by Rudy Wiebe
Monday February 5th Fort Enterprise
Two Indians arrived from Bigfoot for a further supply of ammunition. They are hunting south and west of the house, and Bigfoot is displeased at not having rum sent to him. Sent him a keg of diluted spirits and some powder and shot.
Monday February 12th Fort Enterprise
The winter habitations of the Esquimaux are built of snow, and judging from one constructed by Augustus today, they are very comfortable dwellings. He selected a spot on the river where the snow was about two feet deep and sufficiently compact.
The purity of the material of which the house was framed, the domed elegance of its construction and the translucency of its walls, which transmitted a very pleasant light, gave it an appearance far superior to a marble building and one might survey it with feelings somewhat akin to those produced by the contemplation of a Grecian temple reared by Phidias. Both are triumphs of art inimitable in their kinds.
8
STOLEN WOMAN
“This happened a long time ago, when a man and a woman were living together,” Keskarrah begins several nights after the voyageurs return from great Tucho without Boy English. Or Broadface and Little Marten either, who were the only People who agreed to keep up with Back travelling to Fort Chipewyan on his little snowshoes.
Though perhaps no one except Greenstockings is thinking about that journey; certainly no one in the lodge mentions it. Why should they, any more than the inevitable passages of weather? People have come to the esker from The Hook’s camp because they wanted to, and from Longleg’s, and Bigfoot’s as well, and met where others had already arrived. Many have brought food, others have not, and there are certainly dances and talking and singing and eating whatever anyone has, and now as many as can get into the lodge sit or lie circled around Keskarrah, listening. The warmth of their many bodies together flares the fire upwards into light, glistening on winter-burned faces. Some smaller children crawl over one person to another, or fall asleep in convenient laps, under warm hands they find gentle enough.
“Maybe it was a thousand years ago,” Keskarrah says at the head of the fire. “Memory can see that far, and many of you know this one about the woman and Blackfire, but hear me now.
“Blackfire was a great warrior, though no one knows his name from before then, or who his People were, and sometimes he is called ‘No Fire’, or ‘Very Long Without Fire’. But Blackfire is his name for us because in that coldest winter, when it happened, he had a fire burning inside him that no one could see, not even in the darkness. It was his fire, one he had to carry, and it wasn’t wood that made it burn either.
“It began at this time, when it is coldest, and the animals had gone away as they sometimes do for us, for no one can truly understand the way of the wind or the caribou. All the People had to live on were the good rabbits. The man who would become Blackfire was a superb hunter and he had killed the most, a great pile, and everyone brought their rabbits together to his lodge the way we do to feast, especially after long hunger when eating alone becomes worse than not eating at all. It was so hot in the lodge from women cooking that Blackfire and the other men had taken off their shirts, they were naked to the waist keeping the fires going to eat.”
A murmur of assent and encouragement rustles through the lodge, and Keskarrah lifts his head higher, his voice rising:
“Then Blackfire’s woman heard something, outside. She was already known everywhere as a very wise person and her names are several too. Not Copperwoman, who was stolen as well, but some call her ‘Fiercely Desired Woman’, or ‘The One Fought Over’, or ‘Ravished Woman’, or ‘Woman Stolen Back and Forth’ — but for us her name is ‘She Who Delights’, as her man is Blackfire.
“That day She Who Delights heard something, and stood listening so hard, it sounded like a coming thunderstorm though it was midwinter. Blackfire saw her, and came beside her in the door to look for himself. Instantly he knew what it was: an army of enemies was attacking, closing in on their camp. There was only one tiny gap left where they were not already surrounded, and he grabbed his snowshoes and threw them down to run.
“But the binding on his left shoe broke as he turned his foot into it. Immediately She Who Delights threw one of her snowshoes down for him and he was off like an arrow, the way warriors are trained to do, running for the tiny gap between the attackers. He was so fast he got through before they saw him coming and he ran for the hills, naked as he was.
“Blackfire’s brother’s boy, who lived in his lodge like a son, also grabbed his snowshoes to run. But he twisted his foot putting them on and couldn’t get through before the gap closed. So he was the first one lanced, by the rocks below the hills, and then those enemies attacked the camp and cut and clubbed every person to death, every child and even the dogs, and they burned the camp, a fire so huge it seemed the world was burning to the last scrap of wood or bone or leather. And after they had heated themselves on that, they buried the ashes in snow so that there would be nothing to help Blackfire if they didn’t find him and kill him too.
“That was the way People fought in those days: if you make war, kill everyone. Otherwise there may never be an end to the necessary revenge.
“Yes, those enemies did what they had come for: they chased Blackfire naked into the hills and destroyed his People. But there was one Person they didn’t kill, and that was She Who Delights. They captured her alive, though she fought them until they had to beat her senseless, captured alive because she was the reason for their winter journey. They had come for her, a powerful, beautiful and very wise woman. Men kill each other for women like that, they always have, and of course the war leader of the enemy strangers took her first, but then he gave her to two brothers, his strongest men. She was far too much for just one of them.
“Blackfire had hidden himself well among the rocks up on the hills. They searched everywhere there but couldn’t find him, and he watched them kill his People and burn the camp. He had to see three warriors overpowering She Who Delights, but neither that nor the warriors, when they left, each one clubbing his son’s body again and screaming his power, would enrage him into revealing himself. He was too smart; that fire was beginning to burn in him.
“So they carried his woman away below him, tied up like a chunk of fresh meat, and the last to leave was the war leader. Now this powerful man, White Horizon, is known to everyone. White Horizon was Blackfire’s equal among these enemies, a man powerful enough to trade with him and give him shelter when they met, and so they would not kill each other. When White Horizon passed the rocks with his bloody club in his bloody hands he stopped by the boy’s smashed body, but he did not hit it. He called out softly to Blackfire,
“ ‘Come down, I’ll give you warm clothes.’
“But Blackfire would not reveal himself.
“ ‘You’ll freeze to death,’ White Horizon called. Still Blackfire would not answer. ‘Well, I’ll leave you these long beaver mittens, they’ll help.’
“Then Blackfire hissed from above in the rocks, ‘I tell you: when the hair grows white again around the throats of the caribou, don’t sleep in your camp!’
“So White Horizon, that eternal enemy, walked away and followed his men south over the hills, and Blackfire came down and pulled on the mittens. They were so long they reached to his armpits. He piled stones over his son’s mutilated body and searched for whatever could help him stay alive, but those strangers were very clever and he found nothing. He had had to watch everything being destroyed and She Who Delights raped and dragged away and yet no tears had broken from him, but when he knew that the last spark of fire in the buried ashes of the camp was dead, he sat down and cried. Without fire in the long darkness, how could he live to gain revenge?
“Something licked his face as he lay hollowed under a snowdrift: two dogs. Badly wounded, but they too had survived the attack. So he pulled a thong from She Who Delights’ snowshoe, made a snare and set it, and slept tight between the dogs. And he caught a rabbit i
n his woman’s snare. He skinned it with a cracked stone but, hungry as he was, he couldn’t eat raw rabbit. Since then every Person knows, no matter how hungry you are, you can’t keep raw rabbit down, you’ll just vomit and become weaker. So he tore the skin into strips, wound them around his naked chest and fed the meat to the dogs, who of course have stronger stomachs. Then he started looking for People to help him.
“The snow was very deep and he could see no track, so he took the longest willow he could break off and poked it carefully into the snow, trying to discover a trail. At last, very deep down, it seemed he felt one, the slight hardness of a footprint deep down in the snow, and then he circled wider, probing, until he touched that faint hardening again. Day after day through the darkness he worked in big circles, setting the snare for rabbits and wrapping their fur around himself and feeding the meat to the dogs, who kept him alive with their warmth when he slept a little. But he was starving, and the dogs were too badly wounded; first one and then the other died.
“He could barely move, but now he was almost covered with rabbit and dog fur; and could feel the trail was just under the surface. He kept going, every day more slowly but he would not stop. Every day he remembered more names as the land showed him places where things have happened, surrounding him with the voices of his ancestors until one day, far in the distance, Blackfire saw the great rock where the Dogribs once shot Oltsintthedh full of arrows — that’s another story, of two sisters being stolen — which showed him direction. And when he reached the shore of lake below the rock, he found a place where People had camped so recently that one of their fires had burned down to moss, and the grey lichen still held a spark, smouldering. He breathed on it gently, into glowing, and fed it fine strands of dry moss until it grew big enough for sticks and he could warm himself at last, and roast a deer foot left lying there by those People for someone who might be hungry.
“But he ate too fast, it knocked him out. Everyone knows now, if you’ve been starving, the first thing you eat will try to kill you, so be careful! When he recovered his senses, the fire was almost dead again. That really scared him. He built it up carefully and didn’t try eating, just warmed himself and then followed the trail. He could see it now, without feeling for it.”
Keskarrah pauses to drink the hot blood soup Greenstockings passes him. The listeners stir, nodding, the long murmurs of their attention rising in their throats, but the children have stopped running around as they usually do because all know the story is almost here now, in the lodge where they sit. Somewhere, a baby sucks.
From behind her small hiding leather Birdseye asks, “Where is raven? Wolf?”
Greenstockings knows this story her father is telling, and she could not dare ask that. Only her mother, destroyed beyond recognition … how will they ever live without her?
Keskarrah stares up into the smoky cone of the lodge. What he sees there settles into his face hard as frozen rock defying all wind-blasted snow. And he laughs, but only a little, glancing at no one, though every person is watching him. The two women, mother and daughter, understand then that this time the story will offer no brooding presence, no spirit or vision or medicine, no shimmering distance of tenderness and mercy; or beauty, beyond his cold language of deliberated theft and ravishment. The cruel gift of mittens, the gentle lichen and moss nurturing a fire — this time every foot will be twisted and freezing, every dress ripped open, every club will drip blood and every mind hatred until it is spilled out, back into the enduring land. There is no place to run from what is coming: there is only this place, there is no other home.
And if strangers, if enemies have the power to find them here, they will. With all the accumulating cruelty of their fine, murderous gifts. That too cannot be changed.
Keskarrah says softly to their circle, explaining what Birdseye and Greenstockings understand in his cold laughter, “Raven and wolf have followed the caribou, as they do. Blackfire has to find People whom the animals have not left, and the trail climbing out of deep snow is leading him there.
“And he found something else on the lakeshore below Dogrib Rock, while he was digging around for that fire — something that guided him more surely than his willow wand. It was a needle made from the penis-bone of a marten, and he travelled as fast as he could on his snowshoes — one belonging to She Who Delights, the other the one she had completed for him — swung along the memory of that journey in snow to catch up with those People. They travelled like we do, hunters first, followed by their families and then the old men and women and last the widows with their children. He came close to them as they were putting up their lodges. At the outer edge of the camp a girl was telling her widowed mother that she had lost her needle at their last campfire, and she wanted to go back to find it. But the mother said,
“ ‘No, don’t go, it’s too dark.’
“The girl asked, ‘But what will I sew with?’
“It’s too dangerous, don’t.’
“As the mother spoke, Blackfire came close and put his arm wearing the long beaver mitt around the girl from behind, his hand offering her nothing but the needle. Without making a sound the girl turned inside his arm and saw him. His ragged rabbit clothing almost touched her beautiful face.
“The girl said quietly to her mother?, I don’t have to go back. The fire has brought me my needle.’
“When the mother looked around she screamed, but just a little, because she was almost as clever as her daughter. The man was so huge, his face beaten so black from suffering and cold and starvation. Nevertheless his hands were empty except for her daughter’s needle.
“ ‘O-o-o-o,’ the mother said, when she could. ‘Then you can build up a fire, together.’
“That’s what they called him, Blackfire. And when those People surrounded him he told them his story. O, what a wailing went up then for all he had had to endure. People understand suffering very well, how deeply and long we are forced to remember those who rob us. So Blackfire didn’t have to explain what more he wanted. The widow fed him bone soup and the girl sewed him clothing with her needle and every night together their fire broke the darkness and cold into little pieces and threw them away until there was nothing left of that but the coloured lights that sing across the cold, bright sky in winter and the bears sleep, o if we could only be sleepers like bears, ah-h-h-h — but we are not bears, unfortunately, though sometimes warm in each other’s arms we dream we are because, when it has finally passed, winter may seem no more than one short sleep, one warm memory before daylight and the slipping warmth of spring.”
Keskarrah’s voice has grown so tender in its lovely telling that both Birdseye and Greenstockings think the story will, for once, be different. Perhaps if a drum were beating it could remain good and desirable and … but of course it won’t. She Who Delights is so ravishing the story cannot end here: it must stalk on to uncover the continuing rape of her endurance that is waiting, somewhere. Keskarrah’s voice has already turned deeper. The name of the beautiful orphan girl tonight is The One Also Desirable, and though she has led him into a moment of tenderness — Greenstockings remembers her father told it so very differently one night, once — that will not happen tonight. Tonight, if Keskarrah follows The One Also Desirable, she will be ravished as well.
And Greenstockings feels the story breathe cold on her neck, the ice of its contradictions prickle along her back. In telling it this way, why has her father called her “She Who Delights”? Why not “Ravaged Woman”? Why not “The One for Killing”?
“Ah-h-h-h,” Keskarrah sighs deeply. “A fiercely desired woman can do almost anything — but she can’t change revenge. No, and perhaps she doesn’t want to. Revenge is a fire she never lit in Blackfire, nor he in himself, nor in her, for a Person knows that when you have suffered such things, nothing has happened to you before that and nothing will happen to you after: nothing matters except that now you must travel, circling ahead, because somewhere that one Person is waiting for you. She will not die; she is
still waiting as you are waiting for her, because we are People of this land, we know who we are. He will find the food and the friends he needs, and a needle-woman who will clothe him and heal him, and whom he will leave to travel again. That is how this land has made People.
“And, though the snow towards the south and west is still too deep even for a circling willow probe, the signs that She Who Delights has left wait patiently for him. Wherever her captors have dragged her many days before: the nick of her fingernail on a willow, the touch of her red pigment along a tall rock or in the melting snow from the bottom of her moccasin, and high along the bleak eskers where the relentless wind blinds you to everything but your own tears and the moss-spotted stones rest frozen in their hollows, there suddenly your toe will touch one and you’ll feel it is loose, and you’ll bend, lift it easily, and discover under it the shavings she has hidden from the sharpened killing lances of the strangers, our enemies. Your desired woman has hidden them to remind you: here, see, touch them. These killed our People, these have ravished me.
“And you will be led through the quick spring and short, flaming summer south and west between lakes and across rivers and finally the mountains almost to the greatest river itself, Dehcho, to where these faint traces of her relentless determination will end with her at last, there where every night she must lie between two of those enemies. And night and day neither demands of her any more, nor any less, than what every man demands of a woman. Only her strength and hatred will be able to distinguish between them.
“Until one day.…” and Keskarrah pauses. The deep sighs of listening around him might be the great trees bending their branches lower, easing them down into cones of shelter from the driving storms yet to come. They can hear the snow outside, the silver streaking world of moonlight.