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Authors: Rudy Wiebe
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toes; grizzlies have five. Napoleon would say: This is our brother, our sister wolf who long ago when the world was new showed us how to hunt the running caribou, taught us how to live as good a life as the Creator has already given us, live it until we die. The relentless hospital wards slide over Adam’s thoughts, row on row on corridor of Hippocratic devastation so simple if they could all simply die when their bodies said so, and he simply carry a tumpline ofmeat, drag his convoluted life over the moss-and-stony tundra—sweet shit.
He should go back. Gnaw a roasted rib, listen to hunter talk and grunt, stare into a three-stone fire. Shut the shit down.
As the autumn night deepens they lie side by side on or in their sleeping bags inside the perimeter of the tent; it is so compact that unless they curl a little their feet touch down the centre line. Napoleon sits beside the barrel heater and tells stories. Some in English, a few in Dogrib that he has been given to tell only in that language, but which John L has permission to translate. Stories about the People, who have always lived here, who know certain things a little, who have no word for wilderness because everywhere this land is home. No plane or skin canoe or radio or bone needle changes land and People. A journey here to Lastfire Lake for fall caribou once required three or four weeks, paddling and carrying around rapids and between rivers from Rae-Edzo, their dogs running along the banks with them in summer clouds of mosquitoes, fifty-seven portages on tumplines, even the little children carrying. And on the way they would pass the immense dam built by the Giant Beavers where the Lawgiver Yamoria fought them, and also the place where the Dogrib and Yellowknife Dene a hundred and fifty years ago pledged peace to each other forever and danced, the circle they pounded into the earth dancing still rounded deep between the stones. Napoleon’s lips barely move, a mystery of incomprehensible language and John L’s quiet voice speaking his words into the further mystery of English as the spruce snaps in the heater. They are drifting into sleep while the mantle lamp hisses down.
And then Adam is jerked awake, the warm stovepipescrashing down over them. Storm outside, slamming the tent with boxer combinations
boom! boom! boomboom!
Someone opens the tent flap, in the grey dawn snow is streaking past and John L shouts above the din for everyone to sit up, back onto the floor edges of the tent, the anchor ropes may not hold. Then he tries to burrow out, low, and the wind catches the flap and gets a muscle inside and bulges the tent out of itself with a roar, it will heave them all into the lake; they can hear whitecaps smashing against the shore below. They sit bunched up and as heavy as they can imagine themselves, the canvas pounding continuous ice and thunder back and forth over them, and there is nothing to do but sit, and nothing particular to think about; they are inside and dry and together, nothing to do but smile at each other sometimes a little. Wait.
Napoleon tells Adam, “My grandfather Pierre had power with animals. Mostly with caribou, but he always said to me, power is seeing. There’s a way to find anything you need, what you have to do is first see it.”
They have re-erected their tent in a hollow studded with brush at the end of the lake. Kathy is showing Adam how to cut meat properly into strips for drying. She laughed aloud when he asked her if he could try; the cutting board is short and for every uneven strip he manages she cuts three. Swiftness matters here, not studied laboratory investigation, though the running muscles of a caribou haunch are stunning in their complexity. They sit shoulder to shoulder on the ground over the cutting board worn thin by long hunts, while the old man lies on his elbow feeding tiny sticks into the fire.
“Everything you need to have,” Napoleon continues, “mygrandfather always said when I was a little kid,
He should go back. Gnaw a roasted rib, listen to hunter talk and grunt, stare into a three-stone fire. Shut the shit down.
As the autumn night deepens they lie side by side on or in their sleeping bags inside the perimeter of the tent; it is so compact that unless they curl a little their feet touch down the centre line. Napoleon sits beside the barrel heater and tells stories. Some in English, a few in Dogrib that he has been given to tell only in that language, but which John L has permission to translate. Stories about the People, who have always lived here, who know certain things a little, who have no word for wilderness because everywhere this land is home. No plane or skin canoe or radio or bone needle changes land and People. A journey here to Lastfire Lake for fall caribou once required three or four weeks, paddling and carrying around rapids and between rivers from Rae-Edzo, their dogs running along the banks with them in summer clouds of mosquitoes, fifty-seven portages on tumplines, even the little children carrying. And on the way they would pass the immense dam built by the Giant Beavers where the Lawgiver Yamoria fought them, and also the place where the Dogrib and Yellowknife Dene a hundred and fifty years ago pledged peace to each other forever and danced, the circle they pounded into the earth dancing still rounded deep between the stones. Napoleon’s lips barely move, a mystery of incomprehensible language and John L’s quiet voice speaking his words into the further mystery of English as the spruce snaps in the heater. They are drifting into sleep while the mantle lamp hisses down.
And then Adam is jerked awake, the warm stovepipescrashing down over them. Storm outside, slamming the tent with boxer combinations
boom! boom! boomboom!
Someone opens the tent flap, in the grey dawn snow is streaking past and John L shouts above the din for everyone to sit up, back onto the floor edges of the tent, the anchor ropes may not hold. Then he tries to burrow out, low, and the wind catches the flap and gets a muscle inside and bulges the tent out of itself with a roar, it will heave them all into the lake; they can hear whitecaps smashing against the shore below. They sit bunched up and as heavy as they can imagine themselves, the canvas pounding continuous ice and thunder back and forth over them, and there is nothing to do but sit, and nothing particular to think about; they are inside and dry and together, nothing to do but smile at each other sometimes a little. Wait.
Napoleon tells Adam, “My grandfather Pierre had power with animals. Mostly with caribou, but he always said to me, power is seeing. There’s a way to find anything you need, what you have to do is first see it.”
They have re-erected their tent in a hollow studded with brush at the end of the lake. Kathy is showing Adam how to cut meat properly into strips for drying. She laughed aloud when he asked her if he could try; the cutting board is short and for every uneven strip he manages she cuts three. Swiftness matters here, not studied laboratory investigation, though the running muscles of a caribou haunch are stunning in their complexity. They sit shoulder to shoulder on the ground over the cutting board worn thin by long hunts, while the old man lies on his elbow feeding tiny sticks into the fire.
“Everything you need to have,” Napoleon continues, “mygrandfather always said when I was a little kid,
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