A Discovery of Strangers Read online

  The small rift between calf and herd was all that mattered to the white wolf. She shifted her charge slightly, straight across the curve of the calf strained now beyond breathing for the fleeing herd, and on that line for one instant only she ran alongside him, stride upon stride, her jaws companionably gaping wide with his, and in that last second of speed they snapped into his nose, a flurry of wolf and caribou skidding, smashing over in the snow. Desperately the calf lunged to his feet, his nose-blood bursting over the wolf as he heaved her here, there, body spastic with terror, heaved her, heaved! but her teeth were clamped immovably, and then the brown male arrived and leaped up. With one gigantic bite to the base of the skull, he crushed the calf’s neck.

  Swiftly the other wolves arrived and circled the kill, their tongues lolling between the daggers of their teeth, panting clouds into air dripping silver under the livid moon. The caribou ran on, then gradually they slowed to a walk, and finally panted into great scraggly islands on the deepest northern reach of the lake. They were very tired now. It seemed the length and depth of the lake they had run was multiplied into their exhausted fear, here where moonlight was beginning to lift the great hump of Dogrib Rock up over the last edge of trees, the solitary erratics waiting along the skyline like relentless totems to guide them in their travel north into the open tundra, fifty or sixty or seventy running days north, into the constant light of their calving grounds, travelling, travelling.…

  The white wolf tore the calf’s throat open, and with her eyes washed by spraying blood dug in, through, to the sweet tongue. The silver male charged up, growling, and as always the others fell back before him; he sprang to the calf’s belly and the six wolves, circling, waited for him to rip it open and devour the liver as was his right. But he merely growled again, deeper. And then, when they looked at him in mild surprise, they noticed a split of red seeping along his long jaw. Though he had not yet touched the bloody head, his mouth was already full of blood.

  The three-tined cow did not search for the calf for which she had once, necessarily, submitted to a conjunction with a momentary bull, and then borne and birthed and nurtured and guarded perpetually for ten months; which had lain so long in the lee of her body and so often run with her in the desperate, totally terrified strength of the hunted. For those ten months it had reached into the deepest call of her every bone, blood, muscle; now she knew that if it was not beside her soon, it never would be again.

  She eased herself down, front and back, into her hollow of welcome snow. With each moment she knew her name, if she had one, was becoming Dámbé? Elchánile; but when her travel in her present direction ended it might very well be? Elyáske again. At least for a time. And if she and her newborn calf, then, survive the coming intermittent blizzards, and mosquitoes, and hordes of botflies, and swift river crossings, and wide summer lakes and storms, and the invidious treachery of a stone splitting a running hoof — as she has for this moment survived the wolves again — she knows one of them may once again be reborn a child, and in that less fleeting incarnation gradually grow once more into this dream of being what she is now, resting, sleeping the profound safety, as deep as it is fleeting, of all continually hunted animals. Alive on the sheltering ice.

  The silver wolf may live into and perhaps even through the perpetual light of summer; and when tundra light again shortens towards winter darkness he may well discover the helpless trail of the few Whites he has ignored until now. It may be he will follow them, and find them where they collapse one after the other, and gradually creep close; may gouge and gnaw and tear from each whatever he can before their corpses harden into impossiblity for the rotting lower half of his jaw, which the brown male did not rip away when he supplanted him.

  A tattered rack of once-great bones, the silver wolf will recognize his death in that straggle of frozen meat briefly marking the tundra, emaciated meat of no interest to his powerful offspring. For they will be travelling somewhere with caribou, nowhere near him then, and he will not be thinking of them. Nor will the other animals who follow and feed quite fearlessly about him: the white and silver and red arctic foxes, or migrating gulls, or mice, or golden eagles, or lemmings or ground squirrels, or even the grizzly and vicious wolverine whom he must avoid by crawling away as he can. Or the great ravens, flying the stark black message of their perfect bodies over the unrelenting land.

  MIDSHIPMAN ROBERT HOOD

  Tuesday July 18th 1820 Fort Chipewyan

  Despite the discouraging situation, though not hopeless, we were determined on pushing forwards. Till today we were fully occupied in assembling provisions. The gentlemen of the trading posts contributed what was in their power to assist us, and our voyageurs, if not contented, were silent, for they saw that solicitation could not add to our store; an uncommon exertion of thought for Canadians.

  Mr. Franklin proposed that the Expedition proceed northward to Fort Providence and the Yellowknife Indians with all speed and that, besides the four English officers, it consist of three canoes and twenty Canadians, including two half-breed interpreters. Three of our four English sailors were deterred from coming with us by the dread of famine and fatigue which they said we were doomed to encounter. Only John Hepburn remained with us as servant, consigned alone to the society of foreigners, whose language he could not speak; his constancy absolved his country from the disgrace attached to it by the others.

  2

  INTO A NORTHERN BLINDNESS OF NAMES

  The lake they named after her, later, was no more than an infinitesimal detail in their grand attempt to rename the entire country. It is, however, questionable whether the English naval officers ever actually saw Greenstockings Lake. In their first coming, going north, they were portaged around it by the Canadian voyageurs who had already carried them all those months of labour from Hudson Bay, and when those who were still alive appeared again out of the north fifteen months later, they were quite incapable of seeing anything at all. Except perhaps their own frozen feet blundering along the track the Tetsot’ine hunters tramped down in front of them.

  “I laughed to myself when I first saw their boss, Thick English,” Greenstockings’ father, Keskarrah, said much later, his relentless memory circling once more around that first and then that second moment of unforgettable English arrivals. “When he explained to us that it was for our benefit they had come to find what was in our land, I should have laughed again. Louder.”

  It may be that when the naval officers returned at last from their “discovery excursion” to the northern ice, trying so desperately to leave a second time, they did notice the snowshoes they had been given, which had been tied onto their feet to hold them safely upon the driven snow. Certainly they must sometimes have been aware of the muscled Yellowknife (as they named the Tetsot’ine) arms that supported them, kept them from collapsing on the wind-ridged surface of the (to them) nameless lake.

  Green stockings … Greenstockings. And the deeply bitter irony of Robert Hood no longer being there. Who knew her best. No longer dragging his bent body like a question mark across ice and tundra after them.

  By that time there were, of course, no voyageurs left to carry the English anywhere. But a lake under their feet would have been at least a more or less level bit of that unending snow that lay between them and Yellowknife food in a land their numbers on squared paper had not yet discovered to be twenty-six times the size of England, though they were beginning to suspect such a horror. The Ghost River, as white with ice in winter as with rapids in summer, was frozen more or less solid, but it led the wrong way, west. Nevertheless, the Yellowknife River they had first travelled and named lay somewhere south, and they knew it must offer a track past the Indians, back to the small but certain White safety of Fort Providence; though they also knew they must heave their bodies — what was left of them — somehow — around or over the river’s devastating rapids. They had once, o so long, an eternity of fifteen months ago, seen each eddy and rock vista from the picturesque, foaming immediacy of a Ca
nadian canoe, but now, to their emaciated eyes in the November glare of noon, even the most memorable, seductive rapid was unrecognizable under these lurking gurgles, these chuckles of thick, slipping swiftness, this ice like smashed teeth.

  “The lake and river ice thundered cold at them the whole year they were carried to us.” Keskarrah gestured to the passing wind. “Again and again. How much more did These English have to be told?”

  It seemed they had heard only their own telling, as told to themselves. And the names they had vied, with such gentlemanly camaraderie, to give each interlaced lake and rapid that mosquito-driven summer, were lost in their staggering memories, all quite lost, with their lost, starving notebooks. Boudelkell and The Rat and Crookedfoot lakes somewhere flowed into Greenstockings Lake, itself a strip of water so narrow it might have been drawn into rock by the edge of a casual hand. Those three lakes were also named much later, after the Yellowknife hunters they were leaning on, who had walked north four days dragging two sleds of dried meat and fat and one of furs when all These English were already more or less dead. Only three of them needed meat by then, in their ruined shelter of logs and mud — the three who had not tried to kill each other because of Greenstockings.

  Of course, Greenstockings is not her name either, that summer of first arrival. For years the childhood memory of the oldest Tetsot’ine has told stories about Whites, and the farthest northern arm of their great lake Tucho has occasionally fumbled such a blanched body out onto its black sand. Indeed, well beyond the story memories of living grandmothers, it is told that children saw strange wood-chips dancing on the Desnede River, thin, curled chips that could not have been cut by a stone or copper axe. So sometimes, deep in the sleepy winter around warm fires, the elders tell the story of Jumping Marten, a woman so desirable she was stolen by enemies from the east. But she was too wise for any man to hold, she escaped and travelled alone, as only a woman can, until she found Stone House Whites far away, and she was the one who brought an iron axe and a needle and tea and a small kettle to the Tetsot’ine for the first time. Good things, just a few, very good for living.

  And then, even more quietly, they tell of the one White who came walking alone one summer from the east, guided by Matonabbee (who had enough wives for them both), and who wandered about making those tiny marks on paper too, and then strangely went walking back towards the east again, still travelling alone.

  And sometimes, in the darkest winter, Keskarrah will recall aloud the story all the Dene nations around them know but rarely speak, of how Ageenah guided the second solitary White down the great river Dehcho. Many of the Dene nations saw him, and named him Long Neck, his bandy legs and ridiculous clothes, and saw how he ate thick meat four times a day but fed his paddle-slaves nothing but fish no bigger than a person’s hand. He made them paddle him north fast, and then immediately turn around and paddle him back south again, up Dehcho, even harder — as if something truly terrifying had met him at the edge of the Everlasting Ice, and he knew it had started to chase him for the rest of his life.

  But now, in the regular cycle of Tetsot’ine seasons, These English have arrived, and the youngest person will discover that they and their paddle-slaves stepping so easily out of three huge birchbark canoes are impossible to forget. It will seem to them, later, that at one time they needed to think only of People, and of animals and coming weather, and food, and the prevention and curing of possible illness: that was the world of their land and they lived it. But suddenly a fireball smashed through the sky: crash! — here are Whites! Now! And immediately the world is always on fire with something else, something they have never thought about or had to do before; always, it seems, burning out of its centre and rushing, destroying itself towards all possible edges. Strangely, for ever, different.

  It was Birdseye who said, much later, “I think this story may be the melting mountain again. The mountain that burst open and People had to run as far and as fast as they could to escape the ground boiling under their feet, or rocks falling from the sky. After that, everyone spoke different languages too.”

  Perhaps that was why she said nothing when These English called her daughter “Greenstockings” for the first time, and they found out what that meant. Somehow then Greenstockings’ real name vanished from every memory, even it seemed from Birdseye, who bore her and named her first.

  And Birdseye stands beside her when these paddle-slaves first stroke the lead canoe in to shore with a great, driving shout. They are standing side by side where they have never come before, on the black-sand edge of Tucho, watching the lake in its eternal heave and lift. The enormous canoe rams ashore below the crooked palisade of the new company trading post, but the lake takes it back, and then heaves it forwards again, and settles. So that all Tetsot’ine see Thick English, in his blue and gold-braided coat, place his tall boot on the black sand first.

  “Look there,” Birdseye says, with fear. “Look.”

  Greenstockings looks. Unable then to ask her mother what she sees. But her father is afraid of nothing. Keskarrah has told her out loud, grinning and rubbing his finger across his teeth, that even though he is so old only worn stumps stick out of his gums, he has never yet seen the Supreme One everyone believes is everywhere around them. “It is strange,” he has said to her sometimes, staring up at the stars, or at sundogs, “that living so long, I still cannot meet anyone who understands this as clearly as I. I have met all the animals, I think, and I know many stories from so long ago, when animals talked like People. Some of those stories are mine, so I can tell them too. And I even met that first lonely White Walker, travelling with his worn-out feet, I saw him when I was a small boy. But I have never seen the Soul Everywhere. Everybody talks so much, but no one can ever say they have seen — anything.”

  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 n
orth 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.”