ELEVEN

THE SKINS of the dead are traveling toward us,” said Dora-Rouge.

I was having trouble lighting a fire in the cookstove. I blew on the smoking embers, then looked over my shoulder at her, sure I’d hear a prophecy or a vision from the other world. Instead I heard Bush’s squeaky-wheeled red cart rattling toward us on the road.

I went to the window. Against the soft, new green of springtime, Bush looked small. She wore her fishing vest and her hair was loose. She pulled the wooden wagon behind her. It was piled high with a mound of animal skins, and it looked as if a large animal tracked her, smelling her steps, and creeping forward. Mud swallows flew up from the road as she walked. I could tell by the way the wagon moved that the thick, gold-tinged furs of wolves and dark beaver hides made for a heavy load. From the window I waved at Bush, but she didn’t see me. She looked straight ahead.

The men had smoothed the road the previous day, raking rocks and filling in potholes, but a brief night rain had returned the road to its uneven, washboard state. Now the stubborn puddles reflected blue sky. Bush went around them. Once or twice, she had to turn around and use both hands to tug the wagon along.

She parted with the skins unwillingly, I knew. They meant something to her, more than just the symbol of her fight with the trapers. They were what was left of a past. Grasses and moose meat lived in the pelts of the wolves, water and trees in the skins of beavers. But she no longer worked for Rue; the nearly assembled turtle bones and shells sat in pieces outside her dark stone house like ancient things cast out of a changing sea. In order to buy provisions for our journey, Bush was forced to sell the furs that rattled behind her on the road.

It was the day before our journey. All of us were busy with preparations. I went back to the stove. The fire didn’t take. I held another stick match to the kindling. This time it caught and the little fire roared in that smaller way fires have of sounding like their large relations who sweep through forests and consume everything in their path—trees, burrows, and nests.

Before long, Bush and the red-painted cart squeaked back down the road. This time the cart was loaded with sacks of oats, Carnation powdered milk, dried meat, three pairs of olive green lace-up rubber boots, and what was left of the beaver pelts, which Bush planned to take along to trade at outposts and stations along the northern waterways. In the north, some things were more valuable than money, and these were prime pelts, old, but thick and dense.

“It’s damned inconvenient, if you ask me,” Agnes mumbled as soon as Bush was inside the door. For the last few days, Agnes had wandered around the house nervous and distracted, unable to remember what she was doing. Now she’d forgotten why she had come into the living room.

Bush carried an armload of supplies through the door. “Give me a hand, Angel.” She ignored Agnes’ complaint.

I lifted the furs onto the cot. They smelled of cedar and were slightly dusty.

Agnes, I think, was angry about her mother’s planned death. She was angrier still that she had no choice but to go along on the difficult death journey. But her anger, I figured, had a root of sadness. I followed her back to the little laundry room off the kitchen. I chatted with her, trying to distract her. “Do you think the weather’s going to stay warm?” I asked.

She glared at me.

“What would happen if we had trouble up there?”

“What are you?” she said. “The FBI?”

I backed out and went into the kitchen. I pretended I was busy, but I kept an eye on Agnes. She wore a sour look and ran clothing through the wringer. When she came to Dora-Rouge’s white blouse, she ran it through as if Dora-Rouge were still in it and she was punishing her, but her eyes were moist.

Dora-Rouge was every bit as stubborn as her daughter. It had long been her dream to return to the land of the Fat-Eaters to die and she wasn’t going to let any child of hers keep her from doing one more thing in her life. She was beyond that now. “You don’t have to go,” she told Agnes.

It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that by now Dora-Rouge was the only one who believed wholeheartedly that we would complete the journey. Even Bush now realized the magnitude of our responsibility. She wore a stern, tight-lipped look. It didn’t help, either, that all the men thought we were crazy, and even worse, they said so. Justin LaBlanc spared no words when he said to Bush, “The strongest men wouldn’t do such a stupid thing as that. And with old Dora, too, carrying her and all.” But in spite of everything a quickness filled the house as we packed. Agnes cleaned out her drawers and tucked her large underpants into a backpack. I rolled my jeans to make them more compact.

I picked up a rubber boot. “What are these?” They had lace-up supports at the ankles.

“They’re for us. Here, hand me one.” Bush sat down on the cot next to the furs. She pulled off a shoe and tried on the boot. “Yes, I think they’ll fit.” She stood up and tested it. “My old ones don’t have enough support.” She didn’t mention that they were nearly ruined from her run through the thickets and that she’d placed them on the woodstove to warm. “Now, that’s what I call a boot.”

“How attractive,” I said.

The boots were all the same size, 7. A little tight for me. It was all they’d gotten in. That’s why they were on sale, the price marked on them with red pen: $4.98.

When I’d arrived there such a short time ago, I cared only about what I looked like. My eyes had been lined in dark blue and I showed only the good side of my face. I never gave much thought to what things were like inside me or how I felt. I had never cared what was practical, either. I’d walked to school, through snow, in white plastic shoes, my red-painted toes squeezed up tight inside them. And now I was going to wear army boots, tall ones at that.

I wondered if we’d reach our destination, the four of us. Destination. I liked that word, with its hint of fate. I believed in destiny as much as I believed everything was a sign. It had been a sign to get Agnes’ letter with the folded dollar bills. It was a sign when a woodpecker tapped at a dead tree. Sometimes a person smiled at me a certain way and I knew we’d be friends or that our fates would, in some way, overlap. Once, I’d dreamed German words. Achtung. Halt. The next day two boys from Munich in dirty jeans showed up at the A&W and I went off with them to Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I was sure it was meant to be, that my dream was a sign. I was always looking for signs. I even called the two boys Stop and Look. But as I packed for our journey, I wondered about this particular destiny, if it was really ours. Maybe there were others to be pursued. Maybe destiny was a limitless, open road. Something dark and doubting weighed me down. I tried to talk those doubts away. Angel, I said to myself, you are being silly, Angel, you are this, you are that. As I went through my clothing, fresh from the line, I had feelings of dread and joy, hope and futility all linked together at once, as when people’s destinies twine around each other like roots or vines. I had it in my stomach, that feeling of doubting, wondering if it really mattered if we stayed or went. Maybe we would head toward our destinies all the same without this trip, the four of us. And though my grandmothers accepted me without misgivings, slow as I was in their ways, and as fast as I was in others, I had cold feet. Bush trusted I could do the work, could paddle and lift, could hunt if I had to. But I was not so sure. What did matter to me was how much I wanted to find my mother, Hannah Wing, whose red hair was braided and twined together with my own, at least in color. I wanted to know the truth about her, whatever it was.

We worked all that day, chatting busily about what to take and what to leave until our supplies and equipment filled up the small living room. To my annoyance, Agnes worried about everything. She fidgeted and fussed over whether we had enough toilet paper, whether we should take the gray wheels from the office chair we now used to wheel Dora-Rouge about. “Just in case she needs them,” Agnes said, but Dora-Rouge said, “Honey, don’t worry so much about me. There’s not a smooth piece of land between here and where we’re going, anyway.” But that only gave Agnes something else to worry about.

I helped to pack all Dora-Rouge’s things into boxes to send to the people she was leaving behind. It was a sad chore, but I closed and labeled cardboard boxes of silverware, old moccasins, and carnival glass platters wrapped in newsprint. I folded an unused nightie and a bottle of wine from 1947 in a box for Frenchie and then I went to the bathroom to wipe my eyes. I’d packed herbs and seeds, including a few kernels of corn, for the old people on the Hundred-Year-Old Road.

When we were quiet, there was a weighty, downpouring silence which took up far more room than words and tents. At these moments, Dora-Rouge pushed her chair around the room with the canoe paddle, drifting as if she were already on water. She glided to the window and looked out in one last attempt to memorize the land, the fresh green light of the trees, and all the things she would never see again, even the broken-down, rusted old cars she’d complained about so often. Her eyes grew soft, reminding us all that this was an unhappy occasion.

Dora-Rouge felt guilty about depriving the others of her death. They saw it as a hardship of the heart, she knew, but the old land was calling her, and she had an unflagging loyalty to the land and to her own heart, and she had to obey. But once she said to me, as I put a paperweight in a brown bag, “I don’t dare come back. They’d hate me for putting them through all this. Give that weight to Justin, will you?”

Afraid of the silence, I asked Bush again how many days she thought it would take. I already knew the answer. Bush played along with it, though. She closed her eyes, trying to calculate the distance by dark fathoms, and as if I had never asked the question before, said, “Thirteen. I’m sure of it.”

“That’s pretty optimistic, if you ask me,” said Agnes. She handed me another roll of toilet paper. “Put that in the top of the bag.” She’d already added odds and ends, lotion, an extra knife. “Put this in, too.” She gave me a container of Morton’s salt. “We might get dehydrated.”

And Bush replied, “In a lake?” She stood there with her hands on her hips, a woman’s gesture that to this day needs no words.

THE SOUND OF VOICES and fiddle music floated down the road toward us as we walked toward Frenchie’s going-away party. Agnes hummed to herself in the manner that said she was in her own private world, which was often those days, as she tried to drown out the sound of our watery plans and the death talk of Dora-Rouge. I walked beside her in silence, my own mind still occupied with thoughts of fate and destiny. Tied in her secretary chair, Dora-Rouge looked like a scrawny hostage as Bush pushed her up the road. John Husk walked slightly ahead of us.

“He’s the alpha male of the pack,” Dora-Rouge joked. “Just look at him.” He wore a starched white shirt, freshly ironed. Above us, bats flickered through the night sky.

Every once in a while, Agnes stopped humming and added some last thing to the list of what we should take. “We might need aspirin,” she would say, and, “Don’t let me forget the witch hazel.”

Frenchie had done her best to blow up some balloons, but they were halfhearted little affairs. They were tacked to the door next to the “Bon Voyage” sign, and they were as wrinkled and rosy as Frenchie herself.

Inside her house was another world. Suddenly we were among the smell of perfumes, the bright blue vases and colored waters, the noise and flickering of the television that was always on and never in proper adjustment.

Dora-Rouge lit up with more than just the fluttering light of the television. “Just look at this room!” The others parted like the Red Sea to let her pass.

It was going to be an occasion, I could see that. Frenchie would call it a “festive occasion” if she hadn’t been so sad from the loss of her daughter. Still, she tried her best. Red carnations and baby’s breath had come in from the florist by Tinselman’s ferry. I’d forgotten such things as greenhouse flowers. This was a measure of the distance between the Oklahoma I grew in and the north, and I was like one of those flowers, a forced bloom in unnatural conditions.

Dora-Rouge was transfixed. “I’m so glad I can still see!” With these words, everyone saw the room through her eyes. It was grand, full of people, everything scrubbed clean and shining. Even the walls were washed and, to Dora-Rouge’s amazement, the windows had no streaks. Frenchie laid down her fiddle to hug Dora-Rouge. She was shoeless in her Sunday dress with the large red peonies. She hugged us tightly, one at a time. When she bent over Dora-Rouge, Frenchie’s wonderful and sagging breasts bulged out a little above the low-cut flowered dress, and I smelled the rose water she had splashed on her skin.

Frenchie went back to fiddle playing, but only in B-flat—and she laughed. Her face, like Dora-Rouge’s, looked full and bright, this time without the use of false color. While she played, Justin LaBlanc himself sat near her, the transforming power of love incarnate, a bottle of Dr Pepper in his hand. He smiled and tapped an unpolished brown shoe on the floor, and when she wasn’t playing and he wasn’t eating, they held hands like young lovers. Justin looked slightly embarrassed around the other men, but it was them or Frenchie and, as he said, he’d had enough of them with their talk about fish and poker and bait. “And Frenchie’s a good-looking woman. She’s still got nice legs for a woman her age.”

“When did all this happen?” I asked.

Dora-Rouge said, “The night the mirror broke.”

Two young men, with their paper bags of liquor, had closed themselves into the bedroom. One woman asked Frenchie if she shouldn’t kick them out. “Not tonight,” Frenchie said, but everyone could already hear their slurred voices and smell the whiskey. Mingled with the fragrance of soup, bread, and perfume, it was a powerful kind of smell, an intoxicating poison that passed through the overheated house and made it seem damp as a swamp.

A few children from town ran through the house. Their parents tried in vain to silence them. Frenchie looked at the three boys and one girl with both a wistful amusement and a worry that they might break an Avon bottle or glass figurine.

A large tureen of wild rice and ham soup sat at the center of the table.

I followed Frenchie into the kitchen, “Can I help?”

She bustled about, getting silverware out of the drawer. “Oh, sure, honey. Put these soup spoons out for me, will you?”

The table was nearly ready. People were already lining up. Near some cloth napkins were bowls of warm water. “What’s this? Soup?” Justin asked. He was first in line. Everyone stood behind him.

Frenchie peered out from the kitchen. “What’s what?”

He pointed at the bowls.

“For washing your hands.” She went back to the kitchen and didn’t see how the people looked at each other. Even though they wanted to, no one smirked or laughed. “Finger bowls,” they would say later, and they’d say Frenchie is just that way, it’s how she always was.

When Justin opened a bottle of red wine, the two men from the back bedroom appeared as if by magic, their own bottle stashed away on the closet floor amid unmatched shoes and a few bright, low-cut dresses that had slipped off the scrawny shoulders of hangers. One of the two men was round and light-skinned. He wore a cast on his hand and wrist. He smiled at me in a way that was embarrassing. The other was dark and bone-thin, a red bandanna tied around his forehead, just above his eyes. They filled their plates and glasses and went back into the bedroom.

By the time Tommy arrived with four of the quiet people from the Hundred-Year-Old Road, the house was filled with a happy mood and the sound of forks on Melmac. My cheeks felt hot. I had sipped some of the wine when no one was looking. Others, plates balanced on their laps, could not stand up to greet or touch hands with the Hundred-Year-Old Road people, who all entered wearing solemn looks, reminding us of the importance and seriousness of the gathering and of our journey. At first no one but me seemed to notice, and it made me mighty nervous to see their faces, as if they thought we’d bit off more than we could chew. Or that we were all four going to our deaths. I had that feeling right away, and then, one by one, the others grew quiet until even the bright room itself dulled.

Wiley was dark and small. He was the one with the young wife, Chiquita, and she stood beside him, all of twenty-four, her hair pulled straight back. Wiley wore a thin cotton shirt with a sleeveless tee beneath it, his pants high. He remained standing and waited for the room to grow quiet, then he said a prayer for Dora-Rouge’s safe departure. In spite of the new serious mood of the room, a few people smiled throughout the prayer, and looked at each other, especially Frenchie and Justin. I smiled at Tommy, hoping our lack of solemnity would not undermine our fortune with the Great Spirit as we traveled to the far place of my mother.

The Hundred-Year-Old Road people had intended to stay only awhile, but before long they, too, were carried into the merriment. What with the cut flowers and the fiddle, and the rare, noisy children, the happiness was contagious, in spite of the impending loss of Dora-Rouge. “It’s the way I always wanted to go out,” she said. After a while, even Wiley smiled and said, “Well, I might as well make a night of it,” and he poured himself a glass of Coca-Cola, and in the house of perfumes and powders, bottles and tins, it seemed for once that everyone was prosperous, and we had joy, at least half a night’s worth.

I watched Chiquita, wishing I knew her better. In spite of her hair, and her attempts to behave in a traditional manner—she really did try—she seemed younger than me, more protected than the girls I had known. Chiquita was impressed, for instance, with the perfumes on Frenchie’s table and didn’t try to hide it. “You have Avon!” she said. She opened a red bottle and smelled it. “I love Persian Wood.”

“Why don’t you keep it, dear?” With her hands, Frenchie pushed back any argument Chiquita might have had.

All night Chiquita held the bottle she was given, as if someone would steal it from her, or it would slip through her fingers if she let her guard down. I made a mental note that when we returned from the Fat-Eaters, I would give her some girl things. She was deprived, living with Wiley.

Then I turned my attention to Tommy. He ladled soup into a flowered bowl and brought it to me. We stood together, afraid of our love and the words it might utter, so we said nothing. Only now did I think of how we would be apart. Now I was dreading to go.

Across the room, John Husk was well pressed and shining clean. Close to him, Chiquita passed the bottle of perfume beneath Wiley’s nose. He wrinkled up his face. “You don’t like it?” she asked. “He doesn’t like it,” she said to no one in particular, like a girl who’d taken up talking to air because she lived in the presence of the hard-of-hearing.

LaRue watched Bush from across the room like a predator who had just spotted a helpless lamb. He was dressed in the fashion of the day, pointed-toe shoes and tight pants, his hair loose at his shoulders and a pair of sunglasses hanging out of his shirt pocket. At least it wasn’t a leisure suit, I thought. I gave him a stern look, but he didn’t notice me at all; he had eyes only for Bush, who didn’t cast a single look at him. She was preoccupied with listening to Mrs. Illinois. Her face, in deep worry as she listened and nodded, made me think about our journey, tomorrow’s undertaking. Tommy took my hand, still quiet, and I leaned against him, feeling the strong warmth of his body.

About nine o’clock, people’s attention again turned to us. Between sips of cola and wine, the men were full of advice for our journey. It was partly that we were women who were about to venture into the deep world of broken waters, and partly that the men believed we were touched with a craziness and it was their duty to set us straight. They must have thought we were giddy with confidence and not with wine. That’s why they wanted to remind us of all the dangers ahead. They wanted us to know that we were journeying into a watery place most men would not want to endure, and that the dangers were real.

“This time of year is bad for bears,” one man said to me.

“I know that,” I said. I blushed to hear my haughty voice. It sounded like adolescent disdain. But my shortness was wasted on him.

From every corner the advice continued. “You have to mark your trails,” one man said, and Wiley added, “Break twigs in case you have to find your way back. It’s easy to get lost up there.” It would have gone on all night except for the fact that Mrs. Illinois silenced them. “Hush,” she said quietly. “You’re worrying the girl. They have Dora-Rouge. They’ll find the way.”

The room quieted, but now that our trip was mentioned, Bush unfolded one of the maps beneath the light of a lamp and asked a few questions of the men she knew had journeyed into the far north by canoe. She went to the table and pushed dishes and cups aside and they all gathered in the light of a pink flowered lamp. Which currents were useful, she wanted to know, and which places had falls and steep portages to avoid.

“Why don’t you let me do your face sometime?” Frenchie asked Chiquita, ignoring the concerns of the men, ignoring, too, the people bent over the map at the table. She had her priorities. Chiquita, so excited and deprived at the same time, smelled her perfumed wrist.

Only a few of Bush’s questions were answered, and even those answers did not sound too certain. What had seemed so far away even a day before now stared us in the face. I no longer wanted to go. I knew this clearly, as well as I knew the love lines and life lines of my own palm. I had a bad feeling about it. Bush had hatched this plan in winter, under the crazy hand of cold and dark. I hated to admit LaRue might have been right. I had never been completely sure about Bush’s sanity. Now the panic rose in my chest. But I knew I would go. I was dead clear about it. And I would utter no word of dissent, not even when the men said a thirteen-day journey was next to impossible. The furs were sold, the canoes were already on The Raven, and we were packed. This was a fate I accepted. But even so, Frenchie’s house felt suddenly chilly. I told myself this was what it felt like for a bride, getting the jitters before her wedding. It was last-minute nerves.

Mrs. Illinois pulled up a chair beside Dora-Rouge. She called her by her old name. “Ena,” she said. “Ena, do you remember that medicine on Sleeper Island, those tiny plants with round leaves? Could you bring me some?” But as soon as she spoke she remembered Dora-Rouge would not return. Too late, she clapped her hand over her mouth.

“It’s all right.” Dora-Rouge answered with grace and strength. “I’ll send them back with Agnes.” She was going to say something else, but the clock on the wall called out ten o’clock and, relieved, she said instead, “Let’s see the news.”

It was a troubling time, with difficult news. The war in Vietnam would soon be over, but the deaths, to everyone’s shock and dismay, were still carried across oceans and land by the invisible waves and particles of air. On a closer front, the American Indian Movement was gaining momentum in the cities. We’d heard a little about the goings-on in Wounded Knee, but we were hungry for more information. We wanted to see and hear more from the young men with braids. They sounded strong as warriors to us. Many of the people in the room admired them, even the older ones, and some had already taken to letting their hair grow and wearing it, once again, in growing-out braids.

If the American Indian Movement got little attention on television, the dams and diversions of rivers to the north were even more absent. They were a well-kept secret, passed along only by word-of-mouth. We would have known nothing about them if not for the young men who canoed from place to place, telling people what had happened.

The news disturbed Justin. As if he could bear it no longer, he exploded in red-faced anger. “Those young men act just like Reds!” Communists, he meant. That’s what he called AIM members. Everyone turned away from the gray light of the screen and stared at him. He didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were watching the screen. But Frenchie, too, stared at him. “What?” she said, as if she hadn’t understood. “What?”

“They’re Reds.” He repeated this in an angry voice, still looking at the screen, oblivious to the openmouthed stares around him.

“Why, Justin LaBlanc. How can you say such a thing?” Frenchie didn’t wait for his answer. “They’re right! You can see with your own eyes what’s happening.” Her face turned pale and she began to tremble. She stood up awkwardly. “I can’t believe you feel that way!” She walked quickly to the room where the two men drank among the doilies and talcum dust and mirrors. Her high-heeled shoes clicked behind her. “Get out,” I heard her say. “Get out of here now!” She slammed the door behind them and they stood before us, red-eyed and sheepish, all of us staring at them as if they held a clue as to what was going on.

We watched the rest of the news in uncomfortable silence, pretending Justin hadn’t spoken, but soon after that, a few people drifted out of the house toward their homes. They held Dora-Rouge tightly a long time before they left, and they cried. With both hands, Mrs. Illinois held a hanky to her face and sobbed into it.

After a while, Bush took a glass of water in to Frenchie. She was gone awhile and when she came back out I asked, “What did she say?”

“She’s crying.” And more quietly, so no one else would hear, “She’s drinking their whiskey.” The two men were empty-handed and unsteady, still standing.

But just then Frenchie flew out of the room like a storm. “Get out of my house!” she said to Justin. Her face was red and puffy. Justin went over to her and touched her shoulders with both of his hands. He bent down just enough to look squarely into her eyes and, as if he were talking to a child, he said, “I was wrong, baby, it’s just the old U.S. Army in me talking. Ever since being in the service I hear the voices of the sergeants, and they even speak right out of my mouth. Like how you hear your mother. The thing is, it’s their words, not mine.”

Husk and LaRue looked at Justin LaBlanc as if he were crazy. Then they exchanged a glance between them. LaRue shook his head as if to say, “He’s got it bad, and an old man, too.”

To prove how sorry he was, Justin ate one of Frenchie’s cookies, the ones he had hated before. She was still red-faced. She sat down at the end of the table.

Frenchie had been right, all of us agreed. Luckily, Justin, using the army sergeants as an excuse, had saved face in their eyes. If anything, they respected him more for admitting he was wrong, because they’d all been mad at him, too, they had just kept their own mouths shut.

By the time we were ready to leave for the night, Frenchie was pacified. Just a moment after we stepped out the door, she said, “Wait. I have something for you.”

She went inside. When she returned she placed, in Dora-Rouge’s lap, two of the precious bags of wild rice she was storing for relatives. They were contained in flowered pillowcase cotton and tied with pink ribbon.

ON THE WAY HOME, Agnes walked beside me, carrying away some of the wilting hothouse carnations. Light clouds drifted across the full moon. She looked up. “Do you think it’s a good idea to leave during the full moon?” By now everyone was accustomed to her anxiety and no one answered.

Husk pushed Dora-Rouge and her wheeled secretary chair over the bumpy road, the rice heavy in her lap. Even though he hadn’t had a single drink, the secretary chair Frenchie had sent on the ferry from her daughter’s place would speed up now and then, with a will of its own.

“You’re damaging my kidneys,” Dora-Rouge said in a shaky voice. “Slowdown.”

Husk obeyed for a few moments, but before long, distracted, he would speed up the pace again.

“I mean it! Slow down.” Her voice rattled. She put out a tiny foot as if to stop the chair. A darker cloud moved over the moon.

“I’m so sorry.” Husk’s white shirt shone through the darkness and with his black pants it looked like there were no man’s legs beneath it. I watched the floating shirt and the soft, white hair of Dora-Rouge move through the darkness of night. The smell of Frenchie’s perfumes was still in our clothing. Dora-Rouge bumped along the narrow road. The lights of houses fell across the deep spring grasses and a soft breeze moved them like waves of water. It was a beautiful night, the grasses bending, and Husk in his luminous shirt. Agnes hummed, her voice deep and soft, this time not just to drown out the voices of others, because we were quiet. It was one of the songs strong enough to need no words.

ON THAT LAST NIGHT, whenever I closed my eyes to sleep, I had visions of our traveling. In the darkness I saw the two canoes like thin lights moving through water, or silk-fine cocoons, the bodies brilliant inside them, waiting to grow wings. Sun played across the shimmering skin of water. Floating, I looked down from above and had no sense of what world was there except that it was alive, immense, and it took us in. For great distances ahead of me was the shining water. But a kind of sorrow stood by the bed. I pulled the sheets to my neck as if I could keep it from me. Maybe something I didn’t know was dreaming me. Somehow I knew I would lose a part of myself on this journey, as if, when we cast off into water, I would step outside my skin. It was a kind of dying. And I was afraid. Before then I’d feared that night and sleep could swallow me, that I would drown inside darkness, but now my fears grew to contain lakes and rivers and things with teeth.

I pulled back the covers. Barefoot, I went to the kitchen after Dora-Rouge’s bitter sleeping potion, but before I reached the bathroom, there was a soft knock at the door, I tiptoed over. “Who is it?” I whispered, leaning against the door. But I knew who it was. I opened the door. Tommy stood on the porch. A light wind moved the trees outside. “I want to be with you,” he said.

I buried my face in his chest and let him in. We lay down together in silence on the cot. We were close enough that I could feel his heart beating. We stroked each other’s hair. He caressed me with infinite tenderness, touching my face lightly. His arms were dark and strong against the white sheets. Our bodies made an agreement with one another, that one day they would be lovers. Soon, on the crowded little cot, I slept, my head against his shoulder, with none of Dora-Rouge’s potion in my stomach.

WHEN I OPENED my eyes Agnes smiled simply and said, “Did you remember to pack the rice?”

I nodded.

She must have watched us sleep for a while before she woke us, looking at our bare arms casual in the square light from the kitchen, our hands half-open in that sleeping kind of faith bodies have that they are safe, a trust lost in daylight.

For a moment Agnes busied herself folding blankets, then she turned away and went to the kitchen so that we could get up without embarrassment.

Through the window the first morning light was a line of red.

Beside the cot, Tommy’s boots sat in an angle of yellow kitchen light. They looked comforting in a domestic kind of way.

The bacon smelled good and it was already cooked. Bush sat at the table. She studied the maps in a last, almost desperate, effort to understand the territory.

“You can never be sure,” Dora-Rouge teased. “But we’re already lost.”

There were last-minute details. Agnes put an extra shine on the stove, arranged the wilting carnations, and dusted a shelf that she usually overlooked. For Tommy, Husk cracked three extra eggs on the side of the black iron skillet. They sizzled in the grease.

No one said a word about Tommy’s presence. It was a natural thing. I was the only one nervous about it, not that we’d done anything but sleep. And how unlike me that was. I thought how different my own people were from the ones I’d lived with in Oklahoma. Here, sleeping with a man wasn’t an offense. True sin had nothing to do with love; it consisted of crimes against nature and life. But it might have been that they all wanted me to love Tommy so I would never leave. Whichever it was, I liked it.

IT WAS A MORNING full of fire smoke. As we loaded our supplies into the rusting truck, I hung back a little. Whenever I looked at Bush, we shared a gaze of common concern. We were caretakers on this trip. Most of the work was up to us, and neither of us knew for sure how we’d get Dora-Rouge across all that space. God only knew how many portages. Dora-Rouge, of course, insisted there would be few. There would be roadblocks, we were sure, as the police tried to keep all but the local Indians out of the Two-Town area. That’s what the Fat-Eaters’ territory was called on maps. And for all we knew, the waterways might also be closed off by the time we reached the Fat-Eaters. Then we’d have to turn back. Or worse yet, they might shoot at us.

Dora-Rouge said, looking at me, as if reading my mind, “We’ll find a way.” She was composed and seemed larger than usual, with calm eyes.

Agnes rummaged through the packs at the last minute. She stretched tall to reach one that had already been loaded into the truck bed. Awkwardly she unzipped pockets, searching inside, still anxious that she’d forgotten something. She looked weary. When the truck was finally all packed, she returned to the house to look things over one last time. Leaving, she could not bear to close the door behind her. She left it open.

Bush boosted her up into the truck. Then, after Bush was in, Tommy put Dora-Rouge on Bush’s lap. Dora-Rouge glared at Husk, still mad at him from the night before. “This better be easy on my kidneys.”

“I’ll drive slow,” he said.

Bush said didn’t the air smell good.

After Tommy and I climbed into the rusted truck bed, we were off. I turned and looked back at the house one last time. The torn screen had been sewn a few days ago by Agnes, a last jagged touch, with blue thread. The red chair sat beside the door. The door itself watched like an open eye, waiting to see us return to simple fires and sleepings. Inside were the closed cupboards and cleaned-out drawers, the for-once empty kettles.

We rattled down the road as morning rolled across the lake, its first sunlight a red fire on the windows of buildings we passed.

A FEW CARLOADS OF PEOPLE waited to see Dora-Rouge off. I was surprised to see them. Frenchie stood and wiped at her eyes with a perfumed handkerchief embroidered in yellow silk, Justin at her side. The two young men had slept by the lake all night, and now, with dried grass in their hair, they looked surprised that the party-goers were present.

From behind the sound of tackle boxes I heard water lapping at the land and the clanking of fishermen loading up their boats for the day. Tommy and I unloaded the gear and carried it, bit by bit, to the rocking boat. It was going to be a tight fit. A loon spoke a solitary word. Suddenly everything was ready, and then it was a tearful good-bye as John Husk started the motor and The Raven began to cut its way across the lake. Agnes hollered something at Bush. Bush leaned forward to hear her, but Agnes’ words were whipped away by cold wind as soon as they left her mouth.

“Did you get the mosquito net?” Agnes asked. I nodded.

OUR FIRST PORTAGE, the first real step of our journey, was long, steep, and rocky. The men helped us over this first stretch of land. Tommy slipped the food pack onto my back. It was an enormous weight, more than I had imagined. I thought this didn’t bode well. Day one and I was already overloaded. It wasn’t just food, but pots and pans as well, even a stove. He patted it as if that would make it lighter. “How’s that?”

“Okay,” I lied. I started up the rocky path. My ankles felt as if they would break under the weight, and it was difficult to breathe. I stumbled. Once, Bush came up behind me, loaded like a pack burro, and I complained to her. “This is killing my ankles.” But then I looked at her and wanted to laugh. She carried a pack of clothes, tents, and a tarp, all on her back, with paddles and seat cushions in her hands.

“The boots,” she said. “You need them.” She put down her bag and rummaged through it until she found them and sat them on the trail. “Put these on.” She leaned backward, bent to an almost sitting position, and struggled into her pack again.

With Bush’s help, still nearly falling, I worked myself out from under my own pack and sat it on the ground. I took off my shoes and pulled the army-colored rubber boots onto my feet. They didn’t feel much better, but at least they had laced-up ankle support.

Bush picked up the seat cushions and paddles.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I couldn’t lift my pack onto my own back.

She put down the paddles and cushions to help me.

Then I loaded up, trying to stand beneath the weight. I handed her the paddles.

“We need a choreographer,” Bush said. But I didn’t smile. Not even a hint of a smile. Already I was exhausted and we’d have to lug the heavy furs, too, next portage, without Husk and Tommy. Not to mention carrying Dora-Rouge. Discouraged already on our first day, I followed Bush up the hilly portage and half-slid down the other side. It was treacherous, with loose stones and muddy, slippery places, a hint of what was to come.

I wasn’t the only one with doubts. Once, on that first day’s trip, we realized Agnes had not kept up with us. Bush backtracked and found her sitting on a stone, breathing heavily. Her hair was damp with sweat. When I saw her I felt a sinking sensation. I didn’t hold out much hope for this trip. I was sorry Bush had ever told Dora-Rouge about this idea. We wouldn’t reach our destination for two weeks, longer if the men at Frenchie’s party were correct.

For day one, I had a bad attitude. I fell into step beside Bush, wondering aloud why we couldn’t find a way to break through all the highways, rails, and airways that were closed to protesters, and why Dora-Rouge couldn’t wait a little longer to die. I’d thought all along that if we remained, Dora-Rouge might live longer, that it was a way of keeping her. “I don’t want her to die, anyway. Besides, why can’t we just drive there? Why does everything always have to be so hard with you?” I said this, though I knew why we couldn’t just drive. It wasn’t just that we would never have reached our destination, but that there were herbs to gather, places Dora-Rouge wanted, needed, to visit.

Just then Tommy came up behind us and I tried to look like all the work was a breeze. He carried Dora-Rouge as if she were a bag of feathers. She was bright with excitement. It was the land of the voyageurs and she said she could almost hear the French songs coming out of the ground. “Can’t you hear them?” she asked. She said the older, Indian songs were just behind them. Tommy carried her past us, his boots noisy on the gravel. She looked back at us and gave the sign for okay, joining her thumb and index finger together as if she were doing all the work herself and it was nothing. But even Dora-Rouge didn’t cheer me. Nor was the green beauty of the land any consolation.

Even so, underneath it all, something beckoned, more than my mother, more than healing plants or dams. For Bush, water was the summoning thing. For me, it was something I had yet to understand, but it compelled me.

By the time we reached the place where land ended and new water began, John Husk was walking beside Agnes, carrying some of the furs. I could see he refrained from voicing his concerns. Tommy, with his muscular legs, had passed three effortless times to my one, the last time carrying the new camouflage canoe with his head inside it, as if it weighed nothing. Paul Bunyan, I thought, smiling at him.

Then, too soon, we were at the water, ready to strike off on our own. “You might need this,” Husk said, offering Bush the handle of a pistol. “The ammo is in the waterproof case.” He pointed it out. The red case sat on top of the food pack.

Bush took the gun without a word. Her hopes, like mine, were sinking, and everything added to the weight we had to carry—the gun, even the heavy hopes—and then suddenly it was solemn, it was the time I’d dreaded. We were leaving. Husk looked tired. He kissed Agnes. A long kiss, caressing her back. He held Dora-Rouge in his arms a long while. He called her “my mother,” and he stumbled when he turned away with tears in his eyes.

Dora-Rouge looked at Husk and Tommy and at all the things and places she’d never see again. This world was a beautiful place, filled with life. Even the air was a soup of love and pollen and stars; that’s what she’d always said, and then she settled down into the canoe as if sue had always lived there.

As we paddled away, both Dora-Rouge and I looked back every few yards and waved to the two men standing at the water. Each time we looked, John and Tommy grew smaller and farther away. Then, one time, I turned back and they were no longer there. Where they had stood a moment before was just emptiness. I waved anyway, feeling a sinking in my stomach and chest. Above us, the ravens called out.

Agnes and Bush were in the larger canoe, both paddling, although it was only a halfhearted attempt on Agnes’ part. Dora-Rouge, the furs, and I were in the other.

Soon Bush pulled up alongside our camouflage canoe. “The waters are swollen. That’s to our advantage.” She softened when she looked at Dora-Rouge, who was curved into the canoe, seeming at peace, with the furs about her. “How are you doing, Dora?”

“Never better,” she said, the light reflecting on her glasses. “Just look.” All around us was the green of opened spring, the new leaves reflected by water, the gleam of sky beneath the canoes.

WE PADDLED long and hard that day. Sometimes I fell into the rhythm of it. Then, it seemed effortless. But the rest of the time, I hid behind my sunglasses and windblown red hair, and cried. And when we portaged, even with the new boots, I cried when I walked, from the weight, from the ache in my ankles, from my belief that this trip was a pipe dream. I cried when I lifted Dora-Rouge, and when I sat still. On top of all that, I, who had never admitted to being lonely, had a terrible first touch of loneliness seeing John and Tommy vanish, and it all was made even worse knowing Dora-Rouge would soon be gone from my life forever. If anyone noticed I cried, she kept silent about it.

The shadows lengthened into late afternoon and we were settled into a rhythm when it dawned on Agnes what she had forgotten. She sat bolt upright. “Oh no! My coat!” Her hand flew to her throat. “I forgot my coat!”

Bush and I stared at her.

Agnes’ eyes filled with tears.

“It isn’t too far yet,” Dora-Rouge said. “We should go back for it.”

We stopped paddling, the two canoes side by side. With the late sun reflecting off its surface, the water rocked us, the trees behind us, all around us. I knew if we turned around, we would have to cross the long portage again by ourselves, and we would have to say another good-bye to John and Tommy. As it was, I could think of nothing but sleep.

For a long time Agnes considered this. “No,” she said. “It would take at least another day to get back to Adam’s Rib on the lake. Look how long it took them to tow us.” She seemed unconvinced, though. I think she hoped we’d ignore her words and insist on returning, but she said, “I’ll just have to do without it.”

Dora-Rouge meant it when she said again, “We should go back.”

And Agnes meant it when she said, “No,” and waved us on.

EARLY EVENING we stopped to set up camp. I was exhausted beyond anything I had ever known. With a clattering of poles the tents went up, and Bush and I unrolled the sleeping bags. It was only around six o’clock, and there was a beautiful, rosy light to the sky, but I fell immediately into a deep sleep, leaving Bush and Agnes to cook, clean up, and put the food pack on a rope high up between trees, far away from bears. I didn’t even smell the chicken of that first night’s feast. I slept on a rock that would have been unbearably miserable at any other time in my life.

The next morning I woke with aching muscles and blisters on my feet that had gone unnoticed the day before. I ate the leftover fried chicken hungrily while Dora-Rouge stared at the sky with its soft clouds.

Once under way on that second day, we made good time, and in the warm sunlight of late morning, the pain in my arms dropped away.

The current was with us most of the day, and so was the wind.

All around us were the wide shining spaces of my dreams. Sometimes it seemed as if we were the first people who’d passed here. Near one island, we paddled through strands of spider silk, the paths and creations of other lives reaching out from themselves, drifting sheer behind us, and stuck to our clothing and boats as if we were carrying away the threads of what we were leaving, or unraveling some fabric of the past.

There were only two portages the second day. Both were short and both were on Bush’s map. Along one of them were unfolding ferns, horsetail, and deep, cool shade, a beloved darkness of the earth. Turtles out in the lake had pulled themselves up on rocks and logs, and the sunlight glistened on their shells. Beneath sky, the water was blue.

At midday we stopped at the first island to rest and eat lunch. “The vichyssoise is highly overrated,” Dora-Rouge said, drinking powdered, reconstituted soup.

At this place, Bush cast out a line and caught three shining fish. Northern pike. Not wanting to build a fire just yet, she wrapped them in plastic and placed them in water to keep cool. We ate them that night, laying them on evergreen boughs to let the grease drip off, according to Dora-Rouge’s recipe and direction.

DORA-ROUGE, the woman going home, was going backward in her memory as well, in that way a single life travels a closed circle. As she floated in water, she thought about the time when the Indian agents came to take her away to school.

She was twelve, she said, lithe as a snake.

I was a tomboy. Always scrambling up the trees. I caught the most bottom fish of all, you know, and I was just a girl. My nickname was Walleye. “Hey, Walleye,” the boys would say. I was just tiny.

The agents from the school caught me, but I managed to escape from their big, pale hands, the way a fish would; I slipped out.

They scared me to death. Their eyes were so blue, I thought they were evil spirits. They were tall, too, more than any men I’d ever seen. I escaped. I ran. I felt the thickets grabbing at my skirt.

Once, when I looked back, I fell over a rock. I knew my leg was broken, I heard it break. But as bad as it hurt, that’s how bad my fear was, too. I crawled home, crying. I cried all the way. The skin of my palms and elbows was all broken open by the time I got back.

Ek, my mother, set the leg and she made a splint of willow bark.

The next year, when they came again to round up children for school, I was slower. They caught me. I held to my little sister tight and wouldn’t let go. The men hit us to get us apart. It was so sad. When they carried me away my little sister held out her arms, her nose bleeding, her eyes streaming tears. “Ena,” she said, “Ena, don’t leave me. Somebody please help us, please!”

I can hear her and see her. She wore a brown dress, a dress that had been mine. She held her arms out to me. It still breaks my heart to remember. It was just a few years later when little sister, taken to another school, walked into the snow, lay down on it, and froze to death. I wouldn’t have even known except some boys came by the school and told me. I went home. Thirty-two miles, too, and it was winter. I wore seal boots I’d stolen from a teacher. Some stolen sunglasses, too. Because of snow blindness. Oh, it was a terrible walk. That long night I slept in a cave of ice. I knew about winter spirits that prey on the souls of young girls, but I was too tired to fear them. I heard when you freeze to death, you get sleepy first. You see things. I saw my mother stirring a kettle. She looked so beautiful. We were always happy. We had such love. I shook my head to keep awake. But I saw my father walk right out of winter with frozen meat the way he always did, a lynx on his back. Like he just stepped out of a blizzard. He looked like he was made of snow. I dreamed of my brother. He used to swing me up in his arms. “Ena,” he would say, “I hope you grow up ugly, so no man will want you. Then you have to stay here with us. We get to keep you.”

By the time I got home, my fingers were frostbitten. But it was a small pain next to that memory of having seen my sister cry and call out my name, begging the righteous men to let me go.

DORA-ROUGE LOOKED at her hands as if she was seeing them young, new in all this history. They were full of memory—the soft touch of her sister; the father who’d taught her to drive a team of dogs along their trapline, their faces nearly covered with cloth and fur to keep them warm. Through her I could see into the past. I saw the deep past, even before the time of Dora-Rouge.

In the past, I’d heard, it was a woman who saw the first white men arrive in a boat. They were floating toward her. Before she’d seen the wind-filled sails of the graceful boat of death, she thought it was a floating island and that it carried strange and beautiful beings instead of the tormented world that was its true cargo. No one could have guessed its presence would change everything until she and her people would want to lie down on ice, like Dora-Rouge’s little sister, and die. The woman who saw the island coming toward her didn’t know beloved children would be mutilated, women cut open and torn, that strong, brave men would die, and that even their gods would be massacred. She didn’t know of horses, the long-necked ones, that would stand in one place in the winter and freeze like statues and still be there next spring, aloof and majestic and blue, with frozen manes and ice crystals shimmering in the air all around them.

AS WE TRAVELED, we entered time and began to trouble it, to pester it apart or into some kind of change. On the short nights we sat by firelight and looked at the moon’s long face on water. Dora-Rouge would lie on the beaver blankets and tell us what place we would pass on the next day. She’d look at the stars in the shortening night and say, “the Meeting Place,” or “God Island.” True to her word, the next day we reached those places.

God Island, according to Bush’s maps, was now named Smith’s Island. It had been an old settlement. We paddled toward it in silence, slowing ourselves as we neared land, drifting toward it. There was a sense of mystery about it. A few tall, moss-covered stone walls remained half-standing at one end of the large island, like a crumbled fortress. A sense of richness dwelled on this island, as if it were inhabited by people to this day unseen but present all the same.

A very tall man had gone there in search of copper mines, Dora-Rouge told us. He was part of a tribe from the east, but had become lost, and instead of the copper, he found this island inhabited by small women and only a few short men. Instead of continuing his search for the island of red silver, he remained. Eventually he took several wives, women who bore taller children, all of them beautiful and copper brown. Whenever strangers came, they thought the people were so beautiful and straight they looked like gods.

“God Island,” said Dora-Rouge. “It’s an appropriate name. The people there feared no evil and wanted not,” she said. “Look, it still has the trees.”

It was true, there were ancient trees in the center that looked as if they belonged in a southern swamp. They were something like cypress.

Even from a distance the island had a feeling of intimacy. It was open and inviting. I thought maybe that was why the tall man had stayed. Or perhaps it was the word “God” that was inviting to me, a word I thought I knew too much about. The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah.

I know now that the name does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon. To use words and sing, to speak. And call out that island did. I heard the sound of this strong land. It was so lovely that, skeptical or not, I wanted to stay there for the night.

“No. We should move on,” Bush said, even though the island seemed to plead with us to remain. “All the campsites are taken.”

When I looked back, I agreed with her. Something lived there, something I didn’t understand, but would always remember by feel, and when I felt it, I would call it God and that was how I came later to understand that God was everything beneath my feet, everything surrounded by water; it was in the air, and there was no such thing as empty space.

Now, looking back, I understand how easily we lost track of things. The time we’d been teasing apart, unraveled. And now it began to unravel us as we entered a kind of timelessness. Wednesday was the last day we called by name, and truly, we no longer needed time. We were lost from it, and lost in this way, I came alive. It was as if I’d slept for years, and was now awake. The others felt it, too. Cell by cell, all of us were taken in by water and by land, swallowed a little at a time. What we’d thought of as our lives and being on earth was gone, and now the world was made up of pathways of its own invention. We were only one of the many dreams of earth. And I knew we were just a small dream.

But there was a place inside the human that spoke with land, that entered dreaming, in the way that people in the north found direction in their dreams. They dreamed charts of land and currents of water. They dreamed where food animals lived. These dreams they called hunger maps and when they followed those maps, they found their prey. It was the language animals and humans had in common. People found their cures in the same way.

“No one understands this anymore. Once they dreamed lynx and beaver,” Agnes said. “It used to be that you could even strike a bargain with the weather.”

For my own part in this dreaming, as soon as I left time, when Thursday and Friday slipped away, plants began to cross my restless sleep in abundance. A tendril reached through darkness, a first sharp leaf came up from the rich ground of my sleeping, opened upward from the place in my body that knew absolute truth. It wasn’t a seed that had been planted there, not a cultivated growing, but a wild one, one that had been there all along, waiting. I saw vines creeping forward. Inside the thin lid of an eye, petals opened, and there was pollen at the center of each flower. Field, forest, swamp. I knew how they breathed at night, and that they were linked to us in that breath. It was the oldest bond of survival. I was devoted to woods the wind walked through, to mosses and lichens. Somewhere in my past, I had lost the knowing of this opening light of life, the taking up of minerals from dark ground, the magnitude of thickets and brush. Now I found it once again. Sleep changed me. I remembered things I’d forgotten, how a hundred years ago, leaves reached toward sunlight, plants bent into currents of water. Something persistent nudged me and it had morning rain on its leaves.

Maybe the roots of dreaming are in the soil of dailiness, or in the heart, or in another place without words, but when they come together and grow, they are like the seeds of hydrogen and the seeds of oxygen that together create ocean, lake, and ice. In this way, the plants and I joined each other. They entangled me in their stems and vines and it was a beautiful entanglement.

“I KNEW there’d be another plant dreamer in my family someday,” Dora-Rouge said. Her mother, Ek, had been an herb woman. I got it from blood, she said. I came by it legitimately.

“Can you draw them?” she asked.

We searched the packs for a pencil. But we had forgotten a pencil, along with all the other things we’d left behind: combs, pencils, paper, keys.

Bush lit a match, blew it out, and handed it to me. “Here. Try this.”

I laughed. If the world came to an end, I wanted to be with Bush. She could make do with anything. “What a good idea,” I said. I appreciated her. Bush could find water in a desert, food on an iceberg. She knew the way around troubles. These waters were the only things that muddled her.

She tore open a brown bag, flattened it out, and laid it before me, almost reverent, a map awaiting creation.

I drew carefully, but after a while, the smudges vanished into the paper, so I merely began to remember the plants inside myself and describe them to Dora-Rouge. “This one is the color of sage,” I would say, closing my eyes, seeing it. “It opens like a circle. It grows between rocks.”

“That’s an akitsi plant,” said Dora-Rouge. “It’s good for headaches.”

SOME MORNINGS as we packed our things, set out across water, the world was the color of copper, a flood of sun arrived from the east, and a thick mist rose up from black earth. Other mornings, heating water over the fire, we’d see the world covered with fog, and the birdsongs sounded forlorn and far away. There were days when we traveled as many as thirty miles. Others we traveled no more than ten. There were times when I resented the work, and days I worked so hard even Agnes’ liniment and aspirin would not relax my aching shoulders and I would crave ice, even a single chip of it, cold and shining. On other days I felt a deep contentment as I poled inside shallow currents or glided across a new wide lake.

We were in the hands of nature. In these places things turned about and were other than what they seemed. In silence, I pulled through the water and saw how a river appeared through rolling fog and emptied into the lake. One day, a full-tailed fox moved inside the shadows of trees, then stepped into a cloud. New senses came to me. I was equal to the other animals, hearing as they heard, moving as they moved, seeing as they saw.

ONE NIGHT we stayed on an island close to the decaying, moss-covered pieces of a boat. Its remains looked like the ribs of a large animal. In the morning, sun was a dim light reaching down through the branches of trees. Pollen floated across the dark water and gathered, yellow and life-giving, along the place where water met land.

ONE DAY we came to a long swamp that neither Bush nor Dora-Rouge could identify. Agnes looked at us with her arms across her chest. Bush furrowed her brow and looked around as if a clue to our location could be fathomed by the shapes of trees or the sounds of birds. She took out her maps and looked at the lay of the land, trying to decipher any familiar shape. Dora-Rouge rested her scrawny back against a bedroll. “Well, we’ve passed God Island and the ribs of that boat. We must be at …” But just then, before she finished speaking, Bush once more unfolded the map and held it open, and as she did, the creases split, the map came apart, and parts of it fell from her hands.

Dora-Rouge laughed. “Throw it away.”

But even after that, useless as it was, there were many evenings Bush would look at a piece of the map, hold it up in the light and stare.

I never understood why she placed so much faith in paper when she trusted nothing else about the world that had created those maps. She wanted to know where she was at any given time, as if not knowing would change everything, would say there was such a thing as being lost. Whenever frogs in the swamp ahead of us began to sing, she fretted. “There’s no swamp on any of the maps, not here, anyway,” she’d say. Or when we crossed a stream, “I wonder if this is Willow Creek.”

From the west, soft clouds floated over. We set up camp. I placed stones in a circle and built a fire, then walked across the rocky island and entered the cold water. For a while I floated and dog-paddled and looked at the land on which we were camped. There was smoke from our campfire. It was a place of mosses, lichens, and calm water. From the water I saw Agnes off by herself, singing, walking toward a group of trees.

I was swimming stronger than ever. The water was cold and it was sharp against my skin, as if it had blades or edges. But I swam. My arms were lean and newly muscled. I moved through water easily. Then, refreshed, I dried myself, pulled on my jeans and sweater, and went about the job of gathering more wood. We had worked out our routines by now. We had our roles. Wood gathering was one of mine. And fire building. Bush and I set up tents, unrolled sleeping bags. Agnes cooked.

Soon we had boiling water and black coffee, and I saw Bush walk toward us with two large fish on a stringer.

I teased her. She was a dreamer of walleyes, I told her.

Agnes looked at Bush, looked at the two fish, and said, “Where’s yours and Angel’s?”

ONE EVENING it seemed cooler. The air had a different feel, rarefied, clean, and thin. Wolves in the distance were singing and their voices made a sound that seemed to lie upon the land, like a cloud covering the world from one edge of the horizon to the other. We sat around the fire and listened, the light on our faces, our eyes soft. Agnes warmed her hands over the flames.

There was a shorter time of darkness every night, but how beautiful the brief nights, with the stars and the wolves.

THE NEXT DAY, as if we’d become too complacent, a dark cloud of mosquitoes rose up from swamps and marshes. It was late for them, Bush said. Up to now, we’d just been lucky. She reached to the bottom of the clothing pack and took out four white cloth hats and shook them until the brims opened. I laughed but I was grateful she’d brought them. “Where in the world did you get those?” I asked. They looked vaguely like safari hats. Bush was too busy searching among the clothing for veils to answer me.

Within a few moments we looked like brides on safari. The insects landed on the netting, attracted by our warm breath. Already the droning of them made me anxious. I was grateful Bush had remembered the nets. We had to cover our hands, as well. The high noise of the mosquitoes, as they came near me, tightened my stomach. I waved them away, but more of them seemed to slip around behind any movement I made.

“Don’t bother to fight them,” Dora-Rouge said. “It only wastes your energy.” Then she said, “I don’t know what I had in mind. We should have been drinking swamp tea.”

Yes, I remembered the tea. People in the north had used it for centuries as tonic, as repellent.

“We forgot it,” Agnes said, but she did not say that Bush, in her zeal to keep our packs light, had probably left it out.

Bush set to work making a larger fire, a smudge, and we put green wood on it, grass, and leaves until smoke was all around us.

“We need to get the tea leaves,” said Dora-Rouge, coughing.

My eyes watered.

But even if we found swamp tea that day, it had to build up; it would be a few days before enough tea was in our blood to keep the insects away. In the meantime, the insects tortured me the most, flying toward me with an electric sound, finding the places I’d neglected to cover: the hole in my jeans, the gap between neck and shirt collar. Pant-leg openings. “It’s because you eat too much sugar,” Agnes said.

Later, I heard stories, accounts of caribou and men killed by mosquitoes, almost bloodless or drowned as they submerged themselves to get away from the tiny swarming insects.

At darkness, when the mosquitoes abated for a time, Bush went out to gather stalks and leaves of the tea. She was careful in the canoe as she paddled toward the swampy regions where both mosquitoes and swamp tea grew, taking with her a light that would, unfortunately, also wake many of the insects prematurely.

I saw her move across the lake, the water silver and heavy as mercury.

Mosquitoes are one of the oldest forms of life. They were already there when the first people lit their fires of smoke. That’s what Dora-Rouge said. Their ancestors heard the songs of my ancestors, she said, and they were there when the French passed through the broken land singing love songs and ballads of sorrow. They were there when the fur traders paddled swiftly through rivers, up and down, searching for furs and for the dark men who would offer them for trade. The mosquitoes remembered all the letting of blood. They remembered the animals sinking down into earth.

Sometimes I thought I could hear these things myself, the lonely, sad songs coming through trees and up from the banks of their destruction. Always, behind those songs, I heard our own deep-pitched songs that were the songs of land speaking through its keepers. Sometimes, too, I heard the old ones in the songs of wolves. It made me think we were undoing the routes of explorers, taking apart the advance of commerce, narrowing down and distilling the truth out of history.

We were still and let smoke curl around our bodies. The next day I resorted, finally, to wearing mud in order to protect my too-sweet skin, and to draw the sting from the bites. In what we thought of as evening, the mosquitoes and swarms of black flies were a shadow, a dark cloud, clinging to the tents. I was ashamed to be so afraid of them, more afraid of them than of bears or wolves, or even wolverines. But one evening we looked at each other, our veils covered with alive, dark mosquitoes, mud on our faces, gloves on our hands, and I started laughing. It was contagious, the laughter. Agnes said, “It’s not funny,” but even she laughed.

ON OUR JOURNEY, Bush opened like the lilies that flowered on some of the islands, at first tentative and delicate and finally with resolve. It was as if she had needed this place and all the water, to sing in, room to hold out her hands. Water and sky were windows she peered through to something beyond this world. Or perhaps they were mirrors in which she saw herself, her skin, her hands, her thighs, all brand-new. She was as uncontained as she had previously been contained by skin, house, island, and water. Now it seemed there were no borders. In shadows and in deep woods, she vanished, or she danced a slow dance, or she talked to the land. Some nights I sat beside the fire and saw her against the deepening sky, walking toward us, or sitting on a rock, or moving into the woods, stealthy as an animal. Time dropped away from her. Her eyes softened. She might have been thinking of the things she had been dealt in her life: the betrayals, the unhealable wounds made by Hannah, the loss of me, the solitudes she had needed and thrived on.

At times, too, I heard Agnes singing, talking the old language, mumbling inside a tent.

Agnes remembered the bear more strongly now and, even without her coat, she talked with it. Dora-Rouge sang low songs that sounded like wind. She read things in the moving of waters; she saw what couldn’t be seen by us as the land and soundless mists passed by.

As for me, I was awake in time that was measured from before axes, before traps, flint, and carpenter’s nails. It was this gap in time we entered, and it was a place between worlds. I was under the spell of wilderness, close to what no one had ever been able to call by name. Everything merged and united. There were no sharp distinctions left between darkness and light. Water and air became the same thing, as did water and land in the marshy broth of creation. Inside the clear water we passed over, rocks looked only a few inches away. Birds swam across lakes. It was all one thing. The canoes were our bodies, our skin. We passed through green leaves, wild rice, and rushes. In small lakes, dense with lily pads, tiny frogs leaped from leaves into the water as we passed.

Sometimes I felt there were eyes around us, peering through trees and fog. Maybe it was the eyes of land and creatures regarding us, taking our measure. And listening to the night, I knew there was another horizon, beyond the one we could see. And all of it was storied land, land where deities walked, where people traveled, desiring to be one with infinite space.

We were full and powerful, wearing the face of the world, floating in silence. Dora-Rouge said, “Yes, I believe we’ve always been lost,” as we traveled through thick-grown rushes, marsh, and water so shallow our paddles touched bottom.

The four of us became like one animal. We heard inside each other in a tribal way. I understood this at once and was easy with it. With my grandmothers, there was no such thing as loneliness. Before, my life had been without all its ears, eyes, without all its knowings. Now we, the four of us, all had the same eyes, and when Dora-Rouge pointed a bony finger and said, “This way,” we instinctively followed that crooked finger.

I never felt lost. I felt newly found, opening, like the tiny eggs we found in a pond one day, fertile and transparent. I bent over them. The life was already moving inside them, like an eye or heartbeat. One day we passed alongside cliff walls that bore red, ancient drawings of moose and bear. These were said to have been painted not by humans, but by spirits.

ONE DAY IT RAINED, but we passed through this day, too, as if nothing had changed, not the tree trunks black with water, not the shining rocks, not even the low clouds curling through land, winding between the wet, dripping branches of trees. It seemed there was no difference between the water below us and the water above.

There was lake after lake, island after island, and then, one day, we traveled down a calm river in silence. It was a lush day. Pollen blew through the air and landed on water like yellow snow. Smiling, I looked back at Bush and Agnes behind us. “Dora-Rouge,” I said. “It is so beautiful.”

At river’s end, where water emptied into a lake, we came to gray walls of stone that held other paintings, red and black. These were of moose and wolverine. “Look,” I said. I stopped paddling. A rain cloud passed over, and it was our good fortune that a light mist fell because when the rock wall became wet, we could see that the wolverine had wings. Invisible in the dry air, those wings waited for water to expose them. A white bird, too, was now visible. “What people,” I wondered aloud, “had such vision?”

“Your people,” said Dora-Rouge. “Mine.”

Beneath the surface of the water were more paintings, just visible.

“The water must have risen,” said Dora-Rouge.

It was true. Our paddles touched the tops of trees. On the land many trees were half-submerged. They stood in water, still rooted, looking like bushes growing along the surface of water. We still had a part day’s travel left in our arms, but we decided to set up camp high on this island that was partly drowned and worth examining.

I undressed quickly. I wanted to swim through these waters by the wall of drawings.

“Be careful,” said Agnes.

Entering water, I lost my breath. The water was colder than before. And it was clear. Through water, the flooded land looked perfectly normal, except that grasses swayed with the currents and not with the wind. A trail was still visible between the drowning trees.

I made my way to the painted walls and dived, eyes open. Never had I seen water like this, so clear and deep. I thought of Bush, standing before water one day, saying, “Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen,” in her dreamy way. When I was inside water, I understood how these simple elements married and became a third thing.

Fish were painted at the lowest depth of the stone walls. Just above them were several red deer, standing as if startled by a twig breaking in the underwater forest. They were prepared to run off the stone and through water. I forgot to breathe, swimming as if once again, as before birth, I had a gill slit. In that moment, I remembered being fish. I remembered being oxygen and hydrogen, bird and wolverine. It was all there. I felt it in my heart. But I could never think what to call it after that. I only knew that I and my many mothers had been lost in sky, water, and the galaxy, as we rested on a planet so small it was invisible to the turning of other worlds.

As I left water, I smelled rabbit cooking. Agnes was cheerful with the promise of fresh meat. I stood near the fire and squeezed out my wet hair. “Where’d you get the rabbit?”

Bush was using some of her own hair to tie a fly. “I pretended I wasn’t hunting,” she said. “Watch it, Angel. You’re getting me wet.”

“Come on, tell me. How’d you get it?” But I knew how. I’d seen her set a snare once, with twine, twig, and a single nail.

“There was a place like this in Oklahoma.” She looked around. “With rock paintings of bear. No one knew about them. They were in a forest.” She pulled some of the hair through a loop. “My uncle lived in those woods. Once he saw thirty bear walking through the forest together. He said they were growling and roaring and breaking trees as they went. He was scared to death. He tried to find a place to hide where they couldn’t get him. He thought of a tree. But bears climb trees. He knew of a cave, too, but any place he could think of, bears could reach. But they were so powerful in their walking that they forgot all about men.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Agnes said.

“I know. That’s why I’m sure my uncle didn’t make it up.”

Agnes brushed some ashes off my leg. “I wish I had my coat.”

Dora-Rouge divulged Bush’s hunting trick to me. “She caught it with a snare. All she needed was fishline and a stick.”

Bush put the fly aside. It looked exactly like a mosquito.

“I hope that’s not a decoy,” I said.

THAT NIGHT Agnes went to bed early. The rest of us stayed up late, talking. As we stirred dried apricots into hot water, we heard Agnes in the tent. All the talk of bears sent her to seek the one she had known. Now she was trying to talk with it, trying to summon the bear that had been her ally since she was twelve.

Without the coat, Agnes seemed to be without skin, and the little bit of flesh she still had looked loose enough to step out of, to leave behind. She slept longer every day. She felt penned in, she said, by the boat, the sleeping bag and tent, even by her skin. She was tired. I told myself it was nothing; it was due to the absence of her coat. Now she tried to summon the bear in new ways, singing bear songs, doing a hidden dance she called bear walking, talking to the bear with her eyes closed tight and reverent.

Watching her, worried about her, I started to think: What if something happened to one of us? There was no one to help us. We were alone.

Dora-Rouge seemed to be thinking the same thing, pursing her lips, watching Agnes, even shielding her eyes from the sun when she looked at her, to see her better. “Maybe it’s nerves,” Dora-Rouge said, as if I’d spoken my worries out loud.

“The Europeans called this world dangerous,” she said. And I thought I understood: they had trapped themselves inside their own destruction of it, the oldest kind of snare, older than twine and twigs. Their legacy, I began to understand, had been the removal of spirit from everything, from animals, trees, fishhooks, and hammers, all things the Indians had as allies. They’d forgotten how to live. Before, everything lived together well—lynx and women, trappers and beaver. Now most of us had inarticulate souls, silent spirits, and despairing hearts.

“When hunters of the past killed an animal,” Dora-Rouge said, “they blinded it. They did not want it to see what things they did to its body. They tied the feet of killed birds together so their spirits could not follow them home. They cut the paws off bear so their souls would not chase them.” But now, she told me, the men were haunted by something else, by something inside themselves they’d tried, but failed, to forget.

“That’s why animals and people stopped talking to each other.”

But sometimes on this journey I thought I heard the voices of the world, of what was all around us—the stones, the waters flowing toward their ends, the osprey with its claws in fish, even the minnows and spawn. I heard trees with their roots holding ground.

“Once we could ask them to do something for us, to find our way home, to take away pain,” said Dora-Rouge. “And they would help us. I believe this knowledge was given on the tenth day of creation,” she said. And those that didn’t know it were unfinished creations, cursed to be eternal children on this earth, lacking in the wisdom that understands life, even the diatoms precious and strange.

Creation, according to Dora-Rouge, was an ongoing thing. On the eighth day of creation, Dora-Rouge had told me, human beings were given their place with the earth. “By then some of the humans must have drifted away, across the newly formed waters, toward even newer land,” she said. “Or maybe they just had poor memories, but there must have been some reason those people thought there were only six days of creation and one of rest, that they thought it ended there. Then, on the ninth day was the creation of stories, and these had many uses.” They taught a thing or two about doing work, about kindness and love. She told me there were even stories to show a way out of unhappiness. Another day was devoted to snails and slugs, night crawlers and silverfish, roaches. Then there was the creation of singing and songs. “If those drifting ones would have stayed behind, they might even have learned the antidote for war,” she said. “But they heard only as far as the creation of war on the sixth day. Thieves were created on that same day, too.”

With tenderness I looked at Dora-Rouge, her white hair, her face with light coming from it. Never, I thought, was life so good, were women more wonderful.

At times I saw something shining in the depths of Bush, something I thought I could reach inside and touch, take out, turn over in my hand, and love. She was the closest thing I had to a mother. And if she was the closest thing to a mother, Dora-Rouge, who insisted she was born new every day, was the closest thing to God. And I was partly made in the old woman’s image, right down to the owl-beak nose and dark, curved brows, and when she spoke the days of creation, I believed in them.

LATE ONE DAY as I built a fire, I saw Bush out in the smooth water. Like a dark-headed otter, she surfaced for a few moments, only to slip down the cold surface and disappear. I watched for her to surface again. She was at home in water, an element given shape by what contained it. She was water. Agnes once told me there were rumors how the men she’d slept with believed they swam across her.

That night, I rubbed oil into Agnes’ back. She lay beside the fire, holding a cloth to her chest, the oil shining on her dark, naked back. When she fell asleep in the warmth, Dora-Rouge covered her with the skins and it looked as if a large animal breathed there. Dora-Rouge sat all night awake beside her, now and then tossing old cedar into the fire, releasing its smoke and odor.

ANOTHER EVENING, when we’d fallen into a steady stroking rhythm, our canoe drifted into a shaft of red sunlight. That evening, Dora-Rouge led us to some other rock paintings of moon and lynx. The paintings themselves, she remembered, were on steep cliff walls. When we found them it was still light and they were reflected on water, the lynx gazing down at itself, looking at its twin as if they had just met for the first time. It looked as if it could step away from stone, enter water, its own reflection, and come alive, the way spirit meets matter. Something about the paintings, done so long ago, tugged at the edge of me; at the older mind still at work in me.

Agnes leaned forward, reached into the water, and tried to lift the moon from the surface. When she touched it, it broke; the lynx wavered on water.

THAT SAME NIGHT, when the sun was a long path across water, we saw a canoe move toward us, traveling in the path of light. Inside the canoe sat a white man and woman. Between the man and woman was a white dog. We watched them approach. As they neared us, a heron rose up from the edge of water.

“Look,” said Dora-Rouge, “they’ve made love. They are shining.”

I barely heard her. Instead, I waved and hollered. “Hey!” I had nearly forgotten there were other people in the world. I came quickly out of lost time, silent space. Now all I wanted was a tube of lipstick. “Over here!” I put my fingers to my mouth and whistled. I would have stood up if the boat had allowed it. The two waved back.

Their canoe was overloaded to within only inches of water. It looked like any movement would sink them. They looked so foolish, I nearly laughed. But for the first time, I saw our own little flotilla through the eyes of others and we looked as much like fools as they did, four Indian women, one old and birdlike, having to be carried about while she gave out commands and directions she had made up from somewhere inside her old, brittle bones.

The dog stood up and barked. The canoe tilted dangerously, threatening to overturn. “Sit, Tyler!” the woman yelled.

Agnes took in the sight of the blond hair, white eyebrows, and pink skin of the two people and was silent.

The young couple, Bob and Jean, had been flown in and dropped off a few days earlier. The man, although an experienced canoer, a frequent journeyer here, thought perhaps they were lost. I didn’t yet realize that the faces of land and water had been changed up above us, nor did I know what such change meant. I thought him merely inexperienced.

As he pulled up to us, smiling, he asked, “What’s the name of this island?” He pointed to it. The woman lifted her paddle to her lap and waited. “We must be lost,” he said.

Dora-Rouge knew he wouldn’t understand her usual answer, about how we’d always been lost. She had sense enough not to say it.

The dog, a white shepherd, wagged its tail and panted. “Tyler. Sit!”

It was late and it had been a good full day’s traveling, so Dora-Rouge invited the couple to remain with us that evening. “The company would be good for us,” Dora-Rouge said, after observing my excitement.

“YOU CAN’T GET AROUND the Se Nay River anymore through the old way,” the man told Dora-Rouge as we sat beside the fire. “You have to take another route.”

“Why not?” She looked at him with keen interest.

“We saw it ourselves from the plane. It was socked in. The Big Arm River has been diverted into it from above. They had to drop us to the west so we could get another passage, and even that one is probably no longer passable. It was nearly all mud then; by now every bit of it must be.”

Dora-Rouge turned this over in her mind as we sat together by the fire, the white shepherd with its head on my lap. I scratched its ears. “How bad is the river?” she asked.

“You wouldn’t want to travel down the river.” He brushed himself off. “It’s too rapid.”

“Luther,” Dora-Rouge said, calling on him. The man looked at her with a strange expression. But Luther said nothing. Maybe he was silent because of the couple. They looked startled and exchanged a glance with each other. They looked around the campsite to see if we had another person with us.

Agnes, I noticed, was behaving in a strange manner. Finally, she got me alone, walking out of the bushes back toward the fire. “There’s something wrong with them,” she said. And later, when I was washing a pot in the lake, scrubbing it with sand, she whispered as loud as possible, “They are cannibals, those two.”

Once, that evening, she even said to them, “You’re cannibals, aren’t you?”

The man and woman smiled and ignored her. They remained polite as she stared at their faces with apprehension. They pretended not to notice. It was, after all, a known fact that people went crazy in these broken, water-split lands.

“There’s a bog fire up ahead,” the man said to Bush.

“How far is it?”

“You can see a trace of the smoke from here.” He pointed. We all looked. We saw only a blue glow in the sky, the gases burning off.

Dora-Rouge smiled at the couple. “And what are you doing here?”

“We’re going to live in the wilderness.” The woman’s skin was the color of shells, surprisingly pale, as if she’d been protected from light all her life, worn nothing but black.

“How wonderful,” said Dora-Rouge, her dark eyes happy. “I’m going home to die.”

The young woman grew silent. I could read on her face how she thought it was bad enough that one of us was crazy; now there was also the presence of death.

That night, Bush cooked wild rice and fried bread and we shared a feast. The young couple got the short end of the stick, I thought, when it came to food; they had fresh oranges and after I ate one, I stared at the rest until they offered me another. I had no pride left. I would have stolen them if I’d had to. They were beautiful, full globes, sweet and filled with juice.

While I ate them, Agnes leaned toward me and whispered fierce words close to my ear, “Don’t eat it. Don’t eat their food.”

I hoped they wouldn’t hear her, but they did, and they looked at each other often. Agnes, just as often, looked afraid, leaned close, and hissed, “I mean it.”

The young woman looked around, nervous, as if plotting an escape, and later, when we’d all gone to bed, the couple got into a fight. Above the snoring of Agnes from the next tent over, I overheard, “Those women are crazy.”

“She’s just old,” the man said. “They’re okay. Just let it be.” He wanted to remain, if for nothing else, I thought, so he could tell about these women and me, the dark girl with scars and long red hair, and how we floated in outmoded canoes, carrying furs and Dora-Rouge.

But the woman kept crying and then she became angry and said, “They are plumb crazy. If you don’t leave now, I’m going home.”

It wasn’t long before I heard the sound of tent stakes, the rattling of metal, the sound of cloth zipping. By morning the young couple, their dog, and their oranges were gone.

“What could have happened?” Bush said, looking at where their tent had been. She looked disappointed. Agnes looked relieved. As I pushed the boat into the water and stepped inside it, I gave her a dirty look.

Then I settled into the space that, by now, seemed created just for me and Dora-Rouge.

After we’d gotten out a ways into the water, Dora-Rouge turned and looked at me. She said, “Those women are plumb crazy,” and laughed.

YEARS BEFORE, it was said, cannibals appeared this way, from out of the path of water, rowing in from the horizon just the way Bob and Jean had done.

Once, it was said, a man and a woman floated up from the depths of water in a boat made of human skin. They appeared on a path of light, came over the horizon. It was an old, old story. They wanted to devour humans. The woman gave birth to twins that were war and starvation. They had a white wolf with them.

Wolverine, they say, was the one who saved them. He sprang the human woman from the trap and he made two skin bags of the murderous infants called hunger and war, and filled them with berries and meat and offered this to the humans.

IT WASN’T LONG after meeting the young couple, after wishing for lipstick, that I felt once again strange and wild, as if we hadn’t crossed paths with other people at all, as if we were the only ones who moved through this world. Agnes returned to talking the bear language, Dora-Rouge to saying “Go around this bend,” and Bush once again retreated into her own world, inexhaustible and animal. Out of the four of us, I was the most stable. I had my two feet, if not on the ground, close to it.

FROM THERE we traveled northeast. Ahead of us, just as the young man had said, was the peat fire burning in the bog. Bush shaded her eyes from the sun and looked at the gray smoke and waves of heat that rose. It had burned for over a year, the gases from underneath fueling the flame.

From somewhere behind the smoke and heat came the hypnotic sound of frogs, rhythmic as a heartbeat from the swampiness of beginnings. Ravens flew up, calling out as if they were the voice of smoke. The fire itself seemed to be alive, a red-and-black animal that grew, sparked out of the richness and rot of underground, out of ancient plants and insects that had fallen there. Moths flew toward it.

The smell of smoke burned our nostrils and eyes. We tried to make a wide circle around it, passing through a shallow swamp with tall dark reeds and a breeze that made a shushing sound as it bent grasses. I stepped out of the canoe into the mud and pulled Dora-Rouge along through liquid earth. As I dragged her, Dora-Rouge looked me in the eye and asked point-blank, “Do you think Agnes is sick?”

“Watch out for the branches,” I said. I waded through the silty water. The mud pulled at my boots.

A branch nearly hit her. She ducked. “Do you?”

The same thought had crossed my mind more than a few times. I cast a glance toward Agnes. She looked pale. “I think she’s just tired.”

I didn’t notice when Agnes had first begun to look sick, but now, she looked drained of energy. Her ankles were swollen. In one place on her leg the skin was cracked and fluid seeped from it as if she were waterlogged. But she hadn’t complained at all.

Bush, too, had been watching Agnes, and when we came to dry land, she said, “Let’s stay here for a day and rest.” She’d already pulled her boat to land, not caring if there was any argument from the rest of us. We weren’t far now, Bush was certain, from North House, a point that indicated we were returning to humans; we were not far from our destination. “We’re already way past due, another day wouldn’t mean much.”

I went to gather wood for the fire. Luckily, there’d been a hot, clear sun. Wood was plentiful there and ready to burn. Agnes followed me. “I’ll help you,” she said. She breathed heavily.

“That’s okay, Grandmother. I can do it.”

But Agnes still followed. I walked slowly so she could keep up, and when we walked into a stand of trees, she said to me, “Listen.” She fumbled for the right words. “Listen, if something happens to me, I want you to let me lie out for the wolves and birds; would you?”

I studied her face, but said nothing.

Agnes didn’t look back at me. “That’s what I want.”

“Okay.” I broke off a dead branch, bent down, suddenly awkward, and picked up several pieces of wood. I handed two of them to Agnes, then picked up some more and laid them across my own arms, smelling the sharp, resin-sweet odor of trees, and we went back to the camp.

“What did she say back there?” Dora-Rouge asked, when Agnes was out of hearing distance.

I put down the wood.

“I saw her talking to you.” Dora-Rouge looked concerned.

I struck a match. “Nothing,” I said. I changed the subject. “I think I’ll wash some clothes. Do you want a clean dress?” We would be meeting people at North House. I wanted a clean shirt.

But I paid close attention to Agnes after that and avoided Dora-Rouge’s sharp questioning eyes.

That night, Dora-Rouge hardly slept at all. Strengthened by mother love, she sat by the fire beside a sleeping Agnes. She leaned toward her daughter and covered her with beaver skins. Agnes didn’t wake when the older woman touched her.

Inside my sleep that same night, a rust-colored root grew in a circle around itself, forming new bulbs and connected tubers, splitting and multiplying. A first green shoot moved toward light. I saw it clear as daylight.

“Redroot. I believe that must be redroot,” Dora-Rouge said the next morning, when I described it. “I can’t be sure. But if you dreamed it, it’s what we need.” She squinted at Agnes. “Wolfsbane, too.”

LATER, as I knelt above the pan of warm water, I thought of the ancestors who showed Dora-Rouge the directions for travel. My life, before Adam’s Rib, had been limited in ways I hadn’t even known. I’d never have thought there might be people who found their ways by dreaming. What was real in those land-broken waters, real even to me, were things others might call the superstitions of primitive people. How could it be, I wondered, that all people who came from their own earth, who lived there for tens of thousands of years, could talk with spirits, could hear land speak, and animals? Northern hunters were brilliant hunters. Even now they dream the location of their prey and find it. Could they all have been wrong? I didn’t think so.

The old world dawning new in me was something like the way a human eye righted what was upside down, turned over an image and saw true.

IT WAS only a short time later that we once again came across the pale woman and man. Agnes looked at them with foreboding. “They’re following me,” she said.

They weren’t happy to see us, either, nor had they expected it. They were sheepish and embarrassed about leaving in the middle of the night.

“Are you guys lost?” the man asked Bush, but he already knew the answer; he’d been in these parts before. He knew he was the lost one. Even so, he looked at Bush in hope that she would say yes. She reached inside the pack for a piece of map. This time, she knew for certain where she was. The presence of smoke from the peat fire was still a gray cloud in the far south sky. If they had gotten turned around with the thickness of smoke to show them the way, it didn’t look good for their survival skills the next winter.

The couple pulled their canoe alongside Bush’s. I paddled over to them, too. On a fragment of map, Bush pointed out where they were.

The water was deep green there, with algae and plants. As Bush went over the map with them, holding two pieces of it together, Tyler looked into the water, panting, ready to leap on quick-striding water bugs. I didn’t talk to him; he would have overturned their canoe.

“We must have gone in a circle.” Without hesitating, he said, “Thanks,” turned the canoe around, and started away.

“Wait,” Dora-Rouge called after him. “Do you have a pencil?”

He reached into his shirt pocket. His pen was hooked to a credit card. Bush tried not to smile.

“Thank you.” Dora-Rouge took the pen and handed it to me. “Do you have any paper?” she asked him.

He looked at his companion. She was thin-lipped. She shook her head no. She was anxious to leave, and probably happy we didn’t ask why they’d pulled up stakes in the middle of the night, but I could see that she was simply too exhausted to dig around for paper. By then, Bush had handed me another paper bag.

Dora-Rouge said, “Just a minute.” She held up one scrawny finger to the man. “Go ahead. Draw the plant,” she told me.

While I sketched it, the man paddled away from us, eased back, only to pull away again, as if he thought he could vanish when we were off guard. When I was done, I said, “This is it,” and handed the brown paper to Dora-Rouge.

“Have you seen this plant growing anywhere?” Dora-Rouge held out the drawing to him. “It used to be up here.” The light of the water reflected on her skin.

“Tyler, be still!”

The man studied the drawing. “Yes,” he said, and in this, at least, he seemed knowledgeable. “Yes, I’m sure of it. It wasn’t this year, but for the past two years I saw it growing. It was on the far side of North House last year. Close to the Flower Islands. Here, give me the pen.” He made a map for us. It showed a place with numerous tiny islands scattered through the water.

“I know where those are,” said Dora-Rouge.

Two large twin pieces of land he diagrammed, writing beneath them “Flower Islands.” Then, quickly, as if to make up for lost time, the couple said good-bye and paddled south. We watched them depart. The pale dog with blue eyes looked back at us. The blond hair of the woman looked white in sunlight.

“Agnes needs this plant,” said Dora-Rouge to Bush. “We’ll have to go up there.”

I could see that the little string of islands was far away, would take us out of our way, but not, I hoped, by far.

As we neared the Se Nay River, our plans to bypass it had to be given up because some of the waters leading to it were now only mud and our canoes could not pass through it. We’d have to risk the river even if it was all rapids. The river itself was now the force of two rivers, the Big Arm River having been diverted into the Se Nay. This added distance to our journey.

As we neared the Se Nay River, the land began to change. It was rocky and darker. We felt the breeze from the river. First, it was soft, but that was only its deceptive voice, whispering. As we neared the river, it strengthened into a cold, stiff wind, and even that was a lying breath. In truth, the river was a deafening roar and was virtually impassable. As we reached it, I saw how it rushed down, overfull, and was held in check, in some places, only by rock walls and steep cliffs. The water of two rivers, forced into one, was deeper and wider than it should have been, hitting the walls far up the sides and spreading out wherever it could in other places, taking down trees.

“This can’t be the Se Nay,” Bush said. She shook her head. In places, the muddy brown bank was washed away. She looked pale. I was panicked.

Bush worried about the details, trying to understand how this river had been affected, how much the land and waters might be changed. It was a puzzle. If they’d diverted the Big Arm River, as the man said, it would mean that certain waters ahead of us might be closed, others flooded. Bush tried to see the large picture, but it seemed impossible. She checked the pieces of maps that were, by now, committed to her memory, as if there were something she might have missed. She tried to figure out the lay of the land, to predict what we’d find. We’d already seen some of the flooding, mudflats where other rivers had failed to empty into their destinations.

The Se Nay yelled out in a voice so loud, nothing could be heard above it. “It’s angry,” said Dora-Rouge. I leaned toward her to hear. “The rivers are angry. Both of them.” That was why it was a strong roar, she said, so loud it sounded like earth breaking open and raging.

“Come with me, Angel,” said Bush, already walking toward the Se Nay. The wind whipped up off the water. It swept Bush’s hair from her shoulders. Her sweater blew tight against her as she tried to walk along the edge of the water, hoping we could find a way to travel some of it on foot. I hoped, too, that around a bend or over a rock, we would find a calmer river. But the stone walls that held the fierce river were high, much of the ground impossible to pass on foot, let alone carrying a boat and a frail old woman. Everything was slippery with moss and spray. We turned and walked back.

“We can’t do it,” said Bush. “It’s like this all the way down.” She looked worried. “We can’t travel it.” She shook her head. Her words were nearly drowned out by the noise.

Dora-Rouge nodded at Bush, her own white hair blown back from her face. “Yes,” the nod meant. Reading Bush’s face. Yes, we could do it. We would travel it. The old woman knew this. We would have to risk the water. The only other thing was to turn back. Who could say what might have happened to the world behind us? It could be a closed place by now, what with the building of dams, the waters dry in places we had canoed through. Not only that, but if we turned, we’d have to go against currents.

Standing against the wind, Bush and I looked at each other. Should we turn back? we both wondered. We could overrule Dora-Rouge. Our faces were hopeless, our eyes contained a question. But neither of us knew the answer to this. There was no longer a thing such as “should.” Everything had changed. We’d gone too far to turn back. Not too far in distance alone, but too far inside ourselves. No longer were we the women who left Adam’s Rib. And as for me, the girl I had once been could never have paddled through rain as if it were not falling and camped in wet mosses. Those women would never have sung ancient songs at night so assuredly, or spoken to spirits that walked through forests and gave us their permission to enter. That girl would never have known how spirits hung above the water like fog, would never have heard stories in the land we passed over, or given herself up to a trail that went any map’s wrong way.

Now our arms were strong and we were articulate in the languages of land, water, animal, even in the harder languages of one another. I’d entered waters and swamps, been changed by them. I’d dreamed medicines, some that could be found in this world no longer, like the one for arthritis, and I remembered the plentiful days of ongoing creation.

It was for all these things that Dora-Rouge was going to talk to the churning river, the white and muddy foam of it, the hydrogen and oxygen of it, and convince it to let us pass safely. All this she did while we watched.

It would have been a lie if any of us had said we weren’t afraid, and it would have been a lie, too, if we’d said we believed completely in Dora-Rouge as she sat on the bank of the river and spoke. We could only see her lips move. We heard nothing she said. But after a while she nodded at us. “It will let us go,” she said loudly, and that was the final word. Before we placed the canoes into the fierce, charging dark water, Dora-Rouge said a prayer, opened her hand, and tossed tobacco into it. Her eyes were closed, a high-pitched song coming from deep inside her. I could barely hear her for the sound of water. I only saw her sing as her voice was taken away from her by the windy river. But I could see she was loud and strong. When the tobacco disappeared into the water, I was without faith, but I did what Dora-Rouge said.

My canoe went into the water first, and from the moment it was there the current tried to swallow it. My arms shook as I held it, the spray hitting at my face as I watched Bush lift Dora-Rouge and, knee-deep in water, carry the old woman toward the rocking canoe. I was soaked to the skin already and shivering and the strong current pushed against my legs even where it was shallow. It took all my strength to stand there. I held the canoe while Bush lowered Dora-Rouge inside it. The cold spray of water blowing against us was muddy and violent. And then Bush held the other canoe while Agnes climbed inside. Agnes was pale with terror, her legs wide apart in the water. She eyed the churning of water about the rocks. Even where it was deep, it looked rocky. And she was the one who was fearless in rivers. Unsteadily, she sat down, holding her shirt tight at the neck, as if it would keep the cold water from seeping to her skin, but she, like the rest of us, was already wet and her hair had come down around her face and neck.

And then Bush knelt inside the canoe like she was praying. I watched as she tried to paddle, but suddenly, Bush’s canoe was gone and before I knew it, we were behind her, dropping down. I screamed out, though no one could hear me. Even Dora-Rouge looked afraid, and she was the one who’d been certain we would make it through, the one who’d worked out a deal, whatever it was, with water. Her eyes squeezed shut. She dropped down deeper into the canoe. There was the sound of a rock hitting against the underside. My heart beat with fear. I’m dead, I thought. If we didn’t make it, we’d surely drown. We hit eddies and whirling currents that tried to turn us sideways. All the time, the cold water pelted us, wetting our hair, chilling our skin. I tried to paddle, and my arms hurt, but it was no use. For a moment I’d catch a current just right and then the canoe would shift, would seem to enter air, turn, then drop. The water carried debris in it. I was afraid of being hit by one of the long trees with still-green leaves. There was no hope of stopping or slowing. These two rivers had probably never liked each other in the first place, I thought. We were held in the hands of fighting water. We were at its mercy. Then I remembered John Husk telling me to catch the current and ride it like an animal, and finally, I gave up, giving in to gravity and to the motion of it, allowing my hips to move with it, not against it. Like riding a horse, he’d said.

I tried to watch the willows and branches that grabbed at us. For brief seconds the water would be slack, then treacherous again as we sped past hills and groves of trees, moving through shadows and blinding flashes of sunlight, all of it so fast we couldn’t see how birds flew up along the river edges, could only see everything else that was falling with us down the cold, muddy waters. In places, it narrowed and snaked off in new directions. But we passed through, passing places where the riverbanks had collapsed and the torn roots of trees reached out of a loamy smell, as if to keep us from going north where winter lived. We passed burned woods, traveled through darkness and mud and silt, and finally we were taken to the end of the rapids, and something godly brought us through. Maybe it was the words of Dora-Rouge, after all, that saved us, words both Bush and I would later wish we’d heard and remembered. Or maybe it was blind luck, pure and simple. But whatever it was, the four of us, drenched and breathing hard, climbed out of the water and lay down cold and exhausted on firm ground. Even Dora-Rouge worked up the strength to pull herself along by her hands. After a while, Dora-Rouge, wet, her muscles strained, said, “Those women are crazy,” and began to laugh. She had tricked something, all right. She was sure of it, even if she wouldn’t tell us what it was. Maybe it wasn’t water she’d bartered with, after all, but she’d struck up one hell of a deal with something, Bush said. What she’d traded in exchange, she wouldn’t say, but this much was clear: something godly was bringing us through.