A Discovery of Strangers (4 page)

Standing there, suddenly apprehensive, on the rock and sandy shore of the great lake with her mother and father and all their People watching, Greenstockings waits for her father to answer something to her mother. She has herself seen Tucho only once before, not here, and never crossed any arm of it. These three great canoes emerged from smudges on the far limits of the water, an edge that seems to lean above her breathing deep, breathing white with the summer rage of wind until the weight of winter will, she knows, crush it motionless into
crested ice pale as an ageing woman. Keskarrah understands much, he has been given the power to know something a little, and Birdseye also has some of that — but neither of them ever talks of such things unless somehow they find words together.

So she waits for her father to speak, or ask; and watches those five pale strangers come riding in at the centre of the giant canoes, erect, motionless, not one with a paddle in his hands. On their heads sit tall, black, round boxes curled up at the side edges. One by one they are stepping so carefully over the restless line of water, onto the sand.

And Keskarrah says nothing. Not even later, when he agrees to go to the council suddenly demanded by These English, whom no one has ever seen before. He will let Bigfoot talk, the man they have agreed will speak for them this time, because they have all together decided how he will do it, and he has already learned to talk to traders in the south and is very careful. Keskarrah continues to say nothing at all in that council circle. But then, when he has sat a long time with his eyes closed, hearing Twospeaker, who came in the canoes, trying to change the White chirpings into words People can comprehend, and searching deeper inside himself, slowly, slowly he will lean forwards.

He will dare to draw, with his finger on the ground between them, a very small picture of the land. He will say to Bigfoot as he draws:

“I think, if These English are to know anything, you will have to name it. Tell them this: here we are, on Tucho, and here our greatest river begins, Dehcho, below the great bay of Tucho we call Breasts Like a Woman, flowing west and then north. And here is the other river, which flows east and then north, the
Ana-tessy. And here between them, look, is the River of Copperwoman. It flows only north, here. Do they see this? It leads north to the end of where we go, far beyond the last trees in the world. The caribou and the wolves with them go even farther north, here, every spring and summer, but we never do. Here, beyond where we go, the river bends like this, at the Copperwoman Mountains, and after certain days it becomes stinking water, here where I stood once, I was very young then, with White Walker, who knew nothing either, but did ask many questions. Tell them, if they will not walk, this is the closest river to follow if they would find our enemies, the Raw-Meat Eaters. And also, the Everlasting Ice.”

And Bigfoot has been repeating all this to Twospeaker, who whistles it to These English. Keskarrah will say nothing directly to them, for he is powerful and old enough to draw the picture of the world in the sand and name a few places what they are.

But the council has not had to happen, not yet. Suddenly now, as the last White stranger steps ashore, Keskarrah does speak. He asks Birdseye, “What is it you see?”

And cold like winter water wipes over Greenstockings. Can’t he see what Birdseye means? With this coming, is he suddenly become blind as well as old?

Birdseye says, “That younger one.”

There are two younger ones, one as short as a boy, and when Greenstockings risks looking at her, her mother adds, “The last, the thin one.”

Against the great lake Greenstockings sees that young White like a slender, wind-broken tree, walking. Keskarrah continues to chew the smoked meat he has thrust into his mouth. Finally Birdseye says,

“He’s … nothing … only bone.…”

“Isn’t that just their skin?” Keskarrah says, chewing thoughtfully. He can still speak calmly, then. “I saw White Walker’s skin long ago, and considered it a long time. It looks sodden like that, like a body coming up without blood after twelve days under water and the fish leaving it alone. But up close it’s hard, almost like ours. Pretty good skin.”

“It is skin…” Birdseye agrees, but hesitant. “Nevertheless his skin … isn’t just skin, it’s … like … bones. Or like the Snow Man.”

She has said the last very quickly, and Keskarrah glances at her just as fast. After a long moment he asks,

“Then … if he’s Snow Man, is bad weather following him?”

But she only sees the great lake, heaving. Snow Man? — a story of a stranger, of danger coming and going — or bones, the hard necessity of eating? But Greenstockings is so fascinated by the thin White that she forgets, for now, everything except skin — she thinks she understands skin — and soon she will discover that his skin is not at all hard, and that his hair, when he lifts the long hat that at a distance makes him look broken off, is crinkled light brown, not black and hard and straight. When weeks from now the length of him stands against Greenstockings, he will rub her one hand over his pale hair springy as caribou moss in the sun and hold the other tightly to point at himself. He will breathe quietly at her, “Hood … Hood.”

And he will pull her hand all around his head, as if with her fingers in his he could draw his face into a circle, “Robert Hood,” and play her fingers as though their hands were tying a string together under his beautiful chin. “Yes,” he will whisper, “Ho-o-o-o-od.”

Then she will suddenly understand from his intense, pale eyes that he is making a picture of his name with her hand around his face,
hood
. His skin as soft as a baby’s, and yet bristly — it is very strange, that skin bleached like caribou hide in water and delicate with hair over it, sharp, not smooth. Nor bony. It will make her wonder what her mother has seen, what her father in his long, inquisitive life has truly touched. When, if ever, it has been possible for his fingers to find such skin under them: such a different creature, but perhaps a human being — a man, can she feel that through his skin, is he a man?

“Hood,” the pursed red mouth will then breathe again, and she will try to shape her lips into a puckered, protruding “O” like his and puff air at him, “ooo … ooo…” but she cannot click her tongue back to sound “dd”, until he laughs and laughs so happily, the skin of his face very nearly touching hers, and he will never be able to say her name at all, not even the middle of it as she can his. Though all that will be much later, when the Tetsot’ine have already led These English into their country and the paddle-slaves are very busy building that cracked winter rectangle of logs and mud, and they have finally given her a name they can say easily. None of them, except he, will ever try to say her Tetsot’ine name. Only “Greenstockings”.

These English. Who also tried to name every lake and river with whatever sound slips from their mouths: Singing Lake and Aurora and Grizzle Bear and Snare lakes and Starvation River, or the names of hunters, Longleg, Baldhead, Humpy, Little Forehead, and a hundred other things, or a thousand — it is truly difficult for a few men who glance at it once to name an entire country. And perhaps they even intended to acknowledge a few of the women whose names they never learned, the
women who spliced meat and tanned hides to sew endless clothing for them that first fall, when the deer crowded so thickly to the river crossings that the hunters could have lanced them far more easily than blundered about with the racket and unending busyness of guns. But since the men had been given guns and powder and lead, and told to hunt with them, they ran along the shore, across the paths of hoofs worn hollow to the water, shooting now and then instead of floating in tiny canoes on the silent water and spearing fast. It may have been that, at first, These English dared to eat only animals killed with the clumsy instruments they’d brought — though before they left the country they would eat anything, even meat other animals had hunted or left behind long ago — o yes, so gladly eat anything at all, any meat they could still lift as high as their loosening, bloody teeth.

That was what Keskarrah hated before he ever met any Whites: guns. Trader guns needed endless, slow work, and yet were never as accurate as a quick arrow. And they screamed, “Listen: I’M HERE!” for unbelievable distances in all directions. Worse still, a gun sometimes exploded in its barrel instead of out of it and shredded your hand, if not your nose or shoulder or entire arm — then you were fortunate to heal together crooked. When the hunters shot the first eighteen caribou above the rapids where the river crashed into the lake, These English named that “Hunter Lake”, though with lances they might easily have taken a hundred. But the paddle-slaves were happy then, their guts packed so tight and full they carried the long portage singing. And later, when only some English came back, the names of those slaves for whom fifty songs were no more than a day’s work were given to lakes and
rivers everywhere north of there too: Beauparlant, Crédit, Vaillant, Bélanger, Perrault, Fontano, Samandré, Peltier. As if that would change the People’s memory of their strength and dancing and laughter, or how miserably they died.

And long after that, far away to the east, a lake came to be known as “Mohawk” — where he had never been, that one paddler who was a Person from so many rivers away, Michel Terohaute.

Of course, every place already was its true and exact name. Birdseye and Keskarrah between them knew the land, each name a story complete in their heads. Keskarrah could see, there, in the shape and turn of an eddy, the broken brush at the last edge of the trees, the rocks of every place where he waited for caribou, or had been given to know and dream; and Birdseye had walked everywhere — under packs, or paddled, following or leading him, looking at each place where the fell of soft caribou and thick marten or fox turned continually into clothing for People in her hands: in their lifetime of ceaseless travel and thought, the way any Tetsot’ine must if they would live the life of this land.

The stories the land told, Keskarrah said, and the sky over it in any place, were the stories of all People who had ever lived there, and therefore they were greater than any person, or two, could comprehend, even if one could have remained in one place motionless for an entire season, either of snow or mosquitoes. But he could draw, very carefully, the places he knew through his fingers from behind his eyes onto the ground, which is where all land already lies fully and complete, though hidden. Or he would look at Birdseye, and then tenderly make those lines on birchbark with dead embers from her fire, because
the seeds and roots of trees are always in the land, and the seed and root of fire live eternally within trees. Names all waiting to be breathed out again, quietly, into the air.

“Just making a sound can mean … nothing…” he will muse into the perpetual fire of the winter lodge, a fire their mothers beyond memory have carried everywhere in the flint and touchwood of their pouches. “It is for us to look. Perhaps we will recognize how everything alive is already within everything else. It is like … holding water … cup it in your hands, and it is the nature of water that very soon it will cup your hands as well.”

So at the council he will make the small picture on the ground for the strangers. And the hunter Bigfoot, whom These English instantly named “chief”, though he had no more authority than any other person, looked down at the immense land barely scratched between their feet, and he was deeply troubled. He said sadly, to Keskarrah alone,

“You know, if we tell them how to go north to the Everlasting Ice, they won’t return.”

“Yes, we know that. But what can we do, if they want to go? You’ve told them how the rivers could bring them back, both west and east.”

“But they don’t listen, and we’ll never see them again.”

Keskarrah said impatiently, “Of course we know that! And it doesn’t matter — we never saw them before today either.”

“That’s true,” Bigfoot agreed. “But today we have seen them, and so it’s different.”

Keskarrah said, “No, it can’t be.”

“I believe it is … different,” Bigfoot insisted. Strangely, as though speaking to These English had for the first time given him the insight of debate. “We see them. How they look like
strong human beings despite their silly clothes? And eyes as sharp as ours, and a flag?”

“Yes, we see that.”

“Yesterday we had not seen any of it. And I would be as happy as you if we never had, but unfortunately, now we will never be able to say we haven’t. If someone asks for them tomorrow, we will have to say it. And then we will also have to say, ‘They are dead.’ ”

So Keskarrah had to tell him once more, “I’m looking. What will come and ask for them?”

Bigfoot could not find another word for that. Only great Tucho itself beyond the split palisade logs seemed to have anything to say.

Keskarrah continued very quietly, “All right, but you see they want to hear nothing except the way of the lakes and rivers to the ice. North, north, we have already offered more than they want.”

Slowly Thick English, who really was their boss because he spoke without consulting anyone about anything, bent and whispered to Twospeaker, who in turn spoke to Bigfoot.

“This English John Franklin wants to know, I am supposed to say it to him, what you say to each other.”

“Of course.” Bigfoot looked at Keskarrah, but he refused to speak. “So-o-o,” Bigfoot decided carefully, “tell him if they will not walk, there are several ways to travel north on water. We are discussing which way is best.”

Keskarrah spoke out directly. “Tell them this. We have already explained the best way to go, and return.”

Twospeaker agreed, “I’ve explained that.”

“Good.” Keskarrah faced Thick English. “Now we need to
know something from him. We have heard that when Whites appear, People sometimes get strange illnesses — coughs, blisters, even burning or freezing from inside. We don’t know what to do with White illness, so we ask him, which of you is the one who can keep a person from dying?”

Twospeaker stared. “Do I ask that?” he said finally.