll fall asleep very fast then.”

Little Marten laughs quietly, and Greenstockings joins her.

“If you want him to sleep,” she adds.

When she has climbed the first rocks tilted against the esker, she looks back along the river towards Winter Lake. The brief flurry of snow has blown away; they are almost at the rapids, receding into a touch of dark on the stark, bent lines of the great snow world. On Hood’s paper they would be nothing but tiny spots.

When had she decided she would grow so strong and smart that she could marry anyone she wanted? Or no one if she didn’t? Why? She cannot remember ever deciding these things, but that is what she is living. And as her face warms in the crimson light burning along the hills she feels it must have been the four years of her mother’s warm milk until Greywing was born, of Birdseye refusing to give Keskarrah any sons, so that when her blood began to flow and told her to go by herself to the isolation tent to become a woman, no male — not even a younger brother — had ever seen her naked, even by accident. So now there are men tearing at her, and will be for the rest of her life. Well — let them.

Her father passes her without looking up from his path before him in the snow. He walks steadily down the esker. She sees he is going to the rapids, to pray.

That night Keskarrah, out of his deep sleep, suddenly speaks the name of the double rapids on the River of Copperwoman, which Birdseye has already dreamed. He is speaking their name very loudly, again and again, as if he were moulding them into existence, he shouts them until the women are awake. Greenstockings hears her father’s rasping breath, his cough, his shouts hammer at the lodge walls until that deadly name bursts over
her white in darkness so profound she cannot at first tell if her eyes are open. And then she recognizes that the rapids are only two days’ walking away, they will die very close to shelter … within reach of so many warm arms, so close —— it’s a grizzly, Keskarrah shouts into the darkness, a sow grizzly come down to the opposite bank of the ice-slivered river where he stands, and she paces back and forth over water there, snaking her head to and fro as if swinging her gigantic weight into a charge through ice and moving water at him. He must sing to her, because he is without so much as a little knife or even a dog to help him welcome her visiting him on the open tundra.

“O Great Bear,” Keskarrah sings, terrified, “I have never harmed you, the cooked paws of your relations or friends have never filled my stomach, only when I was dying of hunger, and then only with the deepest of gratitude, always with such enormous gratitude! Accept my renewed thankfulness now, here it is, all my gratitude, now!”

But the swing of grizzly’s deadly prowl along the bank grows swifter and ever wider, she is directly in front of him now, a few steps and her wheeling turns fling her higher into the air until she blots out the sun, the sky itself turns over him her ominous darkness, and falling there he sees, like a sudden revelation, the two long rapids at either point of her turning. The double rapids, the curved lake between them slick with a white skin of ice! And then over him she rises up like a giant tree, she reveals to him her belly and chest where she suckles her young, and he must bury his face between her teats if he would get inside the violence she will now reveal to him, if he is to survive where death is already growing like depthless cold out of the land, where he would have to drive his knife, if he had one, as she embraces him. But her
arms reach higher, beyond him, to lift up the coming-winter sky, and he knows the name of that place, knows that fatal place on the River of Copperwoman. And cries it aloud to the women.

“Have mercy, good Bear,” the old man prays on, singing as he can, “I beg you, have mercy, go away my sweet sister, my mother, so caring when you show yourself over and beside swift water, I am begging you now, go away.”

Prays and sings the bear, who has told him more than any of them wanted to know, into vanishment. Until there is only the name of the place left.

And he is awake. With him in their wide common bed of sweet hides and fur Greywing lies between Birdseye and Greenstockings, who is rigid with fear. Birdseye has not moved; there is not even the sound of her breathing to reveal she is alive, or awake. If the dreams of her mother and her father begin to follow and elaborate each other like this, Greenstockings knows that they will also have to meet at some point, and in this darkness she does not dare think about that. She prefers the darkness of her nameless lake to this place they have designated, no matter how deep, and she pulls her sister closer, the fear they must all face in the future already faintly there in the hot, familiar skin she cuddles against herself.

Keskarrah says over them, “The ice is too thin to walk on. Whitemuds are always too heavy.”

The heavy, heavy Whitemuds. There is a wisp of comfort for them in that. Slowly Greenstockings and Greywing turn together, fold into each other’s limbs as they have slept so often, the smaller girl bent around, open-mouthed between Greenstockings’ breasts and legs, she curled about her as if growing that small body into her own, and slowly, gently, their hearts
beat together and they seek into each other, shift, merge, become the delicacy of skin globed into one, shaped round by firm and dreamless sleep. The deep maw of the lake.

The moon rides through cloud over a rasped silver world. For months to come the ceaseless stars will dominate it, and the erratic aurora, the sun at noon vanishing from its brief smudge beyond the rocks and burned sticks of the southern horizon. Tomorrow evening, Thursday, October 19, 1820, as all the English record it in their endless notebooks, Lieutenant Franklin will see his Midshipman Hood, whom he is already convinced he loves as he would the son he does not yet know he will never have, walk away from the frozen mud-smeared triangle of buildings they call Fort Enterprise. Lieutenant Franklin will decide that his conscientious youngest officer is off for another session of sketching the natives, drawings he has already decided will form part of the extremely detailed report he must present on his return to England, to His Majesty’s Government and Earl Bathurst, who appointed him to command this Expedition for the “determining of the Northern Coast of North America, and the trending of that Coast from the Mouth of the Coppermine River to the eastern extremity of that Continent” on the recommendation of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty; drawings as essential as the magnetic-needle readings and declensions, the endless longitudes and latitudes, the flora and fauna, the temperatures and lists of aurora borealis sightings they have each, separately, recorded so meticulously day by day despite notebooks lost and other indescribable difficulties and hardships endured.

Perhaps, as he watches his Admiralty Midshipman trudge through the dreadful cold he will soon find unbelievable, though
he will be forced to endure it, the Lieutenant already has a notion that Hood’s paintings and sketches will become an essential element of the book he will be prevailed upon to write, a book that will be more widely distributed and read than either Samuel Hearne’s record of his amazing walk to the mouth of what he called the Coppermine River (1769–72) or Alexander Mackenzie’s quick and comfortable (for him) paddle to the Arctic Ocean down what he nevertheless called “The River of Disappointment” (1789) because of course it took him where he did not want to go — always to the wrong place. The Lieutenant, who will reach a few of the right places — that is, places where he was ordered to go, though no European has ever been there before him — certainly does not suspect that the various manifestations of death he will meet on this four-year journey to the shores of the Polar Sea will make him as famous as if he were the first person to walk physically upon the moon. In searing winter darkness that he will never, quite, find acceptable (no more than years later he will find acceptable the dazzling florescence of antipodean Van Diemen’s Land), John Franklin knows that, with George Back hard at work travelling as only he of the Expedition can, they who remain at Fort Enterprise “now get on very well
en famille
, not a single dispute or unpleasant word”. John Richardson and he himself have “properly regulated minds” and so the possible “pleasures of (a) female companion(s)” are unnecessary to think about or acknowledge. He does not know (and if such knowledge of his future were offered him, he would refuse to consider it, as being un-Christian) that the Robert Hood he sees disappear into the spruce sheltering the one Yellowknife lodge on the esker has, in fact, left him; vanished for ever.

DOCTOR JOHN RICHARDSON

Monday December
25th 1820
Fort Enterprise

The male reindeer are now shedding their horns. The trees are intensely frozen and so hard that all the large axes are broken to pieces except one. We have frequently remarked that in the cold clear nights the moisture of the breath freezes with a considerable crackling noise
.

Bigfoot with his young men and their wives are encamped near Dissension Lake, where the reindeer are again seen
.

Monday January 1st
1821
Fort Enterprise

This morning the Canadians assembled and greeted us with their customary salutation on the new year. We could only treat them with a little flour and fat, and to divert their attention from their wants, which include the lack of rum for festivities, we encouraged the practice of sliding down the steep bank of the river upon sledges. These vehicles descended the snowy bank with much velocity and ran a great distance upon the ice. The officers joined in the sport, and the numerous overturns we experienced formed no small share of the amusement of the party. But on one occasion, when Lieutenant Franklin had been thrown from his seat and almost buried in the snow, a large Indian woman drove her sledge over him, and sprained his knee severely
.

7
E
NTERING
E
XHAUSTION

The name of the rapid on the River of Copperwoman silvered with ice so thin that the grayling flicker under it releases Birdseye from her unending woman’s work. She begins to sleep towards that future. Into the long darkness she now lives sleeping, waking sometimes for a moment to eat a little dryfish, or drink, to go outside briefly, or have Greenstockings touch the salve Richard Sun still gives them daily to her face under the sleeping-robes.

And gradually, so gently out of her day and night sleep, words begin to rise, a faint, endless thread spun into brightness for them through the deepening winter — words that tell the incredible story of the long, long journey of the Whitemuds: what that travel has already been, and how it now hesitates here on this winter esker, and the travail it will soon continue to be, though they have not lived it yet.

The long past of what their travel has already been emerges first like pale streaks of distance unimaginably far away, with
monster waterbirds, whose innumerable upraised wings they cannot quite visualize, lifting these strangers they now know over stinking water so vast only the tribal memory of snow beyond the last trees in the world can encompass it. There they are, white-winged monsters covered with lice-swarms of strangers, between massive icebergs coming like mountains through water that always rolls apart for them.