A Discovery of Strangers (15 page)

6
M
OMENTARY
M
ERCIES OF THE
B
EAR

When Greenstockings’ shadow first begins to emerge from Hood’s paper, the river is already motionless ice except for the smoking rapids. The winter world darkens into silver around Keskarrah’s hide lodge heaped with spruce boughs and snow in the shelter of the esker. And the sharp corners of the mudded English buildings are softening a little as the ice grows over them, their green logs cracked open by the cold now furred thick as winter animals. At noon, very briefly, the sun glowers over the white folds of the scorched hills, an orange ball dancing tripled with sundogs behind Big Stone, between the black spars of trees.

Now the People have moved their lodges west with Bigfoot, nearer the new snares they have braided and set, nearer the log pounds they have piled together scraggling along the trails that
Keskarrah dreamed the caribou will wear down onto the ice of Roundrock Lake, where they will sleep every night beyond their predators’ approach. Only Keskarrah’s single lodge remains on the esker near the log houses, Birdseye’s two dogs curled beside it in the snow. The giant ravens plod heavily from the English offal heap through deep air across the river, to roosts hidden among the pygmy spruce that had somehow refused to burn.

“At least that bird isn’t wearing a necklace of caribou eyes,” Keskarrah says, squinting from the doorway into the blazing silver valley, the black line of two ravens wavering through it. “As long as These English throw away enough good things for them to eat, we won’t starve.” He drops the hide covering, scratching himself.

Greenstockings knows the cold is flexing its young winter muscle. It wants to terrify them for the days ahead when they will be held solid and black as rock in its grip. But since that is what has happened every annual round of her life, she does not actually think about it; nor has she heard or seen anything when she sleeps, so she has nothing to say to Birdseye whenever they awake into morning darkness. Sleep now drops her into an unfathomable lake where, falling and falling, she dreams nothing. She cannot tell how deep she must go before she finds bottom and can then walk out; if ever. And she wakes to their lodge piled heavy with the stench of hides waiting to be scraped again and tanned and sewn. Never before, not even when the long killing rapids lured three canoes and two families into the hardest grief she can remember, never have they had to soften so many hard hides for so long into the coming cold. She cannot reach the top of them, sitting.

Broadface hunts and hunts, there is no winter rest and sleeping
for him either. On the days when he comes dragging more frozen bodies for These English on the snow, his fingers bulge thick with cold despite the mittens she has sewn him, fur doubled inside. Gradually his hands soften a little in the warmth of their lodge, the skin of his face becomes almost tender while he sits hunched forwards like an old man, eating all the delicious animal parts that the Whites will not: brains, eyes, lungs, heart, the long, sweet filaments of intestine fat, thick penises, nursing udders. He scoops up the marrow she breaks out of the bones, or bites mouthfuls of the frozen slices of mossy stomach she cuts so thin for him that he can see the lodge fire leaping through them. What he loves best is smoked stomach, the fat she chews small before she spits it into an opened paunch filled with half-digested moss and then adds blood, a little brains and water to ferment and smoke, slowly, hanging over the fire for several days, until he returns and sucks that into his cavernous mouth burned black by the ice he always breathes around it.

But Broadface does not look at her. Nor turn and take her until morning, because the men are all hunting so much to satisfy the demands of These English for fresh meat and dried meat and pemmican for storage, firing their guns into the pounds and waiting in ambush along the rocks of the lakeshore and stalking the lake, and even shooting those animals who have accepted snares as they always have. What kind of hunting is that, Keskarrah asks him, though mildly, when a hunter no longer touches an animal until it is dead and its life is spreading out in the snow? He has already spoken a warning two times: endlessly pouring grey powder and poking a ball into an iron barrel, and flexing a finger on curled steel that can burn you raw, if you dare touch it, is not the way numberless beautiful
caribou, who always will make it possible for human beings to live, should be forced to die. There is too much sacrifice being demanded. There is no consideration or tenderness left in so much long-distance killing; only noise and stink.

“For what purpose?” Keskarrah questions the smoke rising from the centre fire. “For huge, fat men in gigantic canoes? These strangers?”

Only Keskarrah dares think such things, and Greenstockings; but only he says them aloud. Broadface is a hunter and he does what he must, as necessity stands before him and the animal is there. He listens to Keskarrah, carefully, but says no word about the endless throats and bellies he and the other hunters rip open, the steaming guts he spills on the snow to freeze hard as his iron gun before he remembers to lift his head for a breath of gratitude. Silently he eats the food provided by the animals, the mounds of it that Greenstockings prepares for him even while she scrapes and scrapes hides and sews winter boots and leggings and coats and mittens and caps and cuts spirals of endless lacing. Within the hot, tired circle of her arms he awakes to find comfort inside her, and in the pale morning when Birdseye wakes her again he is always gone. The memory of his closed face rubbing hers, his taut, twisting legs, his hard, sullen body and mouth and hip bones and penis attached to her as if they were seared together by the very fire of intensifying cold — all this seems vaguely reassuring to her, but far less memorable than the black lake she has sunk into once more despite anything he is able to make her feel, out of which she has been pulled once more, temporarily, by her mother’s hand.

Birdseye is weaker every day; the soft leather now permanently hides what the Eater continues to do to her face. Every
day Keskarrah brings the salve, and with it Greenstockings touches the black edges of what has already been taken. But the salve does nothing to stop her fingers passing over the deeper blackness which opens always wider in her mother’s face, and one day she recognizes that that blackness is what opens down into her sleep. She has not known such impenetrability can exist in sleep; she begins to dread that she will never plumb it completely, much less walk through it, unless Broadface … and someone else, Hood, it will be hooded Hood who may need all winter to find her picture on his paper — but that does not matter, he will find it — and she will need both of them to know how black, how deep, where the bottom of the lake is. Until now she has found no human voices there, nor any light.

So she works longer and longer, trying to avoid that sharper devastation of sleep. Sometimes in exhaustion she finds herself contemplating her hand. Her powerful pale fingers which hold scrapers, knives, dig into Broadface’s muscles or play his soft balls and cock into another, more tender, pleasure. Her powerful fingers, tired though they are, feel everything, like her eyes feeling texture and shade, dimension, heft, or her nostrils knowing essence. Her fingers feel exactly the slip of Richard Sun’s salve, which deadens open pain but, she suspects now, will not stop the Eater — merely hide him more secretly. And sometimes she can barely stop her fingers, the lure to touch the blackness widening in Birdseye’s beloved face. She spreads the salve with extreme care, to the exact destroyed edge of skin. She cannot permit her fingers to disappear.

Keskarrah says again, moving across her personal memory of darkness, “When raven has lots to eat, he’s happy. And then he won’t make us as black as he is.”

Clearly her father does not understand; he is lost in that long story of creating birds. Neither he nor Birdseye can help her — will it be the men? Or must it be herself?

Gradually, day by shortening day, she sees Keskarrah become the winter bear he likes to be. He dreamed some of the trails for the caribou and he is guarding Greenstockings in Hood’s picture and for that, he says, Richard Sun will give them the salve that protects Birdseye. He is so strangely, thoughtlessly content about the salve, and he lies naked under his robes while the women continue in their endless work, breathing aloud sometimes of what he has seen while he sleeps, or the stories he finds wandering in his head, which he pulls into words so that they are happening somewhere, to someone they probably know, even while he speaks them. Winter is the time for stories, of course, the stories that tell why the world is the way it is and the places are where they are, and every winter he tells them again, but never in quite the same way. And some of the stories have never been heard by anyone, not even Keskarrah, because they have not told themselves to him yet and so could not be uttered until now.

However, the stories of what will come do not speak to him. He has refused the future all his life, he says that is a burden for others to carry, and now it seems he has been spared that. For which he is loudly thankful.

“I have enough to carry already,” he says, looking at Birdseye but saying nothing directly to her; they both know she has her own great burdens. “Sometimes,” he continues, “all the past life of the animals becomes too much for me, and all the world’s endless places and so much about people, all the way back from when man was alone, no woman, and so without
even a child to tell all the stories that were already happening, when man was first thinking he needed bigger feet to run on the snow if he was to live through the winter — sometimes — I don’t know about anyone else, but sometimes I think the necessary order of dreams I am given is too much for one lifetime.”

Birdseye is silent. They all know, except perhaps Greywing, that the inevitability of the future is growing in her when she sleeps, but beyond the first two outbursts she has so far been able to contain what she knows about themselves and These English and all their paddle-slaves waiting here and eating, waiting to go north. Nevertheless they know that she cannot contain all that much longer: she will have to start telling it for the air to carry, somehow.

“I like the story of Owl, better than.…” Greywing hesitates, not wishing to insult anyone; she pushes the robes close around her father and returns to her stretching skin. When her sister speaks with such a child’s thoughtlessness, Greenstockings wishes she herself could still do that. But she cannot pretend any longer, as she has recently, to childlike playfulness; every night the deep lake of her foreboding deepens.

Keskarrah laughs, knowing what the girl wants and therefore he can tease her. “O, Owl was there too when Raven said to People, ‘You made me all black, and now I’ll make you black too, black from starvation.’ But that time Owl was good and told the People where Raven had hidden the caribou, hey! it was Owl who sang them out of their hiding, ‘There they are, over there between those two thin hills, thick as maggots, those juicy, sweet maggots of the tundra,’ Owl sang to People.”

“I like Owl…” Greywing begins and stops, remembering
herself, remembering that a story is what it is and will not change no matter what you wish of it.

“Which one?” Keskarrah asks innocently, knowing. “There are so many stories, which one about Owl?”

But the girl is wordless now, blushing, her hand with the bone scraper barely moving. Keskarrah laughs, his eyes crinkling even more against the noon blaze of the fire, and as Greenstockings hauls down another of the heavy hides, she wishes again that the clumsy immovable houses and the medicines of These English had never paddled across great lake Tucho, that their insistence here on the esker, the loud ugliness of their voices and axes and guns walking and screaming everywhere between the silent trees, making everything jump and shiver far beyond any cold, could be dumped into a hole, as their servant does their night piss and shit every morning; and she would go personally and pick up that frozen hole they are filling and hurl it into a lake deeper than her sleep, from which they never, ever, could crawl out, they and all their endless demands and heavy words and jaws chewing and chewing and clothing and shit. Not even Hood … she would … his long pencil fingers … would he accept her throwing him away … could she, Hood?

“…I really like,” their father is saying, so innocently, “is Mouse talking to Owl. Have I ever told you what she does to Owl?”

Greywing whispers, “No, no,” because she wants to hear it again so very badly. And Keskarrah wants to tell it; he turns on his elbow towards her, his tone smiling like his face.

“Well, this is how their conversation starts. Mouse has just hidden herself under the corner of a rock, hidden herself there very, very fast, and Owl has had to pull out of his dive before he hits the rock and has to sit there, for her to come out, though
he knows it’s useless. So Mouse starts it, very politely from under the rock, ‘Are you quite comfortable there? Did you bruise your wings stopping so fast? O-o-o-o, do your empty claws hurt from hitting the ground so hard, and so completely empty?’ Of course, hey! Owl says nothing. Not this time, but wait, next time, as long as you’re alive there’s always a next time, just wait, and he clappers his beak together fiercely to let Mouse know what will certainly happen, next time. But Mouse is an excellent conversationalist, and to make sure that Owl doesn’t get bored during what they both know is his long, useless waiting, she continues, very politely,