A Discovery of Strangers

by Rudy Wiebe

  We sup on singed skins, a soup of pounded bone, which is so acrid as to excoriate the mouth, and a soft larva each for an amen. Moment by moment we pray that Mr. Back with St. Germain may locate the Indians very soon, who before God remain our last hope.

  I must explain, Reverend Sir, that your son, though debilitated by perfect famine, did not expire of it. He was the finest navigator among us, and in our march from the Northern Ocean after August 25, which soon became desperate because the untimely coming of winter had driven the reindeer, which were to have been our source of food, south before us, your son was always in second position with the compass, immediately behind the leader, a voyageur who every hour took turn and turn about with his fellows breaking trail through the snow. Such a position was necessary for him to keep us on the most direct route for Fort Enterprise crossing the featureless tundra, but you will understand that he exhausted himself following in that single track, and when he finally admitted that he could no longer continue in that position, and I took his place, he was already greatly weakened.

  Also, the tripe de roche that we scraped from the rocks, unpalatable and feeble as it was, became our main source of food, and was nauseous to all, but caused him the greater pain of bowels. After a time it was necessary to eat our extra skin footwear, but then we had none to put on at night, and those we wore wet from the day’s exertions froze on our feet as we slept.

  No language that I can use will convey a just idea of that painful journey. I shall merely mention that in traversing the tundra we had to coast four lakes and cross three huge rivers never before seen, and when after nine days we managed to cross the Coppermine River at the double rapids, every reserve of strength your son had was gone. He could no longer walk and there was no one who could carry him. We would not leave him alone while the rest continued, as we permitted the voyageurs to do when they weakened. We finally crossed the river on October 4, and on October 7 Hepburn and I remained with your son while Lieutenant Franklin and the rest of our party continued towards Fort Enterprise as best they could. A day later Mr. Back, with the translator St. Germain and several strong Canadians, struck out ahead to seek help of the Indians. To date we know nothing of the progress of Mr. Back’s party, but we do know that eight men have been left behind.

  This includes the Mohawk Indian voyageur, Michel Terohaute. It was he who killed your son Robert, who did not die of famine. Michel shot him, and he was instantly, painlessly gone.

  I can offer no consolation to you for such an inexpressible loss. But my prayer is directed to Him Who alone is able to pour balm on the broken heart, for I have every confidence that your son is in His presence in Whom we will all and for ever rejoice. I shall endeavour to continue this narrative, as I am able.

  Sunday, November 4th

  Towards evening on November 1 Joseph Peltier became quite speechless, and passed away without a sound during the night.

  François Samandré, whose strength throughout the day appeared to be greater, as if he were terrified at the fate of his companion, grew very low and lived only until the morning.

  We have removed the deceased as far as we can from the fireplace, but are incapable of laying them outside the house, and spend what strength we have bringing in wood we remove from the nearest walls of the storehouse, which barely suffices to keep the fire going.

  Hepburn’s limbs have now begun to swell, and the incisions in Adam’s legs have been renewed. Lieutenant Franklin found one more reindeer skin today, but unfortunately without larvae.

  The weather is comparatively mild. The view down Winter River as beheld from the house, at all times beautiful, was uncommonly so today.

  I must conclude in haste, no help has come. We have heard nothing from Mr. Back, but know that ten of our twenty Expedition members no longer live.

  Lieutenant Franklin assures me that on October 9 last, when the Canadians Bélanger and Perrault were unable to continue with his party and turned back with Michel to rejoin us because of weakness, it was Bélanger who carried the rifle and ammunition. But Michel alone came to us with the note from Lieutenant Franklin, carrying the rifle, and seemed surprised that both Perrault and Bélanger were mentioned in it as being with him. He insisted, angrily, that he had not seen either, nor had they come with him.

  To us Michel appeared then to be, despite Lieutenant Franklin’s note concerning his weakness, very strong and he went out great distances to hunt every day, though it appeared he shot nothing. He once fed us the flesh of a wolf that had, he said, been killed by the stroke of a deer’s horn. We believed his story then, but afterwards became convinced from circumstances, the detail of which you may be spared, that what he brought us, and used privately for himself when he went away for several days at a time, must have been some portion of the two lost men. He may have murdered them, or found their bodies in the snow, but Lieutenant Franklin conjectures that Michel having first destroyed Bélanger to obtain the rifle, completed his crime by Perrault’s death to screen himself from detection.

  His subsequent conduct showed that he was certainly capable of committing such a deed.

  I can only hurry on with memories too painful, and with strength too far gone, and trust that somehow through God’s grace these words may reach you with some small comfort of fact. The fire in the fireplace built so well the previous year from clay and stones by your talented son throws a most grateful heat, but we are too weak to keep it fed and suffer much from cold, though we wear every particle of clothing we have left, indeed have not removed any in two months.

  Your son died instantly. After our morning devotions on Sunday, October 20, Hepburn and I were at some distance, endeavouring to gather wood, while your son was sitting up in his blankets near the fire. I heard him speak loudly several times, as in admonishment, to Michel, who was readying his outfit to advance on the Fort with Hepburn. Then I was startled to hear the report of a gun.

  When I arrived, I found your dear son lying lifeless, a ball having, it appeared, entered at his forehead. I was at first horror-struck, that in a fit of despondency he had hurried himself into the presence of his Almighty Judge, by an act of his own hand. But the conduct of Michel soon excited other suspicions, which were confirmed, when upon examination, I discovered that the shot had entered the back part of the head and passed out at the forehead, and that the muzzle of the gun had been applied so close as to set fire to the nightcap behind. The fired rifle, which was of the longest, could not have been placed in a position to inflict such a wound, except by a second party. Michel now held a shorter gun in his hand, and upon my enquiry, replied that Mr. Hood had called him into the tent to clean the short gun, and that while his back was turned the long gun had gone off.

  Hepburn had now arrived and Michel moved with the short gun between us, declaring himself incapable of committing any act as would endanger Mr. Hood, the gun must have gone off accidentally. Hepburn tried to speak, but Michel turned angrily towards him and demanded if he accused him of murder. He was very strong and held the loaded gun, it was unsafe for us to say anything to each other on the subject in his presence, as he understood English well enough.

  I am, however, perfectly convinced that he committed the desperate act. He had insisted we must try to reach Fort Enterprise, but knew we would never leave your son behind as long as he was alive.

  The loss of such a distinguished officer of such varied talents and application, to say nothing of the bosom friend he became to me, I cannot express to you. Daily we had expected the worst, and yet we never did despair. Had my poor friend been spared to revisit his native land, his variety of talent in scientific observations, together with his maps and drawings, which have been the admiration of everyone who has seen them, must have rendered him a distinguished ornament to his profession, and I should look back to this period, where we never spoke but with cheerfulness, with unalloyed delight.

  The Bible was lying open beside the body, as if it had fallen from his hand, and it is certain he was reading it
at the instant of his death. Blessed are they that die in the Lord, for their works follow after them. Amen.

  We wrapped and removed the body into a clump of willows behind the tent and, returning to the fire, read the funeral service in addition to the evening prayers, and also some of the forms of prayer to be used at sea, as were appropriate, for truly our eternal Lord has here spread out and compassed these lands like “the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end.” We passed the night in the tent together without rest, everyone being on his guard.

  Reverend Sir, the sailor Hepburn and I were in great perplexity. We were ill and very nearly destroyed by famine, our friend whom we had nursed for weeks as best we could now lay murdered, we were convinced of it, though we could not communicate beyond glances, by the man who purported to have returned to save us and who now for the first time addressed us with such a tone of superiority and blatant behaviour as evinced he considered us completely in his power. He kept himself always armed and between us, and would allow us no conversation, giving vent to various expressions of hatred towards white people, some of whom he said had killed and eaten his uncle and two brothers on the Ottawa River as they had devoured Mohawks for two hundred years. Such dreadful stories of course abound in the Canadas where he originated, though we have heard very few here in the north, indeed it seems the natives here abominate such abhorrent customs. In our weakness we could not by any device escape him, and knew he would attempt to destroy us at the first opportunity that offered, and that all that restrained him from doing so immediately was his ignorance of the way to the Fort.

  We could not therefore mourn your son properly as befits a beloved brother in Christ. We determined on trying for the Fort, and left that horrid place the following day. Four days later we at last sighted the Dogrib Rock, though it was no more than fifteen miles, and it was here that Michel left us for the first moment alone, saying he wished to gather some tripe de roche. Hepburn instantly confirmed me in the opinion about the circumstances of poor Hood’s murder, and that there was no safety for us except in Michel’s death, and I was thoroughly convinced of the necessity of such a dreadful act. Immediately upon Michel’s coming up, I put an end to his life by shooting him through the head with a small pistol I carried concealed throughout the Expedition.

  We discovered then that Michel had gathered no tripe de roche, but had halted for the purpose of putting his gun in order with the intention of attacking us, as we had suspected.

  Hepburn and I were another six days before we staggered into Fort Enterprise, though we had less than twelve miles to travel, where we had the melancholy satisfaction of embracing Lieutenant Franklin and his companions, the wretchedness of whose abode it is impossible for me to describe.

  We weep with you, Sir, and with your family for a gentle, tender-hearted son and brother now lost. His talents shed a lustre upon the Expedition, even as the memory of his blessed spirit has given me the strength to write these clumsy words with much crossing out, which I pray God in mercy may in the manner best known to Himself reach you, to offer a few moments of consolation to you in your inexpressible loss.

  It is evening and we three are still alive at Fort Enterprise, together with Adam, the Indian translator, very low. We have made up an outline report and a packet of letters to our loved ones. Fear of death has long held no meaning for us. We pray now for peace to die in the Lord. With the highest esteem, I am, Reverend Sir,

  Your very sincere friend,

  John Richardson

  The name for it is “long pig”, you ever heard of that?

  Ask any English tar an’ he’ll tell you. Give him a drink, an’ he’ll tell you more than you can stomach, ha-ha!

  Stomach all right it is, an’ was, all of them bloody big Canadian paddlers dead, just dropped an’ dead on that trek from the Northern Ocean over all those rivers an’ barrens an’ snowdrifts an’ rocks an’ that big double rapid on the Coppermine, Obstruction Rapids, what took us nine days trying to get across till St. Germain, who could do anything, made that cup out of canvas an’ we pulled ourselves across one by one — the rapids really finished us. But those Canadians were dead, an’ our English officers alive — except poor Hood shot when he lies dying already, our officers live to come home an’ every one of them quick as winking Knights of the Garter an’ famous.

  An’ me too, alive, the one yattering tar daft enough to go every step with them when even the Orkneymen — God be blessed, quick Orkneymen! — know enough to run early in the hard going, me a sailor of the bottom class given a soft lick on the London docks all those years, an’ now more than soft in the sweet air of Van Dieman’s Land, sweet if you ain’t a gaolbird here, all because I come alive out of that trek, you think ten Canadian voyageurs are falling down dead because they were weaker than us? Ha!

  You hear me now, I lived with those Canadians for three years, an’ ate an’ slept with them too. More than I wanted, but that’s the English way, the servants sleep together whether they can talk to each other or not, I saw those buggers work, blessed be God! work strong as any ox an’ so fast on their feet or with their hands you couldn’t see them move, that quick, an’ when the rapids there come roar a white wash down a canyon bend they’d never seen before an’ those great canoes thin as paper an’ loaded deep to the gunnels, you should of heard them laugh, riding that, where one wrong stroke an’ it all goes smash! riding it like ducks light an’ sailing. Or seen them paddle across a lake singing to a rhythm that would break your back before your lungs, sixty strokes every minute between pipes, that’s a hour steady without a stop! I seen them naked, many a time, they had shoulders an’ chests like a great Scots Clydesdale.

  An’ only two of them lived, that’s all. Two of the eleven, or twelve — talk about disciples, ha! One alive was Solomon Bélanger, le gros they called him, his brother le rouge was … well, left behind to “rest”, like we said to them then. But Bélanger le gros was so strong he walked through snow from Fort Providence to Enterprise in five days with mail in November, 1820, more than one hundred and fifty miles of devil’s winter, the last thirty-six hours without stopping, straight into a snowstorm an’ come in, we had to break the ice off his face to know who it was. An’ a year later it was him found the Indian track for Mr. Back that saved us all, an’ us in the Fort giving up, mostly dead.

  He was one that lived, an’ Joseph Benoît the other, a square hulk as wide as he was tall, an’ so thick no one could lock his arms round him to throw him. I never knew which was stronger, Joseph was the only one ever dared to say a word back at Solomon, though once he didn’t blow his breath talking, he just grabs le gros by his leather pants an’ shirt an’ hoists him over his head an’ throws him in the Yellowknife River. I think Joseph could have taken le gros if he had wanted to. I saw them dance around the fire watching each other close enough, like two old dogs who’ve known each other for ever, you know, circling and pissing in the same spot, one beside the other.

  Those two the only ones, the other ten dead. What for?

  Ah-h-h-h God … I think there were times John Franklin thought they died because they cursed so much, those Canadians. It seems to me a good easy vice for working men, it don’t take time from work, nor energy, an’ costs nothing, but the Lieutenant thought their cursing was so sinful. He couldn’t even understand their Cree French! The name of God an’ all His shining attributes an’ history was there plain enough, known or unknown, an’ every blistering part of the Lord’s body uttered in vain, though the way they said it they sure didn’t figure it was vain. I don’t know if they ever cursed him — Sir John — he just a lowly lieutenant then, an’ near the end they were even past cursing after five hundred miles in those paper canoes in an ocean always nearer ice than water. Mr. Back, Sir George now, mostly never translated everything they said, though sometimes I thought he explained more than needful, a raunchy little midshipman hard as a rock an’ needing something, anything I guess, with no women inside a month’s walking to titter h
im up like they always did. But when we left those Canadians behind in the snow, one skeleton after the other with a thin blanket an’ mouth bleeding scurvy, those poor buggers were all praying like the true Christians they was raised to be, not one of them wasn’t.

  Why ten of twelve, falling down? I’ll tell you: they had carried so much of our useless stuff — useless for staying alive, if that’s what you’re after in that country, an’ what else can you chase there once you’re forced to get down to it? — carrying so much stuff even on foot in bloody big packs even after all the canoes were smashed, that strong as they were, they got caught on a neat point: what between starving an’ dropping of scurvy an’ freezing, they were just worked to death.

  On that Expedition I worked as hard as any Indian dog I ever saw, an’ I expected that being the only servant so called to four officers who ate what we ate — if there was anything — they worked hard too as officers go, an’ walked every step like us after the canoes were gone an’ carrying their own notebooks an’ instruments, but I tell you I never worked like those voyageurs piled high as donkeys. An’ when the Doctor an’ me were left alone to get to Fort Enterprise, Hood an’ Michel both dead, shot — o, the Doctor he had a good hand then, still steady enough with a barrel notched in the ear to make the one shot he had time for, that shot neat an’ quick as threading a needle with one stroke an’ Michel was in Mohawk heaven or hell, let him rest in peace or heat, whichever he found. But we did that together, me an’ him. You don’t think one of us could of done it alone?