THROUGH SPACE, TIME AND DEVASTATION, LAND FORMS.
Foursquare, sheer, the cliffs of a muscled terrain stand stalwart to the sea, their dawn shadow a broad river’s awning. Tilting northeast, the strata of rock ascend steeply, legacy of a time when rock ripped from rock in fire and blast and polar shift, continent from continent, plates skid loose and from the rupture a hard surface arose from an ocean’s buckled floor.
A northerly forge.
Land heaves. Erupts. Ground rolls, in agony sways, then rests awhile.
Along the shore of what would become a grand estuary to and from the sea, three hundred and fifty million voyages around the sun before the diminutive, pale Frenchman Jacques Cartier anchored on the spot, a meteor’s impact shattered the earth’s crust. As measured in a future epoch, a crater punched a plateau fifty-four kilometres in diameter. Away from the epicentre, the surface crumpled into mountainous waves.
Over eons, the dazed planet wobbled back from the blow.
In another time, the hills were struck again, albeit mildly, a deep, circular lake the residual souvenir.
Upon the plains south of the great river, hills took shape as glacial deposits, the prodigious ebb of tidal ice scrapping rocks into giant rogue waves before setting them gently down at select locations, marking the passage of sluggish time in ceremonial nubs. North of the fault line delineated by the river, ancient rock eroded under the stress of the elements. The oldest mountain range on the continent slumped nearer to the level of the sea again, debilitated by age, in summer mere green hills and under a winter’s blanket windswept creases.
One peak formed from vacant space. An empty volcanic crater, backfilled by glacial debris, compressed by ice miles high. The ice receded, the outer lava mould washed away. The tougher inner plug revealed itself and remained ever the more tenacious, a scrap heap of rock to be anointed in time as a royal mountain.
The warm melt of glaciers, the fall of winter snows, the rains of spring and the thunderclaps of summer storms conspired to create a green land. Rivers etched the landscape. Lakes became plentiful. Fish swam the freshwater currents or lazed in the arbour of shoreline trees. Bear and moose, lynx, wolf and deer prospered and found their balance. Caribou roamed the northern pelt. A crafty, industrious creature, the beaver, dammed streams and ponds and constructed community lodges from sticks that rose above the water, altering the landscape for those who depended upon its engineering acumen.
The land’s genius lay in its waterways. Loon alighted each spring, forerunner to waterfowl that would arrive and go in great masses to dapple along the shores or dive to the depths of cold lakes. Upon the rivers appeared the first people, eleven thousand migrations around the sun before the present moment, as glaciers receded. Russet-skinned and curious, they travelled in tune to the seasons as did the birds, and a few tribes learned to cope with the vigour of enduring winters. In the far north, the people lived along the shore of an immense saltwater bay, an ocean of ice, where they fished through short, bright summers and in the forests through sunless months trapped and hunted the four-leggeds. They chose to live where the land was unforgiving, where peaceable lives could prosper.
Generations lapsed in this way, one folded upon another.
Where the forests and rivers were generous, the weathers becoming less extreme, tribes competed for land. Those who spoke the language of the Iroquois roamed the great inland waterway and along the rivers and lakes south. To the west dwelled proud Huron and Algonquin, and to the north ruddy Montagnais. They fought the Iroquois when one tribe encroached upon another, and battled for rivers and lakes, for shorelines, for whole forests, and at times the wars were great furies and at other times mere skirmishes among rowdy young men anxious to test their mettle. Generations lapsed in this way, striving to persist.
Time immemorial, so it seemed, lapsed in this way, striving to persist.