A Discovery of Strangers Read online

  “No.” Angélique speaks so softly a moment passes before they know it. “No, they don’t. Some Whites don’t.”

  They all stare at her. Angélique continues, “My man says sometimes Whites don’t have any cap there … just nothing at all. No one has seen These English yet, they always go behind something to piss, but some Whites, he says, because they think they’ll be stronger then, they cut that cap off.”

  Into their stunned silence Birdseye says, head bent to her squishing, oozing leather, “Or it may be eaten … off.”

  Everyone seems to stop breathing. Into their play of words about Whites has crept the simple and continually unfathomable burden women must carry — all men. For the strangers clearly are men; Greenstockings at least has felt it and Angélique also knows. Men. In each other’s eyes the women recognize the inescapable power and fear — sometimes joy, often brutality, even terror — that men forever carry about them like their cocks, limp or rigid, hanging somehow gently, possibly tender or abruptly lethal; which they bring to women as certain as the meat they hunt, offer them or thrust, even in their quietest moment at the flicker of a glance threaten to jerk out at them whether they would accept it or not: grab, ram, pound into them. Again and again, always, and leave with them as if it were a fleeting spasm; as if it were nothing more than something to forget and remember, and then shudder to watch out for again. And endure again; like passing sunshine and more black, pounding, bitter weather.

  Birdseye undoubtedly knows that her small words have grown behind their eyes to help them see this. But she does not look up; she is merely silent, working at their endless women’s labour. Slowly one by one the women leave, back to their necessary fires. Greenstockings picks up her scraper. Her younger sister, Greywing, helps her pull the stretching-frame with its bloody hide into the low, pale light of the curing sun. In a few days the sun will not give enough warmth to lure the night ice off the lake even by noon, though it will still darken, harden the fat layered on a hide.

  Greywing has returned from her solitary tent, where, for a full cycle of the moon, she has been initiated into womanhood, and can now for the first time begin to speak among women. “Does it matter,” she asks her sister tentatively, “what their names are? You’re with Broadface, won’t he just … kill them both anyway?”

  Greenstockings says nothing, so Angélique accepts her question. “English make knives, so I think they aren’t scared of them. Maybe not even guns. No one has ever seen a White die by a gun.”

  Greywing chuckles a little, to cover her own daring. “Broadface wouldn’t need a gun,” she says. “Maybe a rock — or the heavy claw that stupid gun gave him.”

  Birdseye murmurs, “I heard no one has ever seen an English die of sickness either, so if their … maybe … maybe.…”

  She is bent so low her forehead almost touches her muscling fingers, but she stops speaking. Greenstockings grimly forces the scraper down with her two hands; the only sound is the curved bone gnawing through fat, around a hole exploded big as a fist in what was once the deer’s belly, such massive holes torn by guns. Her skin remembers the length of those two young English through their stiff cloth, her own soft leather against her thigh, her belly: so different from each other, from anything she has ever felt with Broadface’s long black eyes and copper skin glistening over her, his bending bones flattening her until she loosens, opening gladly. And yet, strangely, always the lurking threat of explosion — no warning, the second before you sense he’s there, just smash! Her belly cramps.

  Angélique continues, “But Whites have never come with their own women, and they never fight for one. They just take whom they want.”

  When Greenstockings looks up, Angélique is also gone. Birdseye says to Greywing,

  “Perhaps there is still some water left for us in the river.”

  Greenstockings watches her sister lift the leather bucket. Her small shape bending, her smooth movement around and down the rocks curved to the whistling river below, beyond the trees, is like the rainbow fin of a grayling quick as a quiver of light in bright, clear water.

  “Thick English,” Birdseye says, “wants all our best hunters to kill animals for him. He says he will need more dead animals than anyone has ever counted.”

  “What do the hunters say?”

  “Bigfoot says they’ll hunt.”

  “Bigfoot?” Greenstockings cannot understand. “What? He says what we all say.”

  Within the shifting groups of Tetsot’ine for a time agreeing to live together, as necessity arises, one person decides finally where they will travel, where they will stop — but that implies nothing like boss. They have no word for “chief”, and Greenstockings is trying to think how one person could commit others to do something they might not want to do, or stop doing at some point: the way he would order a woman he could threaten or try to beat into obedience? Why would the men do it? They would just take their families and travel on the welcoming land to where others might be who would accept their living together. Perhaps all the men do want to do it now, just kill animals for Whites?

  And she feels a woman’s contempt for this illogical acquiescence, this feeble agreement of all accepting what a stranger wants of them. “Soon,” she sniffs, “Bigfoot will be so bigfooted even his youngest wife won’t listen to him!”

  But Birdseye will not laugh. “Whites have so many things. And you know men — if they could, all they would do is chase animals.”

  “Yes,” Greenstockings says, suddenly bitter. “So many, heavy things they already need twenty gigantic paddle-slaves to carry them, and more things we women and children will have to carry for them too. And what will it help us, all this extra carrying and all the animals our great hunters kill, so busy far away? Whatever meat they get, someone has to carry it here and cook it so These English and their slaves can eat first. If we do all that work, when will we have time to eat?”

  Birdseye says, still softly, “I think Thick English will hang another shiny medal around Bigfoot’s neck, over the first one, and then give the hunters more tea and then whisky, and when they wake up in the morning there will be more nets for fishing and more guns and more bullets and powder piled up in front of each lodge, and every man stepping through his door will be happy to kill more animals so far away he can barely see them, agree to.…”

  But her voice is falling away, and Greenstockings bursts out, “Things piled up! Is that what our men think should happen? My father too?”

  Birdseye does not raise her head from the leather that is twisting smoky water from her powerful hands. She says, “There are now twenty-five men here whom we have never seen before. They are very big and eat everything they can — and they all have to have clothes for the long darkness.”

  “Yes … and where are their women?” Greenstockings insists. “There are only three, and they belong to their slaves.”

  “Those three.…” Birdseye hesitates. “They may also be slaves to These English.”

  “Three women for twenty-five men!”

  Birdseye says, “I think English have so many things, they think every person is their slave.”

  Greenstockings looks at her mother, her scraper motionless.

  “You and I are their slaves?”

  “Keskarrah has said nothing.”

  “What will he say?”

  “If all the men agree, how can he.…”

  “He’s my father … he knows something a little.…”

  But Birdseye refuses to look up.

  “O yes.” Greenstockings can only whisper her rage to her mother, at what she realizes she has known since she first saw Thick English step ashore as if the world were rubbing its face into the sand under his feet — known but has tried to avoid thinking. “Yes! All our mighty men agree, listen to Thick English and they pile those things on us to carry. And they’ll kill all the animals, so many they’ll go away to avoid being killed, and we’ll have to drag what they kill here to our fires and skin them for These English and cu
t the meat into strips and smoke it and cook it and sew their winter clothes so they won’t freeze after we scrape and tan all those hides, these mighty English! Let them freeze stiff as cocks in their cloth!”

  Birdseye says nothing. She refuses; as though what Greenstockings has dared to utter — these incredible pointed words hissed into the coming-winter air, which are as strange in the mouth, or the ears, of a woman as anything These English have dragged into their country — had never been spoken.

  Greenstockings says, very softly, “We can go away.” And after a moment, “Broadface would come with me — if I went.…”

  But Birdseye is bent low, smoothing hide over her knee; she murmurs into the luminous leather even more softly, “Anger is always dangerous.” Her head and voice shift, a certain awareness of age. “What is it? What have you felt?”

  Greenstockings, frightened, tries to see her mother’s face. Only last winter her nose was as beautiful as Greywing walking, and she herself was so empty of knowing about Whites that it was not even necessary for her to dream of imagining their aggression. But now Birdseye will not let her avoid it.

  “What have you felt?” her mother insists more gently. “When you feel all over that head, those Snow Man arms and hands feeling you?”

  Greenstockings understands her mother has heard every word she has ever swallowed in her thoughts, Snow Man story or not; so she waits, hiding her anger again, scraping the hide steadily around the ragged emptiness of its bullet hole until her mother is ready to help her by continuing.

  They can wait for each other for days, wait for seasons and ages, since their work together will never be done as long as they live. Finally Greenstockings ventures, “Maybe … that sickness they always have is hiding … scared by our quick cold.…”

  “These English,” Birdseye says finally, “will not admit they can keep a person from dying, but it may be true. If they have brought sickness, it is hiding.” And then she adds, almost inaudibly, “Perhaps wherever their medicine man is, no one will die.”

  A tree is falling. Somewhere behind them, beyond the spruce-covered lodges of the People, along the sand and rock curve of esker that shelters them from the north wind, a tree falls. Its shriek, its quiet cry before it crashes, touching them like a motion in air, a whisper against the sharp, hard clang of steel they have been forced to hear for days, a new sound so brittle and ringing that sometimes when the wind turns away it slashes across the ear like the distant scream of a child. Even the eternal, gentle voice of the rapids coming out of Winter Lake is no longer reassuring. There is something Birdseye must be told.

  “They both want to make my picture,” Greenstockings whispers. “Draw it with their sticks on bark. Both of them.…”

  The fluid leather flows into stillness between Birdseye’s hands.

  Greenstockings is desperate to explain, quickly before her mother will speak. “It’s … really no different from looking in water, water makes pictures of us, all the time, you know it does.”

  Slowly the leather begins to ooze again. Birdseye says,

  “When you look away, the water picture is gone.”

  Greenstockings says swiftly into her hesitation, “If no one looks at them, perhaps the pictures they make aren’t there either.”

  “I … I don’t think so. With water often you have to see deeper than you want to. But the way These English make a picture … shows more … and less.…” Birdseye pauses, breathing. “Sometimes I think everything has become different. Sound, and taste, different.”

  The wind eddies between them, a heavy crash of English axes rolls over them from among the last great trees. Perhaps soon the trees that have always welcomed the People here to the edge of the tundra will all be dead too. Killed by These English. Laid out and skinned side by side, piled up on one another into square naked corners, trying to keep winter from cutting between them, their brown, dried blood sticking them together into walls wherever they touch.

  Greenstockings whispers to her mother: “If one of them can draw what he wants, maybe their medicine man will do what you want.”

  And there is Keskarrah, coming towards their outdoor fire. He is old and yet she sees that he walks straight, straighter than anyone except Hood. What strange names they have — Hood — Back — no short back or red hood, just one short word to name them. As if they had no stories in them.

  “…ooo … d,” she practises again. If she can say it right, he will do it. Safely. “…o-o-o-o-d.”

  Keskarrah speaks beside her. “I’ve found which English it is. The one with the yellow bag he never lets anyone carry, and he’s named after the sun. This paddler who is also a Person, Michel, he told me.”

  Greenstockings knew it could be neither Hood nor Back. The dark paddler is standing behind her father, the Mohawk from so many rivers away. Michel. He is taller than Hood, and almost twice as broad as Keskarrah. The level sunlight cuts past him, half his face brilliant like a thin, steel knife as he stares at her.

  Keskarrah says, “Michel says that one’s strong name is Richard Sun.”

  MIDSHIPMAN ROBERT HOOD

  Monday July 31st 1820 Fort Providence

  In the evening we divided a few gallons of rum between the Canadians and the Yellowknives, and the night was passed in mirth and revelry. The Canadians amused themselves by singing and dancing, imitating the gestures of a particular person, who placed himself in ludicrous postures, and performed extraordinary feats of activity. The gravity of the chief gave way to violent bursts of laughter, and indeed, the confusion of languages, dresses, and unartificial character had something in it more entertaining than a common masquerade. In return, he desired his young men to exhibit the Dogrib dance; and ranging themselves in a circle with their legs widely separated, they began to jump simultaneously sideways. Some, whom the potent effects of the spirits had stretched on the floor, rose from their besotted sleep and joined the circle, bouncing with uncouth alacrity, but out of time, to the great discomfiture of their sober companions.

  Thursday August 3rd 1820 Great Slave Lake

  At 4 a. m. we proceeded to the head of the lake channel, where we found Bigfoot and his party waiting to guide us. We were soon surrounded by a little fleet of canoes, containing the Yellowknives, their wives and children, and in company with them we entered a river 150 yards wide, with banks well covered by pines and poplars, but the naked hills behind them betrayed the barrenness of the country. We named it the Yellowknife River.

  3

  MIDSHIPMAN GEORGE BACK

  As the young Indian men were beginning what their chief called the Dogrib dance, Lieutenant Franklin’s tent most inopportunely burst into flame and threatened to ruin the agreement the dance was to celebrate — the Indian mind being as superstitious as it is. I am not at all averse to brown, glistening muscles, especially when draped by leather and fur, but apparently the worst of the event in their eyes was the flag ablaze so ominously, rather like a beacon of uncertain signal above the black sand of the lake. I admit I ran without ceremony, fearing some base treachery, but only the flag was completely aflame, with its burning tatters falling dangerously on the tent roof. I seized the pole and scrambled down the rocks — very nearly breaking my leg — to thrust the blazing banner into the water.

  What a grand fireworks of smoke and hissing that produced! Even the brown leather women, who until then had refused to be anything but silent mounds beyond the men’s circle — and were thus somewhat nearer the fire — sighed magnificently in admiration. However, when the chief came pacing up, he was already in lament, a singing so dolorous and ear-piercing that our half-breed translator hesitated even more than usual before he would venture a word in English. It seemed that destroying the flag was more or less equivalent to destroying England — so the chief sang — since besides our dress uniforms that was all he had yet seen of its particular majesty.

  Perhaps in our proposal we had been somewhat too strong for these primitive people. I had read the proclamation phrase by
phrase for our translator so there could be no misunderstanding:

  “This, our great flag, is the sign of the King of England’s power, who is your king also! The King of England is your Great Father! We are not traders, we are the King’s warriors, as you can see by our uniforms. We are not come to trade, but to establish good relations between us and yourselves, and to discover the resources of your country. We already know one great river to the north, but if you show us the way of the other great river to the Northern Ocean, and if you hunt for us as we follow it, the King will be very thankful. He will send ships bigger than a hundred voyageur canoes combined to trade with you. Then your enemies will fade away with envy at your wealth and power, and you will be richer than all your ancestors together.”

  They stared at us in disbelief, especially the old man who subsequently — after a deal of hesitation — scratched the map of the country on the ground. He seemed to be advising the chief, though he was much too apprehensive to say anything directly to us. (Our translator from Fort Chipewyan spoke English intelligibly enough — he had a somewhat larger vocabulary of Canadian French, though execrably muddled with Cree — but he was obviously slow in communicating what was said in either, which I gather is partly due to the paucity of the Indian language.) When Lieutenant Franklin explained further — and at more length — what we had planned to tell them, I thought the idea of the wealth we proposed was too much for their minds to grasp. They seem unable to understand anything of the principles of “property”. In fact — our translator insisted — there was no word for it in their language! Ah, primitiva gloriosa indeed!

  However, when Lieutenant Franklin tried to explain what numberless goods our great ships coming directly from England could bring them, cutting out entirely the present 2,205 miles of incalculable lake, river and rapid labour between York Factory and Fort Providence, it emerged that their hesitance did not concern wealth at all. It was the size of ships that held them speechless. A hundred of our huge voyageur canoes? Their own canoes can barely sustain four people. Thereupon Hood brought out his sketch of Prince of Wales, which had brought us from England, as we traded with the Esquimaux in Hudson Bay the summer before, but then, perversely, they did not for a moment notice the immensity of the vessel, but rather gave all their attention to the kayaks of the Esquimaux fleeting on the water.