Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“What does it matter? Before you there lie many good years of hunting. That is a better life for you.”

Achille stood silent for many heartbeats, then said, “We will come with you to our mother’s country.”

“Good. First we go to Odanak.”

At Odanak, Zoë, Noë and Achille turned shy, unused to such a moil. The village, with its wikuoms, and even some log cabins, frothed with people working, cooking, softening hides, splitting canoe ribs, lifting a tangle of gaudy roots from a dye kettle. Two men played waltes, the bone dice leaping up when they slapped down the wooden bowl. Jen, a round-faced Mi’kmaw woman with three children, looked at Zoë and Noë, at their soiled whiteman dresses.

“Sit down. Eat,” she said. “You are good strong girls who will make a journey to Mi’kma’ki.” Zoë and Noë, starved of female company for years, began to thaw. Noë had brought three of her baskets, which she presented to them, but these were not admired. In Odanak there were basket makers of great skill and the women brought out several to show her: an oval birch-bark container sewn with spruce root and worked with such intricate designs the eye could not hold them. Noë touched a basket with a decorative rim of artfully twisted black root. Some baskets were tiny, woven of sweet-grass, some were splendid with red- and green-dyed root strips.

“I wish to learn how to make such beautiful baskets,” said Noë, kicking at her own poor efforts.

“We will show you,” said a young and heavy woman with callused hands who told the story of Ai’ip, the lazy woman who split and twisted roots around her fingers and somehow made the first basket. “No person could name this object. And they had to call it ‘that root thing.’ ”

“I am choking with new thoughts,” said Zoë. “We know nothing,” for they had only ten winters.

Theotiste, Elphège and Achille wanted to start at once for Mi’kma’ki, but Sosep, an old trapper sagmaw, took them aside and spoke at length.

“I am going with you. But it is not good to go now when winter is advancing. There is nothing to eat at that place in the winter. People go up the river. We better wait until spring.”

Achille itched to go.

“What does he mean, there is no food at Mi’kma’ki? Mari our mother told us it was a place of great richness, fish, lobsters, clams and oysters, birds by the thousand, succulent plants.” Sosep overheard this and laughed. “Mi’kma’ki is a summer place. Winter very hard there unless you cached ten moose and sixteen bears.”

For more than four cycles of the moon the Sels waited at Odanak. Theotiste, Elphège and Achille hunted and fished, talked with the men about the best route to Mi’kma’ki. The women helped Noë and Zoë dry and smoke venison and eel for their journey. Noë, determined to become a maker of fine baskets, worked at it until her fingers blistered.

The approaching journey with their older brothers to their mother’s country filled their thoughts. From Mari they had heard of the parts of their homeland: Wild Potato Place, Skin Dresser’s Territory and Land of Fog. They were discarding memories of their forest childhood. Would spring never come?

Theotiste told Zoë one day that Mari’s spirit would surely be there in the trees and wild plants, perhaps in the rocks, in the fish and animals. It would be a reconnection.

“I wish we had brought Maman’s bones,” said Zoë.

Theotiste nodded. “I have brought them,” he said.

“That is good!” Then a moment later she said, “I wish I had brought the little wall basket she made to hold René’s comb.”

“Noë will make one. It will hold new combs.”

When at last they set out, the woman friend of Theotiste’s dead wife came with them as well as old Sosep, who had the solid reputation of an important trapper-hunter, the wavering reputation of a sagmaw and the faded reputation of a local chief. His scarred face was serious. He had a grave manner that indicated character and wisdom. His teeth were large and yellow, his black eyes squinted, for his sight was failing. “It is good you waited. Even now it may be too early. But we can advance. My trapping run is still in Mi’kmaw country — if those French have not built their square houses on it. I wish to return. I wanted to see what Odanak was like — but even here there were whitemen. The worst is this Odanak priest, Father Lacet.” He imitated the priest’s sly expression, his dabbling hands. “He is boring holes in all the waltes bowls so they cannot hold water and give us divinations. I will help you. I know your father’s favored trapping places, for his brother told me.”

“His brother !” said Theotiste. “Do we then have an uncle? Living?”

“Very alive. Cache Emil. He will show you that place and others. But these days whitemen want those places, too. And they take them without courtesy or talk. They take them.”

For Theotiste and Elphège this was earth-shaking news. They had believed their father, whom they did not remember, and all of their father’s kin were dead. This magical uncle was a proof that they had made a correct decision.

Sosep said, “We will be pressing through the end season of snow. We must make snowshoes as you did not bring any from that place you were before you came here.” And he sat with Elphège and Theotiste and Achille making the ash-wood frames while the woman friend of Theotiste’s dead wife, Zoë and Noë wove the caribou rawhide webbing in a close mesh to better support the weight of their loads.

• • •

They began to walk toward the ocean, which none of the Sels had ever seen except in imagination. The journey was rough underfoot and circuitous in their minds. They lived on their dried meat and sacks of maize, for at this time of year wild creatures were still deep in the forest, plants had not broken through the ground. Every morning the streams were edged in ice. But in the second week Theotiste got two fat beaver.

Winter returned with a snowstorm, a giddy flying mass, heaping drifts behind logs, covering all. When the storm cleared and night became as day with reflected moonlight the cold increased. In the next weeks they twice had to build temporary wikuoms and take shelter from the snows.

“Oh, what a late spring. If it snows more,” said Sosep, “we will have to construct a toboggan.”

“Perhaps it will not snow,” said Theotiste.

“Perhaps the sun will not rise tomorrow,” muttered Sosep.

“I am hungry,” said Nöe.

Sosep laughed. “Mi’kmaw persons can stand hunger for a long time without dying.”

In the waiting days inside the wikuoms Noë and Zoë plagued Theotiste and Elphège to retell their mother’s stories about Mi’kma’ki. They never tired of hearing about the blueberry patches, the elderberries with their drooping umbels, serviceberries, chokecherry trees, the succulent crayfish, roasted beaver, the fattest eels, even oily walrus, all part of the rich Mi’kma’ki life where one had only to step outside the wikuom and take a plump turkey. Later Elphège wondered if it had been a mistake to fill their heads with stories of a summer world, so different from what they found when they reached their destination. Others told stories about Kluskap when life for the Mi’kmaq was good.

• • •

“Listen to me,” said Sosep. “This is a bad time to return to our country, not only because of this untimely weather. Do you not know that the French king gave our lands to the British?”

Theotiste looked at him. “How can that be? It is not the land of the French king to give. It is ours.”

“This happened some winters ago. Surely you heard the talk of it in Odanak?”