River City (19 page)

They tore at his flesh with knives and hammered his bones with tomahawks and burned his skin with stones roasted in the campfire. They scowled in his face and threatened worse: to tear out his eyes, to slice off his genitals, to roll boulders off an outcropping onto him spread-eagled below. This they did to each of his good friends, and made them suffer before slicing their throats.
The youngest was the last to die, crying out as huge rocks fell upon him. In the end, his body was buried under a pile of rocks with only his head visible, and, dead or still alive, they scalped him.

They waved the three scalps before Brulé’s eyes.

What to do with the Frenchman? How to kill Brulé? This was a dilemma for the Iroquois. His death had to be fitting, for all the Iroquois had heard the story of Ticonderoga, of how the white man’s magic had slaughtered their brothers. When they told the story of this Frenchman’s death, they would need to satisfy the rage of all their brothers.

They cut three slices of flesh from above each nipple, using his own knife—an extraordinary instrument with bright stones in the handle and sharp bone for the blade—and, with his hands tied, they burned his feet, then made him run. They rammed his head into tree trunks, and he bled, and he wobbled on his burnt feet as the Iroquois laughed and discussed how they might choose to kill him.

They made him run along the rocky beach while they threw stones at him and talked about their predicament, and he ran this way and that to avoid the warriors who could throw best. The man who had rammed his head into trees grabbed him and pulled him up onto a low cliff and made him jump off into deep water, and the Iroquois laughed at this, and rushed to the ledge to see him thrash about and sink. They planned to catch him like a fish in their nets downstream, then humiliate him further while they devised their best killing method.

The Frenchman sank, but when his head popped back to the surface, they were confused. No Iroquois had ever swum in water—no native knew that that trick could be managed. The man whose hands were tied was kicking his feet and floating on his back like a tree, and then he would rest—he would appear to be resting!—in the middle of the stream, and he was speaking Huron to the Iroquois.

They all raced back down to the beach, each man frantically exclaiming about the wonders he had witnessed.

One man knew the language, but he was away with the others contemplating the best death for the white man. When he was summoned and returned
on the run down to the shore, the white man still swam in the water, with his head up, and when he chose to do so, he’d kick his feet. This was a great magic the white man possessed, that he did not sink.

Did this mean that he could not die?

Was it true, then, that the white men were really only ghosts? This was debated and discussed.

“What does he say?” the Iroquois chief wanted to know.

The man who spoke Huron asked that everyone be quiet, and he listened to what the Frenchman had to say in the Indian tongue.

“The white man who talks like a stupid Huron,” the Iroquois elder stated, “says to us that he is the only man on the earth who can save our people.”

This started up a great conflagration among the elders and the young men who wanted to kill him instantly, but they could not catch him without getting into their canoes. A few climbed into a canoe and pursued him in the river.

The white man dove below the surface of the water to avoid the canoe, and the Indians knew then that he was dead, for no man could live under the surface of the water, and this man had disappeared. The canoeists paddled back to shore. The people were disappointed, for they had not killed him very well. The death had been ordinary and did not make for a good story. Then Brulé stuck his head up and breathed the clear air, and the Iroquois were amazed, yet concerned, and the canoe turned back to catch the Frenchman.

While he had been underwater, Brulé had been sawing his restraints against a sharp rock, and with further struggle he was able to slip his hands free. As the canoe approached a second time, he dove beneath the surface and the men stopped paddling, not knowing where he had gone. The young man came up under the canoe and made it rock, then pulled it down hard so that the men panicked. One slipped over the side, trying to get at the man under the canoe, and the vessel tipped over. The four Iroquois hung on for their lives while Brulé swam in the stream and harangued the Iroquois on shore.

He had caused a grave consternation to ripple through the men, who disapproved of his magic and feared his ability to live where any Iroquois would die. The chief gave the order to pierce him with arrows and so the warriors
retrieved their bows, but when they fired their arrows, Brulé dove to the bottom of the river again.

He had much to think about down there. He could swim to the opposite shore, although the Iroquois could cross the river quickly in their canoes. His predicament would remain dire if he chose to float downriver, and down the Ohio, for even if he eluded his enemies he would be left in the wilderness with neither weapons nor food, nor clothes, nor companions, nor a canoe. The Iroquois had clearly demonstrated their zeal to kill him properly. He had to negotiate a truce with them. Only in this strategy did hope lie. He was about to resurface when he became the world’s luckiest Frenchman at the bottom of a river.

Breaking the surface of the water, he held his right hand straight aloft, and in it his harquebusier. The Indians were suitably astounded, and two men fell over one another in their fright while several of the others stepped back.

“See what I have made from the stones of this river!” Brulé called out. His interpreter let his words be understood by the others, and the Iroquois were both suitably impressed and warily skeptical.

“Do I kill you today, and your children tomorrow, and all Iroquois people? Or do I save you and make a pact between the French and the Iroquois? Speak now!”

Trembling, the translator needed Brulé to repeat himself a few times before he could get the full message across, but once he had done so, the chief moved him aside to fully examine the youth floating freely in the water where any Iroquois man would drown, having devised a fire-spear out of the river’s stones. The chief considered carefully what his eyes did see before he spoke. The man possessed magic, and whether he could kill them and their children was a consideration but perhaps not the most important. For him, this white boy who could live like a fish, who could make weapons at the bottom of a river, who was brave and did not flee, but taunted the men who would kill him—such a boy deserved to have his life preserved. More than any white man, he deserved to live awhile.

“Tell the fish-man, who does not die in a river where a man should die,” he told the elder who could speak the language of the Huron, “to come to me. He will not be harmed this day or tomorrow.”

Hearing the message, Brulé put his rifle between his knees and swam ashore, his smooth, sure strokes an extraordinary spectacle to the Indians.

On the stone-covered beach, Étienne Brulé stood upon his burnt feet, his heaving chest bleeding, his stomach bloody as well, his joints bruised purple. His skin was goose-bumped from the cold water and his teeth chattered. He said, “The man who holds my knife will be killed by every Frenchmen who is alive today and by every Frenchmen who will ever be alive tomorrow, and his children and his children’s children will die also.”

The dagger was returned to him by the man who had bashed his head into trees. He received the knife and stuck it into its sheath, and although he knew that it could not fire, for he’d need a dry wick and he carried no gunpowder on his person, having been stripped of all his possessions, Brulé cradled his magic spear across his chest. “Now let us talk,” he said. “Let us make a great peace between the white man and the red.”

“Can you fly?” the Iroquois chief asked him first.

“What?” Brulé thought he had misunderstood the translation.

“You can live in the water like a fish. Can you live in the sky like a bird?”

The man was asking if he was a god. For Brulé, it was difficult to judge what his best tactical answer might be. He chose to be honest.

“I am a man like you,” he said.

In their prodigious labour, the centuries would pass, one time folded into another, and a city would rise in that place where the waters of the Allegheny flowed together with those of the Monongahela to cast the Ohio River upon its journey, but in that place on that day, only a camp of Iroquois and a single Frenchman sat still, and three Huron lay dead nearby. A small fire crackled where the men talked, and on the autumnal winds their voices were heard to speak in solemn tones.

Bound north the next day in the company of two Iroquois, including the man who had bashed his head against trees, Brulé paddled his own canoe, and he would cross safely through the Iroquois lands on his long winter’s journey home, taking shelter in Iroquois villages and learning their ways. After winter had slipped into spring and spring had yielded to summer, he taught his guides how to do the dog paddle. The young men loved to show the fellow
Iroquois they met during their travels that a man could swim like a fish if he pretended to be a dog.

“What’s a dog?” those Indians asked. The travellers did their best to explain that a dog was a white man’s shabby wolf.

They had an inkling of what it must feel like to be gods, to be like fish, the young warriors did, afloat on the rivers.

Shortly before reaching the island of Montreal, the place the Iroquois called Hochelaga, Étienne Brulé swam with his guides in the morning, laughing with them as they emerged from the pool by a waterfall, then passed behind them as they squatted to evacuate their bowels, and, in memory of his Huron friends, slit their throats. So that the white man would not be blamed, he took both their scalps, for he was a man of the woods now, a
sauvage,
and paddled on home alone.

Samuel de Champlain received the Cartier Dagger back from Étienne Brulé with a sense of solemn occasion. The young man’s return had presaged a burst of optimism throughout the community, for he had proven that a man could endure in this country, travel the uncharted rivers in the company of Indians and come back alive. Their own survival now seemed remotely possible. The two men kneeled in a small, makeshift tent, a swath of canvas fitted between pine trees on one side and a boulder on the other. Here they were sheltered from wind and rain and from the eyes of the other French. Brulé bowed, holding the dagger before him with both hands. Champlain balanced it upon two fingers and lifted it away from the young man’s possession. He then kissed the centre diamond on the hilt and placed the knife in a small box alongside his right knee.

“I looked for this in the hands of others. When I did not see it, I believed that you remained alive. It gave us all hope. For you, and for ourselves.”

“With respect, sir, I’d rather not travel with that knife again. A man could get killed for that knife.”

“Ah. Yes. I see.”

Brulé had returned as an apparition emerging from the woods and yet, seemingly, a part of the woods, and for a second time Champlain had scarcely recognized the young adventurer. Wilderness life had changed him—his appearance, the way he carried himself, even the way he spoke, and perhaps not all the changes were for the better. An inner determination had supplanted the youth’s earlier impetuousness, and the romantic eagerness with which he had embarked had been augmented along the way by a seasoned fatalism. He no longer possessed the demeanour of a dislocated youth. In idle hours, Champlain had imagined that he would welcome the lad home in a manner befitting the return of a beloved son from a war, and he had done so. And yet, similar to any son arriving back from a conflict, the warrior was no longer the rambunctious, grinning boy who had departed, and the relationship between the two men had also been altered.

Champlain understood the change, gleaning insight as he listened to Brulé’s accounts of his escapades. He remained the leader of this mission, but no longer was Brulé a mere foot soldier at his command. The youth was the only one among them who possessed true and generous knowledge of the territory, the only one who had proven himself and developed the capacity to survive on his own in the wild woods, and he alone among the French comprehended the language and strategies of their friends and enemies both. Brulé understood Indian ways, and consequently the ways of this land. While he was much too young to be a rival to Champlain’s leadership, he nonetheless had become a person of influence and standing. He was considered courageous and insightful. The people revered and trusted him, so that it was now prudent for Champlain to consult him regarding a variety of crucial decisions. Laughing one night, meaning to make a joke, he dubbed Brulé the first Quebec man.

“What?” Brulé, somewhat inebriated with the last of the ship’s wine, responded.

“You were not born here,” Champlain expounded, and clamped an arm around the lad’s shoulders, “but you are the first Frenchman to belong to this land. You are, Étienne, the first Frenchman of the New World, for you are no longer a Frenchman of the old.”

“France,” Brulé muttered, taking his final swig, “can kiss my ass.”

Given the late hour, and their general state of drunkenness, the French around the campfire that night chuckled.

The next morning, Champlain was still thinking about Brulé as he pondered a new scheme, letting it settle into his head. Eternally at odds with powers guiding him from France, Champlain allowed himself to imagine a new man, a new people. One day, a few years later, he would take his ideas to the Algonquin, and suggest that they and the French form a new race. Indian and French would intermarry, binding their alliance through shared offspring and a unified purpose. The proposal was not without interest to the natives, and they considered the possibility at length, deciding in the end to respectfully decline. The French had brought over too few women to tempt their young men, and they feared that their young men might want for wives while Indian girls merrily ran off with the randy French. Yet both sides agreed, in the face of the idea’s defeat, that although intermarriage would not become a requirement, neither would it be discouraged in their communities. Love, then, would be permitted to take its course, wherever it might arise.