A Discovery of Strangers Read online

  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.

  Bigfoot said, studying those stiff Whites one by one, “Not one of them looks as if he could say that.”

  But Keskarrah had decided. “I’ve never heard anyone say such words myself, but when I saw these Whites coming I dreamed of sickness like lice crawling all over, it was coming with them, but also that one of them could keep a person from dying whenever he was there. So, will one of them dare to say he can do that?”

  “All right,” Bigfoot said. “Ask it.”

  Later, when they have almost forgotten Keskarrah’s question, it will be Twospeaker who explains to Greenstockings what the other young man’s name means, the very short, pretty one with hair down both sides of his face. Boy English at first does not seem to know how to draw his name in the air, and when he gets hold of her hand at last he will do almost everything else with it except that. His name is easier to say than Hood’s, and she laughs aloud because “Back” is right: his short back is much stronger than slender Hood’s. And though when she stands beside him she can look completely over his head, he is so compactly confident and without concern that he takes her between his hands and lifts her high (no one ever sees him touch the huge double packs and massive canoes the paddle-slaves walk under day after day, carrying These English over the rock and muskeg portages to the hill above Winter Lake, where they start chopping down trees) — Back lifts her so easily over his curly head that she is forced to know, as with every man she has ever met, the power of his name: “George Back!”

  But with Back she can quickly reach up, higher than his short muscled arms, and grasp two beams of the piled logs the Whites foolishly imagine will keep them warm in winter, and swing herself out of his grasp before he can finish shouting “…ack!” and kick him hard in the ribs. By then she will know where those two young English keep their names (which is dangerous), and where her mother keeps hers (which has never been dangerous for her, though it may become that), but her feet wrapped in supple moccasins are much too soft for kicking anyone memorably. Back’s busy hands grapple for her again, tug her down against himself more proud than ever, and it is then she feels him shift hard between her thighs like every man always has, hard bone.

  Birdseye long ago taught her how to knead leather soft and pale as a baby’s face, softer even than Robert Hood’s, and certainly softer than Back’s. They will be wringing leather in the sunlight outside their lodge between what the Whites will call Winter and Roundrock lakes, the great trees along the esker crashing to the ground with the noise of steel axes, when her mother says to her:

  “If you laugh with both of them, I think one will get killed.”

  “Whites don’t fight over women.”

  “U-u-u-ugh!” Birdseye snorts. “And nothing hangs between their legs either.”

  Greenstockings bursts out laughing. “It doesn’t just hang!”

  Birdseye lifts her head quickly from the dripping leather. She rarely looks up now, because she wants to spare everyone the necessary recognition of seeing her. And Keskarrah has found no dream, nor has anyone else Who Knows Something a Little, who could divine what is happening to her beautiful face: what Eater is slowly, imperceptibly, eating her face away.

  As winter approaches, pain draws her face more tightly into the emptiness where her cheek and part of her nose were at the beginning of summer. Soon white bone may be visible there, and Greenstockings fears her mother will hang a soft leather below her eyes, dreads that she will never be able to touch her mother’s mouth again. The Eater is eating towards her lips.

  Birdseye offers, allows Greenstockings one glance, then bends quickly, spits between her fingers on the leather as she kneads pounded caribou brain into it. Once those hands fondled Greenstockings until she cried in ecstasy, cried in ways the four men who have already fought and nearly killed themselves over her cannot find anywhere in the brief duration of their manly imaginations. Often it seems to her that men’s hands are fit only to clutch knives, to claw at clubs and lances, to strip hide or flesh from dead bones, to knot into fists, perhaps — now — to grope and jerk at triggers. Broadface’s left hand has become two strips of talon, the rest torn away when the gun a trader was teaching him how to shoot exploded. What can a person fondle with such a split stick for a hand, even if he’s strong enough to carry a grizzly? No woman weighs as much as a bear anyway, nor needs such force if she wants to be lifted, or entered. Doing it that way is simply a story to be remembered; to be told and resmelled by other men, bragging.

  Birdseye says, “Oh, he’s shown you that much, has he?” the faintest breath of sarcasm in her voice, and then suddenly they are both laughing. So loudly that the other women stream about from their fires, smiling and chuckling already, crowding nearer for what they can hear.

  “He has a black stick for drawing,” Greenstockings tells them, “Boy English, his name is ‘Back’ and he can draw his own short back in one line so fast you can see it exactly, the way it bends, and then he curls the bottom end of it up, pointing down at himself, he’s so proud, hooked up as he draws it almost as long!”

  The women are all shouting with laughter, some behind their hands in incredulity but others open-mouthed with anticipation. For how can one know how These English will behave, so safely far from whatever land they have left that they may do anything at all as long as another English isn’t looking; or what they carry in those strange clothes, doubled up perhaps or folded in pleats, and doubtless Greenstockings will be the first to find out, if she wants to. Boy English will keep pretending in his towering black officer’s hat, which makes him almost as tall as the others, will co
ntinue to stride between their lodges, point everywhere imperially, order voyageurs to chop down that tree, flatten that log for the ridgepole, set that upright into place, may pretend for ever to own the whole world when his boss, Thick English, is somewhere else; but these women will never again see him without laughter flickering naked behind their eyes. And they offer Greenstockings whatever bits of advice or malice they please, especially since many of them know that, before she went with Broadface, their own men sharpened their knives to try to get the frightening power of her sixteen-year-old beauty into their lodge. If that happened, they themselves would become second wives, or third, and some of them might be happy for that too — after all, what woman wants to carry alone the weight of one man’s clutching, violent necessity for attention? — so at this moment they all laugh with her:

  “Such a pretty-bone Boy English!”

  “You’re too young for all that pretty boy!”

  “He’s dreaming he’s a bear!”

  “Back, back, bone of a back!”

  Birdseye says, “But that is his name, isn’t it?”

  And her tone, as much as their knowledge of her ravaged face bent aside, silences them.

  “Yes, it is,” Angélique answers. She is a Person from south of Deninu, but her husband is Twospeaker, the mixed-blood Pierre St. Germain who speaks Tetsot’ine and French and Dogrib and English too; what he knows about Whites, Angélique knows as well. “Yes,” she says again, “that is really his name, right up the middle, and maybe the thin young one could draw his name out of his bone too.”

  They are all puzzled. “How could he do that?” someone asks.

  “In English his name can mean ‘cap’.”

  Someone else says quickly, “Then of course he could. Every man has a cap on his bone!”

  And they are laughing again, even louder because they are all laughing at the same dangly, miserable, hard thing about men, together, however it may delight or plague them.