A Discovery of Strangers (19 page)

And slowly, slowly, the water turns crimson under the sun of Birdseye’s dreaming, until the great sea surrenders them into heavy boats, and then quickly, into birchbark canoes too large for People, which need three men to carry one, or four lockstep, but which nevertheless dance on the frothing rivers filled with the rocks and smashing white and blue water of the quiet land the Tetsot’ine know surrounds and sustains them with life, but which these strangers do not ever want to be there. Water! they scream in every mark they scratch with birdfeathers on their papers. Calm water! Not cut into streamers by all this horrible, lethal rock, or worse, ice, this is all wrong, give us the right, the proper water! Flat, wide open, and best of all stinking!

These heavy, water-logged strangers really want no land to be here, especially not this land with ice growing down into it wherever, amidst its overwhelming rock and distance, there is a small relief of moss or sand. As if it were held in the fist of cold always, the tender green of summer at best a thin, lightning memory of surface.

But if something must be here, as it seems there must, then they would much prefer the endless plains of lakes which, if they cannot be sailed across by monster ships, can at least most easily be traversed in massive canoes driven by paddle-slaves. Then the Whitemuds can so easily sit on the water and observe
the immense land pass inside the tubes they hold to their eyes, and see nothing except the folds of papers they always clutch in their hands, the tiny marks they continuously accumulate heap upon heap between straight lines, down in columns. What they lay out flat and straight and hold in their hands in these marks, which only they will know how to interpret, will be enough to guide them; that is how they know everything, and will know whatever happens to them. Sometime, somewhere, they have decided to believe this simplicity of
mark
, and they will live their lives straight to the end believing that.

But even as Birdseye weaves this continuous whisper of fact and understanding and judgement into the growing dark, the ceaseless travel of the Whitemuds begins to tire her and she forces them to move more slowly. More and more slowly from where they have been to where they plan to go, without knowing what waits for them there, and which they anticipate with both joy and fearful trepidation. Her gradual slowness teaches them to savour details, whether they wish to or not. Sometimes for an entire day she describes one single rock they must pass in the crooked river of their journey, describes every individual plain, slope, twist and crack of it, every textured grain and worn corner exactly there where, against it, the swift water smashes itself into white foam and then instantly refolds down like a glazed sheet, ribbed and smooth for that one slipping instant in which they can finally pass over it.

Or she tells them, with extreme care, of the wolf standing against the sky on the horizon of an esker beside a balanced erratic, contemplating their ponderous passage through landscape on water; she details that silver wolf exactly, to the very whisper of his jaws opening on his brilliant teeth, the shift and flow of
his fur as it runs under wind. His cocked furry ears, his teeth, his tongue and his anticipating teeth.

Or caribou, female here and male there, carrying the branching lyres and immense forests of their antlers against the light of an evening lake. But there are, very quickly it seems, so few of these, and almost no running calves.

As the sun sinks completely into winter, Greenstockings watches for the lengthening line of Whitemud story that her mother’s voice draws up out of darkness, waits for those giant canoes to appear at last on Tucho so she can begin to understand why they blundered into the Tetsot’ine’s own brief trading journey last summer to that new trading place, Fort Providence. She wants to hear her mother tell why all the People stood there so heedlessly, as if nothing but curiosity was happening, and watched These English arrive.

But Birdseye’s murmured story explains nothing about what happened to the People then — why they decided to stay and talk to these coming strangers rather than leave quickly in their tiny craft, as some of them wished; why Keskarrah dignified the White demands by drawing pictures of the land on the ground after certain of the Tesot’ine men committed themselves to become “game-killers”, as Thick English would name them; or why the hunters, who have never carried more than their light weapons and themselves, now accept to drag around with them over the tired land all the heavy guns and heavy powder and heavier lead, where the heavier, deeper tracks they now leave will last longer in the sinking moss than they will be remembered. Why does Birdseye tell nothing about that first bony apparition they saw together of Hood? Or the fire, and Boy English so proud with the burnt stump of their flag scattering
ashes on Tucho still hissing, as Greenstockings now recognizes it was, its blazing scream, “Watch out! Be careful!”

But no. Birdseye speaks nothing about People at the coming. Nothing of the men’s broken dance after they drank what These English gave them to honour their promise, nor how some became so crazy they threw their women around as if they were frozen meat, bellowing, “Did you hear? These Whites from so far away know we’re the greatest men in the world, we’re the greatest game-killers, look at all these long knives, these axes, these shining guns! Now we’ll kill so much meat you can roll yourself in fat with your mouth always full, chewing, chewing, buried in meat, you’ll grow hot, grow round as warble slugs! You’ll have enough meat, you’ll see, finally!”

Men saying unspeakable things aloud, things they would be ashamed for a lifetime to hear another man say about himself. As if animals can simply be blown apart, chopped down for food because they happen to be somewhere.

Birdseye does not tell that, nor does her story linger at Tucho. Though Greenstockings remembers very well how some of the Tetsot’ine men awoke the next morning into staggers — as if their heads had burst upon awakening and blown away every memory of what they had said or done. But even when they could finally walk properly again, the men, strangely, had no memory of their unbelievable behaviour, and so for them nothing except the sweet Whitemud taste of happiness and nothing happening remained. To want again, if possible.

Broadfoot could speak as fast and sweet as any bird singing, but that evening he neither said nor sang anything; he was massively silent dancing and drinking. The Dogrib dance stumbled into disorder, and meaninglessness, finally chaos. Abruptly
Broadface fell like a tree beside Greenstockings as he tottered past, his shining new gun clutched irremovably in his split hand, and when she tried to pull him a little into shadow, away from this alarming, blank stupidity she had never before seen on his beautiful face, his mouth jerked open and he blurted out whatever stinking poison he had heard and swallowed and held within himself that day, together with everything he had eaten. And then he snored away into gentle, unawakable, stinking sleep. So she wiped his face and pulled him aside from his vomit; watched the other women suffer the inexplicable behaviour of their distorted, gradually unrecognizable men.

It seems to her now that Birdseye, in not telling this about the moment when These English came, wants every person to heal themselves so deeply and for ever over that chaos that they will all together be convinced it never happened; as if by not speaking it into story, it never can happen again. Even though everyone fears in silence that it will.

For Birdseye, asleep and dreaming, there emerges only the flit of Tetsot’ine in their tiny birchbark shells as they circle those huge paddle-slaves bellowing songs over the placid heave and breathing of small lakes; over the bright standing waves and the turning eddies where the river plunges down or is surprised into climbing over rocks, to the wash of the first long fall slanted above them. Their journey together, into the long travelling home of the People, paddles, trudges, lifts itself up the Yellowknife River, and the visitors almost shoot or knife themselves at Dissension Lake, but unfortunately they don’t, and the journey trundles on through swamp and welcoming barrens, eddies and is forced by winter coming to pause here among the last great trees.

The living winter, and Birdseye is able to rest a little. It will be longer, colder, darker, she whispers, than People have ever had to live here before this coming of these strangers. Here it is, now all around them.

Here on the esker, where Birdseye gathers her strength to tell the irrevocable journey of These English yet to come. The fierce darkness thickens the wavering voice of the rapids so deeply into itself that one night before he left Broadface told Greenstockings, as he lay in her arms, that the cold came so fast he has seen a wolverine, frozen, staring at him out of its ice. No one has ever seen that before: wolverine is too smart — but there he was, caught and frozen so quick his eyes were still open. She and Greywing were then scraping, day after day scrape, rub to keep soft and sew the strong hide of deer legs endlessly into boots. Working without Birdseye now, more urgently, the rhythm of their mother’s breath luring them into its whispers until both their fingers and their minds are held suspended by her lengthening pauses. They listen, and among all the destroying of trees and dragging things and endless shooting and cutting and tearing apart of anything that lives or moves, they sense themselves still alive, their own relentless round of gathering wood, cooking, hauling water, setting snares for rabbits, scraping, twisting wet hides, cutting meat, sewing — they are here, as if time were a ball rolling over itself between ice and the bottomless darkness.

And then, abruptly, one night Birdseye plunges on. Leaps ahead past the gradual return of the circular light that will eventually (they still believe) arise south of their lodge, where it will emerge from under bones and soot-scattered snow, the gurgle again of running water. She grows louder and faster, for her
story has blundered ahead into summer, into the horizon reaches of tundra and barren lands circling them, into briefly green, measureless distance.

“Ahhh yes,” Keskarrah murmurs that night when they all want so badly to hear every word. “Perhaps this story is becoming like the wolf’s track often is, it goes farther ahead into where it will happen, on and on, until it leads into beyond, and only then can it circle back to us again.”

Nevertheless, though he surmises that the story has leaped far ahead and will eventually come back to them here and now, even he is confused about what they hear. Why is Thick English trying to walk across the tundra with his Halfmuds humped under those enormous packs, over swamp and between rocks? Why are they not on the continuous rivers he drew and explained for them, why is no Everlasting Ice visible even in the hand-shaded distance towards which, as Thick English has said again and again, they will track the River of Copperwoman so that they can bring their giant ships filled with all their stuff into the People’s land and make them all so loaded down with the endless things no Person has ever seen? What has happened to their giant canoes? Where is the sea? Have they left it? If so, why — when that was all they ever wanted to find?

Perhaps, Keskarrah ponders aloud between Birdseye’s pauses, the story is telling itself backwards. Perhaps also, now that These English have no more canoes to float on water, the story is too exhausting for her to lay out step after ponderous step and she is dreaming another moment far ahead on the continuous circle that is their travel, has touched on it somewhere nearer to the point where the end they do not anticipate arrives at its beginning again. And perhaps that circle is smaller than
they think. Because it is of course now clear that, whether they knew it or not, the trek of These English coming has always been here waiting for them. It was already waiting before they decided (as they still seem to think
they decide
everything, as if they could determine or change what will happen), before they marked down and decided what should happen, before they climbed into their ships far over the stinking water and began this coming. If that is so, the smaller circle of the story will come around soon enough until it returns to find all the People here again.

“Wait … wait,” he tells his daughters, “their travel goes forwards, but the story is coming backwards, it will eventually find itself back to us here. Soon enough.”

But Keskerrah’s tangled conjectures comfort no one. Birdseye exists gaunt and contorted under the sleeping-robes, as if waves of pain were grinding her into the spruce boughs of her bed. And finally one day Greywing begins to cry, even more bitterly than she has so often since her mother has walked motionlessly on this lengthening journey. Keskarrah reaches his hand to the girl from out of his fur nest.

“Come,” he says. “Come.”

“It’s so long,” Greywing sobs, trying to burrow in. He pulls aside the robes and she disappears against him. “Why do we have to hear it?” Her voice a distant hollow.

Under the robes Keskarrah cuddles her, profoundly sad. “You may be right,” he concedes. “These Whitemuds may be here for ever.”

But he does try to reassure them, himself as much as his two daughters. “Every story is long.” And adds, hopefully, “It is not necessarily sad.”

Greenstockings echoes her sister, “Why do we have to hear this? If they have to live it anyway, I don’t want to hear it too.”

Gently Keskarrah rocks Greywing against himself.

“The White story is what it is,” he says. “Story permits no lie.”

Birdseye is dreaming it now. And they must listen.

A lake, the frigid edge of it, and a canoe walking upside down, six legs between stones and smooth, bent sand. A line of men following. Spoors of animals lead in every direction away from their feet, deep trails braided together into a certain impossibility by hoofs walking yesterday, walking tomorrow, never walking today.

The paws and claws that relentlessly loop around these trails of hoof-prints are a day away also. An animal watches canoe and men walking, a bird pounds steady as stone through air above them, but neither will accept being nearer than one day away from either canoe or men. Never, never again.