A Discovery of Strangers

by Rudy Wiebe

  “It’s very strange,” he adds thoughtfully, “hard for us to understand. Maybe it’s eating together that’s so bad for them — I’ve never seen a White woman, so I can’t tell — maybe that’s why White men never travel with one?”

  Greenstockings has not heard his contemplative speculations that are tangling him further — she is thinking about the rib.

  “A rib from a tree?” she asks him, smiling and ready to laugh. That’s a good story. A tall tree surely has as many ribs as branches. As it is, there are never enough women in the world so men never leave them alone, but if women were as numerous as branches, the fewer men would be kept so busy running after them that at least some women would be left in peace some of the time, maybe as long as the female caribou, who with their growing calves live free from males for an entire year. She laughs aloud for happiness: what a happy story! And in her laughter catches the essence of her father’s contemplations. “So — just never eat with them!”

  “No no,” Keskarrah, always a man, spoils it. “The rib is from the man, one rib only, that is where Whitemud woman comes from.”

  Greenstockings asks, “These English do have their own women, somewhere? And their first woman has a man for her mother?”

  Her laughter catches in her throat, then bursts out even louder at this truly incredible story; Birdseye and Greywing answer her, and suddenly the lodge is shaking with laughter. What would such a first woman possibly look like! Even Keskarrah cannot help snorting aloud. But he stops suddenly.

  “Their stories seem to be only about men, they say their Soul Everywhere is a man also,” he explains gently. “I think the Whitemud story says that two men have to dream and work, really hard, to give birth to one woman.”

  Tears of laughter are running down the women’s cheeks. Astounded, they can only cover their mouths with their hands. They are hearing such a male story that Greenstockings knows she would never have heard it, so marvellously funny, without her father’s power to tell it. Did these first story men have very tiny nipples too, surrounded by a few coarse hair? How did their babies get born if they have no cunt — out of the two tiny holes in their two cocks? With nothing but a rib between them, and it bent so long and stiff as well? Her thoughts swim in laughter: if there are as many Whites somewhere beyond even the reach of the giant canoes as they insist — probably hidden under heaps of stuff they want someone to drag everywhere for them — what other fantastic stories do they have? There would be no time for anything like forgetting — only continuous laughter.

  “There’s trouble.” Keskarrah’s tone quiets them immediately. He is lying with his eyes closed, as if he has already wandered much farther than he wanted to. Indeed, as if he has betrayed himself.

  “The Whitemud story,” he says, “is not happy. Not like our story of the man and the ptarmigan-woman and how they make the snowshoes together. They’re both the same then, and different. I’ve only heard a little of Richard Sun’s story, but I don’t think I want to hear more. It sounds dangerous.”

  Greenstockings looks at him, silently.

  He says, “Stories are like ropes, they pull you to incomprehensible places. This rib story could drag us tighter together with Whitemuds than the endless killing of animals, which we agreed to do without a proper council — a few men quickly said ‘Yes, yes’ very loudly when Thick English asked it, and then no one dared say anything else. Hey! a story can tangle you up so badly you start to think different. I think these strange Whitemud stories could be strong enough to tie us down — though I should be old enough by now to have heard everything at least once.”

  He lies motionless, contemplating the luminous darkness under his own eyelids. Searching.

  “Everything,” he says softly, “is becoming dangerous.”

  In the lengthening silence no one looks at Birdseye. But the warm lodge filled with the tight smell of life and work and thinking suddenly sparkles with all their awareness of her bent, so worn, over interminable sewing. The beloved face none of them will see again except in the dark memory of their fingers; if they dare. They are as together now as they have been; but afraid. If Keskarrah were to open his eyes, lightning and flames would circle them.

  “These strangers are here now,” he says with staggering sadness. “It must be their fault. Never before has anything been wrong with the world.”

  “The ice on Copperwoman’s River,” Birdseye speaks softly, reassuringly, “it was very fresh. So thin I could see through it, and the beautiful fins of the grayling were brushing against it, blue as veins below the rapids.”

  “Rapids?” Keskarrah asks, very diminished. He has spoken all he can — the most powerful story cannot stop her, so he must answer. If he does so carefully enough, he may recognize the place and they will be warned.

  “Two of them, rapids, and the bare banks are without stones, a small curved lake, curved all white between them.”

  “Ah-h-h-h.” And Keskarrah will lie as long as necessary to travel the river faster than any bird, searching for those two rapids.

  But Bigfoot arrives first. He stoops into their lodge holding a long rifle in his stiff mittens, and for the first time a tall, black English hat sits on his head. He does not take that off as Birdseye welcomes him with a gesture to seat himself near the fire. After some time Keskarrah opens one eye, then opens them both, wider.

  “You’re welcome,” he says out loud without moving. And his tone is on such a bare edge of courtesy that the two girls almost dare show their laughter at Bigfoot’s appearance. It would have been hard for Greenstockings to imagine how fur from an ordinary beaver — that’s what they say it is — could enlarge and extend a man’s head upwards like that, but These English have done it, somehow, because there the hat is, tall as a stump on Bigfoot’s head, and as wobbly as the authority they assume he has over People just because he talks for them. How is it sewn together? What is the tiny curled edge that curves twice so gracefully around it? She has never touched one, though she thinks Boy English once was ready to lift the one on his head and place it on hers. Unfortunately before she noticed that she already had her knife at his pants, and he certainly understood nothing about playing with knives.

  “Have fish found the lake nets?”

  “O yes,” Bigfoot answers too quickly. “Many, many.”

  “And caribou?”

  Bigfoot gestures to the hides piled about the lodge, still too quickly. “Our women are very busy,” he says. “With meat too. Their paddle-slaves remain fat.”

  “True.” Keskarrah grins. “Those Halfmuds sit behind logs stuffing meat into their enormous mouths, no need to shoot them!”

  “What, ‘Halfmud’?”

  “You know, These English say they are made of mud and spit.”

  “Ahh … yes, I have heard something … Halfmud.” Bigfoot slowly gathers that into his ponderous comprehension. “Is that why they were so happy they found the white mud here?”

  “I think so. And also the large trees, though ours don’t have such big berries. I had heard all the White traders mix mud to smear between trees to build their houses, and I always thought they did that because they want beavers so badly, who build their houses with logs and mud rather than hides like smart People, but since I heard the story of how these Whites were made.…”

  Bigfoot sits motionless, confused by this confusing story.

  “It seems,” Keskarrah muses, staring into the fire, “they don’t need the animal circle that gives us life every day. They want to live inside straight walls, as straight as round trees can make them — maybe they have to live inside the crossed-together corners of the trees that gave them their endless sorrow and wrong! So … they tie these big trees together … they smear them over thick with their first ancestors … and white mud is surely the best for that … then they can live here a whole winter, surrounded … sheltered by everything they’ve already done wrong … and all of it smeared over by the life of their ancestors — waugh!”

  This rea
sonable explanation of White behaviour, which Keskarrah has wandered into aloud, startles his upper body up from his robes.

  “That’s power! No wonder Whitemuds are so strong — they always follow the power of their wrong!”

  Bigfoot slowly takes off the black hat, fumbles it between his thick fingers. There is a dent all around the hair on his head, which none of them has seen before.

  “The caribou,” he says finally, unable to follow Keskarrah in pursuit of White wrong, “many of them seem to be going away.”

  “I thought so,” Keskarrah says quietly, turning from what he has just understood; not wanting to think any further into what such a presence must mean for their winter’s living.

  “So many usually stay here, and the ice is now strong on the lake, they can avoid the wolves here, but they all seem to be leaving, going farther south into the trees.…”

  Keskarrah lets Bigfoot’s words grow gradually smaller until they trickle into nothing. It seems to Greenstockings that her father’s ancient skin glows in the firelight like a baby’s, newborn. She scrapes precisely around a maggot-hole in the tensile sacrifice of hide splayed white before her: that will have to be folded over, sewn tight to keep out a spear of cold. A Whitemud baby must look like a soft maggot growing in thick caribou hide, a tender grub squeezing itself, lengthening itself out into air, glistening in light. She feels a spasm of longing in her breasts flicker double-pronged through the folded length of her legs.

  “It may be like you’ve said,” Bigfoot bumbles on. “Too many caribou have died here for us, too fast.”

  “They won’t go on their winter paths?”

  “But … you dreamed them well.”

  Keskarrah lifts his head. “You’ve heard the Whitemud story. For them everything in the world has to be wrong.”

  Bigfoot agrees gloomily.

  “Before they found this place, Lastfire Lake took two of our hunters.”

  Bigfoot says, “Lakes have done that to us before.”

  “But not while we were hunting for strangers,” Keskarrah muses. “When you work hard to feed and clothe others.…” He pauses, but suddenly continues. “We are hospitable, no one with us will starve while we have something to eat, but perhaps … perhaps at some point we … make ourselves stranger too.”

  The two men glance at each other quickly, then away. There cannot be words to speak about that. Not yet, nor do they want to find them.

  Bigfoot says carefully, “Nevertheless you dreamed very well … the animals have fed us very well, everyone has enough so far, even winter clothing.”

  “Whitemuds want more.”

  Bigfoot says nothing, so Keskarrah says it. “They want sacks of meat for summer, they want it dried now.”

  “No one dries meat in dark winter.”

  “They don’t know what we do.”

  “I’ve told them, again and again, when the sun returns there are always other caribou.”

  “Not along the Everlasting Ice, where they want to go.”

  “But why will they go there?” Bigfoot is almost shouting. “We’ve told them, there’s nothing there but ice!”

  “I know,” Keskarrah says quietly. “I think we have to understand this: Whitemuds hear only what they want to hear.”

  Bigfoot turns the grotesque hat round and round in his hands; Greenstockings cannot see the faintest shadow of a seam there, it is made so beautifully.

  Keskarrah sinks down, props his head on one hand. His slow words walk step by step through their minds like wolves moving into the lethal curve of a hunt.

  “Nothing, nothing. For them the world is always wrong because they never want it to be … the way it is.”

  Bigfoot snorts in agreement, “Huh! They didn’t want our strong rivers, our many rapids, the quick coming of winter — they won’t want the Everlasting Ice if they get there! What does it matter, what they want? The world is what it is.”

  Keskarrah agrees. “If I could understand them, I’d gladly tell you. But before these Whitemuds got here, I think they’d decided how the world should be.”

  Bigfoot stares at him, obviously lost. Keskarrah adds,

  “Their first story tells them everything is always wrong. So wherever they go, they can see only how wrong the world is.”

  How can a place be — wrong? Despite her father’s disturbing words, Greenstockings cannot help grinning at Bigfoot. He knows that hunting is easy, and a delight, but the thinking that makes it possible — and the prayer — may well be more difficult than he can ever achieve. Keskarrah has told her often: talking is never just talk, even when it happens through Twospeaker with These English. Words mirror what there is in the world, as they also anticipate it, and when she sees Bigfoot glumly ponder the hides stacked thin and high as his hunter memory beside her, she understands his dilemma. He knows as well as she that, no matter with what respect and care the women may sew them, hides remain gifts from the animals, and gifts can disappear if snatched by the unworthy; knows that hides always belong to the animals, are their clothing for ever, and that only proper acceptance, hide and human worn together, will make the new animal-person who can live protected and strong in the killing winter cold. There is no way to force animals to surrender more than they wish. If pursued unworthily, with deception, the gifts of animals will be deceptive; perhaps even deadly. That is the way they protect themselves.

  Bigfoot’s glance slips towards Birdseye bent over her needle, behind her hiding leather, but instantly he shifts to a minute inspection of the black hat he is turning in his hands: as if fur dragged from this country, subjected to something unknowable in English hands and returned here so unrecognizable might nevertheless be somehow less strange — less lethal — than the animals they live with. Greenstockings knows her mother has caribou hide between her fingers, the steel needle These English have given Birdseye cuts through it quick as a fish — but how long after the coat is completed and given to them will it still be there to wear? And all the women along the lake whose lodges are filled with these swift steel needles and the thick, sweet smoke of drying meat, even if they can ever make enough to satisfy the Whitemuds while they are here, how much will remain for the Whitemuds to eat when they carry it away? Clothes and meat can disappear like the animals, whose gifts they are.

  Watching Bigfoot beyond her busy hands, Greenstockings ponders all this; ponders his blunt fingers stroking that seamless fur. Strange things, becoming stranger. Once they had agreed that Bigfoot had the possibility of mature, elderly wisdom, and she thought then she could easily accept being his third wife. But now he seems to have lost his discernment, his hunter balance; becoming the person everyone agreed should talk to These English has made him by turns either foolishly arrogant or obsequious, either superbly dignified or fawning without seeming comprehension. Only after he talks to Keskarrah for some time is he the man she remembers. But his eyes always were very small, as if grown just large enough to measure everything only by their own size.

  Keskarrah says carefully aloud, as if they have been speaking throughout this silence, “Not much can be said yet. You know I first thought they would go, be gone fast like those other two Whites — and these could be gone if they weren’t so slow and heavy, and the winter hadn’t caught them. But now … now I think … they’ll be gone at last only when the ice is very thin on the River of Copperwoman, thin enough to see fish through it.”

  Bigfoot looks up, hopefully.

  “The ice isn’t very thick, not yet.”

  “No. But it will have be thinner … much thinner.”

  At the corner of her eye Greenstockings senses her mother hunched almost into a ball around her working hands. And she understands: this is the knowledge Birdseye and Keskarrah have found together and wanted to avoid, but couldn’t. Almost another whole year of These English. She sees Bigfoot’s head droop wearily. That may be too long even for him and his fast, preening imitation of Thick English, and she cannot help grinning at him. As if Tetsot’ine would ever put
up with a man who strutted about as boss beyond the brief necessities of defence and raid. He must understand already that he has started acting different too fast.

  There is a thickness in her head, she cannot breathe for all the talk piled like animal bodies over her. Very deliberately she unstretches herself from her finished hide, stands up slender as willow into the cone warmth of the lodge. She pulls her parka down her strong arms and over her head, picks up the leather pail and bends, quick as thinking, out into the fresh mist of snow. Black raven is nowhere in the purple sky.

  The Dogrib boy, whom Bigfoot has kept as a slave since Thick English came, sits on his master’s pack, clutching Birdseye’s dogs close to him for warmth. One cowers as Greenstockings passes, but the bitch bares her bright teeth and she wonders once more if, when the long darkness is completely here and he sleeps behind his mud-smeared logs, Thick English will finally reach for dogs and discover warmth. Now he sleeps alone and cold every night, everyone knows he will have no woman and allows his men none; he seems to like only puppies still on the teat, before they grow old, cringing or savage in turn, and must hunt food for themselves. Like Bigfoot now, whom she once liked because it seemed then he need not be as heavy as other men. Despite his betraying little eyes.

  Down the granular snow of rocks away from the square houses she will not look at, beneath the willows to the river: the hole is frozen clear as the water itself. She cannot break through with her heel. She is searching for a loose stone when she hears voices, the string of sound trailing indecipherably down towards her. She looks up from the circle of crushed wet ice, about to sink her bucket there even as it hardens again: six of them are coming down to the river. And clearly the only English is Back, leading the toboggans, packs, guns towards her — Boy English coming fast on his little snowshoes, swinging them easily, he’s so strong, such a powerful walker the others half-trot to keep up.