A Discovery of Strangers (9 page)

And then the island, whose low mound none of the officers had discerned against the northern shore, came into existence for them very suddenly.

It was not sight, but a distant sound above the swing of paddles that first made them aware of it. Sound they could not order, a tintinnabulation of insanities. Then, as they continued to stare over the glacial water, they could decipher motion … some things being thrown up, or leaping. Shapes skipping erratically against the sky, like sandflies on water, but which they gradually recognized to be human disportment in the midst of the water or … ah yes, that was the hump of an island: on a strip of beach people flailing, it must be their Indians since no one else could be here. They were jumping wildly about on a small island. Shrieking?

Back shouted from the lead canoe, “Carnival, sir! They’ve discovered an eternal spring — of rum!”

But Lieutenant Franklin did not answer him. The voyageurs’ morning song had died in their throats, their broken rhythm reflecting what emerged clearly now as wailing, as aboriginal dirge, fraying out along the line of distant rock that separated the water from the immense sky.

In the last canoe, Robert Hood had been trying all morning to capture once more, on a small piece of paper, a coherent quadrant of the world through which he was being carried. But even after an exhausting year of continuously widening vistas, he was tempted to look sideways, tugged towards a periphery in
the corner of his eye that, when he yielded, was still never there. Riding motionless in the canoe on this usual lake, he felt his body slowly tighten, twist; as if it were forming into a gradual spiral that might turn his head off at the neck. Like one of those pathetic little trees, enduring forever a relentless side wind so that it could only twist itself upwards year after year by eighth-of-an-inching; or like the owl in the story that turned its head in a circle, staring with intense fixity, trying to discover all around itself that perfect sphere of unbordered sameness and, at the moment of discovery that the continuous world was, nevertheless, not at all or anywhere ever the same, it had completed its own strangulation. A tree at the treeline … a headless owl.…

But his sketch must stop, must have frame!

He found he could concentrate on what appeared to be a wash of river falling into the northern shore of the lake. Separating two scraggly trees, which seemed too tall to be there. Or was it simply the perspectiveless distance over water that made them appear so? He had been betrayed by this intense light distortion before: he must be careful. But a tall tree on either side — that was still a possible frame, if he drew them foreground enough.

But he had drawn that so often! Scribbling in trees where none could exist; doing it now where they did seemed mere repetition … and then his eyes discovered that the falls, instead of falling down into spray, appeared to climb out of the bristle of brush, climb up into air above their surrounding rock — like a column of ice pasted against space and darkness. Amazing.

Nevertheless, beyond any deception of light the roar of the falls emerged distinctly, and then vanished on the lake wind. But the island sound wavered over it. Those were people, certainly
Yellowknives, twitching, spastic on that whaleback rock now clearly fruzzed with bushes. Hurling things that everywhere burst high in the black water.

“What is that?” Hood asked the translator, St. Germain, beside him.

“Somebody for sure dead.”

“Dead?”

The English officers could not in a lifetime have imagined such grief. That was what it was, though at first Doctor Richardson was convinced it must be a witches’ or (more likely) a devils’ sabbath, performed with typical native perversity in the glare of high noon rather than midnight. But it was Indian grief. A distant lake had taken two hunters, one of them Big-foot’s brother-in-law, the other his wife’s sister’s son, and as long as the two pillars of black smoke stood beyond the falls and the mound of Dogrib Rock to the north, they knew the distant lake had refused to give the bodies back for them to mourn over and then leave properly to the animals.

“Double smoke, two men,” St. Germain explained. “All their relations.”

From the island the smoke was now obvious enough to the officers, even against the clouds. But their minds were overwhelmed with bellows and weeping and screams so closely about them, with lodgepoles being broken and skins ripped, kettles crushed, axes splintered, dogs throats being slit and everything, any thing or animal that came to hand, smashed and torn and bleeding, being flung everywhere into the lake. The small island blazed with the necessity of destruction. The Yellowknives were attacking their canoes, breaking the very guns with which they were to hunt.

“Why are they doing this?” Lieutenant Franklin demanded of St. Germain.

“Dead,” he said stoically. “They cry, make themselves poor.”

Even Richardson felt suddenly afraid. “Will they destroy everything they have, that they must have to live?”

“Maybe. Sad, very big. Always cry, dead.”

Though required Empire authority might drive him to the threatened brink of execution, Lieutenant Franklin’s reverence for life would not allow him to kill so much as a mosquito; but here, under his very eyes, a boy was about to slash open a terrified dog. He scrambled ashore and seized the boy’s shoulder, shouting, and the boy wheeled around, might have disembowled him if St. Germain had not knocked up his arm.

“No! No!” the translator yelled. “Don’t grab — hide what you can — don’t grab ’em!”

Several reluctant voyageurs stepped from the canoes, seizing what possessions they could and piling them farther from the shore, higher on the island. Hepburn trudged up and began to assist as well. No Yellowknife protested or hindered them. Richardson led St. Germain from one man to the next, persuading them that they must stop smashing the guns, which, after all, he explained, had been given them by their Great Father in England, who would be very angry if his gifts were destroyed, even in deep grief. The men dropped the firearms but continued to tear at their clothes in the frigid air, wailing; their mouths gaping, insensible holes in their suddenly grotesque heads, their eyes untouchably vacant, stunned with sorrow.

“They seem thankful if we stop them, yes,” Lieutenant Franklin insisted, believing he understood something profound at last.

When the violence of their grief gradually eddied into a wailing dance, he ordered St. Germain to remain and guard what had been saved; the rest of the party must continue looking for the trees.

Richardson discovered that he had lost his notebook. St. Germain was pushing the rifles aside for him, looking for it, when Greywing came over the hump of the island dragging the slashed, sodden mass of her family’s lodgeskins. The lake had given it back, she told St. Germain, wide-eyed.

Richardson could have wept. The child stood with nothing but a scrap of leather over her shoulders, and he could not keep his eyes from her slender, sturdy legs, her tiny breasts, the innocent fold of her sex, hunched together in the fierce, cold sunlight off the lake. He turned quickly then, almost wishing it were possible for him to wail as they did, beating themselves into exhaustion and emptiness. A grief to end every known grief here in this ultimate barrenness of the world, an island so tiny he felt for a moment lost as in a vacant ship on an empty ocean.

Hood appeared lugging a half-smashed canoe up the rocks, his face running tears.

“They
want
us to save their things, we aren’t Yellowknives, we
can
save their things,” he gasped.

“They are so…” in all his English the doctor could not find a suitable word, “ … intemperate.…”

“But they’ll freeze, to death,” Hood insisted, as if his saying it were somehow a prevention. “Marooned on this bare rock!”

“Now, now.” Richardson shook himself into thinking reasonably. On this wailing island Hood’s emotion was clearly inappropriate, as was his own. “We know our duty. These people have mourned before, and they still live.”

“But they were hunting for us!”

“Now now,” Richardson said again, and took the useless husk of the canoe in hand. “They contracted to hunt for us, that cannot harm them.” The notebook was gone. Perhaps it too had, inadvertently of course, been thrown into the lake. He would make up certain details again from memory and the notes the other officers had kept, as far as that was possible. “Guard this canoe too,” he said to St. Germain, unnecessarily.

“They don’t leave,” the translator said. “Not yet, so quick.”

“How long will they remain and … grieve?”

“When they feel.”

“Guard the canoe too,” Richardson said again. “The children will certainly need every bit of shelter during the night.”

And after a short paddle, like a blessing poured out by their encounter with unimaginable grief, at the end of the lake where the Winter River (as they called it) drained west over rapids, they found Keskarrah’s forest. Exactly where, they recalled then, the old man had promised it would be. Inexplicably in these barrens a sudden island of huge intermittent spruce, as much as two feet thick and forty or fifty feet tall, rooted in the valleys and rims of muskegs and especially on the high sandy ridge of the esker that spread the river below them from Winter west to Roundrock lakes. Northeast beyond bare ridges loomed the dome of Dogrib Rock, indelibly shouldered in grey, and south across the river a massive erratic sat on a straight skyline of ridge as if balanced by primordial giants. Back shouted out, “Big Stone!” just before Hood, studying it in the evening light through the telescope, saw what he thought must be a tundra grizzly grazing moss across the slope below it. After the endless low marshes and rocks, the beauty of green vistas swirled like
fingers over hills — in the distance imaginably the English winter downs — was beyond his hopes.

Doctor Richardson returned from a quick wider survey and declared the situation most suitable: stream water, many large trees, the shelter of the esker against the northern winds and its dry, coarse sand for a foundation; also, a bit farther into the trees was an extrusion of excellent white clay (amazing in a land of moss and rock) for chinking between house logs. All that, and they were on a straight line between Dogrib Rock and the Big Stone, so that even without a compass, if they were within sight of either, they could not be lost. Altogether (Richardson getting as close to excitement as a scientific Scot might be permitted) quite the proper situation to be chosen for the proposed wintering residence.

Deeply grateful, Lieutenant Franklin performed Sunday evening divine service before a great fire, the voyageurs piling on torn spruce branches still snapping with summer sap.

‘Thus saith the Lord, heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is my place of rest? … For I know your works and your thoughts: it shall come to pass that I will gather all nations and tongues, and they shall come and see my glory. And ye I will send to the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame, and ye shall declare my glory among the Gentiles.’ This is the very Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Robert Hood stood steady, head bowed, hands folded. Behind his eyelids he saw the children again, a few of whom he
already recognized, on that rock in the windy lake, huddling under wet, torn hides supported by the splintered ribs of canoes, bent guns, sticks. In the pause after the responses he thought he could still hear that harrowing lament. Somewhere beyond the feather of wind in spruce, beyond the waterfall and the lake’s deepening darkness. It seemed to him he was praying — for a revelation. How could they have existed here ages before they were known of? How would he draw a sorrow he could barely hear?

The lament was still there next morning, faint but clear as the icy air, and it carried on the wind all day as they measured out and drove stakes for the three buildings of “Fort Enterprise” into the hard sand. George Back was everywhere, gashing timber to be hewn for the houses, pointing, issuing orders. But by noon the distant sound seemed to have drifted away. It was the Mohawk voyageur, Michel Terohaute, who pointed out that the doubled black smoke beyond Dogrib Rock had been replaced by a single white column: the bodies must have been returned.

Thus informed, Lieutenant Franklin issued orders to the voyageurs: at dawn on the morrow half-crews must be prepared to portage two canoes back into the lake and bring St. Germain and the poor wretches here from their island. In the meantime, Back and two men would cross to the south side of the river immediately and set a fire there with an open view over Winter Lake. That would be a signal to Bigfoot.

Hood asked, “What … will our fire signal mean? Sir?”

“That we are coming to help them off the island. And where we are,” Lieutenant Franklin said firmly. “Bigfoot understands smoke.”

Daylight was almost gone before any fire was discernible
across the river on the south slope; its delicate smoke vanished without trace into the heavy clouds. Nevertheless, the flames at last leaping up beside the Big Stone, against the wispy line of setting sun, flickered with beauty; and cheeriness, Hood thought. A further touch of humanity in this surround of water and bare rock without ending.

But the wind began to lift dangerously from the west. By midnight, when Back and the two men finally returned, the entire ridge south of the river was burning like an immense, long city.

“Sir, it spread in moss, and then various small brush caught fire,” Back reported, exhausted. “But there’s no problem, there’s no one there, it must consume itself, it has nowhere to go.”

The officers and men stared at Back, the length of flaming ridge reflected in their eyes. Finally Richardson said, very quietly, “It is fortunate the river is between the fire and our trees. I found a stump today that has been growing here for 306 years.”

They barely slept that night, the roar of fire magnified by the enraged wind hammering their tents. For three days they could see little; smoke enveloped them as if they had discovered a planet of flame, it was barely possible to chop down a marked tree, or to breathe. The voyageurs bringing up water from below reported that at times the fire, racing along the low trees of the opposite shore, threatened to jump the river. On the fourth night, however, a heavy rain mixed with driving sleet fell and by morning the fire was dead. All their magnificent green prospect south, Hood noted in his diary, had been metamorphosed into a hideous waste — smoking rock and bristling black poles.