A Discovery of Strangers Read online

  A DISCOVERY OF STRANGERS

  Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction

  The National Bestseller

  “Wiebe lives up to status of literary icon.… Wiebe has told a powerful story with passion and verve. He has written a haunting book, one worthy of the vast and desolate land, and the courageous people, white and Yellowknife, to which it pays homage.”

  The Gazette (Montreal)

  “Gripping … Wiebe has created a powerful, dreamlike narrative of a society profoundly shattered by the arrival of Europeans.… Fascinating.”

  The Toronto Star

  “A major work of art … Wiebe provides some of the most evocative prose yet about the Canadian North.”

  Maclean’s

  “Beautiful … fascinating … [A Discovery of Strangers is] a pleasure of the first order.”

  Josef Skvorecky

  “On a rich and broad canvas, Wiebe paints his characters with penetrating insight.… This memorable novel will add to the author’s reputation as one of Canada’s most gifted writers — peerless delineator of his country’s history and soul.”

  The Canadian Jewish News

  “[A] poetically charged work that resonates long after the book is closed.”

  The Edmonton Journal

  “Wiebe is able to be both Faulkner and Balzac.… [He] can construct scenes of painstaking detail and psychological insight.… Exciting and unpredictable … vintage Wiebe.”

  Books in Canada

  ALSO BY RUDY WIEBE

  Fiction

  Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962)

  First and Vital Candle (1966)

  The Blue Mountains of China (1970)

  The Temptations of Big Bear (1973)

  Where Is the Voice Coming From? (1974)

  The Scorched-Wood People (1977)

  Alberta/A Celebration (1979)

  The Mad Trapper (1980)

  The Angel of the Tar Sands (1982)

  My Lovely Enemy (1983)

  Chinook Christmas (1992)

  River of Stone: Fictions and Memories (1995)

  Sweeter Than All the World (2001)

  Non-Fiction

  A Voice in the Land (ed. by W. J. Keith) (1981)

  War in the West: Voices of the 1885 Rebellion (with Bob Beal) (1985)

  Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (1989)

  Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (with Yvonne Johnson) (1998)

  Drama

  Far as the Eye Can See (with Theatre Passe Muraille) (1977)

  Rudy Wiebe, widely published internationally and winner of numerous awards, including two Governor General’s Awards, is the author of nine novels, four short-story collections, three books of essays and Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, which he co-authored with Yvonne Johnson. Rudy Wiebe is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and lives in Edmonton.

  VINTAGE BOOKS CANADA EDITION, 1995

  Copyright © 1994 by Jackpine House Ltd.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada in 1995 by Vintage Books, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. First published in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada in 1994. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Wiebe, Rudy, 1934–

  A discovery of strangers

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36714-3

  1. Indians of North America - First contact with Europeans - Fiction.

  2. Franklin, John, Sir, 1786 - 1847 - Fiction.

  3. Arctic regions - Discovery and exploration - British - Fiction.

  4. Northwest Passage - Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS8545.I38D57 1995 C813′.54 C94-932384-5

  PR9199.3.W54D57 1995

  Detail from a painting by Toni Onley, Untitled, 1958

  From the collection of Jessica and Percy Waxer

  v3.1

  Strangely I heard a stranger say,

  I am with you.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Prefatory Note

  The dated selections between chapters are quoted (some with minor rearrangements) from the journals kept by Robert Hood (1797—1821) and John Richardson (1787—1865) during the first Franklin overland expedition (1819-1822) to the Arctic coast of what is today Canada.

  A DISCOVERY OF STRANGERS

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Chapter 1 The Animals In This Country

  Chapter 2 Into a Northern Blindness of Names

  Chapter 3 Midshipman George Back

  Chapter 4 Snowshoes

  Chapter 5 Seaman John Hepburn

  Chapter 6 Momentary Mercies of the Bear

  Chapter 7 Entering Exhaustion

  Chapter 8 Stolen Woman

  Chapter 9 Geese

  Chapter 10 Offering Strange Fire

  Chapter 11 Out of the Lake

  Chapter 12 Eating Starvation

  Chapter 13 The Split-footed Caribou

  Acknowledgements

  1

  THE ANIMALS IN THIS COUNTRY

  The land is so long, and the people travelling in it so few, the curious animals barely notice them from one lifetime to the next. The human beings whose name is Tetsot’ine live here with great care, their feet travelling year after year those paths where the animals can easily avoid them if they want to, or follow, or circle back ahead to watch them with little danger. Therefore, when the first one or two Whites appeared in this country, an animal would have had to search for four lifetimes to find them being paddled about, or walking, or bent and staggering, somewhere on the inexorable land.

  About that time some of the animals did begin to hear strange noises, bits of shriek and hammer above the wavering roar of rapids or the steady flagellation of wind. These were strangers, so different, so blatantly loud the caribou themselves could not help hearing them long before they needed to be smelled, and some animals drifted around to see what made the trees in one place scream and smash that way, the rocks clang. They noticed creatures that looked like humans standing motionless here and there, abruptly pointing and shrieking, pounding! pounding! scuttling about all day and sometimes at night as well, when tendrils of bush along the river might spring up suddenly into terrifying flame. And the animals understood then that such brutal hiss and clangour must bring on a winter even colder than usual.

  And shortly after, when wind hammered the snow hard as folded rock under the thickest trees, and growing ice choked the rapids into silence, they knew that of course they had been right. Then an erratic cracking open, or a tree splitting, could be heard so far it seemed they were alert to every sound happening anywhere in the world, and the racket these strange human beings made in one place mattered nothing at all. The animals simply moved away into their necessary silence, travelling where they pleased, as they always had inside that clenched fist of the long darkness, their powerful feathered, furred bodies as light as flecks of ice sifting over snow, as light and quick as breathing.

  But throughout the dark weight of midwinter, with moss and lichens always harder to smell and paw from under the crusted snow, all the caribou knew that the sun would certainly return again. And eventually it did; its rim grew slowly day by day up out of darkness into red brilliance, until finally the cows and calves recognized themselves together as they always were, in the whole giant ball of it shimmering through ice fog, round and complete again on the distant edge of the sky. The cows lay in their hollows of snow on a drifted lake, their calves from the previous spring sheltered against their backs out of the wind. The
ir blunt, furry noses lifted from the angles of their folded legs, their nostrils opened to the burning air: it was sharp as ice, gentle with all the smells they recognized, arctic and safe. Lying safe, alert in this instant of rest, they were reassured that when that blazing sun stands three times its height over the glazed levels of this lake, they will feel the restlessness of their young grow heavier within them. And then they will move again into their continual travel.

  Gradually at first, then more steadily, like driftwood discovering a momentary current, hesitating into daily eddies of moss or crusted erratics but leaning more certainly down into motion along this contorted river, or this lakeshore; easily avoiding the noisy, devastated esker between Roundrock and Winter lakes and their connecting tributary streams. Seeking steadily north. From every direction more and more of them will drift together, thousands and tens of thousands drawn together by the lengthening light into the worn paths of their necessary journey, an immense dark river of life flowing north to the ocean, to the calving grounds where they know themselves to have been born.

  The caribou cow with three tines on each of her antlers lay curled, bedded and at momentary rest with her calf in the lee of her body. She had once been a woman; in fact, she has already been born a woman twice. But she has never liked that very much, and each time she is born that way she lives human only until her dreams are strong enough to call her innumerable caribou family, and they come for her. One morning people will awaken, and their child is gone. They search everywhere to find her, and finally notice the two pointed tracks that come to their lodge in the hard travelling snow, and the three tracks that leave. Then the Tetsot’ine — Those Who Know Something a Little — understand what has happened.

  “We have lost another good child to the caribou,” they begin to wail. “She will never play and make a fire with us, or dance, or sew clothes and bear strong children, or comfort us when we are hungry and sick. No-o-o-o, oh no, no. We will never see that good child again.”

  And they will, of course, be right. If the three-tined cow with her calf alive beside her had had a name, it would have been? Elyáske. All the animals knew this, but they didn’t think about that.

  The silver wolf who lived with the caribou had never been anything but a wolf, and he would have defied any animal, and that included the seven members of his pack, to know his name. However, sometimes when the strands of their twilight howl strayed alone and united again over the long evening hills, or his voice deepened into that longer warning other males could only hear and avoid, the silver wolf remembered himself as roaming alone, a presence of untouchable enigma between the eskers and the ocean, an apparition so gigantic that people are like mosquitoes to him, trifles to swat and eat whatever tasty parts he deigns to tear out of them. But lives best in memory; he cannot see very well, nor hear, and he hunts alone mostly by smell, so the silver wolf liked being what he is now better, though he was only a little longer than a human sleeping, or possibly collapsed in the snow. He liked the skill and nerve of having to be precisely careful. He could run so swiftly that the opening moss was far too slow to swallow him, he could see an eyelid flicker and hear a caribou calf’s heart beat steady and unaware in the shelter of its mother, the folds of rocks now hid him silent as breath. And he could still smell anything he sniffed after, drawing winter air like bloody slivers into his deliberating nose. Above all, he liked the female wolf who hunted beside him.

  It was that female, white as a numinous drift, who turned left to lie in wait when the silver male led their hunting pack out of the brush above the falls and onto Lastfire Lake. She had played with him below the falls all afternoon, stretching languidly near him, urinating to give him something to sniff and claw over with snow, stiff-legged, and bumping into him and dancing away and bumping until they licked each other’s laughing faces, rolling over and under each other, their teeth gleaming like icicles. All afternoon the other six wolves lay easily about on the snow and watched them play, especially the heavy brown male who occasionally seemed to be a little too close, and the silver wolf would whirl on him, forcing him to creep back, crouch and fawn, even to roll over on his back with paws helpless in the air, pleading open-mouthed, throat vulnerable, like any puppy. When the white wolf finally permitted the silver male to mount her, the brown wolf sank down with his long, sharp head along his paws, watching them intensely.

  And for a time the two alpha wolves were joined together, were one great doubled animal whose every hair bristled red in the level blazing light; whose twin heads pointed in opposite directions, aimed still and alert towards whatever might materialize or threaten them from anywhere within the completed circle of the world.

  In the sinking light the caribou cow uncovered their afternoon food along a tilted esker, between erratics and the last dwarves of the treeline. Her yearling calf crowded down into the craters she dug, so tightly against her that sometimes he tore away from her teeth and lips the crusted lichen she unerringly smelled under the snow. As he had done all winter, his body filling out powerfully into the length of his legs, into his muscled endurance. He was a thick, solid warmth now, holding tight against her, and sometimes he thrust his head up between her hind legs, nosing for the comfort of her teats, but she bumped him away. The sunlight against the hillside was threaded occasionally with a whiff of warmth, and as the light burned lower behind the southern hills they slipped into the communal drift of cows and calves all about them, down the deep trails in snow onto the ice of Lastfire Lake. They felt the thick ice boom and crack, splitting in black branches away before them as the air grew colder. The undulating limit of horizon all around them, the hump and hollow of island and hill and lake and the long eskers, and the southern sky burning from crimson to thick red down into the slow, sheltering twilight.

  They heard the wolves then begin to call and answer in their evening howl — there where the water slipped from under the ice, and smashed down into the steaming falls that thickened the willows and birch and spruce and shattered rocks and stones with perpetual ice. The wolves were always with them, around them everywhere like air, wherever they folded their legs and eased themselves into an instant of rest; that wolfsong had haunted them since they’d slept curled in their mothers’ bellies, and when they jolted into air, and awoke, it lay weeping over them and remained still their eternal ruminating lullaby.

  The cow had bedded at the edge of the herd which spread through its labyrinthine tracks upon the lake. Her square and triangular teeth ground the swallowed lichen rhythmically into cud as she waited. The day was closing, but it was not complete, not yet. She had only to wait while those interlacing howls sang, shivered through her and faded against the dying light, and rose again. She understood their every shift and whisper, the high yowls of the younger wolves, the deeper call of those huge mouths lifted open somewhere below the horizon, closing and opening upwards into a sky of blazing teeth. She lay replete, her mouth and stomach gurgling, while the heat of her blood beat as one with the unborn calf she carried soft and safely hidden, beat to the edges of her body, to the tips of her hoofs, in the cold that cradled her. She watched the bright bowl of sky tighten over her, the lethal edge of its darkness seeping upwards. Her thick tongue, powerful and sweet, licked into one opened nostril and then the other. There was still only the smell of themselves, strong as a vision of the immense renewed herd they will soon be, spread like grey moss over tundra in the constant light of coming summer. She waited.

  And saw movement flicker where the edge of mist slid into the rumble of water. Instantly she stopped chewing, lunged to her feet, staring hard to be certain, for the air in her flared nostrils remained clean and without warning. Her yearling and the others lying nearby scrambled up at her motion, and so they all together recognized the silent wolves at the same moment: seven of them fanning out, coming on, the huge silver male they knew so well at the centre, very nearly invisible between the grey hills and the lake just before the rising of the moon.

  The cows now s
tanding with their yearling calves watched, heads poised and alert, all knowing the exact distance they would need. A few urinated nervously, some cocked one hind leg to the side, the position of alarm, and a ripple of others rising swiftly flowed around the curve in which they lay bedded. Breath snored here and there, the cold, rigid air, still treacherously clean, so confident in all their powerful chests. But the seven wolves were coming on faster now, the widening fan of them loping over the hard drifts, and then in one sudden simultaneous motion, they charged.

  Instantly the caribou along the edge nearest the charge exploded into flying snow. And their flight spread like a quick river bursting thick and strong into the herd, and there was really no more danger than the continual community of apprehension that was their entire life; they knew they could outrun any wolf, the tight, hot closeness of their boned bodies beginning to stretch every intricacy of muscle into familiar speed, all their perfect hoofs reaching, gripping and hurling their bodies away over snow or swept ice, barely touching in their immense communal vision of safety for ever awaiting them over the deepest waters of lakes, always there at the spooned tips of their united, infallible hoofs.

  In that burst of dark animals like land flooding over the frozen lake, the silver wolf ran closest to the three-tined cow. Her calf was well ahead of her, running as strongly as she, and they were running as they had so often run all their lives, it was their only and continuing life and there was no particular danger for one or for the other. Until, from the sidelong treachery of a drift, the white wolf lying there in wait, charged them.

  For that moment of angle she was faster than any caribou, even as they all whirled aside as if the lake had opened beneath them and ripped wide their flowing forest of bodies, and still it would seem they remained that one essential lunge beyond danger. The calf turned a trifle slowly, turned a hesitation too wide, and in that beat of burst apprehension the cow’s concentration staggered and the silver wolf was directly behind her, her powerful hind leg stretched far back in the power-thrust of her bend towards the open lake, and he lunged for that tendon and the granite edge of her great shovel-hoof flashed up against his counter-rhythm, touched him, just barely touched him like the flicker of lightning from a storm already past, and he missed the one grip he needed all his life, the one grip he had never missed before, and his lower jaw cracked.