IT WAS TOWARD SPRING that Bush gathered up the maps to go to the mainland. By then she had our course fixed in her mind and she was easier about things. “Come on,” she said impatiently.
I followed. The ice of the lake, while still frozen, was beginning to thaw and it was slushy as we walked over it.
All around us, spring was a wonderful quickening, a smell of newness in the air, a brightening of light. Trees, freed up, were being moved by the wind. They creaked as the wind spoke through them, telling winter to hurry away, singing back the sun, the green new shoots of living things. At the roots of dry brown grasses were new soft beginnings. The tips of gray rocks were emerging from snow. Everywhere was a sound of water dripping, running, surfacing.
Spring was a statement of faith, trust that all would be well, that light would return. The faithful earth was swept with the religion of the season. Opening. Rising. Muddy, soft, and renewed. I believed spring entered not only our dreams but those of the moose and wolves. Soon we would all be about, back to our lives.
DORA-ROUGE and Agnes were glad to see Bush. They’d worried about her and now they greeted her with warmth and love. But she was too occupied with the journey to be civil. Almost as soon as we stepped inside the door, before my boots were even off, before she removed her coat, Bush announced, “I’ve thought it over. I’m going. No matter what you say.” She was ready for an argument. She sounded unlike herself.
“Where are you going?” asked Dora-Rouge.
“You’re getting kind of busty,” Agnes said to me.
I pretended not to hear. But I’d seen myself in their new mirror and yes, I was changing.
“I’m going up to the headwaters and bay.” She was abrupt, as if they would try to change her mind.
“Take off your coat, dear,” said Dora-Rouge.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me.” With an edge of stubbornness. It wasn’t so much that she thought they would argue her out of it; it was because when thaw comes, everything moves more quickly, even words.
“Where did you say you are going?” said Dora-Rouge.
“To the Fat-Eaters.”
Dora-Rouge lit up, hearing about our plans. “How wonderful.” To me, she said, “I was born up there, you know,” as if I’d forgotten about the First World in the divided waters and lands of the farther north, her stories of the Fat-Eaters, who lived three human territories to the north of us and who were our ancestors. “It’s where I want to go so I can die in peace.”
“We’re going to take you with us, Dora,” said Bush. Her voice was soft again.
I hadn’t heard about this part of the plan. My mouth dropped open. Against my will, I said, “What?”
Agnes looked dismayed. If Dora-Rouge went, it was to her death. So far Agnes had kept her mother alive by not going home. Not only that, but if Dora-Rouge was going to her final resting place, Agnes had no choice but to go along or seem uncaring.
Dora-Rouge could not hide her excitement. “Really? You’re taking me?” She said this with wonder, but after she heard our plan, her spirits fell, as if for the first time she grasped reality. “But I’d just be a burden to you. It would be such a hardship to take me along.”
“Traveling there, Grandmother, everything is a burden.”
At least Bush was honest. She could have denied it.
She turned then to Agnes. “We will take you, too. I know you wouldn’t want her to go without you. And she wouldn’t go without you. But it will be hard work. We will have to walk over several portages and distances on land.”
Bush had plotted out the easiest route with the least number of places, portages, to cross on foot. Still in her coat, she unfolded two maps before them. “We’ll be traveling out of the way at times, but in a roundabout way that will make it easier in the long run.”
“Take your coat off. Make yourself at home,” Dora-Rouge said. “How have you been?”
“I’m going to do it,” Agnes said, even though a furrow formed between her brows. “I can handle it.”
I knew she’d go whether she wanted to or not. This journey seemed unfair to Agnes. Sitting next to her mother, she leaned forward to look at the maps. Two gray-haired women at the kitchen table, water steaming on the stove. “No, I’m sure I can make it.”
I didn’t know then what all was involved. I knew only what Bush had told me. Dora-Rouge would have to be carried. “No problem,” I’d said, when Bush told me this. I’d calculated Dora-Rouge’s weight to be not much over seventy pounds. I was strong and even though my back was bent from bad beds, it was not hurt from lifting, so what was Dora-Rouge to carry, I thought, such a light weight. I didn’t yet know the heaviness of canoes and all the rest that we would carry, lift, and drag.
“I was always good at rapids,” Agnes said. She spoke the truth. I had heard about her safe traveling through rapids and white-capped waves. She was something of a legend. Tommy told me that the old people had seen her go down small falls and sit erect and guide the canoe safely to its destination in situations where other people would only cower or cover their heads and toss it all to fate.
“But there is a way,” Dora-Rouge said, “where we can stay in the water most of the time. I remember it. It was how they brought the whale down. It was the route they used to carry all the furs away from their bodies.”
These, the furs of my sleep.
Bush looked at Dora-Rouge for some time. Dora-Rouge’s way was not the path she had planned, I was certain. Doubt was a shadow on Bush’s face and I could see the thoughts that crossed her mind, hear the words her tight lips wanted to say. She didn’t want to disagree with Dora-Rouge, but I saw that she thought the older woman might be wrong.
I looked at Bush’s face, trying to read her expression. Her eyes were like the small, round pictures of Mary and Jesus, or the little mirrors we’d so desired, mirrors our lives had fallen into, our faces had died inside. In her eyes, too, I could almost see the carrying of Dora-Rouge across land, through mud, over stones, inclines, and drops. It was as if it were inside me already, the future, alongside a memory of place, people, and even hardship. And in my mind’s eye, I saw the freighter canoes with scores of men and tall mounds of skins taken from the naked backs of beaver and marten and fox, the open-eyed, childlike animals that lived in the Hungry Mouth.
Husk had told me once about planaria, that when fed pieces of their ancestors, they would remember tasks the gone ones had known. It was a cell-deep memory, he said. Maybe that was why I saw and thought what I did. Maybe places and people are like this, too, with a sad homing, a remembering of what has gone before us.
“Yes,” Dora-Rouge said, confirming her own words. “It was called the Million-Dollar Trail. We used to travel it. It was an old waterway. It offered hides and skins to the Europeans who never dreamed this land, who had no eyes for it. But I remember it.”
I, too, saw the watery paths. I’d dreamed them, lakes clear as glass, lakes that were black water and rocked against land, sure as tributaries of my own blood.
Agnes said, “Mother, you are not that old.”
“Yes. Yes, I am.” She looked directly at Agnes. “This time I really am.”
Dora-Rouge had already told me that there were plants up north that made useful medicines. She longed to find them. I could see her mind already clicking. We’d collect seeds, roots, beginnings.
Bush squinted at the map, as if losing her focus would yield to her eyes Dora-Rouge’s open way. She softened. “Where is it? I’ve looked for it.” She placed her elbows on it. “I’ve looked and looked and I just can’t see it.”
Dora-Rouge placed her hand on Bush’s arm. “These maps are not our inventions. Maps are only masks over the face of God. There are other ways around the world.”
As WINTER CONTINUED to slip away around us, I watched small islands of ice move down the river. At first I felt excitement about our journey. We were going. Four women, each of us with a mission. I was going to meet my mother, who lived near the Fat-Eaters. Bush was going to see what was happening to the water, to see if what the two men had said was true, to help the people. Dora-Rouge was going, first, after plants that were helpful to the people, and then to die in her ancestral homeland. It was Agnes whose task was going to be the hardest. She was going to deliver her mother to that place and grieve. Agnes began to sadden from that day on, even to the point of agreeing with everything her mother said. Even when Dora-Rouge was clearly wrong, Agnes kept silent. This worried Dora-Rouge. “Are you all right, Ag?” she’d ask. Husk, too. He tried to comfort her. He said death was only matter turning into light or energy, that we were atoms, anyway, from distant stars, and that we’d once been stones and ferns and even cotton. But I, too, was selfish. I wanted to keep Dora-Rouge.
One day, as it rained lightly, Frenchie arrived at dinnertime, her neatly arranged charcoal hair misted with the rain. She wore a long blue chiffon scarf around the neck of her jacket; it matched her eye shadow precisely and it trailed like a river down her chest. And she pushed an office chair, the kind on four wheels, with a seat that swiveled. It was gray. “This was poor Helene’s. She brought it home with her. Dora-Rouge, I think you can use it.”
Frenchie’s eyes were swollen. She’d been crying for days. Thaw had come and now she was miserably sad. She wanted nothing more, she said, than just to see Helene’s face and touch her hand one more time. All she could see inside her mind was Helene curled up and settled at the bottom of water with the whalebones, the Skidoos, and old trucks. And Helene was such a vulnerable vision floating in those maternal waters of Lake Grand, like an infant waiting to be born instead of a woman who’d just gone into death.
THAT NIGHT, LaRue came by on the pretext of bringing us some fish, but he was coming to see Bush. I knew he’d seen us walking to the mainland. He was out that morning, returning from his trapline. I’d seen his steps. I recognized his footprints by now. It was one of the talents of the north that I gained.
“How was the trapping?” Husk asked him.
“They were all empty. No good. It’s the wrong time of year, I suppose.” He eyed Bush.
Agnes said, “But surely they are hungry after winter. And moving about.”
“Maybe they are hunted out.” Husk shook his head. “That has happened before.” I could see that Husk remembered the time he’d been forced to trap and hunt the last of dwindling populations.
“Hey, where’d you get the chair?”
Dora-Rouge said, “From Frenchie.” She was learning to push herself in the chair, using a crutch with a rubber tip as an oar.
“I didn’t even know you typed.”
“Real funny, LaRue,” I said. I caught the scent of LaRue’s cologne. It was no wonder he had such bad luck snaring anything, animal or female. It was his smell. He might as well have carried a radio. But I didn’t tell him. I wanted his luck with animals to be bad. As I looked at him, I wondered why I had made it my work to bring together Bush and Rue, two people so unlike, LaRue believing animals felt no pain and Bush, like the traditional people, knowing the world was alive and that all creatures were God. I had wanted, before now, to tell LaRue about pain and animals, but I knew he would never believe a girl. I would have to wait for science to back me up, watching the magazines for hard evidence. I’d learned this from Husk. And I knew LaRue believed in things like science and printed words. But Husk said some things were so obvious the scientists couldn’t even see them.
“Guess what?” Dora-Rouge said to LaRue. “We’re going north!”
He stared at her, then at Bush. “What? Is that what that map business was all about?”
When Rue heard the full details of our travel plan, he looked at us and shook his head as if we were victims of a dreadful malady. “Hey! It’s spring. What else can I say?” And he laughed, certain we wouldn’t go, certain that we joked.
“Thanks for the encouragement,” Bush said. She sounded cold. But he was right in a way. Spring was a season of madness. The warming air and thawing water brought people to a kind of hysteria that could not be helped. After winter’s numbness and isolation, people were suddenly possessed by a great restless longing. I felt it, too, and it was beyond describing. It caused men to rush across ice in pursuit of something they themselves could not quite see or track, and to fall through the dark fissures growing in ice as it separated from itself. Women moved out of their homes, headed for another man or town or country. Younger men, powerless against it, shot themselves. And as we sat there at Agnes’ table with LaRue, Frenchie sat on the cot and continued to cry. Later, after Rue left, she hit herself in her own heart with a grief that had built all winter.
John Husk gave her some brandy.
She drank it, leaving her lipstick on the rim of the glass.
WE STAYED over that night. Early the next morning I put a kettle of water on the stove. The stove wasn’t quite hot enough. I poked in the coals and blew air on them, saw the orange fire flare up. I clanged the lid back on.
About LaRue. I thought, even as distasteful as his comments had been, he was still the only prospect for Bush. I dropped hints to her. I boiled water. I said, “He’s kind of good-looking, don’t you think?” It was part of my plan to make him seem desirable.
She was surveying one of Husk’s fishnets for rips, a ball of twine and a large, curved needle in her lap. “Not really.”
“I think he has potential. He’s kind of cute.”
“No, he’s a lost cause.” She said it cut-and-dry, without a thought. She put twine through the large hole in the needle.
Suddenly she looked at me. “Why are you so interested in him? Is there anything going on?
“What? Between us? No. Not me,” I said quickly.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, there was a memorial for Helene at Frenchie’s house. It was a small house and crowded with people. There were even some I had never seen. They’d all been closed inside most of the winter and looked thin and pale. I was late. I’d been talking with Dora-Rouge, who decided not to attend. It was too much trouble for her, she said. She was resting for our trip.
As soon as I walked in the door, I was handed a plate and sent to the table to fill it. The table was heaped high with food—breads, rice, stews. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate. Death meant eating, as if food would protect us from our own. There was plenty of food that year, as if to celebrate, even at a funeral, that hunger had not again taken up residence with us.
Frenchie wore a black chiffon scarf on her head, tied under her chin. She ate absentmindedly, looking up with her great sad eyes at nothing, taking a sip of wine, then one of coffee. She said this was how she liked to drink, to come down and up at the same time.
Tommy was there with the people of the Hundred-Year-Old Road. They cried. They had lived so long and seen so many of the younger generations gone, but even at that they had been unable to convince later generations to follow the paths of the older ways. The secrets of their longevity were to shun the ways of the white world and remember to live each day with reverence for all that was around them.
Other people cried, too, in that way my people had, and still have, of weeping out loud, without self-consciousness or apology or embarrassment. I’d never met Helene and my own eyes remained dry in spite of how their crying touched me. I took the dishes to the sink and rinsed them. I carried coffee around the room and filled cups and then stood looking out the kitchen window as steam rose from the sun-covered land.
The gathering was meant to dignify the loss. Helene would not be buried. Instead, Frenchie wanted to bury her favorite things. That day, the men had heated the ground with a torch and placed hot rocks on it. It was hard work, but finally there was a long, narrow grave, deep and wet. What was buried in Helene’s place, inside an old wooden grub box, was a ring of silver, a pair of Cree shoes someone had once given her, a piece of red earth she had believed could heal varicose veins, a marten fur, and a hair comb made of old tortoiseshell. A picture of a young man she had once loved went into the box, along with an unopened bottle of Tweed cologne, and a pocketknife that served as both a sharp blade and a beer-can opener. The grub box with Helene’s things was placed inside a small blue canoe and it was buried, with Helene’s favorite doll, blond-headed, and wearing a red scarf, the doll sitting behind the grub box, as if to paddle. It was lowered into the thawed ground, and clods of dirt were thrown in on top. But what touched me most was that they buried with her a song that was not ever to be sung again. Her song. I tried not to learn it as we stood around the wooden box. Frenchie sang it in a dry voice, stopping a few times, her throat choked up, and then beginning again. The mist of the ground floated behind her as she wiped her eyes on her sleeve. The others bent their heads even more.
I would never forget that song, buried or not. I thought, this is the way to keep the song in our memory. By making it forbidden. By burying it. It haunted me. I hear it still, the song of a woman I never met.
TOMMY WENT WITH ME back to Agnes’ house. He carried the black cast-iron kettle that contained stew. Above us, I could feel the life returning to the trees. Tommy said, “Think of how many people have carried this kettle.”
I did. I thought of it. It was iron that had probably been mined from our own earth. Suddenly I saw how old it was, this kettle. It had witnessed the killing of my people. It had been fired by trees no longer there, and forged in the presence of women talking at night. Now Frenchie’s tears were a part of it, too, and God only knew what other sorrows. Agnes once said it had contained a soup of rocks, twigs, and moss. Food for lean times.
It had other uses, too. It had bathed my grandfather, Harold, when he was an infant. It held a river. It was alive. I thought I’d heard sounds from it one night. Now I told Tommy and he nodded like he knew just what I meant. I think he was proud of me for hearing such things.
Outside, too, I heard singing in the distance. And I could still hear, in my own ears, the song we were supposed to bury and forget.
I looked in on Dora-Rouge. She slept like a child. I pulled her door silently closed. “Why don’t I fix us some coffee?” I said.
I measured out twice the amount of coffee grounds that Agnes would use. I stood in front of the stove, suddenly silent. Tommy stood behind me and took me in his arms and held me. I felt the warmth of the stove on my stomach and thighs, felt his warmth along my back. I bent my neck and he kissed it and I realized I was crying, that my face was covered with tears I hadn’t known were there, and he turned me around slowly and wiped them away, and tenderly he smoothed my hair. I felt his rough wool shirt against my cheek. We hated death and feared it, at least I did, but its presence, as it always does, made us desperate for love, the shining part of life, and to make love, to enter creation. I believe it happens this way to ensure that life will go on, that our people would continue.
Love is a beginning, a secret warmth that grows, something that comes alive; inside skin a soul turns over and opens its eyes. Love, I realize now, is a third person come to stand between the loving two.
From the next room Dora-Rouge said, “I can hear the grass growing.”
I looked at the kettle on the counter. The sunlight came inside it and filled it. It was a new angle of light, springtime, one I’d never before seen in this place.
WHEN THE LAKE was mostly thawed, when there were only a few islands of ice floating in the water, I decided to paddle to the Hungry Mouth. Near it I felt an undertow, a pull, as if something wrapped itself around me. I thought I saw hands, human hands, pale white and thin, and the face of the beluga and the red scarf of a snowmobiler. I sang Helene’s song as if to leave it there.
OVERNIGHT, all at once, it seemed, the world became green. In one day the snow was gone, the dark earth visible. Because of the sudden thaw, I could believe a god, any god, created water in one day, animals in another. In still another, trees were set to bud, then opened. There was a change in light. Ice moved and floated. It hit itself. Then parts of it broke away. There was a loosening, winter breaking in half, then in smaller and smaller pieces, all the way down to atoms and particles. The world was filled with sound. It was a wonderful din, the many voices of spring, the running of water, the ice breaking up, the wind and stars telling birds the way home so that they could fly even while asleep, return, and take count of us wingless people.
Even the island of the spiders came unmoored and began to float away, and Bush sent for Husk to tow it back to its place at Fur Island.