Léon dwindles to a speck, though I can still see the jerky movements of his head as he barks. We travel west, and the west wind carries the sound away. For a moment, there is nothing but the soughing of the wind and the sound of my own thoughts. Then the old woman begins to chant, some deep-voiced song, rhythmic, repetitive, nonsensical but oddly soothing. Looking back, I see the ancient tattooed savage bending to her paddle, the Isle of Demons receding in the distance, the tiny black dog. I have the strangest feeling, a conviction really, based on no evidence but my intuition, that the song she is singing is about me.
I Am Kochab and Polaris
The next morning I find myself abed in the self-same hut beside the aforementioned fast-flowing creek. And the next, and the next. We haven’t embarked upon a journey at all, although the journey itself seems more real than my sickly, indolent life with the old woman and her dogs. We never leave except in my nightmares, and Léon sleeps next to me, and only his frantic yips and whimpers and his violent running motions betray the fact that he is having the same dream.
Day after day, she sings to me. At first I am lost in my own profound melancholy and do not notice the insidious effect of the song. (I am sick, starved, sad and confused — about what you would expect, given my history.) But the song insinuates itself into my heart, where it alters me, infects me with restlessness. The tempo quickens, seems freighted with urgency, with some purpose I cannot guess. The song’s rhythm imitates the rhythm of the old woman’s paddle strokes in my dream. It echoes against the forest wall and the colossal cliffs where mountains shoulder into the river. It resonates inside my breast. It seems to propel me forward on some mysterious trajectory as the canoe rushes westward.
At night or when I doze during the day, the song infects my dreams. We camp on lonely beaches, sleeping beneath the upturned canoe draped with animal hides. The old woman disappears, and the bear walks at the edge of the firelight. Sometimes I sense the presence of other mysterious shapes, thin, winter-starved bears come down to the shore to commune with the old one. Often in the morning fresh piles of bear dung dot the campsite. My dreams are incontinent. She seems to sing to them as she sings to me, and always there is an undertone of anxiety and embarrassment. In my dreams I grow a snout, huge curved claws and extra teats, coarse hair covers my body, and I shamble alone through trackless forests, along ancient rivers, ravenous, immensely strong, dim-eyed. (It could be worse, I think. I might have turned into a slug or a mosquito.)
The worst is when I dream that the General is hunting me, although often it seems that I am hunting him, that we are bound together, even created, in some dramatic relation of hunter and hunted, though the roles are interchangeable. His colonists, wraiths by now, form a line in the forest, raising a din with shouts and drums and battered cookware, driving me toward the place where he waits with an arquebus, mounted and primed. Does he remember me? Does he regret his hasty judgment at the Isle of Demons? Will he recognize me in my new form? I am a head-strong girl, shallow and frivolous. Aguyase. I am a friend. Quatgathoma. Look at me. Attend to me. Love me. But the words sound foreign to him, like the snarling of a she-bear. The matchlock fizzes, detonates. I wake with a horrible pain in my breast.
Along my riverine dream shore, snow disappears, the boggy places give way to dense forest, cataracts plunge into the Great River, threatening to overturn our slender canoe as we slip past their mouths. We meet a party of savages setting up their summer fishing camps, as I am made to understand by their chief men or interpreters, who speak a river patois of foreign words and hand signs. They treat us with suspicion and distaste, as though our presence were somehow inappropriate, which I take to mean that we are as much like dream figures, wraiths or revenants to them as they are to me. By the odd bits of tattered European clothing, tufted Breton caps, torn hose, pewter rings, rosary beads, sword belts, iron knives and cooking pots, I conclude that I am far from the first white person to pass this way. (A grizzled warrior walks about in a gown worn back to front — not one of mine.)
I do not know where the dream begins or ends. Am I the wasted, half-dead girl in the hut, dreaming of myself on a journey to the heart of a continent, or I am an adventurous paddler dreaming the girl who seems to sleep all day, rousing herself at mealtimes, only to fall back into an exhausted and troubled delirium at night? Dream and reality weave together patterns that appear and disappear and appear again. This is like poetry, but it is also like madness, which is governed by the same rules of repetition and similitude.
Stranger still, at the dream’s climax or when some wild animal’s howl disturbs me, I awake to see the she-bears whirling above my head, my dream repeating itself in the sky I have watched since I was a girl. I am Kochab and Polaris at the hub of the mill of the gods. And all the while, in dream or out, there is the song which the old one sings, though her lips never move. At times it seems as if the words of the song come from inside my own head. The words seem familiar, though they have the air and peculiarity of a foreign tongue. What do they mean? Over and over I hear the hissing match of the fusil and the thunderous report and feel the pain in my breast. Someone, some thing, falls like a sack of meat. The dog snarls.
Always when I awake I find myself in the hut by the creek. The old woman treats me like an invalid or an infant, lifting me out of and into the hut — or the canoe in my dream — with her huge hands, cosseting me, tucking me in at night. Sometimes she reminds me of Bastienne, with her strange face, half bear, half turnip. And the savages I meet in my dreams turn out to be only memories of a small band that inhabits a summer fishing camp at the mouth of the creek, a short walk from where I lie. The first time I manage to limp as far as their dwellings I am shocked at the sight of two yellow dogs hanging by their necks from poles, much as in Old Europe one might expect to see the bodies of executed criminals.
They bring us food, baskets of berries and occasionally a salmon or a hare or a bark tray of seal meat, in return for nostrums, philtres, charms and snatches of song from the old woman. She reads the bones for hunters — I used to watch Bastienne tell fortunes the same way — burning the scapula of some large beast in the fire and scrying over the cracks and smudges that appear. As likely as not, when the hunter returns, he will drop a bloody haunch of meat before the doorway. They negotiate in loud harangues, full of bluff oratory — one old man, with the Great Bear tattooed on his face, speaks for the rest. And, yes, I ask about the beaver anus story — these are the mountain people Itslk told me of; the old man, in signs and bastard words of half a dozen tongues, regales me with an encyclopedia of anus stories: their god Messou shooting ducks with his anus, the ducks shitting in his food pail. They are a jolly people with a sense of comedy founded on their backsides.
(Once the tattooed man leads me by a circuitous route to a secluded rocky cove. Just at the tide line lie the ribs and cross-beams of a sailing ship, blackened with age and damp, like the half-buried skeleton of a whale or a man. We spend an hour poking about. He finds a rusty nail. I discover a sailor’s jawbone and the remains of a book, the unreadable pages glued together by sea water. It is a dreary spot.)
All the while the crone treats me with the same rough tenderness she displayed when we first met. Hardly a day goes by without some unpleasant medical attention. I will wake to find her milky gaze fixed upon me, her face so close I can smell her fetid breath. She throws off my rug and runs her knobby hands over my body, exploring my most secret places, sniffing here and there with that tattooed snout, sometimes holding her fingers up to her nose, snorting like a she-bear with her young. Then the blowing and kneading begin, soothing at first, but soon more urgent and painful as she teases the object from deep inside my body (or so it seems).
She has removed a musket ball from my breast, a wadded up page of illuminated text, much scraped and scratched but clearly depicting an Eve expelled from Eden, her hands pressed over her privy parts, a fragment of quill pen, a square-head nail, a claw, three more teeth, one human (a remnant of cord tied to th
e root), a sailor’s canvas needle, a piece of a knife blade, some silver thread, a prayer bead, a stone arrowhead and a half-dozen bone fragments.
I have heard how the balls and scraps of metal in the wounds of old soldiers fester and creep, year by year, to the surface, where they erupt and are expelled. My body encases the detritus of two worlds, or my shabby memories have frozen into shapes which gall me but can now be safely, if painfully, removed. Perhaps even Emmanuel was one such, a wound, a frozen memory. Of what? I wonder. And what if memory itself is a foreign object which the body longs to be rid of? At the threshold of another world, where strangeness and confusion rule, where all words are un-translatable, such questions become paramount. What if I forget everything? Then I will be made anew.
The Rest of the Voyage Is Wanting
At this juncture: I am not myself, but who am I? Even after the passage of years, I cannot write about this experience with my usual acerbic wit, the rhetorical device by which I keep my distance from myself Like Itslk, I find I am the subject of a story I can hardly follow. In the labyrinth of dream, I lose the power of thought. Is this what happens when one truly encounters another being (love)? I do not say I am better than anyone else. But I was weakened and susceptible.
This is the unofficial account of an anti-quest. This is the story of a girl who went to Canada, gave birth to a fish, turned into a bear, and fell in love with a famous author (F.). Or did she just go mad? In either case, from my point of view (the inside), they look the same.
On his first voyage past Newfoundland, M. Cartier met a fishing ship from La Rochelle sailing in the opposite direction. He reported, not that these sailors had discovered the New World before him, but that they were lost. Thus he became the official discoverer of Canada, behind the crowds of secretive, greedy, unofficial Breton cod fisherman, unofficial, oil-covered Basque whalers, unofficial Hibernian monks, and who knows who else. (Not to mention the inhabitants.)
So much for the official version.
What of my uncle, the General? When did he begin to dream? Far away the General strips his colony of useful supplies. Leaving thirty men and women behind, he loads seventy into an armada of skiffs, barques and rowboats taken from the ships. He writes that the weather continues abysmal and that he must abandon the colony if not resupplied before the summer is half out. His health is bad. He has the toothache and jaundice. He suffers that peculiar melancholy which afflicts predestinarians who begin to suspect that the mysterious finger of God, the instrument of His grace, has somehow passed over them, that they are not, after all, one of the Elect. But crime is down among the wretched colonists — no one is strong enough to commit one. The General has established a little France in the New World, a groaning, wretched copy of what he left behind. He is king, god and judge and touches this one and that as the need for punishment arises. He is leading his people through fire to faith and civil order.
It is early June, once my favourite month, a month for love and tennis. And I know all this, not because I dream it (though I do — well, some of it) but because F. later shows me a copy of the General’s log, which was part of the court case, and I find occasion to speak with de Saintonge, the pilot, as well as Guillemette Jansart’s ineffable consort and a sailor who went mad on the voyage and believed himself transformed into a frigate bird by a savage sorcerer named Lox, who also gave him a disease in his privy parts. Mysteriously, the General’s log, the diary of his defeats, stops before he records the last stages of his epic exploration inland. On the final page, someone has scrawled: The rest of the voyage is wanting. The narrative is defined by the encroaching silence. The General is trying to hide.
They embark after supper on a Wednesday night, which means they can get nowhere before dark and merely drop anchor off M. Cartier’s abandoned post at Charlesbourg-Royal and go to sleep. This somewhat spoils the grandeur of their departure — they had sung Te Deums by the quayside, and the General had given last-minute instructions in the event of his death during the voyage. If he did not return in three weeks, he said, his voice rasping with self-importance, the remaining colonists were to try to save themselves by sailing back to France. No one weeps. Several pray for his quick demise. Those left behind wave handkerchiefs, fire arquebuses and raise a ragged shout but then grow tired of watching the barques sit there in the waning light. Instead of making history, the General’s gesture declines into comedy.
He sails upstream against the current at dawn and soon arrives at the foot of Mount Royal and the savage town of Hochelaga, recently abandoned by its inhabitants. He climbs the mountain, tracing M. Cartier’s footsteps, and spies the same broad river leading northwest into the wilderness and the fabled country called Saguenay. He remembers the stories whispered to M. Cartier — a land wealthy in copper and gold, inhabited by white men who wear clothes made of wool like the French and have no assholes. (He has niggling doubts about the wool, based on the scarcity of sheep, which have so far proved non-existent in Canada.) And, of course, King Francis has given it to him to rule. He fancies he can see the gleam of sunlight off the waves of a distant ocean. His savage guides seem positively Asiatic. The answer to some great riddle seems tantalizingly near.
Next day they reach the foot of a rapids, where they disembark and rope the boats upriver. A boat broaches, drowning eight men. But this is the mystery. The boat had been dragged through the rapids empty, and the mishap took place in still water. Is it a portent? A symptom of malign fate? The General develops an obsession with bears. They haunt his dreams. At least now he is past M. Cartier’s farthest exploration, farther west than any white man has journeyed. For once he is not in the shadow of that ridiculously humble Malouin sea captain. He has achieved a kind of apotheosis, a fragment of glory.
Does he remember me? In his dreams, he hears the screams of the demons (birds and sea cats) and spies a fish with a human face. In his dreams, he finds himself beneath the capsized boat, sees the surface of the river far above his head, or he is chased by a bear, immense, red-eyed and uncanny, the spirit of the forest. Sometimes this bear has the torso and legs of a young French woman, delicate, desirable breasts beneath the beast’s head. He remembers his wife — there always was some-thing bearlike about her. In broad daylight, he fears he is being watched. He never imagined that the land would prove as vast or as empty as it now seems. He has the European prejudice about signs: A sign must be a sign of something. But Canada is beginning to look like a sign that is just a sign of itself.
A single arrow reaches for them out of a morning mist, lodging in a thwart. The General orders his pikemen ashore (that is, pickpockets, road agents, heretical printers, shoemakers, smiths, carpenters and sailors temporarily armed with spears) to scour the banks. The arquebusiers shoot at the trees. Volley after volley echoes along the river. Gunfire is their interpretation of silence. Two men of the landing party fail to return, victims of some silent ambush. The General, in his heart, suspects the worst, that they have fled into the wilderness to join the savages.
In dreams, I paddle the same spindrift river. The journey is silent except for the eerie pulse of the bear-woman’s song, which is no song, just a rhythm punctuated by the sh-sh sound and a delicate popping of her tongue and lips. Savages emerge like ghosts from the fog along the riverbank. Their gestures tell me the one I seek is not far ahead. He dresses in black and travels with a large party in boats which spout thunder and lightning as they pass. Who is the hunter and who the hunted? I ask myself.
In dreams, I hear the beaters — men thrashing in the under-growth accompanied by tambours, cow bells, cymbals, flutes, kitchen pots and odd bits of armour used as drums. The old woman lifts her huge head, sniffs the breeze, then cocks her ears and lurches to her feet. Sadness surges in me — I don’t know why. I am in a place where everything means something, but nothing is understood. Or I am trapped in some fatal rite. I hear the hiss of the match and the furious sizzling when it touches the pan, like the beginning of a fireworks display. It seems to take forever
for the powder to ignite and the terrific detonation. Who is the hunter, who the hunted?
I roll over on all fours, feeling immensely strong, feeling, well, like a bear. When I look down at myself, I am still a woman, though somewhat patched, callused and scarred, and my hair is a mess. Sometimes I don’t know (even now I don’t know) what to believe. The light seems to flicker like a flame; what goes for reality seems to flicker (and I am reminded of Heraclitus, who taught that the substance of the universe is fire). The old woman is and isn’t a bear, and sometimes she is very close to being another me — I can see her as a young woman, headstrong, shallow and frivolous, eons ago.
(All this could be explained by the power of suggestion, of dreams. Or it is real. I am of two minds myself.)
What the Frigate Bird Said
Once when I wake, the old man with the Great Bear tattoo is seated in the hut next to me, a red rag tied round his head and a nightcap perched on top. He has a dozen pewter rings strung around his neck, also a tiny framed illumination of the Virgin and Child, which I have seen him speaking to in quiet moments. He is naked because of the heat, his body scarred from wars and hunts. He has brought a fish to donate, but there is no sign of the bear-woman. He takes a shard of broken mirror from a pouch and offers it to me. He says I may keep it if I come to live with him. His eyes are small and brown like raisins. His penis nestles like a sparrow between his legs and looks, oddly enough, younger than the rest of him, like a boy’s penis, like my little Carlito’s pee-pee. I touch the stars on his forehead, say their names aloud.
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