An officer of the Mounted Police told me that when on duty near the International Boundary Line he had heard there was a wonderful cave some miles distant, containing Indian pictures. This he visited and found stone couches within and drawings upon the wall. Conversing with several Indians he was told that two young men had gazed upon the writing and consequently they were killed.
JOHN MCLEAN M.A. PH.D, 1888
THE MAN WAS WAITING FOR him on a sagging dock on the Churchill River where the pike hung in the weeds like transmissions of energy, quivering green and slender in the shallow water. An old hide-coloured freighter canoe with a twenty-horsepower motor knocked against the dock. The man who stepped out of it was mustached and beer-bellied and his black hair hung from under the same tattered tractor cap he always wore, on which an expanding stain of sweat was working its way. The cap had an air of impregnability about it, so did the man. Red Man Chewing Tobacco was stitched in gold letters across the cap. Paul had never seen the man without it and was not entirely sure that it was physically possible to remove the cap from his head. It was not possible for him to conceive of Joe Animal without this tractor cap. Beneath the rim of the cap, a hand-rolled cigarette rested on the man’s lip and hung down like a line of spittle.
“You look great,” Paul offered.
“Don’t I,” said Joe. His forehead showed large as a rock face and he leaned in as if he intended to crush Paul with it. The man’s lips were ample and floated on his face with no apparent means of being fastened there. To Paul, the entire face resembled an old baseball glove that he’d owned as a kid. He was tempted to remind the man of that. Despite the individual wreckage that made up the parts, the face was comforting and familiar like a well-used map.
Paul strapped himself into the lifejacket that Joe handed him and positioned himself carefully in the bow of the freighter canoe.
“Where’s Raphael?” asked Paul. “Is that his name, Raphael, that guy? That weird guy? I thought he was coming with us.”
Joe Animal spat his cigarette end into the water. “Raphael was in the hospital. Only now he ain’t. I called. He’s dead. He got the pig flu. Or that other one. His wife told me. She’s not doing so great either.”
“Jesus,” said Paul.
Joe nodded, but said nothing. There was nothing to say about it. They paddled without speaking. Paul would have spoken gladly, his companion not so much as a word.
After an hour, Paul attempted to provoke the man into language.
“The trouble with you Joe is that you’re not phlegmatic enough. In the old days you couldn’t read about a Native who wasn’t phlegmatic.”
“I wouldn’t know that,” said Joe Animal. “Seeing as how I can’t read.” It was a falsehood the man was unusually insistent about. For a moment, Joe Animal was tempted to repeat to Paul, once again, that he was the lone and illegitimate descendant of the Earl of Sandwich and an English show girl. He’d read about such a girl in a half-burnt magazine that he’d found in a hunter’s camp near Hawk Junction. The magazine was actually called Hot Chicks in History and stated, on absolute authority, that the young woman possessed the finest legs in all of Europe. Duels had been fought over her. Men mortally wounded in the fog at dawn. Her name was Eliza Vestris, she was a nineteen-year-old actress and her legs had been cast in plaster by a sculptor. “Such a leg,” said the sculptor, “is always sure to fetch a high price.” Joe liked the sound of that. He had good legs himself. There was a woman who had told him that, years ago. He remembered. He came from a long line of men and women with good legs.
The freighter canoe thumped alongside a world of green, abundant green, a vast green hemorrhage of trees that reflected in the chill and now almost purple water. A heron drifted over top of them as still as an aircraft. To Paul, it felt like there was not the slightest deviance from green, the universal green textured differently in the trees, the marsh grass slightly less green, the leaves of the birch trees darker green than the marsh green, the green world, the wedges of green, the greenness of his wife’s thumb. There was nothing that Linda couldn’t make grow. He thought there was something brilliant about that. Suddenly he missed her immensely. He had made a mistake, he thought, coming here.
“Everything’s green,” he said lamely.
“Green,” said Joe. “Yep.”
At nightfall they camped in separate domed tents, both of them snoring viciously and in tandem while the stars shot over top of them.
IN THE MORNING THEY WERE on the river again. The water had darkened. The cliffs rose in steep and black formations, straight out of the water, icebergs made of stone, and the rock tripe hung down in sheets, dark and vulva-shaped. Windigo cabbage they’d called it. Famine food. Paul had tasted it. Franklin’s men had peeled it off the rocks and eaten it on their journey back from the Coppermine. Half the men starved, others took to cannibalism, Franklin ate his boots instead. Two centuries earlier, on the U.S. side of Superior, the Jesuits had eaten the rock tripe and gone mad. Father Menard, irascible, hateful, holding a cross in an outstretched hand, actually running through the woods in an effort to convert les sauvages. Chased them into their own homes. Paul had written about Menard; he vanished out of La Pointe in a desperate search for souls, his body never found. For a moment he considered what it must be like at the end, to be broken like that, eating rock fungus.
They moored the outboard at the rock face. Paul took his camera and began to snap the rusted blots, a canoe the size of his fist, inhabited by three stick figures and what looked to be a cross; an X figure joined at the top and bottom, two dots that might have been eyes or suns, blind eyes, he thought, dead suns. The figures were in the shape of an hourglass, and possessed five fingers. He put the camera away.
“What do you think?” he said. He expected no reply. There was the click of a cigarette lighter, and then Joe’s deep and remote voice.
“What they drawed is what they dreamed. That’s what I think. I know that. What do you know?” The man paused for a long exhalation in which he watched the smoke leave his mouth and begin its journey.
Paul stood and made a sweep of his hand to indicate how the painting would be composed, here, in this spot in a craft like this one, a clay paint bowl in hand, a finger for a brush. Most likely a finger. He was only guessing. So much of it was guesswork.
They drifted a few metres, clapping gently against the rock, until they reached the lines. Three rust-coloured lines stacked horizontally at eye level. Joe Animal spoke: “That first one up there, eh, that first line. You know what that is, right?”
“No. I don’t. Neither do you.”
“I do.”
“Who told you? Was it one of your cousins? One of your many cousins?”
“That’s right. Cousin Clarence.” He pointed. “That first one, that’s the Canadian National Railway.”
Paul looked closely at the horizontal stain three inches long welded to the rock. It was a tally mark, nothing more, he was sure of it. He had no idea what it tallied.
“The second one. That’s the Canadian Pacific Railway. The third, you know what that is?”
“The Trans-Canada Highway,” said Paul at once. It would have pleased him enormously to appear knowledgeable in front of this Native from the Pic Mobert reserve, a man he had come to know, against the odds. A man he probably did not know at all. “The Trans-Canada Highway,” Paul repeated. “The Highway of Hope.”
Joe Animal shook his head and grinned. “The third one is the end of the world,” he said cheerfully.