by David Treuer
He rubbed his eyes some more and they fluttered against the light. The light was too strong, his eyes were too weak. The melting snow was freezing against his skin. His clothes were becoming stiff with ice. He resisted the urge to lie back down in the snow and go to sleep. He turned his head to the left and to the right and caught again, this time very close, the sound of footsteps, crunching through the deep snow. They came from the left, and he turned once again in that direction. He still couldn’t see, but he relaxed his eyes and opened them, shut them quickly and opened them again to become accustomed to the light. The footsteps drew nearer—advancing slowly, unhurriedly.
Finally they drew even with him and stopped next to the lodge. Whoever it was pushed against the doorflap and scraped the bark covering. The boy was afraid to reach out and touch his companion. His tongue clacked against the roof of his mouth.
The footsteps continued, so close the boy could hear his breath: great furls of air, great labor of life. And then, mercifully, whoever it was took another step, and the sun was blocked out by his body. A gentle dusk descended on the boy’s face, a blanket for his eyes. He opened them—still squinting and blinking—and he could see.
It was as though he had stepped into a cave. He was surrounded by trees, their black trunks growing up to meet the low ceiling of this movable night that hovered above him. His eyesight improved as he continued to look up at what he thought was a shadow, but proved to be not at a shadow at all but the distended belly of a cow moose. Her underside was covered in coarse, nearly black hair, and heaved in and out with each breath. Snow clung to the hair in places, mostly over her rib cage, which swung close to the deep snow. She was not concerned about the boy, if she even noticed him. Whether because of her own distracted hunger, poor vision, or his rabbitskin camouflage—he was invisible. Again and again she thrust her nose against the lodge where the snow was less deep, and by blowing and shoveling the snow out of the way, she tried to find the remnants of summer grass growing there.
The boy looked at the cow moose’s belly, and with growing clarity, saw her low-hanging teats sagging away from her body and noticed a rind of dried milk around her nipples. He thought of his own mother’s milk—the last meal she had given him.
Dazed, starving, and desperate, he rocked forward on his knees and sat up. Ready to receive a new mother, to receive a new life. He took one flattened teat in his hands, and when she did not run or step or kick, he grasped it more firmly and took the cold spout between his cracked lips and began to suck.
2. A hunting party from Agencytown had been in the area. They had been careful to hunt on their lands and not to cross over into the enemy territory. But when the snow began and the hunters became stuck, they had no choice but to try and seek shelter at the enemy village near the river’s source. They had toiled against the storm for four days, fighting the drifts. Their legs ached, and the only reason they survived was that they had carried a heavy store of meat with them.
Finally, they rounded the bend and saw the enemy village. There were no tracks, no sounds of village life, and they smelled no wood smoke. It was ghostly quiet and despite their history of conflict, the cold and snow were enemy to all and so they were very concerned. They all imagined the worst and were soon greeted by it. The human enemy was dead.
The hunting party spread out and searched all the lodges for survivors. They found none. In lodge after lodge they didn’t disturb anything except ragged piles of rags and hides under which the enemy had burrowed only to die. But it was with surprise that a man named Jiigibiig—still searching, still hoping—rounded the last lodge on the far side of the village and saw the cow moose.
He looked closely and saw something underneath. A boy? A rabbit? Was that what he saw? He couldn’t be sure. Really it looked like a large rabbit was nursing on the moose’s teats. Meat was scarce, they had eaten their whole supply, and so Jiigibiig acted quickly. He raised his gun and shot for the moose’s heart. At such close range he couldn’t miss. The moose toppled over where it stood. And directly beneath it—blinking confusedly in the sudden light and stunned by the report of the rifle—was a young boy in rabbit-fur clothing.
The boy was no older than four years old, and he covered his ears and blinked and twisted his head, confused by the sound rushing in his ears. Jiigibiig leaned his gun against the lodge and approached the boy with his arms empty and outstretched. He called to him softly. The boy didn’t try to run and didn’t scream or cower. Jiigibiig drew near and nearer still, and when he was close enough, he reached out and picked the boy up. Jiigibiig was old—perhaps forty—and he had no children of his own so he hardly knew what to do, much less what to expect. But the boy knew—he wrapped his arms around Jiigibiig’s shoulders and his legs around his waist and burrowed his face into the human warmth that had been lost to him for so many days.
The men in the hunting party camped in the enemy village for the next few days during which they constructed sleds to carry back the moose meat. Jiigibiig searched the lodge near where he found the boy, but most everything inside had been burnt. Just outside the doorflap lay the frozen bodies of a woman and five children.
They waited patiently for survivors to straggle into the village but none came. So the men burned the bodies and put the bones in a scaffold so the animals of the forest would not eat them. They fed the boy boiled pemmican and made sure he was warm. They tried to talk to him in all the languages they knew, but the boy would not respond and it was clear he did not want to speak. He had been given a new life, and he came to it fresh.
Finally, when they were ready, the men loaded the sleds and Jiigibiig pulled the biggest one loaded with meat and with the boy. It took them four days to reach Agencytown and when Jiigibiig opened the door to the shack he shared with his wife Zhookaagiizhigookwe, she was very surprised to see he carried a boy in his arms.
Since they had no children they decided immediately to raise the boy as their own. Zhookaagiizhigookwe stripped him down and dressed him in regular clothes. She carefully rolled his rabbit-skin outfit together with the pipebag and bowl and put them in a flour sack filled with crushed cedar and stowed them in the rafters of the small shack. After years of wishing and hoping they now had a boy of their own, whom they named Bimaadiz, because he was alive, against all odds, and their hope for a family had been rekindled, too.
3. The next year was just as disastrous for other Indians in the area, but this time hardship came to a village on the big lake not far from Agencytown. The people had been threatened with famine for some time. The stores of food procured in the summer were running low and winter had set in. And then came a devastating plague. Many died and were buried, blanketed by piles of rocks to wait until spring when the survivors could dig proper graves. A small band, the last of their tribe and consisting mostly of one large family, left the village site to camp on an island in the big lake two miles from the mainland, near the fall fishing grounds.
Their nets were hung over deep water with the hopes of catching trout as they followed the cold water to the surface. More nets were set in the branches of the trees for partridge and spruce grouse. All the people had to do was wait for those that swim and those that fly—the golden apples of the sun and the silver apples of the moon—to be plucked. The people waited for the fish and the fowl, waited to be nourished by these generous animals.
But it was not to be. The winter-maker—that great mason of the North—held back the snow and sent a slurry of ice over the land. The temperature dropped, but still no snow. Ice covered the lake.
The fowl did not fly into the nets. The fish nets waited below the surface for the people to pull them up, but the ice was too thin to support human weight and too thick to be chopped away. No one was alarmed—winter sometimes came on this way—persistent but shy. Soon the cold would come in earnest, freeze the lake solid, and they could walk out and check their catch. But the ice did not thicken. The weather tur
ned neither warmer nor colder.
The ice would not thicken or thaw. The birds did not fly toward the nets. There was no snow by which to set snares. It was a hard and empty world, and there was nothing to do. A few of the smaller men volunteered to crawl out on the ice with axes. They slipped and slid on their hands and knees, dragging a canoe after them, but it was of no use. One by one they drowned as those in camp watched.
Still the brave among them tried to reach the nets even though death seemed certain. And so, afraid they would die and sink in the lake and leave nothing for their families to bury, they each left something of themselves in the village. Solemnly, one man cut off his finger and gave it to his mother to hold, and then he crawled out on the ice only to disappear below. The next, seeing the wisdom of the man who had just drowned, the man who was also his brother, handed his father a toe. The next parted with his ear, another with a patch of skin from his thigh. Altogether, those remaining onshore were almost able to assemble a whole man out of the parts left behind.
Their families cried over these relics—over the finger that had rung the edges of the sugar kettle, for the ear that had drunk in song so happily, the skin that had covered such a swift leg. Each time a man died they spoke for him and buried what he had left behind. Soon there were clusters of rocks standing alongshore where so recently there had stood clusters of men. The winter-maker’s message was clear: the people were to be turned to stone.
It was with wailing and crying, with the soughing of human anguish, that these brave men tried to feed their people, but they only succeeded in feeding the lake. And the memories of their men weighed on the living as much as the stones that covered their bodies. Perhaps it is merciful for us that we have only their names, which for us are mere markers of stone: Beaver Hat, Skinny Sticks, Moose Dung, Sleeping Sky, and Redgut.
Soon, there were none left who could or who would crawl out on the ice. Until one day, the people living lower in their stomachs, everyone near the end, the sun appeared and leads opened up between great sheets of ice. It so happened that a mother and a father of a newborn girl, being the fittest, were able to paddle out to the nets.
What heartbreak! The nets were empty save for a single pike—all teeth and head and little flesh—which resembled the people themselves. The men had died for nothing—the nets had been empty after all. No gold-sided walleye, or silver-mailed tulibee, or pouting sturgeon, or wise bullheads, or laughing bass had condescended to be caught.
Being the healthiest yet in camp the mother and father left their little girl with her grandmother and paddled on through the shifting ice toward the portage where they had stored some caches of rice and squash. They were to paddle out, cross the portage, dig up the food, and bring it back. They were not seen again. Soon after they left, with the ragged remnants of the band watching their birch-bark canoe zigzag slowly across the lake, the weather reverted to its previous aspect; the leads froze over and yet, as before, the ice refused to thicken, and the people were stranded once more.
The people had lost their chance with the disappearance of the girl’s parents. She continued to gurgle and babble from her cradleboard, nourished by her mother’s milk still flowing through her body and by the hank of deerfat—the only food in camp—that her parents had given her.
Now, except for the sounds of the little girl’s contentment, the camp—unlike the wailing and crying that had marked the hours when the men crawled on the ice only to drown—was quiet. No one spoke. No one cried. No sounds were heard as the people, one by one, began to die. The living were too weak to bury the dead. And even so, they saved what energy they had to buy themselves a view of the lake, of the treacherous ice, of the gray seam of the far shore. They propped themselves in the doorways of their lodges and fixed their eyes on the lake in hope that they would see—before they drifted off—the canoe coming back, riding low in the water, loaded to the gunwales with rice and squash. Only the little girl, swaddled and nestled into her cradleboard, remained as she was before the flight of her family to the island. She contentedly chewed the strap of jerky she had been given and let herself be mesmerized by the clicking of the bare branches and the occasional cursive swoop of a woodpecker as it wrote its way through the treetops. She laughed and gurgled.
The people who looked toward the lake began to see things. Far out on the ice they thought they saw movement—dark shapes running back and forth. They couldn’t be sure, it could be simply the swirling of mist. Or their eyes, straining toward the distance, could be making the trees jump and change position with every watery blink. But still, everyone saw the shapes, and it gave them hope. Only to have it taken away when the black shapes did not draw any nearer. They watched night fall and hoped that what they had seen was a group of people trying to get across and bringing with them food and comfort.
The next day the distant activity was renewed. They were certain they saw something—movement, something or someone running or skating on the ice. Closer this time. It was only a matter of hours before whoever it was would draw nearer.
Each day the shapes in the distance appeared closer and suggested frantic activity. It further exhausted the people to watch this motion—hope exhausted them. Each day in the stilled village the people woke to the sight of these shapes slowly drawing near. Each night they prayed they would last through till dawn, possibly, the dawn of their delivery.
And then, one morning, through the pearly mist—a lighter shade of gray over the gray ice—they saw the result of their vigil. They would not be saved. Out of the mist, nearer, but not close, not yet, they saw the shapes emerge and they were not people, not other Indians, not the deliverance for which they had longed.
A lean pack of timber wolves had caught their scent and, over the days, had circled closer and closer, orbiting the island on which the band was camped. They circled, crossed, and cantered, testing the air at regular intervals for the change that would tell them that the people had all died. They would not attack the band, would not come tearing through the camp. The wolves were content to wait—benevolently vicious—until the people died and to only enter the camp at that time for their feast. Until then, they circled in wild dressage—never running full-out, rarely stopping, and in complete silence. There was no need for encouragement or communication; they continued to orbit and sample the wind as though checking a clock for the appointed hour.
The people were broken. What the hunger had started, the sight of the wolves finished. They began to die quickly. And not one by one, but rather in groups, lodge by lodge, as nighttime clouds darken whole sections of the starred sky. And there was great relief in such death. Without hope it was easy to die.
Within two days of seeing the wolves, everyone was dead, save one.
The little infant girl in her cradleboard was still alive, sustained by the scrap of smoked beaver she had managed to gnaw on. She laughed occasionally, and since she was bound to the cradleboard, her eyes played with the view and she was content, except for her swaddling of moss, which was soaked with urine and caked with shit. This made her uncomfortable—and it is only discomfort, the wants of life, that occupy the minds of babies. That was all—dirty diapers—that concerned her, and since she was barely three months old, everything was new to her. She had not yet learned of the terrible promise of life’s comfort, had not learned to expect comfort at all, not learned that she could expect to be delivered from hunger or dirty swaddling, to be cleaned with an infusion of boiled willow bark, caressed with the ears of mullion. She was like a wild animal, because they, even when mortally wounded, will not make a sound. The sounds we make are for the ears of those that can help us. She did not cry.
The camp was silent, and the wolves—so careful, so concerned with their own safety—after almost endless circling, disembarked from their ship of ice onto the human shores of the island. One after another, in the tracks made by the first, they entered the defeated city through a gate of smell and sight. On
ce ashore, in keeping with their roles as victors, they did not at once rush to the village center and rip into the bodies. They were secure in their victory, and they could wait. Instead, crossing one another’s tracks, they wove a road around the camp, circled the island, demarcating a domain that was once someone else’s, but was now theirs. Satisfied, they stopped and howled, exultant, and headed with their noses to the ground into the center of the camp.
If there had been anyone to see it, what happened next would have looked like the most awful of massacres, but since the people were already dead, killed by a much greater force, it was not a massacre, except perhaps a massacre of memory. If seen by someone else—one wolf standing on the chest of a dead woman while his partner twisted on her ankle until the foot came off; another wolf, working alone, grabbing up a jawful of a boy’s clothed chest and jerked, shoulders hunched, until the skin and the breast came away along the zipper of the boy’s ribs—it would have seemed a brutal meal. But no one did see it, and as such feasts go, this one was a delicate and respectful satiation. The wolves did not fight each other for the meat. When full, they did not, as they often do, regurgitate their meal into a pile of bones, scraps of clothing and hair, only to swallow it down again. Rather, they slept next to the corpses, the ground serving as both bed and plate. And so with wild patience, the villagers disappeared. Except in a quiet corner of the village something else entirely was taking place.
The girl, quiet, content to wonder at the branches pleached overhead, and lulled by the sound of eating and of movement around her, was resting in her cradleboard. And she was discovered there by a lone she-wolf.
The wolf approached her cautiously. The cradleboard and its contents still exuded live human scent, but of a different quality than usual, for this human had not eaten much meat and so it did not smell the same as other humans. Honoring an old agreement between wolves and people, she was loath to go near if the morsel of life there was indeed human. Yet other scents mingled with the human scent to lure the wolf closer: the smell of beaver fat, of freshly cased martin, of shit and urine, and something else, mother’s milk. Mother’s milk is just that and is attractive to all creatures. The she-wolf had weaned her pups earlier that fall, had chased them from the hearth of her belly, and yet her milk had not stopped pooling in her teats. And since the milk still flowed, the desire to put it to use did too. So she came near—slowly, each step a motion forward but loaded with tension. She was ready to spring away, sensitive to any trick or trap. All the while the she-wolf alternately stood erect and sniffed the air or crouched to test the trampled leaves and ground currents for the taste of danger. She finally arrived nose to nose with the little girl, and as a last test, pressed the great wet world of her nose against the girl’s cheek.
