A Discovery of Strangers (24 page)

Keskarrah stares up into the smoky cone of the lodge. What he sees there settles into his face hard as frozen rock defying all wind-blasted snow. And he laughs, but only a little, glancing at no one, though every person is watching him. The two women, mother and daughter, understand then that this time the story will offer no brooding presence, no spirit or vision or medicine, no shimmering distance of tenderness and mercy; or beauty, beyond his cold language of deliberated theft and ravishment. The cruel gift of mittens, the gentle lichen and moss nurturing a fire — this time every foot will be twisted and freezing, every dress ripped open, every club will drip blood and every mind hatred until it is spilled out, back into the enduring land. There is no place to run from what is coming: there is only this place, there is no other home.

And if strangers, if enemies have the power to find them here, they will. With all the accumulating cruelty of their fine,
murderous gifts. That too cannot be changed.

Keskarrah says softly to their circle, explaining what Birdseye and Greenstockings understand in his cold laughter, “Raven and wolf have followed the caribou, as they do. Blackfire has to find People whom the animals have not left, and the trail climbing out of deep snow is leading him there.

“And he found something else on the lakeshore below Dogrib Rock, while he was digging around for that fire — something that guided him more surely than his willow wand. It was a needle made from the penis-bone of a marten, and he travelled as fast as he could on his snowshoes — one belonging to She Who Delights, the other the one she had completed for him — swung along the memory of that journey in snow to catch up with those People. They travelled like we do, hunters first, followed by their families and then the old men and women and last the widows with their children. He came close to them as they were putting up their lodges. At the outer edge of the camp a girl was telling her widowed mother that she had lost her needle at their last campfire, and she wanted to go back to find it. But the mother said,

“ ‘No, don’t go, it’s too dark.’

“The girl asked, ‘But what will I sew with?’

“It’s too dangerous, don’t.’

“As the mother spoke, Blackfire came close and put his arm wearing the long beaver mitt around the girl from behind, his hand offering her nothing but the needle. Without making a sound the girl turned inside his arm and saw him. His ragged rabbit clothing almost touched her beautiful face.

“The girl said quietly to her mother?, I don’t have to go back. The fire has brought me my needle.’

“When the mother looked around she screamed, but just a little, because she was almost as clever as her daughter. The man was so huge, his face beaten so black from suffering and cold and starvation. Nevertheless his hands were empty except for her daughter’s needle.

“ ‘O-o-o-o,’ the mother said, when she could. ‘Then you can build up a fire, together.’

“That’s what they called him, Blackfire. And when those People surrounded him he told them his story. O, what a wailing went up then for all he had had to endure. People understand suffering very well, how deeply and long we are forced to remember those who rob us. So Blackfire didn’t have to explain what more he wanted. The widow fed him bone soup and the girl sewed him clothing with her needle and every night together their fire broke the darkness and cold into little pieces and threw them away until there was nothing left of that but the coloured lights that sing across the cold, bright sky in winter and the bears sleep, o if we could only be sleepers like bears, ah-h-h-h — but we are not bears, unfortunately, though sometimes warm in each other’s arms we dream we are because, when it has finally passed, winter may seem no more than one short sleep, one warm memory before daylight and the slipping warmth of spring.”

Keskarrah’s voice has grown so tender in its lovely telling that both Birdseye and Greenstockings think the story will, for once, be different. Perhaps if a drum were beating it could remain good and desirable and … but of course it won’t. She Who Delights is so ravishing the story cannot end here: it must stalk on to uncover the continuing rape of her endurance that is waiting, somewhere. Keskarrah’s voice has already turned
deeper. The name of the beautiful orphan girl tonight is The One Also Desirable, and though she has led him into a moment of tenderness — Greenstockings remembers her father told it so very differently one night, once — that will not happen tonight. Tonight, if Keskarrah follows The One Also Desirable, she will be ravished as well.

And Greenstockings feels the story breathe cold on her neck, the ice of its contradictions prickle along her back. In telling it this way, why has her father called her “She Who Delights”? Why not “Ravaged Woman”? Why not “The One for Killing”?

“Ah-h-h-h,” Keskarrah sighs deeply. “A fiercely desired woman can do almost anything — but she can’t change revenge. No, and perhaps she doesn’t want to. Revenge is a fire she never lit in Blackfire, nor he in himself, nor in her, for a Person knows that when you have suffered such things, nothing has happened to you before that and nothing will happen to you after: nothing matters except that now you must travel, circling ahead, because somewhere that one Person is waiting for you. She will not die; she is still waiting as you are waiting for her, because we are People of this land, we know who we are. He will find the food and the friends he needs, and a needle-woman who will clothe him and heal him, and whom he will leave to travel again. That is how this land has made People.

“And, though the snow towards the south and west is still too deep even for a circling willow probe, the signs that She Who Delights has left wait patiently for him. Wherever her captors have dragged her many days before: the nick of her fingernail on a willow, the touch of her red pigment along a tall rock or in the melting snow from the bottom of her moccasin,
and high along the bleak eskers where the relentless wind blinds you to everything but your own tears and the moss-spotted stones rest frozen in their hollows, there suddenly your toe will touch one and you’ll feel it is loose, and you’ll bend, lift it easily, and discover under it the shavings she has hidden from the sharpened killing lances of the strangers, our enemies. Your desired woman has hidden them to remind you: here, see, touch them. These killed our People, these have ravished me.

“And you will be led through the quick spring and short, flaming summer south and west between lakes and across rivers and finally the mountains almost to the greatest river itself, Dehcho, to where these faint traces of her relentless determination will end with her at last, there where every night she must lie between two of those enemies. And night and day neither demands of her any more, nor any less, than what every man demands of a woman. Only her strength and hatred will be able to distinguish between them.

“Until one day.…” and Keskarrah pauses. The deep sighs of listening around him might be the great trees bending their branches lower, easing them down into cones of shelter from the driving storms yet to come. They can hear the snow outside, the silver streaking world of moonlight.

“One day, She Who Delights notices that the caribou are coming back from the north of their summer calving. These beautiful lice of the tundra flow south, the cows with their calves who have outrun the wolves and the yearlings and the growing males and the females about to be bred and the great bulls, travelling, travelling. And the great fur about their necks already hangs white as winter. It is then, when she looks across the lake where she has gone to fetch water, two enemy women
always watchful beside her, that she will see some distant reeds shiver, there across the water, and know it is you. You and the friends you have found were always as certain to come for her as any stranger.

“Listen to me, all of you. Closely guarded as she is day and night, how will Blackfire take her back from White Horizon? Those enemies will hide her, or kill her if they must, the moment they know he’s there, and certainly kill him too if they possibly can, because they know they’ll never be free of revenge if either of them lives. How will it happen?

“Ah-h-h-h-h, beauty and wisdom are so desirable. But dangerous. She Who Delights has power, and is wise, and has decided to be beautiful. Every man knows that, knows that if he has her and lives right with her, he may become almost as powerful and wise as she — that is why she’ll be stolen for as long as she lives.

“Now, knowing what she’s seen across the lake, this is what She Who Delights will do: she’ll throw the water from her pail, as if cleaning it, in the direction where the shortest path for Blackfire leads along the shore; she’ll wear meat hidden under her clothes, to leave for him and his coming warriors when she goes to gather firewood; when they have crept close enough to watch from behind rocks on the hill above White Horizon’s camp, she’ll walk directly, again and again, in and out of the lodge where she lives between the two men.

“And she’ll know that, when the owl calls from the sunset behind the rocks, she must place a sharp flint between her legs and turn to one of those men — which one will she choose? how can hatred decide? — turn and pull that one on top of her and hold him tighter and tighter in her strong arms until past
his beating body she sees Blackfire above her and then instantly half-roll aside as his club crashes down on the head of the one she hasn’t chosen but who lies waiting his turn to use her, roll aside holding the one she is bleeding with the flint she placed inside herself so powerfully that his eyes won’t open even at the sound of a skull smashed beside them, will still be locked tight in the hollow of her neck when Blackfire’s lance drives up into him with a scream and his body rips open to his last shriek beyond all agony or hearing.

“She will lie still, knowing that Blackfire’s club was unnecessary for the ravager she holds in her arms — while that club smashes down again and again so close beside her that she’s splattered, sprayed over with blood and bones. Motionless, naked, dressed and filled for once with male blood, not making a sound because there is so much screaming all around her as somewhere White Horizon dies too, and she screamed enough long ago. Motionless because she is trying to recognize this dark man working over her as the black-faced warrior and avenger and name he has suffered and lived to become, to see him exactly so that she will remember his huge, scarred, half-naked body massive in fury, his face contorted as if about to burst with hatred, lust, jealousy, desire for her.

“Lie motionless thinking: will he spear me too? Or love me? Or beat me to death?

“Knowing then she will be stolen again, and again; knowing she can never have a name other than that most dangerous one: She Who Delights.”

Greenstockings circles the coals of the fire together with a long willow. She searches, searches among them, but finds no trace of guidance, only glimmering redness and a brief glower
of flame that dies as it awakens. Her father is no longer speaking; a silence of People breathing this endless story that is ready to begin again. She knows Keskarrah is contemplating her sadly through a quick flame, and she feels herself surrounded; hounded home into the certain knowledge that something is stalking her.

And she has a sudden apprehension of why — growing from the depths of her mother’s illness and dreaming and her own bottomless lake — why of the many stories he might have told them, this one has uttered itself just as light returns the dawn of morning. Winter living and quiet cannot hold; there are too many men here, too near Dogrib Rock, far too many strangers from far and farther away. And the caribou — they scattered, left, but then strangely returned and have been very numerous. If there were less to eat, the men would have no room in their heads for hunting women, and Keskarrah might have told the story of the Snow Man returning north to his place over the treeless tundra, trailing the ice behind him. But she knows: Hood has been changed by her mother’s dream, she has not been sleeping in Snow Man’s arms — where she has found delight.

Something else will now happen. And again before next winter — when the caribou return from the north of their calving and the long fur about their neck hangs white for the coming snow.

Her mother has retreated into her furs as if, despite People listening, she could still hide her dreams and ravaged face where no one knows of them. But the People in the crowded lodge have not helped her live through the darkness, beside the cracked mud and log burrows of These Whitemuds; they have
lived away from here along the interlaced paths of the caribou worn down through snow onto Roundrock and Snare and Dissension and Hunter lakes. Some days ago one of them may have looked between green spruce becoming discernible in the rising brightness, and seen three columns of smoke stand up beyond the line of light upon the southern hills; strangely, a signal that no one anticipated, or dared to interpret.

Perhaps that is why so many have come to the esker within a few days; have appeared this evening without saying anything to Keskarrah other than what they blandly offer over black tea, to sit smoking, drinking, talking less and less until all are listening. Or perhaps someone heard a bird on a snow-sifted tree call in a voice not the oldest of them could remember, and that apprehensive message spoke itself from lodge to lodge and they came here, some from two days’ journey southwest on Snare Lake or three from Hunter, even those hunting east past the frozen falls and rapids beyond Lastfire Lake where the female caribou will soon pass in their immense gathering again, on their long travail north to their calving.

Greenstockings does not know, and the quiet faces around their fire remain closed. Even the women bend away from her, as if she, like her mother’s face, were already missing in darkness. Perhaps that is why Keskarrah told the story of She Who Delights, as if nothing existed besides revenge and suffering and needles and a woman’s snowshoe and lance shavings, without a single voice from beyond, or a dreaming.

But … where then is the delight? It must be there, even if hidden. Within bodies holding each other, in tenderness, in joy and ecstasy, forebearance, care, somewhere if she is truly that — because how can she delight if he does not delight her as well?
Delight together. Told as Keskarrah told it, the story seems to say that all one needs to follow her is a trace of red on rock, a fingernail mark on a willow, and one or two brutal men will do whatever they want to do to one woman for ever.