A Discovery of Strangers Read online

  “Do what Richard Sun says.”

  As if he too wanted to see nothing — at least of this. As if that bit of White they are given every day for her fingertips to spread might not be as lethal for People as instruments and dreamlessness.

  “What?” Keskarrah bends to Birdseye now. “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe they don’t need to dream. Maybe through those instruments the sun lets them see how the world is. For them always there, always the same.”

  Keskarrah stares at her, dumbfounded. He has never considered that the sun through glass might not deceive Whites; never imagined that something they could make and drag into the world he has always lived, travelling it into existence, might make that world more fixed than his own awareness could recognize. Greenstockings glances up and sees the possibilities of such an apprehension, with something like fear, gather in her father’s eyes. Something far worse than one person’s Eater.

  But then, in their looking together, they are distracted by Birdseye’s face. The lower bulb of her nose is no longer there. Greenstockings remembers nuzzling her own small nose into that soft corner, and her mother’s warm breath, laughter, her mother’s long stroke down her knobby back with one hand while keeping her head rigid, pushing until their shared faces washed warmth over them both. Keskarrah holds the tiny box with the salve; if he does not believe in the power of These English, why does he go every day to Richard Sun for another portion, and lean so close, watching with the intensity of a touch, while she dips her finger into it and draws it around the raw edge of what is now only memory for them both? But, she realizes suddenly, what she is doing is different from the memory of lying against Birdseye’s back under the furs of the animals and feeling, magnified through her own small body, her parents holding each other through a winter night when they were all the furry animals sleeping, dreaming curled together skin to skin, like seeds hidden in the long winter night, and waking into the dim morning still woven into that warmth, that soft, tensile voluptitude.

  No, it seems to her now she had no body then: she was a skin of happiness folded into exquisite awareness within sleep. And the men whom she has since accepted, none, not even Broadface — not yet — has ever again helped her remember such anticipation.

  Ah no, she thinks sadly, her fingers letting Birdseye know that the salve has all been placed, never again known that. As if she had already lived everything in her childhood, before she knew she was alive; and would never be more so. Her fingers at her mother’s face move through the fearful backwards gap in memory. If she could feel that as an unthinking child, surely it must still be, somewhere. So, how can she think of … nothing?

  But there it is. Moving into her mother; there, under her fingertips.

  “Yes. Yes.” Keskarrah is wrapping the tiny box in leather and hiding it in his clothes. “Tomorrow Richard Sun will give me more.”

  Greenstockings shudders. Her father does not seem to understand what may be the truth of that grand deceiver, the sun, not even when he says that English name. He says their families will stay here, refusing to travel with the People as they follow the caribou: theirs is now the only lodge left where These English have rooted themselves immovably on the esker above the river. And despite her gathering weakness, Birdseye still works endlessly, scraping hides, cutting the meat the hunters bring for them and These English when they have it. But Greywing is almost as fast as she at the hides, and once Greenstockings had to work streaks of fat that Birdseye seemed not to notice out of a skin before it turned hard as wood in the cold. Keskarrah refuses to hunt more than one day at a time, or dream animal dreams, but finally he has assented to Bigfoot’s pleading and gone downriver along Roundrock Lake, where the other People have gone, to show them exactly where they must build the necessary pounds, exactly where he has seen the caribou trail down into their crossings. Pounds and their snares are essential now: once the lake is frozen strong enough, the animals, alert to the faintest sound or motion, will flee onto the snow-drifted ice where they can outrun any wolf, and usually not even the most skilful hunter can crawl close enough to kill them with a gun. For several days Keskarrah has gone; nevertheless he will not move their lodge with the other People to Roundrock. He returns to Fort Enterprise in darkness every evening, sometimes with a stiff hide or meat, so that every morning he can bring new salve from Richard Sun to Birdseye.

  The river is still open at the caribou crossings, he tells them, but the People have not yet completed all the snaring pounds, though the lake is already skimmed with deceptive ice and the wind whips snow flurries over the eskers, trying to level the moss depressions. Strong ice, snow and snowshoes: that is the necessary sequence of travel in the lengthening darkness, and so it is not Birdseye but Greenstockings who is webbing the snowshoe frames Keskarrah has bent out of thin steamed birch the evening Robert Hood appears, with his paper and many little pencils.

  Birdseye tugs the leather down over her face. “He should not do that,” she says. “No.”

  “I would like to draw her picture … at her woman’s work. Making snowshoes,” Robert Hood says in English. Very quietly, as he has learned to speak in this unimaginable land where the few sounds made by trees or rocks or water, or the occasional animal or human, vanish into silence like a snowflake touching into the swell of an ocean. He points at the young woman, gestures a fluid shape lightly in the air with his hand.

  Greenstockings likes his hand, so long-boned and pale, so quick that the pencil it holds between two powerful fingertips sighs grey lines out of the bending paper. A curve of her knee, her leg, appears.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Birdseye says.

  “Why does he do that?” Keskarrah frowns, worried as well. “He can look at you, he can see you different every day, why fix you on his paper once?”

  Greenstockings laughs a little. “Maybe he has no memory.”

  Birdseye murmurs, “Snow Man.”

  Greenstockings studies this man carefully for that story, and she cannot believe her mother: he is pale enough, yes, but he came to them from the south, not the north, and so how can he have brought an everlasting winter with him? And he is so thin, so stretched and gaunt, so obviously helpless, it is impossible that he have any woman or children waiting for him in the north, to whom he can be tricked into returning. She chuckles tugging the babiche tight, and holds that: would good, rich food make him strong enough … to be interesting?

  But Keskarrah does not notice her; he continues to follow his inevitable man’s thought: “Is he ready to fight for you?” he asks the air above her. “When a knife opens him and his guts steam on the snow, These English will be so enraged all of them will have to be killed.”

  “I … she is the most … beautiful woman I’ve ever seen … I.…”

  Even very softly, Robert Hood can only say this because neither he nor they understand a single sound either can utter. He does not consider what they can obviously see; it is enough for him that the meanings of their two incomprehensible languages pass each other unscathed in the close warmth of these hide walls, their mourning slashes folded over and sewn tight against any draft, and vanish outwards into the fierce darkness before they can reach the cold mud-smeared logs of the officers’ quarters, where Lieutenant Franklin and Doctor Richardson — and Midshipman Back, of course — edge closer to the fire in the centre mess and write down every English word they can think of in their journals, vanish long before they can reach the smaller house where Ordinary Seaman John Hepburn must live crowded with the twenty voyageurs and their three wives, whose various languages he cannot understand either. Years of latitudes and distance, of darkness, of cold and the absolute secret constructs of language: Robert Hood knows he has fallen into freedom. Unfathomably.

  “I … if I … could touch her, there is only a … tongue, licking.”

  An ineffable word. And he can only repeat it: “Licking, licking.”

  With her bone needle Greenstockings threads the babiche through holes burned in the bir
ch frame, tying each intricate intersection in a pattern of exact size and tension. Keskarrah’s life (and therefore all of theirs) depends on how swift as a bird he can run over the valley snows where the shovel-footed caribou, whose hide threaded in her hands makes such running possible, themselves sometimes flounder and die. She too loves to run, carried by snowshoes, when winter at last smooths the hum-mocked, rotting muskeg and rocks and brush of ridge and valley into hard, undulating whiteness, the snowshoes, oooo, she weaves herself into a giant, winged raven lifting away, rising over island and rapids to be held on delicate eddies of curling air, spiralling, soaring to hang motionless as ash over the conical lodges of the People piled over with spruce boughs and snow, soaring on tip-lifted wings over the stumps of trees that defied the wind for centuries and are now burned or smashed down into walls for the three square English houses covered with frozen mud and hammered down like chips on the crest of the esker that opens northward into silence where the wind burrows at moss, rubs for ever over stone and lichen, whispers granular snow into rock. There, when she folds and leans down into the shelter of such rock, the sky will harden her face also, the light search through the wrinkles of her head, and she will hear the ice growing out of the ground, freezing up into her feet, branching itself through her body and out into her arms and head and ears until it bristles beyond the tips of her fingers and the innumerable points of her hair: everywhere. She cannot believe this thin, bony English can exist here: if she lets him love her, she will kill him.

  But she senses Birdseye murmuring, like chant buried in her throat beyond leather, “…Snow Man, Snow Man, white as snow man … why have you come? … what follows you? … nothing but snow, nothing but woe man.…”

  And if Birdseye insists on seeing him as snow, why shouldn’t Greenstockings love him? Hold him within herself while she can, since he is either gone or dead already? And if her mother, or father — who is staring at him now as if he were a barely discernible spoor that might lead somewhere — if either of them starts dreaming the brief footprints of what life he has left, he will turn stiff as wood. Hood’s sky-blue eyes are fixed on her. He is certainly alive at this moment, bent towards her; she could thread him like this snowshoe.

  Someone outside clears his throat, the lodge opening lifts and Twospeaker stoops in. Birdseye turns away instantly — she will never say a word anyone tries to translate — but Keskarrah nods happily, as if he now knows everything when an instant before he recognized only doubtful questions. He even chuckles a greeting, and Robert Hood, immediately silenced by the languages that have entered, rises and bows to Keskarrah as if he were in court. Then, formally, he requests that he may be permitted to draw a portrait of his extraordinarily beautiful daughter. And St. Germain translates.

  Slowly Keskarrah rises also, shifts the huge grizzly hide tight around his shoulders and folds his arms over his chest. Under their sleeping-robes Greywing stirs, awakened by new voices. Greenstockings hears her mother murmuring again, but she is somewhere in a mist; as if the sounds being made about her are smoke and her father, planting himself like an ancient tree swaying above her, separating and merging with what may be Hood, or may be a story spirit or her endless longing. Men standing over her — and she realizes again that her father is first of all and always a man — with his eagle-beaked face pushing into anything he pleases, as men do — men always above her — will there ever be a time when their assumption over her ends, even if she slits lengthwise or crosswise every single one of their throats or their cocks? Hood’s momentary seduction of her tenderness infuriates her, as Twospeaker crystallizes his pale language like familiar ice inside her ear. And her father’s words: “I will stand guard beside her so that, when the big boss across the stinking water sees her picture, he won’t try to send for her.”

  Twospeaker laughs as he translates, but Robert Hood responds very seriously; the translator stops laughing, speaks so that his tone will not betray him.

  “He says the father across the water is old, so old he never leaves his bed. But I’ll tell you more, Hepburn has told me that he’s far too old and crazy, so crazy he can’t wipe his own shit off his ass.”

  Keskarrah’s eagle face does not twitch. “I think,” he says, “an old White would like to have a beautiful young woman do that too, but I could be wrong. Tell him our pictures have to be made together, because if there is a beautiful daughter, a strong mother must stand beside her, and if that’s impossible, it must be the father, who has already been inside the mother first.”

  Greenstockings listens intently to the sounds Twospeaker makes: snow squeaking under feet in the long darkness. She ties the soft babiche intersections of the snowshoe design with concentrated care: whoever crosses the brief memory these shoes will leave on snow will recognize her, and recognize her father who bent the wood, and recognize the caribou, and the birch tree, because all together in the great travelling world they have made a new creature, one winged to walk on snow, on snow where caribou are the core of all life like the moss and lichen they eat, and wolves and humans and ravens eat caribou, and moss and birch and lichen will drink every drop of their dropping blood.

  When she looks up, Twospeaker is gone.

  Keskarrah’s burly shape under the bearskin has emerged in profile quicker than he himself ever found a line map in the dust. Robert Hood is not looking at Greenstockings yet, nor has he noticed Greywing sitting up naked among the furs, staring. Keskarrah talks, talks, as if it were his voice that is drawing his outline from the white paper.

  “The lake you named ‘Winter’ is really a fish with its head to the east and its tail whipping up the froth of rapids just below us, the place you’ve tried to draw so often already. This great lake fish is trying to swim away east, as fish generally do, against the current. You can see that clearly by walking around the lake: its strong lower fin is the waterfall half-way along the north shore that in winter makes the river water climb even higher into the sky. I have seen that this lake is a fish many times walking around it, both when the lake pretends to be land but is really ice, and when it’s water and cannot be walked on. Certain People can also recognize the fish from our small canoes, though it may be impossible from your big ones. That’s why the last trees here grow so large: that giant fish tries to swim east, but these giant trees hold it back, no matter how hard it swims, it can’t move. Of course all the trees along the south shore are burned now, gone, but I still don’t think the fish can leave this winter — unless too many more trees are cut down for firewood, and if you pile up more houses, here where its tail keeps thrashing.

  “Now these snowshoes she is making,” Keskarrah adds thoughtfully, “they could carry you around it, when they are completely sewn. Then you might be able to see. If you drew the lake as it is you would have to see the fish, and you could name it correctly. That is, if you wanted to.”

  Robert Hood hears the deep rumble of the old man’s voice like wind in night spruce, like aurora walking over sky. He has turned to Greenstockings, is trying to find her shape before he attempts details, and has been led astray by her exact edge, which must be … is surely, yes, under the obscuring leather and small cloths, and he wants his pencil to imagine it, yes, his fingers must imagine her shape since he cannot yet imagine physically uncovering her and actually seeing skin. How will he draw anything of her correctly if he cannot.…

  “O-o-o-o,” he sings to himself out loud, Keskarrah’s bass sustaining him like a grand organ, “you are such a woman, o-o-o-o-oh, any sea captain would forget his cabin boys and the palm trees of Africa and sail through the French and Dutch navies together to see you seated with your legs aslant, your strong fingers tying leather so hard and clean over and through and into, and your hands, God to lift that leather and see all of you, draw your woman’s shape, draw it exact as feeling your skin, touching you, my fingers along every bend of.…”

  And he is so suddenly, vividly happy to hear himself say all this aloud while he draws. After all, he is performing t
he assigned duty for which he was selected from so many applicants and appointed to this expedition — knowing no one will ever know he thought this, leave alone said aloud any English word into this north air. He peers at his hand: it moves, draws this stunning woman’s line from his fingertips over and over again; he can fondle her until he has found her body’s exact turn, until he knows it so indelibly that when he slashes the snowshoe across her lap it seems he has hurled himself, dived across her lap stretched out and pointed, become the long, fish-like shape he aches with her to be. Thrashing.

  Greenstockings has no need to look up again. She can easily hear the gathering together of Hood’s body, can smell it thicken into memory while her father stands erect, speaking over the fire to protect her. Birdseye is bent beside it, hands motionless, dreaming perhaps, and Greywing pretends sleep again under the robes while she listens to this old and always new sacred story. Circled inside the lodge, Greenstockings believes Hood — who may be Snow Man, may be simply white bone — may be able to understand her fingers and her father, even if he comprehends no words and seems to be humming his own, may understand a little since he is so desperately trying to draw her, once, this instant before she is different again. But for Keskarrah speaking with such great care, she would laugh at the futility of that repeating pencil.