Michael Rowe - Enter, Night

The Indians, naturally, ignored me. But there had been no need for my exhortations in any case. The men were already carefully reaching for her, using their paddles almost as grappling hooks, pulling the girl’s body towards them.

The combination of their paddles and the motion of the waves that had sprung up in the breeze caused the body to roll in the water. As it did, the full abomination of the tableau revealed itself to all of us, and I again had occasion to cross myself.

The girl’s eyes had not rolled up in her head; rather they seemed to stare fixedly at us. The pupils were dilated so that they looked like two pieces of flat black glass. But O! the mute asseverations of dread in those eyes, the terror frozen eternally in violent death. Her mouth was stretched open in a silent scream of pain and terror. Worst of all, her throat had been all but torn out, as though by the jaws of a wolf, the flesh of the wound washed clean and pink by the lake water. Her poor fingers were fixed into claws, as though in her last moments she had been fighting to escape from whatever beast killed her.

The effect on the Indians was marvellous. With a collective cry of despair, they pushed the body away from them. They beat the water to a white froth with their paddles as they turned the canoes about, gaining distance between themselves and the poor dead girl’s body in a trice.

“Stop! Stop!” I screamed. “Go back! We must bury her!”

But stop the Indians did not. They laid their backs into their paddling as though the spot was accursed. The lost child’s body floating in that desolate lake shrank to a distant speck-a lonely sacrilege bobbing in the black waves as the sun sank behind the hills and the night came alive around us.

The next morning, Askuwheteau avowed to me that we were very near our destination. He said we would reach St. Barthélemy that night, and that we would portage inland from Lac Supérieur, then camp in the forest near a small lake, which, he told me, was hidden within a rocky region known to be treacherous.

It may have been the combined effect of the dramatic hibernal shift in the weather and the changing light, but the entire landscape appeared even more forbidding, remote and haunted than it ever had before. The water, dull pewter, violently wind-lashed and bitterly cold, smashed against the massive jutting islands of rock rising out of the oceanic vastness of Lac Supérieur. It froze my toughened hands, driving me almost mad with pain that I could not express in front of the Indians for fear of their reaction.

Their behaviour towards me had grown increasingly hostile, almost antagonistic. They now slept apart from me, and they built two fires, one for them and one for me, farther away. I ate separately from the Indians at their insistence, and never a word was passed between us now, except obligatorily, when Askuwheteau needed to communicate some detail of our voyage. Whatever the unfavourable sentence that had been passed upon me by the elders of the Ojibwa village where we had overnighted, it seemed that it had radically, unsympathetically, and permanently altered the Indians’ view of me.

Finally, we landed on a beach of smooth rock in a horseshoe-shaped inlet just as the sun was beginning to lower in the sky. The strong, gelid wind that had raised such waves upon the surface of Lac Supérieur now whipped at our bodies and faces. My clothing was wet from rogue waves over the side of the canoe, and now, on that rocky beach as we prepared to portage, I had begun to shiver violently.

“When will we camp?” I asked Askuwheteau. “I am cold and wet. Perhaps we should make camp here, on the beach?”

Askuwheteau gestured with a wide swing of his arm. “There is danger,” he said. “It is too easy to find us here. We must go deeper into the forest.”

“Who would find us?” I said. “The Hiroquois? Surely, we are in friendly country here? This is Ojibwa country. We are near the mission of St. Barthélemy, you said. The Ojibwa are not our enemies. From whom are we in danger?”

He stared at me, again that maddening Savage inscrutability. “Not the Hiroquois,” he said. “Not the Ojibwa.” Then he grew silent. He picked up his pack and began to carry it into the forest. All I could do was pick up my own pack and follow him.

As we portaged through the woods towards St. Barthélemy, my travelling companions grew more and more apprehensive in a way that was entirely out of character, for they had hitherto shown themselves to be fearless. It would not be incorrect to say that the Indians appeared to be at the ready, as taut as their own bow strings, the way they might be if hunting, or anticipating an attack by the Hiroquois, or some other enemy.

At last, in the growing gloom, we laid down our packs and made camp in the clearing of a coppice of trees and set about building temporary shelter. I began to gather wood for my own fire, as I had been forced to do throughout the last week of our voyage. When I had found several stout sticks, I made as though to arrange them apart from the larger fire being built by Askuwheteau and his men. The Indians regarded me strangely, though still with no hint of the amity I had known at the beginning of our voyage.

It was old Hausisse who spoke first-to Askuwheteau. Her Algonquian was so rapid that I was unable to follow it, though the urgency of her tone was unmistakable. Her hands flew in the air as she pointed to me, then gestured around her towards the trees, and the sunless sky above, then back to me. Whatever she said to him clearly gave him pause, because he told me to put my wood in the pile beside the fire that the Indians had already built, and which was already burning. Hausisse stared at me from where she sat, her regard almost approving. Askuwheteau told me that I would remain with the rest of them tonight. Too grateful to do anything but nod, I threw my wood into the pile.

The Indians reluctantly made room for me around the fire. When I say reluctantly, I mean that while they showed no overt malice or hostility, my apparent state of uncleanliness had not changed in their eyes, in spite of Askuwheteau’s invitation.

My awareness of our complete isolation could not have been sharper than it was at that moment. Even the Ojibwa village where I’d received such a hostile reception seemed like an outpost of warmth and civilization compared to this wild, dark place.

I needed the Indians; they did not need me. This was their world, not mine, and I was lost in it without them. Indeed it was difficult to imagine anything human, Savage or Christian, existing here. Anything could happen to me here, indeed, to any of us, and none would be the wiser.

But still, Hausisse continued to stare at me, at the crucifix lying against my robe, as though it were a sorcerous talisman instead of a holy object, for I knew she had not accepted Christ.

What woke me from my sleep that night I could not say with any certainty.

I had been dreaming of my family’s home in France, and of my mother. In the dream, I was still a young boy in her kitchen, by the fire. My mother was seated in a carved oak chair, and I on her lap, my body pressed against her soft breast as she ran her fingers through my hair. I smelled the lavender sachet from her black woollen dress beneath the starched white apron. From a massive pot on the hearth issued forth the magnificent odour of lamb stew with potatoes, vegetables, and red wine slowly cooking. The fragrance filled every corner of the room, making my mouth water. Never, I think, had I been as hungry as I was in that moment before waking.

At the very moment my eyes opened on the darkness, I was already fully awake, mouth still watering, every sense alert. All about me were the general sounds of the Indians snoring, and the crackle of the fire that had died to glowing embers. I smelled the smoke and the musky scent of the sleeping Savages.