by Michael Rowe
Worse still was the ever more likely possibility that Father de Céligny had been murdered by a group of terrified Savages who believed they were ridding their village of a monster.
I opened my mouth to protest again, but Askuwheteau silenced me with a sharp gesture. “Be quiet, Black Robe,” he said. “You stay here. I will guard you. We leave in morning, when sun rises.”
That night in the moonlight, at several separate intervals I was aware of the sly sound of moccasin-shod feet on dirt and stone as the Indians came to stare at me whilst I lay under my blanket, feigning sleep and listening to the sound of my heart in my chest.
Their gruesome legends, their tales of flesh-devouring, blooddrinking demons, and the spirits that walked their forests at night, were easier to dismiss in the daylight. But when, like at that moment, the dull moon was the only light able to pierce this infernal darkness at the edge of the world, the borders between our world of the living and their land of the dead seemed to shimmer and grow indistinct.
The Indians did not come too near. From their soft, fretful whispering, I came to believe that they were not keeping their distance simply because I was under the protection of Askuwheteau, but also because the Indians were afraid of me.
That morning, I again woke, shivering, to a light covering of snow upon the ground. The dark green trees were likewise wreathed and crested with white and stood out starkly against the deadened sky. The sun remained hidden behind lead-coloured clouds that seemed an advance guard of the deadly coming winter.
As I prayed that morning, I entreated God that we might find Father de Céligny alive and well, presiding over his Christianized congregation at St. Barthélemy, and that I might either return with him to TroisRivières or winter with him in Sault de Gaston if the route back became impassable because of the killing cold.
We again loaded the canoes in preparation for our departure. Askuwheteau and his paddlers were solemn that morning, entirely different in their demeanour than they had been every morning during the last month of our voyage inland. They whispered amongst themselves and, though I may have been imagining it, I caught them looking at me when they thought me unawares, glancing away quickly when I returned their gaze.
At one point, a near brawl appeared to break out between Askuwheteau and Chogan, one of the younger men in our party of paddlers, who had been glaring at me all through the morning. Askuwheteau struck him about the shoulders and rebuked him in Algonquian, though I was too far away to understand his words. When Chogan pointed at me, Askuwheteau seized the younger man’s arm and forced it down to his side. Askuwheteau addressed him sharply, but in a low voice, and Chogan looked vindictively in my direction one more time, then dropped his eyes in submission to Askuwheteau, my protector.
Of course, I had seen the entire exchange, but still I pretended that I had not, as much for my own security as for Chogan’s pride.
As we launched into the water, I saw that the entire village had arrayed itself on the shore, as though to assure themselves that we had indeed departed from their midst. They stared solemnly in our wake as the canoes glided into the morning fog, not speaking nor shouting, but entirely, raptly following the trajectory of our canoes with their eyes.
So general was the ghostly silence, that when one of the paddles rapped against the side of the boat, I cried out in shock. The Indians kept their heads down and paddled, showing no reaction to my outcry, no laughter this time, and none of the usual well-meant mockery. Instead, we paddled in silence until the mist enveloped us and the land behind us vanished from sight.
After five hard, uncomfortable days of mostly silent paddling, we made a gruesome discovery in the early evening of the fifth day as we crossed a particularly vast lake. Lulled and hypnotized by the repetitive motion of the paddle, I was suddenly jolted to consciousness by a sharp shout of warning from the bowsman of the other canoe.
I raised my head and squinted to see where he was pointing. There, floating face down on the surface of the black water was the body of a girl of perhaps no more than twelve or thirteen. I crossed myself and stifled my despair at the tragic sight. The girl’s body must have floated on some sort of very strong underwater current, for we seemed several miles from either shore and there seemed no other earthly way for it to have found itself so far from land. The fantastical thought came to me that she had been dropped from the air, as though from the talons of some monstrous bird in mid-flight.
Too, there seemed to be no putrescence or other decay. She looked as though she had fallen asleep in the lake that very afternoon and simply drifted away on the waves.
“Pull her to us,” I implored them. “Let us take her to shore, so that I may say a prayer for her and we can bury her.”
The Indians, naturally, ignored me. But there had been no need for my exhortations in any case. The men were already carefully reaching for her, using their paddles almost as grappling hooks, pulling the girl’s body towards them.
The combination of their paddles and the motion of the waves that had sprung up in the breeze caused the body to roll in the water. As it did, the full abomination of the tableau revealed itself to all of us, and I again had occasion to cross myself.
The girl’s eyes had not rolled up in her head; rather they seemed to stare fixedly at us. The pupils were dilated so that they looked like two pieces of flat black glass. But O! the mute asseverations of dread in those eyes, the terror frozen eternally in violent death. Her mouth was stretched open in a silent scream of pain and terror. Worst of all, her throat had been all but torn out, as though by the jaws of a wolf, the flesh of the wound washed clean and pink by the lake water. Her poor fingers were fixed into claws, as though in her last moments she had been fighting to escape from whatever beast killed her.
The effect on the Indians was marvellous. With a collective cry of despair, they pushed the body away from them. They beat the water to a white froth with their paddles as they turned the canoes about, gaining distance between themselves and the poor dead girl’s body in a trice.
“Stop! Stop!” I screamed. “Go back! We must bury her!”
But stop the Indians did not. They laid their backs into their paddling as though the spot was accursed. The lost child’s body floating in that desolate lake shrank to a distant speck—a lonely sacrilege bobbing in the black waves as the sun sank behind the hills and the night came alive around us.
The next morning, Askuwheteau avowed to me that we were very near our destination. He said we would reach St. Barthélemy that night, and that we would portage inland from Lac Supérieur, then camp in the forest near a small lake, which, he told me, was hidden within a rocky region known to be treacherous.
It may have been the combined effect of the dramatic hibernal shift in the weather and the changing light, but the entire landscape appeared even more forbidding, remote and haunted than it ever had before. The water, dull pewter, violently wind-lashed and bitterly cold, smashed against the massive jutting islands of rock rising out of the oceanic vastness of Lac Supérieur. It froze my toughened hands, driving me almost mad with pain that I could not express in front of the Indians for fear of their reaction.
Their behaviour towards me had grown increasingly hostile, almost antagonistic. They now slept apart from me, and they built two fires, one for them and one for me, farther away. I ate separately from the Indians at their insistence, and never a word was passed between us now, except obligatorily, when Askuwheteau needed to communicate some detail of our voyage. Whatever the unfavourable sentence that had been passed upon me by the elders of the Ojibwa village where we had overnighted, it seemed that it had radically, unsympathetically, and permanently altered the Indians’ view of me.
Finally, we landed on a beach of smooth rock in a horseshoe-shaped inlet just as the sun was beginning to lower in the sky. The strong, gelid wind that had raised such waves upon the surface of Lac Supérieur now whipped at our bodies and faces. My clothing was wet from rogue waves over
the side of the canoe, and now, on that rocky beach as we prepared to portage, I had begun to shiver violently.
“When will we camp?” I asked Askuwheteau. “I am cold and wet. Perhaps we should make camp here, on the beach?”
Askuwheteau gestured with a wide swing of his arm. “There is danger,” he said. “It is too easy to find us here. We must go deeper into the forest.”
“Who would find us?” I said. “The Hiroquois? Surely, we are in friendly country here? This is Ojibwa country. We are near the mission of St. Barthélemy, you said. The Ojibwa are not our enemies. From whom are we in danger?”
He stared at me, again that maddening Savage inscrutability. “Not the Hiroquois,” he said. “Not the Ojibwa.” Then he grew silent. He picked up his pack and began to carry it into the forest. All I could do was pick up my own pack and follow him.
As we portaged through the woods towards St. Barthélemy, my travelling companions grew more and more apprehensive in a way that was entirely out of character, for they had hitherto shown themselves to be fearless. It would not be incorrect to say that the Indians appeared to be at the ready, as taut as their own bow strings, the way they might be if hunting, or anticipating an attack by the Hiroquois, or some other enemy.
At last, in the growing gloom, we laid down our packs and made camp in the clearing of a coppice of trees and set about building temporary shelter. I began to gather wood for my own fire, as I had been forced to do throughout the last week of our voyage. When I had found several stout sticks, I made as though to arrange them apart from the larger fire being built by Askuwheteau and his men. The Indians regarded me strangely, though still with no hint of the amity I had known at the beginning of our voyage.
It was old Hausisse who spoke first—to Askuwheteau. Her Algonquian was so rapid that I was unable to follow it, though the urgency of her tone was unmistakable. Her hands flew in the air as she pointed to me, then gestured around her towards the trees, and the sunless sky above, then back to me. Whatever she said to him clearly gave him pause, because he told me to put my wood in the pile beside the fire that the Indians had already built, and which was already burning. Hausisse stared at me from where she sat, her regard almost approving. Askuwheteau told me that I would remain with the rest of them tonight. Too grateful to do anything but nod, I threw my wood into the pile.
The Indians reluctantly made room for me around the fire. When I say reluctantly, I mean that while they showed no overt malice or hostility, my apparent state of uncleanliness had not changed in their eyes, in spite of Askuwheteau’s invitation.
My awareness of our complete isolation could not have been sharper than it was at that moment. Even the Ojibwa village where I’d received such a hostile reception seemed like an outpost of warmth and civilization compared to this wild, dark place.
I needed the Indians; they did not need me. This was their world, not mine, and I was lost in it without them. Indeed it was difficult to imagine anything human, Savage or Christian, existing here. Anything could happen to me here, indeed, to any of us, and none would be the wiser.
But still, Hausisse continued to stare at me, at the crucifix lying against my robe, as though it were a sorcerous talisman instead of a holy object, for I knew she had not accepted Christ.
What woke me from my sleep that night I could not say with any certainty.
I had been dreaming of my family’s home in France, and of my mother. In the dream, I was still a young boy in her kitchen, by the fire. My mother was seated in a carved oak chair, and I on her lap, my body pressed against her soft breast as she ran her fingers through my hair. I smelled the lavender sachet from her black woollen dress beneath the starched white apron. From a massive pot on the hearth issued forth the magnificent odour of lamb stew with potatoes, vegetables, and red wine slowly cooking. The fragrance filled every corner of the room, making my mouth water. Never, I think, had I been as hungry as I was in that moment before waking.
At the very moment my eyes opened on the darkness, I was already fully awake, mouth still watering, every sense alert. All about me were the general sounds of the Indians snoring, and the crackle of the fire that had died to glowing embers. I smelled the smoke and the musky scent of the sleeping Savages.
I propped myself up on one elbow and glanced around. Nothing seemed amiss in the camp. The surrounding woods were silent as tombs, and I could see my breath in the air in front of me by firelight. I peered into the blackness, trying to ascertain what had roused me, for the sense was growing in me that I was being watched by something, or someone, beyond the tree line.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I thought I saw a shadow moving slyly towards us. Terror leaped in my chest, for I could think of only two things: that it could be some deadly animal, a wolf, or some terrible bear, the stories of which I had heard even before boarding at Dieppe. That, or an armed, bloodthirsty Hiroquois scouting party.
As I stared, the shadow itself divided into two smaller shadows, forms human in shape and contour.
I rubbed my eyes, marvelling at what I saw before me, for standing at the edge of the coppice of trees were two Savage children, a girl of perhaps nine years, holding hands with a small boy who could not have been more than five. The girl wore a simple buckskin shift, and her arms and feet were bare in the bitter cold. The boy was completely naked, though the lower half of his face, his neck, and his upper chest appeared to be smeared with mud, or some other blackish substance.
I thought it a curious trick of the firelight, but even from my vantage point in the doorway, I could clearly see their eyes shining through the trees, even though their faces were deeply painted with shadow.
The two children stared fixedly at our assemblage. They could have been a brother and sister on a walk through the woods on a summer day but for the fact that, by the position of the moon in the sky, it was well past midnight, dawn hours away. And though their state of nakedness would have been tolerable in the heat of August, we were already in the mouth of winter and yet they seemed entirely insensible to the bitter cold. The wind whipped the girl’s long black hair wildly about her face, but she made no move to push it back with her hands, or to cover her body against the deadly wind.
The thought came to me again that I might be dreaming, for it seemed impossible that they could survive, so lightly dressed in such cold, or that their appearance had not wakened Askuwheteau or his men, who could practically hear the day pass into night. But no, I pinched my own face and knew I was awake.
And lo! I realized that the children must be from the settlement at St. Barthélemy! If they were alive, then surely others must be also! But in this cold, I knew they would not survive, especially the naked little boy.
Carefully, so as not to wake the others, I pushed back my blanket and stood up. The cold struck me at once, and with terrible force. My teeth began to clatter and my body reacted with a violent spasm of shivering, but my only concern in that moment was for the two children. I stepped back inside and took up the blanket that had been covering me and wrapped it about me like a cloak. Carefully, I placed another log on the fire. It crackled, and then slowly caught the heat from the embers. Flames encircled it and a plume of smoke rose into the air. From one of the packs, I took another blanket, intending to swaddle the naked little boy with it before his poor little body froze.
I whispered to the children in my crude Ojibwa, indicating that they should come near the fire. I sensed, rather than saw, their response, for they stood as still as statues. And yet somehow I knew their bodies had tensed in anticipation. I beckoned with one arm, making sure to keep my own blanket wrapped about me for my own warmth. Still, they stood motionless.
Then, slowly, the girl raised her own arm and beckoned to me.
The gesture was a perfect facsimile of my own, an invitation to move away from the camp and come to where she was standing. Willingly, I took a step towards her. She and the boy took a reactive step backwards, farther into the
trees. But at the same time, the girl beckoned me again. This time, her brother (for that is how I had come to think of him) gestured as well, as though imitating his sister’s invitation to me.
Then they took two more steps backward until they were nearly invisible.
I called out to them again in Ojibwa as I walked into the forest. I stared hard, straining my eyes to see where they stood. And while I could barely make out the shape of them, I again thought I saw the strange crimson firelight glow of their eyes winking in the blackness like sputtering reddish candlelight. I felt my way through the trees, occasionally colliding painfully with hard branches and stinging needles of pine. I glanced backward and saw that I had walked a considerably farther distance away from the camp than I had first thought. The whole sequence of events had taken on the qualities of a nightmare. But still I pushed through the trees in search of the naked little boy and his sister.
I heard a sigh, and then soft breathing, and I looked down. The children were standing directly in front of me, silent and unmoving. I reached out my hand to touch the little boy’s shoulder. His skin was unearthly cold, and it seemed a miracle to me that he could be alive, even given the legendary hardiness of these people.
Unfurling the blanket I carried under my arm, I draped it as best I could around the little boy’s body and drew him to me. I felt his tiny hand on my leg, stroking it as though to assure himself that I was there. From the other side, I felt his sister’s hands on my other leg, her fingers moving under the blanket, like spiders along the inside of my thigh through my robe. When the child’s fingers caressed my manhood with an insinuating knowledge surely beyond her years, I pulled back in shock. I reached down roughly and pushed her fingers away.
What happened next must have occurred in a matter of seconds, but I remember it as though it was hours instead, and it still haunts my nightmares today.
My hand was seized in a vise-like grip. It was not the grip of a little girl, though the fingers grasping mine gave every appearance of belonging to a human child. I screamed in pain, for it felt as though the bones in my hand would surely crack under the pressure. At the same moment, the gentle caress of the little boy became a heavy, vicious clamp on my thigh. A row of dagger-sharp fingernails ripped into the flesh of my leg and dug deeper, securing the little boy’s grip. I screamed again, and I heard a horrible serpentine hiss issue from the little boy’s mouth. I pushed him away with all my might, but still he held fast. The little girl, too, refused to relinquish her excruciating grip on my hand.
