Voyageurs

by Margaret Elphinstone

  ‘And now,’ said Loic. ‘I have a message for Mark. The mide of the village has sent for him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This is – I don't know how to describe it – he is a member of the Midewiwin. A man of visions, of dreams, with knowledge of many things. Also he understands plants and herbs.’

  ‘Like a priest,’ said Alan helpfully.

  ‘I have naught to do with priests.’

  ’Not like a priest,’ said Loic. ‘That I promise you. I know this much better than Alan, because Father Richard is my priest and sometimes I go to mass, which Alan does not.’

  ‘I'm not a Catholic. There isn't an Episcopal priest west of York, as far as I know. And anyway . . .’

  ‘Alan, thee protests to those who care not. Why has this – this mide – sent for me?’

  ‘This he will tell you. I think it must be about Rachel. I can take you there.’

  ‘Now?’ I asked, getting up.

  The mide didn't live in the village, but along a winding path that led to the inland lake. We brushed through rushes, and bright-coloured ducks flapped out of their hiding places and rose, with squawks of protest, as we passed. The mide’s lodge lay far enough past the lake to escape the worst of the mosquitoes, in a little glade surrounded by basswood trees, which made the wigwam look small as an anthill, a tiny excrescence of the forest floor. The only sign of life was the smoke rising from the roof. Loic lifted aside the hide curtain and spoke to someone within. Then he turned to me. ‘He says I can come too, to translate.’

  The wigwam reeked of tobacco. The mide sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire. I judged him at first to be very old, but his voice was young, and I have no true sense of what his age might be. His hair was still black. He was much hung about with necklaces of polished bone, bear claws, hair and feathers, and indeed that was all of a piece with his surroundings, for the place was filled with strange objects, half of which had no meaning for me. The bunches of herbs hanging from the roof I could understand, but not the claws and hoofs, the carvings and weavings, the piles of unidentifiable no-things that faded into the darkness like the figments of a frightening dream.

  But the long calumet – pipe – I did recognise by now. I took out the twist of tobacco that Loic had told me to bring, and I presented it to the man, who turned it over, sniffed it, broke a piece off and rolled it between finger and thumb, and then nodded his approval. For a time he was busy with the pipe. Loic lit a spill of birchbark and passed it over. Then we smoked for a long time. The second time the pipe came back to me I realised I'd breathed the smoke right in. It filled my lungs with an acrid burning feeling, but I was nowhere near choking. I felt a little dizzy, as if I had overstepped some boundary I'd known nothing of. When a man walks the fells in snow he has to be careful not to tread on the cornices, which look like solid ground, but actually project over the precipices into empty space. I felt as if I was walking on ground which was not there, but I found it not so much frightening in this case as like a dream.

  When the old man began to speak I wasn't exactly waiting for him any more – there was no need – and I was content to sit quiet while he and Loic were talking. Then Loic turned to me. ‘He says he has waited for you a long time. I explained that the journey was very far, that it had taken you more than a year to come all the way from your own country. He says if you had dawdled any longer it would have been too late. Perhaps it is already too late. You must make haste.’

  ‘Waiting for me? But how? Does he know about Rachel? Surely he didn't know I existed!’

  ‘Oh yes, he has dreamed of you several times – oh, for two years or more, he says.’

  ’Dreamed of me? How can he . . . But does he know anything?’

  ‘Hush, Mark! I am telling you what he knows. Perhaps you do not understand that true wisdom and knowledge come to a wise man in his dreams. This is why white people are not very wise; they don't listen to their dreams. Even my father will admit this. For the Indians . . . we are taught to dream from our first days. A child cannot grow up until he – or she – has dreamed his own dream. Some people can dream what is long past, or what is still to come. Your dreams tell you who you are, and who your guardians are when you have a quest, as you have now. Would you have come all this way, if you hadn't dreamed of this?’

  ‘Ay.’ I thought it over. ‘Ay, I would have come – I did come – because I was clear in my mind that I should do so. I thought about it when I was awake, not when I was asleep. I said to my parents I'd look for my sister.’ I added irritably, ‘It would be a lie to say it was because of a dream. It wasn't.’

  The old man interrupted, evidently asking what I'd said. Still annoyed, I watched them talk. Then Loic said, ‘He says you are in danger, because you do not listen to your dream. He says if you forget your dream you forget how you will find your sister, and he cannot help you.’

  ‘Forget? But I never knew!’

  ‘Yes, Mark, you did. You said it was not like looking for a needle in a bottle of hay, because you trust in your God, and he knows where Rachel is. So you have said to me you have a guide, and this I have told the mide. He says that is very well: you have your Manitou, and by your dreams your Manitou will guide you. I know myself this is true, because Father Richard – he it was who baptised me at St Anne's on Mackinac – used to tell us stories, and the Christian God – who is yours, you say – has always spoken to men in dreams, has he not?’

  He was right: examples came flooding into my mind from Old Testament and New. Your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions . . . If any man were guided by his visions in this world, that man was George Fox. Loic had probably never heard of him. And yet . . . and yet . . . Perhaps I was a child of a more secular age than ever I'd thought, even in my own Society. I leaned my elbows on my knees and pressed my fingers to my temples, as if that would help me think. It was hard to be rational, for in my heart I felt deep terror. I told myself it was the reasonable fear of vain superstitions, but it was more than that: I was afraid of the powers of darkness, of witchcraft and evil magic, and of dread phantoms in which I did not even believe. When I was a little lad I had a nightmare about the water scratti that lives in the high tarns. It takes on enticing shapes, then drags men under water to their death. I don't know who told me about the scratti. My parents never lied to us with idle tales of fleys or boggles, but somehow I knew, and moreover I knew that I should not know, the legends of my own country, and I was more flayt by them than Friends would ever have begun to guess.

  The old man was speaking again. ‘Now you have remembered the dream,’ said Loic.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He says now that you remember the dream, you must seek for the second part of it. She did not drown.’

  ’What?’

  ‘He says, you heard me: she did not drown. If you had not known that, you would not have come so far. You came to this island because you knew this was the place. Here you will remember the second part of the dream, the part that tells you how it is she did not die.’

  I shook my head. Unaccountably I felt close to tears, but neither Loic nor the old man would ever see me weep. ‘There's nothing to remember.’

  They ignored that. The old man was speaking, and Loic was translating rapidly. ‘He says, it is two years since he first saw you. In his dream you are blindfold, always blindfold. You are hunting. You are following the tracks of a bear: only, you cannot follow unless you take the bandage from your eyes. He says also, there is blood on the snow. That you will kill. That is how you will find her, if it is not too late. You will kill, or die. When you kill, you must take the tokens and hang them round your neck, for he whom you killed will be your Manitou. He will give his life for you. You must give him thanks and recompense, or you will die. He has spoken.’

  In the days that followed I tried hard to erase my meeting with the mide from my mind. I wasn't very successful. When I didn't watch my thoughts vigilantly, I'd find they'd gone back to that strange i
nterview in the wigwam and were turning it over and over in my mind. I couldn't stop them, particularly when I was falling asleep. The part about the bear must have got into my dreams, for shreds of memory would haunt me unaccountably in the daytime. Because I was thus pre-occupied the days that followed had an unreal quality to them. I kept having the feeling that I'd been here before, that all this had happened before. I was so troubled by it that I described it to Alan, and he said that he knew exactly what I meant. That comforted me; Alan was entirely sane if not perfectly moral, so if he'd felt it too it could not be madness.

  ‘Does thee believe in these visions?’ I asked him.

  ‘Ay,’ said Alan.

  ‘Is that all thee can say?’

  ‘I learned it from you,’ said Alan. ‘Three months in your company, brother, has cured me permanently of guileless chatter, supposing I were given to it before.’

  I'd learned that whenever Alan was more than ordinarily facetious he was embarrassed by a serious matter and didn't wish to own it. But it was too important to let him off the hook. ‘Thee believes that truth may come in dreams and visions, even the truth of what is yet to come?’

  ‘Ay,’ said Alan again. ‘I'm not one of your commonsensical Englishmen, any more than Loic is. Hadn't you realised that? Anyway, I'm surprised at you. Rachel told me that the Society of Friends was founded in a welter of prophetic visions. Your George Fox now – what was the phrase she used? It was opened to me . . . She was all for that sort of thing, your sister. You're not very like her, are you, brother Mark?’

  We now began to search the mainland shore, going up the rivers and across the inland lakes, visiting as many villages as we could. At our next encounter with the Indians Alan and I did just as Loic had said, with the result that very soon no one paid any heed to either of us. Instead they launched into what appeared to be a longstanding discussion between their elders and their warriors as to whether or not a war party should set off for Mackinac before everyone left for the rice harvest. ‘I don't think they're interested in what we have to say,’ I remarked quietly to Alan. He winked at me, and murmured, ‘How salutary!’

  When I think of the weeks that followed, I realise now that I learned many important things, viz:

  First, the Indian lands were no trackless wilderness; on the contrary, we could follow a pattern woven by generations of the people whose land this was. The first Indian path I ever walked was on the far side of the Mattawa at le Talon falls. It felt very foreign to me; I wondered now why I hadn't realised that there would be paths everywhere, just as we have. The main roads are lakes and rivers. The Indians have neither carts nor horses, and all the long journeys with heavy cargoes are done by canoe. There's a trade in corn, fish and sugar that has nothing to do with the white man. The villages are linked just as ours are. If Loic had lost a sister in, say, Borrowdale, he'd be a fool to quarter every acre of the high fells for miles around. I'd tell him to enquire in Grange, Rosthwaite, Seathwaite, Stonethwaite and Seatoller, and find out in each place about all the outlying farms. He'd soon pick up the pattern and be able to follow it. There'd be no end to it, of course – from Seatoller he'd be sent on to Buttermere; from Seathwaite over Styhead to Wasdale; from Stonethwaite up by Langstrath into Langdale; from Grange along the lakeside to Portinscale and Bassenthwaite . . . It would be never-ending, but there'd be pattern enough to keep a man from utter hopelessness. I'm niggled when the Lakers call my own country a wilderness. I learned on our journey that I'd had just the same misconception about the Indian lands of the north-west.

  Second, Alan and I might have saved our tempers, because our opinions made very little difference to anyone. Nearly everyone we spoke to agreed with me that it would be infinitely preferable to have peace than war. But when I spoke of a world in which there need be no wars nor fightings with outward weapons, the usual reaction was summed up by a woman at one of the villages on the great bay with the long peninsula inside it, where we travelled for many days. She said to me, ‘But what were men born for, then? What would you have them do?’ When we talked to young men, they listened to Alan. But the question for them wasn't what the war had seemed to be about at Mackinac. Here, the burning issue was the Treaty of Detroit, and the broken promises that had followed the sale of Ottawa lands. We stopped in an Ottawa village where they told us that Detroit had already fallen to the British. Their warriors had already gone to join Tecumseh in Ohio. An elder at the Manistee River said to Alan, ‘You don't understand. Once there was no fur trade to Montreal. One day there will again be no fur trade to Montreal. What of it? But if our lands are lost to us, then everything we have is gone for ever.’

  Third, I learned enough of the Ottawa tongue to take part in the meetings, instead of being dragged hither and thither like a tailor's dummy. Loic patiently taught me words and phrases as we sat by the campfire in the evening. He didn't laugh at me as my voyageurs had done when they taught me French, but there must have been some entertainment in the task, for presently Alan joined in. This was generous of him, for he whetted my debating skills entirely for use against himself. He said he found the irony diverting.

  Fourth, I truly learned how to paddle a canoe. I found out that my weeks as occasional milieu in a canot du maître had given me strength and skill to paddle the long day through, but taught me nothing of the intricacies of handling an Indian canoe in open water. In good weather Loic let me take a turn as bowsman, and then, once or twice, in his place as steersman. I began to get the feel of wind and water. I learned to change my stroke before we were off course, rather than correct it. I learned to read the lake and the sky, in the same way as I read the land and weather on my own hills. As with any skill, the time came when I didn't have to think about my paddling all the time, but could let the reins hang loose when no immediate danger threatened. And when there was danger, I began to know what we must do, and to adjust my stroke and my weight without being told.

  Fifth – and this is the hardest to explain – I learned what it is to walk on the cornice all the time; to have no solid ground under my feet, and to live always in a peril I could not see. Because we looked like traders, and there were only three of us, approaching the villages openly, we met with no overt violence. But there was violence, even, I sometimes felt, in the very air we breathed. I walked unarmed, as I'd always done, except once or twice I loaded one of the muskets with shot and went after small game. Alan wasn't going to let me have the gun at all at first – he said, was I sure I was capable of loading it, even, for I might very well kill myself just doing that? I said a trade musket could hardly be so different from the fowling piece I had at home, and when I looked at it I found I was right, except that the musket was heavier, though short in the barrel compared with the military muskets I'd seen at Mackinac. Alan reluctantly handed over his horn, and watched critically while I measured out powder, tore off a strip, and rammed in the shot. I asked for priming powder, and Alan passed me his sling and bag without another word. When I came back to camp an hour later, with a plump duck hanging from my belt, I tried not to look vainglorious. Clearly they'd thought a man who refused to kill his fellows was incapable of firing a straight shot. I thought of the rabbit and pigeon pies my mother makes – and the pigeon is the hardest of all targets, in my opinion – and I said to them, did they think a Quaker would scorn to have fresh meat to his dinner? A sad undergrown set of folk we'd be, in that case.1 Whereat they jested somewhat at my expense, but the point was taken.

  Sometimes we encountered Indians hung about with the accoutrements of war. It was Alan who told me that the swathes of hair that hung from a warrior's belt were the scalps of his enemies, whereat my blood ran cold. We only once met a fall band of warriors, when we landed near a camp with four canoes. The warriors were armed with tomahawks, war clubs, bows and arrows, and some muskets. Alan said the best thing was to walk boldly into their midst, and not act furtively. This we did. It turned out they were on their way south to join Tecumseh, and when Alan announced that we wer
e British, they greeted us as allies, and took gifts of tobacco and, what they coveted more and we durst not refuse, much of our precious powder, lead and shot.

  It was not merely that I found myself among a warlike people.2 I felt danger all around me because I knew I couldn't recognise it even with my eyes wide open. These people were hopelessly foreign to me. Sometimes I thought of Waase'aaban, and my heart misgave me yet again for what I had done. The Indians were unlike me in their religion, their beliefs, their ethics, even their most basic customs. Alan's words about torture had lingered in my mind, but when I repeated them to Loic, he was indignant, and said that no such atrocities had occurred for more than a generation, and that it was not his people, but the Iroquois in the south who were guilty of such devilment. I knew not what to think. And no sooner had I thought how far removed these folk were from the civilisation from which I had come, than I would be startled into recognition: the way they grilled fish, the way a man spoke to his dog, the way the children played hide-and-seek, the way someone would make a joke, and the whole company laugh out loud: all these things and many more, would suddenly cause the great gulf between us to be closed up, just for a moment.

  Moreover, these savage people understand silence in the same way as Friends do. They too will sit, sometimes for a long time, with no word spoken, and allow the silence to gather them. Their silence is not different from ours, for were we not all created by the same God? I said this to Loic one evening, and he told me how the stories the priest at St Anne's had taught him fitted in with the stories he'd heard by the fire in winter from his mother's people. ‘Sometimes I forget which is which.’

  ‘Tell me one.’

  Loic stared into the dying embers of our fire – for it was late – and presently began, as formally as if he were speaking ministry in Meeting. ‘In the beginning Gitchi Manitou had a dream. He dreamed, and out of the void he created rock, fire, water and wind. On each one he breathed, and his breath was the breath of life, giving each one its own soul. And Gitchi Manitou saw that this was good. On the next day Gitchi Manitou dreamed the sky, and in it he dreamed the sun and moon and stars, and below the sky the earth. On the next day he dreamed earth, with mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, forests and islands. On the next day he dreamed trees, grasses, herbs and flowers. He dreamed the fish in the water, the birds and insects in the air, and the four-legged and two-legged animals that walk the earth. Gitchi Manitou saw all this, and saw that it was good. He dreamed the thunder and lightning, wind and rain. He dreamed joy and sorrow, love and hate, fear and courage. When he had dreamed all this he rested, for he saw that it was very good.’