Annie Proulx - Barkskins

The Sels married: Noë to Zephirin Desautels, an Acadian fisherman who was a cousin of the dead boy who had fathered Auguste; Zoë to Paul, an older Mi’kmaw man whose left shoulder in childhood had been grievously hurt by an enraged moose, an injury that damaged his hunting abilities. But he became a superior eeler and their wikuom was never empty of food. Achille married a Mi’kmaw beauty named Isobel, already well known for her strong fingers and skill in making the new kind of basket, not of roots but of thin cedar and ash splints — always she had a splint, ligpete’gnapi, in her hand. Elphège had found and courted Delima, the widow of a man killed in an ambush, and Theotiste at last married Anne-Marie, the woman who had been his first wife’s friend. They settled into a way of living away from the white settlers, though more and more men went to cut pine in the winter camps.

Achille grew proud of his hunting skill and he imagined there was no beast he could not understand and kill.

“To be sure, on the land,” said Rouge Emil, “but you avoid the creatures of the sea. You are no fish hunter,” and he laughed.

This remark smarted and Achille kept thinking of the stories of old times, when the Mi’kmaq had hunted whales in their bark canoes. Everyone said canoes were best in rivers and along the seashore; in deep water they could be dangerous when certain bad fish attacked. Achille did not believe that a fish could harm a canoe; this was a story to frighten children. He said he would go far out in the bay and fish alone in a canoe, and twice he did so and caught cod half his own length each time. He carried a fish spear — in case of English attackers, he said. But one hour’s experience changed his opinion of fish.

He persuaded two others, his friends Barth Nocout and Alit Spot, to paddle their canoes out with him. They could see the people onshore as small as their little fingers. From the corner of his eye Achille saw something briefly rise from the water farther out. The fishing was good; they made jokes. Then his canoe lurched. He peered into the water but could see nothing. A few moments later Nocout’s canoe rose high out of the water and they saw the enormous black and white orca that had lifted it up on its back. The whale sank and Nocout’s canoe tipped and rocked but did not go over.

“Do not paddle!” called Nocout, whose father had told the stories of dangerous fish. “Take up your spears! When it comes near again strike it hard.” For long tense minutes they waited and then, ten canoe lengths from Nocout, they saw a dorsal fin like a monstrous pine stump rise from the water and slowly sink again. They gripped their spears. Achille saw the gleaming white oval patch behind the invisible eye as the creature rose below him. He stabbed the spear with force into the sleek side as it came up. The animal rolled away and dived at once, wrenching the spear from his hands and carrying it away. Before the animal disappeared it spoke to Achille in a familiar voice.

“You are not,” it said in Sosep’s deep voice. Then it was gone.

“It may leave us now,” said Nocout. “I pray there are no others.” They waited, motionless, terrified. Then Nocout whispered, “Let us paddle to shore.”

As they paddled, they constantly searched the distant water for the great fin, the near water for the black and white giant.

“We were protected by spirits,” Nocout said, panting, as they reached the shallows.

“Did you hear them speak?” asked Achille.

“I felt their presence.”

Nocout and Spot told their story many times that evening and Nocout’s father shook his head and said that in the old days when Mi’kmaq had to make sea journeys in frail canoes they would put many leafy branches in the prow and stern.

“Those evil fish smell the leaves and they think the canoe is a little island and they are in danger of being stranded on its shore. So they veer away. You were fortunate there was only one. Had there been a pack they would have toppled your canoes and thrown you in the water. They have eaten many of our people. They know the trick of tipping canoes from their way of bumping ice floes. The seals fall in the water and they are caught. Perhaps they think men are seals.”

Nocout’s father went to a storage basket where he kept curiosities and brought out a single tooth the length of a man’s hand. “They have a hundred such teeth,” he said, passing the heavy ivory around.

Achille saw that he had been a fool. He looked across the fire at Sosep. He wanted to ask him what the fish meant when it said “You are not” in Sosep’s voice. Had it truly spoken? What was the meaning of those words? The old man was staring at him, and as their glances met Sosep raised his eyebrows. But Achille was unable to find a way to ask.

Sosep died suddenly after a hard day’s moose hunt. The old man sat by the fire with a piece of meat in his hand. Achille saw he had fallen asleep. He could not be roused. Perhaps an easy death for an old man tired from a successful hunt, enjoying the warmth of a fire and rich moose meat, thought Achille. But Sosep had long been planning his death song, a great recounting of his hunting feats, journeys, his children, wonderful things he had seen in his time as when, during a long battle, an enemy had transformed himself into a bear. Now he had fallen silently into the world of the departed with no death song at all.

Achille went down to the sea and looked out. The water was nearly flat, a dull color under a dull sky. The sky seemed gone, there never had been sky and Sosep was down there, under the water. A gull floated, quietly asleep.

“Grandfather,” called Achille. “I wish you a good journey under the sea even though you told me ‘you are not.’ ” At the sound of his voice the gull awoke and, after some effort, lifted into the air.

• • •

He had thirty-three winters entering his middle years now. Because game was scarce he was away for many days on each hunt. He had somehow lost the respect of the animal persons. His wife, Isobel, sighed at his frequent absences.

“Why can you not work in the forest cutting lo’gs as do others?”

“I cut lo’gs after good hunt if we got plenty food.” His children and wife wore French clothing as he did, and rumors flew that this time the English settlers were coming in truly large numbers to seize the land. You are not, he said to himself. The thought never left his mind.

No one knew if they were at war, or with whom. Bloodthirsty woods rangers came from Boston in armed ships and killed indiscriminately. The English dug up their graveyards and threw Mi’kmaw corpses into fires. Aloosool, the black measles, killed so many there were few left to bury them and in one place they had to put the bodies in a pond to keep them from the whitemen’s devouring hogs.

Although the Mi’kmaq resented their Acadian neighbors’ incursions, they married some of them, taught them their language and beliefs and absorbed many of their ways, moving ever more deeply into their double lives, the interior reality warring with the external world in a kind of teetering madness. For their part, the Acadians, conservative and serious agriculturists, passionate marsh drainers, wished to be left alone and resented the priest’s exhortations to take arms against the English. Père Crème occasionally thought that a new kind of people, part Mi’kmaq, part Acadian, seemed to be forming. Then the English king urged volunteer English on retirement from the army or navy, and colonial New Englanders, to take up free land in Nova Scotia. Thousands upon thousands came.

• • •

Achille, once again beset by the spring urge to travel north, planned a hunting trip of two or three moons with his oldest son, Kuntaw, named for a powerful stone with bright copper specks, and his nephew Auguste, light-eyed and brown-haired like an overseas person, Alman’tiew. Years before, when Kuntaw had passed three winters and it seemed he would survive, Achille had made him a tiny bow and miniature blunt-ended arrows.