Read Online Sweeter Than All the World by Rudy Wiebe - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
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you need to understand it’s already there, you just have to see it and then you’ll know how to make it. So, when you need caribou meat, you first have to see the snare, and you braid that, and then you see the right trail going past Winter Lake and down through the trees to Snare or Roundrock Lake, and the caribou will get tangled in that snare because you set it where you saw the caribou was already caught.”
For an instant something flickers in Adam, almost a whiff of comprehension, but it is gone.
“You mean … dream it?”
“No no, like a dream, but you’re not dreaming, no, you see it. And you can’t be scared because then you won’t see. If you’re scared, that always keeps you too small to see anything.”
Adam thinks, placing his knife for the next cut, Maybe it was this caribou leg I carried here this morning through the snow on the tundra, where John L shot it and removed the hide as if he were pulling a parka over his head and had it disassembled and bundled in twenty minutes, and then I was staggering off again, over two ridges and along an esker, under the gathering pain of a tumpline and not seeing even one trail found long ago by the caribou for easy travel on this relentless, endless land. I’m blinder than a whole Dogrib tundra of bats.
Napoleon seems to be staring into the flames. Five curved halves of caribou rib-racks surround the leaping fire, lean towards it speared on sticks; looking like oval lyres some bloody-minded giant might play with greasy fingers.
If everything can be seen as having already happened, then there is nothing, further, to be scared of. Napoleon said that, twice.
The old man lifts himself off the ground. “Let’s look at the animals,” he says, and walks towards the slight tundra rise between them and the lake. Adam follows him. And he’s right, there the caribou are against the knobby hills again, where they already were when the plane first landed; but much closer now because the storm forced them to move their campsite.
Napoleon lifts his hand, and stops. The hunters from their camp are black dots far away to the right. Arctic landscape with motionless animals and running sky. Adam walks forward. He keeps on walking towards the caribou.
Walks until one by one and then all together they begin to run. They spread flat like a stream flowing over the tundra before him, the mass of them breaking out into tremendous speed and they are so close he sees how they lay their heads back to run, nostrils high in the wind, and he can hear their hooves thunder and click, running right and vanishing behind a long hill away from the hunters and emerging at last far in the flat distance, still running but turned back again to the left, until they slant up among the erratics of a ridge and their small, huge-antlered bodies walk away south there, high against the wild, cloud-driven sky.
When Adam finally turns, Napoleon has not moved. The old man looks at him silently, without expression, not even his eyes asking Adam what he is asking himself: Why did I do that, walk towards them till they ran? Why am I such a fool?
Beside the fire the dark ribs still roast on their stakes. Kathy bends, gathers up a handful of meat strips they have cut. She begins to hang them over the line they have tied between the tent and a dwarf spruce farther in the hollow. Adam listens to the snow melt, the air peaceful as a blanket.
Kathy asks, “You got a picture of your sweetie?”
“Oh yeah,” Adam says. The muscle he sliced looks amazingly like human muscle; he would look like this if he were dead and someone were cutting him into strips to dry, exactly like this, nothing whatsoever special about his muscle; there’d just be a lot less of it to keep someone alive.
“Can I see it?” Kathy grins at him over her shoulder; skin and long profile like any classical Egyptian. “Her picture?”
“Sure.” Adam fumbles against the bump of his wallet, and suddenly he is wiping his hands on
For an instant something flickers in Adam, almost a whiff of comprehension, but it is gone.
“You mean … dream it?”
“No no, like a dream, but you’re not dreaming, no, you see it. And you can’t be scared because then you won’t see. If you’re scared, that always keeps you too small to see anything.”
Adam thinks, placing his knife for the next cut, Maybe it was this caribou leg I carried here this morning through the snow on the tundra, where John L shot it and removed the hide as if he were pulling a parka over his head and had it disassembled and bundled in twenty minutes, and then I was staggering off again, over two ridges and along an esker, under the gathering pain of a tumpline and not seeing even one trail found long ago by the caribou for easy travel on this relentless, endless land. I’m blinder than a whole Dogrib tundra of bats.
Napoleon seems to be staring into the flames. Five curved halves of caribou rib-racks surround the leaping fire, lean towards it speared on sticks; looking like oval lyres some bloody-minded giant might play with greasy fingers.
If everything can be seen as having already happened, then there is nothing, further, to be scared of. Napoleon said that, twice.
The old man lifts himself off the ground. “Let’s look at the animals,” he says, and walks towards the slight tundra rise between them and the lake. Adam follows him. And he’s right, there the caribou are against the knobby hills again, where they already were when the plane first landed; but much closer now because the storm forced them to move their campsite.
Napoleon lifts his hand, and stops. The hunters from their camp are black dots far away to the right. Arctic landscape with motionless animals and running sky. Adam walks forward. He keeps on walking towards the caribou.
Walks until one by one and then all together they begin to run. They spread flat like a stream flowing over the tundra before him, the mass of them breaking out into tremendous speed and they are so close he sees how they lay their heads back to run, nostrils high in the wind, and he can hear their hooves thunder and click, running right and vanishing behind a long hill away from the hunters and emerging at last far in the flat distance, still running but turned back again to the left, until they slant up among the erratics of a ridge and their small, huge-antlered bodies walk away south there, high against the wild, cloud-driven sky.
When Adam finally turns, Napoleon has not moved. The old man looks at him silently, without expression, not even his eyes asking Adam what he is asking himself: Why did I do that, walk towards them till they ran? Why am I such a fool?
Beside the fire the dark ribs still roast on their stakes. Kathy bends, gathers up a handful of meat strips they have cut. She begins to hang them over the line they have tied between the tent and a dwarf spruce farther in the hollow. Adam listens to the snow melt, the air peaceful as a blanket.
Kathy asks, “You got a picture of your sweetie?”
“Oh yeah,” Adam says. The muscle he sliced looks amazingly like human muscle; he would look like this if he were dead and someone were cutting him into strips to dry, exactly like this, nothing whatsoever special about his muscle; there’d just be a lot less of it to keep someone alive.
“Can I see it?” Kathy grins at him over her shoulder; skin and long profile like any classical Egyptian. “Her picture?”
“Sure.” Adam fumbles against the bump of his wallet, and suddenly he is wiping his hands on
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