A Discovery of Strangers (17 page)

This reasonable explanation of White behaviour, which Keskarrah has wandered into aloud, startles his upper body up from his robes.

“That’s power! No wonder Whitemuds are so strong — they always follow the power of their wrong!”

Bigfoot slowly takes off the black hat, fumbles it between his thick fingers. There is a dent all around the hair on his head, which none of them has seen before.

“The caribou,” he says finally, unable to follow Keskarrah in pursuit of White wrong, “many of them seem to be going away.”

“I thought so,” Keskarrah says quietly, turning from what he has just understood; not wanting to think any further into what such a presence must mean for their winter’s living.

“So many usually stay here, and the ice is now strong on the lake, they can avoid the wolves here, but they all seem to be leaving, going farther south into the trees.…”

Keskarrah lets Bigfoot’s words grow gradually smaller until they trickle into nothing. It seems to Greenstockings that her father’s ancient skin glows in the firelight like a baby’s, newborn. She scrapes precisely around a maggot-hole in the tensile sacrifice of hide splayed white before her: that will have to be folded over, sewn tight to keep out a spear of cold. A Whitemud baby must look like a soft maggot growing in thick caribou hide, a tender grub squeezing itself, lengthening itself out into air, glistening in light. She feels a spasm of longing in her breasts flicker double-pronged through the folded length of her legs.

“It may be like you’ve said,” Bigfoot bumbles on. “Too many caribou have died here for us, too fast.”

“They won’t go on their winter paths?”

“But … you dreamed them well.”

Keskarrah lifts his head. “You’ve heard the Whitemud story. For them everything in the world has to be wrong.”

Bigfoot agrees gloomily.

“Before they found this place, Lastfire Lake took two of our hunters.”

Bigfoot says, “Lakes have done that to us before.”

“But not while we were hunting for strangers,” Keskarrah muses. “When you work hard to feed and clothe others.…” He pauses, but suddenly continues. “We are hospitable, no one with us will starve while we have something to eat, but perhaps … perhaps at some point we … make ourselves stranger too.”

The two men glance at each other quickly, then away. There cannot be words to speak about that. Not yet, nor do they want to find them.

Bigfoot says carefully, “Nevertheless you dreamed very well … the animals have fed us very well, everyone has enough so far, even winter clothing.”

“Whitemuds want more.”

Bigfoot says nothing, so Keskarrah says it. “They want sacks of meat for summer, they want it dried now.”

“No one dries meat in dark winter.”

“They don’t know what we do.”

“I’ve told them, again and again, when the sun returns there are always other caribou.”

“Not along the Everlasting Ice, where they want to go.”

“But why will they go there?” Bigfoot is almost shouting. “We’ve told them, there’s nothing there but ice!”

“I know,” Keskarrah says quietly. “I think we have to understand this: Whitemuds hear only what they want to hear.”

Bigfoot turns the grotesque hat round and round in his hands;
Greenstockings cannot see the faintest shadow of a seam there, it is made so beautifully.

Keskarrah sinks down, props his head on one hand. His slow words walk step by step through their minds like wolves moving into the lethal curve of a hunt.

“Nothing, nothing. For them the world is always wrong because they never want it to be … the way it is.”

Bigfoot snorts in agreement, “Huh! They didn’t want our strong rivers, our many rapids, the quick coming of winter — they won’t want the Everlasting Ice if they get there! What does it matter, what they want? The world is what it is.”

Keskarrah agrees. “If I could understand them, I’d gladly tell you. But before these Whitemuds got here, I think they’d decided how the world should be.”

Bigfoot stares at him, obviously lost. Keskarrah adds,

“Their first story tells them everything is always wrong. So wherever they go, they can see only how wrong the world is.”

How can a place be — wrong? Despite her father’s disturbing words, Greenstockings cannot help grinning at Bigfoot. He knows that hunting is easy, and a delight, but the thinking that makes it possible — and the prayer — may well be more difficult than he can ever achieve. Keskarrah has told her often: talking is never just talk, even when it happens through Twospeaker with These English. Words mirror what there is in the world, as they also anticipate it, and when she sees Bigfoot glumly ponder the hides stacked thin and high as his hunter memory beside her, she understands his dilemma. He knows as well as she that, no matter with what respect and care the women may sew them, hides remain gifts from the animals, and gifts can disappear if snatched by the unworthy; knows that hides always
belong to the animals, are their clothing for ever, and that only proper acceptance, hide and human worn together, will make the new animal-person who can live protected and strong in the killing winter cold. There is no way to force animals to surrender more than they wish. If pursued unworthily, with deception, the gifts of animals will be deceptive; perhaps even deadly. That is the way they protect themselves.

Bigfoot’s glance slips towards Birdseye bent over her needle, behind her hiding leather, but instantly he shifts to a minute inspection of the black hat he is turning in his hands: as if fur dragged from this country, subjected to something unknowable in English hands and returned here so unrecognizable might nevertheless be somehow less strange — less lethal — than the animals they live with. Greenstockings knows her mother has caribou hide between her fingers, the steel needle These English have given Birdseye cuts through it quick as a fish — but how long after the coat is completed and given to them will it still be there to wear? And all the women along the lake whose lodges are filled with these swift steel needles and the thick, sweet smoke of drying meat, even if they can ever make enough to satisfy the Whitemuds while they are here, how much will remain for the Whitemuds to eat when they carry it away? Clothes and meat can disappear like the animals, whose gifts they are.

Watching Bigfoot beyond her busy hands, Greenstockings ponders all this; ponders his blunt fingers stroking that seamless fur. Strange things, becoming stranger. Once they had agreed that Bigfoot had the possibility of mature, elderly wisdom, and she thought then she could easily accept being his third wife. But now he seems to have lost his discernment, his hunter balance; becoming the person everyone agreed should talk to
These English has made him by turns either foolishly arrogant or obsequious, either superbly dignified or fawning without seeming comprehension. Only after he talks to Keskarrah for some time is he the man she remembers. But his eyes always were very small, as if grown just large enough to measure everything only by their own size.

Keskarrah says carefully aloud, as if they have been speaking throughout this silence, “Not much can be said yet. You know I first thought they would go, be gone fast like those other two Whites — and these could be gone if they weren’t so slow and heavy, and the winter hadn’t caught them. But now … now I think … they’ll be gone at last only when the ice is very thin on the River of Copperwoman, thin enough to see fish through it.”

Bigfoot looks up, hopefully.

“The ice isn’t very thick, not yet.”

“No. But it will have be thinner … much thinner.”

At the corner of her eye Greenstockings senses her mother hunched almost into a ball around her working hands. And she understands: this is the knowledge Birdseye and Keskarrah have found together and wanted to avoid, but couldn’t. Almost another whole year of These English. She sees Bigfoot’s head droop wearily. That may be too long even for him and his fast, preening imitation of Thick English, and she cannot help grinning at him. As if Tetsot’ine would ever put up with a man who strutted about as
boss
beyond the brief necessities of defence and raid. He must understand already that he has started acting different too fast.

There is a thickness in her head, she cannot breathe for all the talk piled like animal bodies over her. Very deliberately she unstretches herself from her finished hide, stands up slender as
willow into the cone warmth of the lodge. She pulls her parka down her strong arms and over her head, picks up the leather pail and bends, quick as thinking, out into the fresh mist of snow. Black raven is nowhere in the purple sky.

The Dogrib boy, whom Bigfoot has kept as a slave since Thick English came, sits on his master’s pack, clutching Birdseye’s dogs close to him for warmth. One cowers as Greenstockings passes, but the bitch bares her bright teeth and she wonders once more if, when the long darkness is completely here and he sleeps behind his mud-smeared logs, Thick English will finally reach for dogs and discover warmth. Now he sleeps alone and cold every night, everyone knows he will have no woman and allows his men none; he seems to like only puppies still on the teat, before they grow old, cringing or savage in turn, and must hunt food for themselves. Like Bigfoot now, whom she once liked because it seemed then he need not be as heavy as other men. Despite his betraying little eyes.

Down the granular snow of rocks away from the square houses she will not look at, beneath the willows to the river: the hole is frozen clear as the water itself. She cannot break through with her heel. She is searching for a loose stone when she hears voices, the string of sound trailing indecipherably down towards her. She looks up from the circle of crushed wet ice, about to sink her bucket there even as it hardens again: six of them are coming down to the river. And clearly the only English is Back, leading the toboggans, packs, guns towards her — Boy English coming fast on his little snowshoes, swinging them easily, he’s so strong, such a powerful walker the others half-trot to keep up.

Little Back, wrapped under his silly black hat, and his sly black eyes, like fly specks always quick to crawl over her skin.
She sensed no clean lust in him, as if sensuality for him could only be stolen from someone, hidden by deception from someone else. She has not felt his eyes on her for four days, but she feels her knife flex her mittened hand and how his blunt fingers ripped her shirt open: exactly how deep is he white, where will he fold open into red meat? She should have let her knife look more thoroughly than the skin of his pants. And his beautiful small teeth, his delicate reddening face smooth as spilled water on ice already speaking puffs of cold at her into the slanting snow that swirls suddenly out of the sky. She knows he will not touch her because others are here to see what he does, and she cannot, gladly cannot, understand a single sound or recognize the faintest picture in the white mist he blasts out at her. She should have taken one of his poking fingers.

Broadface — there he is, one of two hunters on what will obviously be a long journey. With two voyageurs harnessed to pull two toboggans with the dogs. And behind them all, grinning under her massive pack, is Little Marten, who will carry anything in any cold to roll up with Broadface beside a fire. He may have known of this travel before today, but he has told Greenstockings nothing, and from his tiny smile did not intend to meet her as they left. She looks at Boy English, his many perfect teeth, and remains silent.

“A short walk to Tucho,” Broadface tells her. “For rum and White paper.”

Suddenly she is very happy for them leaving on such a useless trip, days and days, a month, perhaps half a winter of snow walking. Throughout the darkness not one of these will suddenly appear at her lodge entrance — if ever again. A rock fissure may tenderly accept them, or a rapid opening to water quick as
a fish gill, the cold smile clear and crystal all around them like the vanished sun, the great aurora lure them into a devastation of dreams. She should not think this, it makes her feel less than mean, so she smiles at Little Marten weighed down worse than a toboggan. Only Whites would enter the long darkness with such an interminable, annihilating walk. Only Whitemuds.

But Broadface has found his broad grin again. “You keep your hot little hole empty,” he tells her. “Or I’ll know it.”

“O yes” — Greenstockings laughs in Boy English’s uncomprehending face, passing — “and your wet stick will stay here!”

Broadface laughs aloud. “It’ll be here, flying back every night, so watch out!”

“Huh! You’re not Wolverine.”

“You’ll go crazy every night, someone who knows told me.”

“Who that knows?”

“I know.”

“You couldn’t do that alone, and who’d help you?”

“Don’t bother to cross your legs in bed, it won’t help.”

All the People around the waterhole are laughing. The voyageurs have dragged past too, but Back shifts around in his tiny snowshoes, smiling with benign incomprehension at these cheery native farewells. Greenstockings sees his eyes move against her, and she feels again his clumsy hand groping under her clothes for skin, beating at her nipple, his pale face hunching uncontrollably, and she breathes disdain at him and his ignorance open-mouthed, breathes it out like smoke rising above the rapids whose voice is always around them, and the People see her teasing, insulting this Boy English, always leering about and who hasn’t come near her since she showed him her long, bright knife, and they laugh even harder. The sound of it spreads
through air, returns from the rocks holding the frozen river with the jubilant talk of ancestors who have lived here four hundred generations, with the call of drums, with the high voices of children waiting eagerly to be born but still undecided about whom they will enter and make ecstatically happy. In her magnificent, glorious world of rock and sky and tree and ice the cold fondles Greenstockings and for an instant she sways, almost dizzy with happiness, fondles her to the very roots of her tongue. She knows Back will always find a woman and Broadface will never forget her, neither her words nor her red, moist, open mouths.

Little Marten on her snowshoes passes last, and as Greenstockings lifts the heavy water, she pauses beside her in the track.