Barkskins (23 page)

“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.

A few days later many Mi'kmaq came to help put up a big
wikuom,
large enough for all of them, on the edge of the forest overlooking the sea where a path bent down to the shore. Here they buried Mari's bones. After a long search Achille killed a beaver and put its skin on the burial place as they did in the old times, but a few days later it was gone. Someone had taken it to sell.

Achille and Theotiste said they would later make small
wikuoms
in suitable places, but for now it was better if they all stayed together. Zoë laughed to see a band of Mi'kmaw seamstresses sewing their house as one would sew a garment, until they put her to work painting the moose-hide door in whirls and double curves of black, purple and red.

“Sister, there was never a more beautiful entrance,” said Elphège. Inside the
wikuom
was floored with reed mats, a central stone circle for fire. Inside was quiet. Inside was their haven.

“A fine
wikuom,
” said Cache Emil. “The French brag of their great tall houses in their home villages, but why does one need such a tall house? Men are not so high in stature. Perhaps they have giants for visitors? Nor can those houses be moved, they say. And if those houses and those villages are so fine, as we often hear, why did they leave them, leave their friends and wives and come here? Truly these must be the rejected ones from their own people so stupid, so hairy and grasping.”

The elderly Mi'kmaw grandmother Loze, who had been at Odanak, bossed the sewing. “But everything is changed,” she said, as she always said. “Because our fathers killed so many beaver to trade with the Europeans the beaver are angry and have left the country, and now strike us with illnesses.” She pointed at Alit Spot, who had ulcers on his neck and hands that refused to heal. Many of the old beaver hunters had suffered those sores, and when the disease went inside the body they had died coughing blood. “But you know well,” she said, “after eel, beaver meat is the best meat for the Mi'kmaq. We destroyed our best food to trade their furs to the white men. Now these people from far away try to push us off the shore, push us into the interior, where the biting insects live. Here, near the ocean, the breeze teaches insects kind ways.” She said enviously that she had heard a true story that at one place the Mi'kmaq had shot the settlers' cows, but French soldiers came and arrested the hunters. “They should have arrested the cows.” She said that as a child she had been shown the place where the rattling plant—
mededeskooï
—grew, that magic plant that could cure many illnesses and even grant wishes. Even in the old days it had been elusive. Her accounts always ended “that was a long time ago.” Yes, that was the old life.

When the weather warmed she came with the Sels at low tide, showing them how to dig clams, their feet sinking into the rich mud, shorebirds running before them and crying out warnings to each other. Loze told Noë that the dog whelks made the beautiful purple dye the Mi'kmaw people liked.

“I will show you how to do it one day,” the old woman said, and she urged them to gather armfuls of seaweed to flavor the clams they would steam on hot rocks.

•  •  •

The summer and autumn passed. It was time to reinforce the
wikuoms
with skins and weighty poles. The loons called in their storm-coming voices, a sign that otherworld being without legs, Coolpujot, would soon send winter gales. For the men the cold and deepening snow made easier hunting. Achille went into the woods on snowshoes, sleeping out many nights. In January he hunted seals on the ice with Rouge Emil. Achille preferred to hunt with Sosep, whom he called
Nikskamich
—grandfather. He did not smoke the pipe as it dulled the senses. He shuddered to think that he had once stood over a reeking potash kettle. Although January and February were the best months to hunt moose, for dogs could drive the animals into the deep snow, where they floundered and made easy targets for men on snowshoes, Achille hunted them in every season. Before a summer hunt he took a steam bath and then rubbed himself with earth and leaves to dampen his human odor. Unlike other hunters he did not use dogs to find moose except in winter; he could smell them from a great distance and he knew their minds and habits. Old Sosep told Cache Emil that Achille was such a hunter as only emerges every few generations, almost a
megumoowesoo,
one of those fortunate Mi'kmaq whom Kluskap honored with extraordinary abilities. But to Achille he said jokingly, “Now you must marry and have a woman to bring home the meat you catch. Now you must learn to play the flute to attract such a one.”

In spring Achille went with Rouge Emil to an island where
Apagtuey,
the great white auk, nested. They took two each, for the birds were good eating and their gullets made the finest arrow quivers. But the next year when they went to that same island there were no birds, only a litter of feathers and bones, for English and Boston whalers had come before them.

Gradually people began to say that Achille did not care about Mi'kmaw girls because he must be married to
team,
a moose, as he knew moose ways so well. He traveled into the interior and one time went far northwest. When he returned from one long journey he spoke privately to Elphège and said that Captain Bouchard would betray no more Mi'kmaw people, for his tongue had come loose and fallen to the ground.

Elphège nodded and said, “My brother, it is good.”

•  •  •

Mi'kma'ki was richer in birds than the forests of New France, but when the annual migrations began, the volume of birds, as many as the snowflakes in a blizzard, the smell of their hot bodies intensified by millions of pulsing wings, stunned them. It seemed every bird on earth was here—especially sandpipers, so many they covered the shore like a monstrous twitching grey blanket, gorging on mud shrimp. They poured out of the south sky like froth-crested waves. It was the time of birds roasted and steamed, broiled and boiled. The wood pigeons, which they had seen in childhood in Kébec, darkened the world. Predatory birds arrived, too, pierce-eyed ospreys, eagles, hawks, falcons. Old Sosep commented that Europeans would soon be arriving in numbers rivaling the birds. His listeners shuddered. The
sagmaw
seemed to ricochet between two thoughts: he foresaw billows of overseas white people arriving in countless ships—but he spoke and acted as if the old traditions still governed their world.

Theotiste and Elphège went out at night in their canoes with others during the migrations. They lay quietly in the bottoms of their canoes and let them drift like logs into great flocks of sleeping ducks. Then Cache Emil and old Sosep lit birch torches and held them high over their heads in the darkness. The ducks awoke, shrieking, and flew confusedly around the torches while the younger men knocked them down with poles. In this way they filled five canoes with fat ducks in one night.

“Now, Brothers,” called Elphège, “you will see how well we eat. We do not go for long solitary journeys to get one tough old moose, we go together and quickly get an abundance of delicious fat greasy ducks.”

•  •  •

Theotiste and Elphège sat in fog-softened sunlight making ax handles, for the new white settlers coming into Mi'kma'ki thought of nothing else until they had taken down enough trees to build their heavy square huts. It was not interesting work to make the same shape of wood over and again, but they left the hunting to Achille, who was so quiet and stealthy he could creep close to a fever-eyed ruffed grouse on a hollow log rolling out his crescendos of wingbeats, and slip the leather noose at the end of a long stick over the bird's head. Making ax handles for a little money helped, for there were many things that now must be purchased, things that had never been known in the old times. They had to have metal pots and utensils, nails, wire, tools and weapons.

As they scraped and whittled the ash handles, a group of men and women came down the slope. One of the women—Talis—stopped. She was tall, with smiling eyes that crinkled at the corners, her flawless teeth bright.

“Why do you not put away those sticks and come help us mend the weir?”

“Why indeed,” said Theotiste, getting up and setting aside the handle he had begun to shape. “I will go with you.”

The rivers of Mi'kma'ki were not solitary currents of water but strands in a great net of liquid motion that defined the land and mingled with the sea in outward flow and inward rush of tide. Each tiny runnel, each roaring raceway, torrent and trickle, cascade and flood had its own habits and ways, and Mi'kmaq had to know those ways. This was the water world that Theotiste and Elphège began to learn.

“My head is swollen with all this fish lore,” said Elphège.

“Yes,” said a sinewy old fellow with long earlobes, “as long as there are Mi'kmaw people there will be knowledge of fishing.”

•  •  •

The French king sent money to build roads to the interior (where they wished to push the Mi'kmaq, said Sosep), and now, when time allowed, many men, including Theotiste and Elphège, took temporary work as chainmen for surveyors and as laborers on the new road for hard cash. Chopping trees was another thing that had to be done, said the new people.

When a whiteman lumber outfit set up a sawmill and began cutting trees in the interior country, there was more work for money that could be used at the trading post. The missionary, Père Crème, urged them to put aside trapping and fishing for a time in favor of this occupation. With the money, he said, they could buy salt pork and flour. Although salt pork was a disgusting food, flour made bread and the people had come to like bread. Elphège, Theotiste and Achille had all labored long hours with René clearing the forest, they were skilled with the ax and found work with the French company Duquet et Fils. Rouge Emil was less skilled, but he joined them. It was not the Mi'kmaw way, but it seemed necessary.

•  •  •

One who was not pleased with the newcomers from Odanak was Père Crème. He was disturbed that old Joseph, the one the Mi'kmaq called Sosep, had returned. And the Sel family, what a calamity! All of them could speak French, and it was best that Indians did not learn French. The two older brothers could read and write, using the Roman alphabet, a serious error on the part of some mission cleric decades earlier. They were capable of doing much harm and stirring up trouble. And they resisted farming, the men preferring to work in the woods, on the rivers or at odd jobs for some of the year, reserving the autumn and winter for trapping and hunting. He wrote,

Dear Sister Marguerite.

While I have great Sympathy for the Indians, they are difficult. The sorest Point is their Refusal to grasp the Fact that Land belongs to the Man who improves it as Scriptures show. They only fish (an idler's occupation) and wander through the Forest taking Animals and Plants for Sustenance, but when a White Man comes and cuts the oppressive encroaching Forest, builds a House for his Family and Shelter for his Beasts, the Indians complain that he takes their Land, Land they have done nothing to improve, but rather have allowed to ever thicken with more and more Trees. They do not understand that the White Man who struggles and strives to reduce the Forest's grip has exerted his God-given Right to claim the cleared Land as his own. By virtue of the suffering of Indian Attack and severe Labor as well as the adversities of removing from their Homelands to take up a Place in the Wilderness it is the Destiny of the French to hold this Land as they have earned moral Title to it from God.

Nor did Sosep like what he saw. He immediately counted harmful changes. One of the French settlers, Philippe Null, had inherited a sum of money from an uncle in France, and with this windfall he bought three cows, a bull and two horses. The huge animals roamed freely and within days had consumed all the nutritious and medicinal plants within a day's walk.

“Those animals must have been very sick,” said old grandmother Loze, “for they have eaten herbs to cure headache, lingering cough, prolapsed uterus, fevers, broken bones and sore throats.” Sosep added that once butchered and cooked, the cows, though not as tasty as moose or caribou, looked the same in the pot. But one had to be very private about it.