Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

  The approaching journey with their older brothers to their mother’s country filled their thoughts. From Mari they had heard of the parts of their homeland: Wild Potato Place, Skin Dresser’s Territory and Land of Fog. They were discarding memories of their forest childhood. Would spring never come?

  Theotiste told Zoë one day that Mari’s spirit would surely be there in the trees and wild plants, perhaps in the rocks, in the fish and animals. It would be a reconnection.

  “I wish we had brought Maman’s bones,” said Zoë.

  Theotiste nodded. “I have brought them,” he said.

  “That is good!” Then a moment later she said, “I wish I had brought the little wall basket she made to hold René’s comb.”

  “Noë will make one. It will hold new combs.”

  When at last they set out, the woman friend of Theotiste’s dead wife came with them as well as old Sosep, who had the solid reputation of an important trapper-hunter, the wavering reputation of a sagmaw and the faded reputation of a local chief. His scarred face was serious. He had a grave manner that indicated character and wisdom. His teeth were large and yellow, his black eyes squinted, for his sight was failing. “It is good you waited. Even now it may be too early. But we can advance. My trapping run is still in Mi’kmaw country—if those French have not built their square houses on it. I wish to return. I wanted to see what Odanak was like—but even here there were whitemen. The worst is this Odanak priest, Father Lacet.” He imitated the priest’s sly expression, his dabbling hands. “He is boring holes in all the waltes bowls so they cannot hold water and give us divinations. I will help you. I know your father’s favored trapping places, for his brother told me.”

  “His brother!” said Theotiste. “Do we then have an uncle? Living?”

  “Very alive. Cache Emil. He will show you that place and others. But these days whitemen want those places, too. And they take them without courtesy or talk. They take them.”

  For Theotiste and Elphège this was earth-shaking news. They had believed their father, whom they did not remember, and all of their father’s kin were dead. This magical uncle was a proof that they had made a correct decision.

  Sosep said, “We will be pressing through the end season of snow. We must make snowshoes as you did not bring any from that place you were before you came here.” And he sat with Elphège and Theotiste and Achille making the ash-wood frames while the woman friend of Theotiste’s dead wife, Zoë and Noë wove the caribou rawhide webbing in a close mesh to better support the weight of their loads.

  • • •

  They began to walk toward the ocean, which none of the Sels had ever seen except in imagination. The journey was rough underfoot and circuitous in their minds. They lived on their dried meat and sacks of maize, for at this time of year wild creatures were still deep in the forest, plants had not broken through the ground. Every morning the streams were edged in ice. But in the second week Theotiste got two fat beaver.

  Winter returned with a snowstorm, a giddy flying mass, heaping drifts behind logs, covering all. When the storm cleared and night became as day with reflected moonlight the cold increased. In the next weeks they twice had to build temporary wikuoms and take shelter from the snows.

  “Oh, what a late spring. If it snows more,” said Sosep, “we will have to construct a toboggan.”

  “Perhaps it will not snow,” said Theotiste.

  “Perhaps the sun will not rise tomorrow,” muttered Sosep.

  “I am hungry,” said Nöe.

  Sosep laughed. “Mi’kmaw persons can stand hunger for a long time without dying.”

  In the waiting days inside the wikuoms Noë and Zoë plagued Theotiste and Elphège to retell their mother’s stories about Mi’kma’ki. They never tired of hearing about the blueberry patches, the elderberries with their drooping umbels, serviceberries, chokecherry trees, the succulent crayfish, roasted beaver, the fattest eels, even oily walrus, all part of the rich Mi’kma’ki life where one had only to step outside the wikuom and take a plump turkey. Later Elphège wondered if it had been a mistake to fill their heads with stories of a summer world, so different from what they found when they reached their destination. Others told stories about Kluskap when life for the Mi’kmaq was good.

  • • •

  “Listen to me,” said Sosep. “This is a bad time to return to our country, not only because of this untimely weather. Do you not know that the French king gave our lands to the British?”

  Theotiste looked at him. “How can that be? It is not the land of the French king to give. It is ours.”

  “This happened some winters ago. Surely you heard the talk of it in Odanak?”

  “I thought it was only foolish talk. I heard the British seized Port Royal, but you say ‘our lands.’ ”

  “Yes. It is our land but we suffer advances from both French and English. The French see us as soldiers to fight for them, our women good only for fucking. The priests see us as bounty for their God as we might see beaver skins. They do not see us as a worthy people. The French use us for their protection. They do not understand that we are allies of the French king, but not his subjects. We are not obliged to him. That is why he gives us presents—to buy our favor. Now the British greedily claim even more land than the French king gave that was not his to give.” He stopped, raised his chin. “And the British give no presents.”

  “But Mi’kmaq are going back there. As we are. And I have heard that French and Mi’kmaq often marry. As our father René married our mother, Mari.”

  “Yes, it is true. And that is good because there are so few of us left. Now that the beaver are so few we must marry someone, ha ha! I fear we will soon find the English putting their houses on our trapping grounds.”

  “I heard some French families live near us Mi’kmaw and they are not unfriendly.”

  “That maybe is so, the French have long been our friends—somewhat—but now the English think they possess everything. Their settlers move in. The English king pays good money for Mi’kmaw scalps. So we make a war against the English. Many Mi’kmaq are fighting in canoes. We are good fighters and capture many English boats. But we are so few. We are so often ill.”

  • • •

  They reached the Mi’kmaw country in late March with spring trembling behind the wind. Bird migration flights had started. In a small stream they saw numerous small fish surging up against the current. Sosep pointed out a dozen French families living along the shore. He spoke of the woodlands and fruitful edges that had supplied so many generations with berries and edible roots but warned that now much land had been plowed up and given over to maize fields and turnips. These French Acadians had drained many of the salt marshes to grow salt hay for their livestock. The larger game animals, moose, caribou and bear, had all retreated. The beaver were greatly reduced in number so severely had they been taken, for their skins could be turned into guns and metal pots. Yes, the beaver had become a kind of whiteman money and the custom of placing a beaver skin on a grave had fallen away.

  “Still,” said Theotiste, “we can trade meat for maize and pumpkins. Will not the Acadians be glad of venison as they always are? As we are glad of bread. And I think the sky and land must be the same as they forever were, for not the Plets-mun nor the English have the power to level cliffs, they have not the power to drain the sea nor eat the sky. Can we not live side by side?”

  “We have little choice,” said Sosep with a puckered expression. And soon there were so many birds the sky rattled, so many fish the bay boiled like a pot. There was enough for all.

  Despite the old man’s complaints that all was spoiled, the Sels were astounded at the unfolding bounty of Mi’kma’ki. The great bay with its powerful tides, its estuaries and islands, its freshwater rivers and the nurturing ocean supplied everything. The newcomers stared at the ocean beating in ceaselessly, stared agape as the tide went out exposing miles of mudflats riddled with tiny holes from which came the hissing noise of mud shrimp below.
Equally fascinating was the swift return of the ocean, the saline water coming in stealthily.

  They had to learn this new country, its red cliffs, the changing tides, the seasons for herring, for shad, a different pattern of weather and storms than they had ever known. At first the ocean seemed all-powerful, but they came to understand that the true richness of Mi’kma’ki was in its rivers. They had to learn the names of unfamiliar fish. Farther out from shore there swam several kinds of great whales, porpoises and dolphins. There were varieties of seals, lobsters as big as women. The Sel men, as hunters and trappers, had to learn their ways quickly.

  They saw that the foolish Acadians were diligent gardeners and because of this they felt themselves superior. The local surviving Mi’kmaq lived on the edges of old trapping areas, somewhat away from the French settlers.

  “But we newcomers have no wikuom. We have no shelter,” said Noë, who longed for the stability of a wikuom or even a house. A whiteman house was impossible. She knew that. There were several of those geometric structures at Odanak, but here people despised them and there was the example of the young Mi’kmaw hunter a few years earlier who had been to a white settlement and there he had seen English drinking brown water from a saucer. The saucer was very beautiful with a deep blue rim. Somehow he had gained possession of this saucer—or one like it—and brought it back to Mi’kma’ki. His scandalized and outraged neighbors saw him drinking from it and killed him for a traitor to traditional ways. The repulsive object was smashed on a stone.

  “But,” said old grandmother Loze, “two families have saucers now and no one has killed them. Everything does change.”

  27

  blood kin

  With some ceremony Sosep brought Cache Emil, Elphège and Theotiste’s uncle, to them. Cache Emil, a tall, powerful old man with hulking shoulders and a deeply lined face as though flint-gouged, stepped forward and put both hands on Elphège’s shoulders.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know you, the children of my brother. Often my life has been heavy with loss and sadness, but today I feel so much joy that I have no good words for it.” He grasped first Elphège, then Theotiste; his cheeks were wet. For Elphège and Theotiste in that moment Cache Emil became the center of life. They had longed for a father without knowing it. Cache Emil said he had a son, Rouge Emil. Their own blood, their cousin.

  “You,” he said to Achille, who had only fourteen winters. “You are the son of Mari, long-ago wife of my brother Lolan before he ceased his existence. I welcome you. When Rouge Emil returns we will have a feast. But come with me, Elphège, I will take you to some old places where my brother who was your father often got his quarry, fur or flesh. And good places at the river mouths for fish weirs. Sosep and I will speak together of choice trapping lines for Theotiste—and Achille.” Sosep pompously and formally assigned Elphège their father’s old trapping territory and told Theotiste and Achille they would have productive areas adjoining his own. No priest could do that!

  But Rouge Emil made a face; neither his father nor Sosep understood that the old custom of assigning trapping and fishing territories was no longer in the power of Mi’kmaw men; white men and their rules of land division had taken over. Such territories were house sites, garden plots and cow pastures.

  Achille respected Cache Emil but gravitated to old Sosep, not Sosep as a sagmaw, but Sosep the renowned hunter. Achille had been a natural hunter from childhood; René had been a wood chopper who hunted only when pressed by necessity. Now Achille became passionate. It was his new identity in this new world that had enclosed him. He preferred to hunt and stalk on land—and let others concern themselves with the life of rivers and the ocean.

  • • •

  At the welcoming feast Theotiste, who believed drink was an evil spirit’s brew, saw Cache Emil drank only one small cup of brandy, but Rouge Emil swallowed cup after cup.

  “Will you not drink, Cousin?” asked Rouge Emil, but Theotiste turned his face away.

  “I have ever disliked the white man’s whiskey,” he mumbled. Rouge Emil drank on until he surrendered to the weight of the spirit and fell senseless.

  A few days later many Mi’kmaq came to help put up a big wikuom, large enough for all of them, on the edge of the forest overlooking the sea where a path bent down to the shore. Here they buried Mari’s bones. After a long search Achille killed a beaver and put its skin on the burial place as they did in the old times, but a few days later it was gone. Someone had taken it to sell.

  Achille and Theotiste said they would later make small wikuoms in suitable places, but for now it was better if they all stayed together. Zoë laughed to see a band of Mi’kmaw seamstresses sewing their house as one would sew a garment, until they put her to work painting the moose-hide door in whirls and double curves of black, purple and red.

  “Sister, there was never a more beautiful entrance,” said Elphège. Inside the wikuom was floored with reed mats, a central stone circle for fire. Inside was quiet. Inside was their haven.

  “A fine wikuom,” said Cache Emil. “The French brag of their great tall houses in their home villages, but why does one need such a tall house? Men are not so high in stature. Perhaps they have giants for visitors? Nor can those houses be moved, they say. And if those houses and those villages are so fine, as we often hear, why did they leave them, leave their friends and wives and come here? Truly these must be the rejected ones from their own people so stupid, so hairy and grasping.”

  The elderly Mi’kmaw grandmother Loze, who had been at Odanak, bossed the sewing. “But everything is changed,” she said, as she always said. “Because our fathers killed so many beaver to trade with the Europeans the beaver are angry and have left the country, and now strike us with illnesses.” She pointed at Alit Spot, who had ulcers on his neck and hands that refused to heal. Many of the old beaver hunters had suffered those sores, and when the disease went inside the body they had died coughing blood. “But you know well,” she said, “after eel, beaver meat is the best meat for the Mi’kmaq. We destroyed our best food to trade their furs to the white men. Now these people from far away try to push us off the shore, push us into the interior, where the biting insects live. Here, near the ocean, the breeze teaches insects kind ways.” She said enviously that she had heard a true story that at one place the Mi’kmaq had shot the settlers’ cows, but French soldiers came and arrested the hunters. “They should have arrested the cows.” She said that as a child she had been shown the place where the rattling plant—mededeskooï—grew, that magic plant that could cure many illnesses and even grant wishes. Even in the old days it had been elusive. Her accounts always ended “that was a long time ago.” Yes, that was the old life.

  When the weather warmed she came with the Sels at low tide, showing them how to dig clams, their feet sinking into the rich mud, shorebirds running before them and crying out warnings to each other. Loze told Noë that the dog whelks made the beautiful purple dye the Mi’kmaw people liked.

  “I will show you how to do it one day,” the old woman said, and she urged them to gather armfuls of seaweed to flavor the clams they would steam on hot rocks.

  • • •

  The summer and autumn passed. It was time to reinforce the wikuoms with skins and weighty poles. The loons called in their storm-coming voices, a sign that otherworld being without legs, Coolpujot, would soon send winter gales. For the men the cold and deepening snow made easier hunting. Achille went into the woods on snowshoes, sleeping out many nights. In January he hunted seals on the ice with Rouge Emil. Achille preferred to hunt with Sosep, whom he called Nikskamich—grandfather. He did not smoke the pipe as it dulled the senses. He shuddered to think that he had once stood over a reeking potash kettle. Although January and February were the best months to hunt moose, for dogs could drive the animals into the deep snow, where they floundered and made easy targets for men on snowshoes, Achille hunted them in every season. Before a summer hunt he took a steam bath and then rubbed himself with earth and leaves to
dampen his human odor. Unlike other hunters he did not use dogs to find moose except in winter; he could smell them from a great distance and he knew their minds and habits. Old Sosep told Cache Emil that Achille was such a hunter as only emerges every few generations, almost a megumoowesoo, one of those fortunate Mi’kmaq whom Kluskap honored with extraordinary abilities. But to Achille he said jokingly, “Now you must marry and have a woman to bring home the meat you catch. Now you must learn to play the flute to attract such a one.”

  In spring Achille went with Rouge Emil to an island where Apagtuey, the great white auk, nested. They took two each, for the birds were good eating and their gullets made the finest arrow quivers. But the next year when they went to that same island there were no birds, only a litter of feathers and bones, for English and Boston whalers had come before them.

  Gradually people began to say that Achille did not care about Mi’kmaw girls because he must be married to team, a moose, as he knew moose ways so well. He traveled into the interior and one time went far northwest. When he returned from one long journey he spoke privately to Elphège and said that Captain Bouchard would betray no more Mi’kmaw people, for his tongue had come loose and fallen to the ground.

  Elphège nodded and said, “My brother, it is good.”

  • • •

  Mi’kma’ki was richer in birds than the forests of New France, but when the annual migrations began, the volume of birds, as many as the snowflakes in a blizzard, the smell of their hot bodies intensified by millions of pulsing wings, stunned them. It seemed every bird on earth was here—especially sandpipers, so many they covered the shore like a monstrous twitching grey blanket, gorging on mud shrimp. They poured out of the south sky like froth-crested waves. It was the time of birds roasted and steamed, broiled and boiled. The wood pigeons, which they had seen in childhood in Kébec, darkened the world. Predatory birds arrived, too, pierce-eyed ospreys, eagles, hawks, falcons. Old Sosep commented that Europeans would soon be arriving in numbers rivaling the birds. His listeners shuddered. The sagmaw seemed to ricochet between two thoughts: he foresaw billows of overseas white people arriving in countless ships—but he spoke and acted as if the old traditions still governed their world.