Kiss of the Fur Queen (3 page)

He was only vaguely aware that people were gathering: stragglers trundling home from the store at the north end of Eemanapiteepitat hill, young men sawing firewood in front of old log cabins, laughing children romping in the snow with barking dogs, even Crazy Salamoo Oopeewaya arguing with
God from a rooftop; all had abandoned their current pursuit and rushed after Abraham’s sled as it raced up the hill towards the Okimasis cabin. Their gesticulating arms, their babbling voices were indecipherable to the tired though elated hunter. His only two scraps of thought were that this ragtag bunch was ready for a party such as it had never had, and that it was clearly Jane Kaka McCrae’s enormous new radio that had spread the news of his triumph throughout the reserve; for there was Jane Kaka, the most slovenly woman in Eemanapiteepitat, braying like a donkey to a gaggle of women with mouths and eyes as wide as bingo cards.

Before he could alight from his sled, Annie Moostoos, his wife’s addled fifty-five-year-old cousin, renowned throughout the north for the one tooth left in her head, was dancing among the woodchips in the front yard, round and round the sawhorse, wearing Abraham’s silver trophy on her head, like a German soldier’s helmet. How the skinny four-foot widow got the trophy Abraham never did find out, for when he turned to ask, who should be standing there holding out Abraham’s battered old accordion, his face as pink as bubblegum, but his own crusty, half-crazed fifty-five-year-old cousin, Kookoos Cook, renowned throughout the north for having chopped a juvenile caribou in the left hindquarter with a miniature axe and having been whisked off to the horizon by the terrified animal because Kookoos Cook had refused to let go of his only axe. Before Abraham could say
“Weeks’chiloowew,”
Kookoos Cook had shoved the ratty old instrument into the musher’s hands.

“Play my dead wife’s favourite jig, play
‘Kimoosoom Chimasoo’
or I’ll never talk to you again.”

So the caribou hunter pumped and pulled his screechy old accordion, playing
“Kimoosoom Chimasoo”
like it had never been played, which is how Mariesis Okimasis first saw her husband after three whole weeks: through her kitchen window, her apron bloodied by the shank of caribou she was wrestling with, Mariesis Okimasis, forty years of age, black-haired, brown-eyed, lovely as a willow tree in spring. Her bloodied butcher knife missing Jane Kaka’s left breast by half an inch, she zoomed through the door and flew into her husband’s arms.

A mere two hundred yards south of the Okimasis cabin, one could have seen the priest in his study, a nail in one hand, a hammer in the other, poised to nail a brand-new crucifix into a wall. No good Catholic danced on Sundays, Father Eustache Bouchard had told his flock repeatedly. He considered marching over to tell the revellers to go home to supper and do their dancing some other day. His hammer came down, very hard, on his left thumb.

One trillion miles above the aboriginal jamboree, the ghostly foetus continued its airy descent towards Earth. And only medicine women, shamans, artists, and visionaries were aware that a star-born child would soon be joining their dance.

Mariesis Okimasis had once won a contest for which the prize had been to have her picture taken by an itinerant British anthropologist who had claimed that never in all his travels had he seen cheekbones such as hers.

“That guy never did send us a copy of the picture,” moaned Mariesis into her husband’s tingling ear as she slipped under him, he over her, their mountainous, goose-down-filled sleeping robe shifting like an earthquake in slow motion. Mariesis could see the left side of her husband’s face, and for this she was glad, for nothing in life gave her more pleasure than the sight of his thick, sensuous lips.

The moonlight drifting in the little window over their bed made them look like large ripe fruit.

“That’s all right,” the large ripe fruit breathed into her ear as she struggled with her white flannel slip. “I don’t need a picture when I have the real thing.” He slid out of his underwear.

The moonlight led Mariesis’s eyes to the floor beside the bed where her sleeping children lay, those four still at home; she listened to their delicate snores wheeze their way in and out of her husband’s heavy breathing, a sweet kitten’s purr floating up to her. Then the light took them to the dresser top, where sat the trophy her champion of the world had brought for her from the distant south. Beside it stood a photograph: Abraham cradling in his arms the silver bowl, his cheek being kissed by the young woman radiant in her white fur cape and her silver-beaded fur tiara: “The Fur Queen,” he had explained, “the most beautiful woman in the world. Except for Mariesis Okimasis,” of course.

Suddenly, the light was coming from the Fur Queen’s eyes. Mariesis half-closed hers and let this moment take her, out the little window above the bed, out past the branch of the young spruce tree bending under its weight of snow, out
to millions of stars, to the northern lights: the ancestors of her people, ten thousand generations, to the beginning of time. Dancing.

And somewhere within the folds of this dance, Mariesis saw, through tears of an intense joy — or did ecstasy inflict hallucinations on its victims? — a sleeping child, not yet born but fully formed, naked, curled up inside the womb of night, tumbling down towards her and her husband.

The ancestors — the women — moaned and whispered. Mariesis could hear among them her mother, who had left this Earth mere months after Mariesis had become a bride, one among many to have succumbed to tuberculosis. And though barely audible where she lay in her pool of perspiration, the women’s voices said to her: “And
K’si mantou
, the Great Spirit, held the baby boy by his big toe and dropped him from the stars …”

And that was all she remembered.

Poof!
he went on his bum, smack into the most exquisite mound of snow in the entire forest, making crystals of silver spray shoot up to join the stars. He disappeared into the mound and would have stayed down there indefinitely if it hadn’t been for his bouncy baby flesh and his supple newborn bones.

“If you throw them on the floor,” one-toothed Annie Moostoos would brag about her nine brown babies to all who cared to listen, “they’ll bounce right back into your arms — it’s true. Why would I lie to you?”

And the baby boy came shooting out of the mound of snow in two seconds flat and landed on his feet, right beside a small spruce tree that happened to be sleeping there. The little spruce tree opened one drowsy eye to see who could have made the whispering bump in the night and just managed to catch the tail-end of a spirit baby sprinting off into the darkness. There being nothing left to see but the little whirlwind in the baby’s wake, the spruce tree went back to sleep.

The spirit baby ran through the forest, and ran and ran and ran. Hunch led him on, guided him, something having to do with warmth, he knew, something to do with hunger, with appeasing that hunger, something to do with love hunger, with appeasing that hunger, something to do with the length of string that led from the middle of his belly, a string almost invisible, so refined it could have been a strand of spiders web. This string and hunch. That was all.

Bang!
The baby tripped, falling flat on his face, with a shriek more of surprise than of pain, in front of a cave. Growling like an ill-tempered bitch, a large, hairy animal lumbered out of the cave, admonished the prostrate child for having roused him from his winter sleep, and gave him a swift kick in the bum. The baby yelped, jumped up, and dashed away from the cave and its cantankerous occupant through the forest towards a tent standing on the shore of a lake.

Then the child bumped into a rabbit, who took pity on him, for, by this time, the naked child was shivering. The rabbit slipped off his coat and wrapped it around the child’s shivering, plump midsection. The as-yet-unborn infant made
his gratitude clear to the rabbit, who turned out to be a writer of lyric rabbit poetry, and the travelling baby and the now naked, shivering animal would be friends for life.

Finally emerging from the forest, glinting with crystals of snow and frost, the child ran around the tent by the lake, across the pile of woodchips strewn at the entrance, just missing getting sliced in half by a man flailing away with an axe, and burst through the tent flap like a comet.

The tent interior glowed golden warm from the kerosene lamp. Moaning and whimpering and crying softly, Mariesis Okimasis lay on a bed of spruce boughs, a minuscule and very ancient woman hovering over her like the branch of an old pine tree: Misty Marie Gazandlaree, Chipewyan, ninety-three years of age and one of the most respected midwives in the north at that time. The silver baby scooted under the old woman’s left arm, took a little hop, two small skips, one dive and half a pirouette, and landed square on top of Mariesis Okimasis’s firm round belly: 5:00
A.M.
, Saturday, December I, 1951.

He lay puffing and panting, when the man with the flailing weapon entered the tent, his arms piled high with firewood, his eyes aglow at the sight of the child. And the last thing the child remembered, until he was to read about it years later, was shutting his eyes and seeing up in the dome of his miniature skull a sky filled with a million stars, the northern lights pulsating, and somewhere in the web of galaxies, a queen waving a magic wand.

The baby boy was floating in the air, his skin no longer silver blue but pinkish brown. As he floated, he turned and
turned and laughed and laughed. Until, lighter than a tuft of goose-down, he fell to Earth, his plump posterior landing neatly in a bowl of silver.

“Ho-ho!
My victory boy!” the fun-loving caribou hunter trumpeted to whatever audience he could get, which, at the moment, was his wife.
“Ho-ho!
My champion boy!”

“Down! Put him down, or his little bum will freeze!” cried Mariesis Okimasis, though she couldn’t help but laugh and, with her laughing, love this man for all his unpredictable bouts of clownishness. Jumping up and down, the short Mariesis was trying to get the tall Abraham to put his World Champion’ship Dog Derby trophy down so she could put their baby back into the warmth and safety of his cradle-board. This was, after all, a tent, not a palace, not even a house, and this was, after all, mid-December and not July, in a region so remote that the North Pole was rumoured to be just over that next hill. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the curl of smoke from its tin chimney, the little canvas shelter would have been invisible, that’s how much snow there was when Champion Okimasis was born.

A
top a low, moss-covered rock that overlooked Nameegoos Lake, Champion Okimasis stood singing a concert to his father and the caribou. The three-year-old stretched and pumped the miniature accordion strapped to his chest with such abandon that its squawk was frightful. Somewhere out on that lake, Abraham Okimasis and his team of eight grey huskies were giving chase, and if Champion performed with sufficient conviction, the Okimasis family would be feasting on fresh hindquarter of young caribou before the sun touched the prong of that first pine tree.

“Ateek, ateek, astum, astum, yoah, ho-ho!”
Champion’s robin-like soprano rang out, his lungs small balloons. By the time he got to the tenth repetition of the phrase, a herd of caribou would come bursting out the other side of that first island, his father not twenty yards behind them.

“Caribou, caribou, come to me, come to me,
yoah, ho-ho!”

Down the rise of land, Champion’s mother was squatting on bare ground, clearing used dishes from a lunch table of spruce boughs three feet from the smouldering remains of their campfire. The early afternoon sun, amiable enough for early January, wasn’t making much headway on the top layer of snow, but its golden light made Champion Okimasis and his family feel warm and at ease with life.

Covered in earth-toned cotton dress and winter parka, midriff ripe as a full moon, Mariesis Okimasis looked, to the singing Champion, like a boulder, a part of the earth. She was nine months into her twelfth pregnancy and the fateful event could pounce upon her any minute now, so Champion had been informed by his older sister, the pouty and bossy Chugweesees Okimasis.

“Ateek, ateek, astum …”

So proud was he of his first original composition that Champion wanted it to be appreciated, not just by his father and the caribou, not just by the two other hunting families on the other side of the island, but by the world. Her face glowing with an inner light, Mariesis smiled at the impassioned, swaying, rocking musical wonder and said, “Champion. My boy. You will soon have a brother who can dance to that little caribou song of yours.”

Champion would have had ten older siblings but for TB, pneumonia, and childhood ailments, Mariesis had explained to an uncomprehending Champion; but here at least were Josephine, five, and Chugweesees, seven, playing with sticks and stones, and Chichilia, eleven, repacking the grub box for
her mother. William William, nineteen, was up in Kasimir Lake, just south of the Northwest Territories border, helping one-eyed Uncle Wilpaletch trap mink and otter and arctic fox; and Marie-Adele, twenty-one, was married with children of her own and moved to her husband’s home community of Ootasneema, Saskatchewan, so far away that Marie-Adele Weechawagas-née-Okimasis barely existed for Champion.

Sure enough, before he could launch into his forty-third verse, a herd of caribou came charging out from behind that first small island on a lake so white that it was difficult to look at for any length of time. Umpteen-umpteen caribou, Champion estimated their number as he squinted and banged his accordion with even greater vigour, the song kicking into a tempo he would later come to know as allegro con brio. When he saw his father zoom out behind the stampeding animals, hunting rifle in the air, his huskies racing as though demons were nipping at their tails, he yelped his father’s famous “
Weeks’chiloowew!” Two
other rifle-waving hunters came dashing out behind Abraham.

At this distance, Champion, his mother, and his three sisters couldn’t see the details, much less hear the sounds; but the thunder of caribou hooves was so familiar they would hear the rumble in their dreams of any ordinary night. They also knew that Abraham was expressing his joy by yodelling the only word in his yodelling repertoire, the word Champion loved with all his heart.