by Rudy Wiebe
Now the People have moved their lodges west with Bigfoot, nearer the new snares they have braided and set, nearer the log pounds they have piled together scraggling along the trails that Keskarrah dreamed the caribou will wear down onto the ice of Roundrock Lake, where they will sleep every night beyond their predators’ approach. Only Keskarrah’s single lodge remains on the esker near the log houses, Birdseye’s two dogs curled beside it in the snow. The giant ravens plod heavily from the English offal heap through deep air across the river, to roosts hidden among the pygmy spruce that had somehow refused to burn.
“At least that bird isn’t wearing a necklace of caribou eyes,” Keskarrah says, squinting from the doorway into the blazing silver valley, the black line of two ravens wavering through it. “As long as These English throw away enough good things for them to eat, we won’t starve.” He drops the hide covering, scratching himself.
Greenstockings knows the cold is flexing its young winter muscle. It wants to terrify them for the days ahead when they will be held solid and black as rock in its grip. But since that is what has happened every annual round of her life, she does not actually think about it; nor has she heard or seen anything when she sleeps, so she has nothing to say to Birdseye whenever they awake into morning darkness. Sleep now drops her into an unfathomable lake where, falling and falling, she dreams nothing. She cannot tell how deep she must go before she finds bottom and can then walk out; if ever. And she wakes to their lodge piled heavy with the stench of hides waiting to be scraped again and tanned and sewn. Never before, not even when the long killing rapids lured three canoes and two families into the hardest grief she can remember, never have they had to soften so many hard hides for so long into the coming cold. She cannot reach the top of them, sitting.
Broadface hunts and hunts, there is no winter rest and sleeping for him either. On the days when he comes dragging more frozen bodies for These English on the snow, his fingers bulge thick with cold despite the mittens she has sewn him, fur doubled inside. Gradually his hands soften a little in the warmth of their lodge, the skin of his face becomes almost tender while he sits hunched forwards like an old man, eating all the delicious animal parts that the Whites will not: brains, eyes, lungs, heart, the long, sweet filaments of intestine fat, thick penises, nursing udders. He scoops up the marrow she breaks out of the bones, or bites mouthfuls of the frozen slices of mossy stomach she cuts so thin for him that he can see the lodge fire leaping through them. What he loves best is smoked stomach, the fat she chews small before she spits it into an opened paunch filled with half-digested moss and then adds blood, a little brains and water to ferment and smoke, slowly, hanging over the fire for several days, until he returns and sucks that into his cavernous mouth burned black by the ice he always breathes around it.
But Broadface does not look at her. Nor turn and take her until morning, because the men are all hunting so much to satisfy the demands of These English for fresh meat and dried meat and pemmican for storage, firing their guns into the pounds and waiting in ambush along the rocks of the lakeshore and stalking the lake, and even shooting those animals who have accepted snares as they always have. What kind of hunting is that, Keskarrah asks him, though mildly, when a hunter no longer touches an animal until it is dead and its life is spreading out in the snow? He has already spoken a warning two times: endlessly pouring grey powder and poking a ball into an iron barrel, and flexing a finger on curled steel that can burn you raw, if you dare touch it, is not the way numberless beautiful caribou, who always will make it possible for human beings to live, should be forced to die. There is too much sacrifice being demanded. There is no consideration or tenderness left in so much long-distance killing; only noise and stink.
“For what purpose?” Keskarrah questions the smoke rising from the centre fire. “For huge, fat men in gigantic canoes? These strangers?”
Only Keskarrah dares think such things, and Greenstockings; but only he says them aloud. Broadface is a hunter and he does what he must, as necessity stands before him and the animal is there. He listens to Keskarrah, carefully, but says no word about the endless throats and bellies he and the other hunters rip open, the steaming guts he spills on the snow to freeze hard as his iron gun before he remembers to lift his head for a breath of gratitude. Silently he eats the food provided by the animals, the mounds of it that Greenstockings prepares for him even while she scrapes and scrapes hides and sews winter boots and leggings and coats and mittens and caps and cuts spirals of endless lacing. Within the hot, tired circle of her arms he awakes to find comfort inside her, and in the pale morning when Birdseye wakes her again he is always gone. The memory of his closed face rubbing hers, his taut, twisting legs, his hard, sullen body and mouth and hip bones and penis attached to her as if they were seared together by the very fire of intensifying cold — all this seems vaguely reassuring to her, but far less memorable than the black lake she has sunk into once more despite anything he is able to make her feel, out of which she has been pulled once more, temporarily, by her mother’s hand.
Birdseye is weaker every day; the soft leather now permanently hides what the Eater continues to do to her face. Every day Keskarrah brings the salve, and with it Greenstockings touches the black edges of what has already been taken. But the salve does nothing to stop her fingers passing over the deeper blackness which opens always wider in her mother’s face, and one day she recognizes that that blackness is what opens down into her sleep. She has not known such impenetrability can exist in sleep; she begins to dread that she will never plumb it completely, much less walk through it, unless Broadface … and someone else, Hood, it will be hooded Hood who may need all winter to find her picture on his paper — but that does not matter, he will find it — and she will need both of them to know how black, how deep, where the bottom of the lake is. Until now she has found no human voices there, nor any light.
So she works longer and longer, trying to avoid that sharper devastation of sleep. Sometimes in exhaustion she finds herself contemplating her hand. Her powerful pale fingers which hold scrapers, knives, dig into Broadface’s muscles or play his soft balls and cock into another, more tender, pleasure. Her powerful fingers, tired though they are, feel everything, like her eyes feeling texture and shade, dimension, heft, or her nostrils knowing essence. Her fingers feel exactly the slip of Richard Sun’s salve, which deadens open pain but, she suspects now, will not stop the Eater — merely hide him more secretly. And sometimes she can barely stop her fingers, the lure to touch the blackness widening in Birdseye’s beloved face. She spreads the salve with extreme care, to the exact destroyed edge of skin. She cannot permit her fingers to disappear.
Keskarrah says again, moving across her personal memory of darkness, “When raven has lots to eat, he’s happy. And then he won’t make us as black as he is.”
Clearly her father does not understand; he is lost in that long story of creating birds. Neither he nor Birdseye can help her — will it be the men? Or must it be herself?
Gradually, day by shortening day, she sees Keskarrah become the winter bear he likes to be. He dreamed some of the trails for the caribou and he is guarding Greenstockings in Hood’s picture and for that, he says, Richard Sun will give them the salve that protects Birdseye. He is so strangely, thoughtlessly content about the salve, and he lies naked under his robes while the women continue in their endless work, breathing aloud sometimes of what he has seen while he sleeps, or the stories he finds wandering in his head, which he pulls into words so that they are happening somewhere, to someone they probably know, even while he speaks them. Winter is the time for stories, of course, the stories that tell why the world is the way it is and the places are where they are, and every winter he tells them again, but never in quite the same way. And some of the stories have never been heard by anyone, not even Keskarrah, because they have not told themselves to him yet and so could not be uttered until now.
However, the stories of what will come do not speak to him. He
has refused the future all his life, he says that is a burden for others to carry, and now it seems he has been spared that. For which he is loudly thankful.
“I have enough to carry already,” he says, looking at Birdseye but saying nothing directly to her; they both know she has her own great burdens. “Sometimes,” he continues, “all the past life of the animals becomes too much for me, and all the world’s endless places and so much about people, all the way back from when man was alone, no woman, and so without even a child to tell all the stories that were already happening, when man was first thinking he needed bigger feet to run on the snow if he was to live through the winter — sometimes — I don’t know about anyone else, but sometimes I think the necessary order of dreams I am given is too much for one lifetime.”
Birdseye is silent. They all know, except perhaps Greywing, that the inevitability of the future is growing in her when she sleeps, but beyond the first two outbursts she has so far been able to contain what she knows about themselves and These English and all their paddle-slaves waiting here and eating, waiting to go north. Nevertheless they know that she cannot contain all that much longer: she will have to start telling it for the air to carry, somehow.
“I like the story of Owl, better than.…” Greywing hesitates, not wishing to insult anyone; she pushes the robes close around her father and returns to her stretching skin. When her sister speaks with such a child’s thoughtlessness, Greenstockings wishes she herself could still do that. But she cannot pretend any longer, as she has recently, to childlike playfulness; every night the deep lake of her foreboding deepens.
Keskarrah laughs, knowing what the girl wants and therefore he can tease her. “O, Owl was there too when Raven said to People, ‘You made me all black, and now I’ll make you black too, black from starvation.’ But that time Owl was good and told the People where Raven had hidden the caribou, hey! it was Owl who sang them out of their hiding, ‘There they are, over there between those two thin hills, thick as maggots, those juicy, sweet maggots of the tundra,’ Owl sang to People.”
“I like Owl…” Greywing begins and stops, remembering herself, remembering that a story is what it is and will not change no matter what you wish of it.
“Which one?” Keskarrah asks innocently, knowing. “There are so many stories, which one about Owl?”
But the girl is wordless now, blushing, her hand with the bone scraper barely moving. Keskarrah laughs, his eyes crinkling even more against the noon blaze of the fire, and as Greenstockings hauls down another of the heavy hides, she wishes again that the clumsy immovable houses and the medicines of These English had never paddled across great lake Tucho, that their insistence here on the esker, the loud ugliness of their voices and axes and guns walking and screaming everywhere between the silent trees, making everything jump and shiver far beyond any cold, could be dumped into a hole, as their servant does their night piss and shit every morning; and she would go personally and pick up that frozen hole they are filling and hurl it into a lake deeper than her sleep, from which they never, ever, could crawl out, they and all their endless demands and heavy words and jaws chewing and chewing and clothing and shit. Not even Hood … she would … his long pencil fingers … would he accept her throwing him away … could she, Hood?
“…I really like,” their father is saying, so innocently, “is Mouse talking to Owl. Have I ever told you what she does to Owl?”
Greywing whispers, “No, no,” because she wants to hear it again so very badly. And Keskarrah wants to tell it; he turns on his elbow towards her, his tone smiling like his face.
“Well, this is how their conversation starts. Mouse has just hidden herself under the corner of a rock, hidden herself there very, very fast, and Owl has had to pull out of his dive before he hits the rock and has to sit there, for her to come out, though he knows it’s useless. So Mouse starts it, very politely from under the rock, ‘Are you quite comfortable there? Did you bruise your wings stopping so fast? O-o-o-o, do your empty claws hurt from hitting the ground so hard, and so completely empty?’ Of course, hey! Owl says nothing. Not this time, but wait, next time, as long as you’re alive there’s always a next time, just wait, and he clappers his beak together fiercely to let Mouse know what will certainly happen, next time. But Mouse is an excellent conversationalist, and to make sure that Owl doesn’t get bored during what they both know is his long, useless waiting, she continues, very politely,
“ ‘I’ve seen you eat often, and you certainly have a big mouth … for eating, but something puzzles me. I’ve watched for you and listened all my life, and I can’t believe my eyes, perhaps my ears are deceiving me. What puzzles me, Owl, is how you shit. You shit of course out of your beautiful ass, lots of little shits, but how is it that you also shit — even bigger — out of your big mouth?’
“Owl can’t do anything. He knows he would shit happily from both if only he could get hold of Mouse, but a rock is protecting her this time and Owl cannot fight rock. All he can do is talk. He has to talk.
“ ‘O yes,’ he hisses, clappering so dreadfully Mouse almost shakes the rock off her with her shivers, one who can only run and who would be nothing but shreds in my beak, from under a rock can have such a big mouth, such a very big mouth.’ ”
In the lodge they are all laughing, even Birdseye behind her soft leather. Beaks and teeth and claws usually have the last things to say, everyone knows that, so words still possible from under a good rock are doubly amusing; especially in Keskarrah’s reassuring, delicate tone. Greenstockings forgets everything else; she scrapes swiftly, feeling the love of her father embrace them all, irrefutable as rock.
“Here,” she says through her laughter, reaching beside the fire, “some liver to eat.”
And Keskarrah accepts that and eats, his story-teller teeth savouring the tender strength of the animal that gave it.
“Where would we be,” he sings softly, chewing, “without the raven and the owl, the caribou and wolf who taught us how to hunt them, the mouse who gives us wit and small discretion, the beautiful animals, all gifts, gifts.”
Birdseye says, suddenly loud, “I saw the northern river last night, it was the River of Copperwoman, dressed all white like ice —”
Without moving Keskarrah glances sideways, instantly meets her eyes and, still chewing, knows he must speak very fast now, because only an old story can stop a dream from being spoken into life, even temporarily, and he must try that; who can know whose life he will save, even for a day or two days, and the first words that find him are so good, so strong, long and old, that perhaps their two daughters have not noticed. He speaks upwards, into the smoke praying upwards:
“Hey! human beings come from … I have never heard where man comes from, though woman’s story is clearer, every story seems clearer about woman than man … sometimes I think men are afraid to let their stories … they are so afraid of what they think might be their manliness.…”
He hesitates, sees Birdseye still watching him, her mouth filled with words, and he plunges on, “…if man was in the world first, he must have been here alone in the summer when roots and soft stems and especially fields and bushes of berries would be ready for him to eat without cooking, no man knows how to cook everything like a woman. The creator made him so he wouldn’t be scared to death with winter before he even found out how good eating and living was, before he just starved and froze black to death. Hey! I’ve heard it said that These English began from mud. Richard Sun told that story, white mud, I suppose, though he didn’t say it exactly the way, but if that’s what —”
Keskarrah stops abruptly. Words have lured him where he had no intention of going — to talk about the beginnings of Whites — but Birdseye’s look above her leather has remained so intense that he cannot avoid her now, he must continue, and even as he must repeat them, the words excite him with creation again.
“Richard Sun said this to Bigfoot, I heard Twospeaker repeat it: ‘You must know this, we men were made first from mud
and the spit of the great Soul Everywhere.’ How could I not hear that? I’ve never heard a story like that, about such spit, but it would be wonderful to see happening. Or feel such spit, even if you never saw it. It would be like good rain, I suppose, which in summer makes very small things grow out of the ground in every place, so that story could be told, I can’t doubt that. I told Richard Sun that if I’d been spitting and playing with such mud and finding a man in it, I would have used much more and made him bigger and stronger, a lot stronger like a bear; myself.”
“You’re strong enough,” Birdseye says, lost in his story and her own necessities momentarily forgotten. “You have words for anything, you’re always so strong.”
Keskarrah chuckles a little, diffidently. He cannot disagree with her now, but her praise always makes him apprehensive; he already knows her incredible strength. But now he must continue quickly.
“The white mud is good, and there’s that mound of it on the north side of this esker, which These English liked so much and mixed with water and smeared all over their building — so —” he has a sudden revelation “maybe These English should really be called Whitemuds, maybe they came from this place, here they found their original mud again! Though I can’t see how that could be. If they really belonged here, they would have known this place without me telling them, but obviously they know nothing here — and then our ancestors would also have known them and met them long ago, but we didn’t. Richard Sun says woman Whitemud was supposed to be the companion and helper of the man. She happens out of his rib while he’s sleeping, but when he wakes up and there she is, his rib a woman out of his sleep, she doesn’t help him at all, she eats this one berry, which is so large it grows alone on one big tree, and then she gives it to him to eat and that makes everything in the world go completely crazy. Even the woman and the man.”
The women are looking at him, puzzled, and he explains fast. “That’s the part I can’t understand, though I have been thinking about it. If People don’t eat, they die — and Whites eat far more than People. How can one tree berry have so much power that eating it matters to everything else? For ever? Aren’t there plenty of smaller berries for the man to eat? Our first man ate berries alone for a whole summer and nothing happened to him. But Richard Sun says no, that’s probably because there was no woman yet. Once there is one, Whitemud man always has to eat at least as much as the woman, he can’t eat less, and that one big berry she eats easily enough off the tree is too much for him. After that they both do everything all wrong.