Enter, Night (56 page)

Their gruesome legends, their tales of flesh-devouring, blooddrinking demons, and the spirits that walked their forests at night, were
easier to dismiss in the daylight. But when, like at that moment, the dull
moon was the only light able to pierce this infernal darkness at the edge
of the world, the borders between our world of the living and their land
of the dead seemed to shimmer and grow indistinct.

The Indians did not come too near. From their soft, fretful
whispering, I came to believe that they were not keeping their distance simply because I was under the protection of Askuwheteau, but also
because the Indians were afraid of
me
.

That morning, I again woke, shivering, to a light covering of snow upon
the ground. The dark green trees were likewise wreathed and crested with
white and stood out starkly against the deadened sky. The sun remained
hidden behind lead-coloured clouds that seemed an advance guard of the
deadly coming winter.

As I prayed that morning, I entreated God that we might find Father
de Céligny alive and well, presiding over his Christianized congregation
at St. Barthélemy, and that I might either return with him to TroisRivières or winter with him in Sault de Gaston if the route back became
impassable because of the killing cold.

We again loaded the canoes in preparation for our departure.
Askuwheteau and his paddlers were solemn that morning, entirely
different in their demeanour than they had been every morning during
the last month of our voyage inland. They whispered amongst themselves
and, though I may have been imagining it, I caught them looking at me
when they thought me unawares, glancing away quickly when I returned
their gaze.

At one point, a near brawl appeared to break out between
Askuwheteau and Chogan, one of the younger men in our party of paddlers,
who had been glaring at me all through the morning. Askuwheteau
struck him about the shoulders and rebuked him in Algonquian, though
I was too far away to understand his words. When Chogan pointed at me,
Askuwheteau seized the younger man’s arm and forced it down to his
side. Askuwheteau addressed him sharply, but in a low voice, and Chogan
looked vindictively in my direction one more time, then dropped his eyes
in submission to Askuwheteau, my protector.

Of course, I had seen the entire exchange, but still I pretended that
I had not, as much for my own security as for Chogan’s pride.

As we launched into the water, I saw that the entire village had
arrayed itself on the shore, as though to assure themselves that we had
indeed departed from their midst. They stared solemnly in our wake as
the canoes glided into the morning fog, not speaking nor shouting, but
entirely, raptly following the trajectory of our canoes with their eyes.

So general was the ghostly silence, that when one of the paddles
rapped against the side of the boat, I cried out in shock. The Indians kept
their heads down and paddled, showing no reaction to my outcry, no
laughter this time, and none of the usual well-meant mockery. Instead,
we paddled in silence until the mist enveloped us and the land behind us
vanished from sight.

After five hard, uncomfortable days of mostly silent paddling, we made
a gruesome discovery in the early evening of the fifth day as we crossed
a particularly vast lake. Lulled and hypnotized by the repetitive motion
of the paddle, I was suddenly jolted to consciousness by a sharp shout of
warning from the bowsman of the other canoe.

I raised my head and squinted to see where he was pointing.
There, floating face down on the surface of the black water was the
body of a girl of perhaps no more than twelve or thirteen. I crossed myself
and stifled my despair at the tragic sight. The girl’s body must have
floated on some sort of very strong underwater current, for we seemed
several miles from either shore and there seemed no other earthly way
for it to have found itself so far from land. The fantastical thought came
to me that she had been dropped from the air, as though from the talons
of some monstrous bird in mid-flight.

Too, there seemed to be no putrescence or other decay. She looked as
though she had fallen asleep in the lake that very afternoon and simply
drifted away on the waves.

“Pull her to us,” I implored them. “Let us take her to shore, so that I
may say a prayer for her and we can bury her.”

The Indians, naturally, ignored me. But there had been no need for
my exhortations in any case. The men were already carefully reaching for
her, using their paddles almost as grappling hooks, pulling the girl’s body
towards them.

The combination of their paddles and the motion of the waves that
had sprung up in the breeze caused the body to roll in the water. As it did,
the full abomination of the tableau revealed itself to all of us, and I again
had occasion to cross myself.

The girl’s eyes had not rolled up in her head; rather they seemed
to stare fixedly at us. The pupils were dilated so that they looked like
two pieces of flat black glass. But O! the mute asseverations of dread in
those eyes, the terror frozen eternally in violent death. Her mouth was
stretched open in a silent scream of pain and terror. Worst of all, her
throat had been all but torn out, as though by the jaws of a wolf, the
flesh of the wound washed clean and pink by the lake water. Her poor
fingers were fixed into claws, as though in her last moments she had
been fighting to escape from whatever beast killed her.

The effect on the Indians was marvellous. With a collective cry of
despair, they pushed the body away from them. They beat the water to a
white froth with their paddles as they turned the canoes about, gaining
distance between themselves and the poor dead girl’s body in a trice.

“Stop! Stop!” I screamed. “Go back! We must bury her!”

But stop the Indians did not. They laid their backs into their paddling
as though the spot was accursed. The lost child’s body floating in that
desolate lake shrank to a distant speck—a lonely sacrilege bobbing in
the black waves as the sun sank behind the hills and the night came alive
around us.

The next morning, Askuwheteau avowed to me that we were very near
our destination. He said we would reach St. Barthélemy that night, and
that we would portage inland from Lac Supérieur, then camp in the
forest near a small lake, which, he told me, was hidden within a rocky
region known to be treacherous.

It may have been the combined effect of the dramatic hibernal
shift in the weather and the changing light, but the entire landscape
appeared even more forbidding, remote and haunted than it ever had
before. The water, dull pewter, violently wind-lashed and bitterly cold,
smashed against the massive jutting islands of rock rising out of the
oceanic vastness of Lac Supérieur. It froze my toughened hands, driving
me almost mad with pain that I could not express in front of the Indians
for fear of their reaction.

Their behaviour towards me had grown increasingly hostile, almost
antagonistic. They now slept apart from me, and they built two fires, one
for them and one for me, farther away. I ate separately from the Indians
at their insistence, and never a word was passed between us now, except
obligatorily, when Askuwheteau needed to communicate some detail of
our voyage. Whatever the unfavourable sentence that had been passed
upon me by the elders of the Ojibwa village where we had overnighted, it
seemed that it had radically, unsympathetically, and permanently altered
the Indians’ view of me.

Finally, we landed on a beach of smooth rock in a horseshoe-shaped
inlet just as the sun was beginning to lower in the sky. The strong, gelid
wind that had raised such waves upon the surface of Lac Supérieur now
whipped at our bodies and faces. My clothing was wet from rogue waves
over the side of the canoe, and now, on that rocky beach as we prepared
to portage, I had begun to shiver violently.

“When will we camp?” I asked Askuwheteau. “I am cold and wet.
Perhaps we should make camp here, on the beach?”

Askuwheteau gestured with a wide swing of his arm. “There is
danger,” he said. “It is too easy to find us here. We must go deeper into
the forest.”

“Who would find us?” I said. “The Hiroquois? Surely, we are in
friendly country here? This is Ojibwa country. We are near the mission
of St. Barthélemy, you said. The Ojibwa are not our enemies. From whom
are we in danger?”

He stared at me, again that maddening Savage inscrutability. “Not
the Hiroquois,” he said. “Not the Ojibwa.” Then he grew silent. He picked
up his pack and began to carry it into the forest. All I could do was pick
up my own pack and follow him.

As we portaged through the woods towards St. Barthélemy, my
travelling companions grew more and more apprehensive in a way that
was entirely out of character, for they had hitherto shown themselves
to be fearless. It would not be incorrect to say that the Indians appeared
to be at the ready, as taut as their own bow strings, the way they might
be if hunting, or anticipating an attack by the Hiroquois, or some other
enemy.

At last, in the growing gloom, we laid down our packs and made camp
in the clearing of a coppice of trees and set about building temporary
shelter. I began to gather wood for my own fire, as I had been forced to do
throughout the last week of our voyage. When I had found several stout
sticks, I made as though to arrange them apart from the larger fire being
built by Askuwheteau and his men. The Indians regarded me strangely,
though still with no hint of the amity I had known at the beginning of
our voyage.

It was old Hausisse who spoke first—to Askuwheteau. Her
Algonquian was so rapid that I was unable to follow it, though the
urgency of her tone was unmistakable. Her hands flew in the air as she
pointed to me, then gestured around her towards the trees, and the
sunless sky above, then back to me. Whatever she said to him clearly
gave him pause, because he told me to put my wood in the pile beside the
fire that the Indians had already built, and which was already burning.
Hausisse stared at me from where she sat, her regard almost approving.
Askuwheteau told me that I would remain with the rest of them tonight.
Too grateful to do anything but nod, I threw my wood into the pile.

The Indians reluctantly made room for me around the fire. When
I say reluctantly, I mean that while they showed no overt malice or
hostility, my apparent state of uncleanliness had not changed in their
eyes, in spite of Askuwheteau’s invitation.

My awareness of our complete isolation could not have been
sharper than it was at that moment. Even the Ojibwa village where I’d
received such a hostile reception seemed like an outpost of warmth and
civilization compared to this wild, dark place.

I needed the Indians; they did not need me. This was their world,
not mine, and I was lost in it without them. Indeed it was difficult to
imagine anything human, Savage or Christian, existing here. Anything
could happen to me here, indeed, to any of us, and none would be the
wiser.

But still, Hausisse continued to stare at me, at the crucifix lying
against my robe, as though it were a sorcerous talisman instead of a holy
object, for I knew she had not accepted Christ.

What woke me from my sleep that night I could not say with any certainty.

I had been dreaming of my family’s home in France, and of my
mother. In the dream, I was still a young boy in her kitchen, by the fire.
My mother was seated in a carved oak chair, and I on her lap, my body
pressed against her soft breast as she ran her fingers through my hair. I
smelled the lavender sachet from her black woollen dress beneath the
starched white apron. From a massive pot on the hearth issued forth the
magnificent odour of lamb stew with potatoes, vegetables, and red wine
slowly cooking. The fragrance filled every corner of the room, making
my mouth water. Never, I think, had I been as hungry as I was in that
moment before waking.

At the very moment my eyes opened on the darkness, I was already
fully awake, mouth still watering, every sense alert. All about me were
the general sounds of the Indians snoring, and the crackle of the fire that
had died to glowing embers. I smelled the smoke and the musky scent of
the sleeping Savages.

I propped myself up on one elbow and glanced around. Nothing
seemed amiss in the camp. The surrounding woods were silent as tombs,
and I could see my breath in the air in front of me by firelight. I peered
into the blackness, trying to ascertain what had roused me, for the sense
was growing in me that I was being watched by something, or someone,
beyond the tree line.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I thought I saw a
shadow moving slyly towards us. Terror leaped in my chest, for I could
think of only two things: that it could be some deadly animal, a wolf, or
some terrible bear, the stories of which I had heard even before boarding
at Dieppe. That, or an armed, bloodthirsty Hiroquois scouting party.

As I stared, the shadow itself divided into two smaller shadows,
forms human in shape and contour.

I rubbed my eyes, marvelling at what I saw before me, for standing
at the edge of the coppice of trees were two Savage children, a girl of
perhaps nine years, holding hands with a small boy who could not have
been more than five. The girl wore a simple buckskin shift, and her arms
and feet were bare in the bitter cold. The boy was completely naked,
though the lower half of his face, his neck, and his upper chest appeared
to be smeared with mud, or some other blackish substance.

I thought it a curious trick of the firelight, but even from my vantage
point in the doorway, I could clearly see their eyes shining through the
trees, even though their faces were deeply painted with shadow.

The two children stared fixedly at our assemblage. They could have
been a brother and sister on a walk through the woods on a summer day
but for the fact that, by the position of the moon in the sky, it was well
past midnight, dawn hours away. And though their state of nakedness
would have been tolerable in the heat of August, we were already in the
mouth of winter and yet they seemed entirely insensible to the bitter
cold. The wind whipped the girl’s long black hair wildly about her face,
but she made no move to push it back with her hands, or to cover her
body against the deadly wind.