A Discovery of Strangers (26 page)

Keskarrah listens impassively to the translation. Then for an instant his eye catches Twospeaker’s: they both know there is no escape, nor could either imagine what an escape from the inevitability of the land might be in order to want it. Obviously, these Whitemuds will be dead before they recognize this.

Keskarrah gestures at Greenstockings. “We will carry her, to our place.”

And Hood is there! Materializing from the darkness behind the Halfmuds, and kneels as if Richard Sun were not there. Greenstockings hears, smells his movement: when she opens her eyes it is as if he has always been beside her, his hand on her arm, his eyes blue as sky filled with the tenderest longing and concern, his warm, weeping face leaning forwards to touch hers.

A man so gentle and delicately perceptive and intense; and ultimately useless. In the fixed conjunction of her mother’s and father’s power, they two have lived this strange — almost as if they were hidden, sweetly, under furs in the long darkness — lived this strange, short moment of profound difference. But the log walls built by These English and Michel’s groping fists have shown her what she has always known and should have remembered: they are all men, and there are too many of them. Wherever many men are, they can exist only within a certain violence, and they will try to break you again and again. If you
were to live in delight and difference with one for long, you would have to kill all the other men in the world.

Her head is still breaking. She cannot look at Hood with longing or even tenderness. There is no strength in his tears, he is so weak and useless. And stupid.

“Mr. Hood,” Lieutenant Franklin orders, “get up, and stand aside.”

Outside the fetid house the sky is a gasp of cold, and bright with stars. Bright enough for Greenstockings to see the narrow black spruce retreating down the esker to that known distance of silver hills. And so many People stand motionlessly on the snow, disappearing into the shadows between the houses where darkness clusters: they are watching Twospeaker and Hep Burn carry her, back. She has never felt either of them before, but they seem to have the same rock-like strength, a power of muscle, and a certain skill, and concentrated, narrow ignorance.

And then she recognizes Michel: his shape is the darkness sitting on firewood, bent forwards as if his hands were tied tight behind his back. Two huge Halfmuds hunch beside him. What will Thick English do with him now? Nothing; he is so strong and they need him to carry them to the Everlasting Ice. When Broadface returns, if he does, she will not have to think about him. If he doesn’t return.…

Well. In the hard cold of squeaking snow her father opens the lodgehide, and inside her hidden mother, still alive, will take her in her arms. She has been stolen for the first time. Her life will continue to circle now, in and out of whatever pain is patiently waiting for her. That is the way it is.

DOCTOR JOHN RICHARDSON

Saturday March 17th
1821
Fort Enterprise

Mr. Back arrived at last from Fort Chipewyan, having performed since he left us a journey of over
1,100
miles on foot. He brought such further stores as he could acquire from the traders, who he reports are themselves almost destitute. Mr. Franklin said he had every reason to be much pleased with his conduct
.

St. Germain continues to evince great apprehensions respecting the dangers of a sea voyage. A message from The Hook and Longleg imports that if they are now sent a supply of ammunition, they would meet us in the summer on the banks of the Coppermine and bring provisions. Mr. Franklin agreed to pay them for their provisions but could not spare them any ammunition
.

Friday April
27th 1821
Fort Enterprise

The movement of the reindeer north and subsequent cold weather have resulted in the pounded meat that was laid up for our summer stock being all expended. We had nothing to eat today. During the night, however, a deer was brought in which had been killed by old Keskarrah. Our men suffer much from snow blindness. Ice on the lakes about seven feet thick
.

TuesdayMay 8th I82I Fort Enterprise

A fly seen today. A party of men was sent off again to get meat, and the women also sent to live at Bigfoot’s encampment to diminish the consumption at the Fort
.

9
G
EESE

Broadface is considering the length of Greenstockings’ legs hidden in wool. “Do you ever take that off?” he asks her.

“Maybe in summer,” she says. “When it’s warm.”

“It’s warm now, I saw a grey goose today.”

“A caribou would be better.”

“Huh!” he grunts, and refuses to speak about the caribou migration already past, or about the many lodges of People again gathered motionless around the leaking log houses on the esker, though the light is long and the snow and ice excellent for travel. “My grandmother, she once told me about geese.”

“What?” Greenstockings murmurs, leaning back, stretching out, her head surrounded in his lap of warm muscle.

“It was spring, my grandmother told me, when she was little and People were starving, like we do. The men hunted every day, and they were starving so bad they had to tie brush on their bellies. But that didn’t help enough. They had to move with the animals going north, save themselves that big walk back. But
she was weak, she couldn’t walk. Her mother said to her, ‘There’s nothing I can do. I’m too weak to carry you, and there’s nothing to eat.’

“People were just down, there was no hope. So they left my grandmother there, they travelled away, followed the caribou like we do.

“She was little then, all alone. And after a while she heard someone singing songs about love, my grandmother said, because it was spring. Trails showing up everywhere in the sky and the melting snow, and singing, singing. Tender, quiet songs, they were all in love, travelling north. So then some came to her, she said, they walked on the ground like People. They gave her food, and they tied strings around and around her legs because she was just bones, she couldn’t get up, she had no strength in her flesh. They asked her where her parents were, and she told them,

“ ‘It’s a long time since they left, I don’t know, how far.’

“But they said, ‘What do you mean, how far? They’re just right here, see, we can see them.’

“And they left her. She felt so good, there was no weakness left inside her. They fed her, but she couldn’t say what exactly, just goose grass. They were geese going north in the spring, and they told my grandmother her parents were close, so she followed them. And there they were, all the People, with lots to eat, all kinds of meat. She had been given up for dead, my grandmother once told me, but they were singing songs of love with the geese, all travelling north to meet each other — and there she was too.”

Past Broadface’s black mane draped about her, Greenstockings sees deep into the brilliant sky, the wisps of clouds travelling
north on some wind she cannot feel. She is listening, hard, and cannot hear the great birds, but she hears the silence of small water, travelling too, of sunlight reflected hot from the craggy erratic, the long dazzling slashes of melting snow.

“It’s good Michel stole you,” Broadface says. “Otherwise I’d have killed Hood for you.”

“And Boy English, would you have done that to him too?”

“Back,” Broadface grins, his mouth crinkled in both disparagement and admiration, “he’s a little shit, he dragged more stuff away from those traders, to bring back here, more stuff than they had for themselves to live through the winter, he just talked the shit out of them — but when he has what he wants he travels, fast, wo-o-o-o! his short little snowshoes travel!”

“Could you keep up?”

He looks at her along the slant of his black eyes. “I had to wait on the trail for him a few times.”

And then answers her previous question, his masculinity fingered, “You’re mine — he’s strong, but bleeds easy enough.” He grips her shoulders suddenly, his face almost touching hers. “Back fucks every woman he can, morning and evening, he wants everything he sees. Why do you think he stayed away from Thick English all winter, all that time at Fort Chipewyan? He grabs women in front of the traders, he doesn’t care, he shoves his hand up between their legs when they bring him food, while they’re eating.”

Greenstockings is smiling up at him, feeling so warm and bright, thinking of something interesting and so she won’t anger him again by mentioning Little Marten, who wouldn’t leave Fort Chipewyan because she decided on a man there; she merely teases him, lightly:

“So you watched him fuck them.”

“Huh, why watch him, I was busy myself.”

“Falling down, drunk stiff as a log, that busy?”

“You’ll scream, I’ll make you,” he promises her, his hard breath almost blasting into her mouth.

“Make me.”

But his eyes change, he is mesmerized by her mouth. “He … likes this … to do this, to women.…” And Broadface lays his lips over hers, then lunges, crushes them against her teeth. She thrusts him away.

“That hurts!”

Broadface is puzzled. “Back calls that ‘kiss’, he says a woman always likes it.…”

“ ‘Kiss’,” she says softly, and draws him down to her. “Open your mouth,” she says against his lips. “Gently … gently.…”

And his eyes widen, darken into deeper black, as her tongue touches the tips of his teeth, his tongue, slips along its bending roll to the delicate lining of his cheeks — this is not anything Back could show him. She travels around his mouth again.

“That’s ‘kiss’, she tells him. “That’s ‘geese flying’.”

So he flies gently too, into her.

DOCTOR JOHN RICHARDSON

Monday June
4th 1821
Fort Enterprise

The snow having melted and run off the lake ice, I took charge of the advance party and we left the Fort at
4
o’clock this morning and set out for the Coppermine River, down which we intend to proceed to the Polar Sea. Besides numerous women I had
15
Canadians and Yellowknives, three conducting dog sledges, seven dragging their own sledges, and five carrying their burdens on their backs. The average pack was about
80
lbs. exclusive of personal baggage which might be rated at
40
lbs. more
.

Lieutenant Franklin and the other officers and voyageurs and the remaining Indians will follow shortly, carrying the canoes and the rest of our supplies
.