A Discovery of Strangers (37 page)

And they are travelling right, they are still within the winter feeding range of the caribou. But the farther south they move, the less Keskarrah has helped them hunt, the more certainly lured out of mourning into disturbing, uttered thought.

“I know there is less danger when an’ old man thinks,” he says now, as his beautiful daughters look at him, trying to smile a little.

Greenstockings answers him. “It may be time for young women to try to do that too.”

Keskarrah looks at her intently. “You think so?”

“People die, others are born.…”

“And some,” he agrees slowly, carefully, “may begin to feel they know something a little.”

Greenstockings cannot speak about that; Keskarrah accepts her silence, and continues,

“I’ve done everything, and perhaps dreamed enough, so I have to risk thinking. These English won’t eat the best the animals give us, they don’t want heart or marrow or eyes, lungs, those particular parts full of wisdom and endurance, so different between one’s teeth. They just want fat — our cold has finally taught them to eat fat — and of course the red meat, which is all they have ever wanted. And these fat ribs hanging there,” he gestures gently, “may well be waiting for Hep Burn to burn them. If he is still alive. It’s possible the good animals will give us more.”

“Burn, burn.” Greywing laughs fully at last, the only word they need for Hep Burn’s cooking, his dedicated capability of charcoal. She hooks the great double-bowed rack of ribs down from over the fire, and follows Broadface out.

Greenstockings smiles at her emaciated father, at his gentle release of them and their ultimate kindness of food. She ducks out into the gasping cold, the hard door covering falls shut with a crack behind her. She will go see them too, but empty-handed.

The brittle normality of darkening snow. Squeaking underfoot. No one has spoken aloud to her of Richard Sun since he took his salve with him last summer. Nor ever, after she was stolen and Michel tied like a dog to his log bed until Broadface returned, of Hood. The dead deserve the respect of silence, whether they are still walking or not. What was left of his destroyed body has fed the wolves, after the ravens opened whatever thin snow he was wrapped in and took his eyes, his lips and tongue, all those gentle parts of him that they love first and best, the delicacy of spirit he once revealed to her so briefly. The noon winter sun rests like a golden mouth of crystals opening just beyond the ice of the lake, away from the lengthening land that stretches farther and farther north between him and her own continuous travel, south, with child and People.

And though the ravens have their territory, nevertheless they fly steadily, continuously, everywhere north to him in the level light, he has also nurtured them, for a moment, and they lift her high on the invisible lines of their flight until she sees the long narrow rift of her lake below, with Singing Lake and Aurora and Winter, Little Marten (which is the People’s name for it, remembering the numberless women who are always martens,
quick and smooth and warm at their eternal work and caring, just like the animals who give up their lives with their skins), and Lastfire Lake where the caribou cows carrying their unborn calves with their yearlings will cross again in the lengthening light, travelling north to their birthing, each lake reaches out tenderly with bent little streams of fingers crushed solid at the rapids and outlined by grey brush and rocks and shadowed hollows for which not even every English in the world will ever find enough names, where water will trickle into the tentative light of spring below small willows at the double rapids on the River of Copperwoman, where the grizzly roared its warning to Keskarrah, and Birdseye saw him lie, staring up into the brightening sky wrapped in one last, useless blanket: Greenstockings feels desire rise within her again, great black wings rising.

It was Birdseye who told her very early, even before The Hook’s mother repeated it as she waited at Forbidden Rock: “It’s hard to find a child who will become a person Who Knows Something a Little. They’re too hard to see. You can look and look in every hoof-print you cross, but you won’t find one.”

Greenstockings would not accept that. “I’m old enough,” she declared, resisting this “age and suffering wisdom” her parents always insist upon. “If this child is one, I’ll find it.”

Birdseye continued, as if not hearing her refusal, “An old woman like me would find one. It wouldn’t hurt anyone, being born in a caribou track, and no bigger than a thumb.”

Greenstockings feels the child’s strong sucking as she holds it to her breast under her clothing. It came to her, she found it in the death of her mother, and with that memory of her mother’s story she is lifted high and far, the great black bird lifts her away, not so far really, the path in air level and certain as a
thong pulling her to that last measure of snow where he now is, not Snow Man, as her mother feared the first time she saw him, but drawn into the snow, now an’ abstract assemblage of bone. Scattered.

“Remember that tiny child,” her mother told her. “When it is alive, look hard for it. Then you’ll live well, as long as necessary.”

She has screamed enough this year past, even during those months when she saw him only at a distance and without so much as a gesture, their perpetual exiles fixed for each other, when sometimes she closed her eyes and still enfolded him as tightly as ever, as completely as she could within herself. The mouth of the child is a hot, rhythmic grip about her nipple — she will find the knowing in this child, she knows she will. So she follows her sister and their common husband easily, confidently, through the hard trampled snow between small spruce, lodges and the tiny fires of their People towards Bigfoot’s lodge.

From just inside the entrance, through the press of heads and bodies there, she can barely see the top hair of Boy English standing, but all of Twospeaker’s head. Bigfoot must be seated beside his fire, she can hear his voice talk in his new English way, alone, no elders and not even The Hook agreeing with him about what to say. The way in which, Keskarrah in his bed has mused, Bigfoot will either make the Yellowknives more aggressively powerful than they have ever been within the long memory of People, or he may, together with These English who come and go and the Dogribs and the Raw-Meat Eaters who are, of course, enemies between the lakes and along the stinking water, Bigfoot may destroy them. Perhaps completely. Keskarrah cannot decide yet which it will be, power or annihilation, but he thinks it must be either one or the other:

“It’s not the way of People to have one big boss who gives orders and everyone obeys them. That’s useful during the temporary necessities of defence or war — one man telling every man what to do and everyone running around to do it — and perhaps we should consider ourselves at war now — but all the time? Who can endure that? It’s not the way of the land.”

What Bigfoot is saying now in his lodge in the silence of listening People does not sound more than normally dangerous. In fact, Greenstockings is certain it is what Keskarrah would say if he had bothered to get up, if he had ever agreed, as Bigfoot has, to care for all These English still alive and their slaves one more time. Perhaps because Keskarrah would indeed consider this war.

“Three of our best hunters have already gone with meat to Winter Lake,” Bigfoot says carefully to Twospeaker making impenetrable sounds after him, “and we understand, they’ll need more food if five or six are still alive. We know that, we’ve come the long journey back from starvation many times. But listen, and you hear People crying. We don’t cry because we have nothing else to do. We cry because the animals have not been happy with us. It may be we asked them for too much last winter, but only yesterday did we have enough to eat for ourselves, and who knows what will come out of the north tomorrow. Our children cry, and there are traders on great Tucho who also want to eat. They beg as well, ‘Bring us food!’ They can’t live without us and the animals either.

“But you’ve come to us now, very hungry, and we’re the only People who know your way and also the way of the animals. We learned last winter that knowing both animals and Whites is hard — that it can kill you.”

Boy English says something quickly, and St. Germain talks fast after him. “He says he knows about the stubborn traders, and the Commander knows it too, but he says the traders will take the meat you give him off your debt with them. He will make sure of that, if you help him; the traders will give you even more credit.”

“I owe no trader anything. The owing is on the other side.”

“He says, all that will be given, absolutely, everything already promised and written, and for what you give now he will pay double. For everything. See, he says, I write it exactly, here, for everything you give now, for every one piece of meat, the traders give you two. That is how I write it, here.”

“The things the traders have left in their buildings can’t be eaten.”

“Perhaps they have, some things.…”

“We know what we know. The traders themselves have nothing to eat unless we bring it to them.”

“I know that, and he knows it too,” Twospeaker gestures to Back’s emaciated face poised and listening, “but These English are dying up north, they may be mostly dead already, so he promises two for one, to go.”

“Yes,” Bigfoot answers, “that is the way you always explain it, and we always believe you. But,” he looks at Back, pausing for the language to catch up, “last summer when you were trying to paddle canoes through the ice, the traders gave us nothing for your promise papers. They said they had nothing to give.”

“Sometimes, when the long canoes don’t come from the Bay in the summer, but —”

“Paper,” Bigfoot interrupts, “it may be good for them to eat across the stinking water, but here it tastes like shit.”

“Listen,” Twospeaker frowns, listening to Back, “he says the long canoes will come with goods, they
will come!”

“Oh, they will come … if not this summer then the next. But, you know, we’re People, we live every single day. It might be good if we were bears sleeping all winter, but unfortunately we don’t.”

There is a long moment of silence; then Bigfoot touches the centre of his argument with exaggerated humility:

“We are poor People, who understand very little, and we believe your papers — but perhaps the traders don’t believe them.”

Boy English’s voice becomes very quiet, very patient, and Twospeaker, his gaunt face as hollow as a broken tree, says it softly after him, “The Commander says the traders will obey the papers. Otherwise our Great Father across the water, who is over all, will punish them severely. But first, right now, we must save your friend the Commander!”

“Ah-h, Thick English.…” Bigfoot nods, hesitating.

Greenstockings can see him now; he is not wearing that tall Whitemud black hat for this singular council where more women and children than men listen and only three speak, one of them chirping. Nor the shiny medals around his neck: Bigfoot must have at least two, or perhaps three, not one of which will fill anyone’s stomach. She cannot help but smile as Bigfoot’s tone and language broaden even more; almost like her father when he gazes over distance, or thoughtfully at coming stars.

“We know of course that your Great Father will do what you say to him, but he is very far away, perhaps as much as two years, going and coming back, two years or is it four? And some of us have thought, though it couldn’t have been me who you know has always been your friend, that perhaps when he
punishes the traders severely in two years, or four, for what they do to us now, most of us may not be alive to be thankful for it. As you know, life is hard for People so far away from your Great Father, and so ignorant in this hard place where we have always lived.”

And suddenly The Hook stands. Greenstockings cannot see whether he is wearing his medal. He speaks loudly, and straight, “We have heard that Father is so old he may already be dead. Does he die?”

“If he dies,” St. Germain translates Back’s reply quickly, “there is always his son, who is instantly Father after him.”

It is Bigfoot who continues the debate with a long release of breath, “O-o-o-o — a son.” He pauses, looking around, pondering the problems of sons and fathers. “White fathers are always followed by sons?”

“Yes.”

“And these sons always finish what their fathers start?”

For the first time Boy English hesitates. It may be he has finally comprehended the profound irony of this consult. But he speaks confidently nevertheless, and St. Germain says it after him,

“Yes. They do.”

“Ah-h-h-h-h-h,” Bigfoot breathes deeply, and Greenstockings could laugh aloud. He has listened more carefully to her father than she thought. “We have good children, who always care for their parents, but even we can’t always trust children to do what their fathers say.”

It is the women who mutter angry agreement; the men who surround Bigfoot offer only their shuffling expressionlessness, their cold-blotched faces rigid. They recognize necessary debate, and savour it, but they already know what must happen.

Bigfoot continues: “However, if you told us now that your enormous canoes, the ones pushed by wind, would come into our country from the north, along the River of Copperwoman, then the traders at the Fort might of course behave differently.”

Boy English responds hastily, “That is not for me to say, anything about that. We found very much ice in the north, and great rocks in the river.”

“Of course,” Bigfoot agrees with him solemnly. “We suggested that to you before you went. And perhaps you did not find enough of Copperwoman either?”

Boy English answers nothing; perhaps he does not understand, and quickly Bigfoot continues as if that incomprehension is not, for the moment anyway, important.

“What I say is, if the traders, who have tried for some years to live in our country and persuade us to kill animals for furs, if they don’t honour your papers while you are still here, what will they do when you leave? Or if you.…”

He does not complete “die here”, though everyone understands that, but perhaps Twospeaker explains it because Boy English insists immediately,