A Discovery of Strangers Read online

  Doctor Richardson returned from a quick wider survey and declared the situation most suitable: stream water, many large trees, the shelter of the esker against the northern winds and its dry, coarse sand for a foundation; also, a bit farther into the trees was an extrusion of excellent white clay (amazing in a land of moss and rock) for chinking between house logs. All that, and they were on a straight line between Dogrib Rock and the Big Stone, so that even without a compass, if they were within sight of either, they could not be lost. Altogether (Richardson getting as close to excitement as a scientific Scot might be permitted) quite the proper situation to be chosen for the proposed wintering residence.

  Deeply grateful, Lieutenant Franklin performed Sunday evening divine service before a great fire, the voyageurs piling on torn spruce branches still snapping with summer sap.

  ‘Thus saith the Lord, heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is my place of rest? … For I know your works and your thoughts: it shall come to pass that I will gather all nations and tongues, and they shall come and see my glory. And ye I will send to the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame, and ye shall declare my glory among the Gentiles.’ This is the very Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

  Robert Hood stood steady, head bowed, hands folded. Behind his eyelids he saw the children again, a few of whom he already recognized, on that rock in the windy lake, huddling under wet, torn hides supported by the splintered ribs of canoes, bent guns, sticks. In the pause after the responses he thought he could still hear that harrowing lament. Somewhere beyond the feather of wind in spruce, beyond the waterfall and the lake’s deepening darkness. It seemed to him he was praying — for a revelation. How could they have existed here ages before they were known of? How would he draw a sorrow he could barely hear?

  The lament was still there next morning, faint but clear as the icy air, and it carried on the wind all day as they measured out and drove stakes for the three buildings of “Fort Enterprise” into the hard sand. George Back was everywhere, gashing timber to be hewn for the houses, pointing, issuing orders. But by noon the distant sound seemed to have drifted away. It was the Mohawk voyageur, Michel Terohaute, who pointed out that the doubled black smoke beyond Dogrib Rock had been replaced by a single white column: the bodies must have been returned.

  Thus informed, Lieutenant Franklin issued orders to the voyageurs: at dawn on the morrow half-crews must be prepared to portage two canoes back into the lake and bring St. Germain and the poor wretches here from their island. In the meantime, Back and two men would cross to the south side of the river immediately and set a fire there with an open view over Winter Lake. That would be a signal to Bigfoot.

  Hood asked, “What … will our fire signal mean? Sir?”

  “That we are coming to help them off the island. And where we are,” Lieutenant Franklin said firmly. “Bigfoot understands smoke.”

  Daylight was almost gone before any fire was discernible across the river on the south slope; its delicate smoke vanished without trace into the heavy clouds. Nevertheless, the flames at last leaping up beside the Big Stone, against the wispy line of setting sun, flickered with beauty; and cheeriness, Hood thought. A further touch of humanity in this surround of water and bare rock without ending.

  But the wind began to lift dangerously from the west. By midnight, when Back and the two men finally returned, the entire ridge south of the river was burning like an immense, long city.

  “Sir, it spread in moss, and then various small brush caught fire,” Back reported, exhausted. “But there’s no problem, there’s no one there, it must consume itself, it has nowhere to go.”

  The officers and men stared at Back, the length of flaming ridge reflected in their eyes. Finally Richardson said, very quietly, “It is fortunate the river is between the fire and our trees. I found a stump today that has been growing here for 306 years.”

  They barely slept that night, the roar of fire magnified by the enraged wind hammering their tents. For three days they could see little; smoke enveloped them as if they had discovered a planet of flame, it was barely possible to chop down a marked tree, or to breathe. The voyageurs bringing up water from below reported that at times the fire, racing along the low trees of the opposite shore, threatened to jump the river. On the fourth night, however, a heavy rain mixed with driving sleet fell and by morning the fire was dead. All their magnificent green prospect south, Hood noted in his diary, had been metamorphosed into a hideous waste — smoking rock and bristling black poles.

  “Who is dead?” Bigfoot asked Lieutenant Franklin through St. Germain, when at last on August 26 the Tetsot’ine stepped out of the voyageur canoes onto the river rocks below the esker. And he could not seem to comprehend their explanation. “It is strange,” he said. “All those trees have never burned themselves for us.”

  “It will get stranger,” Keskarrah told him gloomily. “You may as well tell Thick English about winter immediately.”

  Bigfoot nodded, heavily. And told the consternated officers: there was now, of course, no possibility of anyone guiding them farther north that season. The People had nothing. As was plain for anyone to see, the lake of their grief had taken everything they had for living, and they would have to work desperately, here — if it was the will of the caribou to come south to this place and if they could, in their dreams, lure them along these paths of their autumn migration — work desperately to get enough clothing and lodgehides and dried meat prepared so that they and the English — whom they had promised to care for, and they would, of course — were to survive the winter.

  For the long winter was already upon them.

  Lieutenant Franklin could not believe his ears. He felt it was not particularly cold, there was still the best part of a week left in August! Finally, recognizing Bigfoot’s adamance, he proposed a swift trip with a small crew to the Coppermine River, down that to the ocean, and return — three weeks in all at most. That would establish the best route for the complete, thorough exploration they must make next summer. Yes, he would reluctantly agree to such a fast trip, now.

  But Bigfoot, again, simply refused. “It will be ten days for you,” he said, “before you even reach the River of Copperwoman.”

  “What!”

  “Lakes, portage so much — how you travel,” St. Germain responded without waiting for Bigfoot. “Heavy, heavy.”

  “I said light canoes only. The two lightest, and very light packs, only two officers.…”

  Keskarrah’s face was like an effigy contemplating the Big Stone high and black on the opposite ridge, smoking, or perhaps steaming faintly in the abrupt twilight. And Bigfoot’s words, when he finally spoke again, seemed tinged with ridicule, though Hood thought it might be St. Germain’s translation more than anything else. The categorical “no’s” and “now’s” must certainly be the translator’s:

  “He say, no deer now, by Copperwoman River. No deer now, by ocean. We dream here, quick, or everybody die, now. Women dry meat, scrape hides here.”

  Lieutenant Franklin could not comprehend. “What does he mean, ‘dream here’?”

  “The way they hunt.”

  “Dreaming?”

  “Here, where deer maybe go.”

  “But they have guns now!”

  “Guns … how to kill. Not hunt.”

  “What?”

  “Dream, how you find ’em.”

  And after that St. Germain could not, or would not, explain anything except “no”. It appeared the translator had become their chief, their most incomprehensible denier, with Bigfoot and Keskarrah and the other circled Yellowknives staring grim and silent across the river. At last Lieutenant Franklin could only insist:

  “What do you say, you yourself?”

  “Yes. It’s so.”

  “But … we take temperatures five times a day, we record all the weather. Now, here, we register only a few degrees below last year, when we travelled to the end of October an
d our cloth clothing was quite adequate, we walked all through —”

  “You, now, in Tetsot’ine place,” St. Germain cut across his protest harshly. “Winter — no deer boots, spring — no feet.”

  Greenstockings passed them with the other carrying People. It was all so undignified, scrabbling into deliberate council as soon as they stepped ashore. Ludicrous, her father and the men behaving without calmness like Whites; the hideous, burned land must be affecting them.

  Steadily she began climbing the steep esker where they often wintered for some months, though the paths were already worn raw by strange feet. The sodden bulk of lodgeskins on her back were slashed, but they were so light too, as they always were when opened in grief to release all the accumulating weight of stolid living, and she would sew them tight and warm again and she felt clean, strong enough to do anything, to carry any thing, any man who thought himself powerful enough to climb onto her. There were so many more men now and their differing skin did not matter, they would certainly want her, especially as the caribou bulls bellowed across the hills and the darkness lengthened steadily into winter. The lake beyond Dogrib Rock had not taken Broadface, who had lived with her all summer, though it might have; he had been there, and had returned with the assurance that the bodies of the two drowned hunters had been returned and properly left on the land, and Greenstockings had come out of the long paroxysm of community grief as powerfully cleansed as she always was, and there he stood facing her. Broadface. His face as ever beautifully round, glistening and long-eyed like any ravishing woman’s. But a man’s.

  And she took him. Or he her, neither could tell which in the whistling, fierce or gentle thunderstorms they rode out together. He was looking for a son inside her, he hissed in her ear, and with his single cock’s eye he would find him even if he had to look all night and all day until the geese returned, and she threw him off her as she would a blanket.

  “At least your words are big,” she said cruelly.

  His hand found his knife, he would have instantly discovered something inside her, though not a son, if her copper skinning-knife had not already been between his legs. He knew that no man is quicker than a woman, who spends her life skinning and slicing what he merely hunts, and so he sat up, smiling.

  “You’re my woman.”

  “If you can keep me.”

  “You want me, you’ll be moaning for me again,” he promised her.

  “Words,” she said, smiling back a little. “Always your big words.”

  But she saw her mother then, above them, and she stood up. On the stony beach at the end of the island of their grief, the men were guiding the immense voyageur canoes in between rocks with great gentleness.

  Perhaps Michel was one of those paddlers. She didn’t look, and did not tell Broadface that the black Mohawk’s eyes tracked her everywhere; why should she, that was Broadface’s concern. Nor did she tell him about Boy English, who at the lake where the voyageurs had wanted to kill These English had stared at her, face and mouth fallen open as if he would eat her. She had thought then she should empty the ice bucket over his head to warn him away, but if she did, she would have to bend over to fill it again, and she remembered Broadface first catching her from behind when she was bent down like that, face to the water. He had clamped her doubled in his massive arms, her skirt already thrown up behind her before she knew he was there, and her trousers ripped down, and in an instant he had thrust himself so savagely into her that she lost every awareness except scream and a sharp, cutting agony that sliced, circled through her like a knife stabbing past any intimation of pleasure; jerking ripples, her bucket by then sunk in the lake. She could not throw him off. Held there, she had to endure whatever his body invented on the round, brutal rocks, her face open, she saw when the ripples faded, as if the black scream of pain and rage she was swallowing and swallowing would suck dry the entire lake.

  But even as this slashed across her mind when Boy English stared, and beside her Greywing heaved her bucket out of the water, she knew she need not bother bending down twice for him. He was brave enough, she had seen that when they faced the voyageurs, but like every one of them this little Boy English walked across the tundra or sat in a giant canoe with his head so high, as if his stubby nose was all that had ever been there ahead of him; he would be impaled or dead before he ever knew what had always been following him, here in their country.

  Hopefully that would happen before These English burned everything, or killed it, they and all their men ate so much. They fed three men just to carry the barrels of gunpowder they thought they needed to kill caribou, though the animals themselves would have given them all the sinews they could need to snare them if they had been treated properly.

  “You’re just a woman,” Keskarrah says, watching Greenstockings touch the salve Richard Sun has given him to Birdseye’s face. “And you know you are right about that.”

  “Just a woman,” Birdseye repeats softly.

  Keskarrah refuses her invitation to debate. “Every woman knows what she knows. I agree, I don’t understand how we’ll be able to live in our world with These English. They have such enormous canoes, they drag so much stuff along we can’t make enough sounds to name it all, and there aren’t enough human beings to carry it across the world if they have to walk — not even stealing every dog from our enemies would be enough. Nothing stays the way it is, everything changes when they come, and yet they mark it down as if it will always be the same and they can use it. We’ve known that long ridge across the river all our lives, and it refuses to stay the same the second day they’re here. It burns itself black. But they don’t see that.”

  Birdseye says nothing; her eyes are closed.

  “Or any lake or river,” Keskarrah continues, peering intently at the sheen of yellow salve. “They’re always making marks, marks on paper that any drop of water can destroy. As if they had no memory.”

  Greenstockings knows she need not answer; her father is trying to think something through with talk, but she doubts if Birdseye under her fingertips is hearing that talk to help him.

  “They always have to hold something in their hands, something to make marks on, or to look at things or through unknowable instruments. They aim their eyes across every lake and river with instruments that the sun distorts first, and then draw something of it onto paper, with names that mostly mean nothing. As if a lake or river is ever the same twice! When you travel and live with a river or lake, or hill, it can remain mostly like it seems, but when you look at it with your dreaming eye, you know it is never what it seemed to be when you were first awake to it. Again and again Thick English talks about the Soul Everywhere, but he himself never looks for the sun. He and his men always stare at it through something else, and I think the sun uses their instruments to blind them. To make them think living things are always the same.”

  He has been watching Greenstockings’ fingers very carefully. “That spot,” he says, pointing to a mark neither of them has seen on Birdseye’s face before. She nudges the salve to find it.

  Slowly he continues: “Before you were born I dreamed you’d be a woman, and that men would fight like wolves to have you — as they have. And there you were, a small bloody body not wanting to come out between your mother’s legs. Where I had already been quite often.” He laughs at both those happy memories, scratching himself easily. “Always wanting to be there between her legs, I did, and sometimes daring to be bloody too!”

  Greenstockings stares at him. “Bloody? When a woman…?”

  Keskarrah laughs even harder at the taboo he and Birdseye have found they could defy. “A man and a woman can do anything, blood or not, whenever they want to, if they’re strong enough together.”

  Birdseye returns with a grimace, suddenly answering him earlier: “For men, women are just places to go, go in and go out,” she says to Greenstockings, tilting her head into the firelight. The salve is smoothed like fingers along the raw, gnarled edges of her face. “That’s all just m
en dream about, all the time.”

  Keskarrah laughs a little more, but soothingly. “I wasn’t talking like that, I didn’t say ‘just’ that way to you, you know that,” he insists. Despite the ugly salve, which appears as if it will be smeared on Birdseye’s beautiful skin for ever, Greenstockings has to chuckle; she has heard her parents debate so often. Keskarrah continues, “Women just come out of there, but a father is always first inside a mother, children understand that. And men of course like to go back in, as often as they can, and women like them to do it because they want it and without that long wanting nothing would be alive — women are the place of living and men want to be there too, then they are both truly alive. I think These English are human, but they are … different. As if they could travel all their lives without needing women to live.”

  “They don’t live without women,” Greenstockings says.

  “How do you know?” Keskarrah asks.

  She turns aside; she cannot explain to him yet what she has seen in Boy English’s eyes. And thought about. She says, “They just take women anywhere they travel.”

  “How can they know there will be some?” Keskarrah persists. “They know nothing otherwise. If a Person isn’t with them as they live and travel, they see nothing until it burns up in front of them. I’ve never even seen them look back to find out what anyone can see is already following them.”

  “Maybe,” Birdseye says slowly, “maybe.…”

  She stops, and for an instant Greenstockings looks away from the dreadful wound whose very edge she will have to touch now, every day. She does not like the salve. She wasn’t afraid when Richard Sun showed her how to spread it carefully, but she did not think of his name then, nor did she realize that looking so closely at her mother’s skin every day would gradually make her see skin everywhere. And so much sickness. Growing on so many faces where she has never seen it before. When Birdseye first told her the salve wiped away the pain of the Eater, o good, so good! she was ecstatic, but it seems to her now that her mother has already become slower, weaker. That the skin she rubs is, though shining, nevertheless harder and somehow not as alive. Once she tried to ask Birdseye whether she could again fight the Eater only with pain, as she did before, but tears, like a child’s, gathered in her mother’s eyes and Keskarrah said roughly,