A Discovery of Strangers (3 page)

She eased herself down, front and back, into her hollow of welcome snow. With each moment she knew her name, if she had one, was becoming Dámbé? Elchánile; but when her travel in her present direction ended it might very well be? Elyáske again. At least for a time. And if she and her newborn calf, then, survive the coming intermittent blizzards, and mosquitoes, and hordes of botflies, and swift river crossings, and wide summer
lakes and storms, and the invidious treachery of a stone splitting a running hoof — as she has for this moment survived the wolves again — she knows one of them may once again be reborn a child, and in that less fleeting incarnation gradually grow once more into this dream of being what she is now, resting, sleeping the profound safety, as deep as it is fleeting, of all continually hunted animals. Alive on the sheltering ice.

The silver wolf may live into and perhaps even through the perpetual light of summer; and when tundra light again shortens towards winter darkness he may well discover the helpless trail of the few Whites he has ignored until now. It may be he will follow them, and find them where they collapse one after the other, and gradually creep close; may gouge and gnaw and tear from each whatever he can before their corpses harden into impossiblity for the rotting lower half of his jaw, which the brown male did not rip away when he supplanted him.

A tattered rack of once-great bones, the silver wolf will recognize his death in that straggle of frozen meat briefly marking the tundra, emaciated meat of no interest to his powerful offspring. For they will be travelling somewhere with caribou, nowhere near him then, and he will not be thinking of them. Nor will the other animals who follow and feed quite fearlessly about him: the white and silver and red arctic foxes, or migrating gulls, or mice, or golden eagles, or lemmings or ground squirrels, or even the grizzly and vicious wolverine whom he must avoid by crawling away as he can. Or the great ravens, flying the stark black message of their perfect bodies over the unrelenting land.

MIDSHIPMAN ROBERT HOOD

Tuesday July 18th
1820
Fort Chipewyan

Despite the discouraging situation, though not hopeless, we were determined on pushing forwards. Till today we were fully occupied in assembling provisions. The gentlemen of the trading posts contributed what was in their power to assist us, and our voyageurs, if not contented, were silent, for they saw that solicitation could not add to our store; an uncommon exertion of thought for Canadians
.

Mr. Franklin proposed that the Expedition proceed northward to Fort Providence and the Yellowknife Indians with all speed and that, besides the four English officers, it consist of three canoes and twenty Canadians, including two half-breed interpreters. Three of our four English sailors were deterred from coming with us by the dread of famine and fatigue which they said we were doomed to encounter. Only John Hepburn remained with us as servant, consigned alone to the society of foreigners, whose language he could not speak; his constancy absolved his country from the disgrace attached to it by the others
.

2
I
NTO A
N
ORTHERN
B
LINDNESS OF
N
AMES

The lake they named after her, later, was no more than an infinitesimal detail in their grand attempt to rename the entire country. It is, however, questionable whether the English naval officers ever actually saw Greenstockings Lake. In their first coming, going north, they were portaged around it by the Canadian voyageurs who had already carried them all those months of labour from Hudson Bay, and when those who were still alive appeared again out of the north fifteen months later, they were quite incapable of seeing anything at all. Except perhaps their own frozen feet blundering along the track the Tetsot’ine hunters tramped down in front of them.

“I laughed to myself when I first saw their boss, Thick English,” Greenstockings’ father, Keskarrah, said much later, his
relentless
memory circling once more around that first and then that second moment of unforgettable English arrivals. “When he explained to us that it was for our benefit they had come to find what was in our land, I should have laughed again. Louder.”

It may be that when the naval officers returned at last from their “discovery excursion” to the northern ice, trying so desperately to leave a second time, they did notice the snowshoes they had been given, which had been tied onto their feet to hold them safely upon the driven snow. Certainly they must sometimes have been aware of the muscled Yellowknife (as they named the Tetsot’ine) arms that supported them, kept them from collapsing on the wind-ridged surface of the (to them) nameless lake.

Green stockings … Greenstockings. And the deeply bitter irony of Robert Hood no longer being there. Who knew her best. No longer dragging his bent body like a question mark across ice and tundra after them.

By that time there were, of course, no voyageurs left to carry the English anywhere. But a lake under their feet would have been at least a more or less level bit of that unending snow that lay between them and Yellowknife food in a land their numbers on squared paper had not yet discovered to be twenty-six times the size of England, though they were beginning to suspect such a horror. The Ghost River, as white with ice in winter as with rapids in summer, was frozen more or less solid, but it led the wrong way, west. Nevertheless, the Yellowknife River they had first travelled and named lay somewhere south, and they knew it must offer a track past the Indians, back to the small but certain White safety of Fort Providence; though they
also knew they must heave their bodies — what was left of them — somehow — around or over the river’s devastating rapids. They had once, o so long, an eternity of fifteen months ago, seen each eddy and rock vista from the picturesque, foaming immediacy of a Canadian canoe, but now, to their emaciated eyes in the November glare of noon, even the most memorable, seductive rapid was unrecognizable under these lurking gurgles, these chuckles of thick, slipping swiftness, this ice like smashed teeth.

“The lake and river ice thundered cold at them the whole year they were carried to us.” Keskarrah gestured to the passing wind. “Again and again. How much more did These English have to be told?”

It seemed they had heard only their own telling, as told to themselves. And the names they had vied, with such gentlemanly camaraderie, to give each interlaced lake and rapid that mosquito-driven summer, were lost in their staggering memories, all quite lost, with their lost, starving notebooks. Boudelkell and The Rat and Crookedfoot lakes somewhere flowed into Greenstockings Lake, itself a strip of water so narrow it might have been drawn into rock by the edge of a casual hand. Those three lakes were also named much later, after the Yellowknife hunters they were leaning on, who had walked north four days dragging two sleds of dried meat and fat and one of furs when all These English were already more or less dead. Only three of them needed meat by then, in their ruined shelter of logs and mud — the three who had not tried to kill each other because of Greenstockings.

Of course, Greenstockings is not her name either, that summer of first arrival. For years the childhood memory of the oldest
Tetsot’ine has told stories about Whites, and the farthest northern arm of their great lake Tucho has occasionally fumbled such a blanched body out onto its black sand. Indeed, well beyond the story memories of living grandmothers, it is told that children saw strange wood-chips dancing on the Desnede River, thin, curled chips that could not have been cut by a stone or copper axe. So sometimes, deep in the sleepy winter around warm fires, the elders tell the story of Jumping Marten, a woman so desirable she was stolen by enemies from the east. But she was too wise for any man to hold, she escaped and travelled alone, as only a woman can, until she found Stone House Whites far away, and she was the one who brought an iron axe and a needle and tea and a small kettle to the Tetsot’ine for the first time. Good things, just a few, very good for living.

And then, even more quietly, they tell of the one White who came walking alone one summer from the east, guided by Matonabbee (who had enough wives for them both), and who wandered about making those tiny marks on paper too, and then strangely went walking back towards the east again, still travelling alone.

And sometimes, in the darkest winter, Keskarrah will recall aloud the story all the Dene nations around them know but rarely speak, of how Ageenah guided the second solitary White down the great river Dehcho. Many of the Dene nations saw him, and named him Long Neck, his bandy legs and ridiculous clothes, and saw how he ate thick meat four times a day but fed his paddle-slaves nothing but fish no bigger than a person’s hand. He made them paddle him north fast, and then immediately turn around and paddle him back south again, up Dehcho, even harder — as if something truly terrifying had met him at
the edge of the Everlasting Ice, and he knew it had started to chase him for the rest of his life.

But now, in the regular cycle of Tetsot’ine seasons, These English have arrived, and the youngest person will discover that they and their paddle-slaves stepping so easily out of three huge birchbark canoes are impossible to forget. It will seem to them, later, that at one time they needed to think only of People, and of animals and coming weather, and food, and the prevention and curing of possible illness: that was the world of their land and they lived it. But suddenly a fireball smashed through the sky: crash! — here are Whites! Now! And immediately the world is always on fire with something else, something they have never thought about or had to do before; always, it seems, burning out of its centre and rushing, destroying itself towards all possible edges. Strangely, for ever, different.

It was Birdseye who said, much later, “I think this story may be the melting mountain again. The mountain that burst open and People had to run as far and as fast as they could to escape the ground boiling under their feet, or rocks falling from the sky. After that, everyone spoke different languages too.”

Perhaps that was why she said nothing when These English called her daughter “Greenstockings” for the first time, and they found out what that meant. Somehow then Greenstockings’ real name vanished from every memory, even it seemed from Birdseye, who bore her and named her first.

And Birdseye stands beside her when these paddle-slaves first stroke the lead canoe in to shore with a great, driving shout. They are standing side by side where they have never come before, on the black-sand edge of Tucho, watching the lake in its eternal heave and lift. The enormous canoe rams
ashore below the crooked palisade of the new company trading post, but the lake takes it back, and then heaves it forwards again, and settles. So that all Tetsot’ine see Thick English, in his blue and gold-braided coat, place his tall boot on the black sand first.

“Look there,” Birdseye says, with fear. “Look.”

Greenstockings looks. Unable then to ask her mother what she sees. But her father is afraid of nothing. Keskarrah has told her out loud, grinning and rubbing his finger across his teeth, that even though he is so old only worn stumps stick out of his gums, he has never yet seen the Supreme One everyone believes is everywhere around them. “It is strange,” he has said to her sometimes, staring up at the stars, or at sundogs, “that living so long, I still cannot meet anyone who understands this as clearly as I. I have met all the animals, I think, and I know many stories from so long ago, when animals talked like People. Some of those stories are mine, so I can tell them too. And I even met that first lonely White Walker, travelling with his worn-out feet, I saw him when I was a small boy. But I have never seen the Soul Everywhere. Everybody talks so much, but no one can ever say they have seen — anything.”