by Ian Roberts
Brulé knows this sacred place would pull a person in and strip them to their core. He wonders now, as he feels the presence of the forest play on his own mind, what trespassing here would do to a mind without ceremony, preparation and unattended by elders. He gazes at the fire, the warmth relaxes the tension in his body. Steam gently rises off the hot leather of his leggings. His mind slowly drifts, loses focus, when suddenly, he bolts upright, aware of movement just outside the cave. There, right in front of him, lit by the fire, stands a commanding soldier. His chain mail and armour gleam in the firelight.
“Father.”
“You fled, Etienne.”
“You know what I fled. The endless dead, and your slain, ravaged body hanging from the city wall.”
“You see it approaches you here.”
“I see that…now. But why does it become so inevitable, the war, the death?”
“That is not your question to answer. At least not now. You have chosen correctly. That choice creates destiny. The clearer the destiny, the less the choice. Follow whatever sliver of hope you can find…to the end.”
As suddenly as he had come, he was gone.
When the priest awakens the next morning, sunlight streams and flickers through the trees. Raindrops, still hanging from the leaves, sparkle in the morning light. The woods clamor with birdsong. The forest seems rejuvenated, alive, the air fresh.
Brulé hands the dry robe to the priest, who quickly pulls it over his head and body, anxious to hide his nakedness. He starts to cough, but not as violently as the night before. Brulé hands him the bark pot from the fire.
“Drink it. It will help your cough.”
LeCharon clasps the warm, bark pot with both hands, breaths in the dense, steaming herbs, and then sips the tea. They sit quietly, watching the fire. Then suddenly LeCharon starts, looking at Brulé in alarm, “The Iroquois, the fire?”
“No Iroquois would come here. They fear it. This forest is sacred to the Wendat. We call it the Forest That Speaks Only Truth. Or perhaps you did not hear.”
“I did hear. She is here. With me. I will not leave this isle. If I go I may never return.”
Brulé observes the priest keenly, realizing that it was not only LeCharon’s body that had taken a cruel beating from this forest the night before.
“Drink. We must find the others.”
LeCharon finishes the tea as Brulé prepares for them to leave. The moment they head into the woods, LeCharon gasps. Brulé turns and sees him cowering. Before him, lodged in a tree, a red face stares back, its grotesque features grimacing. He sees another. Brulé takes him by the arm and leads him over to one. He touches the wooden mask and pulls LeCharon’s hand over so he can touch it.
“You saw these yesterday?”
LeCharon nods, wide-eyed, as he suddenly notices similar masks lodged in trees throughout the forest.
“Healing and vision masks,” Brulé explains. He realizes how terrifying they would appear to someone in the dark, lost and alone…and here of all places. He wonders again at the chance, and destiny, that brought the priest to the very place most spiritually alive for the Wendat. The vision quest, with its terrifying visions, dramatic insights, and above all the need for surrender, requires the guidance of experienced elders and rituals. It requires preparation and fasting. Stumbling into the forest as LeCharon had, afraid, resistant, may have pushed the man too far and shown him too much.
He watches now as the priest stares from mask to mask, then up into the trees, then down to something at his feet. His attention is being pulled like that of young child, seeing things anew, fresh, alive, startling.
Gently pulling LeCharon’s arm to encourage him to follow he starts to run at a slow pace through the forest. The priest shuffles along behind. Brulé knows the others will have waited at the end of the portage until he arrived and that would give them a safe vantage point down the lake to have an early warning of the arrival of Iroquois canoes. He feels certain they would have come to find him if they saw Iroquois approaching so he moves quickly through the forest. LeCharon limps along, desperate not to get left behind.
Back on the portage trail, Brulé waits for the priest to catch up. He had washed LeCharon’s bleeding arms and legs the night before and rubbed the deep cuts and lashes with clay to help stop the bleeding. But they now bleed afresh. Blood runs down his calves and forearms. He cuts such a pathetic and broken figure.
Well-trodden for generations, the winding portage trail settles Brulé. Finding himself in that forest unprepared the night before had revealed to him many visions. In addition to his brief experience with his father, Nuttah had been there. And his daughter. And Kinta. His spirit animal, the White Hawk, had come to him also. But he was unprepared, so the outcome felt vague and unsettling, yet at the same time both powerful and demanding. Now back on the portage trail, feeling his feet firmly gripping the earth with each step, breath filling his lungs, he reconnects to a world more familiar, concrete and physical.
They make good time until Brulé comes to an abrupt stop. He kneels, tracing his hands over footprints. The rain has washed most of them away but they were deep. Deep from a hard, twisting wrench. On his knees now, piecing the clues together, all of a sudden the ground seems covered in deep, forced footprints. A struggle. A small group caught by a second large group, a fight, brief, and then all the footprints head back down the portage trail. The clues rapidly coalesce in his awareness, as a sense of alarm and dread engulfs him.
He leaves the trail now and runs through the woods. He’s forgotten about the priest in his rising fear of what must have befallen the others and who might be waiting at the end of the portage. LeCharon finally catches up to Brulé, only to see him bolt off into the woods. The priest, terrified at once again being abandoned, stumbles along the portage trail as quickly as he can, muttering incoherently.
Brulé runs until he finally sees sky through a break in the trees ahead — the lake at the end of the portage. He slows, crouches and silently crawls towards the clearing at the shoreline. Hearing nothing unusual, he sinks still lower and moves up to the very edge of the clearing. Then he sees it. He buckles, as if someone has physically punched him in the gut. Three figures tied to trees, burnt and mutilated.
An image momentary flashes in his mind —Totiri, surrounded by flames, approaching him with the glow of a red-hot tomahawk gleaming in the night.
Brulé lets out a howl. He knows the Iroquois are gone, but he doesn’t care now. If his son and Savignon are dead, he doesn’t care about Iroquois, or guns. He pounds his fist on the ground.
He hears LeCharon coughing behind him, then watches as he approaches into the clearing and grasps the sight before them. The priest lets out a cry at the sight of the tortured bodies, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the horror.
“The trumpet of judgment blows,” whispers the priest.
“The trumpet of judgment,” repeats Brulé to himself. “What have I done?”
Suddenly, he hears the cawing of a crow. A distinct cry, two long, a pause, one short. Brulé lifts his head, alert now. The cry repeats, two long, then the short. Brulé returns the call. And again, the bird calls out. Relief overwhelms him. He inhales deeply, able to breath again. Through the forest, on the other side of the clearing, he sees Savignon, then Atsan and Tonda.
Brulé rushes over to Atsan embracing him in a tight bear hug, as if to squeeze life back into the hollow, anguished space he had just felt inside at the thought of their death. He laughs and embraces Savignon.
“God, I thought that was you.” Then he turns abruptly, “Who are they?”
“Algonquin from Québec,” answers Savignon.
“What’s left of them,” adds Atsan.
“I recognize one of them. He is Petashwa’s assistant,” says Savignon.
Tonda gestures at the ground of the clearing. “Many Iroquois were here.”
“Did you find anything?” asks Brulé.
“We saw where they were captured when
we came down the trail. Nothing else.”
“I saw that too,” notes Brulé.
“The Iroquois were heading our way to attack the Wendat,” Savignon concludes. “Just as we thought they would. But then they overtook these three, tortured them, then went back the way they came.” He shakes his head. “ I don’t understand. What could they have learned from them that would make them go back?”
“With their guns they would fear nothing,” says Atsan.
Tonda points at the mutilated bodies, “They were tortured for information. This is not ritual torture. Too quick.”
“But why would they talk?” asks Atsan.
“These Algonquin do not live like one of us anymore, Atsan. They live in Québec, in the fort. They sleep in a bed. They eat at a table. Maybe for twenty years now. The inner armour a Wendat has to protect himself from pain, they have lost that. Once the fear of pain arises you cannot hide it. The Iroquois saw that. And, they know that for Algonquin to travel this route now, it must be a crucial mission. Whatever the Iroquois discovered here was enough for them to abandon their attack on the Wendat.” Brulé paces as he speaks, looking from one dead body to the next, trying to piece together the scene and to better read its meaning.
“Petashwa knew the risk from the Iroquois this year,” says Savingon. “We told him. Why would he risk this route?”
“He would not have allowed it. Nor would Champlain,” adds Brulé. “And if not them, then who would have that kind of authority to make such a reckless decision? It makes no sense.”
Brulé paces now and as he passes the remains of the fire in the middle of the clearing, something catches his attention and he kneels. On the edge of the fire pit, held perhaps by wet fingers before being dropped in the flames, lies a two-inch piece of paper with a perfect right angle. He studies the ashes of the fire. They had been flattened by the rain, but no one had poured a bucket of water on them, disturbing them, to put out the fire. Which meant they had probably finished their torture just as it started to rain hard. If the Iroquois had left shortly afterward, Brulé calculates they were by now close to two days away.
Brulé stands again. “They carried a letter. The Iroquois found it, could not read it, burnt it, then they tortured them to find out what it said.”
“That message must have been for you,” says Savignon. “Who else?”
“Petashwa would not risk this whole expedition on a piece of paper.” He paces again now. “He is much too smart and crafty for that. He would not hide anything in the canoe because he knows the Iroquois would want a birch bark canoe and take it. So he must have put something…” He stops pacing and looks again at the bodies, “something on them.”
Brulé stares over at the three gruesome, charred forms. He twitches and hunches down, his body reacting involuntarily to the memory these bodies provoke. Of the three, the one in the middle and on the left, stripped naked, are burnt and beaten beyond recognition. Only Petashwa’s assistant remains recognizable. He hangs slumped, lashed to the tree, the top of his head bashed in, his chest and neck burnt black.
“He defied them. The other two showed their fear and the Iroquois found out what they needed. Then they clubbed him and left.”
Brulé goes over to the body of the assistant. His belt hangs loose, slit. An Iroquois must have cut it to slide off the pouch in search of valuables. Brulé pulls the belt free, studies both sides, then throws it away. The man’s leggings have slid down his thighs. He bends, lifts one leg of the Algonquin and pulls his left legging off. He pulls it inside out, studies it, then pitches it aside. He pulls the right legging off, and turns it inside out. “Ah”
“What is it?” asks Atsan.
“Damn you, Champlain,” yells Brulé. “You damn fool!”
“What?” clamor the others.
Brulé holds up the message inked along the inside of the leather legging.
“Champlain is out here.”
“But why? Why now?” asks Atsan.
“He does not come for twenty years and he chooses now.” He flings the legging into the woods in a fury. “That is why the Iroquois went back. Capturing Champlain is more enticing than attacking the Wendat. That can wait. They think of ransom and more guns. A lot more guns.”
“But why is he out here? He must be coming to see you,” concludes Savignon.
“He only says where we are to meet them. And when. And he comes with a new Jesuit superior…but why would he be coming? None of it makes sense.” He looks over at LeCharon and asks, “Du Barre. Do you know him?”
LeCharon looks up, wide-eyed, gaping. Then he gazes up at the trees. “Oh brother, what a strange path you choose for glory.”
The priest’s mental collapse is increasingly apparent to Brulé; the man seems unhinged, lost in some Biblical universe within himself.
“Champlain wants us to meet him four days before the full moon at the Lake of Many Bays.”
“That is four days from here,” offers Savignon.
“But we would not have got the message for days yet. We never would have got there in time,” says Atsan.
“Champlain probably planned on making camp and resting until we arrived. He would want us with him when he meets the Wendat. But still, why risk sending these three so recklessly. And why is he here?”
Atsan points to the three bodies, “This all happened before the rain. The Iroquois will be at least a day and a half ahead of us by now. We cannot warn Champlain.”
“The damn stupidity of it,” curses Brulé. “Why now? Of all times. If the Iroquois catch them, that will be the end of New France. Champlain, a prisoner. And no chance for us to get guns.”
The disaster that will soon overtake the French camp, and all his plans, overwhelms Brulé. He sinks to his knees as the full implication of Champlain’s predicament hits home — the unraveling of his plan for guns, the deadly shifts of power to the Iroquois that will ensue, and with the English too, and perhaps the fall of Québec…as well as the hopelessness of defending the Wendat.
As the devastation unfolds, layer by layer, in Brulé’s mind, LeCharon standing alone in the clearing, lifts up his arms, as if to petition the trees. “Whose thought is this and from whence does it come? Within me? Is this God’s work?” His voice gains power as his raving intensifies. He holds his head high, preaching now to the forest. But as mad as his words sound, the clarity with which they are uttered and the power of his speech, starts to draw Brulé back to the moment.
“I watch it,” continues LeCharon to the trees, “I am its witness. We are but puppets before the Lord. Behold, ‘tis all rehearsed here before the Fall. Yet we are lifted up out of this smoke and flame unto our Glory.”
“One priest dead,” says Savignon, “the other mad.”
Brulé suddenly looks up at Atsan, then Savignon and scrambles to his feet. “The fall, the falls,” he says, “Smoke River. A day on foot. We could go down the rapids. Below the falls, the portage leads to the Lake of Many Bays. We could be there before the Iroquois.”
Tonda raises his hands as if to ward off a blow or spell as Savignon, too, rejects the idea, “No one has ever gone down those falls. They are cursed.”
“Achak did,” corrects Brulé.
“That is a legend,” says Atsan. “He is a spirit, not a man.”
“A panther lives in that water, “ explains Tonda. “You will hear her laugh as she pulls you under. She will hold you. You will never join the ancestors. No man will be allowed to pass.”
“Can she take us all?” asks Brulé.
“Fear the panther, White Hawk,” warns Tonda. “More than you fear Iroquois. I think you do not understand the price you would pay.”
Brulé recognizes their fear, but the very moment the idea of the falls came to him, the string of disasters that had been unfolding in his mind, if the Iroquois capture Champlain, suddenly stopped. He now sees a way forward and with a brute resolve, he ignores everything else.
“Where are the canoes?” he asks.
&
nbsp; Savignon points and Brulé bolts across the clearing through the trees to where they are hidden. He shoulders one and starts back across the clearing and up the trail. As he passes Atsan, he warns, “Keep the priest safe.”
Three Wendat stand in confusion looking at one another. “He will need someone to cut the trail. He cannot get a canoe there alone,” says Savignon.
Tonda lifts his hand and shakes his head, trying to dissuade Savignon. But Savignon’s fear wrestles with his loyalty to Brulé. He cowers at the misery that would fill his existence after death with no Wendat, no ancestors, just the torment of this vicious sorcerer, the panther, to torment him. But as he watches Brulé run up the trail with the canoe, the moment he disappears from view, Savignon knows he must follow. He too now crosses the clearing, selects a pack, and without looking back at the others for fear they’ll argue him out of his madness, hurries up the trail in pursuit of his friend.
Atsan knows as Savignon races across the clearing that he too will follow. He hurries to catch up, hauling the other canoe onto his shoulders. He yells over at LeCharon, “You must follow me. If I leave you with him,” nodding at Tonda, “he will kill you.”
His words fail to register with LeCharon. The priest gazes past Atsan, “Fear not death in a world of blind and vicious men.” Atsan, frustrated at the priest’s resistance, points at the three mutilated bodies and then at Tonda. “He will do that to you if you stay with him alone.” The image finally seems to break through LeCharon’s jumbled mind and he grips Atsan’s arm. “Follow me,” and he starts up the path with the second canoe, the priest close behind.
Tonda left alone in the clearing, bellows in frustration and throws his tomahawk; it spins across the clearing striking deep into a tree.
Savignon, with a tomahawk in each hand, cuts a trail through the forest. He works fast, cutting each branch as close to the trunk as he can so no sharp ends could puncture the fragile bark canoe. Brulé and Atsan come after him, with LeCharon limping behind, but determined to keep up.
