The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  Eta hadn’t thought much about Bimaadiz’s body before. But when she reached for his clothes to begin washing them out, she looked up at him. He was beautiful. In her naïveté she thought that the water, somehow, must have made him so because he never looked that way before. Entranced, she told him that he still had mud on his back and offered to help him wash it off. The feel of his skin surprised her. It was so smooth and warm she might as well have been touching herself. Yet, unlike her body, his was hard. She noticed how close his muscles rested to the surface of his skin.

  She didn’t know what to think. No animal she had ever touched had felt like Bimaadiz: not the beaver with his thick layer of fat, or the fox with his silky pelt and bony body. They were beautiful, too, but touching them had not unnerved her. She was so distraught she grabbed his jacket and pants and retreated downstream to wash.

  Bimaadiz finished his washing and though still wet, he put on his undergarments, which he had washed himself, and waded downstream to where Eta was scouring his pants and jacket with sand and sweetgrass.

  “You saved me twice,” he joked. “First from the swamp and now from my parents.”

  “You could have saved yourself,” she said shyly.

  Bimaadiz sat down next to Eta. He joked with her and soon they resumed their innocent banter. All the tension that Eta had felt upon seeing Bimaadiz naked vanished. By now it was late in the afternoon and Bimaadiz’s clothes were still wet, so they decided to spend the night in Eta’s little shelter and return to the village the next day. They had done this many times before. But something was different now. Something had been done that could not be undone.

  When Bimaadiz crouched down in the lean-to to build the fire, Eta could not take her eyes off his hands as they shredded the birch bark and snapped small twigs for kindling. They had never looked so strong and sure and deft. The bones and tendons in his fingers seemed remarkably elegant underneath the smooth bark of his skin. And when he put his face down close to the flame, pursed his lips and blew, a flame leapt within Eta’s breast as well and she wished her face was as close to his lips as the fire was and that she could feel his breath against her cheek.

  Bimaadiz fell asleep on his side of the fire quickly—it had been a long, tiring day. But Eta could not catch sleep as quickly. She lay on her side and stared at Bimaadiz. Facing away from the fire, he was wrapped up in a beaverskin robe. Eta tried to see through the thick fur, tried to stare past it for another glimpse of Bimaadiz’s naked body. Since she could not see or touch it, her hand wandered to her flat belly and, as a poor substitute, she stroked her own bellyskin, all the while wondering if hers was as soft as his.

  2. Over the next few weeks Eta began to curse the stream next to the lean-to as much she used to praise it. It felt as though the water, for its part, had cursed her as well. She could think of nothing other than Bimaadiz, of his beautiful back and his smooth, smooth skin. Where she used to be even tempered and patient, as only trappers can be, she was now irritable with everyone she knew, including her parents. And forgetful! She left her snare wire in the village when she set off for the woods and stomped back along the trail to retrieve it only to forget rope and even her puukko. She was sometimes so lost in thought that she forgot where she placed her snares and had to walk up and down the trail looking for them. She was a girl used to life in the bush, raised alone without uncles, aunts, and cousins, all of whom could have given her a word for what she was feeling. Animals snared by the neck and struggling for breath acted with more sense than she did.

  3. But Gitim—who was older, almost a man—knew all about the snares of desire. And he had been trapped by Eta’s beauty and resourcefulness the day he had helped Bimaadiz and Eta in the swamp.

  His family lived near Agencytown and had converted to Christianity. It was a large family—two parents, two brothers, and two sisters. His brothers had been sent away to boarding school, and his sisters both worked at a nearby farm. They all tried as best they could to make money, to support one another, all of them except for Gitim. He had worked at the mill, but it didn’t last long. The foreman had found him sleeping on the roof when he was supposed to be filling the water barrels balanced on the peak. If there had been a fire they could tip the barrels and thereby save the roof, but not if they were empty. Gitim was fired. He worked for the Priest, but he fell asleep after splitting only a few cedar shakes. He did not come close to sheathing the drafty privy. When the village gathered to rice, Gitim never bothered to spread out the green rice and let it dry in the sun, nor would he don his moccasins and take his turn jigging. He would just wander back and forth, heft first one flour sack and then another, and estimate loudly how much he thought it would finish out at.

  Finally, as a last resort, he had begun trapping for his father, and that work suited him. No one was there to watch him. No one could fire him. And if his catch was low, he could blame it on bad luck or bad medicine. His father had been a treaty signer, and so the family received larger annuities than most and had secured some of the best trapping grounds near Agencytown. They were not rich, but they would never starve. Whenever Gitim returned empty-handed he shrugged his shoulders and, speaking in the direction of his father’s feet, he said he had bad luck, that the swamps were dry, that someone had used bad medicine on him.

  After he helped Bimaadiz and Eta in the swamp, and without any work or activity to capture his energy, his fantasies of Eta occupied him completely. He began to visit Bimaadiz and Eta every chance he got, and every time he came singing his way down the trail he brought each of them a gift. He had fallen for Eta. He sang to himself as he loped along the trail to her trapping grounds. He sang,

  Niwaabamig oo, ho ho

  Niwaabamig oo

  Ezhi-badakideg ho ho

  Inga-badakisidoon imaa

  Biindig obasadinaang ho ho

  But he had sense enough to change the words when he was within earshot of Eta’s camp, and sang instead,

  Imbagakaab igo ezhi-gimiwanzinok

  Gaawiin geyaabi nimbitaakoshkaagoosii

  Imbagakaab igo ezhi-gimiwanzinok

  Wii-mizhakwad, mizhakwad, ezhi-giizhigak

  Bimaadiz and Eta always welcomed their new friend and thought nothing of his frequent visits or of his gifts—a tin pail for her and a flute for him, made out of cedar instead of sumac. They were so innocent that they weren’t suspicious when Gitim stopped bringing things for Bimaadiz and lavished all his gifts on Eta.

  This went on for some time, but desire is not patient, no matter how lazy and prone to inactivity the host of such desire might be. By now it was late fall, winter was making its sly entrance—frosting the grass at night, skimming the edges of potholes and swamps with ice—and the three youths rested and played by a large fire next to Eta’s lean-to. Two deer, twins judging from their size, ran into their camp not thirty feet away from the fire and stopped, confused by the smoke. Bimaadiz and Gitim scrambled for their guns. Both of them shot and the two deer fell over.

  Here is an opportunity, thought Gitim. Here is a chance to win some affection.

  “Let’s have a contest,” he announced. “There’s little to do out here in the bush except either work or sleep, and if we don’t spice things up our lives will be dull.”

  Neither Bimaadiz nor Eta felt the same way, but they were easy going and tried to humor their friend.

  “Well, what should we do, then?” asked Bimaadiz.

  Gitim proposed that he and Bimaadiz have a skinning contest. The prize was a kiss from Eta. Gitim was confident that he could beat Bimaadiz, who, after all, was little more than a child. As for Bimaadiz, he loved games of all sorts, and a skinning contest, regardless of the prize, sounded like fun. Eta was thrilled. She had no desire to kiss Gitim, but her lips longed to taste Bimaadiz, to taste what only her eyes had tasted. She had been looking for an excuse to touch him ever since he had bathed naked in her stream,
and she was sure that he would win.

  They laid the deer side by side. Each boy unencumbered himself of his bandolier bag and each grasped a knife. When Eta said start, they began.

  Gitim had trouble immediately. In his haste he could not locate the seam in the pelvis.

  “My deer is bigger and its bones are thicker, that’s why you are ahead,” he said, as always, making excuses.

  “They look the same to me,” said Bimaadiz without breaking his rhythm. Bimaadiz found the pelvis seam right away. Next, Gitim slipped his knife past the belly muscle and took short, quick strokes up toward the breastbone, but Bimaadiz wiggled two fingers through the belly muscle and inserted his knife between them and with one stroke, using his fingers as guides, he split the deer from pelvis to brisket, and without stopping, he removed his fingers, grasped the knife with both hands, and split the rib cage wide open. So, while Gitim reached into the cave of the deer’s ribs and searched blindly for the heart and lungs, Bimaadiz grasped the esophagus, stepped back, and ripped the bloody organs from the deer’s body. So quickly did he do this that the guts and stomach followed, and he flung the entire mess into the bushes behind the deer. In a trice Bimaadiz then slit each leg, cut around the ankle, and using the exposed flap of fur, ripped the skin from the legs and halfway down. He turned the deer on its other side and repeated.

  Gitim was forced to rush, and in doing so, he severed one of the backstraps and half the juicy loin came away attached to the hide.

  Bimaadiz had the quarters and the loins hanging from a tree while Gitim was still working on the neck. The poor boy still had hopes. But in the end, Bimaadiz and Eta watched Gitim as he finished. He was both faster and had made no mistakes.

  “The winner is Bimaadiz!” said Eta. She was overjoyed.

  “He started earlier,” complained Gitim. “His knife was longer. His deer was shot in the neck not in the heart.”

  But Bimaadiz was the winner, and Eta leaned over and kissed him on the mouth.

  It was an inexperienced and childish kind of kiss—devoid of the art that comes only with the loss of innocence. But it was more than capable of setting a heart on fire. Gitim, jealous and disappointed, wandered off to check his traps. As for Bimaadiz, the kiss was startling. He felt as though he had been shot. His head spun and his vision darkened. He tried to control the pounding of his heart but could not. His expression was one of indignation, as though the kiss had hurt. He felt hot, then cold.

  When his vision cleared he noticed for the first time how thick and smooth Eta’s hair was, how full her lips. He was amazed at her strong, slender fingers, at her high cheeks and at how the dark birthmark on her cheek accentuated the symmetry of her face. It was as though he had been blind all his life and only now could see, and all he could see was Eta.

  4. Now neither Bimaadiz nor Eta were able to concentrate on their tasks. It was early winter. Snow covered the ground, and there was a great need for meat in Agencytown. The sawyers had moved back into their winter camps. Fur prices were high but were sure to dip as the season progressed, and so Eta’s mother told her that she’d better trap as much as she could. Moreover, it was time for winter chores—wood needed to be cut and split, ice needed to be sawn from the middle of the lake and brought back and stored in the icehouse, nestled in the sawdust, good smoking wood needed to be laid by to preserve the extra meat, and the meat racks themselves leaned and swayed, exhausted from the summer heat and rain and needed to be fixed if they were to keep the meat away from the dogs.

  It was a busy time of year, but Bimaadiz and Eta got very little done. They ignored their responsibilities: they cut trees down and left them lying in the snow, they did not fix the meat platforms. The children were sullen and listless and all four parents were afraid Bimaadiz and Eta might be sick. There was always the threat of death from whooping cough or smallpox or tuberculosis, and their parents thought seriously of sending the children away to boarding school—at least there they could receive medical attention.

  Whenever Bimaadiz and Eta had a chance they rushed out to the bush together—after telling their parents about a promising hunt or of a previously ignored beaver pond full of super blankets. But once they got clear of Agencytown, Bimaadiz rarely loaded the Winchester and Eta seldom mustered the energy to set traps. Instead, they lazed around camp and played games. Eta would heat up water in a pail, ostensibly to soak hides, and after making a fuss about how bad Bimaadiz smelled she got him to strip to the waist so she could wash away the stink. She bathed his head and torso just so she could feast on the sight of his smooth muscled body. She was filled on the sight of him but after a short time was hungry again. She got no relief. For his part, Bimaadiz watched Eta crimp birch bark with her teeth and would grab the bark away from her and place his teeth where hers had just been so anxious was he to kiss her lips. He did not know how to reach out for the real thing, and the bitter, chalky texture of the bark was a far cry from the slick liquid of her kiss.

  They knew nothing and so suffered without satisfaction. All they did know was that a bath had hurt Eta and a kiss had wounded Bimaadiz.

  5. Meanwhile, the fire of Gitim’s desire for Eta had grown stronger, fueled by jealousy. He had been bested by a boy. He lay in a wool blanket in front of the cookstove in his family’s cabin at Agencytown and turned and turned. And after his parents were sleeping soundly behind the blanket they had hung up across the corner in which they slept, he, by the dying warmth of the fire, reached down his trousers and made use of that dangerous supplement in order to find, as though he had somehow lost it down there, some satisfaction. This helped some, but only for a while. He imagined Eta’s hand there, her strong smooth legs across his hips. Her face next to his. And so, he was quickly robbed of the pleasure of his own hand—and robbed by himself of all people! Because in this, as in all things, what others could do for him was always more attractive than what he could do for himself.

  After a week he could no longer find any satisfaction down there on his own and he thought that now nothing would do but Eta herself. So he woke one morning, bathed with hot water and soap in the half barrel set behind the stove, oiled and parted his hair, and put on his father’s trousers and beaded vest since his own clothes would not impress anyone. From the woodshed he took four prime beaver pelts, four traps, and a dozen of his family’s best snares, dyed in oak leaves and waxed to hide their metallic scent and coiled so as to retain in a perfect loop. He also took a new saw blade and an axe that had yet to bite wood. All of these he stowed in a canvas pack.

  He brought these goods to Aantti and Mary’s cabin when he knew Eta would be away on her trapline.

  Aantti and Mary received him warmly.

  “If it isn’t our nephew,” said Aantti, using a family term to show his affection. They were friends with his parents, and in addition to natural affection they also recognized that Gitim’s family was large and powerful. Already some members of Gitim’s family had secured a number of important government jobs and more would likely follow.

  Mary offered him some tea. Gitim sat down at the table with them and accepted their offer. He felt every bit like an adult.

  “How do the timber sales look for the coming year?” inquired Gitim. “as for trapping, it is very slow.”

  “That happens sometimes,” agreed Mary. “and sometimes there’s little you can do.”

  “You must have spent a lot of time working on the cabin,” said Gitim as he looked around the small house. “It’s much tidier and more snug than last year.”

  “A little work here and there,” agreed Aantti.

  After more polite conversation about unrelated topics—it wouldn’t have been seemly to rush right to the issue that wholly occupied his mind—he brought forth the canvas pack and withdrew its contents one by one: the prime pelts, the coiled snares, the bright axe, and the singing saw. He gifted them to Aantti and Mary.

  “I know this isn’t
much,” he said, though by the way his eyes traveled over the gifts it was clear they had cost him dear. “But your daughter is beautiful and industrious and already we are great friends. I often help her on the trapline. I would like to marry her,” he said finally, his voice shaking. “and what’s more, I’ll bring fifty beaver, a dozen steel traps, and two moose, all in the year to come.” He was almost crying when he promised these items to Aantti and Mary, so moved was he by the depth of his own feelings.

  Aantti and Mary were impressed—they were poor and never expected that whoever ended up marrying Eta would give them any gifts beyond a blanket or two or a single deer, most likely a small doe. And they certainly didn’t expect an offer would come from the youngest member of such an important family. For many minutes they commented on how fine the gifts were that he had already given them—how sharp the axe, how smooth the run of the snares. But they held back and did not gift him in return with the life of their daughter. Even though they had raised Eta as their own, there still existed the chance that her real parents would someday come looking for her. And who knows? Her real parents could be important people, too. If that were the case, Aantti and Mary could be faulted for giving away something that was not theirs to begin with. To do something like that was beneath whiskey traders and bandits. And judging from how fine the cradleboard was in which they had found Eta, how exquisite the beadwork, how expensive the beads, she could very well be the daughter of a war chief. Nothing but trouble could come from offending a man like that. Finally, Aantti spoke.