Loic was gone three days. I was beginning to be anxious, but when he turned up he was pulling an empty sled, and wearing a fur cap, a deerskin tunic with the hair turned inwards, buckskin leggings, mittens, and thick winter moccasins. ‘She says they will make you and Alan the same from our furs, if you will trade her your belts with the metal buckles.’ Loic hesitated, and I was just thinking that the bargain was too good to be true, when he added, ‘And the rest of my brandy.’
‘We agreed we would not trade liquor! Alan gave me his word we would not!’
Loic looked at me dispassionately. ‘You would rather die?’
I was silent.
‘I said you would agree to this,’ said Loic quietly, ‘but that we would not part with our knives.’ The wigwam, he said, was in a good dry place close to a creek, about three miles inland. The Indian family had their lodge about the same distance away in the opposite direction. He'd promised we wouldn't hunt on their side of the lake. Given that we had no choice in the matter, said Loic, they'd been generous with both rice and bark. ‘I promised we'd get the sled back two days from now, and that we would take the furs to make your clothes, which she says will soon be ready.’
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. I could feel a damp chill down my back under my coat, where wet snow had soaked through the wool. Ahead lay far worse cold than that, and far greater hunger than the empty feeling under my belt. I couldn't bring myself to meet Loic's eyes. ‘Ay,’ I said. ‘Very well.’
We took Alan to our new camp on the sled before the first snow melted, and a painful journey it must have been for him. We skirted the maple groves where the Indians had their sugar camp in spring, and headed south. The scrub-covered dunes rose steeply on our right, sheltering us from Lake Michigan, so there was but a thin strip of forest between the sandhills and the inland lake. The site of the old wigwam was on rising ground, where a little creek flowed into the lake. We mended the old frame, and re-lashed the saplings together. Loic showed me how to unroll the fragile birchbark, and lay it round in overlapping layers. We caulked it with moss on the inside, and laid our mattress of pine branches, with the blankets over them. Once we had a roof over our heads, and the fire going within, everything seemed more possible. The little beck ran close by the wigwam – it turned out to be fast-flowing enough never to freeze completely. I used to hear it in my sleep, and dream I was at Highside.
We spent the first weeks exploring the country and getting in all the food we could. It was a short climb – less than two hundred feet, I reckon – to the top of the dunes, and from there I got the lie of the land: to the east the endless miles of rolling forest, still clad in the blazing tatters of its autumn finery; to the west Lake Michigan and the low-lying islands that spattered the water from here to the northern shore, as if someone had thrown a handful of coins across a puddle. As the weeks passed we watched the ice form and settle, until there was a whole landscape between us and the Manitous, sculpted in wild ridges and humps like a silent storm-tossed sea. The dunes themselves were shaped by wind and water even as I watched. I grew to love this shifting desert of sand and ice. At least it was open, like my own hills. But it offered us nothing; our days were perforce spent in the forest searching for food, but whenever I could, even in the depths of winter when the snow lay like a blanket over sand and ice alike, so there was no telling the one from the other any more, I would still climb the dunes in the teeth of the wind, so as to see out.
But first there was work to be done. Loic said, ‘There will be meat all winter, but we cannot live on meat alone: we would be ill. While it is still fall we must gather what we can.’
The berry season was long over, but between the early snows Loic showed me where to gather other foods. All our foraging, and hunting too, was done around the western shores of the inland lake. The lake I discovered to be shaped like a figure of eight, and our end was the smaller part, close up under the dunes, so walking the woods was an endless scramble up and down the sandhills. Wherever a big tree had fallen we could see the bare sand under the thin layer of soil. For all that the place was thickly wooded with beech, maple and hemlock; it seems the great trees of Michigan can grow in earth that would barely support an English cornfield. In the gullies between the sand ridges there were cedar swamps, which became our main hunting grounds, though the going was pretty hard among the deep bogs and rotting wood. The lake shore was often impassable, for the sandy beach was flooded over. One day we walked over to the outlet, which lay in the Indians’ hunting grounds, and found the river jammed by floodwood, which accounted for the high level of the lake, but there was naught that we could do about it. Once the lake froze over it was much easier to get about, as the ice became our main highway. Soon the empty white expanse was criss-crossed with paths through the snow made by our passing.
At first, a few filberts were still left on the hazels, but we got much more of the mast of sweet acorns that lay thick under the bur oak. Cooked, they tasted much like potatoes. We dug in the mud of the lake shore for a tuberous root, which we smoke-dried in the wigwam, then boiled in the kettle with our meat, just like the hot-pots my mother used to make. Both earth and water – for there were strange little potatoes to be had on the bulrush roots, though these were pretty much shrivelled away, it being so late in the year – were punishingly cold. However, our need was great, so we gathered every day until everything froze over.
Loic also collected medicines. I was impressed by his knowledge, but he told me he knew very little; he wished now he'd listened better when he was young. He boiled up tamarack bark every day so I could treat Man's shoulder with it, and certainly the wound healed very cleanly, and the fever never came back. Loic brought in other medicines too, including remedies both for sore gums and ill digestion, which was a good thing, given that we subsisted largely on boiled meat. He'd kept back one twist of tobacco that was his own, and he taught me how to bury a little piece of it in the ground wherever we harvested, by way of thanks to the spirits of that place.
I learned far more about trapping from Loic than I had from Thomas back in Yonge Street. He showed me how to make traps for fishers1 on fallen tree trunks, and for rabbits among the brush, and the best part of the creek to lay the otter trap. He taught me to look for raccoons sleeping on the deserted squirrels’ nests, where we could shoot them down out of the trees. Right up until midwinter we were getting such small game. All the time I was learning how to walk in the forest, how to keep my direction, where to watch for deadfalls, how to be silent and how to be aware of danger. Loic showed me the kind of places where bears made their dens: under piles of brushwood, or among the cedar roots. Sometimes we made the rabbits come out by jumping on the brush piles, and Loic told me how once his father had done that and woken a monstrous black bear from its winter sleep. I was cautious about the brush piles after that.
Loic made himself a bow from a pine sapling and deergut, and also half a dozen arrows, to make up for the loss of the musket. He cut up one of our tin mugs to make sharp points, and showed me how to use the flight feathers from hawks to balance the arrows and make them fly. He said in some ways the bow was better than a gun, being silent and giving the hunter a second chance, if not more. I went out with the musket sometimes, and wasted too much ball trying to get one of the wild turkeys which gathered in the woods in noisy flocks. At first I was amused by these ungainly farmyard-looking birds with their big black bodies and tiny scarlet heads. I thought at first it would be as easy as shooting a chicken in the yard – not that I'd ever done such a thing – but the fact was I've never encountered such wily birds before or since, and always they eluded me. I did get hares sometimes, but there was no great merit in that, for the first I got were in a thaw, when I caught each of them in their white snow-coats against the darkness of the cedar roots where they crouched, evidently thinking themselves invisible.
Loic shot a turkey with his bow and arrow, and showed me how to use the wing bones to make a turk
ey call to bring the birds in close. They hear so well, Loic told me, that they can hear if thee flaps the wing feathers against thy leg and let them fall, by way of a decoy. He thought I touched the first one I aimed for, but their feathers were so thick it was hard to bring one down, even if one hit it. He taught me to look for the ridges where the turkeys foraged – they like to get a clear view all round – and how to read the birds by their droppings, and how to creep up close without being seen or heard. I never managed it, and Loic only succeeded once, when I wasn't with him. I couldn't leave the matter alone though – my pride was hurt, I suppose – and still I watched the turkeys, and planned and thought, and all for naught. To add insult to the injury, when turkeys forage for acorns they leave little printed arrows in the soil telling thee exactly which way they're going. I knew where they roosted, too. The flock I had my eye on had chosen a big tree that overhung the lake. I crept down at dusk one night, and waited in the shelter of a cedar trunk, my musket ready primed, until the birds had all flown in. Then I slowly raised the gun, took my time about sighting, and got my bird. It was easily found, a little dark blob on the gleaming ice. So I won, I suppose. I'd like to have hit one flying, but this I never did.
The deer trails were easy to follow. In the middle of the day we often walked quietly through the forest, noticing where the deer had been feeding off bark, or scraping the snow away to get at the undergrowth beneath. Deer are not so different from sheep, and the hunter not so far from the shepherd, when it comes down to it. I wasn't used to the encircling forest, though, and would have been feart of losing myself, even with Alan's compass in my pouch. Loic never asked to see the compass, and yet this part of the Michigan Territory was as strange to him as it was to me. ‘If you know what to look for,’ he said, when I asked him about it, ‘You can read any place. The signs are the same, just the way they're put together is a little different.’
I shot my first deer on a night of full moon. It was easy to find the deer trail even in the half dark under the trees. We crept upwind round the cedar swamp at the end of the lake. When we came out of the trees it was bright as day, and the lake ice shone like polished glass. There was a little icy wind; otherwise all was quiet. I never saw a land so cold, nor yet so alien in its night-time transformation. We might have been the only men on earth. The herd was foraging close to the rushes. I took my time, aimed true, and got my buck. He was a big fellow, and kept us busy a couple of days with the butchering and getting all the meat in strips to dry. We cut the rawhide into long strips for our snowshoes. His antlers had eight tines, and we were able to make sundry items that we needed out of the horn. I reckon the meat from that buck, along with the rice and roots we had, and bits of small game, kept us going a couple of months.
Loic taught me how to fish through the ice on the little lake. When it froze too thick to cut a hole near the bank we walked out to where the ice was thin enough, but as the winter set in, it grew harder to break a hole, for the only tools we had were our knives, the little axe, and a mallet we made from a heavy stone lashed to a wooden handle.
The hardest time we had was around the end of First Month. The snow blew fiercely, and for days at a time we were cooped up in the wigwam. I made a pair of crutches for Alan, which I bound with rawhide. When his shoulder mended enough to use them he soon became adept. Whenever he tried putting weight on the broken leg it hurt him. I'd thought of him as an impatient fellow, but he never expressed any frustration over his hurts, except in jest.
While the weather was so cold Loic and I took turns to stay awake to keep the fire going. I felt like a hibernating animal, as days and nights, sleeping and waking, merged into an endless dozy firelight. But if the day were clear we made the most of it, and the sudden sharpness of the outside air would have me broad awake at once. We had to stir ourselves quickly to make the most of such small gaps in the weather, taking our chance to fetch more wood. But we couldn't hunt or fish; the buck was about finished, and our food was running low.
When we couldn't hunt we talked about it instead. Both Loic and Alan had plenty of stories. We only had a couple of tallow dips for the lantern, which must be kept in case of dire need, so in the dark hours – which was all day when the blizzards came – we had only firelight, and could do little but listen to each other. The very notion of storytelling was new to me. At home we passed our winter evenings in reading from the Bible or Friends’ Journals, or considering the Advices from Yearly Meeting and other matters. Or we sat in silence, while my mother and Rachel span or sewed, and I read, or whittled small items out of wood, and my father sat motionless, gazing into the fire, for the only idle hour in his long day.
One night Loic was telling me about bears. ‘A bear is not at all like a man,’ he said, ‘And yet bears are also actually people, or have been people. If you talk to a bear, it is good. It shows him you are not afraid.’
‘But I would be afraid,’ I pointed out. ‘And with good reason, from all thee's told me.’
’Oui. But it is also something else. If you go to hunt bear, first you must fast, and then you must sweat – I have told you about this. You can say this is to sweat off your own scent before you hunt. That is true. But that is not all the truth. If you go out as a threat to an animal – to any creature in the world – you must make your peace first. And this you do long before you go to hunt. It is the way you live. When I was growing up I was sent to far-off cousins – my mother's family were dead – so I could learn. Alone I must go into the cedar swamp, and there I must survive. This is how a boy becomes a man. He brings himself close to death. His mind is already on the other side. He must learn how to be in that place. He must be careful how he does this, because perhaps he will get too far to the other side, and not be able to come back. There are spirits round us all the time. In this lodge our own spirits are with us. You believe that, Mark?’
‘Ay,’ I said. ‘I believe that.’
‘We have our senses that tell us these things, just as the animals have. We have them, but we don't use them so well. We must learn. You learn by going into the woods. You go into the woods and you sit down. When you have no interference in your mind you can do this, just going into the woods. You have to face your own death, and not be afraid of dying. Go into the woods and sit down, and think, “I'm part of that.” And you know it. Your skin starts crawling. If you find your place and sit there, where there's nothing to distract you, ask for a sign from the spirit world. Ask for your dream. It will come. Always you ask me about the bear, Mark. You can feel him. If you are afraid, you can call on him to help you. If you hunt him, you make your peace with him, and maybe he gives his life for you.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘The first part I believe, but not that.’
‘Then why do you always ask? You have dreamed about this again, I think.’
I hesitated. ‘It doesn't mean anything. After thee told me about the bear under the brush pile, I dreamed there was a bear in the woodshed at Highside. I had to lead my sister past the door. She was feart; I was pretending not to be. And then it was not a bear at all, but my own dog, Bowder. I laid my hand on his neck, and we walked along together, and I was not feart after all. But it was nothing, only a dream.’ I was feeling annoyed with myself for bothering to tell them about it.
‘You know that bear,’ said Loic. ‘I think you will see him when you die.’
‘I hope not. I'd rather die in my own country.’
Loic ignored that. ‘When you put your finger into that bear's fur and feel his hide and walk with him, then you will be dying. Don't walk too far with that bear. Don't feel that bear's hide and walk with him until you're ready to die.’
‘I didn't,’ I said, even though the conversation made no sense. ‘I just laid my hand on his neck, and it was Bowder.’
We sat in silence for a while. Loic laid fresh wood on the fire, and it spat at us while the flames rose and crackled. ‘What are you thinking, brother Mark?’ asked Alan idly.
‘I was thinking about how Es
au came in hungry from his hunting, and sold his birthright for a pottage of lentils. Somehow I'd always had the impression that Jacob was in the right of it. Or at least, I'd never really thought about it.’
‘And now you favour Esau?’
‘I don't know what I think,’ I said, and that at least was true.
‘Loic,’ said Alan presently. ‘Now tell us a story about yourself.’
‘Myself?’ said Loic in surprise. ‘There is little to say about that.’
He was silent for a while; I thought perhaps we were to be disappointed, but I waited patiently.
‘This is a story about my father,’ said Loic at last. ‘My father, Martin Kerners, was at first a voyageur. He came to Mackinac from Montreal. He worked for MacTavish and McGillivray, and afterwards for some other companies. He liked best to be free. One year he went into the south of Lake Michigan and spent the winter there, to trade. Martin Kerners set up his post in the hunting ground of an Ottawa man, who had once been a leader among his people. When this man had been quite young the smallpox came. He had seen terrible things. After the smallpox came there were so few left living that there were none to lay out the dead. When the people died they rotted in the lodges. The stench was terrible. Some of the lodges he burned with fire. Ghosts walked. The two people who were left went away, and after that they never came back to the summer village any more.
‘The grandparents of Martin Kerners came from a land called Morbihan, in a country called Bretagne. It was a land like this one, only the sea was salt. You could not drink it. In Morbihan there was a lake, but a little part of it bled into the sea. There were many islands. The islands were the homes of Manitous. The houses of the Manitous were easy to see, being built of stone and sometimes very great. Twice a day the sea came into the lake and went out. When the waters of the sea poured into the lake of Morbihan they came faster than the rapids on the Mattawa River. No boat could ply against them. When the sea went out, where there had been water there was a great plain of mud. From this plain you could harvest a plant called salichon, which made every dish taste delicious, such was the power of this herb. There were sand dunes just as there are here. Gorse bushes grew on the sand dunes, also blackberries, raspberries and other berries in the woods, but not all die ones that we have here. There was as much fish as any man could eat. In winter it didn't snow as it does here, but the storms at sea were very dangerous. Men could not fish. If their families were hungry and they went to fish, often they were drowned. There were many widows in Morbihan, and many fatherless children. Such a one was my father's grandmother. She it was who married my father's grandfather, and came with him on a ship with white sails spread to the wind like the wings of a bird, over the great ocean, to the country called Québec.
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