by Rudy Wiebe
Thursday September 27th I82I Obstruction Rapids
The day was mild, though the strongest among us is reduced to little more than a shadow of what he had been a month ago. The Coppermine River here becomes a huge double rapids with a narrow lake between them, which we must cross to reach Fort Enterprise. But on this east bank of the double rapids no wood large enough to make rafts could be found, though the carcass of a deer was discovered in the cleft of a rock into which it had fallen in the spring. It was putrid, but not the less acceptable to us, and a fire of willows being kindled a large portion of it was devoured on the spot. The men scraped together the contents of its intestines and added them to their meal.
A raft of the largest willow that could be found, bound together as faggots, proved too little buoyant to support a man. We named the double rapids Obstruction Rapids.
Thursday October 4th 1821 Obstruction Rapids
Strong winds with snow all forenoon. The sensation of hunger is no longer felt by any of us. St. Germain embarked in the shell he had in four days of heavy snow fashioned of willows and fragments of painted canvas in which we wrapped up our bedding. To our great joy and admiration of his dexterity, he at last succeeded in reaching the opposite shore of the rapids with a double line. The shell was then drawn back, and in this manner we were all conveyed over without serious injury, though we were all wet through and no wood could be found to make a fire sufficient to dry our bedding.
We estimate we are now no more than 55 direct miles from Fort Enterprise, where we hope to meet the Indians.
10
OFFERING STRANGE FIRE
Prayers stagger through Robert Hood, like the footprints that waver away from him through the riven snow of the tundra what may befall me this day O God I know not but I know that nothing can he can no longer walk. Not even with the exhausting drag and thump the others manage to force from themselves, one foot and then the other.
But Richardson and Hepburn refused to leave him alone and motionless in this labyrinth of their disaster, within their Great Lone Empire of the Arctic Snows. The twenty-man-strong united “Expedition determined by His Majesty’s Government to explore the Northern Coast of America from the Mouth of the Coppermine River to the eastern extremity of that Continent” has been forced, still very far from that geographical extremity, to attempt a return to the assumed safety of Fort Enterprise. But the Expedition has begun to break into pieces: first a translator left behind here, then a Canadian voyageur — and then also a second — left behind there, solitary in the alarming maze of their track. And now, while Lieutenant Franklin and Mr. Back lead the remaining voyageurs onwards across the barrens, three Englishmen have stopped and wait, hunched together in this hollow beside a bare dusting of brush above snow, wait. For what? May God be willing, anything.
At noon the sunlight winks on the sloping hills everywhere around them, where their final salvation of meat may be sleeping, hidden. They have learned from the astounding brevity of arctic summer that motionlessness is of all possible postures most dangerous, but what can they do? Hood cannot walk, no one has the strength to carry him. Three men so feeble they can barely erect a small tent —
And suddenly there is a fourth! Of all the men in the Expedition, the Mohawk voyageur, Michel, has returned to them from those who have gone ahead. Michel Terohaute! as George Back with his French quibbles always mocked him among the officers — certainly never to his black face — o high and lofty land, who is like God indeed!
Michel with a written message from Lieutenant Franklin, informing them that he has sent Mr. Back ahead with St. Germain and the two strongest Canadians, and that he with eight others (I. Perrault stopped to rest near some bushes earlier) are proceeding as best they can. However, J-B. Bélanger and Michel T. can no longer keep up even with them, still toiling as directly as the terrain permits via compass towards the hope of Fort Enterprise — they are, he is confident, now very nearly within sight of Dogrib Rock — and the meat the Indians have surely cached there for their sustenance, and so these two are returning to Doctor Richardson’s group to assist as they can and await rescue with them. Lieutenant Franklin affirms that Mr. Back will send meat back to them as soon as he and his men, who may very well by now have already reached Fort Enterprise, when they find “the Yellowknives who alone can save us all.”
Richardson hesitates in his eager reading of the muddled note, but cannot avoid declaiming the final phrase of most uncharacteristic recognition into the rigid air. In fact, he repeats it, so strangely convincing, “ … the Yellowknives who alone can save us all.” And looks at the Indian from far away, Michel, standing there alone: J-B. Bélanger is not with him. And this message, barely decipherable on a page torn from the back of the Lieutenant’s Bible, the letters as if drawn one after the other by a concentrating child. Only Michel, looking fixedly at Richardson and Hepburn, then an instant at Hood covered flat in the shelter — Bélanger supposed to come too? The paper says? The Canadian didn’t follow, he never see him, never for two days, he come along the track, back to them, never see him once.
Turning before them, Michel seems suddenly very powerful: so deliberately intense and muscled it is obvious that he could walk wherever he pleased. Perhaps it is because he carries only his bedding and a long rifle with powder and shot — which Lieutenant Franklin has now assigned to him, he says. But beyond specific hunting forays, no voyageur has ever before been permitted a loaded rifle; especially not this one.
And even more unbelievably he has brought meat, both a ptarmigan and a hare! For them, who for days now have eaten only bits of boiled leather or painfully scraped-off lichen, burning or cooking that while it somehow remained as repulsively inedible as ever. Hepburn exclaims, gnawing his mouthful of meat,
“O God, maybe this one won’t tell lies, like all the others.”
Resting, they have continuously discussed food as the hungry will, making sounds to vary the moan of wind among small brush, their tent too thin to be worthy of assault.
“If we could see sky,” Hood on his back could still speak with some precision, “we might see … ravens. Ravens always eat.”
“They will reach the Fort,” Richardson asserted calmly, “and the Indians. They always have food.”
“Not always, I think.”
“This is their place.”
“Yes,” Hood mused, “it is their place.… ‘And dwelt at a place by the brook Cherith, and the ravens brought Elijah bread and flesh in the evening, and he drank from the brook.’ ”
Hepburn chuckled, “Sir, if only you were a prophet in Israel!”
“And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord, which he spake.’”
“I don’t want so much.” Hepburn could say things the officers could not. “Just one wee pig, one of the suckers that almost knocked you down, sir, in the mud of Stromness. I’d slit its throat an’ we’d drink blood an’ eat its liver raw, like the Indians say, because it gives such quick strength, o, I’d fry its fat so crisp an’ tender we’d dance the flings in a week!”
“My teeth seem rather loose,” Hood murmured, “for fat crackling.”
“Aye sir,” Hepburn said quickly, “but our Orkney women fry them somehow crisp an’ tender, I don’t know how, maybe because there’s always three of them for every man returning home from the sea. It do make the juices run.”
“Ah-h-h-h,” Hood sighed, “the fat pigs.…”
“I think Orkney women always prefer a man hoisting sail, sir, to any amount of pigs.”
“I’d gladly forgo pigs for a great hot fire. If this tent was on fire, I’d dance your fling.”
“Aye, so we would, all the three of us!”
Hood was chanting some scrap of memory: “Three men bound in the midst of the burning fiery furnace, walking loose in the midst of the fire — set the tent on fire again, Hep Burn, according to your glorious name, as you did on the shore of the lake, the one they call Like a Woman’
s Breasts, and we three Shadrack, Meshack and To Bed We Go will walk loose in the midst of it, nor was an hair of our head singed, nor the smell of fire passed on us!”
Even Doctor Richardson, carefully Presbyterian, could join what seemed to him such biblical cheeriness: “My friend, we then need a fourth — there were four men in the fiery furnace.”
“Yes! Also an angel, I pray, sweet angel, come! Carry us into the great, fiery furnace, the Yellowknives call it ‘Like a Woman’s Breasts’, o, soft breasts, blessed be God!”
Yesterday Hood could play that aloud; today with a mouthful of food he cannot count four, and his debilitated mind drifts, shimmers, trying to focus on Michel; he looms somewhere in his past like some mountain, but he cannot find it, the winter so endless at Fort Enterprise, it seems more a blackness already exploded long ago, and for an instant his mind focuses — yes, Michel is the only Indian voyageur.
What induced a Mohawk to hire himself into such miserable drudgery as year by year paddling furs up the unmerciful rivers of Canadian rocks and plains? With his axe of a face he should be staring down another warrior somewhere in I adore Thy eternal and inscrutable designs I submit to this frozen desert, his courage as naked as the hatred on his full and twisted lips. And somewhere he exposed that hatred, during a winter, Hood is certain, though whatever it was straggles away in the present instant of freezing — yet here he is, an Indian shouldered up out of the frozen earth and offering small meat, scrawny juices, to ruin once again Hood’s accepted somnolence of starvation.
He is not a Yellowknife.
And again Hood’s mind trips against some anger, a lurch of what must have been rage. To destroy his peace Michel has destroyed his fast — Michel did it before in winter too, yes, in an earlier winter, he certainly destroyed something that Hood cannot now quite remember, he has avoided every thought of it for so long, but this is a devil and he has returned, forced him to this renewed sacrilege of EAT. Meat in his mouth, shreds to feebly suck at but never uncatch between loosened teeth, sinning his stomach into a grotesque memory of longing for satiation. His teeth seem to shift, for his spastic tongue, pushing them tastes sweetly of blood. Can you live sucking your own teeth for their blood?
Before the Coppermine River, ten days, fourteen days, all of September or whatever — before they finally arrived here at the double rapids, which they have called Obstruction, which destroyed their last bits of strength — then Michel was a good hunter — or was it J-B. Bélanger, who should now be here too, with all his small prayers and charms luring the animals out of their unwillingness, to offer themselves a sacrifice for their pathetic hunger? But now Michel’s apparent strength is not enough, so he says, to hold a wavering rifle into steadiness, hardly enough for a ptarmigan, which will sit until you step on it, and to kill a caribou — well, since Obstruction Rapids not a single one has shown itself, not even on the skyline of the farthest esker, though once herds moved like distant mirages of forests, always fading when pursued — he would have to be close enough, he declares so loudly, to lean forwards and break a caribou’s neck with an axe we’ll shoot at a wren says Robin to Bobbin but the note says Belanger was coming too.
Jean-Baptiste Bélanger, “le rouge” for his skin, crossed himself so swiftly, praying open-mouthed while he paddled in terror, the canoe smashing across or into the ridges of the sea, ice sailing by like knives, his clothes tattered with charms, his enormous hands clenched ready for death on the birch paddle bending. Did Bélanger le rouge begin to follow Michel back to them, and stagger into motionlessness like the three others — or four — who have already stopped walking, somewhere after Obstruction Rapids? Those who still rest where they stopped — rest how? With the ravens or the wolves? Yes, “rest”, Lieutenant Franklin told them, never “wait”, but “rest, wrap yourself tight in your sleeping-hide and rest, we will return with help … help” — Hood remembers that very distinctly. Rest for help.
He lies in his sleeping-hide. Buffalo, rigid with cold, but pliable, with the heavy smell of prairie he has never seen. Someone once suggested he should not have had this warmth carried for him so far on forlorn seas and tundra; also, never wear caribou and seal skins at the same time — superstitious natives — was a curse carried for him into this north, lying under prairie hide in this barren land?
Rest, o rest. It was said, so gently, sadly, to each one, Mathew Péloquin, Régiste Vaillant, little Junius the other Esquimau translator, who served them at table so proudly at the Fort. And now Ignace Perrault too. Rest, we will return. With help. Presumably they are all somewhere — like Bélanger too? — still resting, breathing in the official Expedition decision of an expectation of strength and of food. What happens to them when their arms, their eyelids, stop moving like their feet? Will the animals come? Yes. Always too late, but the warm animals are certain to come. Someone once told him that too.
And did the solicitous animals show Michel this hollow of gnarled trees, this larger possibility of fire? Why did Michel carry him here away from their brush shelter; Michel hates all the officers, he has at least since the long winter certainly hated Hood, about something, something so enormous he may never again be able to remember we will go to the woods says Michael to Robin why did he not continue walking with Lieutenant Franklin’s group — or are they already all dead before they ever got a glimpse of the great monolith, Dogrib Rock, those eternal enemies of the Yellowknives?
No, he brought the Bible note, that was certainly the commander’s starvation writing. When Michel left it, that group must still have been struggling to reach Fort Enterprise — o, Greenstockings will be there! the fire burning in that endlessly warm round lodge, with caribou heart and brain bubbling in her kettle, stuffed stomach turning in smoke there and the heat of her long brown body dear God my God nothing can happen to me which Thou hast not foreseen ruled willed ordained from all eternity bless her bless her that woman more gentle and tender Why has he, so powerful, come?
Perhaps they are already all dead.
And Michel, of course, does not know how to find the Fort from the tundra, and the necessary Yellowknife food that alone can save them all. He is the wrong kind of Indian, from far too far away, there are great differences in Indians — this one knows no directions here if he cannot see Dogrib Rock.
Michel squats at the tent opening, beside the green miserable fire, his rifle in his lap. He was always somehow lost crossing treeless rivers — sea coasts and rivers without trees were a White curse, he told them. When the Expedition stumbled upon the first bristle of waist-high spruce after finally leaving the ocean, it was Michel who walked to them, kneeled, pulled their needles against his emaciated face burned even blacker. Breathed them in like a child.
Trees, these tufted sticks! A single English oak contains more wood than all the twigs bundled together from here to the Polar Ocean. In the blur of his starving eyes floating with blotches, Hood sees through the tent doorway a convulsion of stringy erectiles trying to be green in the blasted withering of wind and snow that tears at them; sees a blister of grey snakes frozen upright.
Robin and Bobbin two big-bellied men
They ate more meat than threescore and ten
They ate a cow they ate a calf
An ox and a.…
The spruce-twig flames slowly, slowly burn themselves down through early October and long September snow, sink towards the permafrost, frozen since before time. Michel lugged him here like any weary ox, though he hates him — why? Robert Hood’s shredded mind shimmers over hatred scattered like ash upon his past. They will insist on his trying to stand again, perhaps even walk. He grasps with a sudden clarity: we must force this Mohawk to carry me all the way, I can still see the compass, I would read it backwards on his back pointing back along the trail we have travelled, the needle wouldn’t waver any more that way than the daily compass point shivers through his mind, it will guide him backwards into gentle summer, all the numbers and calculations shredding away, and he remembers and forgets agai
n that Richardson can calculate true north as well as he, this infallible point on which their lives swing erratically, as if it too were staggering across the magnetic landscape without destination, a discovery of direction from the abysmal height of the stars. Michel can drag him on his buffalo robe — they could freeze it solid in water like the Esquimaux and say it is a sled and harness Michel like any black dog and he will write out the calculations, fill all the pages he still has, they are all somewhere safe, pages with numbers and formulas and the exact mathematical sequences of magnetic declension he knows better than the beat of his blood, numbers upon and over numbers until Dogrib Rock is forced to emerge out of those precise numbers, its grey plateau exact as distance, and beyond that the black treeline is drawn along the esker that for ever shelters the cone of Keskarrah’s lodge — Keskarrah!
The old man blazes in Hood’s memory, branches piled in warm green bedding over his lodge and under the hides, where smoke drifts up and arms fold him into the warmth of breasts the apple taste of her nipples, o sweetest sweetest
How sweet the name of Jesus feels
In a believer’s ear
the huge green trees flaming with heat, the great numbering trees! If he could only draw Lieutenant Franklin there, and Back with the Yellowknives — Greenstockings! her arms, her everlasting arms.
An ox and a half
They ate a church and they ate a steeple
They ate all the
There they are, the tall spars of trees left against the sky beyond Dogrib Rock. Hepburn bends over the smoky fire of twigs trying to heat the horrible tripe de roche that scours Hood’s mouth and throat bloody. Perhaps in his relentless, solicitous effort to feed him, Hepburn will now cure him with smoke — only the lichens do not hide themselves from their ponderous search. If he swallows them smoked, his bowels will at last tear themselves completely out of his anus, their final convulsion rip them loose from his twisted skeleton. When he touches himself he feels bone; and pain everywhere, like snow.