The Last Beothuk

by Gary Collins

  They paddled on. Kuise playfully dragged a stick through the water over the side of the tapooteek as they went. They passed several beaver lodges, but it was unlikely the animals would show themselves in the middle of a sunny day, and Kop pushed on.

  Nearing a narrow section of the pond where the land was flat and low, they saw that abandoned, narrow beaver trails led through the water growth and to the forest banks, where only the gnawed stumps of hardwood trees remained. Tall cattails, their buds bursting, swayed and bent in the warm wind. Small birds flew and called. Insects buzzed above the water, and trout breached after them. The smell of a birthing summer permeated the air.

  In one of the water runs, Kop spotted a family of muskrat. Their little water trails widened behind them as they swam toward the pond. Three ducks using the beaver runs for nesting sprang into the air and flew away, squawking a warning. The muskrat kept coming. Kop lowered his paddle, gave a quiet command, and Tehonee and Kuise bent over double and waited. The boat drifted as quiet as a floating log. Kop readied his bow, nocked an arrow, and drew back the caribou-hair string. The drawn bow made a slight twang when the arrow was released. The aim was true, and the force of the sharp, fire-hardened wooden bolt took the lead water rat just under water. The small creature rose up in pain and began swimming in confused circles, the arrow sticking out of its scrawny chest. Another of the rodents swam toward it. It met the same fate. Its high squeaks of pain stopped suddenly as the black water filled its mouth.

  By late evening they had reached the spot where the water flowed out of the pond again and continued through the land toward other ponds on its passage to the sea. They were now in a swiftly flowing narrow brook. Like the previous one, its banks were encased with boulders, and again Tehonee and Kuise made their way along the banks. Small streams of water entered the main flow and small streams left it, creating miniature tributaries twisting through the tangled underbrush.

  This narrow rush of water caused Kop more concern than the previous river. Here the water ran waist deep. The bottom was uneven and treacherous. To allow more control, he tied a gad to the bow of the tapooteek. The twisted roots were strong and pliant and provided him with a short but strong painter. Twice he allowed his family aboard the boat when the river crossed long, deep pools of steady water.

  Before the sun had done with its westing, they had reached their night camp. It was a place well chosen, where an elbow in the brook exiting a long steady provided a back eddy into a quiet cove of still water beneath a moss-covered clearing sheltered under tall spruce trees.

  The travellers were weary and hungry. They pushed ashore and prepared for the night, which had already come down among the trees. The campsite had seen much use. There were firepits blackened with age and the remains of lodges in need of repair. Kop directed his family to one of them and began gutting the muskrat. Kuise walked past the dead firepits and thought how only one of them would glow on this night. Turning, she was about to voice her thoughts to Kop, but he was bent over his work, so she went in search of firewood. A fire was soon crackling and spitting. The skinned muskrat, skewered on sticks, was placed over it by Tehonee.

  “Look to the roasting of the water rats, my woman. The speckled trout are feasting on the flies. See? The pool is alive with their breaching. They are fat and sweet-tasting.”

  Kop headed for the pool below their camp, carrying a long spear in his hand. At the shallow, lower end of the pool, where the dark waters swirled into eddies before merging once more with the movement of the river, three weirs and their rock fences guided channels of water away from the main flow into a small, shallow cove also surrounded by rocks. It had been constructed by his people long ago. Winter ice and the surge of spring runoff had done some damage. Standing in the water, Kop spent a while repairing the fallen fences. He was swarmed by mosquitoes. The water hummed and rippled down over the rocks.

  Birds twittered and fussed in the trees overhanging the water, which were leaning in the evening breeze over his head. Kop broke armloads of branches from the birch and aspen trees. Their new leaves, soft, green, and sticky with sap, turned darker when he placed them in the water and worked them between the rock fences. Satisfied with the repairs, he sat on his haunches in the water. Flies buzzed and crawled over his face. From the shore across the river came the sound of his daughter playing. A faint wisp of smoke rose from Tehonee’s campfire, and he could smell meat roasting. He was hungry. He stretched out his left arm, and as the voracious mosquitoes landed on it, he snatched them with the fingers of his right hand, quick as a hunting bat, and let them fall into the flow of the weir channel. The dead mosquitoes drifted with the slow current, and the hungry trout followed them into the trap.

  Kop knew there were many trout in the shallow cove. He closed off the main channel to the weir with a heavy bough. The trout had no way out. He waded steadily into the water, which was little more than ankle deep. The trout swam away from him in fright. He crowded them into a narrow depression in the wall of the weir. Kneeling down with spear in hand, he began fishing. He waited until the panicked fish quieted into one slowly milling school. It took great skill to spear them. He had to be careful to gauge his thrusts just right: thrusting too hard could break the spear tip on the rocks of the weir. Many times he missed his target. But many times he did not. He hauled each trout, wriggling at the end of his spear, out of the water. He broke their necks and tossed them ashore. When he had speared enough, he pulled the bough from the weir channel again and skivvered his catch on a long branch. He walked across the river to the camp waiting for him. That night, the little band feasted. And on full bellies, they slept.

  Three days later, with five ponds and one short traverse behind them, and with the sun high over their heads, Kop and his family reached the coast upon which the great salt sea washed. It was a time of feasting, warm days, and soft moonlit nights. But all Kop could think of was what lay ahead for him at the cove of death.

  8

  For kopituk, the sea stretched into a huge distance of fear. Until the massive ships of the Unwanted Ones had appeared upon it, the ocean was a cornucopia of plenty. More fish and birds than all of his people could eat in the long, warm days of summer were there for the hunting and gathering. Kop’s intelligence told him these ships had not been built here, on his island, but had come from a great distance down over the edge of the sea—and where that one came from, there were many more. Now his guard was kept to the sea—of which beyond its outer islands he knew little—more than to the forest, of which he knew all. His meotick was no longer standing on level ground just above the shingled beach where the sea murmured its ageless rote. It was now hidden among the trees and could not be seen from the sea, from which it was always thought no danger could come.

  There were days when fog rolled in from the open ocean, creating swirling images of ghostly sailing ships, seeking the unwary shore, beneath the blanket. But Kop kept his vigil, and when the fog cleared, the ships were not there.

  The days progressed and grew longer. By day the Beothuk feasted on the bounty gleaned from the sea. And on the warm summer nights they slept with full bellies under the brilliant stars tangled in the trees above. And still Kop did not lead his family toward the cove of death. Though he did not tell Tehonee, he was waiting for some sign from the spirit world to allay his fears. Anointing the bones of the dead with the red stain was a sacred process performed with much reverence, usually by an elder of the tribe. In the absence of an elder, if the dead one was a warrior and hunter, another of the same ilk could do the ceremony. Kop was known among his people as a great hunter.

  “Buka was our best hunter, with the deadliest spear and the swiftest arrow,” Kop said. They were gathered around a slow-burning campfire downwind from their meotick, in the deep woods just up from the curved brown beach. “Better he had died at the hands of the white bear which roams the spring ice than by the cowardly act of the Unwanted Ones,” he
went on. Tehonee and Kuise listened with bowed heads. Tehonee was about to mention Buka’s hunt with the white bear but stopped herself in time. It was disrespectful for a woman to interrupt when a dead hunter was mentioned.

  As if seeing into her thoughts, Kop said, “I remember well when Buka slew the largest white bear of them all with his great spear and three arrows, swift as one, sent into its beating heart. It was in the same cove where his bones now lie at the mercy of the raven and the sly weasel. Do you remember when Buka talked of that great hunt, Tehonee?”

  ”I will never forget it, my hunter. But now you must tell it again for Kuise to hear. And through your eyes she, too, will know about the greatest of all hunters.”

  They had come down the river from the forested country in the season of budding trees and drifting sea ice, Kop told them.

  Several families journeyed together to the coast, where they dispersed into smaller groups along the shore choked with sea ice. Buka and Kop and their families camped in the same cove. “You were even smaller then, Small One, and carried on your mother’s back in a sling made from the soft hide of the fawn.” Kuise cried in pleasant delight to hear her name spoken as part of such an important tale. Kop held out his hand for silence, and when Kuise was quiet, admonished by her mother not to interrupt again, Kop continued.

  Thick ice drifted down from the north, and that spring, for as far as the eye could see from the highest cliffs, the sea was white. The winds blew hard in over the sea and pressed the ice sheets upon the land. In places where the ice met the rocks, the ice edges were beaten into grey slush, which surged back and forth with the tides. The seabirds were deprived of their shallow feeding ground offshore and sought out the black swatches of water between the ice pans near shore. They were so many, they cast shadows over the sun as they flew low in dense flocks over meadows of ice, canting and twisting in mid-air, searching for shallow water and food. The hungry birds found both near the shore, where the ice floes had grounded, creating oases of ice-cold water.

  In late evening they settled down in the swatches by the thousands. So noisy was the ruckus from them, the racket sounded like the drone of a winter wind through a steep-walled canyon. And hidden among the rocky crevices downwind from them, Kop and Buka waited for the eider ducks to settle down. Buka shot his arrows first from a notch among the rocks without revealing himself. Amid the din from the birds, the arrows’ flight was unheard. Kop nocked his arrow, and the two men fired bolt after bolt until their supply of arrows had been exhausted. Only the birds within range of the arrows were disturbed as they found their marks. They battered over the bodies of ducks alive and dead in a frantic attempt at escape. When the two men rose above the rocks, the crooning birds rose in panicked fright, eager to be away from the land, leaving behind dozens dead and dying. The two men dashed across the pans of ice like shadows in the twilight air. The black span of birds arched and dipped across the purple sky, seeking another swatch beyond the headland to the north.

  Buka and Kop pulled the dead ducks from the water. They reached some of the crippled ones with their bows. Others had swum farther out in the swatch, and they were soon killed. Dark would be upon the two men before these birds drifted within reach. They would return in the morning and hopefully find them. They sped back over the pans of ice that dipped under their feet as they ran. Though heavily laden, they stepped quick as the lynx over the shifting ice beneath their feet, and never stopped until they stood once again upon the solid, unmoving land.

  Buka and Kop returned to camp with their shoulders laden with the brown hens as well as many of the big king eider drakes. The birds were plucked, cleaned, and spitted on green alders. Fat from the plump birds fell and spat onto the coals. Their skins simmered and roasted and the feasting began.

  The pack ice lingered for many days more. Once, Buka returned to camp with a seal he had speared by a breathing hole in the ice floe, where he had patiently waited for hours. He told Kop there were many other seals which used the same hole.

  The next morning, before the sun had risen above the great white plain of sea ice, the two men were wending their way toward the breathing hole not far from shore. From their place of hiding behind a jagged ice hummock, where Buka had waited for so long the day before, it was clear there were many seals using the same air space. It was now more than a breathing hole and more like a small pool of water to which many seals came to crawl out onto the ice. Three seals had already pulled themselves out of the water, and on occasion others were rising up to view their surroundings. The two Beothuk lay still and quiet behind an ice hummock well chosen by Buka. The ice beneath them undulated and rolled with the swell of the ocean beneath.

  The seals soon relaxed their guard. Pointing their black noses toward the warmth of the rising sun, they lay down on their sides and dozed. Without speaking, but with the signs known to all hunters, Buka and Kop made ready their spears and were preparing themselves for the sprint which would put them between the seals and the swatch of water toward which the animals would surely flee at the first sign of danger. It was at that moment Buka motioned Kop back into hiding with a downward sweep of his hand while holding his favourite spear with the long, sharp, metal tip. He had spotted something big coming over the ice.

  The spear was Buka’s prized possession and never left his side, not even when he went to his sleeping robe at night. He had broken the spear shaft twice, but the tip had remained intact, and each time he had secured it to another wooden shaft. Kop knew well the story of how Buka had found the wondrous spear tip. For Buka, true hunter that he was, had related the story many times.

  Two spring hunts ago, Buka had hunted for seals by the shoreline at the end of a bay with a wide mouth. It was a favourite place for hunting seals. The ice was bearing down, and the tides swinging around the cape always brought loose ice, and with it, seals. The day was bright, and among the pans of ice, the wind was calm. Lying flat and hidden in his birchbark adothe—much smaller than a tapooteek—Buka was drifting with the ebb tide toward a small herd of seals. Some of them were dozing on the ice pans and others were bobbing up and down in the water. Buka’s canoe resembled a floating log, and after a few cursory stares at the object floating toward them, the seals largely ignored the threat. With his head just above the side of the canoe, Buka waited for his chance. He sensed more than saw the time to attack, and barely showing himself above the gunnels, he looked out. The closest seal to him was a big male.

  Buka threw his spear with all his might. The alert seal caught the movement and quickly rolled under the water. The well-thrown spear pierced the folds of fat on the seal’s neck but not the tough hide. The startled animal dived completely under, the spear tip broke, and the shaft floated innocently above the swirl of water created by the seal’s escape. Buka stood, grabbed his bow, and let loose two arrows. But the seals had been alerted by the commotion and were rapidly diving, and his arrows found water. Disappointed, Buka paddled for his arrows and spear shaft. He collected them and made his way back to shore.

  The tide had brought more ice around the bill of the cape while he hunted, and he had to return by a different, much longer route. He pulled his canoe upon a gravelly beach, and with the light fading and growing cold, he decided to camp for the night. He was gathering driftwood for a fire when he saw an odd-shaped piece of wood, not natural to him, partially embedded in the beach sand, well up from the tide line. It was too big to start a fire with but would make an excellent backing for one. Kop ate his fare of smoked fish, relishing each bite. The sun long down, he crawled under his sleeping robe and was soon asleep. Twice during the night, cold seeped under his blanket and woke him. He added more wood to the smouldering fire and slept on.

  The new day found him still near the fire and staring at something very strange. The odd-looking piece of wood had been consumed down to where it was buried in the soil. But standing straight up, with its end still embedded in the wood underne
ath the sand, was a long, black, and very straight spike. It was not made of wood, nor was it of stone or bone. The fire had not consumed it. It was still hot. Buka poked at it with a stick. Finding its base loose, he pushed it back and forth until it fell over onto the hot coals. It abruptly turned a bright red, but still it did not burn. Amazed, Buka flicked the object from the fire upon the sand. It lost its redness as it cooled, but for the longest time it still radiated heat enough to prevent handling. When Buka finally held the piece of metal in his hand, he instantly knew its value. It was longer than his hand and was tapered to a point sharper than the finest piece of chert.

  He looked long out to sea, wondering where it had come from and what manner of people had fashioned it. With his usual practicality, he knew it would make the best of weapons. Buka spent all that day designing a way to secure the metal spike to his sleekest spear shaft. The first time he threw it at a tree, the bindings came loose and he had to modify them. Before the day was over, he had correctly fashioned the spike to the spear. Again and again he threw it at targets on the beach. When he tried it at the trunk of a tree again, it flew true and was so embedded in the wood he had to wrench it loose. Buka was amazed at his discovery and couldn’t wait to try it. Next morning, he got his chance. Using the canoe again, he drifted out the bay among a few seals. When he saw his chance, he threw the spear at the back of a seal’s head. The tip entered the seal’s neck all the way to the bone. He used a braided thong of hair and leather fastened to the shank of the spear to tow the dead seal back to shore. With Buka’s fire-hardened spear tipped with metal, his kills had increased and his fame as a hunter had grown.

  Kop’s musings about the wonderful spear tip were interrupted by Buka, who had caught a motion in his peripheral vision. It was not a seal. Something white and big was stalking the same water hole as they were. Buka pointed seaward. At first Kop saw nothing, only the shimmer of the ice blink to his left and the glare of the rising sun to his right. Then he saw it. Something white and massive was slinking over the ice between the hummocks. It was the undulating back of a huge ice bear. The bear was downwind from both the two Beothuk and the seals. As the men watched, the bear’s black nose appeared above an ice ridge, seeking and zeroing in on the scent of its quarry. Both men dropped to the ice, fearing their excited breath rising above the hummock would be seen by the greatest of all hunters. The seals moved in apparent luxury, the blubber rolls on their sides pulsating as they languished between sleep and slumber, unaware of the danger flanking them.