Elle (15 page)

So much for the official version.

What of my uncle, the General? When did he begin to dream? Far away the General strips his colony of useful supplies. Leaving thirty men and women behind, he loads seventy into an armada of skiffs, barques and rowboats taken from the ships. He writes that the weather continues abysmal and that he must abandon the colony if not resupplied before the summer is half out. His health is bad. He has the toothache and jaundice. He suffers that peculiar melancholy which afflicts predestinarians who begin to suspect that the mysterious finger of God, the instrument of His grace, has somehow passed over them, that they are not, after all, one of the Elect. But crime is down among the wretched colonists — no one is strong enough to commit one. The General has established a little France in the New World, a groaning, wretched copy of what he left behind. He is king, god and judge and touches this one and that as the need for punishment arises. He is leading his people through fire to faith and civil order.

It is early June, once my favourite month, a month for love and tennis. And I know all this, not because I dream it (though I do — well, some of it) but because F. later shows me a copy of the General's log, which was part of the court case, and I find occasion to speak with de Saintonge, the pilot, as well as Guillemette Jansart's ineffable consort and a sailor who went mad on the voyage and believed himself transformed into a frigate bird by a savage sorcerer named Lox, who also gave him a disease in his privy parts. Mysteriously, the General's log, the diary of his defeats, stops before he records the last stages of his epic exploration inland. On the final page, someone has scrawled: The rest of the voyage is wanting. The narrative is defined by the encroaching silence. The General is trying to hide.

They embark after supper on a Wednesday night, which means they can get nowhere before dark and merely drop anchor off M. Cartier's abandoned post at Charlesbourg-Royal and go to sleep. This somewhat spoils the grandeur of their departure — they had sung
Te Deums
by the quayside, and the General had given last-minute instructions in the event of his death during the voyage. If he did not return in three weeks, he said, his voice rasping with self-importance, the remaining colonists were to try to save themselves by sailing back to France. No one weeps. Several pray for his quick demise. Those left behind wave handkerchiefs, fire arquebuses and raise a ragged shout but then grow tired of watching the barques sit there in the waning light. Instead of making history, the General's gesture declines into comedy.

He sails upstream against the current at dawn and soon arrives at the foot of Mount Royal and the savage town of Hochelaga, recently abandoned by its inhabitants. He climbs the mountain, tracing M. Cartier's footsteps, and spies the same broad river leading northwest into the wilderness and the fabled country called Saguenay. He remembers the stories whispered to M. Cartier — a land wealthy in copper and gold, inhabited by white men who wear clothes made of wool like the French and have no assholes. (He has niggling doubts about the wool, based on the scarcity of sheep, which have so far proved non-existent in Canada.) And, of course, King Francis has given it to him to rule. He fancies he can see the gleam of sunlight off the waves of a distant ocean. His savage guides seem positively Asiatic. The answer to some great riddle seems tantalizingly near.

Next day they reach the foot of a rapids, where they disembark and rope the boats upriver. A boat broaches, drowning eight men. But this is the mystery. The boat had been dragged
through the rapids empty, and the mishap took place in still water. Is it a portent? A symptom of malign fate? The General develops an obsession with bears. They haunt his dreams. At least now he is past M. Cartier's farthest exploration, farther west than any white man has journeyed. For once he is not in the shadow of that ridiculously humble Malouin sea captain. He has achieved a kind of apotheosis, a fragment of glory.

Does he remember me? In his dreams, he hears the screams of the demons (birds and sea cats) and spies a fish with a human face. In his dreams, he finds himself beneath the capsized boat, sees the surface of the river far above his head, or he is chased by a bear, immense, red-eyed and uncanny, the spirit of the forest. Sometimes this bear has the torso and legs of a young French woman, delicate, desirable breasts beneath the beast's head. He remembers his wife — there always was some-thing bearlike about her. In broad daylight, he fears he is being watched. He never imagined that the land would prove as vast or as empty as it now seems. He has the European prejudice about signs: A sign must be a sign of something. But Canada is beginning to look like a sign that is just a sign of itself.

A single arrow reaches for them out of a morning mist, lodging in a thwart. The General orders his pikemen ashore (that is, pickpockets, road agents, heretical printers, shoemakers, smiths, carpenters and sailors temporarily armed with spears) to scour the banks. The arquebusiers shoot at the trees. Volley after volley echoes along the river. Gunfire is their interpretation of silence. Two men of the landing party fail to return, victims of some silent ambush. The General, in his heart, suspects the worst, that they have fled into the wilderness to join the savages.

In dreams, I paddle the same spindrift river. The journey is silent except for the eerie pulse of the bear-woman's song,
which is no song, just a rhythm punctuated by the sh-sh sound and a delicate popping of her tongue and lips. Savages emerge like ghosts from the fog along the riverbank. Their gestures tell me the one I seek is not far ahead. He dresses in black and travels with a large party in boats which spout thunder and lightning as they pass. Who is the hunter and who the hunted? I ask myself.

In dreams, I hear the beaters — men thrashing in the under-growth accompanied by tambours, cow bells, cymbals, flutes, kitchen pots and odd bits of armour used as drums. The old woman lifts her huge head, sniffs the breeze, then cocks her ears and lurches to her feet. Sadness surges in me — I don't know why. I am in a place where everything means something, but nothing is understood. Or I am trapped in some fatal rite. I hear the hiss of the match and the furious sizzling when it touches the pan, like the beginning of a fireworks display. It seems to take forever for the powder to ignite and the terrific detonation. Who is the hunter, who the hunted?

I roll over on all fours, feeling immensely strong, feeling, well, like a bear. When I look down at myself, I am still
a
woman, though somewhat patched, callused and scarred, and my hair is a mess. Sometimes I don't know (even now I don't know) what to believe. The light seems to flicker like a flame; what goes for reality seems to flicker (and I am reminded of Heraclitus, who taught that the substance of the universe is fire). The old woman is and isn't a bear, and sometimes she is very close to being another me — I can see her as a young woman, headstrong, shallow and frivolous, eons ago.

(All this could be explained by the power of suggestion, of dreams. Or it is real. I am of two minds myself.)

Once when I wake, the old man with the Great Bear tattoo is seated in the hut next to me, a red rag tied round his head and a nightcap perched on top. He has a dozen pewter rings strung around his neck, also a tiny framed illumination of the Virgin and Child, which I have seen him speaking to in quiet moments. He is naked because of the heat, his body scarred from wars and hunts. He has brought a fish to donate, but there is no sign of the bear-woman. He takes a shard of broken mirror from a pouch and offers it to me. He says I may keep it if I come to live with him. His eyes are small and brown like raisins. His penis nestles like a sparrow between his legs and looks, oddly enough, younger than the rest of him, like a boy's penis, like my little Carlito's pee-pee. I touch the stars on his forehead, say their names aloud.

Later I examine my face in the sliver of mirror (one assumes it began as a perfectly good mirror broken into pieces by a greedy sailor eager to multiply his investment among the commercially inexperienced savages). I am much used, it seems, by history and men, yet recognizable as someone I once knew in France when she was young and careless. Another tooth has begun to ache, a dull throbbing in my cheek.

In my dream, the old woman assumes the shape of a bear, a cumbrous, grizzled she-bear, gigantic in her way, though meagre about the ribs and haunches, with a claw torn out, unhealed sores, fog like a white cloth draped inside her eyes. She paces nervously, anxious to slip away. She prods me with her snout,
urging me to rise. The clatter of drums and cowbells surges nearer and nearer.

The bear-woman and I drift away from the racket. But the unbearable din seems to follow us. The sun is like a hammer. The old woman rips a tree, dragging her claws through the bark in deep grooves, then grunts and lurches into the underbrush. I pick my way over lichen-covered rocks (like green lace), feeling an overpowering urge to tear up a tree myself, threading the low-hanging hemlock branches, skirting deadfalls. The clangour of the hunt infects my brain. I catch a glimpse of the bear-woman's flank through the trees. When I glance up, I have reached an open space about the size of an Orleans tennis court, shaped like a funnel, with the General waiting at the apex.

What does he see? There is a mystery. The old woman's song sends me into the dream, has sent me there over and over (and just as often I wake in the morning inside the hut). So I know that I will rise upon my hind legs, trying to appear human, French and girlish. I will stumble toward the General, trying to cover my numerous teats with a leafy branch. What does he see? An attacking bear? An embarrassed woman? An embarrassed bear? A bear with a woman's face? Does he re-member the face? I have become a metaphor or a joke, a piece of language sliding from one state into another (like my changeling Emmanuel — this sudden fluidity is one effect of entering a New World). It is an ironic position, being neither one thing nor the other.

From somewhere quite close, the clamour of the hunt blots out the hum of the bear-woman's song. I try to rouse myself from the dream but fail because of an eerie hissing sound that snakes through my mind. There is a flash, thunderclap. I hear the meaty slap of penetration (object going in). An old she-bear
running beside me stumbles. Her dim eyes roll white with wonder. To her it feels as if she has tripped over something in the path. She doesn't know she is dead. At the same instant, I feel the familiar blow to my chest. I tumble over a root, some obstruction in my path, falling face down in a berry brake. I notice a bug climbing a thorny stock. My nose is torn, but I compose myself and rest.

When I wake up, it is mid-morning. Weeks have passed in dream. The old man with the star tattoo squats on his meagre haunches. A boy of about six kneels at my feet, examining me with a critical eye. They have brought a bark pail full of blue-berries and a slab of seal fat. The old man clutches a bark scroll in his hand. He reads it like a book. He tells me the bear woman is out upon her business, fighting a demon. I should eat the berries and use the seal fat to keep off the insects. He demonstrates, rubbing the grease over his chest. The boy lifts my bearskin rug to look at my legs, says something in dialect to the old man, and they both laugh in a way that tells me some low humour has passed between them. The boy shifts to my skin bag and sorts through it, holding each object up to his face. He exclaims over the bear statue Itslk carved for me, then replaces it carefully and resumes his silent inspection. The old man asks how I have slept and if I need to piss.

Later the boy leads me by the hand to the tiny colony of skin huts at the mouth of the creek. I have nothing on but the bearskin wrapped about my shoulders. The blackened, fly-blown dogs grin down at me from their poles. The savages offer me fish boiled to a mush, a strip of dried meat (unidentifiable), water to drink. I would die for a loaf of bread or a biscuit. I sit before the fire on a sooty rock, staring into the flames. I let my robe drop to my waist, feeling no embarrassment at my nakedness.
The old man tells me they do not usually stay this long on the coast. This time of year they should be migrating inland, getting ready for the fall hunt. But they are waiting for a ship to come by and trade with them. He wonders if I am expecting one.

He says last winter they took time to trap smaller game — beaver, marten, water rats — especially for the coastal trade. Usually they hunt only the bigger animals for food. You can't feed a family on beaver and rats, he says. They call themselves the Bear-Hunting People, which he thinks is odd because mostly they hunt caribou (I am made to understand this is a kind of deer native to the country). Many things in life seem inexplicable, he says. His people believe that dreams are just as real as waking life. They hunt by dreams and scapulimancy such as I have seen the bear woman perform in our camp. They never feed bones to dogs because that would insult the master of the animals. And when a savage dies, his soul walks over the Ghost Road to the Dance Hall of the Dead, which we call the Milky Way, the
Via lactaea.

His talk is sad, anxious and hopeful all at once — he sounds like Itslk. Jingling the string of pewter rings, he peers wistfully out to sea. The skulls of dead prey perch on stakes and loppedoff tree trunks: bear, huge deer, beaver. Flies buzz from one to the other as if they were flowers. Everything stinks of rotting fish, curing skins, shit and seal grease. The boy stalks Léon with a toy bow and a blunt arrow. I hear the bear-woman's gentle humming in my head, but it grows fainter.

The sailor-turned-into-a-frigate bird is certain there was a bear, though his testimony is suspect. Seeing a mother bear and her cub by the river shore, the General lands and gives chase, trying to catch the cub in an old sail. The mother bear attacks but is dispatched by an arquebusier, the cub is strangled accidentally
in the sail cloth, the General is wounded slightly, which wound, growing morbid, forces him to return to his ships and thence to France.