by Rudy Wiebe
“And beyond good smoking, how have these ‘gifts’ helped US?”
“No one has died.”
“Two hunters died.”
“The lake took them. And we lived without sickness through the winter.”
Keskarrah smiled slightly. “We haven’t lived well with our ancestors through a winter before?”
“They’ve come to us, they’re our guests!”
“That’s true. And we are such People who know well in our hearts how to welcome guests. But no one changes their whole life, for guests.”
Bigfoot said then, very strong, “It is as I said when they came: they are here now, we can’t change that.”
“I know,” Keskarrah answered, suddenly sad. “And These English may go away, or die, hopefully before they find whatever it is they want here. The land will take care of them, I think Copperwoman will give them less copper for their giant boats than she gives us. But the White traders stay with us because they’ve found what they want — fur. And they are finding ways to make us want what they have, all this Whitemud stuff piled up, I think it can make a person avaricious to have more of it, just a little, more, and finally like Whitemuds you have so much you have to force other People to carry it for you because otherwise someone will steal it from you.”
“Stealing … we’ve always stolen women.”
“A good woman doesn’t come from Whitemuds.”
“But a person needs one to live.”
“Yes … as a person needs a good man to live.”
“Sometimes you have to steal one.”
“Yes, men sometimes do that, and often they don’t — men and women find each other otherwise, and both want what they have found. And,” he added thoughtfully, “some old men tell a stealing story, again and again. As if they didn’t know any better.”
Keskarrah and Bigfoot looked at each other steadily, reading each other’s tone correctly there on the gravel ridges of the River of Copperwoman. Beside the voyageur canoes piled high with Whitemud things, The Hook was talking with Thick English, and from a distance the large medal around his neck glinted in the sun very much like the one Bigfoot had been given a year earlier on the blacksand shores of Tucho — when the flag had burned like a beacon, though they had not then understood what it signalled. But they were thinking about that now as well.
Keskarrah turned away; for a time he contemplated the Copperwoman Mountains on the northern horizon. He said at last, even more sadly,
“Copperwoman was stolen. But stolen by enemies, and out of that she gave us a great gift beyond her story, as you know. A man may think he has power over a woman, but if he takes a woman who doesn’t want him, she can make his life taste like dogshit. Even if he tries to beat her twice a day.”
Bigfoot was also considering Copperwoman’s story, sinking year by year into those mountains, escaping deeper and deeper into the memory of her abuse. Taking her gift of copper with her.
“If These English find her,” Keskarrah concluded, “very soon not even the top of her hair will be there for us.”
Bigfoot finally asked, abruptly small again, “But … what do you say? What can we do with these strangers?”
Keskarrah answered, strangely, “I don’t understand.”
As Bigfoot waited, the wind breathing.
Keskarrah murmured, “I think … it will have to be the land. Birdseye is alive, but these Whitemuds have stolen her nevertheless. She saw them too clearly, and dreamed what they will do, and now she is empty. We must pray that the land will take them, before they steal us all.”
In her confinement under the bent trees Greenstockings feels again the power of her father standing over her as she weaves the snowshoe, protecting her from a great danger only he can see at the tip of Hood’s black pencil. Hood who is gone, for ever. Perhaps her father should have been protecting Birdseye then as well — if that had been possible. It is obvious that Bigfoot, at the river, could not understand, nor does Greenstockings, now afloat on her distended stomach, memory opening her eyes into her sister’s upside-down face. Leaning down to her, and weeping.
“Our mother,” Greywing breathes, “our mother.”
And Greenstockings discovers the strangest thought: White Horizon’s men could never have held She Who Delights without other women helping them.
Greywing murmurs, “She’s waiting for this one … waiting.…”
Greenstockings whispers, “I wish she were here.”
They are crying together, sister cradled into sister by their grief for their mother. And the old woman can only hold them both between her large, work-ravaged hands, crooning to them as she croons to the unborn child,
Come out, little child, come out,
A hoof-print is waiting to welcome you, come,
Now is the time to breathe sweetly.
The sisters know they will always have mothers to love and comfort them, but they have been mourning Birdseye’s cavernous death for so long now, the deadly salve from Richard Sun that somehow numbed her alive through the winter nevertheless so deadened her that now, after the brief summer without it, she must be carried on through this length and burden of dreamless dying without the final mercy of death.
Greenstockings knows now that the last time they saw the English on the gravel along the River of Copperwoman, Keskarrah reached a hard decision; just a day ago, as they paddled south on great Sahtú towards Forbidden Rock he explained that decision to her, because her memory of the coming and going of these strangers will live far beyond his own.
“I dared to ask them,” Keskarrah said to her as their small canoe searched through the waves in the scattered flotilla following The Hook. “You heard me ask it: ‘Who among you can keep a human being from dying?’ I asked that, but I was foolish. I had lived so many years with Birdseye, I didn’t need to hear her dream their future for a whole winter to understand. I should have known that to ask like Whitemuds ask — for everything at once — is far too dangerous.”
“But what could you have known?” Greenstockings asked him, paddling steadily with the waves that carried them where they wished to go.
“I was foolish, I thought sickness was no more than blisters, bleeding perhaps, and some People lost in their bodies. Or even Eaters eating parts of us. But that’s not it — the sickness they bring is a spirit, of things. It is connected somehow to this endless killing of more and more small animals, and this shining little shit they hang around People’s necks where nothing so bright has ever hung before. Look, The Hook can never take it off or he’ll lose it, and so even the sun plays with it every day. Behind their quick kindness, These English are deadly. Their coming will destroy us.”
“Hood didn’t destroy me.”
Keskarrah turned his long, worn face back to her; the water carrying them like birds in the tiny shell they built for this travelling and that they would leave at the last portage for the next traveller, or to rot back into the land.
“That’s true,” he said. “You were strong enough to have him for a little while. Until the right enemy came and stole you.”
Greywing says softly into Greenstockings’ memory of her redemption from the Whitemuds, sweet breath against her face, “The People have to go south with the animals, tomorrow. But I’ll wait with you.”
The old woman is gone. They both know Keskarrah must move with the People, who can carry Birdseye over the portages, or their family will be left impossibly solitary for the winter. Shaking herself back into her large, simmering body, Greenstockings sighs with a great happiness. There is only physical pain here, pain easy to accept, easy to bear, and out of it a child wants to be born. She exclaims:
“We can follow them later, together, you and I and this one.”
“Broadface says nothing, he’s still thinking. But he’s looking at me.”
Greenstockings gasps, on the edge of laughter. “He wants you? I know it!”
Greywing smiles. “He wants me — so he can have us both.”
“No,
he’ll drag you off and leave me.…”
“No!” Greywing hisses fiercely. “Both, or he won’t have me! He brags he’s such a great hunter, well, let him hunt for two — three! And he won’t kill this one, no matter what it looks like. I told him.”
Greywing’s young hands cradle her sister’s head in her lap, clasping her in a confidence strong enough to confront any man or mystery of this child that has rooted itself in Greenstockings’ body with its own particular coiled stubbornness.
And then, in a threatened gathering of pain, laughter catches her into another gasp. “I can teach you, what Broadface likes, what he thinks he doesn’t … he’ll be so busy.…”
“…we can do what we please!”
The echo of their laughter bursting out together in the tiny shelter remains long after Greywing has gone to convince Broadface that he has convinced himself that he is hunter enough to have both of Birdseye’s strong, beautiful daughters. She will remind him that not even The Hook or Bigfoot with their shiny medals dared attempt as much. For a time Greenstockings can lie peacefully, almost asleep on the surface of her coming great pain, as a gull rides the lifting water. When the white she-wolf comes, she will give her the thick sweet afterbirth.
And soon she is certain she hears sniffing behind her, the quick pad of feet. But she does not turn, does not lift her belly around to see the animal, or the surface of the bottomless lake, or Forbidden Rock talking eternally within itself. She rests completely upon the earth, her body opening to offer birth to this strange, wilful child. And she feels herself becoming Copperwoman: the worn trail made by the caribou travelling north to the sea plain of their birthing is before her, and now the wolf has come to lead her through that water and swamp and rock, five nights she will follow, though the water rises to her armpits and over her shoulders, until she reaches the land of her People where she can rest. And there in the morning she will see the copper mountain shining above her like the shoulder of the sun rising, a green gift for every generation of her People; and she will search for them and mark her path with the gleaming metal she drops to lead them back to the incredible copper gift of knives and awls and spear points and needles and ice chisels and bracelets and shields and hair clasps and hatchets and rings and arrowheads and kettles and needles, the green and yellow copper lying under their eyes in the shapes and parts of all the burnished animals they must hunt to live, the life to which they give their bodies back when they themselves must die.
Slowly, carefully, Greenstockings turns her laden body, lifts herself to her knees. She raises her hands to clutch the bent green trees of her shelter and begins to rock, slowly, steadily, until at last she feels the living strength of the child that has grown inside her spread through her, enormously. She groans in prayer, and the child groans together with her. To the long drum rhythm of the earth; to the groan of Forbidden Rock out of which they all know someday Whitemuds will rain horror on the world. Know because their prophet listening to the voice of the earth has already told them. But this child will be born strong nevertheless; no Whitemud can stop it.
DOCTOR JOHN RICHARDSON
Sunday October 28th 1821 Dogrib Rock
We attempted to keep a straight course, but, owing to the depth of the snow in the valleys, did not reach the rock until late in the afternoon. We did not like to pass a second night without fire, and though scarcely able to drag our limbs after us, we pushed on to a clump of pines and arrived at them in the dusk of evening. During the last few hundred yards, our track lay over some large stones, among which I fell down upwards of twenty times, and became at length so exhausted that I was unable to stand. If Hepburn had not exerted himself far beyond his strength, and speedily made the encampment and kindled a fire, I must have perished on the spot. That night we had plenty of dry wood.
12
EATING STARVATION
The Reverend Dr. Richard Hood,
St. Mary’s Church,
Bury, Lancashire, England
Fort Enterprise, the Arctic Regions,
Tuesday, October 30th, 1821
Reverend Sir:
I write to you, Sir, to whom I am a stranger, as the father of my departed friend Midshipman Robert Hood, now blessed for ever.
I trust you will excuse the clumsy letters which is all I am able to make in the urgency of writing to you immediately, upon our arrival after indescribable hardship at Fort Enterprise yesterday, when you understand that I may not be able to send this letter to you personally, or that it may never reach you despite my efforts, because of the grievous disappointment we have here experienced.
Despite our struggle to return to Fort Enterprise, there was here no supply of provisions, neither for Mr. Back and his men, who arrived first, nor for Lieutenant Franklin’s party, nor for Hepburn and myself who arrived last by several weeks, supplies so solemnly promised us by the Indians when they left us last summer, the natural fickleness of which people renders them expert in finding any number of reasons for changing an arrangement however desperately important.
But let me spare reproach where it cannot be remedied. At this point your dear son would require me to add that, on the basis of our year’s experience with them, the Yellowknives may themselves have suffered some grievous deaths during the summer, such as by the oversetting of a canoe, whereupon the rest would have thrown away their clothing, broken their guns and mourned themselves into a debilitating weakness, which is their habitual and most inappropriate mode of expressing their grief, since thereby they curtail themselves of every means to continue procuring food for themselves in this desperate country.
Through the protection of Almighty God I have escaped until now, and feel my first duty the more keenly is to leave behind while I can, for you and your grieving family, a reassurance and whatever word of comfort is possible concerning your beloved son’s last hours, to which I was witness. Lieutenant Franklin endeavours to outline the Overland Expedition’s report, and the rough notes of my journals will be added to those official ones, together with these words, for I presently feel my first duty is to you.
We have, throughout the Expedition, been indebted to Lieutenant Franklin for the excellent example he set us in the strict and regular performance of his religious duties. Your son, I firmly believe, had never suffered the principles of religion to be absent from his mind, and to the last he was poring over the Scriptures.
But it was during our perilous march just past across the Barren Grounds from the sea that he and I unbosomed ourselves to each other, and our conversation tended to excite in us mutually a firm reliance on the wisdom and beneficence of the decrees of the Almighty.
Our sufferings were never acute during the march; the sensation of hunger ceases after the third day of privation, and with the decay of strength, the love of life also decays; we could calmly contemplate the approach of death, and our feelings were excited only by the idea of the grief of our relatives.
It was of you, Sir, that your talented son thought and spoke most in the latter days of his life, and when obliged by weakness to abandon everything else, he clung to his Prayerbook, from which the service was daily read with studious devotion.
He delighted also, morning and evening and throughout the day, in repeating the prayer of the Princess Elizabeth of France presented to him by a lady previous to the Expedition leaving London, which he repeated so often aloud that the words are perceptibly in my mind whenever I think of him, which is daily since he preceded me:
“What may befall me this day, O God, I know not. But I do know that nothing can happen to me which Thou hast not foreseen, ruled, willed and ordained from all eternity, and that suffices me. I adore Thy eternal and inscrutable designs, I accept all, I make unto Thee a sacrifice of all, with patience under suffering and with perfect submission.”
The prayer is longer, but you also will have the text — I cannot write more today, and am confident, Reverend Sir, that your son rejoices in Heaven’s blessedness.
Your sincere friend,
John Richardson
Wednesday, October 31st
I will try to continue, Sir, so that the narrative of our journey may possibly be recorded.
The cold was today severe, but I resolved to remove myself from the suffering in our desolate building and endeavour to kill some partridges, which run everywhere. They are so perfectly adapted to this extreme climate that one could easily commit the sin of envying them the beneficence they have received from the Creator.
I was, however, unable to steady my arm enough to dispatch one, being too dim-sighted with famine, but while I was endeavouring this, a large herd of reindeer, perhaps thirty or more, passed close before me, indeed, under my very gun as I supported it against the bole of a tree. I could not hold the gun straight, though I fired, and may have hit one, but was unable to pursue them when they fled; indeed I had not enough strength to ascertain whether any left a drop of blood behind, which I would have eaten from the snow.
Hepburn might have wounded one of so many had he been there, but he was hunting farther along the ridge. His sources of strength are astonishing. When after the death of your son our track lay over some large stones, among which I often fell, he transported me over them and speedily kindled a fire or I must have perished on the spot. Today Hepburn saw not a single animal, not so much as a ptarmigan.
Such heavy disappointment.
The men of Lieutenant Franklin’s small party, whom we found with him when we entered the main house at Fort Enterprise, the greatest part of which had already been pulled down by them for firewood, were all even more wretchedly weak than ourselves. Lieutenant Franklin had endeavoured to feed them by raising reindeer skins from under the snow, where the Indians flung their worn bedding when they left with us the previous spring; these are for the most part rotten and thin, and he can bring in no more than two a day although the distance he drags them does not exceed twenty yards, but those that contain the hibernating larvae of the warble fly are most prized by us for food. The voyageurs Peltier and Samandré can no longer move from their blankets, their loss of flesh producing huge sores where their small weight rests, and our secondary Indian translator, Adam, is much distressed with oedematous swellings. I have now made several scarifications in his scrotum, abdomen and legs, which have eased him of a large quantity of water.