“He boasts that it’s warm, yet light across his shoulders. And he claims to have seen the Huron’s white-faced man.”
Grey Rabbit ducks her head and giggles.
“Shhhhh.” Night Cloud touches her lips. “It’s rumored that he will travel west.”
“Is it true that like the white squirrel, his eyes are red?”
“Ha,” laughs Night Cloud.
“Shhhhh,” she giggles.
The frogs chirp and croak.
“Look.” Night Cloud rises to his elbow.
Grey Rabbit rolls over. Out the open door flap there are beams of green light rippling across the night sky. “The ancestors dancing in the land of the spirits.”
Night Cloud sighs and pulls Grey Rabbit closer. Thinking of his father. Gone so suddenly. And the raw hole that took his place. Already, he has passed his father in years.
Grey Rabbit nestles into Night Cloud. Beams of light shift in the sky. His hand is softly stroking her leg. His thumb now tracing the contour of her hip bone. A bright streak of light sways back and forth. His breath is warm at the edge of her ear, as his fingers stroke her side, tentative, asking.
She’s willing, her body responding as it used to, her breath quickening as his hand rides her skin. She rocks her hips back against him, his hand circling softly at her belly, his mouth now against her neck. She rolls toward him, her heart soft, remembering their private world of mouths and rhythm.
It’s been so long. So long. Her fingers reach into his hair. The chorus of frogs chirp and croak. The sky above his head shimmers green through the smoke hole, and once again they choose each other.
2000
Nora wakes bolt upright in bed and runs her hand over the lamp until she finds the hard round switch. TV. Bureau. Luggage stand. Thunder Bay. She has no idea what woke her. The room is still, the door’s chain lock in place.
She turns off the lamp and pulls up the covers, but her eyes remain wide open. The clock reads 1:45. She considers a slice of cold pizza. The open box lies on the table, and behind it the sky out the window is flickering. Fire. Nora snaps on the lamp and is out of bed, shoving her arms into her coat. She throws open the door to her room.
The entire sky is moving with bits of light. She leans over the balcony rail, her heart beating rapidly as she scans the rooftops for flames. In every direction the sky is tumultuous, but there is no fire. It’s northern lights that fill the sky, and not just a hovering glow, or a few shimmering curtains to the north. Everything is green and wild, breaking and scattering overhead.
Nora hears the click of a lighter in the parking lot. Someone is smoking by the office door. It surprises her to hear the small sound with all the commotion going on. But then she realizes it’s absolutely quiet. Everything is coming through her eyes, not her ears.
The sleeping giant lies in the lake. Flat oval head, arms over its chest, the long thick length of its body and its feet. Above it, the green lights shimmer and undulate, beams flare bright and then disappear. The curtain of light above the sleeping giant jumps. Spears of green light stretch and shoot, appear and disappear faster than she can track, rippling like runs of piano keys.
Nora pulls a chair up to the rail and feels for cigarettes in her coat pocket. She regards the giant’s long dark profile as she smokes. It seems to be watching the sky, too. No, she decides. The giant looks to be presiding.
The person down below has their head thrown back. Nora follows their gaze to a ring of light spinning at the top of the sky. The light circles, then suddenly breaks apart. The lights dash and twirl around the rim of the sky, then rush together, reforming the circle. Nora’s cigarette falls from her hand. The lights scatter, sway, and pulsate. The circle breaks apart again. When Nora looks back to the lake, she half expects to meet the giant standing, its head towering into the green sky, black water to its knees. Tinker says hi, she nearly whispers.
1622
The day is hot, humid, and still, with bugs droning and pesky flies. Grey Rabbit dips her finger in a bowl of hot water, where she has a buck’s brain soaking. Around her are the familiar sounds of women tanning, the rasp of the scraping bones, low voices, punctured by small bursts of laughter.
Grey Rabbit has kept mostly quiet, not because she has nothing to say, but because, for now, she enjoys simply listening. The smell of the brain is acrid and unpleasant as she works it to a paste between her fingers. At least it gives her arms a rest. They are sore from the scraping and her thighs ache, too. She wonders for a moment and then smiles, thinking of Night Cloud.
Grey Rabbit scoops a handful of paste onto the hide and rubs it in vigorous circles, trying to saturate the skin evenly. The flies harass her and land on the fresh paste, and she wishes for a wind to keep them down.
“Aieee, this heat, even in the shade.” Bullhead lowers herself to the hot dry ground and waves a reed fan at her neck. “I know the heat is good for the squash. But on days like this I see the gift of snow.”
Grey Rabbit stiffens. Her hands stop moving on the hide.
“What is it? What did I say?”
Grey Rabbit picks brain from her fingers, reluctant to speak. “A dream,” she whispers. “It wasn’t like the others,” she adds quickly. “There weren’t any children, I’ve not dreamt of children, it just gave me that feeling of heaviness.”
“Can you tell me?”
Grey Rabbit squats on her haunches, holding her pasty hands in the air. She’s sweating everywhere beneath her robe, her back and belly, behind her knees. With her forearm, she shoos a fly from her head. “I just remembered it.”
“What did you see.”
“There was snow. And I was underneath it, tunneling with the voles and the rabbits. They showed me how to move and how to keep watch for the swooping shadows of hunting birds. Then I felt the weight . . .” She slowly closes her fist, the paste squeezing between her fingers.
Bullhead starts fanning again. “I’ve made arrangements with one who interprets. She is willing, when you feel ready.”
“I am ready.” Grey Rabbit bends to her work. “When I’m finished I’ll clean up and approach her myself.”
The heat has only grown thicker, and in the small cove the air bends and waves. Grey Rabbit walks to the water, holding her pasty hands from her body. Her people are gathered up the shore where smoke from the drying fires hangs in the air. The women work and the men sit in the shade while dogs chase a group of children who turn and twist like a flock of birds. Little Cedar is there among them; she can pick him out even at a distance by his funny jumping gait.
The water in the small cove is so still that it looks like it’s layered with ice, just the barest skin stretched over the surface. She slips off her moccasins and steps in. A crow calls from high in a tree. The cold around her calves is good, and the feel of the sand giving way beneath her feet. It’s luscious to plunge her arms in the still clear water, to swirl them in the cold while bits of brain float away.
The crow calls again and again. She finds it at the pointed top of a pine. It caws and opens its black wings against the sky.
Grey Rabbit stands unmoving.
In her dream she’d heard crows cawing, huge numbers of them, as she’d tunneled and the snow drifts claimed the land.
Grey Rabbit wades deeper, tosses water over her hair and face. Her reflection breaks into bits of color and scatters across the water surface.
She hears them first and then she looks up, blinking bright water from her eyes as the high bows of the Huron canoes quietly traverse the flat water before her. There are three boats, and in the last sits a man with pale skin. His face is scarred, his cheeks covered with spidery brown hair.
The white-face pauses his paddle midstroke. He looks in her direction, nods as he glides past.
Grey Rabbit feels the dream heaviness come over her. It expands and spreads like wide wings in her chest. The crow caws. The boat wakes cleave the water.
Grey Rabbit turns and splashes back to shore. His eyes were not red, but the blue of a winter sky. She rushes along the shoreline, after the canoes that fast approach the long cove.
Already the men have moved from the trees and are standing tall along the beach. Her mind spins. The dream heaviness drops through her legs, forcing her urgent steps to a halt.
The three canoes draw in their paddles. They drift in slowly. Show no aggression.
The men line the beach.
The canoes hover in the bay.
It’s silent but for the rushing water of the rapids.
The crow caws from the tree once again.
Grey Rabbit drops to her knees, water dripping down her neck and arms, drops falling from her fingertips. She can see Night Cloud and Standing Bird among the men, their shoulders upright in identical posture. The pale man rises to his feet. He speaks loudly in the Huron tongue, words of greeting and friendship ring through the cove.
Her thoughts flicker, twist, and lift. Ungraspable. Ungraspable as smoke. The men on the beach relax their posture, and the women and children come out of the trees, stifling laughter and fingering their hairless cheeks.
The white-faced man picks up his paddle. The boats land. And he steps ashore.
2000
The motel parking lot has largely cleared out by the time Nora drags her suitcase down the stairs. She shoves it into the backseat, shuts the door and slides behind the wheel. The sleeping giant now looks to be resting. Serene under the blue morning sky. According to the map, she could make it all the way home, but she doesn’t feel compelled to race the way she did the day before. In fact, she feels like slowing down, almost a bit disappointed when she looks back over her route, and all the territory she’d sped through. Her report to Nikki is going to be swiss cheese.
She peruses the brochures she took from the room. One has the sleeping giant on it, and a tale about Nana’b’oozoo turning to stone. The other is for Old Fort William. Its cover shows people dressed up like voyageurs, Indians dancing, white clapboard buildings.
Nora cleans up the floor of the car, gathering stuff into a plastic bag—snack food wrappers, empty cigarette boxes. There is more in the back—an empty pop can, a piece of cellophane clinging to Rose’s painting. She pours the last of an old coffee-to-go on the ground. She is going to do something before leaving Canada.
Fort Williams is huge, at least a couple dozen buildings, each having a designated purpose and each inhabited by people in costume who pretend to be living two hundred years ago. Indian Shop, Counting House, Hospital, Ammunition, Liquor Storage—it goes on and on. Nora stands behind a group of children who are listening to one of the actors. He’s dressed in old-style pants and a balloon-sleeved shirt, his hand resting on a giant wooden contraption as he explains how the voyageurs’ packs were loaded with pelts laid skin to skin, and fur to fur. “This press is used to compact the furs, optimizing the limited space and making the packs easier to handle.”
The sun is warm and sounds drift through the air—bleating sheep, someone hammering metal. Nora doesn’t join any particular group; she just wanders around, listening in.
Off the main square lies a low wooden barrack. It’s dim inside after the bright sunlight, quiet, and the air feels preserved, thin and dry like pressed flowers. The floor sounds hollow under Nora’s feet as she walks down the aisle between rows of cots, surveying the artifacts—a smoking pipe and pouch, a fragile-looking book. “Hey,” she says, her own voice breaking the quiet, when she sees the opposing chairs and the tree stump, a grid of checkerboard squares burned into its top. Maybe Tinker’s “great, great . . .”—she sees Tinker twirling her hand—had died in that very room. She touches her finger to one of the burnt squares, but it doesn’t come off ashy.
“Have you gotten separated from your group?”
“Holy . . .” Nora starts. “You scared me, geez.”
A young man in costume stands in the open door. “You should be scared, a woman wandering the fort unescorted. Many of the lads here are not to be trusted.”
He’s feigning an accent, but she can’t tell what it is supposed to be.
“I’d be happy to show you around myself. Have you visited the Great Hall?”
Nora declines, but he is insistent. She looks him over, his woolen cap and his sash. “Thanks, but I’m just leaving.”
The smell of baking bread wafts across the grounds, and a group of actors are square-dancing, clapping, and calling out in theatrical voices. It doesn’t look like a bad life, at least in its make-believe form, with the sun shining on the white buildings and the warm yeasty smell in the air. But then, she figures as she leaves the walled fort, it’s hardly the dead of winter, without heat, electricity, or running water.
The shuttle to the visitor center is not due for ten minutes, so she follows the path away from the gate. It leads her to a small clearing and a sign that reads “Native Encampment.” A fire burns in an open pit below an iron cooking pot, though there isn’t anyone around. On the ground lies a halfwoven mat made of reeds. She pokes her head into one of the birch-bark structures, surprised by how large and cozy it seems.