A Discovery of Strangers Page 5

  “Our enemies,” they groaned. “You have talked — you have traded — you have already eaten — with the Raw-Meat Eaters!”

  The beak-nosed old mapmaker seemed especially disturbed and we had to expend more time than ever convincing them of our totally pacific intentions. “Our Great Father wants all his children to live at peace!” we told them emphatically. “We are all his children, we and all Indians and all Esquimaux alike, and he wants you to stop killing each other. We cannot help you become rich if you fight and kill each other!”

  To which they — ever perverse — responded, “Then why are you come as warriors and not as traders?”

  How to attempt explaining European history! What can the inhabitants of such a desolate land understand concerning the political and national philosophies of Empire? To compare their elementary hostilities to England’s conflict with Napoleon, as Hood sometimes attempts to do, is ludicrous, as he would know if he had been a captive of the French for five years as I was. However, our pomp of proclamation may have been poor strategy — we might better have devoted our persuasions, as the traders do, to the simple ones of tribal pride and full bellies. God knows these natives live in a dreadful land with more than enough space quite empty around them. With no discernible social organization — and wandering about at random — why will they laboriously transport themselves through four hundred miles of vacant moss to identify a possible enemy? Not even Samuel Hearne forty years ago, in his lengthy book, could elucidate that. Nevertheless, out of this irreducible confusion of idea and inadequate translation — however it may have emerged in their minimal language — there suddenly developed their ritual dance. What it was — other than referring somehow to their Dogrib Indian neighbours, apparently the dancing masters of the country — or why they danced, our translator could not explain, nor how such a thumping ceremony would commit them to hunt for our expedition — as apparently it did!

  So, whatever our strategy, happy results. I began to anticipate that some of the females might join in, the dance being exceedingly energetic. And truly — though seated and much encumbered with heavy clothing — they were beginning to sway, rather like a field of dark corn playing under wind, when the blazing flag roused everyone, women included, for a run to our camp above the lake. After my heroics it was quickly established that our servant, John Hepburn, had built a fire before the main tent to repel the usual mosquito hordes, and being more used to smoke than clear air — his pipe was a cloud-burner — fell comfortably asleep at last, the clouds of pests held somewhat at bay, and so did not notice the thin moss catch and the flag dipping down to it under the wind until our shouts awoke him.

  But the Indian mind rejects accident. The women, as saggy and wrinkled as native females invariably are — their breasts undergo great distention from an early age from long feeding of their infants, the sight of which can only be repugnant — took up the chief’s lament, whereupon Lieutenant Franklin quickly had our extra flag unrolled. By good fortune it was larger than the first — though not of silk, which difference no Indian could discern — and the chief, seeing majesty wave again, subsided together with all his factotums. Doctor Richardson treated the servant for a slight burn and the dancers were especially cheered when — on further orders — Hood broached another cask of rum for them, well watered though it was. As became evident, the men — who had most willingly shared the wailing — would share neither rum nor dance with the females, but left them to look on, squat and sullen, at their own boisterous, expanding caterwaul.

  Still, the old mapmaker seemed unreassured. During the dance he questioned our translator further, who repeated the name of our servant again and again rather oddly:

  “Hep Burn, Hep Burn,”

  together with a great deal of what seemed elaborate explanation, such as he had never yet vouchsafed us. Suddenly the grizzled oldster walked away to crouch on the folded rock by himself, staring across the lake and paying no attention to the young men trundling a circle in their tuneless chant, their pounding of the long-suffering ground. I was about to make a quick sketch of him against the great wind-swept water — truly an astonishing freshwater inland sea, we were three days crossing the narrowest parts of it, island to island — when Hood appeared beside me.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t do that, Mr. Back,” he said in his oracular minister’s voice — so out of keeping with his gaunt, almost diaphanous appearance. “He will not like it.”

  Really. I know as well as he that the Indians must work for us if our expedition is not to prove impossible. I will — if such are orders — don naval dress whites (the Cumberland House dance only warranted dress blues) no matter how crushed they may be after a year’s canoe travail from York Factory compressed in a Canadian voyageur pack, and stand at attention on primitive rock, facing an endless lake for an hour, until a mottled birch flotilla approaches and a chief deigns to step ashore, his shoulders draped in an enormous bear-hide — and his eyes offering not a flicker of recognition as to our existence. Though their formality outfrump the French, I will accept it: the chief may pace through the log entrance of Fort Providence and seat himself in the recently mud-smeared trading company hall — which in keeping with his imperial dignity is no larger than an English cottage kitchen — and while enthroned on dirt accept an introduction with the distant gravity of King George III himself, and I will bow as if he were in fact the sixty-year ruler of the whole earth — God save the King! But if we permit and help enact such pretentious charades for too long, I am confident disaster will strike.

  I understand thoroughly the routine of our voyage — and this country as far as it has been explored and written about — and my conjectures of the coast we must map I am quite certain are correct. It is clear to us all that we are not proof against the possible treachery of a native, therefore much depends on accident and so we must work hard, anticipate what we can — and look for the best. Hope is our sheet anchor, and sailors know how to make use of that.

  Our Lieutenant Franklin is nothing if not thoroughly planned, ordered and methodical. He may very well explain our Admiralty orders, and as much of the attendant purposes of Empire as he deems expedient, all of which — however translated — the chief greets with that grave dignity that invariably attends stolid incomprehension. But such laborious ceremony allows a good deal of time for me to consider this Indian and his stitched-together retinue of leather and fur and nakedness: I see strong handsome limbs, but I also see a wild people who have never seen an Englishman before, leave alone worked for one — indeed, do they know what work is? — as our Canadian voyageurs trained in the fur trade certainly do?

  But the natives must obey us if we are to succeed. They must be able to find and kill enough deer to feed us and all our labouring men: five Englishmen and eighteen paddlers and two translators — to say nothing of several of their necessary attendant women — in three birchbark canoes — a minimum of twenty-five men in all travelling down the Coppermine River, which no voyageur or Englishman has ever seen — except Samuel Hearne, now dead. And he saw only twenty miles of it at its mouth fifty years ago. It would seem much long labour remains for us even before we reach the Coppermine — and can we be certain that hesitating old man was drawing the course of exactly that river to the ocean? Whatever he said, via the chief and our translator? He seemed confused about a “return” river — but if we achieve our goal in the Arctic, we have no intention of returning again this way.

  For when we arrive at the mouth of the Coppermine River, as we fully intend to by this autumn, we propose to explore the Great Northern Ocean — the “Everlasting Ice”, as it seems these Indians call it, doubtless because they fear it — explore its shore eastward as far as Hudson Bay and the ships passing there, all by birchbark canoe. A fact we have not yet explained to our voyageurs, who are superbly trained to dance on turbulent rivers — in over 2,000 miles we have lost only one man, a sternman drowned while running a rapid, a standard hazard, we understand — but an ice-filled ocea
n? Lieutenant Franklin and I saw a good deal of it two years ago, north of Spitzbergen Island, and we saw more traversing it on Prince of Wales, and even from the deck of a 200-ton vessel icebergs are not a reassuring sight. Even for an English sailor.

  And indeed, the chase of deer may in England be royal entertainment, but we are after food, not vicarious wood-and-meadow danger. Each canoe has a crew of six: bowman, sternman and paddlers. Since eating is their greatest, together with drinking their only diversion, they expect to devour eight pounds of meat per day. When you add our translators and ourselves — four officers plus servant — we presently require almost a full ton of meat a week; that is, a minimum of twenty large dressed deer. And, since we are told the deer will have migrated during the season we intend to move along the barren coast, we must now acquire at least twice as many — forty in all brought in every week — so that their meat can be dried and pounded into pemmican to supply that difficult but most crucial part of our exploration: the discovery of how to get east to Hudson Bay while mapping the northern coastline of North America.

  So indeed we stood at serious attention as the seven slender Indian hunters — they are lean and agile as schoolboys — stepped forwards and Hood measured their first small bags of powder and twenty-five musket balls formally into their hands. We expect them to kill for us per week an average of six deer each.

  “There are some ninety Yellowknife children and women in this band, and fewer than thirty mature hunters,” Hood confides to me at the lake in his sepulchral tones. “We’ve now hired their best hunters — so who will feed all their families this winter?”

  “They share what the others have — Indians share.”

  “But we’ve got all their best hunters!”

  “Didn’t you hear the chief?” I tell him bulging with native concern. “He declared, ‘Never will we allow our new friends, the White warriors, to go hungry!’ ”

  “This goes beyond hunters,” Hood continues undeterred. “The three voyageur women cannot possibly skin and cut and dry all that meat before it rots — or tan all the necessary hides — even if they never sleep. The Yellowknife women will have to help them.”

  In our year together Hood and I have, perforce, got on well enough, but his manner of speaking on matters he considers moral imperatives always irks me to argument. It is his insufferable rectitude — the dry echo of a small clergyman on a very small living.

  “Probably Bigfoot,” I say, “sees his own advantage in these arrangements. Otherwise, why would he agree?”

  “A leader does not consider the disadvantages for his people?”

  “Do you know what they think? Why they listen to him? He’s agreed, so there’s obviously something in it for him.”

  “I see,” Hood responds, now openly snide. “You do compare him to Napoleon.”

  “God’s Name, this greasy primitive?”

  And only a cleric’s progeny could produce his subsequent tone of sly unction: “Of course, I never saw the short Great Emperor, as you did, all tied up so cruelly in a donkey’s pannier.”

  When outthought, Hood can only resort to the elementary accident of his own length. Though I outweigh him by two stone and can easily outwalk him twice in a day, as I have many times. But he must give me advice about when it may be injudicious to sketch a wrinkled Indian! Advice from him, when after a year in this wilderness he still has not learned when to keep his pistol loaded — which is always!

  By August 13 we were two weeks north of Fort Providence, alone with our voyageurs and accompanied by our Indians — mostly women and children in their cockleshell canoes — as we travelled up the Yellowknife River. Though we were supposedly crossing directly through the annual deer migration route, in those two weeks our “seven very best” hunters had not yet presented us with a single mouthful of meat. Before the last portage of the day — around a rapid picturesque enough for any painter — our voyageurs suddenly, as if by bad instinct, stop and cluster into a huddle beside the canoes they have just dragged onto the rocks.

  At first we think they are taking an extra moment of rest. The day has been filled with eight short lakes and seven long carries, beginning with one of two hundred yards and increasing to this one of over a thousand, up broken rock and through muskeg so tussocked and spongy that, active as I am, I am very nearly exhausted carrying my instruments and notebooks. But all their working lives these men have portaged 180-pound packs, and four of them can carry the 600-pound canoe over any rocky defile without betraying the slightest weariness. It may be their male pride — we have seen them wrestle or dance around their fires even after fourteen hours of indescribable labour — and such pride is certainly both good and highly useful to us: as Lieutenant Franklin said one night when the noise of singing from their tents kept us awake in ours, “With such spirit, we could drive these thin canoes to China.” And I must say that their songs, spectral though they were in the awful silence of wilderness, did bespeak a certain courageous humanity.

  Nevertheless, that hardly gives Hood an excuse to be standing there with nothing but pencil and paper in hand when suddenly they turn to what is clearly full mutiny.

  They declare they have had nothing to eat for seven days except poor fish and rotten pemmican — well, we must eat exactly what they eat, so we know! — and no assurances will now convince them that the hunter smoke on the northern horizon portends anything beyond mere location. They absolutely refuse this last carry of the day unless they are first provided with fresh meat.

  True, their labours have been immense — especially today — but are we to produce a herd of bullocks from our instrument cases? After being two thousand miles dependent upon them, we understand with absolute clarity that the weathercock minds of Canadians are stirred to reflection only by their bellies, and Lieutenant Franklin has me explain again, in simple French unadulterated by Cree, what he has told them again and again: he considers them his ship’s crew and he has always treated them, and will always treat them, like English sailors — that is, they will do their contracted duty. If they refuse such duty, they will be immediately punished.

  But it is now clear that he must go a step farther. Ever since leaving Fort Providence they have been grumbling as if they — who were hired because they were the strongest and most highly recommended of all voyageurs — are capable only of travel on rivers familiar to them. Well, he has now had quite enough of their grumbling and petulant complaint. If they do not pick up their packs immediately for this last portage of the day, he will not hesitate — as he has every right under English law — to blow their brains out.

  Even in basic French there is satisfaction in uttering such an unambiguous phrase. The Indian women and children and old men have carried their goods exactly as far as the voyageurs in four days, and have certainly had less to eat. They are coming in off the lake in the usual bedraggled flotilla and are preparing — in their massive confusion of children and dogs and sacks of all kinds — to commence the portage without a glance of complaint. Hood of course is sitting on his heels with his sketchpad on his knee, surrounded by landscape, but he looks about when I shout to him. At my shout the Indians turn motionless, staring at us on the rocky beach, but Hood walks up very calmly, still holding his futile pencil.

  We are five — but of course the servant carries no pistol. So Lieutenant Franklin, Doctor Richardson and I will only be able to execute three mutineers before the others reach us with their knives.

  I must say I experience a strange sense of déjà vu, almost vertigo, as I check my priming. I know I must be intent on which man I must take — that enormous French Canadian or the skulking Mohawk? — why did we ever choose that glowering blackface? — but the absurdity of having survived the British Navy and the last of the Napoleonic wars and five dreadful years of French and Spanish captivity and traversing 113 degrees of longitude, all before I am twenty-four, and then getting my throat slit by Canadian half-breed louts on the shores of a desolate, nameless lake — sometimes we travel
too fast to name or even see them all — is momentarily more than my mind can fathom. The huge voyageurs advance up the sand.

  “Where’s St. Germain?” Lieutenant Franklin asks.

  Hood has pulled out his useless pistol as calmly as though he is about to polish it; perhaps he is fumbling at his powder-purse.

  “He said he’d go to meet the hunters,” he says.

  Our translator is our most valuable man — and also a better hunter than any three Indians together — but we know his sharp and calculating mind: we instinctively think he has initated this. And even if he is not here, he may well have done so, and Lieutenant Franklin would accept the necessary responsibility of having to execute him first. But if he were here, it certainly would not end as it does: we raise and cock our pistols. Nevertheless, the two biggest voyageurs and the Mohawk take several steps before they are aware that their sixteen confrères have stopped in their tracks. Dear God, they can crush us like mosquitoes between their enormous hands! But no Canadian can outface British character.

  “You will all be docked three full days’ pay,” Lieutenant Franklin orders.

  “Set up the camp here,” I tell them in French, and I make no attempt to hide my disdain. “You will carry the portage tomorrow.”

  Dissension Lake. Lieutenant Franklin would permit no name stronger. Hood corroborated my reading of it exactly — he is well trained in mathematics — as latitude 64°, 6’, 47 “north, longitude 113°, 25’, o” west. And an hour later our translator and Indian hunters arrived with meat: the enormous irony, in the light of our near annihilation, was that they had killed eighteen deer along the shores of the next lake, at the end of the very portage the men had refused to carry!