A Discovery of Strangers (29 page)

Because after five strokes Richardson’s arms stopped in the water, bent down into whirls smooth as glass, apparently inert, and when he turned on his back, after ten more strokes his legs stopped too, and they desperately hauled him back for dead, though they found he was not quite that, yet. But when they stripped to warm him, they stared, dumbfounded at the revelation of his body.
“Ah Dieu,”
the voyageurs groaned,
“que nous sommes maigres!”
Enclosing Richardson between their naked bodies, unable to see their own bone cages by the seething water.

As if they had clawed over thousands of miles of sea and land and sea and back over the land again, to discover no more than each other’s walking skeletons.

They named that — what? — Burnside River? — which he recognized when he accumulated the numbers for it, recognized like a word leaping into reality at the tip of his pencil on squared paper, that it was the river her father
O God her father
our father which art in heaven
drew on the ground when they first arrived on the shore of the great crashing lake. Keskarrah had called it the Ana-tessy, named it the closest and easiest river for their return if they must return from the east — that was what Keskarrah meant! Their return made easily by water, floating canoes, revealed at their feet in the dust a year ago. But they then recognized nothing of their possible salvation, and Hood’s numbers told him too late that if only they had found this river’s mouth on Bathurst Inlet, it would have saved them seven days of starvation walking and perhaps saved the canoes and also all … or was that rapid at last and truly the Coppermine? No, only a single wash of white water — God our father which art in heaven a land so enormous, graspable only through the confusion of after-the-fact numbers that foretold nothing, no, those huge single rapids where all of Lieutenant Franklin’s instruments and notebooks vanished in glaze, the ice there barely crusted the edges, that
was
the Burnside River, not yet running in icepans, and they named them Bélanger Rapids after Jean-Baptiste
le rouge
, which was all they saw of that river, the Burnside, which he recognized too late as Ana–tessy and where their second canoe smashed down off the shoulders of the voyageurs into tiny shards of fire — to save the canoes and themselves at least seven days they should have come up that river of return — but they did not. No, when they at last crossed it the Canadians had already carried two canoes for 107 direct miles over the barrens since they left the 200-foot falls and the river they called Hood. Ah-h-h-h, Hood, his father’s name. Drawn long across this land … somewhere.

“Mr. Hood,” Richardson murmurs again. “Do you wish to read?”

“Thank you, Doctor Richardson. No. If you do, please.”

The winter light has inevitably drawn their ritual of morning and vesper readings, as they try to remember them from the lectionary of the Book of Common Prayer, closer and closer together. Soon only firelight can show them what
I promise I will I will
text they should read, their only chronometer tell them when. And even that instrument will mean nothing when in their gathering debilitation they lose the sequence of morning and evening to the continual darkness coming steadily on. A low line of light somewhere, is it growing or waning? They cannot remember, however long any of them will still breathe to see it.

“ ‘…and there came a fire out from before the Lord,’ ” Richardson reads in the slow, stentorian rhythm of King James, the ritual comfort of its Judeo-British confidence, “and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and the fat: which when all the people saw, they shouted, and fell on their faces.’”

“So would I,” Hepburn says outside. “Seeing good fat burn.”

Richardson glances towards him without the effort of moving his head, then continues, his voice so magnificently roughed and deepened by starvation:

“Leviticus, chapter ten: ‘And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the Lord, and devoured them, and they.…’ ”

Hood is contemplating his stinking arm: he can smell it better than see it; for some reason it is uncovered. Though he does not feel it cold. He does not feel hunger either, but he continually thinks, eat, his English duty is EAT … his stinking arm reminds
him: they are four men and each has two arms. Surely one is sufficient for any man — for walking, two legs are essential — a contribution of an arm, only one each, with all its bones — but the hand. Attached to the arm, so particular, the hand, the most personal and intimate body part one knows of one’s self.

“ ‘…they died before the Lord,’ ” Richardson stumbles on. “ ‘Then Moses said unto Aaron, This is it that the Lord spake, saying, I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace.’ ”

Who could masticate his own hand?

Michel is outside, over the fire. No one has heard or seen him return, they are so far away in the blessed garden of Sinai, and when he lifts his axe together with something else, Hood sees only a black blur, but Hepburn lurches to his knees.

“Meat!” he gasps. “He’s brought red meat!”

They cannot believe they are drinking the pale blood soup Michel cooks over dry sticks; their loose teeth ache gnawing stringy meat from shreds of bone. Hood eats at last, but eating is such a labour, such laborious duty, that when he swallows the hunger inside him awakens, ravages him instantly. He knows there is not enough to drive his hunger beyond itself. His excoriated mouth.

“So bitter and lean,” Hepburn says, “but to God be all praise!”

“Perhaps, ’twere better, to fast,” Hood murmurs. “Before, the Lord.”

Richardson says, “Aye, praise Him,” to Hepburn, studying with his unhurried eye the bone whose marrow he is sucking. “This wolf … it must have been very near death … too.”

Wolf is not to be eaten, Hood knows that, and the gristle tells him too; wolf is brother and sister, wolf will feed you but is not to be eaten!

“Raven,” Michel mutters, and gestures his mittened hand into flapping distance. “See raven, big rocks, wolf freeze. Raven … eat.”

“How would a wolf die?” Richardson asks, quietly scientific.

Suddenly Michel is shouting. “Caribou! Old wolf, horn,” and he thrusts his hands out, head curved down, jabbing, “old wolf, worn out, no good, big caribou!”

Richardson continues, “And you took your axe with you, this morning?”

“Raven! Meat freeze, chop!” Michel is so wildly furious he seems about to reach for their single axe again, chop them all into edible pieces.

Richardson maintains his level politeness, “Of course, I know frozen meat is too hard for a knife, of course.”

How can Michel waste strength on anger? Hood lifts his boiled bone with its strange bristle of dark ragged meat to Hepburn, sitting at the tent opening beside his bedroll. Gnawing is impossible; the pain in his head has grown into his stomach, an unfathomable and unuttered loneliness. Michel’s wolf dripping like a strange memory of pork in his mouth.

“Fast before, the Lord.…”

“Sir,” Hepburn says gently. “It’s your little share, you must eat, sir. You must.”

The ravens and the wolves shall feed thee
He has always known that, wolves and ravens. But who told him first, who told him so indelibly what he now instantly thinks whenever a bird — any bird, blue or black or white — moves though air?
Where it may rise and where it rests there indeed is God’s good plenty
how shall we boil her says Michael to Robin

the church
they ate the steeple
they ate all the … the priest and all the people

but until this unutterable north he has always had enough to eat. The only ravens he knew were that fringe of small rooks above the pasture trees
here’s parson rook a-reading his book
and of course Elijah in his father’s absolute sermons bent forwards over the pulpit, such a consolation without the least touch of cold or green wool or seal-skin-cursed feet or the rip of hunger like blood leaking inside in your body

In the brewer’s big pan
Says John all alone
In the brewer’s big pan says everyone
And we’ll have enough over to give eyes to the blind
And legs to the lame and pluck for the poor
In the brewer’s big pan says every

All alone. As the light shrinks over the brush and their tent hardens smaller into drifts only one point of distance remains: that place where the eskers once opened west to God only knows what farther lakes. His eyes blinded by starvation, that opening is carved in Robert Hood’s memory; it rests on the mosquito-smeared canvas ceaselessly pounding about him — could he lick that for sustenance, those thin memories of their own healthy blood dried and carried and crushed? — whistling
with snow under wind. And he feels that notch of land roll along the back of his aching eye, never a human figure in it even when he hears Hepburn drag himself away for
tripe de roche
he has somehow missed until now under crusted snow, when Richardson again moves the little distance he can, feeding that minuscule, useless fire.

Every day Michel hunts.

So he says. He vanishes into the spaces Hood can no longer see and then they are so kindly three again, quiet, gentle, stinking like labouring horses though they have not so much as moved, so delicately thoughtful of each other, their manners as reassuring and immovable as the starvation that they now acknowledge without a word is eating them.

But then Michel is there again, moving so hard, hammering frozen wood together beside the tent, so dreadfully alive and loud. Never bringing more meat. How can one man hunt, alone and starving? he roars as if he had found coherent English in his craving gut. He smashes firewood too impossibly fast for Richardson to prop in the fire, he seems stronger than ever, his high voice often bellowing some grotesque language. Richardson is now convinced: Lieutenant Franklin and his party have not reached Fort Enterprise.

What! Michel is enraged. It seems he is outside, suddenly arrived in silence, and has overheard that remark, them talking White again! He yells he will leave for Fort Enterprise right now, he should never have come back to care for them, they cannot walk and he will not carry them, he will take the compass and go himself — teach him how to read it and he will go, he says, his tone changing, quickly quiet, he will go and find the Yellowknives and bring food back to them, he has taken
care of them for days, he will save them if they teach him how to follow the compass, save them for certain now, teach him the instrument.

You need at least two to hunt, he says, as any wolf will show you. Every animal stays far away from me alone, there is just the stink of death here.

And he will die first, hunting every day as he does, and when he is dead he knows what they will do. They will eat him, the way they ate his brother on the Ottawa River, that is what Whites do to Mohawks, if you can’t help them they just tear you apart and eat you — bones and all!

The three Englishmen stare at him. At his preposterous — he cannot know what he is saying — unthinkable words. Finally Hood gestures to Richardson, who bends to him.

“He is right,” Hood is able to whisper, and Richardson jerks in consternation. “Not … eating. But you must, find help. Can you walk?”

Richardson smiles wanly. “Perhaps in a day, to that stone.”

“Then Hepburn must go, he is the only one left, with Michel, to reach — Enterprise, if possible.”

“Lieutenant Franklin and Mr. Back will never desert —”

Hood talks between breaths. “Of course, but perhaps … something has, happened, and you cannot … Hepburn, perhaps he, some strength, we must not, sacrifice, him too.”

Slowly Naval Surgeon John Richardson’s eyes sink into themselves. It may be that Mohawk voyageur Michel Terohaute’s unthinkable outburst has permitted Midshipman Robert Hood for the first time — it is not for Seaman John Hepburn to say such things to his superiors — permitted Hood to utter at last that impossible word:
sacrifice
. Perhaps if for two months they had
been heaved about in a longboat at sea, the four naval officers of the Expedition could have confessed that necessity earlier, but perversely their duty on land among these numberless rivers and rocks and shorelines and lakes since leaving the shores of Hudson Bay have helped them discover very little English vocabulary. Land. Frozen so motionless, it does not storm and heave like the sea whose travail it is their heritage to know; it can be travelled upon, of course, but it is nevertheless also as unending as the sea. Wherever they walk, they are encircled by undifferentiated namelessness.

Thus marooned, land-cornered, this senior and junior naval officer left behind know they retain nothing; except perhaps a slight courage. It is unnecessary to speak. One last attempt must be made.

An attempt possible only by their English seaman-servant from Northumberland and the Orkney Islands, who is still capable of some travel. At first John Hepburn refuses to leave Hood; but he does finally, in tears, agree to try. Of course he cannot do so without Michel, who has already chopped a large heap of small brush to sustain the fire. Michel will go whether they give him the compass or not; and he adds, that strange blackness sharpening his frost-ruined face again, Hepburn must keep up with him. He will certainly not sit and freeze here, and be eaten.

“Why does he,” Hood says in his starvation slowness, “talk like … that?”

He feels the one warm spot on his freezing body: the back of the native, as Lieutenant Franklin has always called him, breathing perceptibly against his back. Once he stretches out under the robe with his face to the wall of the tent, Michel slips
instantly into the heaven of painless sleep; which is now all that Hood himself longs for.

Richardson shakes his head. And Hepburn suddenly responds, without being asked.