Written in Stone

by Peter Unwin

  PAUL DROPPED THIGH HIGH INTO the water of Superior and felt the coldness stab his groin and shock even the base of his chin. “Aaah-ha,” he cried out. He was aware of his oldness, that it had finally come and built a nest in him.

  Joe Animal shouted from the boat. “I can’t get no closer.” The vessel pitched alarmingly between two outcrops of rock. The air hissed.

  Paul swore again.

  “It’s fine once you get used to it, right?”

  “It’s fine once you get out of it,” shouted Paul.

  “Yeah, once you’re out and you got a fire going and you’re drinking and you’re in bed. Then it’s pretty good. At least it’s not cold anymore.”

  “A week,” said Paul, taking down the gear that was handed him. “One week exactly. Seven days. Not six, or eight. White man’s week, right? Old-fashioned colonial-style racist week.”

  “You mean a week like?”

  “One week.”

  “Seven days?”

  “If I get weathered in, you call someone. You call the Coast Guard.”

  “No coast guard,” shouted Joe. “They shut it down. Been shut down a year. They don’t got the money anymore. Get weathered in, you’re screwed. You got enough food?”

  “Next Saturday, right here. Get the crazy guy out of Jackfish to come and get me if you can’t do it.”

  “That guy’s dead,” said Joe Animal. “I’ll be here next Saturday. You going up the trail, to those pits?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You stay out of those things.”

  “I will.”

  “You won’t.” Joe was not comfortable with Pukaskwa pits, or goodbyes either, and he turned his head into the wind dragging his boat around with him. The vessel followed like a willing dog, pitching sideways on the curling water.

  AS HE CLAMBERED THE WHITE cobbles, Paul startled grasshoppers that popped madly into the air as if mounted on pogo sticks. They seemed to be deliberately luring him away from the nests of their beloved young ones, clattering against stones with the strange sound of chucka chucka chucka, their wings snapping and jerking them into the air, like helicopters, he thought, malfunctioning helicopters. A snake slid sideways on the rock.

  He negotiated his way under a fallen tree that had tumbled down from the timberline. The trunk was smooth as a tusk. The rock surface under his feet was deeply scratched by glaciers. He felt the familiar comfort of being on rock. He’d read Louis Agassiz’s writings about rock; that hateful man who had turned his hatred into science. Paul, as a young man, had poured over his writings while sitting on rocks, the Precambrian pillow lava showing like the waterways of an ancient map. He had made love on rock, the girl was dead now, but this was not his fault. A car crash had taken her, years ago. He stood on the rock and watched the shield unfold before him to the north.

  Soon he was leaping from boulder to boulder like some younger incarnation of himself, moving quickly, searching for a route between the stone terraces while the surging and sucking of the seas played out beneath him. Great heaves of green water entered the caverns, sloshed and broke like gunshots. The waves fragmented into pools scummy with algae and crisscrossed with spiders. A gull turned above his head in the white sky. For several minutes, Paul sat and faced the water, watching the waves flatten into a frantic turquoise agitation at a point far away. He tried to visualize the American shore a hundred miles southwest, to Copper Harbour, and the abandoned graves of Cornish miners. The miniature graves of their babies. Linda had wept when she saw them. His eyes shifted west to where the Keweenaw finger would be, the Apostle Islands, the cliffs where old stories said a scroll existed, buried under the roots of an ironwood tree.

  A scatter of black birds left the branches and were wind-tossed back to where they started. “Quo Vadis … Quo Vadis,” cried the crows. Where are you going? Where? Into what future? Paul followed a quartz vein into the forest and turned with it, throwing his arms up as he rammed through the bush. The shore was not navigable and he was close now, he sensed it from the fallen hush in the trees and from the growing silence in himself. The birds, the insects, had given in to stillness. A stream leaked from the woods, lapping softly.

  He found the pits on the other side, on the creek shore, barely visible, two concentric terraces of rocks built into the ground, layered in regularity to form a hole, deep as his arm. The stones themselves seemed braided into a type of bird’s nest and imbedded in the ancient shore of a diminished ocean. Each pit made a pocket large enough to curl up in and dream, or sleep, or die. Or to cook fish in. Five thousand years old. Three hundred years? He didn’t know. He was not aware of anyone who did. Dream pits? Pits for the storing and curing of meat? Long ago, on a campus radio station, he’d debated the raving Seth Blumrich who insisted the structures were built by Andromeda Galaxy aliens. No, answered Paul, they were constructed by the hands of men or women, people, ancestors about whom we know almost nothing. They are beyond our capacity to understand. Or our right, he thought. Beyond our right to understand. Part of a story we do not understand. What about the records, Blumrich had insisted, why have we no record? What happened to those people? What spaceship were they on? What deadly microbes did they leave behind, that have come back now in these times? Mark my words. The paintings, Paul had always insisted. The paintings on the rock. They were the record, a living record. On Michipicoten, he had seen pit structures extending two thousand square feet, large enough for a clan of people to curl up together and dream. Large enough for a space vehicle to land, Blumrich had insisted.

  Paul went to his knees beside the largest of the two pits. He unpacked swiftly, whistling to himself and poled the tent low to the ground next to it. Once, long ago, they had gathered here, people who weaved with stone, paddled stone canoes before disappearing into rock faces. I am practising the religion of life, he told himself as he pegged the tent. The life that death covets; blueberries and rock and water, women, and men, and stinging insects and tobacco; most of all tobacco, which heaven had none. Nothing in heaven tempted him. Nothing tempted him, not even tobacco. All heaven had going for it was dreary eternity. And whiteness, a thick whiteness, like shaving cream, he thought.

  He heard the high klee klee klee of the osprey.

  Hunger clutched him, but he wouldn’t eat. His tooth bothered him a great deal, but he refused to think about it. His pills lay in a container somewhere in his knapsack. Pink ones in another container. He should have taken care of all of that before he left, he knew it. He was getting careless.

  Paul went down shore to the rock cliff and angled himself in front of the paintings, on a low ledge that barely protruded from the face. They showed there like rust on the surface; fine clay impregnated with ferrous oxide congealed with sturgeon oil, the yellow ochre transforming into red oxide through heat. Some of it had lasted four hundred winters. Such paint could not be replicated. No one had that knowledge now. He stood in front of a grey vertical face displaying the letters, L and R, and next to it, the date, 1781. The face had once been overgrown by lichen, now withered away, revealing figures of a rabbit-eared man with both arms crooked. The three fingered man, the man with a bird’s head, the man with antlers. The figures appeared to be waving at something, not him, something beyond him. Pre-literate gropings toward the written word. The attitude had not satisfied him. He did not consider them pre-literate gropings. He considered them a concentrated formal and literal expression of the end of time, a visual display of past and future, when the animal joined in sickness and greed and avian diseases and the diseases of monkeys and swine mingled with the people and great sicknesses came. It was written in stone, the antlers emerged from the head of man, a false prophet, or the true one, in a time without truth.

  Paul touched the rock. He wanted to feel on his finger a language that was made of something other than words. Different language. No one had been here, he knew that. No one who was alive.

 
AT NIGHT HE BOILED RICE on a stove and allowed himself to eat only half of it. He would starve to a point. To stoke a hunger for dreaming. His tent was pitched, but he would take the night outside.

  When the moon came up over the tree line on the mountain, he entered the pit and lay with his back against the sloping cobble walls. He felt the moisture, the stones were soaked with it, soaked with the night. Joe Animal wouldn’t do this, he thought. No matter how sober he was. Paul reminded himself that he was not entering into a place that was forbidden to him. Everyone was native of the earth. Even him. The rock was his. He was native, finally, his body lay on stone, he had achieved that. Native of the earth, like stone. Ancient now, like stone. For a moment the cold sheer discomfort of the cobbles was unbearable to him.

  He pulled the sleeping bag around him, wedged his eyes shut until finally and wretchedly he slept. Within two hours, he awoke hard. A root had snapped in the forest or in his mind. His tooth throbbed insanely. He had not dreamed yet, instead he lay awake, feeling that something was observing him.

  33

  DREAMWORK

  Wheeler’s informant told him that the old medicine man searching for a cure for a sick woman said he received powerful medicines from the men who lived in the rock.

  GRACE RAJNOVICH, 1994

  OF COURSE LINDA WAS DREAMING, she knew that, she had to be. What else was there for her to be doing? She was dreaming of a spot where she’d once camped with her husband, he was shirtless and sketching a snake petroform on the ground at the Manitoba border. A soft-drink machine glowed from the depths of the forest. She recognized it from numerous rainy nights camping on the Sleeping Giant, when Paul had given a talk. Later, through the mesh of the tent, she saw the machine by the visitor’s centre, glowing blue between the trees. “Feed me,” it said, “put coins into my mouth.” She had been dreaming, then too. She had been dreaming even when she had her dream. Now she was at the water’s edge. The sturgeon lolled there, such a slow gentle beast with its two soft mandibles. Its skin of leather. They’d bound books out of its skin, left its carcasses rotting in heaps on the shore. She slid into its toothless mouth, head first, the way she’d tobogganed as a girl, tugged into a warm belly as if a sledding down a snowy hill. Inside it smelled like the St. Lawrence Market on a Saturday morning when the rolls came out of the oven, and the meat was stacked and raw on a mat of wax paper. She remained in there, in the dark of the belly of the great fish. Softly at first, coming near, she heard it, the familiar snort and snuffle of a bear and she listened, unafraid, while it chewed a hole in the sturgeon’s side. Sun entered in shafts, cycling through the widening wound; with some childish delight, she found herself being washed through it into the earth on the tides of the fish’s guts, into the hubbub of a language that sounded from the trees, “Da-da-edewenh-hye, da-da-edewenh-hyedaghsatka-ghtoogh-seron-ee.” Something bat-like swooped to her ear. The cold nose of a deer nuzzled against her palm. “Give my meat to your people,” the creature instructed her. “Your rivers are distressed.” Whose people, she thought. Her hand reached into a wooden barrel in the basement — Sunday then, baking day across the north — Linda plunged her arm deep into the isinglass for eggs; the frigid sturgeon goo that kept the eggs cold, isinglass. The word appealed to her. Isinglass. She would live there one day, in the Kingdom of Isinglass, where the men were long-limbed. She reached in without distaste, groping for eggs, but what she came up with was not an egg. Her hand emerged holding the severed head of a dog, the mouth bound shut with twine, its eyes white and brimming with mucus. She let the dog’s head fall back into the barrel and saw without surprise, that her father was there beside her. Her father again. There had been a time she had wanted so much from him. She had no idea what. “The Chief of Gardens,” she’d called him that for years. His back was turned, and the leather patches on his elbows in need of mending. “Look after your garden Linda, listen to me. Don’t let your children kick the hell out of it.” Linda held up her hands to indicate she had no children hidden there. “I don’t have any children, Dad. Sorry.” She saw that her hands were covered in filth: the earth and the dirt of the earth. At least the humus was still willing to stain her skin. Her wedding band was lost however and she sensed with mounting relief that she was dreaming. There was nothing in her hand but a chestnut-sized nugget of mud that Linda tossed flippantly into the lake. As she did that she was stricken by the urgent need to pee and squatted in the blueberries watching the rivulet of her urine search the ground and snake through the grass and sand. Without looking up, Linda understood that she was being watched; Arthur, that foolish man, was hidden behind a tree watching all the girls pee. He held a powerful pair of binoculars, shifting from one side to another as he sought to get a better look at her cleft. “Linda Richardson,” he cried. “I want to hump thee.”

  She understood that she was dreaming or was very close to it. “Of course, you do Arthur. You can get in line with the rest,” she said coolly. But Arthur had no intention of waiting and leapt from behind a white pine wearing a loincloth that he ripped off. “That is really too much, Arthur. For God’s sake.” Linda laughed, but she had to admit that he possessed an impressive cock. No sooner had she conceded this point to herself than she saw that the poor man had no eyes and this saddened her. Another man with no eyes. How long could this go on? All that staring they did, at screens that never blinked. At words. Two pink craters showed there. “I warned you, Arthur. This happens when you constantly fool with that thing. You have gone blind, you silly man.”

  “I was faking it,” he cried. “I was always faking it. From the start. I faked the four winds. I fabricated the four stations of the cross. I wrote Hitler’s diaries. It was me.” At that moment, Arthur was no longer there. He had been replaced by the elderly fellow standing next to her. She felt she knew the man, that she recognized him somehow, from somewhere. “Can you believe I slept with that guy,” she said. “More than once. It was the only thing we knew how to do. Now look, I’ve lost my wedding ring.” She turned and fully regarded the statuesque old man next to her, his reams of white hair, some of it emerging from his nostrils. She suspected it was a mistake to say this to him, but couldn’t stop herself. “Wait a minute. I know you. You’re Longfellow. Henry Wadsworth. Aren’t you? You’re the Gitchee Gummee guy!”

  The old man examined her severely. “You foolish woman,” he answered brusquely. “Look what’s become of you. Do you have the faintest idea where you are?” With a trembling and knotted finger, he indicated the ground. “This earth which is held together by billions of years, now worn down by the feet of the runners of the confederacy of Iroquois. They ran even at night, guided by the constellations. Do you know what this place is?”

  “Let me guess. Would it be the forest primeval?” Linda was pleased with this comeback. She didn’t hold a postgraduate degree in English literature for nothing. “And you and I are just ships passing in the night, right?”

  The old poet smiled in spite of himself and snapped open a locket, with the ease of gesture repeated many times. He turned it to her. A woman’s face in miniature, hand-coloured, wrapped in folded grey hair.

  “Your wife?”

  “I tried to save her. Her gown, you see, I tried to save her with these hands. She burned. From the lamps. She died screaming. I failed to save her.” He seemed to recover himself for a moment, and pointed at her. “What is it that you hear? Your husband, he’s dead as well? Do you hear him? Are we here to grieve? You and I? To grieve together?”

  “Of course not,” cried Linda.

  Even as she spoke, she saw a man lying face down on the forest floor, wounded in the thigh, “He’s writing in a notebook right now. If you must know,” she said archly. “He is out somewhere on the north shore of Lake Superior saving us with his dreams.”

  34

  COLDWELL PENNINSULA

  My friend told me it represented his dream of life and that he had this dream on the St. Croix River
when he was quite young. He fasted ten days for it. “Canst thou impart to me all the circumstances of this dream,” I asked him. “No, but when I am in great danger and on the point of dying then I shall collect all my family around me and reveal to them the entire history of my dream.

  KITCHI-GAMI: LIFE AMONGST THE LAKE SUPERIOR OJIBWAY, JOHANN GEORGE KOHL, 1860

  AFTER SEVERAL DAYS, HE MADE his way to the shoreline and lapped water in the manner of a bear, following it with three pieces of dried papaya. His vision had sharpened, become more intense; a silver phosphorescent glow sprang from all things. This pleased him. His teeth hurt him very much however, and in defiance of the pain he gargled the chilling water of Superior over the aching region of his face.

  He spent the day at the side of the pit with his shirt off, pressing his skin to rock. His notes, assembled in a spiral-bound book, lay on the ground. The hairy-faced ones, the little ones of legend, they entered these rocks with offerings of tobacco and for this they were given the knowledge of rock medicine.

  In the afternoon, a light rain nudged in from Superior and loosed a steaming vapour in the forest, damping the mosquitoes and flies. He retreated to his tent, and permitted himself to swallow a thousand milligrams of Novamoxin, hoping they would punch the pain away for a time. It annoyed him he couldn’t find the blue pills. He had not searched everything yet, but he was sure he’d forgotten to pack them. They remained on the bedside table back home, beneath the chiming of the Greek church. It was a mistake and he was annoyed by it. Expeditions had been wiped out by small mistakes.

  In the afternoon, he removed his watch and threw it into Lake Superior. On the day of wrath, he thought, every precious thing shall be useless and we shall chuck our precious silver into the street. The watch was gone, but a band of white skin remained on his wrist. He retreated from the water. The flies had come in their fury. He lay in his tent, trying to ignore the throbbing of his teeth. Indecipherable forest noises came through the nylon walls. A silver film bled across the rocks and trees, casting down finally a quarter moon. The waves sounded on the shore, the repeating thud of waves came to him like someone moaning.