We continued to watch the small boats in the bay for several more suns. From time to time a boat would land and the men would come ashore. Only once did Demasduit make her way up a path to the old mamateeks, where some of her people had once wintered. The English left some things in it for us: tea, a few needles, some fish hooks, and a quantity of red cloth, which no doubt would enable us to be more easily seen. We sensed a trap, and did not reveal ourselves.
The men wanted to leave Demasduit behind, but she refused. She must have known she was incapable of looking after herself, sick as she was. The disease made her extremely weak, and she had seen men much stronger than her unable to raise themselves from their beds once the fever had taken hold. Without weapons, without even red ochre to cover her skin, she would quickly die. She shouted something in English and finally the men gave in and allowed her back in the rowboat. They returned with her to Twillingate.
Governor Hamilton was still determined to return Demasduit to her people. This time he instructed Captain David Buchan, a naval officer, to sail in the Grasshopper as far up the Exploits River as the section known as Peter’s Arm. He and his men prepared to spend the winter. Meanwhile, John Peyton took Demasduit from Reverend Leigh’s house in Twillingate to Captain Buchan’s ship. They arrived on the twenty-fifth of November, 1819. A woman was brought along to take care of Demasduit, who by this time was so sick that Captain Buchan soon realized he had very little time to get her to Red Ochre Lake. She could no longer stand without the aid of at least one person, and sometimes two.
She had begun to complain of being separated from her son. Even in her sleep she called him by the name she had intended to give him: Buh-Bosha-Yesh, the name Anin and Woasut had given to their first child more than eight hundred season-cycles before, during the life of the glorious hero of the island of the Red Men.
The season of cold and snow had been upon them for a while. Demasduit called to John Peyton and David Buchan: “I know I am going to die,” she told them. “I can see the colour of death all about me … it is white everywhere I look. I want you to take me to Red Ochre Lake, where my son is. I want to see him one more time.”
The two men gave her their word that they would take her to Red Indian Lake. On the morning of January the eighth, 1820, John Peyton made a circuit on his snowshoes, as he had been doing every morning, in order to keep himself in good physical shape. While he was away, Demasduit was seized by a violent fit of coughing, after which she had much difficulty breathing. She recovered slightly, but several minutes later her coughing fit returned, this time even stronger than the first. She was suffocating. David Buchan was called back, but there was nothing he could do for her except to watch her take her last breath. She died saying the name John Peyton.
Buchan declared that her death did not mean that they should change their plan. “We promised to bring her with us to Red Indian Lake,” he told his men, “and we will bring her to Red Indian Lake.”
The ice on the river was not solid enough to travel on until January the twenty-first. The men took every precaution necessary, but it was a march of more than one hundred and twenty kilometres undertaken by a group of sailors who had never worn snowshoes before. They had somehow to avoid frostbite and cope with damp clothing, heavy packs, and so on. A team of ten men broke trail for the others at least as far as the second set of rapids. They were followed by fifty men carrying packs and pulling sledges. On one of the sledges was the body of Demasduit, also known as Mary March.
That winter the ice was badly formed. As well, the portages and forest paths, usually well maintained by the Beothuk, who used them often, were grown over and difficult to negotiate. Many sledges broke and had to be repaired. Much time was lost. On the eighth day, a huge ice dam formed on the river, swamping the banks and forcing the men to walk through water. Their provisions were lost and the men’s feet froze.
On the eleventh day, the ice dam broke and the men’s lives were saved only by the swiftness of their reflexes. Even at that, thirteen men had to return to the ship on the thirteenth day. One had split his foot with an axe, and eleven were suffering from frostbite. The thirteenth was an officer who was ordered to accompany them to safety.
The expedition arrived at Red Indian Lake on the twentieth day. They saw many mamateeks, all of them empty. Only one showed signs of having been recently used; it was ours, which we had quickly abandoned when we had heard the army of men approaching our lake.
The men placed Demasduit’s red coffin, with its copper ornamentation, on the scaffold that we had built the preceding spring for the body of Nonosabasut and the child Demasduit had named Buh-Bosha-Yesh. She had returned to her son and her husband, the man who was her life and her death. Buchan remained in the camp with his men, and we continued to watch them. He knew that we were nearby, but like all whites he could not see us unless we showed ourselves openly to him. When we were not taken by surprise, we were invisible to these people.
After resting for several suns, the expedition left. We know that later on the party split up, and some of the men went to Badger Bay to attempt to meet our people. Of course they did not find any of us. We learned of this from some of our people who had gone to live with the Mixed-Bloods at Bay d’Espoir. For three suns after their departure, we prayed for the remains of my mother’s brother, my father’s sister, and for Buh-Bosha-Yesh, their son. We were happy that they were together again for their long voyage.
We were certain that Nonosabasut would have waited for Demasduit before setting out on that long journey. He never went anywhere without her. And she, Demasduit, known as Mary March, Wonaoktaé of the nation of Beothuk before me, had returned to the place of her birth, and was once again among her people.
Welcome home, Demasduit. Welcome to the well-springs of your life.
55
Now we were truly lost. There was only my family left. No one else in the world but the four of us. The sky was always grey, and the sun did not shine as it once did. The moon made only brief appearances, and there were no more stars. The nights were cold. And my mother’s tears flowed more frequently! My father never smiled any more, and my sister did not speak. We were torn open, our insides ripped apart, all our bones ached, and the bones of our ancestors ached as well.
When the naval expedition left the lake and we were alone again, Ge-oun the Jaw visited us before returning to the Mixed-Bloods. He had married a woman from the community who was neither Innu nor Shanung, but a bit of both, although she wasn’t sure how much. She didn’t know what she was. In that community, no one really knew who they were, and they did not wish to know. Everyone lived from day to day, asking only that they had enough to get them through to the next morning. They were an unbelievably generous people, but uninterested in their identity as a nation. Iwish said that a people with no memory is a people with no future. Iwish the Devourer of Guardians.… A people with nothing left but a Living Memory, Iwish, what kind of people are they? Tell me. Explain it to me, renew my hope in life so that I can give hope back to my family. Tell me, Iwish, when all there is is memory, what good is it? And for whom?
My father hardly had enough energy to hunt for food. My mother coughed all the time. My sister felt herself weakening also. It seemed I was the only one left capable of smiling, or speaking, or thinking, of wanting to go on. To live. Is it living when all you do is subsist for the day without knowing what will be left for tomorrow? Is it living to know that when you die there will be no one to continue being what you have been? Is it living to think that there is no hope of finding a companion to share the way with? I no longer knew whether I wanted to go on living or not. If a Bouguishamesh aimed his musket at me, I did not know if I would have the strength to run. I would open my coat so that he would at least know that he was shooting a woman. “Go on,” I would say, “do me a favour. Kill me.”
I do not think I would be afraid. There was no place within me for fear to reside. There was no place within me for joy. There was no place within me for hop
e.
Sometimes we had to walk for days to find rabbit tracks. The ptarmigan no longer came to mock us, as they once did. For as long as I could remember the caribou always came from the end of the lake to winter in the mossy valley near the natural harbour at our end of the lake, but this winter they did not come. Red Ochre Lake had been abandoned not only by the Red-Ochre people, but also by the very animals that once lived there.
One morning, Mamjaesdoo, my father, slipped on an icy rock and hurt his leg. After that he could not walk without leaning on a stick. I was the only one who could find us something to eat for the next few suns. The next day I would leave with my sledge for the bare mountain, where I might find some caribou. That night I slept to make up for all the nights I had stayed up to watch the English sailors.
My mother coughed all the time. I was very worried about her. “It would be better if you did not go, Shanawdithit,” she said to me. “I won’t need you much longer.”
During the night I had terrible nightmares followed by dreams of hope. In the nightmares, I was captured by white men who changed into sea monsters and chopped me up into little pieces, although I was still alive, and they ate me as they gazed out over a furious sea. In my dreams of hope I was lying in the arms of a handsome young Beothuk man who had just come down from the north, where he had been secretly raised. He loved me, and gave me four beautiful children at once. We started a new nation. We covered the whole island with our children and their children, and drove out all the foreigners. We lived happily, surrounded by our own people. Everywhere we went the game was plentiful.
In the morning, cursing my dreams as well as my nightmares, I left for the bare mountain. Nothing in life could have been as frightening as those dreams had been. But neither could life ever be so beautiful. I became angry with my dream spirit for bringing me such visions of life that vanished when the morning came. As I walked, I began to dream again. My stomach woke me up to tell me that if I did not eat something soon I would die. I had some smoked fish in my pack. I ate a piece of it before starting again for the mountain. At the end of the day I did not have to make a shelter for the night because I found two mamateeks that had been built during the previous season of cold and snow. I chose the least damaged one and made a good fire in it with dried wood that I found neatly stacked inside, and ate the rest of my smoked fish. Before going to sleep I looked outside the mamateek and saw rabbit tracks, so I set several snares in the hope of having fresh game in the morning. Then I lay down and very quickly went to sleep, exhausted by the long distance I had come during the day.
At daybreak I heard a sound outside the mamateek. I took my bow and an arrow, opened the door covering and saw three beautiful caribou. I made sure I had a second arrow ready, and quickly went outside, setting the first arrow to my bowstring. The closest caribou was barely twenty paces from me, and I shot it in the heart. I let my second arrow go too quickly and it went wide of its mark. In my defence, I should say that as soon as I left the mamateek two of the caribou began to scurry away; only the male remained still, and that was the one I hit.
I made certain that it was dead before I went close to it, then I took out my long English knife and made an incision in its chest just below the sternum, and opened its chest cavity right down to the penis. I went around the penis to the rectum, went around the rectum also, and, with a single heave, pulled out the lower intestine. I knotted the end of this so that the animal’s excrement would not spill out into the body cavity. The warm blood that ran out over my hands kept them from freezing, but it was still cold work. When this first operation was completed, I carefully skinned the animal, being sure not to let the knife slip and cut through the hide. I scraped it well to remove every last trace of flesh, then folded it hair-side to hair-side, and tied it into as tight a bundle as I could manage. Then with my axe I quartered the meat by cutting through the sternum and then along the vertebral column, separating the two hind quarters and cutting the thorax in half. I tied everything to my birch sledge. I took the caribou’s head and cut out its throat up to the lower jaw, and removed the tongue, which I placed on the coals inside the mamateek to cook. I placed the heart, the liver, and the kidneys in my pack to give to my mother and sister when I was back in camp, since they were sorely in need of fresh organ meat. Only then did I eat the tongue, the outside membrane of which I could easily cut through with my teeth. When I was well warmed and fed, I began to walk back to our camp, pulling the sledge behind me. My bow and arrows were tied to the pile of meat on the sledge.
As night fell, I began to sense a presence around me. I looked carefully in all directions, but could see nothing. It was probably an animal that had picked up the scent of caribou blood. I could not walk as quickly as I had the day before, because of the heavy load on the sledge, but I knew I had almost reached the north end of Red Ochre Lake. I was too tired to continue, however, so using my snowshoes I dug a hole in the snow and made a fire in the bottom of it. I pulled the sledge over beside the hole so that the fire would keep predators away from the meat, and covered myself with the two caribou hides I had brought with me. No sooner had I laid myself down when I heard a loud howl. It was a wolf that had been following me. Another wolf replied from some distance away towards the south. Then another from the north! After a few moments there came another howl from very close, and then the others howled again, this time from not so far away. The pack was closing in for the feast, and I would be part of the meal if I did not move quickly. I jumped up and laid four more fires, completely surrounding my shelter. Then when I heard the wolves howling again I lit the fires. Now all I had to do was make sure I had enough wood to keep five fires going all night. I took a torch to go into the bush to gather firewood, but when I stood up I found myself nose to nose with a wolf, all its teeth bared: I jumped back, and so did the wolf. It ran off into the darkness, and I ran back to my shelter in the snow.
My heart was pounding like a drum made tight by the heat of the fire. I spread one of the caribou skins on the ground and sat on it, then I began to laugh: the wolf had been as frightened as I was. Its heart must be pounding, too. I could not stop laughing. I laughed until I was so exhausted I fell asleep. I did not hear another howl all night, and I slept without feeling any more fear.
I had had an experience that I would not have missed for all the stories in the world. Even though my father had always told me that a wolf never attacks a person who is standing, I felt I had had a very close call.
During the night I dreamed about the wolf nation. It, too, had been attacked by the English fur traders. Every trapper on the island wore a long coat made from wolf skins. It was necessary to kill wolf after wolf. Then all the wolves changed into Beothuk, and the fur coats on the traders were made from the skins of Beothuk, without hair. The island was completely cleaned of natural predators. As the Living Memory of a people on the verge of extinction, I was convinced, in my dream, that the wolves were suffering the same fate as we were. When I slept, I thought of myself as another person, someone else who was telling my story! Was I becoming crazy? Hadn’t I always been a bit simple-minded? That would make me someone special! That must be why Demasduit chose me to tell the story of our past. That was why I was the past. If I am the past, I cannot at the same time be the future. That would explain why I had never found a husband. That was why I would die alone! I knew then that I am the past. I knew then that I would die alone.
In the morning I woke up with the sun. It was going to be a beautiful day. As I checked each of my fires to make sure that they were completely cold, I saw dozens of wolf tracks and I studied them carefully. There were three distinct sets of prints; three animals had spent the night circling my shelter. I had seen only one. If I had seen all three, perhaps I would not have slept so soundly. Wolves are not as vicious as people make them out to be. They are like Beothuk! The Shanung who guided the Englishman Banks more than two hundred season-cycles ago was right. He said to the scientist that if the Beothuk were as vicious as the E
nglish said they were, they would have killed all the newcomers to the island and would never even have let themselves be seen. It was the same with the wolves.
The sun had still not reached its highest point in the sky when I arrived at our mamateek. Mamjaesdoo, my father, was outside, waiting for me.
“I was worried,” he said. “I heard wolves howling last night, and I was worried about you.”
I looked at him in surprise. “Was it not you who always told me that wolves do not attack a man when he is standing up?”
“Yes, but you are not a man!”
And he laughed for the first time in many moons. It was good to see and hear my father laugh. It warmed my heart. But when I was untying the caribou meat I remembered that I had not removed the snares I had set for the rabbits. I was mortified. That was something we Beothuk had always been taught: never set snares unless you know you are going to be able to check them. An animal that is killed and abandoned has died for nothing. Everything must be used. Especially during a time of famine, as we were now in. My father’s smile faded. When I saw him I told him I would go back to check the snares. He asked me how far it was, and when I told him that it had taken me almost an entire sun to get there, he said it was too dangerous to travel so far for so little.
“You must not risk your life for a few rabbits,” he said.
However, my father had often risked his life for less than that. He had run for ten suns after stealing a few fish hooks, chased by two fur trappers carrying muskets. I tried to persuade him, but he refused to let me leave that day. “Later,” he said.
“Later, the rabbits will have been eaten by the wolves,” I said.
“Wolves must eat, too,” he replied.
The Beothuk Saga Page 32
