A Discovery of Strangers Read online

  Sight unseen we named that Hunter Lake, and the voyageurs spent the evening gorging themselves and laughing like the children they are — a mouthful of meat cures every ill. I do believe that the sternest possible warnings, docked pay and even cocked and levelled pistols — unfortunately we are in no position to have them whipped — mean no more to them than our daily reading of the Scriptures, since they understand not a word of English save curses. Lieutenant Franklin insists, however, that eventually the readings must have a beneficent effect — he alone remaining steadfast in such Christian hope.

  But when he heard of the confrontation with levelled pistols, our translator did not laugh. Neither, I noticed, did the black-faced Mohawk. He alone had dared advance so far up the sand as to almost touch us. And he deliberately advanced upon Hood.

  Though it is after ten o’clock, the light over placid Dissension Lake still lies like restless gold, a molten treasure — if only this dreadful land were that, Spanish Main golden sun and golden! — bowled among these primitive rocks. And despite the inevitable clouds of mosquitoes boiling about him like the devil of this place and all his angels, Hood sketches. As usual, he refuses to show me what he has drawn, and so I will show him nothing of my assignment either, but it is obvious he is not working on a landscape now, nor was he when those cowards momentarily defied us. A woman and a girl are going down to the lake carrying water buckets. Without a sound they float down into the level light.

  It seems Hood is watching them too, for he says behind me, “Those are Keskarrah’s daughters.”

  “Keskarrah?”

  “The old man who walked with Hearne — the mapmaker.”

  “He has daughters that young?”

  Perhaps my tone betrays me. Hood joined the navy at age fourteen, two years after me, and he must then have been as pretty a boy as any captain could wish for, but he will confess to me nothing but duty and Bible reading — why should I care about such a practising junior Franklin? His small cleric father could not have spoken in a more condemnatory tone:

  “George, she is the merest child.”

  But I am walking towards them at the molten edge of the lake. The girl has barely lifted her bucket and stands there slender as willow, dripping light back into the water — it is the bending woman I must see. Her narrow arm reaching for water, the golden circles of her hand and bucket submerged and lapping outwards ring upon ring, her form lifting, turning, a slim darkness shaped out of blazing light. Never in my life have I seen such a stunning shape — face — if she lived in Italy she’d be burning on walls, a leather Madonna lifting water.

  MIDSHIPMAN ROBERT HOOD

  Sunday August 13th 1820 Yellowknife River

  The woods discontinued and the rest of the country was a naked desert of coarse brown sand diversified by small rocky hills and lakes, and it was here the voyageurs gave up all hope of relief They imagined that the Indians were cajoling us, and that in leading them into such inhospitable country, we were incurring dangers of which we were ignorant, but determined to obtain experience by sacrificing them. Their discontents broke forth into threats of desertion, which Mr. Franklin silenced by denouncing the heaviest punishment against the ringleaders. Few could have borne the hardships they endured without murmuring, but these complaints were very ill timed. We had scarcely encamped before four hunters arrived with the flesh of two reindeer, and were not again censured: the Canadians never exercising reflection unless they are hungry.

  Sunday August 20th 1820 Winter Lake

  We had, at length, penetrated into the native haunts of the reindeer, whose antlers were moving forests on the ridges of the hills, where they assembled to graze in security. At the western extremity of the lake we found a river fifty yards wide, which discharged from the lake in a strong rapid southwest. Haifa mile below this rapid, we landed on the north bank of the river, at the most eligible place that offered itself for our winter abode.

  4

  SNOWSHOES

  On a tiny island in the lake on whose western shore Keskarrah had assured them they would find the most northerly trees large enough to build a shelter similar to Fort Providence, the English officers began to discover the nature of “our Indians”, as they labelled the Tetsot’ine in their notebooks. That August day, the air brisk as Lincolnshire midwinter, began with no more warning than an exceptionally fine paddle out into the lake, singing.

  Lieutenant Franklin was deeply concerned about the trees, but he could only begin obliquely. It seemed, he confided aloud to his second in command in the centre canoe, the Hudson’s Bay Company traders were relatively new in Yellowknife country, and they had certainly been very lax in establishing any sense of duty required by a work contract. After two weeks it was obvious to him that the hunters they had been forced to hire (unfortunately no other natives lived in the area) lacked almost completely the discipline necessary for efficient service to the Expedition. He did not believe that four pistols (one of them unloaded) and constant reminders of planning months ahead for meat would ever convince them of the steady, daily requirements of duty; only an extended and very firm experience of English order would ever achieve that — as it had for the voyageurs.

  Doctor Richardson grunted, perhaps in agreement. With his trained Scottish thoroughness he was recording the temperature of the water. His notebooks were full of numbers, morning, noon, evening, including decimal points. But then, abruptly, he did speak.

  “Money,” he said, registering some final numbers.

  “Money?”

  “You seek out the larger issues, sir,” Richardson said, smiling at his commander; at his inexorable reliability. “But most people wish to understand only what they hold in their hands. We will never control any Indians, not in this wild country, until we teach them the absolute, practical necessity of money.”

  “They hardly seem to require it, since they trade for what they need.”

  “Exactly. I believe that is the fundamental problem in the economic development of primitives. If they understood money, they would work harder to get more of it, in order to buy what they want.”

  Franklin shook his head. “But … it seems they want so little.”

  “Exactly,” Richardson murmured, closing his notebook. “They must want more than they need. That is civilization.”

  On the ice-cold lake flashing with ripples that swished to the racing canoes, Lieutenant Franklin did not look happy at this analysis. It seemed to him not so much down to earth as profoundly uncharitable, almost revealing an ungodly cynicism — though his implacable optimism told him that the kindly doctor was not at all like that. They were fifteen months out of Gravesend, though hopefully no longer that distant from a return to it; the individual and interpersonal strains of the Expedition would gradually reveal themselves as no more difficult than they must be, Deo volente.

  Lieutenant Franklin twisted in his seat, looked ahead past the driving arms of Solomon Bélanger at his back: the Yellowknives were gone. Ahead, perhaps far over various bodies and strips of water … ahead somewhere. Their ragged flotilla, where apparently every woman and child and man paddled or carried whatever as inclination moved them, had gradually, casually, outstripped his giant canoes and the voyageurs’ contracted rhythm to vanish somewhere north over the rock shoulders of portages, across the endless hummocky, wet excretions of moss. As the sun set yesterday, August 19, 1820, the Expedition had portaged over the height of land down to this lake which, unseen, they had already agreed to call “Winter”. But the vanished Indians and the isolated, deformed pines they discovered there along the south shore valleys did not reassure them.

  Had the old man actually understood what they needed? Such slim sticks, such wind-riven twists of indefatigable wood, gnarled spirals, really, could not fashion a framework for canvas, leave alone the log houses they must build. Now it was Sunday, and they had not yet performed divine service, but the voyageurs always worked with less complaint immediately after sleeping, especially if there was a calm lake
to cross, and so he had ordered the launch at sunrise with the prospect of service a respite later. But despite the cheerful song of the voyageurs, every lake vista made him more doubtful about the old man, about what they had understood him to say concerning “the last very large trees”. The vacancy of tundra, the measureless Barren Lands, was already more than a threat, here all about them.

  And then the island, whose low mound none of the officers had discerned against the northern shore, came into existence for them very suddenly.

  It was not sight, but a distant sound above the swing of paddles that first made them aware of it. Sound they could not order, a tintinnabulation of insanities. Then, as they continued to stare over the glacial water, they could decipher motion … some things being thrown up, or leaping. Shapes skipping erratically against the sky, like sandflies on water, but which they gradually recognized to be human disportment in the midst of the water or … ah yes, that was the hump of an island: on a strip of beach people flailing, it must be their Indians since no one else could be here. They were jumping wildly about on a small island. Shrieking?

  Back shouted from the lead canoe, “Carnival, sir! They’ve discovered an eternal spring — of rum!”

  But Lieutenant Franklin did not answer him. The voyageurs’ morning song had died in their throats, their broken rhythm reflecting what emerged clearly now as wailing, as aboriginal dirge, fraying out along the line of distant rock that separated the water from the immense sky.

  In the last canoe, Robert Hood had been trying all morning to capture once more, on a small piece of paper, a coherent quadrant of the world through which he was being carried. But even after an exhausting year of continuously widening vistas, he was tempted to look sideways, tugged towards a periphery in the corner of his eye that, when he yielded, was still never there. Riding motionless in the canoe on this usual lake, he felt his body slowly tighten, twist; as if it were forming into a gradual spiral that might turn his head off at the neck. Like one of those pathetic little trees, enduring forever a relentless side wind so that it could only twist itself upwards year after year by eighth-of-an-inching; or like the owl in the story that turned its head in a circle, staring with intense fixity, trying to discover all around itself that perfect sphere of unbordered sameness and, at the moment of discovery that the continuous world was, nevertheless, not at all or anywhere ever the same, it had completed its own strangulation. A tree at the treeline … a headless owl.…

  But his sketch must stop, must have frame!

  He found he could concentrate on what appeared to be a wash of river falling into the northern shore of the lake. Separating two scraggly trees, which seemed too tall to be there. Or was it simply the perspectiveless distance over water that made them appear so? He had been betrayed by this intense light distortion before: he must be careful. But a tall tree on either side — that was still a possible frame, if he drew them foreground enough.

  But he had drawn that so often! Scribbling in trees where none could exist; doing it now where they did seemed mere repetition … and then his eyes discovered that the falls, instead of falling down into spray, appeared to climb out of the bristle of brush, climb up into air above their surrounding rock — like a column of ice pasted against space and darkness. Amazing.

  Nevertheless, beyond any deception of light the roar of the falls emerged distinctly, and then vanished on the lake wind. But the island sound wavered over it. Those were people, certainly Yellowknives, twitching, spastic on that whaleback rock now clearly fruzzed with bushes. Hurling things that everywhere burst high in the black water.

  “What is that?” Hood asked the translator, St. Germain, beside him.

  “Somebody for sure dead.”

  “Dead?”

  The English officers could not in a lifetime have imagined such grief. That was what it was, though at first Doctor Richardson was convinced it must be a witches’ or (more likely) a devils’ sabbath, performed with typical native perversity in the glare of high noon rather than midnight. But it was Indian grief. A distant lake had taken two hunters, one of them Big-foot’s brother-in-law, the other his wife’s sister’s son, and as long as the two pillars of black smoke stood beyond the falls and the mound of Dogrib Rock to the north, they knew the distant lake had refused to give the bodies back for them to mourn over and then leave properly to the animals.

  “Double smoke, two men,” St. Germain explained. “All their relations.”

  From the island the smoke was now obvious enough to the officers, even against the clouds. But their minds were overwhelmed with bellows and weeping and screams so closely about them, with lodgepoles being broken and skins ripped, kettles crushed, axes splintered, dogs throats being slit and everything, any thing or animal that came to hand, smashed and torn and bleeding, being flung everywhere into the lake. The small island blazed with the necessity of destruction. The Yellowknives were attacking their canoes, breaking the very guns with which they were to hunt.

  “Why are they doing this?” Lieutenant Franklin demanded of St. Germain.

  “Dead,” he said stoically. “They cry, make themselves poor.”

  Even Richardson felt suddenly afraid. “Will they destroy everything they have, that they must have to live?”

  “Maybe. Sad, very big. Always cry, dead.”

  Though required Empire authority might drive him to the threatened brink of execution, Lieutenant Franklin’s reverence for life would not allow him to kill so much as a mosquito; but here, under his very eyes, a boy was about to slash open a terrified dog. He scrambled ashore and seized the boy’s shoulder, shouting, and the boy wheeled around, might have disembowled him if St. Germain had not knocked up his arm.

  “No! No!” the translator yelled. “Don’t grab — hide what you can — don’t grab ’em!”

  Several reluctant voyageurs stepped from the canoes, seizing what possessions they could and piling them farther from the shore, higher on the island. Hepburn trudged up and began to assist as well. No Yellowknife protested or hindered them. Richardson led St. Germain from one man to the next, persuading them that they must stop smashing the guns, which, after all, he explained, had been given them by their Great Father in England, who would be very angry if his gifts were destroyed, even in deep grief. The men dropped the firearms but continued to tear at their clothes in the frigid air, wailing; their mouths gaping, insensible holes in their suddenly grotesque heads, their eyes untouchably vacant, stunned with sorrow.

  “They seem thankful if we stop them, yes,” Lieutenant Franklin insisted, believing he understood something profound at last.

  When the violence of their grief gradually eddied into a wailing dance, he ordered St. Germain to remain and guard what had been saved; the rest of the party must continue looking for the trees.

  Richardson discovered that he had lost his notebook. St. Germain was pushing the rifles aside for him, looking for it, when Greywing came over the hump of the island dragging the slashed, sodden mass of her family’s lodgeskins. The lake had given it back, she told St. Germain, wide-eyed.

  Richardson could have wept. The child stood with nothing but a scrap of leather over her shoulders, and he could not keep his eyes from her slender, sturdy legs, her tiny breasts, the innocent fold of her sex, hunched together in the fierce, cold sunlight off the lake. He turned quickly then, almost wishing it were possible for him to wail as they did, beating themselves into exhaustion and emptiness. A grief to end every known grief here in this ultimate barrenness of the world, an island so tiny he felt for a moment lost as in a vacant ship on an empty ocean.

  Hood appeared lugging a half-smashed canoe up the rocks, his face running tears.

  “They want us to save their things, we aren’t Yellowknives, we can save their things,” he gasped.

  “They are so…” in all his English the doctor could not find a suitable word, “ … intemperate.…”

  “But they’ll freeze, to death,” Hood insisted, as if his saying it were somehow
a prevention. “Marooned on this bare rock!”

  “Now, now.” Richardson shook himself into thinking reasonably. On this wailing island Hood’s emotion was clearly inappropriate, as was his own. “We know our duty. These people have mourned before, and they still live.”

  “But they were hunting for us!”

  “Now now,” Richardson said again, and took the useless husk of the canoe in hand. “They contracted to hunt for us, that cannot harm them.” The notebook was gone. Perhaps it too had, inadvertently of course, been thrown into the lake. He would make up certain details again from memory and the notes the other officers had kept, as far as that was possible. “Guard this canoe too,” he said to St. Germain, unnecessarily.

  “They don’t leave,” the translator said. “Not yet, so quick.”

  “How long will they remain and … grieve?”

  “When they feel.”

  “Guard the canoe too,” Richardson said again. “The children will certainly need every bit of shelter during the night.”

  And after a short paddle, like a blessing poured out by their encounter with unimaginable grief, at the end of the lake where the Winter River (as they called it) drained west over rapids, they found Keskarrah’s forest. Exactly where, they recalled then, the old man had promised it would be. Inexplicably in these barrens a sudden island of huge intermittent spruce, as much as two feet thick and forty or fifty feet tall, rooted in the valleys and rims of muskegs and especially on the high sandy ridge of the esker that spread the river below them from Winter west to Roundrock lakes. Northeast beyond bare ridges loomed the dome of Dogrib Rock, indelibly shouldered in grey, and south across the river a massive erratic sat on a straight skyline of ridge as if balanced by primordial giants. Back shouted out, “Big Stone!” just before Hood, studying it in the evening light through the telescope, saw what he thought must be a tundra grizzly grazing moss across the slope below it. After the endless low marshes and rocks, the beauty of green vistas swirled like fingers over hills — in the distance imaginably the English winter downs — was beyond his hopes.