Kiss of the Fur Queen (4 page)

Josephine and Chugweesees and their puppies Cha-La-La and Ginger went tumbling, screaming, yelling, and barking
down to the lake and would have run clean across the ice to join their father if the wise-beyond-her-years Chichilia Okimasis hadn’t grabbed them and dragged them back to shore. “You wanna be stomped to death by wild caribou?” she screamed. “You wanna leave this Earth looking like two ugly little meat patties?”

Champion knew that the most effective way to help his father was to keep singing, and this he did, the song now more a furious jig than the anthem of hope it had been. Champion was so surprised by the new effect that he slipped into the key of D, although C was the only key he knew.

“Champion! Champion, call your father!” Alarmed by the sudden sharpness in Mariesis’s voice, Champion saw that her face was contorted, her arms wrapped around her belly, her body rocking back and forth. The little musician stopped in mid-vibrato. Accordion still strapped to his little torso, he scampered down to the shore.

“Chichilia! Chichilia!” cried Champion, the accordion bouncing up and down on his little belly, squeaking and sputtering out random clusters of semitones. “There’s something wrong with Mama! There’s something —”

Splat
He had tripped on the root of a dying tree and lay on his accordion with the breath knocked out of both of them.

When he looked up, his face covered with dirt and dirty snow, all he could see was Chichilia’s feet striding up to his face. Her dog, the remarkably intelligent Suitcase Okimasis, sniffed around his neck for a trace of broken vertebrae.

“Mama’s belly is hurting! Mama’s belly …”

Chichilia wasted not a word; the young woman strode across the ice towards her father and the stampeding herd.

Though he couldn’t hear it from such a distance — at least a mile was his estimation — Abraham knew that his son was singing for him. For wasn’t it his greatest pride to have finally sired a child with a gift for the making of music, one to whom he could pass on his father’s, his grandfather’s, and his great-grandfather’s legacy? The assurance that this ancient treasure of the Okimasis clan could rest intact for at least another generation inspired him to glide across the ice with even greater skill, greater precision, greater speed.

“Mush
, Tiger-Tiger,
mush!”

The caribou now loomed a mere fifty yards in front of him; his soul began to sing.

Then a yearling veered to the left. The hunter’s heart jumped three half beats. Separated from the herd, this yearling would give Abraham the perfect opportunity to display to the other hunters trailing him what was admired throughout northern Manitoba as caribou-hunting prowess without equal.

“U
, Tiger-Tiger,
u!”
Abraham yelled to his lead dog, and Tiger-Tiger swerved, his seven team-mates following; the sled made an elegant turn to the left.

“Such a prince, my Tiger-Tiger, such a prince,” Abraham whispered, for he and his part-wolf, part-husky had learned, over the seven years of Tiger-Tiger’s eventful life, to communicate both with and without words. This was fortunate because Tiger-Tiger’s Cree vocabulary was limited, though he
had learned how to ask for “black coffee” on blizzardy Tuesday mornings. Keeping his left hand firmly hooked around the handlebar of the sled, Abraham took aim at the frightened caribou with his right. The sled’s sudden encounter with patches of unevenly packed snow, however — and the fact that the fleeing animal, knowing death was imminent, was running erratically — was making his aim unsteady. His finger was about to press the trigger when a human figure beyond and to the right of his quarry drew his focus. He shot and missed.

“Damn,” he cursed the ill-timed appearance of this human, who was waving frantically. He would have taken a second shot but recognized his intrepid daughter, Chichilia. She may not be able to sing a note, much less play one, try as Abraham might to teach her, but she could shoot a slingshot with such accuracy that, at eight years old, she killed an entire warren of rabbits, whose ears she made into a stunningly succulent stew. For a girl who astonished audiences with highly polished displays of level-headedness and self-possession, Chichilia’s current agitation was downright alarming.

“Cha
, Tiger-tiger,
cha!”
the hunter yelled into the wind. The leader of the team swerved to the right so suddenly that the left side of the sled came off the ground. Abraham was now heading straight for Chichilia.

“Whoa, Tiger-Tiger, whoa!” he shouted, and the dogs began to slow down, though not fast enough for Abraham’s comfort.

“Whoa!” he screamed, dropping his rifle into the sled as Chichilia’s legs took great strides through snow that, in places, hadn’t hardened quite enough to bear her weight. But all the hunter had to hear was
“nimama!”
to understand her message.

He pulled his sled to a halt beside the girl, sending fountains of powder snow everywhere. With well-practised motion, Chichilia leapt into the canvas-sided conveyance with the intention of sitting at the bottom. But Abraham had already slashed the air with one grand sweep of his moose-hide whip, shouted
“mush!”
and the dogs were off like bullets, making a beeline for the campsite. Chichilia went flying and slammed headfirst into the handlebar.

The caribou hunter was in such a rush that he forgot his normally fine-tuned manners. It was a few days before he remembered to apologize to his daughter for causing the rather spectacular bump on her head that would remain with her for the rest of her long and passionate life — a bump that would become the subject of many hours’ quality conversation.

It couldn’t have taken more than four minutes for father and daughter to reach the spot where they had stopped for lunch on their way to Eemanapiteepitat one hundred miles south for the birth.

Mariesis was not, however, bent over in pain or crying for help. She was unpacking their tent with the intention of erecting it, help or no help from her three small children. Josephine and Chugweesees were gathering sticks for tent pegs, and handling the hatchet with a less than admirable skill. Champion sat perched on the grub box, singing and
playing his only song, “to make her feel better,” he would explain to his father later, “so she wouldn’t hurt so much.”

Not waiting for his sled to come to a full stop, the caribou hunter leapt out and ordered his wife to lie down on a blanket.

“Won’t stop jumping up and down” were all the words she could muster.

“Ho-ho!”
the caribou hunter exclaimed. “Gonna be a dancer, this one.” And in no time, the tent was standing.

That night, Mariesis lay half-covered by her enormous goose-down sleeping robe, the light of a kerosene lamp dancing on her perspiring face. To Abraham, hanging a white flannel bed-sheet across the middle of the small room to give his wife a measure of privacy, she looked beatific, the darkness of her deep-set eyes bottomless wells of love. From a carpet of newly cut spruce boughs, a fresh, moist, minty aroma filled the room to overflowing.

He tested the twine that held the sheet, then bent to put more wood into the stove he had fashioned out of a once-red oil drum, black from years of use. Abraham had to keep the hardy little appliance going, for if it stopped, they froze to death, it was as simple as that. Having refilled the stove, the hunter went outside to chop more wood.

Champion lay on the other side of the hanging sheet, his head next to the accordion he loved so much that he refused to be parted from it, day or night. Josephine and Chugweesees wiggled like worms beside him. Covered by a puffy down-filled sleeping robe, they whispered furiously.

“The Great Spirit must be holding our little sister up by her big toe by now,” said the bossy Chugweesees. “Getting ready to drop her, right from the centre of the sky.” She left no room for anyone to argue that the new arrival might be a boy; Chugweesees Okimasis simply assumed she could predict the future.

Across the lake, a lone wolf raised its howl, the string of notes arcing in a seamless, infinitely slow, infinitely sad glissando, then fading into silence, leaving the hearts of its listeners motionless with awe. Then two wolves joined the first in song. One of Abraham’s dogs, tethered to trees behind the tent, answered, then a second dog, and a third, until a chorus of weeping souls, as if in mourning for one irretrievably lost, filled the night air, numbing the pain of the woman now deep in her labour in this snow-covered tent on this remote island.

Stifling a yawn, Champion looked up at the hanging bed-sheet and made up his mind that he was not going to miss a second of whatever shadows played on it. He made the mistake of blinking, however, just once, which was enough to send him slipping across a river to the world of dreams, where he had long ago learned how to fly, where he might fly up to meet the falling baby halfway and tell him to go back. For was not this brazen new arrival about to depose the unique Champion Okimasis from his status as not only baby but star of this illustrious caribou-hunting family?

On the other side of the island, Chichilia Okimasis was dragging a one-hundred-year-old woman through knee-deep snow.
The crone’s spine was as crooked as the gnarled pine walking stick with which she propped herself up; she was not much more than four feet tall and so fearfully thin that eleven-year-old Chichilia looked as large as a moose. Abraham had heard from another hunter that the campsite two miles away might harbour just such a woman and so had dispatched his strapping daughter to fetch her. Peroxide Lavoix by baptism, the midwife of births so numerous that she had long ago lost count much preferred her Indian name, which was Little Seagull Ovary.

“Not so fast, my girl,” Little Seagull Ovary wheezed, like an accordion. “These spindly old legs of mine aren’t what they used to be.” The black silk kerchief she wore tied tight over her snow-white head — the trademark of all good mid-wives everywhere, she explained to her extremely impatient young escort — lent her the air of a fearsome one-eyed pirate.

To shorten their passage, the elder of the pair entertained the younger with a tale that her listener had heard at least one hundred times yet would never tire of hearing. This was the tale of newborn babies falling from beyond the stars, rousing cantankerous, hibernating bears, magnanimous lyric-poet rabbits, and such. Chichilia giggled as the midwife embellished the ancient yarn as only her very advanced age earned her the right to do. Little Seagull Ovary, for instance, insisted that the hibernating bear, being an actor bear, celebrated throughout the bear community, had missed a vital entrance cue on stage as a result of the newborn baby’s interruption; his audience had complained to the management and he was in danger of fading into obscurity.

A star shot across the heavens, arced, and landed with a little explosion of light so close that Chichilia could almost catch it in the palm of her hand. The earth rumbled faintly; a shiver leapt up their spines.

“The child has landed. The child is running through the forest now,” said Little Seagull Ovary.

In the land of dreams, the child-about-to-be-born was fluttering through a forest lit in hues of mauve and pink and turquoise, the wings that had sprouted on his back whirring soundlessly. He alighted on the occasional spruce, the occasional pine, the occasional birch as the fancy tickled him, like a subarctic hummingbird. A distance off, he spied another flying creature, compressing and pulling at a funny corrugated box strapped to his scrawny chest; in response, the box produced an irritating, squeaky whine. The infant-not-yet-born and the itinerant musician were about to fly to each other for a better look when they were interrupted by a cry, half wail of lamentation and half shout of triumph. Suspecting the cry as his entrance cue, the infant-not-yet-born dove into the nearest mound of snow, images of the sour-tempered actor bear and the sweet-faced lyric-poet rabbit he had met minutes earlier flashing across his memory. He dove with such enthusiasm, however, that he was way below the permafrost before he remembered to turn around.

Back beside his snoring sisters, Champion stirred and looked up at the hanging bedsheet. He rubbed his eyes. Eventually,
with an effort that caused him to become wide awake, he was able to grasp that a shadow splashed across the sheet might be a very large fish hook.

“Athweepi,”
an ancient voice intoned, gentle as morning dew. The fish hook was, in fact, an old woman, and she was addressing a largish mound that moaned and shifted in front of her.

Champion could discern in the old woman’s hands scissors, a length of cloth, and perhaps a bowl. And he heard, amidst the moans and the whispered, calming words, the sloshing of liquid on metal. Then the old woman reached so deep into the mound that she almost disappeared.

The journey back up to the surface was not as easy as the journey down, the spirit baby in the loincloth of rabbit fur discovered. For he had to squirm and wriggle and flail and punch his way through soil and rock and minerals so thickly layered they were all but impassable, through permanently frozen clay, tangled roots of trees and dormant fireweed, and shards of animal and human bone. He pushed and pushed until a tunnel eased his passage, replete with a viscous wetness. The earth around him rumbled and gurgled as if it would split open. The rumble became a roar. The roar became a scream. And the flash of light was the second-last thing he would remember about his first journey on Earth.

When the scream was gone, only moans and whispers remained, subdued currents of wind, a chorus of ancient women whispering,
“Awasis, magawa, tugoosin.”

The hook-backed old woman resurfaced and from her hands, to Champion’s great astonishment, dangled neither scissors nor cloth nor bowl. It looked like legs, arms, and a head, although so spindly they were hardly worth mentioning.

“The baby!” The realization slapped Champion square across the face. He stopped his breathing so his ears could open wide: not a peep, not a sigh, not even half a burp. Maybe it was dead, Champion dared to hope, then blushed. He would have crossed himself in repentance had he already learned the labyrinth of Roman Catholic guilt.