by David Treuer
The wolf’s nose was as big as the girl’s cheek, and the wolf had to flatten her neck in order to get down to the girl’s level. And what a sight it must have been for the little girl. The wet hot breath blowing in her face; breath so thick and sweet it made the girl blink. It was the only movement the girl could make—her arms and feet were bound in her otterskin robe and her head was wrapped close around the neck so it would not flop forward.
The she-wolf was undecided about what to do with this thing—this creature with the body of an otter and the head of a human; this thing that made no sound and that was pungent with the scent of milk.
Two young wolves in search of more food trotted up behind the she-wolf. Instinctively, the she-wolf wheeled to face them, to claim the girl as hers. As she did so—her back legs swinging round, her shoulders hunched—the cradleboard, reclining on its stand, was suddenly positioned right below her belly. Her nipples slapped the girl’s face. The girl’s nose, being weaker than the wolf’s, only then scented milk. With the rough nipple in front of her face, she latched on and began sucking. The she-wolf flinched, surprised, but did not move—such was her pleasure, such was her relief.
The young wolves turned and vanished; only their breath was left hanging in the air where they had been standing.
4. A party of timber cruisers had come to the lake that day. They were from Agencytown—four days’ paddle from the dead village camped on the island. The timberjacks and sawyers were done with milling the previous year’s lumber and were out scouting locations for the mill’s winter camp.
They carried their bedrolls and camp gear on their backs and were armed with a transit and a rifle. In addition, more out of hope than necessity, they had packed blades to attach to their boots, on the chance that instead of walking the shoreline of the big lake, they could skate.
They were a rough, merry bunch. Hardworking and wild, they grasped at every opportunity to stretch the fabric of their lives to make a garment big enough to contain work and pleasure. Their existence in the lumber camp was little better than that of convicts: a strict schedule, bad meals, hard work. They drank, whored when possible, stole, trapped or shot anything of value they happened upon. As it was, they had spied the thickly timbered island from shore, and since it looked like a good place for winter camp they strapped their skates to their boots and set out across the ice.
They skated toward the island in single file. It was the first chance they had to break the slow rhythm of their lives—the agonizing repetition of pushing each log free with peaveys, of gaffing them with picaroons onto the chute, of feeding them into the blade, of quarter-sawing again and again the reluctant pine, of stacking the lumber and burning the slab, of hauling water to the barrels that were balanced on the roof-ridge in case of fire below. They flew across the ice in silence and did not, as they later would, shout and race one another, did not pull on the leader’s coattails to slow him down. They stayed in line—conscious only of how fast they were going, of the rasp of their blades on the ice, and of the shores of the island drawing nearer and nearer. They reached the island more quickly than they thought possible, and since the pleasure of speed was, after long interruption, so new again, they did not stop and instead circled the small nipple of land. Without knowing it they were doing what the wolves had done before them. Their breath blew out behind them, wreathing the island. When they had circled twice, the leader who carried the gun slowed and stopped. It was getting late—they had work to do after all. No sooner had he stopped than he looked inland among the trees and saw the dark lodges of the village and, standing stock-still, its head turned away, was an enormous gray wolf.
Here was a gift! he thought and without waiting he set the hammer, shouldered the rifle, and fired.
The wolf toppled and so did Aantti Home; the wolf fell because a .30-.30 bullet hit a rib, flattened out, and pushed its way through the animal’s heart. Home fell because he was still on his skates and the recoil slammed him over flat on his back. He hit his head on the ice and lay still.
The other men divided into two groups. Some stayed with Home to see how badly he was hurt, and the others unlaced their blades and rushed up to see what had happened to the wolf. They found the animal tipped over on its side. Where the she-wolf had been standing, they found the cradlebord with the little girl blinking into the newly emerged cathedral ceiling of the canopy. She began to cry; her milk had been so abruptly taken away.
The men spread out to see what other surprises the island held, but there were no surprises, only death, which, among those people, was not surprising. They found no more wolves. The others had funneled off into the approaching night after the rifle shot. All that remained were the half-eaten corpses of the villagers. The bodies were badly damaged along with all the tunics and moccasins and gloves they wore. So, after collecting as many bandolier bags, pipes, and drums—which they would sell—they picked up the girl in her cradleboard and dragged the wolf by its front paws and convened on the shore around the unconscious body of Aantti Home.
Home had not awakened, but since it was his kill, the others did not dress out the wolf. No one wanted to stay on the island at night. Quickly, they built a sled for Home out of balsam poles and set off the way they had come.
It was almost night, and in profile their party made for a strange sight, seen only by the hidden eyes of the wolves who had retreated into the bush: the foremost man carried the baby in its cradleboard, followed by the four others. The second-to-last man dragged Home on the sled. He was followed by one more man who dragged the dead wolf by a rope attached around its neck. It was too dark for even the wolves to see the details, light enough only to see the shapes: a line of men—the first without arms that were held close to his body in order to hold the cradleboard, four more swinging their arms and singing in time with the rhythm of their skates, the fifth pulling a man who faced back toward the deadly little island, and all of them chased by a wolf that decided to slide over the ice instead of run, and who made no sound at all.
5. By the time the sawyers reached Agencytown, Aantti Home had recovered from his fall on the ice, and he opened the door to his house with a large lump on his head, and bearing the little girl still strapped in her cradleboard. The wolf he had killed he set in the woodshed next to the house so as not to frighten the dogs. Aantti’s wife, Mary, was an Indian from Agencytown. In addition to being a practical woman, she had been longing for a child of her own—all of their pleasurable efforts had so far been to no avail. So, as Aantti lit his small clay pipe with a sliver of wood held under the grate of the cast-iron stove, Mary got busy. She un-swaddled the girl and cleaned her with her softest rags and made her an Indian swing out of a blanket and some rope. After that was done and the girl was asleep in her swing, she put on her husband’s wool coat and went outside to hang the wolf in the woodshed. By lantern light she skinned the beast, pulling down the hide, separating the skin from muscle with careful quick strokes of her skinning knife.
She was done in a matter of hours and brought the hide into their cabin so it would not freeze—she would stretch it the next day. Back inside she found her husband asleep in the chair and the little girl alert but silent in her swing. Mary carefully cleaned and dried the otterskin blanket and the cradleboard and under the watchful eyes of the girl, she stored them high up under the eaves. These items could be used to identify the girl should her parents ever come to Agencytown to claim her. Mary hoped they would never come. They named the girl Eta because she was the only one from the island village to survive. They raised her as their own.
Dr Apelles looks up from the manuscript in front of him on the library table, he has just finished the first part of his translation.
He has an hour before the archive closes.
He has discovered a document that only he can translate. And it has occurred to him that he has never been in love. Or, rather, finding the document makes him realize that he has ne
ver been in love. Suffice it to say, when he first found the document, his world, as it was, collapsed. And he relives, each and every day, the feeling of that discovery.
He puts his hand to the left side of his chest, and there, under the fat and muscle and bone, he feels his heart beating. He is a doctor of philosophy, not of medicine, so he has no language with which to envision it accurately, but he imagines his heart pushing blood through his arteries and sucking it back again along his veins endlessly. Endlessly for now because some day his heart will stop. But his heart has not been put to use for years except to send his blood along its appointed rounds. His heart has never beat in the service of love.
He feels faint, dizzy. It is the same feeling he had when he boarded the plane to fly away to college all those years ago. He had never been on a plane before and had rarely been off the reservation. And of a sudden there he was, leaving. As the plane picked up speed he could not fathom how it could leave the ground. It felt heavy, awkward—rooted to the place like he was. But then seconds later the ground was receding and he, inexplicably, began to cry. Not because he was scared or because he was sad about leaving the reservation, but because that awkward heavy connection, that love of place and the sense of self it can bring, can be severed so easily.
Dr Apelles has found a document for which he himself is the only remaining key, and because of it he knows that he has never been in love. The reasons for his strange predicament are nowise clear to him, but he can sense there is a connection between the translation and love. But the question of love itself will have to wait. After all, the never-asked question of its absence has been waiting for forty-three years. A few more minutes, a couple of hours, even a day or two will make no difference. He has never loved, and now he knows this.
What he has just read demands his attention. That which comes from outside of us, that presents itself at a certain moment, or on a certain day, can be so easily lost. As lost as the years. Already the words on the ancient manuscript page, that shy paper, are beginning to swirl, mix, and change. The words don’t fade in his mind as dreams do. Rather, they break through the cover of obscurity that has hidden them for so long and hide in the lush foliage of what he already knows—other languages, other landscapes, other stories. But it isn’t really the manuscript or the words written there that are moving. They are, physically at least, resolute, still. It is what is within him that is moving. The treasures of his mind are being rearranged and reordered, as well as the habits of his heart.
He looks down at the document. It is still there. The words are still there. And they still mean something. But only to him. Only he can translate it. Any story, all stories, suppose a reader. Stories are meant to be heard and are meant to be read. And translations, no matter what the subject, are like stories in that regard, only more so. Twice the effort has been put into a translated document than has been put into the original: it has to be created in the first place and then it has to be recreated.
There are no readers for this translation, and if he wanted to he could make it up; he could, he sees, make that poor document say anything at all and no one would be the wiser. This feeling, the singular feeling that no one is watching us, the feeling that no one is looking over our shoulder, is something all of us have felt, that everyone feels at one time or another. And this feeling, the abyss of unknowing, comes on cat’s feet, surprises us. We shudder. We could do something or not do something and it wouldn’t matter because it would have no perceptible effect on the world. What we feel is freedom. And what we feel is also oblivion. But the feeling passes. It has lasted but a moment. Life’s sound track resumes, the world—suspended while we consider the abyss—once again begins turning.
But the world does not begin turning right away for Dr Apelles. His moment does not pass because no one is looking over his shoulder. No one is looking at him at all. And no one has looked at him for years. If he ceased to exist no one would notice. These two concerns, one about the manuscript and one about his heart, are linked. This is why Dr Apelles is so shaken, why his world, as he has known it, has come to an end. He has no reader for his heart. And he never has.
Most people begin practicing love when they are young, and through the years they hone, mistake by mistake, the satisfying sorrow love brings. But Dr Apelles had only a childish infatuation as an adolescent and a banal affair when he was in college, and that was not enough. He has found, over the years, too much satisfaction in his own mind, too much comfort in the bouquet of languages he holds so dear. But, as air bubbles travel from the ocean floor to burst on the water’s surface, his need for love has been traveling toward the surface of his life for some time and has suddenly burst open. And perhaps, too, the translation and the question of love are linked for no other reason than they both occur inside him—they are both near neighbors in his mind and you can only jump from one to the other for so long without mixing the two together.
Like everyone else, he thinks about love. And like all readers, he has read his fair share of love stories. But as a translator he had begun to see himself as standing outside all stories, written and lived. It was his job to move them from one place to another, from one language to another, and it mattered little that a particular story was about love or about war or about anything at all. Dr Apelles has grown accustomed to the idea that stories happened to other people, not to him.
Now, even that rare document he has found seems better off than he: at least it has one person that can understand it. As for him, he now sees he is alone. He feels, again, the terror of the plane lifting off the ground, the painfully painless separation, the great distance between things. But after the plane had crept into the sky—his sky, which domed his little world—and he had quit crying just as the fine rain had been wiped off the windows by the speed of their departure, he looked down on the land that had so recently been his. And he was terrified all over again because he saw, here and there, cupped in the reach of the trees, small swamps and marshy little ponds, and there were so many more than he had ever thought there were. Here and there he could see a beaver lodge poised on the edge of the round pond like an off-side nipple. And he remembered the days of his youth when he would walk the hills and creep to the potholes and sloughs to jump mallards and wood ducks that he would bring home to his mother to make into soup and where he first experienced a sense of completeness—each muddy swamp, ringed with dead ash and elm and studded with clumps of cattails, marsh grass, and wiike, was a world unto itself: finite and complete and endless. But he was in the grip of the plane now and he fell away, up, higher, from those small anonymous and communal worlds he knew so well, and he had felt, acutely, that he was leaving himself behind.
And that is why the document he found, quite by accident, has unsettled him so, and given him that sickening sense of vertigo. It is with terrifying certainty that he realizes now that he has been falling away, away, forever.
This is why when he looks at the document he feels dizzy and needs to hold onto something more solid than the table edge, or his pencil, or his past. The document has languished—unknown and untranslated in a language no one save him speaks. It is one thing to translate a thing, and something else completely to have that thing read. It is one thing to love someone, and something else entirely to be loved in return. When he reads the document, and contemplates translating it, he looks up wildly around the archive at the other researchers and is suddenly tempted to try and anchor himself to them. He has the urge to stand up, walk to the next table, and hug the man over there. Or to approach the reading-room librarian and tell her that he loves her. To love someone. To have that person love him—this might just keep him from the deadly atmosphere high above the earth toward which he is falling at incredible speed. But that is impossible. It is impossible. He cannot suddenly cling to just anyone simply because he is lonely and alone. And what would that person do? Would she love him back? No. The answer is no.
He, once again, looks back
down at the document. Still there. He can’t seem to keep his eyes on it. Every time he focuses on it his mind is sent spinning in another direction. And he, once again, feels like he is falling and thinks, again, perhaps he has always been falling. And suddenly, he can’t help it—the document, and the feelings it stirs, throw him back to his childhood. In and of itself it was nothing special, merely his childhood. Everyone’s got one. Everyone’s had one, some people more so. But all the same . . .
As his fingers stroke the smooth plastic film of the document cover he is reminded, because the surface is so smooth and cool, of the sensation of rubbing his cheek against a wool blanket. And before he can help it, do anything, he is beating back against the tide of memory and suddenly there he is—his cheek resting uncomfortably on his father’s prized Hudson Bay blanket, his feet cupping each other for warmth, the tip of his nose so cold it is without sensation—lost in the shadow of his parents’ small cabin. He is six years old, winter is full on, his parents are sitting at the small table, and Apelles is trying to make himself cry because his baby sister has just died. If he lifts his head a little he can see the small cola crate in which she rests wrapped in calico on the table between his parents. They lean over the box and fuss with the wrappings. They are lit by the kerosene lamp overhead and, if you didn’t know that they were contemplating the corpse of their youngest, they would look as though they are carving a cold roast. Theirs is a feast of grief.