Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“I thought it was only foolish talk. I heard the British seized Port Royal, but you say ‘our lands.’ ”

“Yes. It is our land but we suffer advances from both French and English. The French see us as soldiers to fight for them, our women good only for fucking. The priests see us as bounty for their God as we might see beaver skins. They do not see us as a worthy people. The French use us for their protection. They do not understand that we are allies of the French king, but not his subjects. We are not obliged to him. That is why he gives us presents — to buy our favor. Now the British greedily claim even more land than the French king gave that was not his to give.” He stopped, raised his chin. “And the British give no presents.”

“But Mi’kmaq are going back there. As we are. And I have heard that French and Mi’kmaq often marry. As our father René married our mother, Mari.”

“Yes, it is true. And that is good because there are so few of us left. Now that the beaver are so few we must marry someone, ha ha! I fear we will soon find the English putting their houses on our trapping grounds.”

“I heard some French families live near us Mi’kmaw and they are not unfriendly.”

“That maybe is so, the French have long been our friends — somewhat — but now the English think they possess everything. Their settlers move in. The English king pays good money for Mi’kmaw scalps. So we make a war against the English. Many Mi’kmaq are fighting in canoes. We are good fighters and capture many English boats. But we are so few. We are so often ill.”

• • •

They reached the Mi’kmaw country in late March with spring trembling behind the wind. Bird migration flights had started. In a small stream they saw numerous small fish surging up against the current. Sosep pointed out a dozen French families living along the shore. He spoke of the woodlands and fruitful edges that had supplied so many generations with berries and edible roots but warned that now much land had been plowed up and given over to maize fields and turnips. These French Acadians had drained many of the salt marshes to grow salt hay for their livestock. The larger game animals, moose, caribou and bear, had all retreated. The beaver were greatly reduced in number so severely had they been taken, for their skins could be turned into guns and metal pots. Yes, the beaver had become a kind of whiteman money and the custom of placing a beaver skin on a grave had fallen away.

“Still,” said Theotiste, “we can trade meat for maize and pumpkins. Will not the Acadians be glad of venison as they always are? As we are glad of bread. And I think the sky and land must be the same as they forever were, for not the Plets-mun nor the English have the power to level cliffs, they have not the power to drain the sea nor eat the sky. Can we not live side by side?”

“We have little choice,” said Sosep with a puckered expression. And soon there were so many birds the sky rattled, so many fish the bay boiled like a pot. There was enough for all.

Despite the old man’s complaints that all was spoiled, the Sels were astounded at the unfolding bounty of Mi’kma’ki. The great bay with its powerful tides, its estuaries and islands, its freshwater rivers and the nurturing ocean supplied everything. The newcomers stared at the ocean beating in ceaselessly, stared agape as the tide went out exposing miles of mudflats riddled with tiny holes from which came the hissing noise of mud shrimp below. Equally fascinating was the swift return of the ocean, the saline water coming in stealthily.

They had to learn this new country, its red cliffs, the changing tides, the seasons for herring, for shad, a different pattern of weather and storms than they had ever known. At first the ocean seemed all-powerful, but they came to understand that the true richness of Mi’kma’ki was in its rivers. They had to learn the names of unfamiliar fish. Farther out from shore there swam several kinds of great whales, porpoises and dolphins. There were varieties of seals, lobsters as big as women. The Sel men, as hunters and trappers, had to learn their ways quickly.

They saw that the foolish Acadians were diligent gardeners and because of this they felt themselves superior. The local surviving Mi’kmaq lived on the edges of old trapping areas, somewhat away from the French settlers.

“But we newcomers have no wikuom. We have no shelter,” said Noë, who longed for the stability of a wikuom or even a house. A whiteman house was impossible. She knew that. There were several of those geometric structures at Odanak, but here people despised them and there was the example of the young Mi’kmaw hunter a few years earlier who had been to a white settlement and there he had seen English drinking brown water from a saucer. The saucer was very beautiful with a deep blue rim. Somehow he had gained possession of this saucer — or one like it — and brought it back to Mi’kma’ki. His scandalized and outraged neighbors saw him drinking from it and killed him for a traitor to traditional ways. The repulsive object was smashed on a stone.

“But,” said old grandmother Loze, “two families have saucers now and no one has killed them. Everything does change.”

With some ceremony Sosep brought Cache Emil, Elphège and Theotiste’s uncle, to them. Cache Emil, a tall, powerful old man with hulking shoulders and a deeply lined face as though flint-gouged, stepped forward and put both hands on Elphège’s shoulders.

“Yes,” he said. “I know you, the children of my brother. Often my life has been heavy with loss and sadness, but today I feel so much joy that I have no good words for it.” He grasped first Elphège, then Theotiste; his cheeks were wet. For Elphège and Theotiste in that moment Cache Emil became the center of life. They had longed for a father without knowing it. Cache Emil said he had a son, Rouge Emil. Their own blood, their cousin.

“You,” he said to Achille, who had only fourteen winters. “You are the son of Mari, long-ago wife of my brother Lolan before he ceased his existence. I welcome you. When Rouge Emil returns we will have a feast. But come with me, Elphège, I will take you to some old places where my brother who was your father often got his quarry, fur or flesh. And good places at the river mouths for fish weirs. Sosep and I will speak together of choice trapping lines for Theotiste — and Achille.” Sosep pompously and formally assigned Elphège their father’s old trapping territory and told Theotiste and Achille they would have productive areas adjoining his own. No priest could do that!

But Rouge Emil made a face; neither his father nor Sosep understood that the old custom of assigning trapping and fishing territories was no longer in the power of Mi’kmaw men; white men and their rules of land division had taken over. Such territories were house sites, garden plots and cow pastures.

Achille respected Cache Emil but gravitated to old Sosep, not Sosep as a sagmaw, but Sosep the renowned hunter. Achille had been a natural hunter from childhood; René had been a wood chopper who hunted only when pressed by necessity. Now Achille became passionate. It was his new identity in this new world that had enclosed him. He preferred to hunt and stalk on land — and let others concern themselves with the life of rivers and the ocean.

• • •

At the welcoming feast Theotiste, who believed drink was an evil spirit’s brew, saw Cache Emil drank only one small cup of brandy, but Rouge Emil swallowed cup after cup.

“Will you not drink, Cousin?” asked Rouge Emil, but Theotiste turned his face away.

“I have ever disliked the white man’s whiskey,” he mumbled. Rouge Emil drank on until he surrendered to the weight of the spirit and fell senseless.