Elle

by Douglas Glover

  Later I examine my face in the sliver of mirror (one assumes it began as a perfectly good mirror broken into pieces by a greedy sailor eager to multiply his investment among the commercially inexperienced savages). I am much used, it seems, by history and men, yet recognizable as someone I once knew in France when she was young and careless. Another tooth has begun to ache, a dull throbbing in my cheek.

  In my dream, the old woman assumes the shape of a bear, a cumbrous, grizzled she-bear, gigantic in her way, though meagre about the ribs and haunches, with a claw torn out, unhealed sores, fog like a white cloth draped inside her eyes. She paces nervously, anxious to slip away. She prods me with her snout, urging me to rise. The clatter of drums and cowbells surges nearer and nearer.

  The bear-woman and I drift away from the racket. But the unbearable din seems to follow us. The sun is like a hammer. The old woman rips a tree, dragging her claws through the bark in deep grooves, then grunts and lurches into the underbrush. I pick my way over lichen-covered rocks (like green lace), feeling an overpowering urge to tear up a tree myself, threading the low-hanging hemlock branches, skirting deadfalls. The clangour of the hunt infects my brain. I catch a glimpse of the bear-woman’s flank through the trees. When I glance up, I have reached an open space about the size of an Orleans tennis court, shaped like a funnel, with the General waiting at the apex.

  What does he see? There is a mystery. The old woman’s song sends me into the dream, has sent me there over and over (and just as often I wake in the morning inside the hut). So I know that I will rise upon my hind legs, trying to appear human, French and girlish. I will stumble toward the General, trying to cover my numerous teats with a leafy branch. What does he see? An attacking bear? An embarrassed woman? An embarrassed bear? A bear with a woman’s face? Does he re-member the face? I have become a metaphor or a joke, a piece of language sliding from one state into another (like my changeling Emmanuel — this sudden fluidity is one effect of entering a New World). It is an ironic position, being neither one thing nor the other.

  From somewhere quite close, the clamour of the hunt blots out the hum of the bear-woman’s song. I try to rouse myself from the dream but fail because of an eerie hissing sound that snakes through my mind. There is a flash, thunderclap. I hear the meaty slap of penetration (object going in). An old she-bear running beside me stumbles. Her dim eyes roll white with wonder. To her it feels as if she has tripped over something in the path. She doesn’t know she is dead. At the same instant, I feel the familiar blow to my chest. I tumble over a root, some obstruction in my path, falling face down in a berry brake. I notice a bug climbing a thorny stock. My nose is torn, but I compose myself and rest.

  When I wake up, it is mid-morning. Weeks have passed in dream. The old man with the star tattoo squats on his meagre haunches. A boy of about six kneels at my feet, examining me with a critical eye. They have brought a bark pail full of blue-berries and a slab of seal fat. The old man clutches a bark scroll in his hand. He reads it like a book. He tells me the bear woman is out upon her business, fighting a demon. I should eat the berries and use the seal fat to keep off the insects. He demonstrates, rubbing the grease over his chest. The boy lifts my bearskin rug to look at my legs, says something in dialect to the old man, and they both laugh in a way that tells me some low humour has passed between them. The boy shifts to my skin bag and sorts through it, holding each object up to his face. He exclaims over the bear statue Itslk carved for me, then replaces it carefully and resumes his silent inspection. The old man asks how I have slept and if I need to piss.

  Later the boy leads me by the hand to the tiny colony of skin huts at the mouth of the creek. I have nothing on but the bearskin wrapped about my shoulders. The blackened, fly-blown dogs grin down at me from their poles. The savages offer me fish boiled to a mush, a strip of dried meat (unidentifiable), water to drink. I would die for a loaf of bread or a biscuit. I sit before the fire on a sooty rock, staring into the flames. I let my robe drop to my waist, feeling no embarrassment at my nakedness. The old man tells me they do not usually stay this long on the coast. This time of year they should be migrating inland, getting ready for the fall hunt. But they are waiting for a ship to come by and trade with them. He wonders if I am expecting one.

  He says last winter they took time to trap smaller game — beaver, marten, water rats — especially for the coastal trade. Usually they hunt only the bigger animals for food. You can’t feed a family on beaver and rats, he says. They call themselves the Bear-Hunting People, which he thinks is odd because mostly they hunt caribou (I am made to understand this is a kind of deer native to the country). Many things in life seem inexplicable, he says. His people believe that dreams are just as real as waking life. They hunt by dreams and scapulimancy such as I have seen the bear woman perform in our camp. They never feed bones to dogs because that would insult the master of the animals. And when a savage dies, his soul walks over the Ghost Road to the Dance Hall of the Dead, which we call the Milky Way, the Via lactaea.

  His talk is sad, anxious and hopeful all at once — he sounds like Itslk. Jingling the string of pewter rings, he peers wistfully out to sea. The skulls of dead prey perch on stakes and loppedoff tree trunks: bear, huge deer, beaver. Flies buzz from one to the other as if they were flowers. Everything stinks of rotting fish, curing skins, shit and seal grease. The boy stalks Léon with a toy bow and a blunt arrow. I hear the bear-woman’s gentle humming in my head, but it grows fainter.

  The sailor-turned-into-a-frigate bird is certain there was a bear, though his testimony is suspect. Seeing a mother bear and her cub by the river shore, the General lands and gives chase, trying to catch the cub in an old sail. The mother bear attacks but is dispatched by an arquebusier, the cub is strangled accidentally in the sail cloth, the General is wounded slightly, which wound, growing morbid, forces him to return to his ships and thence to France.

  This sailor, far gone in drink and suffering the pox, further testifies that a savage dressed in a bearskin made threatening gestures from the shore and was fired upon by the boat’s company, that a bear danced upon the bow of a skiff in broad daylight (forcing the General to turn around), that the General was so terrified of bears or demons or both that he surrounded himself with arquebusiers till he reached France-Roy and then begged an exorcism of the priest. The sailor also confides that a small bear befriended him one night when they were camped along the shore and allowed him to enter her. His current wife, who really isn’t his wife but a bottle whore much impressed by sailors, has a backside much like a bear’s. He asks if I am interested in hearing stories about any other animals. F. is laughing at me.

  Dark and Gloomy Is the Land of the Gods

  I wake before dawn the next morning by a cold fire in a savage encampment beside a bay, the mouth of an immense river, with no far shore in sight, a river greater than any we can boast in Europe. Two rotten dogs hanging from poles watch over me. A circle of sun-bleached skulls watches over me. I shiver inside my bear robe. The ground about is dotted with other sleeping forms. Léon sleeps against my thigh, snoring fretfully, thrashing in his dreams.

  I stagger to my feet, alarmed by the unusual silence, the bear-woman’s absence. The stars whirl above in the blue-black of the morning sky. Racing back to our hut, I call and call for her, scouring the camp and woods nearby — the place where she liked to relieve herself in a bed of club moss, the marsh where she gathered herbs, especially the one with roots like golden threads, the traps she set for hares, the hemlock worn smooth where she rubbed her back when it itched, her favourite berry patch, her fishing rock beside the creek and the hollow tree where honey bees live.

  Then I notice Léon sniffing with the curious enthusiasm of dogs at something in the underbrush and discover the corpse of an old she-bear, already wormy and beginning to stink. There is no mark on her. She looks uncommonly peaceful, as the dead often do, and my mind gratefully retreats from the conclusion that I feared most, that she was killed by the ball from a
dream arquebus in some distant place.

  Something in me wants to be tender with her. I cradle her enormous old head in my lap, fanning the flies away, cleaning her rheumy eyes with a bit of rag saved from a dress, stroking the fur down the back of her neck, fondling her scarred ears. It is a relief to see her at rest. Despite the flies and maggots, her ancient, ursine face is stern and noble in death, almost human in its attitude of repose. Her bearishness makes me think of Richard’s tennis-playing; both roles seem out of place, romantic in their insistence upon a way of operating that no longer fits the circumstances.

  And I remember the long, anxious nights when she paced in the darkness (there is a path worn in the forest floor). What disturbed her? My own presence, for one thing. Of this I am certain. I am the herald of the new, a new world for the inhabitants of this New World, as disturbing for them as they are for us. I believe she peered into the future and foresaw the end of everything that had meaning for her. She would no longer fit into the world without an explanation, everything would have to be translated, just as in my Old World the disruptions which are only beginning will end by sweeping all the ancient hierarchies, courtesies and protocols away. For it seems to me that their world is as much a disproof of ours as ours is of theirs. One of our advantages will be our ability to live and fight and destroy while remaining in doubt. But the doubt will gradually eat away at us. That is what I think.

  That afternoon savages arrive from the fishing camp. They have heard about the old bear-woman’s death — I don’t know how. At first they are frightened. Léon snarls, crouching protectively astride the bear’s body. The savages confer, then gently lead me away, offering me a salmon of such prodigious size I cannot carry it. (It seems a strange offering. Why give me a salmon?) Léon licks its tail and dances, trying to get the fish to play. The savages squat around the bear, buzzing with consternation. They draw diagrams in the sand, sing one of their songs (monotonous, rising and falling like the wind — this one is not about me). Then they skin the bear, slicing her from chin to anus with a stone knife as sharp as a razor, the hide curling back like the bow wave of a ship.

  It is my turn to pace nervously upon the old bear’s path. Léon keeps me company, grumbling deep in his throat at the savage intruders. I am not myself, I can tell. Some unexpected diffidence separates me from our visitors. Aguyase, I want to say, but what is the use? They pretend to ignore me but cast wary glances in my direction from time to time. I ramble up and down the old woman’s well-worn path, whirling abruptly at the forest’s edge and turning back on my tracks. After a while, I notice that I have dropped to all fours, as I have often done in my dreams. My agitation increases. I rage against the men working over the she-bear’s corpse. I am shocked at how human her body seems once they have stripped away the hide. Someone has cut out her tongue and placed it on a rock nearby. Yellow dogs race in and out, snapping at scraps of flesh.

  The bearskin cape is suddenly too tight, constricting me at the neck and shoulders where I keep it pinned. I catch sight of my hands, which now have huge curved nails and a coating of black fur. My head sinks comfortably into my chest. But horror and revulsion flood my heart. God’s wounds, I can see the end of my own nose, black as charcoal, and I am not dreaming, not even asleep. And my hands, which once were delicate (though lately scuffed and hardened with ill-use), have turned into paws. Without even thinking, and to my mortification, I squat and release a stream of urine. I feel the extra teats pop out along my belly. Léon edges away from me. My cape falls off, leaving me naked.

  The savages leap to their feet, brandishing spears and bows, shouting and gesticulating. One man, with a constellation of blue dots like stars tattooed on his face, more resolute than the others — indeed, he seems to know me (and I him, though when and where we have met I cannot recall) — steps forward and delivers a harangue in his own tongue. I fail to understand a single word, but then he drops his voice and speaks to me in their river-speech, and with hand signs makes me understand that I have committed a faux pas. Perhaps it is only that, by turning into a bear before their eyes, I have made literal what should remain mysterious. Yes, yes, I think, I have always had a difficult time keeping in step with convention. What do you do with a headstrong girl? The star-man looks like my father, looks like the General, looks like every disapproving male I have ever known. He shakes his bow at me, notches an arrow with exaggerated care. By his manner, I can tell he is as afraid and as disgusted by me as I feel myself. It’s true — part of me wants to be normal.

  But then, I think, this is what it is like to be a god — and I realize suddenly the naivete of my own prior conceptions, Jesus, the Trinity (an idea, if anything, more bizarre than a woman turning into a bear), Christ’s torment in Gethsemane when it is clear he would prefer to remain a disputatious carpenter instead of becoming the son of God. I wonder if I will ever change back and, in passing, what bear sex is like and how you meet boy bears (inward shudder). Lately I have been thinking of France, and mostly what I think about is the talk, the brilliant, witty, shallow, trivial, never-ending chatter of commerce, flirtation, politics, gossip and scholarship. I would like to read a book instead of eating one. But in a universe governed by swirling contraries, I seem to be drifting farther and farther from the world I used to know, farther from the world of the recognizably human, closer to difference, divinity and madness.

  I emit a bearish cough of frustration, which, even to my new ears, sounds fearsome. I shake my head till my lips slap (humans can’t do this). I rush at the nearest hemlock, dig into it with my claws and give it a shake. The savages flee. One moment they are threatening me, the next they scatter in all directions like startled pheasants, vanishing among the trees. A single arrow clatters harmlessly at my feet. My first impulse is to sniff it. Then I smell Léon, a familiar scent but much stronger and more musical, composed of a medley of subtler scents I have not noticed before. He slinks into the underbrush. I try to call him, but my voice is gone. I walk toward the dead she-bear, a strange gait — like walking downhill with my ass in the air, exposing my nether parts for all to see. I nudge her corpse with my snout, moan a bearish moan, not because I miss her or mourn but because now I understand the awful force of her loneliness.

  The flickering sensation I felt in my dreams returns. The world seems to flame and glow, though, in truth, I can’t see it very well through my bear eyes. The shadows change direction and lengthen into evening. I notice I have changed back into a woman. This is a relief. I begin to hope this bear thing is only a phase. Léon slinks back, licks my hand. But then I notice the hand beginning to sprout fur again, the claws begin to lengthen. Léon returns to the undergrowth. I wash the paw in the creek, wondering if scrubbing might rid me of this infection. The fur runs up my arm like flames licking through dead grass. Then it recedes, my hand returns to normal. The smell of blood makes me hungry, but I cry the dog away when he tries to lick the bear’s flesh. Eating the bear strikes me as revolting. Later I seem to come out of my trance in a berry patch, gorging on fruit, my mouth dripping with juice (but I still look like a woman). Then I remember that salmon.

  Next morning I am exhausted, spent, empty, lucid — and a woman. I hear no song but the birds. I feel like a fever patient who has passed a crisis. I wrap the old woman’s carcass in bark (as I say, she looks so human without her bear skin), hoisting her into a tree to keep the dogs away. I hang her tongue on a meat-drying rack beneath the ceiling of my hut, where the smoke will cure it. Then I treat the hide with fat and ashes and stretch it to dry in the sun. For days I live like this, like a hermit, sheltered by strangeness, growing strong in the sunlight.

  One night I pierce my ear lobes with bone skewers in the savage fashion. I experiment with a needle and soot and give myself a tattoo, imitating the star pattern, the Great Bear, because it is easy to apply (another time I will elaborate my efforts). In the dark, I finger my new wounds and point them out to Léon in the sky and say the names. By what names they are called in Canada, I can
not say.

  When I am bored, I drape the bearskin over my head and shoulders, waddle along the creek to its mouth and frighten the savages in their encampment, doing no real damage beyond stealing a few fish and overturning their cooking frames. I believe they see the humour in this, for they do not shoot at me, only shout and wave their capes. A little boy, impudently naked, chases me with a toy bow and blunt arrows.

  Once I go there and find them all gathered by the shore. Two caravels march slowly past in the swell, pushed along by the current, with hardly a man up in the sails and those on deck as like skeletons and scarecrows as real men. The ships look familiar, even to my dim, bearish eyes. Seeing us, a black-clad man with a crippled hand directs sailors to discharge the ship’s cannon in our direction. Balls wheel lazily through the serene air and splash magnificently into the water far short of their target. The savages wave and call out and show their bare bums — by their actions I judge they are trying to get the ships to shoot at them again or perhaps to come and trade for furs. But the ships drift on to the horizon, tip over it and disappear, east toward the ocean and France.

  What is France? Did I not once dream of rescue? As I recall, in the Old World they burn people less strange than I have become for consorting with the Devil. Did I once speak fluent French, read books? Now I am mute, or my words stumble as they come out of my mouth. Did I really turn into a bear, or was I but a captive of a system of belief into which I had wandered all unknowing? There is something I cannot explain here, some character of reality not contained between the via antiqua and the via moderna of the scholars who debate at the universities. Is it possible that with the help of God’s light we can know the true substance of things, or is everything just a sign of something else? Or is neither proposition true? What does the world look like to a savage? Or to a dog? Or to a Frenchman of the petty nobility? Or an ordinary girl with marriage hopes and a dowry? What I have become is more like a garbled translation than a self.