Barkskins (22 page)

Achille stood stiff with rage but Elphège touched his arm and said in a low voice, “Brother, it is only a whiteman house. You do not wish to be tied down to a potash kettle like such a one. Let us go. We will hunt and fight. We will not burn trees into dirty ashes.”

Achille's voice was tight. He felt his blood curdling with poison. “It is clear that Captain Bouchard informed them, that he removed René's claim from the ledger. He was friendly to our father—for our father was a white
Wenuj.
But to our mother and to us his friendship was false.”

“What does it matter? Before you there lie many good years of hunting. That is a better life for you.”

Achille stood silent for many heartbeats, then said, “We will come with you to our mother's country.”

“Good. First we go to Odanak.”

A
t Odanak, Zoë, Noë and Achille turned shy, unused to such a moil. The village, with its
wikuoms,
and even some log cabins, frothed with people working, cooking, softening hides, splitting canoe ribs, lifting a tangle of gaudy roots from a dye kettle. Two men played
waltes,
the bone dice leaping up when they slapped down the wooden bowl. Jen, a round-faced Mi'kmaw woman with three children, looked at Zoë and Noë, at their soiled whiteman dresses.

“Sit down. Eat,” she said. “You are good strong girls who will make a journey to Mi'kma'ki.” Zoë and Noë, starved of female company for years, began to thaw. Noë had brought three of her baskets, which she presented to them, but these were not admired. In Odanak there were basket makers of great skill and the women brought out several to show her: an oval birch-bark container sewn with spruce root and worked with such intricate designs the eye could not hold them. Noë touched a basket with a decorative rim of artfully twisted black root. Some baskets were tiny, woven of sweet-grass, some were splendid with red- and green-dyed root strips.

“I wish to learn how to make such beautiful baskets,” said Noë, kicking at her own poor efforts.

“We will show you,” said a young and heavy woman with callused hands who told the story of Ai'ip, the lazy woman who split and twisted roots around her fingers and somehow made the first basket. “No person could name this object. And they had to call it ‘that root thing.' ”

“I am choking with new thoughts,” said Zoë. “We know nothing,” for they had only ten winters.

Theotiste, Elphège and Achille wanted to start at once for Mi'kma'ki, but Sosep, an old trapper
sagmaw,
took them aside and spoke at length.

“I am going with you. But it is not good to go now when winter is advancing. There is nothing to eat at that place in the winter. People go up the river. We better wait until spring.”

Achille itched to go.

“What does he mean, there is no food at Mi'kma'ki? Mari our mother told us it was a place of great richness, fish, lobsters, clams and oysters, birds by the thousand, succulent plants.” Sosep overheard this and laughed. “Mi'kma'ki is a summer place. Winter very hard there unless you cached ten moose and sixteen bears.”

For more than four cycles of the moon the Sels waited at Odanak. Theotiste, Elphège and Achille hunted and fished, talked with the men about the best route to Mi'kma'ki. The women helped Noë and Zoë dry and smoke venison and eel for their journey. Noë, determined to become a maker of fine baskets, worked at it until her fingers blistered.

The approaching journey with their older brothers to their mother's country filled their thoughts. From Mari they had heard of the parts of their homeland: Wild Potato Place, Skin Dresser's Territory and Land of Fog. They were discarding memories of their forest childhood. Would spring never come?

Theotiste told Zoë one day that Mari's spirit would surely be there in the trees and wild plants, perhaps in the rocks, in the fish and animals. It would be a reconnection.

“I wish we had brought Maman's bones,” said Zoë.

Theotiste nodded. “I have brought them,” he said.

“That is good!” Then a moment later she said, “I wish I had brought the little wall basket she made to hold René's comb.”

“Noë will make one. It will hold new combs.”

When at last they set out, the woman friend of Theotiste's dead wife came with them as well as old Sosep, who had the solid reputation of an important trapper-hunter, the wavering reputation of a
sagmaw
and the faded reputation of a local chief. His scarred face was serious. He had a grave manner that indicated character and wisdom. His teeth were large and yellow, his black eyes squinted, for his sight was failing. “It is good you waited. Even now it may be too early. But we can advance. My trapping run is still in Mi'kmaw country—if those French have not built their square houses on it. I wish to return. I wanted to see what Odanak was like—but even here there were whitemen. The worst is this Odanak priest, Father Lacet.” He imitated the priest's sly expression, his dabbling hands. “He is boring holes in all the
waltes
bowls so they cannot hold water and give us divinations. I will help you. I know your father's favored trapping places, for his brother told me.”

“His
brother
!” said Theotiste. “Do we then have an uncle? Living?”

“Very alive. Cache Emil. He will show you that place and others. But these days whitemen want those places, too. And they take them without courtesy or talk. They
take
them.”

For Theotiste and Elphège this was earth-shaking news. They had believed their father, whom they did not remember, and all of their father's kin were dead. This magical uncle was a proof that they had made a correct decision.

Sosep said, “We will be pressing through the end season of snow. We must make snowshoes as you did not bring any from that place you were before you came here.” And he sat with Elphège and Theotiste and Achille making the ash-wood frames while the woman friend of Theotiste's dead wife, Zoë and Noë wove the caribou rawhide webbing in a close mesh to better support the weight of their loads.

•  •  •

They began to walk toward the ocean, which none of the Sels had ever seen except in imagination. The journey was rough underfoot and circuitous in their minds. They lived on their dried meat and sacks of maize, for at this time of year wild creatures were still deep in the forest, plants had not broken through the ground. Every morning the streams were edged in ice. But in the second week Theotiste got two fat beaver.

Winter returned with a snowstorm, a giddy flying mass, heaping drifts behind logs, covering all. When the storm cleared and night became as day with reflected moonlight the cold increased. In the next weeks they twice had to build temporary
wikuoms
and take shelter from the snows.

“Oh, what a late spring. If it snows more,” said Sosep, “we will have to construct a toboggan.”

“Perhaps it will not snow,” said Theotiste.

“Perhaps the sun will not rise tomorrow,” muttered Sosep.

“I am hungry,” said Nöe.

Sosep laughed. “Mi'kmaw persons can stand hunger for a long time without dying.”

In the waiting days inside the
wikuoms
Noë and Zoë plagued Theotiste and Elphège to retell their mother's stories about Mi'kma'ki. They never tired of hearing about the blueberry patches, the elderberries with their drooping umbels, serviceberries, chokecherry trees, the succulent crayfish, roasted beaver, the fattest eels, even oily walrus, all part of the rich Mi'kma'ki life where one had only to step outside the
wikuom
and take a plump turkey. Later Elphège wondered if it had been a mistake to fill their heads with stories of a summer world, so different from what they found when they reached their destination. Others told stories about Kluskap when life for the Mi'kmaq was good.

•  •  •

“Listen to me,” said Sosep. “This is a bad time to return to our country, not only because of this untimely weather. Do you not know that the French king gave our lands to the British?”

Theotiste looked at him. “How can that be? It is not the land of the French king to give. It is ours.”

“This happened some winters ago. Surely you heard the talk of it in Odanak?”

“I thought it was only foolish talk. I heard the British seized Port Royal, but you say ‘our lands.' ”

“Yes. It is our land but we suffer advances from both French and English. The French see us as soldiers to fight for them, our women good only for fucking. The priests see us as bounty for their God as we might see beaver skins. They do not see us as a worthy people. The French use us for their protection. They do not understand that we are allies of the French king, but not his subjects. We are not obliged to him. That is why he gives us presents—to buy our favor. Now the British greedily claim even more land than the French king gave that was not his to give.” He stopped, raised his chin. “And the British give no presents.”

“But Mi'kmaq are going back there. As we are. And I have heard that French and Mi'kmaq often marry. As our father René married our mother, Mari.”

“Yes, it is true. And that is good because there are so few of us left. Now that the beaver are so few we must marry someone,
ha ha!
I fear we will soon find the English putting their houses on our trapping grounds.”

“I heard some French families live near us Mi'kmaw and they are not unfriendly.”

“That maybe is so, the French have long been our friends—somewhat—but now the English think they possess everything. Their settlers move in. The English king pays good money for Mi'kmaw scalps. So we make a war against the English. Many Mi'kmaq are fighting in canoes. We are good fighters and capture many English boats. But we are so few. We are so often ill.”

•  •  •

They reached the Mi'kmaw country in late March with spring trembling behind the wind. Bird migration flights had started. In a small stream they saw numerous small fish surging up against the current. Sosep pointed out a dozen French families living along the shore. He spoke of the woodlands and fruitful edges that had supplied so many generations with berries and edible roots but warned that now much land had been plowed up and given over to maize fields and turnips. These French Acadians had drained many of the salt marshes to grow salt hay for their livestock. The larger game animals, moose, caribou and bear, had all retreated. The beaver were greatly reduced in number so severely had they been taken, for their skins could be turned into guns and metal pots. Yes, the beaver had become a kind of whiteman money and the custom of placing a beaver skin on a grave had fallen away.

“Still,” said Theotiste, “we can trade meat for maize and pumpkins. Will not the Acadians be glad of venison as they always are? As we are glad of bread. And I think the sky and land must be the same as they forever were, for not the
Plets-mun
nor the English have the power to level cliffs, they have not the power to drain the sea nor eat the sky. Can we not live side by side?”

“We have little choice,” said Sosep with a puckered expression. And soon there were so many birds the sky rattled, so many fish the bay boiled like a pot. There was enough for all.

Despite the old man's complaints that all was spoiled, the Sels were astounded at the unfolding bounty of Mi'kma'ki. The great bay with its powerful tides, its estuaries and islands, its freshwater rivers and the nurturing ocean supplied everything. The newcomers stared at the ocean beating in ceaselessly, stared agape as the tide went out exposing miles of mudflats riddled with tiny holes from which came the hissing noise of mud shrimp below. Equally fascinating was the swift return of the ocean, the saline water coming in stealthily.

They had to learn this new country, its red cliffs, the changing tides, the seasons for herring, for shad, a different pattern of weather and storms than they had ever known. At first the ocean seemed all-powerful, but they came to understand that the true richness of Mi'kma'ki was in its rivers. They had to learn the names of unfamiliar fish. Farther out from shore there swam several kinds of great whales, porpoises and dolphins. There were varieties of seals, lobsters as big as women. The Sel men, as hunters and trappers, had to learn their ways quickly.

They saw that the foolish Acadians were diligent gardeners and because of this they felt themselves superior. The local surviving Mi'kmaq lived on the edges of old trapping areas, somewhat away from the French settlers.

“But we newcomers have no
wikuom.
We have no shelter,” said Noë, who longed for the stability of a
wikuom
or even a house. A whiteman house was impossible. She knew that. There were several of those geometric structures at Odanak, but here people despised them and there was the example of the young Mi'kmaw hunter a few years earlier who had been to a white settlement and there he had seen English drinking brown water from a saucer. The saucer was very beautiful with a deep blue rim. Somehow he had gained possession of this saucer—or one like it—and brought it back to Mi'kma'ki. His scandalized and outraged neighbors saw him drinking from it and killed him for a traitor to traditional ways. The repulsive object was smashed on a stone.

“But,” said old grandmother Loze, “two families have saucers now and no one has killed them. Everything does change.”

W
ith some ceremony Sosep brought Cache Emil, Elphège and Theotiste's uncle, to them. Cache Emil, a tall, powerful old man with hulking shoulders and a deeply lined face as though flint-gouged, stepped forward and put both hands on Elphège's shoulders.

“Yes,” he said. “I know you, the children of my brother. Often my life has been heavy with loss and sadness, but today I feel so much joy that I have no good words for it.” He grasped first Elphège, then Theotiste; his cheeks were wet. For Elphège and Theotiste in that moment Cache Emil became the center of life. They had longed for a father without knowing it. Cache Emil said he had a son, Rouge Emil. Their own blood, their cousin.