by Linda Hogan
We were full and powerful, wearing the face of the world, floating in silence. Dora-Rouge said, “Yes, I believe we’ve always been lost,” as we traveled through thick-grown rushes, marsh, and water so shallow our paddles touched bottom.
The four of us became like one animal. We heard inside each other in a tribal way. I understood this at once and was easy with it. With my grandmothers, there was no such thing as loneliness. Before, my life had been without all its ears, eyes, without all its knowings. Now we, the four of us, all had the same eyes, and when Dora-Rouge pointed a bony finger and said, “This way,” we instinctively followed that crooked finger.
I never felt lost. I felt newly found, opening, like the tiny eggs we found in a pond one day, fertile and transparent. I bent over them. The life was already moving inside them, like an eye or heartbeat. One day we passed alongside cliff walls that bore red, ancient drawings of moose and bear. These were said to have been painted not by humans, but by spirits.
ONE DAY IT RAINED, but we passed through this day, too, as if nothing had changed, not the tree trunks black with water, not the shining rocks, not even the low clouds curling through land, winding between the wet, dripping branches of trees. It seemed there was no difference between the water below us and the water above.
There was lake after lake, island after island, and then, one day, we traveled down a calm river in silence. It was a lush day. Pollen blew through the air and landed on water like yellow snow. Smiling, I looked back at Bush and Agnes behind us. “Dora-Rouge,” I said. “It is so beautiful.”
At river’s end, where water emptied into a lake, we came to gray walls of stone that held other paintings, red and black. These were of moose and wolverine. “Look,” I said. I stopped paddling. A rain cloud passed over, and it was our good fortune that a light mist fell because when the rock wall became wet, we could see that the wolverine had wings. Invisible in the dry air, those wings waited for water to expose them. A white bird, too, was now visible. “What people,” I wondered aloud, “had such vision?”
“Your people,” said Dora-Rouge. “Mine.”
Beneath the surface of the water were more paintings, just visible.
“The water must have risen,” said Dora-Rouge.
It was true. Our paddles touched the tops of trees. On the land many trees were half-submerged. They stood in water, still rooted, looking like bushes growing along the surface of water. We still had a part day’s travel left in our arms, but we decided to set up camp high on this island that was partly drowned and worth examining.
I undressed quickly. I wanted to swim through these waters by the wall of drawings.
“Be careful,” said Agnes.
Entering water, I lost my breath. The water was colder than before. And it was clear. Through water, the flooded land looked perfectly normal, except that grasses swayed with the currents and not with the wind. A trail was still visible between the drowning trees.
I made my way to the painted walls and dived, eyes open. Never had I seen water like this, so clear and deep. I thought of Bush, standing before water one day, saying, “Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen,” in her dreamy way. When I was inside water, I understood how these simple elements married and became a third thing.
Fish were painted at the lowest depth of the stone walls. Just above them were several red deer, standing as if startled by a twig breaking in the underwater forest. They were prepared to run off the stone and through water. I forgot to breathe, swimming as if once again, as before birth, I had a gill slit. In that moment, I remembered being fish. I remembered being oxygen and hydrogen, bird and wolverine. It was all there. I felt it in my heart. But I could never think what to call it after that. I only knew that I and my many mothers had been lost in sky, water, and the galaxy, as we rested on a planet so small it was invisible to the turning of other worlds.
As I left water, I smelled rabbit cooking. Agnes was cheerful with the promise of fresh meat. I stood near the fire and squeezed out my wet hair. “Where’d you get the rabbit?”
Bush was using some of her own hair to tie a fly. “I pretended I wasn’t hunting,” she said. “Watch it, Angel. You’re getting me wet.”
“Come on, tell me. How’d you get it?” But I knew how. I’d seen her set a snare once, with twine, twig, and a single nail.
“There was a place like this in Oklahoma.” She looked around. “With rock paintings of bear. No one knew about them. They were in a forest.” She pulled some of the hair through a loop. “My uncle lived in those woods. Once he saw thirty bear walking through the forest together. He said they were growling and roaring and breaking trees as they went. He was scared to death. He tried to find a place to hide where they couldn’t get him. He thought of a tree. But bears climb trees. He knew of a cave, too, but any place he could think of, bears could reach. But they were so powerful in their walking that they forgot all about men.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Agnes said.
“I know. That’s why I’m sure my uncle didn’t make it up.”
Agnes brushed some ashes off my leg. “I wish I had my coat.”
Dora-Rouge divulged Bush’s hunting trick to me. “She caught it with a snare. All she needed was fishline and a stick.”
Bush put the fly aside. It looked exactly like a mosquito.
“I hope that’s not a decoy,” I said.
THAT NIGHT Agnes went to bed early. The rest of us stayed up late, talking. As we stirred dried apricots into hot water, we heard Agnes in the tent. All the talk of bears sent her to seek the one she had known. Now she was trying to talk with it, trying to summon the bear that had been her ally since she was twelve.
Without the coat, Agnes seemed to be without skin, and the little bit of flesh she still had looked loose enough to step out of, to leave behind. She slept longer every day. She felt penned in, she said, by the boat, the sleeping bag and tent, even by her skin. She was tired. I told myself it was nothing; it was due to the absence of her coat. Now she tried to summon the bear in new ways, singing bear songs, doing a hidden dance she called bear walking, talking to the bear with her eyes closed tight and reverent.
Watching her, worried about her, I started to think: What if something happened to one of us? There was no one to help us. We were alone.
Dora-Rouge seemed to be thinking the same thing, pursing her lips, watching Agnes, even shielding her eyes from the sun when she looked at her, to see her better. “Maybe it’s nerves,” Dora-Rouge said, as if I’d spoken my worries out loud.
“The Europeans called this world dangerous,” she said. And I thought I understood: they had trapped themselves inside their own destruction of it, the oldest kind of snare, older than twine and twigs. Their legacy, I began to understand, had been the removal of spirit from everything, from animals, trees, fishhooks, and hammers, all things the Indians had as allies. They’d forgotten how to live. Before, everything lived together well—lynx and women, trappers and beaver. Now most of us had inarticulate souls, silent spirits, and despairing hearts.
“When hunters of the past killed an animal,” Dora-Rouge said, “they blinded it. They did not want it to see what things they did to its body. They tied the feet of killed birds together so their spirits could not follow them home. They cut the paws off bear so their souls would not chase them.” But now, she told me, the men were haunted by something else, by something inside themselves they’d tried, but failed, to forget.
“That’s why animals and people stopped talking to each other.”
But sometimes on this journey I thought I heard the voices of the world, of what was all around us—the stones, the waters flowing toward their ends, the osprey with its claws in fish, even the minnows and spawn. I heard trees with their roots holding ground.
“Once we could ask them to do something for us, to find our way home, to take away pain,” said Dora-Rouge. “And they would help us. I believe this knowledge was given on the tenth day of creation,” she said. And those that
didn’t know it were unfinished creations, cursed to be eternal children on this earth, lacking in the wisdom that understands life, even the diatoms precious and strange.
Creation, according to Dora-Rouge, was an ongoing thing. On the eighth day of creation, Dora-Rouge had told me, human beings were given their place with the earth. “By then some of the humans must have drifted away, across the newly formed waters, toward even newer land,” she said. “Or maybe they just had poor memories, but there must have been some reason those people thought there were only six days of creation and one of rest, that they thought it ended there. Then, on the ninth day was the creation of stories, and these had many uses.” They taught a thing or two about doing work, about kindness and love. She told me there were even stories to show a way out of unhappiness. Another day was devoted to snails and slugs, night crawlers and silverfish, roaches. Then there was the creation of singing and songs. “If those drifting ones would have stayed behind, they might even have learned the antidote for war,” she said. “But they heard only as far as the creation of war on the sixth day. Thieves were created on that same day, too.”
With tenderness I looked at Dora-Rouge, her white hair, her face with light coming from it. Never, I thought, was life so good, were women more wonderful.
At times I saw something shining in the depths of Bush, something I thought I could reach inside and touch, take out, turn over in my hand, and love. She was the closest thing I had to a mother. And if she was the closest thing to a mother, Dora-Rouge, who insisted she was born new every day, was the closest thing to God. And I was partly made in the old woman’s image, right down to the owl-beak nose and dark, curved brows, and when she spoke the days of creation, I believed in them.
LATE ONE DAY as I built a fire, I saw Bush out in the smooth water. Like a dark-headed otter, she surfaced for a few moments, only to slip down the cold surface and disappear. I watched for her to surface again. She was at home in water, an element given shape by what contained it. She was water. Agnes once told me there were rumors how the men she’d slept with believed they swam across her.
That night, I rubbed oil into Agnes’ back. She lay beside the fire, holding a cloth to her chest, the oil shining on her dark, naked back. When she fell asleep in the warmth, Dora-Rouge covered her with the skins and it looked as if a large animal breathed there. Dora-Rouge sat all night awake beside her, now and then tossing old cedar into the fire, releasing its smoke and odor.
ANOTHER EVENING, when we’d fallen into a steady stroking rhythm, our canoe drifted into a shaft of red sunlight. That evening, Dora-Rouge led us to some other rock paintings of moon and lynx. The paintings themselves, she remembered, were on steep cliff walls. When we found them it was still light and they were reflected on water, the lynx gazing down at itself, looking at its twin as if they had just met for the first time. It looked as if it could step away from stone, enter water, its own reflection, and come alive, the way spirit meets matter. Something about the paintings, done so long ago, tugged at the edge of me; at the older mind still at work in me.
Agnes leaned forward, reached into the water, and tried to lift the moon from the surface. When she touched it, it broke; the lynx wavered on water.
THAT SAME NIGHT, when the sun was a long path across water, we saw a canoe move toward us, traveling in the path of light. Inside the canoe sat a white man and woman. Between the man and woman was a white dog. We watched them approach. As they neared us, a heron rose up from the edge of water.
“Look,” said Dora-Rouge, “they’ve made love. They are shining.”
I barely heard her. Instead, I waved and hollered. “Hey!” I had nearly forgotten there were other people in the world. I came quickly out of lost time, silent space. Now all I wanted was a tube of lipstick. “Over here!” I put my fingers to my mouth and whistled. I would have stood up if the boat had allowed it. The two waved back.
Their canoe was overloaded to within only inches of water. It looked like any movement would sink them. They looked so foolish, I nearly laughed. But for the first time, I saw our own little flotilla through the eyes of others and we looked as much like fools as they did, four Indian women, one old and birdlike, having to be carried about while she gave out commands and directions she had made up from somewhere inside her old, brittle bones.
The dog stood up and barked. The canoe tilted dangerously, threatening to overturn. “Sit, Tyler!” the woman yelled.
Agnes took in the sight of the blond hair, white eyebrows, and pink skin of the two people and was silent.
The young couple, Bob and Jean, had been flown in and dropped off a few days earlier. The man, although an experienced canoer, a frequent journeyer here, thought perhaps they were lost. I didn’t yet realize that the faces of land and water had been changed up above us, nor did I know what such change meant. I thought him merely inexperienced.
As he pulled up to us, smiling, he asked, “What’s the name of this island?” He pointed to it. The woman lifted her paddle to her lap and waited. “We must be lost,” he said.
Dora-Rouge knew he wouldn’t understand her usual answer, about how we’d always been lost. She had sense enough not to say it.
The dog, a white shepherd, wagged its tail and panted. “Tyler. Sit!”
It was late and it had been a good full day’s traveling, so Dora-Rouge invited the couple to remain with us that evening. “The company would be good for us,” Dora-Rouge said, after observing my excitement.
“YOU CAN’T GET AROUND the Se Nay River anymore through the old way,” the man told Dora-Rouge as we sat beside the fire. “You have to take another route.”
“Why not?” She looked at him with keen interest.
“We saw it ourselves from the plane. It was socked in. The Big Arm River has been diverted into it from above. They had to drop us to the west so we could get another passage, and even that one is probably no longer passable. It was nearly all mud then; by now every bit of it must be.”
Dora-Rouge turned this over in her mind as we sat together by the fire, the white shepherd with its head on my lap. I scratched its ears. “How bad is the river?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t want to travel down the river.” He brushed himself off. “It’s too rapid.”
“Luther,” Dora-Rouge said, calling on him. The man looked at her with a strange expression. But Luther said nothing. Maybe he was silent because of the couple. They looked startled and exchanged a glance with each other. They looked around the campsite to see if we had another person with us.
Agnes, I noticed, was behaving in a strange manner. Finally, she got me alone, walking out of the bushes back toward the fire. “There’s something wrong with them,” she said. And later, when I was washing a pot in the lake, scrubbing it with sand, she whispered as loud as possible, “They are cannibals, those two.”
Once, that evening, she even said to them, “You’re cannibals, aren’t you?”
The man and woman smiled and ignored her. They remained polite as she stared at their faces with apprehension. They pretended not to notice. It was, after all, a known fact that people went crazy in these broken, water-split lands.
“There’s a bog fire up ahead,” the man said to Bush.
“How far is it?”
“You can see a trace of the smoke from here.” He pointed. We all looked. We saw only a blue glow in the sky, the gases burning off.
Dora-Rouge smiled at the couple. “And what are you doing here?”
“We’re going to live in the wilderness.” The woman’s skin was the color of shells, surprisingly pale, as if she’d been protected from light all her life, worn nothing but black.
“How wonderful,” said Dora-Rouge, her dark eyes happy. “I’m going home to die.”
The young woman grew silent. I could read on her face how she thought it was bad enough that one of us was crazy; now there was also the presence of death.
That night, Bush cooked wild rice and fried bread and we shared a feast. The young
couple got the short end of the stick, I thought, when it came to food; they had fresh oranges and after I ate one, I stared at the rest until they offered me another. I had no pride left. I would have stolen them if I’d had to. They were beautiful, full globes, sweet and filled with juice.
While I ate them, Agnes leaned toward me and whispered fierce words close to my ear, “Don’t eat it. Don’t eat their food.”
I hoped they wouldn’t hear her, but they did, and they looked at each other often. Agnes, just as often, looked afraid, leaned close, and hissed, “I mean it.”
The young woman looked around, nervous, as if plotting an escape, and later, when we’d all gone to bed, the couple got into a fight. Above the snoring of Agnes from the next tent over, I overheard, “Those women are crazy.”
“She’s just old,” the man said. “They’re okay. Just let it be.” He wanted to remain, if for nothing else, I thought, so he could tell about these women and me, the dark girl with scars and long red hair, and how we floated in outmoded canoes, carrying furs and Dora-Rouge.
But the woman kept crying and then she became angry and said, “They are plumb crazy. If you don’t leave now, I’m going home.”
It wasn’t long before I heard the sound of tent stakes, the rattling of metal, the sound of cloth zipping. By morning the young couple, their dog, and their oranges were gone.
“What could have happened?” Bush said, looking at where their tent had been. She looked disappointed. Agnes looked relieved. As I pushed the boat into the water and stepped inside it, I gave her a dirty look.
Then I settled into the space that, by now, seemed created just for me and Dora-Rouge.
After we’d gotten out a ways into the water, Dora-Rouge turned and looked at me. She said, “Those women are plumb crazy,” and laughed.
YEARS BEFORE, it was said, cannibals appeared this way, from out of the path of water, rowing in from the horizon just the way Bob and Jean had done.