Enter, Night (55 page)

The Indians are impermeable to hardship in a way that we Europeans
cannot fathom. I had of course been made aware of the stoical inurement
particular to these people before I left France, but hearing it described
by returning priests was entirely different to seeing it in the flesh. The
Savage women, too, paddle the canoes alongside their men, as well as
carry their own heavy packs along the trails. Their hands are hard and
calloused and would be unrecognizable, in France, as belonging to any
but the hardest-working peasant.

I sat close behind Askuwheteau in the canoe and tried to match
the force of his paddle-stroke. He bent his body to the task as though it
were a Sisyphean machine, his back leaning into each stroke. Each time
his paddle cut the black water, a perfect white-crested whirlpool spun
away in its wake. Try as I might to imitate his movements, my own poor
attempts were clumsy and ineffectual. In truth, I felt unmanned, and yet
I set myself arduously to my own portion of the labour, remembering
well the admonitions of Father de Varennes with regard to the Savages’
measure of me. My life depended in no small part on their protection and
goodwill.

Indeed, my position relative to theirs became more and more obvious.
While I might be their intellectual and spiritual superior through the
agency of my education and my role as Christ’s humble representative in
their world of godless ignorance, they were, in every practical sense, my
superiors. I saw—and felt—this reality with every stroke of the paddle
that took me farther and farther into the wilderness.

We camped that first night by the shore of a nameless lake—
nameless to me, though I do not doubt the Savages had a name for it, as
they have a name for everything in earthly nature, as well as names for
their pantheon of pagan gods and spirits that, I had been told, dwelt not
only in the heavens above, but shared the earth with them.

My hands were raw and bleeding from the repetitive friction of wet
skin against wood after that first long day’s paddle. Sitting about the
campfire that night with the Indians, one of the older women, Hausisse,
noticed my pain. From one of her packs, she withdrew a greasy poultice.
She started to apply it to my wounds. When I pulled back and uttered
some instinctive protest, she grasped my wrist as firmly as if I were
an unruly child and rebuked me in Algonquian. Then she applied the
poultice even more vigorously upon my wounds. In truth, the sting
in my hands from the paddle began almost immediately to subside, a
cooling sensation spreading across my palms, and indeed everywhere the
poultice touched my skin.

“
Meegwetch,
” I said in awe, thanking Hausisse in my own crude
Algonquian. I looked down at my hands in wonderment, for the pain had
almost completely vanished, as though it had never been there.

She spoke again in Algonquian, calling me “stupid” or “foolish,” but
in no way unkindly. She smiled and put the poultice back inside her
buckskin pack, then shuffled off to join her putative “husband” by the
fire.

The Indians regarded me with amusement as I continued to stare at
my hands, but then made room for me when I went myself to sit closer to
the flames. I found the smell of them comforting—that curious mixture
of buckskin, sweat, dried lake water and smoke from the fire. In truth,
their very presence was a bulwark against the terrors of the unknown and
the unknowable. The darkness surrounding the fire was of an opacity the
likes of which I had never known in France, or perhaps it seemed darker
because, in France, I knew reasonably well what it might conceal. Here,
in this savage Devil’s-land, God only knew what lay beneath night’s cloak,
hidden and in wait.

As we lay down and prepared to sleep, I looked about me uneasily,
for, unbidden, Dumont’s words had come back to me:
There are worse
things now walking in the forests at night than the Savages.
I said a prayer
for our safety and put myself in God’s hands as we slept. This time, I slept
soundly and without dreams, surrounded by my Indian protectors.

The next morning, upon waking, I washed in the lake before my
morning prayers. The poultice on my hands that had dried and crusted
while I slept was rinsed off in the lake water. Miraculously, my hands had
almost completely healed while I was asleep. Examining them in the pink
light of the early dawn, I saw that the wounds were dry and had already
scabbed.

I went to find Hausisse, the old woman who had acted as my surgeon,
to show her this miracle, but when I did, she seemed uninterested.
Hausisse looked away, muttering words under her breath in Algonquian I
could not understand. After taking our morning meal, we packed up our
rudimentary camp, loaded the two canoes, and again we set out across
the water in the direction of Sault de Gaston.

The first few weeks passed without incident. They evolved into a
backbreaking cycle of repetitive days that began at dawn and ended at
sunset. The air had grown decidedly colder as the days shortened in
anticipation of the coming winter. The hills and mountains surrounding
the lakes and rivers were dappled in scarlet and saffron yellow,
breathtakingly beautiful in the wildness of their colour. One morning, we
woke to a light dusting of snow around the camp, but it melted with the
sun, almost before we were underway again. The men shot wild fowl that
the women would then prepare as part of our supper, and they fished the
dark water with a dexterity at which I marvelled.

Though the work of paddling and camping became no easier, and in
fact the land grew more rugged and forbidding the closer we came to our
destination, making the portaging of the canoes and packs more difficult,
a
camaraderie
of sorts seemed to have grown between us. I am under no
illusion that the Indians saw me as one of them, and indeed they often
mocked my seeming inability to master the most rudimentary of their
skills, from paddling to portaging, yet we had settled into a peaceable
accord.

My proficiency with the bow and arrow, however, surprised
them, especially the men. Unbeknownst to them, of course, my father
had hunted often on our family’s estate in Beauce, and he had drilled
me throughout my boyhood in this one martial skill. Askuwheteau in
particular took delight in my ability to shoot. On such occasions as we had
time for recreation, which where precious few, he allowed me to practise
with his own bow and arrow. While Askuwheteau was my unchallenged
superior, I flatter myself that I won a measure of his respect in time.

I spoke my crude Algonquian with the other paddlers. With
Askuwheteau, I spoke a mixture of Algonquian and French by which
we both seemed to understand one another. We were not friends—the
very idea seemed preposterous, especially then—but perhaps my utter
dependence on him, coupled with my willingness to share a full portion
of the work of our voyage and match the Indians effort for effort, had
roused an answering kindness in him that made him more than merely
my guide.

I came to find comfort in the sound of their voices, especially at
night in the forest around the campfire. The sound had become a sort of
lodestar of safety in the midst of the wilderness.

Blessedly there had been no sign of Hiroquois hunters along our
route—in itself a miracle, for their appearance would have very likely
signalled our doom. I realized that the Algonquians had been paid to
protect me, and, as much as I might doubt their commitment to my
safety, still I sensed that this group wished me no ill will, and indeed
would safeguard me to the best of their ability and deliver me to the
site of St. Barthélemy as promised, and wait there to return me to TroisRivières—either tragically alone, or in the company of Father de Céligny.

In the fourth week of our journey, we stopped in an Ojibwa village a
week’s paddle or more from Sault de Gaston. It was apparently a village
where Askuwheteau was known and respected, for the chief received
him. The Chief and some of the Savages took my measure gravely, and
with what appeared to be suspicion. Askuwheteau turned his back to me
and spoke to them in a low voice. Over his shoulder, the Chief and the
men with him continued to regard me with something I took to be either
anger or fear, or indeed some mixture of both. Anger I had seen before,
during my year in New France, but their fear was something with which
I was unfamiliar.

Clearly, at Trois-Rivières the Indians were used to us, and even
farther afield than the settlement there, we Fathers were more likely to
be met with contempt than fear. And yet there it was in the eyes of the
chief and his men: fear, or so it appeared to me.

Finally Askuwheteau turned to me and spoke in French. “Black
Robe,” he said. “The Chief wants to speak with me alone. Go through the
village, to the water’s edge and wait for me.”

I answered him in Algonquian, asking him what was wrong. I had
a notion that the Chief might more kindly consider me if I spoke one of
their languages.

Again, Askuwheteau spoke to me in French. “Go, Black Robe,” he
said gruffly. “Go wait by the water. Do not answer me in Algonquian. Do
not speak my name. Do not answer me at all. Go, now.”

Without a word, I turned and walked towards the village, which was
not itself dissimilar to others I had seen: huts of birch-pole and tents, the
whole place a seething, untidy coil of Savages, their filthy children, and
their verminous dogs, all intermingling hither and thither in the mud,
or squatting on their haunches, men and women both, in apparently
earnest debate or parley. The acrid smoke from the wood cooking fires
and the odour of the Savages themselves, combined with the noise of
their squalling children and barking dogs, became almost overpowering.
I was more eager than not to obey Askuwheteau, and so I went to the
edge of the lake and waited for him there.

After a time, Askuwheteau came to where I was sitting. I had not
heard him approach until he was standing behind me. I turned and
looked up. The sun was behind him, so his face was hidden from my sight.

“Black Robe,” he said. “We may stay here tonight, but only tonight.
And we are told we must stand guard over you until the dawn. Also, you
may not sleep in the village. You must sleep here, near the water, away
from the people.

“Why?” I queried, rousing myself to a standing position. “For what
reasons?”

“They fear you,” Askuwheteau replied. He stared at me with no
expression. It was as though the fact of the Indians fearing me was so
entirely reasonable that it required no elucidation.

“What is there to fear?” I scoffed. “They know of us. They have seen
Black Robes before. Surely we have more to fear from them than they
have to fear from us.”

“They have seen Black Robes before,” Askuwheteau said, with that
maddening, implacable stolidity of the Savages. “They are not afraid of
Black Robes. They are afraid of you.”

“Of me? Why?”

“They believe you are
Weetigo
. They believe you are like the other
Black Robe. The one you go to.” Askuwheteau was silent for a long
moment. Then, he spoke again. “You will sleep here, Black Robe. I will
guard you. I am not afraid of you. I do not believe you are
Weetigo
. If you
go to the village tonight, they will kill you. And tomorrow, we leave.”

“Why do they believe this?” I was again outraged. “This is nonsense.
It is blasphemy.”

“They speak of the other Black Robe. They say he eats flesh. They
say he drinks blood.”

“Askuwheteau,” I said, trying to calm myself. I spoke slowly,
enunciating carefully, in French, which Askuwheteau rudimentarily
understood. “We have told you the meaning of the Eucharist. You know
of the rituals of the Black Robes—how the bread and the wine become the
body and blood of Jesus Christ through the miracle of transubstantiation.
We do not eat the flesh of human beings, nor do we drink their blood.
The very thought is an affront to God. The people of this village do not
understand. You should have explained it to them better. You speak their
language. Tell them they are mistaken.”

“
Weetigo
eats the body and drinks the blood,” he insisted stubbornly.
He gestured to the village behind him. “There are many stories of
Weetigo
here. People have seen the
Weetigo
in the village where we go to your
Black Robe. There are many dead.” He gestured again, this time towards
the lake. “Many dead in the water. They fell from the sky.” He gestured
overhead. “This
Weetigo
flies at night, like the owl. He runs like the wolf.
He has killed many.”

I was frustrated by Askuwheteau’s dogged insistence that this
gruesome Indian legend of a mythical demon (as I then understood it, an
evil spirit that enters a human body and possesses it, turning the unlucky
vessel into a cannibal monster) was true. I was horrified that it should be
so blasphemously entangled with our own holy ritual of Communion. I
was reminded again of Dumont’s disquieting raving on the shore at TroisRivières about Father de Céligny being something other than human.

While it had been relatively easy to dismiss Dumont as mad, it was
harder to be as sanguine in the face of Askuwheteau’s declaration that he
was all that was standing between me and a terrible death at the hands
of an entire village of Ojibwa Savages who believed I was in league with a
living demon.

Worse still was the ever more likely possibility that Father de Céligny
had been murdered by a group of terrified Savages who believed they
were ridding their village of a monster.

I opened my mouth to protest again, but Askuwheteau silenced me
with a sharp gesture. “Be quiet, Black Robe,” he said. “You stay here. I will
guard you. We leave in morning, when sun rises.”

That night in the moonlight, at several separate intervals I was
aware of the sly sound of moccasin-shod feet on dirt and stone as the
Indians came to stare at me whilst I lay under my blanket, feigning sleep
and listening to the sound of my heart in my chest.