A Discovery of Strangers (22 page)

“We hunger often,” she tells him. “Often the animals are gone, they will not let us find them where they go to calve in spring or return in the fall, and sometimes even the bears or ptarmigan or rabbits or squirrels or mice avoid us like weather. All animals go where they go, we can only sing to follow them. The fish swim to us, but not always, and there may be moss to cook, it curls black on stones for winter, but if the animals don’t eat it for you so you can eat it from their stomachs, you have to be careful, because it can make you shit more than you eat, and when you do that you are really eating yourself. Inside.

“I’ve done that often, eat myself; there is time for everyone to do that. There is a place inside my mouth that is dangerous. Every person finds that place inside them, and it only hurts for four days and after that you get thinner and soon you think so slowly, your voice comes out deeper between your bloodied, hollow cheeks, and if you bruise or cut yourself you won’t heal any more, but it bleeds and hurts very little. Only if someone snares a ptarmigan and you accept a mouthful of it, then the giant hunger settling to rest in your bones wakes immediately and you want food again so much that People sometimes cannot help but eat those who have already died. Hunger then has become too much, no one can speak of it any more. People eat and vomit and eat everything again, though if those they eat have starved to death not even their bones and marrow will help, you just eat the hunger that has already eaten them. Hunger makes People crazy sometimes. I have seen them afterwards, and they are worse than dead because they are still living. But my father has lived long without going crazy and he
watches ravens. ‘Ravens,’ he says, ‘you must sing, and they will feed you. Ravens, and the compassionate wolves.’ ”

She cuts away a sliver of the tender smoked stomach, scoops it into the food and offers it on her spread fingers.

“The wolves,” she tells him as his face approaches her hand, “taught us how to hunt these honey animals that feed us. Perhaps sometimes we are born as wolves, but they have always been our sisters and brothers, we never kill them. They will feed you too, if you are careful and let them.”

Her fingers enter his mouth; his tongue curls around them slick with fat as his body tightens, coils, tightens. Slowly she begins to withdraw them, but he lingers, holding them, sucks clean every taste and lingulation of food. She is telling him:

“My father says when a person is too hungry to see land clearly, or cannot crawl around animals to turn them where an armed hunter waits in hiding like the strongest she-wolf with her teeth, when the hunter is too weak to hold his lance or bow steady, or even draw it, then ravens can lead him to what the wolves kindly leave for us. For we are all animals, we know our hunger, and when we have food we leave some for each other. Wolves will leave a head, bones, sometimes even some hide to scrape and boil, though you cannot expect the tenderest parts — remember,” she says, looking directly now into Hood’s eager, uncomprehending eyes, “when you are too weak to think, remember: look in the sky. Raven will be there. He will lead you to our sister wolf. Leave food for her and her little ones when you have some, and she will always leave some for you.”

Hood is looking into Greenstockings’ eyes and sees there, it seems, the shape of the silver wolf he dreamed — a trick of her fire perhaps — superb and powerful he remembers, its neck
bent round to look at him through daggered teeth out of a jaw he shot away — why did he do that? Why did he fire that rifle, dearest God?

He dreamed he was trying to draw that wolf, always the drawing, as he has literally drawn so many, even one for Back and his prosaic background of Dogrib Rock, and he tugged at his raven quill, which was suddenly frozen tight in the inkwell, and shot the wolf’s jaw away, its lower head exploded in ink and the fur ripped back completely, off its bent neck and shoulders and it was still standing there with its skinned skull and its grotesque upper jaw thrust at him like a serrated knife, bone clean and white. Why did he shoot it? How in the dream could his gun be loaded, since he has always refused that when he is awake?

Tears well in her eyes; their blackness floats him into them. Her brown hands bright as glass rise together around his face and pull him over, his head down into her lap. Surrounded so tightly by her he smells deep smoke and texture, hot animal. What she is doing he cannot think of, but is so overwhelmed with its intimacy that he would not resist even if she intended that his throat now open under her inerrant knife. She talks bent over him, her body folded about him.

“Now you will feed me,” her lips tell him, her dark cheek within the length of his tongue, and he feels her powerful fingers search at the roots of his hair. She is doing for him what he has seen her and Greywing do often, and he has shuddered with longing for it to be done to him: cradling each other in their laps, they stroke each other clean of lice.

The lice are everywhere. Like sin waiting in every tree, the logs and mud roofs of their huts, every cranny of bed and blanket,
the hides of every animal they eat, everything they wear, between the very pages of his notebook and snug in every fold or crevice of his body and numberless in his hair — at times he tears his hair in bristling rage and discovers nits on a single strand clustered thick as cellar onions hung stored on a delicate rope. It could be, Lieutenant Franklin has conjectured ponderously (though Doctor Richardson disagrees scientifically), that the very air of this dreadful land engenders such vermin as it engenders cold; a kind of spontaneous genesis. But now Greenstockings is picking them from him one by one, her quick fingers, which he has endlessly tried to draw tying the complex pattern of snowshoe web, strip the lice, place them cluster by scrabbling cluster between her teeth. Her full lips close, her jaw shifts and he hears the lice being crushed, and then she swallows them.

Her close face above him soothes him so completely out of his revulsion that he will remember nothing of this moment but her ethereal face. It floats golden in the firelight, serene as a madonna, offering in this filthy frozen world the ultimate hospitality of food and tender, intimate cleanliness. “Which Is Next To Godliness,” his mother always said in High Church capitals, knuckling his grubby ears. Cradled here, he can only smile at the irony of what she would have refused to imagine for him: how to be next to godliness indeed.

“They live drinking your blood,” Greenstockings says close against his forehead, a trace of blood curved on the curve of her lower lip. “Your sweet blood.”

We are all always bloody, Robert Hood thinks. From the instant we are born bloody, everything we eat is won with blood. And bent about her hot body, clasping the full heat of it, he is
standing behind the massive ship’s gun below the mast still splintering above him in the continuing crash of bombardment, his loaded pistol high as the captain has ordered and terrified beyond himself that now, surely now one of the sailors will run, this is too much, one will certainly try to scoot past him on the deck already washed twice with their comrades’ blood and he will have to shoot him, no, no,
execute
, the captain said, whoever deserts his assigned post in battle is judged with instant
execution
, by you, you are an English naval officer, your imperial duty under oath is to stand behind that gun with two loaded pistols, one in hand and one stuck in — he twists his face into Greenstockings’ stomach, thrusting his legs out as the soft leather yields against him, but even there he cannot escape the thin, ascetic voice of his father, the Right Reverend Richard Hood,
B.A.
,
LL
.
D
., rising to his favourite text from the high chancel at St. Mary’s Church, Bury, Lancashire, in the necessary morning lesson from St. Paul, his categorical, logical clarity of preposterous faith:

“And all things are by the law purged with blood; and without the shedding of blood is no remission of sin. It was therefore necessary that all who——”

He clutches Greenstockings spastically, tighter, crying aloud to drown, disappear somehow in her smoky, yielding … he feels his cheekbone hard against her mound; her folded legs loosen about his face.

And he jerks up out of her arms, twists himself around to reach his feet. “Here … here…” he hisses into her startled surprise, untying the string and stripping down the tall boots she has sewn to care for his feet — when he walked them into the snow he felt powerful enough to hurl aside the frozen tundra — “My … my stockings, here … my.…”

Peeling his stockings down, one and then as quickly as he can the other, and offering them to her, her brilliant eyes reflecting firelight.

And slowly she removes her moccasins. For a moment of stopped breath he sees for the first time her narrow naked foot before it enters the round mellow warmth created by his knee and leg and foot, watches her leg, her skin, slip down and fill the space only he has shaped, one leg and as slowly the other. Then she stands up, over him, long and firm in Sherwood Forest greenwood stockings, and then he can lift his two hands and touch her skin above them. And his face must tilt forwards there as his hands slide down, and turn, and feel each perfect toe spreading like fingers into the gentleness of wool, her slim, o, so vulnerable feet hidden, sheltered and safe within the interwoven circles knit so lovingly by steel in the hands of his loving mother. Forehead and skin, and lips, and tongues.

Inside the round lodge sheltered from the hard moon by tall evergreen trees below the brow of the esker, Birdseye murmurs aloud. Her exhaustion can no longer pull her story steadily into words, she can find bits of its circle only where the hard knotted threads of its facts belabour her:

 … tracks filled. Mounds lengthen towards the horizon. Circles of twigs burned within sight of each other erased by the wind of running snow. A tent and three mounds perhaps sleeping. A fourth moving erect, massive black, the Mohawk from so many rivers away, his body blazing naked and in the snow — be careful! something is wrong, when you freeze or starve the strongest is always the most dangerous — don’t you know that? It is always the strongest who most tenderly cares for you, until he kills you — watch out!

Greywing stirs at a muffled scream, lifts her head from among Keskarrah’s furs. Her mother’s sleeping nest beside her is shaking, opening, shuddering into pieces.

“Everything is dangerous!” her voice cries under layers of leather. “The fire, the knife, his eye, his axe.…”

Greywing shakes her father. He stirs, struggling against awareness.

“Any piece of heavy wood, his gun, his hand, his two hands.…”

The lodge is clasped inside the immense, silent rock of cold that is the world. Greywing whimpers in her lonely consciousness, digging through fur for Greenstockings, along her strange woollen foot and leg, her naked thigh.

“His teeth, oh yes, watch his teeth!” Birdseye screams.

Greywing grabs at covers, exposes Greenstockings and Hood beyond her, Bone is all he can be named, asleep now; they are folded around each other slippery and naked.

“Wake up! Wake up!” She is jerking Greenstockings’ head away from Hood by her long hair, their arms and breasts and stomachs separating, the intertwined lengths of their moist legs smelling sweet as animals, and they stir awake, eyes opening. “Listen — listen!”

Birdseye sings spastically over and over,
“Cock … robin … rock … robin … who … saw … him …I … said … the … fly.…”

Greywing and Greenstockings stare at Robert Hood, stunned beyond comprehension, who is staring at their mother’s
open defacement rising out of the furs. He cannot believe it — it must be the blunder of low shadows and … darkness, of the fearsome cold as the fire dies — but his ears force him into stupefaction, her breath snoring out of her opened face, her words that he cannot but understand: as if after two years of labouring to reach the ends of the world he had arrived there in time to find what he most hated already waiting for him. Speaking to him in language he is forced to understand:

“With … my … little … eye”
Birdseye stutters, groans in English.
“And … I … saw … him.…”

Greenstockings and Greywing shriek in fear — as if they understood where Hood knows nothing — both reaching to clutch him. Keskarrah heaves himself up.

“Who is dead?” he instantly asks of the darkness.

His daughters rock Hood between them, so warm against their fine, bare skins. And then Keskarrah begins to shout, as if to drown out Birdseye’s indecipherable cries.

“Why have you come here?” he bellows at Hood with an aggression that makes his daughters huddle the stranger away between them in renewed fear. “If you are Snow Man the ice will never thaw nor the wind stop blowing while you’re here, so go away, go north where your enemies are killing your children, go, we can’t help you, go away, go back north! Go away!”

But his beautiful daughters rock the young Whitemud between their naked breasts, their slender arms and legs coil around him in a tangle of grief and terror and Keskarrah knows that this is no Snow Man, and never was. That is no way to trick him into leaving. He can only blurt out at Hood, with deep bitterness:

“You are strong, you could easily take one of them, and she
could save you. Should I make a picture of where you must go? To go away?”

And then, almost pathetically at Hood’s stunned silence, “Will you go away?”

“…I … caught … his … blood…
.” Birdseye weeps in English, clawing savagely at the blackness in her ravaged face.

“Ah-h-h-h,” Keskarrah groans in despair at her tone, at the unavoidable understanding that what Birdseye has discovered goes far beyond any arrivals that Tetsot’ine stories have until now explored. “Ah-h-h-h-h-h…” is all he can groan.

DOCTOR JOHN RICHARDSON