He spoke to me in a quiet and humble voice. I couldn’t understand him very well except that he asked, “Where is Agnes Iron?”
“Just a minute,” I said. “I’ll go get her.” I turned and ran to the house.
“Agnes!” I called out. “There’s two men who want to see you.”
She was in the middle of mending the screen door with needle and thread. “Where are they?”
I was breathless from running. “Down at the water.”
“Where are your manners? Go get them. Bring them here.”
Right away she put down the blue thread and went inside to cook.
I ran to where they sat in the shade of a tree. “Let me help.” I took one of their bags, and led them up Poison Road. By the time we returned to Agnes’, she had already sent for Tommy Grove and the Hundred-Year-Old Road people and pulled a meal together—eggs, bread, potatoes, and her terrible coffee.
Soon Tommy arrived. Some of the old people looked shaken from riding in the back of his red, faded truck, even though he’d built pine benches for transporting them.
I was uncomfortable with the two men and with the elders. I tried not to look at the four old women who came in Tommy’s truck, but it was the first time I’d seen them and they were interesting to me. They were quiet, their clothing colorful but faded. An old cotton scarf on one woman, an apron, too. There were three old men, one with long, white hair and a clean shirt. One old woman dressed all in black sat in the living room on the cot and dozed, her dark gray hair braided, her eyes barely visible in her old, lined face. I waited on her, taking her a plate of potatoes.
After we ate, one of the young men began to talk. He was quiet and humble. He spoke softly but there was an urgency to what he said. They had heard about plans to build a dam, a reservoir. This year, he told us, the government and a hydroelectric corporation had decided to construct several dams.
I listened carefully. In the first flooding, the young man said, they’d killed many thousands of caribou and flooded land the people lived on and revered. Agents of the government insisted the people had no legal right to the land. No agreement had ever been signed, he said, no compensation offered. Even if it had been offered, the people would not have sold their lives. Not one of them. Overnight many of the old ones were forced to move. Dams were already going in. The caribou and geese were affected, as well as the healing plants the people needed.
These men’s people, my own people, too, had lived there forever, for more than ten thousand years, and had been sustained by these lands that were now being called empty and useless. If the dam project continued, the lives of the people who lived there would cease to be, a way of life would end in yet another act of displacement and betrayal.
These were my people. I listened carefully.
Without permission, roads had already been built. In order to determine what should be extracted before the land was drowned, mineral exploration was taking place. Then they would divert rivers into reservoirs. The effects would be seen even at Adam’s Rib, as different bodies of water were changed around.
It was now a matter of how many communities, villages, and towns they could notify of the trouble. With winter coming, everything would slow down. Construction would end for the season. It was a break, a stay. It would give protesters time to reach the Fat-Eaters before the new projected wave of construction. It would give time to get the matter into court.
The young men asked for our help. Not for money, just for people to show up to stop the machines. Or, in the case of the Hundred-Year-Old Road people, a ceremony to assist them in reaching a good end.
Agnes set more black coffee and bread on the table for the Hundred-Year-Old Road people. I looked at the women’s wide skirts. They ate hungrily. Agnes cooked more eggs, potatoes, and bacon.
This was the first time I spent with Tommy, and he was quiet and open. I’d seen him pass in the truck along Poison Road or at the store while getting supplies, but now I was impressed with how he spoke with the young men, my distant cousins, and with the elders. He spoke and then was quiet while they talked among themselves. He waited, listened, heard. Even at my young age, even without an ounce of wisdom, I respected this.
That day, with the two young men, I felt something in the air, that our lives were going to change, that nothing would remain the same, not the land, not the two young men, not the people present, not me. Change was in the air. It was palpable, a strong presence in the room.
FOUR
THE WOMAN named Bush, the one who tried to scrub the cyanide odor off my mother, the one who had taken Hannah to Old Man on the Hundred-Year-Old Road, the woman of the island five miles out in the lake, knew that I’d come back. That’s what she told me after I moved into her house on Fur Island. It’s why she was on the lake that morning of my return, the floating woman, still and watchful in her canoe.
On that first morning I arrived, she’d slept badly. It wasn’t much more than the sound of water that she heard, or the loon, but something called out to her, and there was the familiar presence of a young child standing beside her bed in the first light of morning. It was a girl, about five years of age, wearing hand-sewn deerskin boots and a soft dress. The child looked like me. She had visited Bush all the years I’d been gone, but that morning the girl raised her hand in a wave of good-bye. That was how Bush knew I had come home after all her years of patient waiting. Twelve years had passed. Now was the time she had waited for.
ON THE DAY they sent me to Bush, Dora-Rouge called me into her room. “Hand me that box,” she said. It was the one I’d snooped in while she slept on the porch. I thought at first she’d found me out. My face grew warm.
When she opened it, it smelled of cedar. She took out the amber I had already seen, the frog so small, so perfectly formed inside it, and she held it up and let the light shine into it.
“This is for you,” she said. “It was found in water.” Her old hands turned it over. Then she wrapped it in tissue and pressed it into my hand. “Those people from the south told our ancestors, ‘Remember us when we are gone,’ and they placed this into the hands of an old woman named Luri, one of my ancestors, one of yours.
“I know an animal-calling song,” Dora-Rouge said. “I’m going to teach it to you. You might need it out on that island of Bush’s.” And then she sang.
Soon there were deer on the road walking toward the house in the first musky smell of autumn. Husk and I drove past them on our way to Tinselman’s store to stock up on goods for Bush and for another person on his grocery-delivery route, then we drove to the dock. For a Saturday, it was quieter than usual. In autumn, when the fish were full of food, the fishermen were forced to travel longer distances, so when we reached the lake, it was still. There was no longer the drone of the boats, only of hungry bees in their last hold on life and the sound of crows cawing above the smooth water. The lake looked as if nothing had ever disturbed it except the reflections of the black birds.
Husk parked the old blue truck, then went to the truck bed and lifted out the black, half-full suitcase Agnes insisted I carry. It was more self-respecting, she’d told me, than a garbage bag full of my clothes.
I helped Husk carry the bags of groceries down the pier to the worn-out black boat he called The Raven. I took sticks of firewood out of the truck bed and helped load them. Winter would soon reach us. It was never too early to begin preparations. The wood smelled sweet and dry, the scent of what had been clear light through forests, and there was sap on my palms and the cool touch of changing seasons. All this along with the smell of leaves and firesmoke.
The engine made an urgent cutting sound that broke silence in half. Husk squinted through the gray cloud of exhaust. It was the way he had of looking at times. A squint something like Justin’s, but from that winter of 1929 when he’d been stranded in minus-eight-degree weather with a dog team suddenly overwhelmed by a virus. Unlike Justin, who, according to Frenchie, had gotten hung up on a mass of ice, the squint made Husk look dee
p. I liked the look. Now, as the boat pitched forward, he looked as if he’d fixed his mind on unraveling some knotted tangle of thought and would find a way to pull it straight and clear as fishline. Even his lips were tight, concentrated. I liked to look at him, the man who used theories of science to confirm what he knew was true. On land, he wasn’t much over five feet five, but in water Husk became large. It was his place, the swaying water. It was what he knew.
In the distance before us, several islands looked like rocky planets in a watery sky, and the world stretched wide open. Soon, the musky smell of autumn air gave way to the smell of fish and coolness, even a possibility of coming rain.
Behind us, in the wake of the boat, glaring water closed, hiding our path, and returned to stillness and secrecy. The houses on Adam’s Rib vanished from sight, leaving only the thick shapes of trees, and then the trees, too, became nothing more than a dark blue line. Below us, I knew, fish swam in the awake darkness, green weeds bent with the currents.
HALFWAY BETWEEN ADAM’S RIB and Fur Island was the Hungry Mouth of Water. It was a circle in the lake where winter ice never froze. Young people, with their new and shiny beliefs, called this place the Warm Spot, and thought it was a geological oddity, a spring perhaps, or bad currents. But the older ones, whose gods still lived on earth, called it the Hungry Mouth of Water, because if water wasn’t a spirit, if water wasn’t a god that ruled their lives, nothing was. For centuries they had lived by nets and hooks, spears and ropes, by distances and depths. They’d lived on the rocking skin of water and the groaning ice it became. They swallowed it. It swallowed them. But whatever it was, none of them, young or old, would go near this one place. They all gave it a wide berth.
Every winter the Hungry Mouth laid its trap of thin ice and awaited whatever crossed above it. Young deer, not knowing the weaknesses of ice, fell through the thin roof of this trap, as did drunks who wandered away from their lives on land, forgot what they knew, and unwittingly offered themselves to this god. Once, a showman transported a sleek white beluga down from the mouth of Hudson Bay, taking it over the dry, rocky, and long portages with the help of logrollers. He even went so far as to hire Indian boys to keep the whale moist as it traveled. He showed it to people for a fee, calling out, “Come see the ugly beast!” And when it began to fail, he hoisted it up on chains and cast it outside his boat to die, into that hungry place, until finally it sank into the open mouth where it remained, an apparition from another world, in the warm circle of water. No one ever claimed to have seen the whale; no one dared to venture that close.
Alongside it were many thousand skinned carcasses of fur-bearing animals discarded by trappers. Without their pelts, it was said, they looked like human children, perfectly preserved, their eyes still open, dark and shining in water, peering through it. Two Skidoos had come to rest inside that mouth, as well as a shipwreck, hunters, and lost men who had believed they knew the waters. One of the faults of men, Husk always said, was that they believed they were smarter than they were. Nothing ever surfaced from that place, but some people said that if you dared close enough, you could see it all floating in there, each thing just as it had been the day it broke through or fell, the antlers of deer like roots unmoored.
I studied this place as we went around it. It looked no different from the rest of the lake, which made it all the more dangerous. Near this place was a current that would carry a boat north into the system of lakes, islands, and portages, all the way to places where remnants of old settlements and villages were now in ruins, and beyond that to rivers winding their way north. Islands in that far north held vestiges of an older people now only remembered. There were places wild rice grew, bonelike trees, and other plants that grew like hands reaching toward sky, and the cleared places of cattle. A person could go from water to water, land to land in that broken country. To keep the Hungry Mouth content while we passed it, Husk took a bag of tobacco from his pocket and fed it to the water, then he added cornmeal and bread.
AND THEN Fur Island came toward us. It was a dark island a little over two miles across, with rocks and trees. Behind it, other pieces of land floated in the distance.
It seems to me now that as we neared the island, we went into another kind of time, one that floated down through history, and like the lake we traveled, was unsounded and bottomless in places. Bush would say there were those who believed oceans from one side of earth entered oceans of the other, and perhaps the lake was like that, maybe it had a sister lake on the other side of the world—because it was said that the whales of one hemisphere sang the same songs as those of other whales far around the circle of the planet. They spoke the same language. They knew what had happened to water, to their sisters. Husk said Einstein believed time would bend and circle back to itself, maybe in the way that planets orbit. And I think he was right because I remember clear as yesterday how it felt to go there, to Fur Island, that day. As if time were nothing at all.
Whatever it was, I was traveling backward in time toward myself at the same time I journeyed forward, like the new star astronomers found that traveled in two directions at once.
I opened my handbag and took out the gift Dora-Rouge had pressed into my hand, the frog of my snooping. It was so small, so intricate and perfect, a life stopped in its living, trapped inside the ancient pitch of a tree. It was warm to the touch, and beautiful and sad at the same time. I hid it deep in my bag. Already I believed in the power of water. I believed water might leap up, open my palm, and take Dora-Rouge’s gift from me. Or perhaps it was that I did not trust my own grip on things and I feared losing more of myself than had already closed behind me, like the water behind us that gave no hint of our passage. I put the amber in the only safe place I knew, inside my bag at the bottom of a closed-in darkness, and I thought, it’s shining in there, casting its light.
The island we traveled toward had a history. Over the noise of the boat, Husk told me about the frogs on Fur Island, how thick they were, how people had once heard them from miles away. He said at times they sounded like drums, and that they were conceived by rain. They slept through years of drought, buried in the ground, until the time was right for their emergence, and then, on that island, gleaming in mud, frogs would come out of the darkness, bronze-eyed, golden, and eating their own skins. On rainy nights they appeared and were plentiful. They were sacred beings. One year they would again rise from the mud of the island, he said, the place they called the Navel of the World.
The names, Husk said, were like layers of time.
IT WAS A SMALL ISLAND, one of immense beauty. It had been hostage to that beauty, to its own plentitude, because it was inviting to animals and men alike. Rich, fertile, hilly in places, it was once populated with marten, otter, and beaver, a large concentration of animals in so small a place. When the water wasn’t frozen, animals were stranded by their solitude on this island, where Europeans sought their skins and other wealth. This place of trade and barter was a meeting place, a crossing ground. But after all that, it became an isolated parcel of land; now Bush was the only one who was there and she lived there year-round, during both the mosquito season and the near-arctic cold of winter, two facts that by themselves said much about her stamina and persistence.
There was more to Fur Island, I would learn. In the summer of 1924, two wolf children were found there. They’d been left behind by their parents—no one knew what happened to them—and gone wild. The children were raised by a pack of wolves. From wolves they’d learned how to evade explorers and priests, even in so small a space, how to cross ice in winter, how to avoid the Hungry Mouth. When finally they were captured—it had been accomplished through the killing of the wolf pack—they had night-shining eyes, dark and astonished to see human beings, creatures vaguely familiar and shadowy, but remembered by the children in a bad light and as ruthless beings, never to be trusted. They didn’t survive, that boy and girl. Dora-Rouge told me this. After being found they fell into a state of despair. The captive lives that held
most humans could not hold them. They saw through the savagery of civilization. They grieved something fierce for their lost kin, the murdered wolves. Dora-Rouge remembered these two light-skinned, dark-eyed, tangle-haired children. Their wary eyes were the standard against which she measured all other wild things, including Hannah Wing, my mother, whose own fierceness and danger made the feral children seem tame by comparison.
It was on this island, too, where once a Briton declared himself king and strutted about like a foolish rooster until he was deposed by French trappers. And where a milkstone, flowing with healing mineral waters, was dynamited at the order of a bishop who wanted to spite the superstitious natives who said, and even worse, believed, that they’d been healed by those milky waters. One of his own priests had been cured of smallpox by these white, bubbling waters that came from stone, but even so, the bishop maintained that any healing in that place must have come from the devil, who lived under the land. Because of the killing of the waters, the Indians who journeyed there for healing let Christianity pass them by; they didn’t want a god that made them sick and took away the remedy.
Fur Island endured all of this, and somewhere, beneath it, the healing milk still flowed, frogs remained buried and waiting, and the wild children were still remembered by the trees.
STRAIGHT AHEAD OF US a yellow shaft of sunlight cut through a rolling mist. In it, I saw the smaller island beside Fur Island. It was a broken-off raft of land populated by spiders. In sunlight, the webs looked like a craziness, slow and silver, one which was taken apart and rewoven nightly as if to capture whatever came close. It was a peat island and it would have floated here and there, except that Bush kept it tethered to Fur Island by rope. The spiders, she said, kept the insect population down. They needed that in the north. Another reason she kept it tied was that this region, known as the Triangle, had long been in dispute between Canada, the United States, and tribal nations. Bush didn’t want the island of spiders to be part of the conflict between governments who had fought territorial battles over even smaller pieces of land. But most important, the two pieces of land had been one in the past, like Pangaea, a continent of puzzle pieces now separated by water. They were kindred spirits, one male and one female. Bush thought it would be too lonely for those pieces of land to drift far from one another.