That winter was no different. Joppa Ryan, Tommy’s cousin at Old Fish Hook, was killed in a freak accident when the jack he was using to change a flat tire slipped on the ice and hit him. Then Frenchie’s visiting daughter, Helene, a woman I’d never met, walked off drunk one night across the lake and disappeared. Her footprints in a new layer of snow led to the Hungry Mouth, but no one was courageous enough to go retrieve her body. None of us wanted to risk being swallowed by the lake. It made me sad to think of her, but the healing outpouring of tears comes slowly in winter, if at all. Like everything else, like water stopped in the rivers, tears wait for spring. Grief is forced to a halt. Frenchie, held in this grip of winter, did not cry. She went pale and quiet beneath the rouge. By then, I’d forgiven her for asking about my face.
Several times, Dora-Rouge said she should have been the one who died. She grew even more insistent about going home to die.
But if tears and human lives were stopped, the wolves were not. Their cries of raw nerve made up for the lack of human mourning. “Look,” Bush said one day.
I went to the window where she stood and looked out.
“They do this every winter. They know the skins of their ancestors are stored in there.”
A few of the wolves, not quite a whole pack, circled the shed that contained the furs and traps. They looked at the wood as if they could see or smell the trapping gear through the walls. It made them restless, their breathing visible as they paced. If we understood their language, their cries might tell us all that had happened on the island.
There were many voices of winter, not just the wolves and crows. There was the wind against out sheltering walls, the wind that sang across swirling snow. Never silent, the ice of the lake pushed against itself and cried out. It broke and healed, groaned and gave off green light. From a spot at the window I would think of all the things lost in Lake Grand—jewelry, wedding rings thrown in by hurt and estranged people, boats, fishermen from the storms, and now Helene.
Even silence was loud on Fur Island. There were soundless walkings. The quiet flying of owls. The absent voices of flown-south birds.
Sometimes, as we sewed, and the trees creaked or the gales of wind howled around us, Bush took a straight pin from beneath her teeth and in a quiet voice she spoke of my mother. Firelight moved across her face. “You see how powerless we are against the wind.” As if to confirm something while cold crept under the door, Bush took a piece of cloth, got up, and filled the gap beneath it. She didn’t have to tell me more to say, “Hannah was like that.” By then I knew what she meant. Indifferent elements, and cold. She meant that a person can’t blame the wind for how it blows and Hannah was like that. She wanted me to know that what possessed my mother was a force as real as wind, as strong as ice, as common as winter.
Occasionally we had the noise of a visitor. Now and then, Husk drove his enormous truck over the ice with groceries and heating oil and cans of gas for the generator and always with wood, our utmost necessity. He brought Archway cookies for me. At these times, after he stamped the snow from his feet, there would be talking and laughing. And Tommy came over, sometimes at the urging of Agnes. She worried about me. It wasnt good for me, she said, to be isolated on the island, not with Bush and her long, brooding silences. Tommy always brought deer or moose meat and we smiled stupidly at each other as we sat at the table or walked through the snow on our hand-crafted snowshoes. Sometimes I went back with him to the mainland.
But for the most part, Bush and I were quiet for hours—sometimes it seemed like days—at a stretch. It was a full and caring silence, and in it we were all that existed, the dark gray stones of the house moving through howling, boundless space, the planet traveling around a weakened sun, the windblown ice glaring up at sun’s diminished power. In those days even the wolves seemed remote and far away. Darkness came early and nights were long. At times I put my sewing down, stationed myself at one of the windows, and stared out at the stark white land where rabbits were burrowed beneath heavy trees.
The tracks of animals wrote stories I couldn’t yet decipher, being new to this place. There were places on snow where a set of tracks vanished in mid-path, next to a snow-embossed fan of wings, a rabbit or mouse lifted up in the claws of a hungry god.
Soon I barely remembered the vines that crept inside the windows, or that this world was capable of heat and growing corn, green moss.
THROUGH THE WINDOW one January afternoon, like something glimpsed from the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a dark shape being shadowed by smaller ones. I squinted into the glare. It was a solitary cow moose, thin-legged, with winter fur. She was dark and great, stranded on slick ice, unable to move without falling, while the wolves walked toward her with their heads down, their muzzles frozen. They spoke to one another from inside themselves and slowly they circled her.
She was defenseless on ice. She would fall. She was old and alone. She had no calf, no mate, no protection. The wolves had selected wisely.
I heard the stranded moose cry out. I turned away and put my hands over my ears.
It was an ancient ritual of hunger, but the laws of winter were a justice foreign to my nature. At times I could not bear this world. At times I was sorry I’d gone there. Bush said winter was like a wound healing because of the way everything closes in, grows over itself. But winter was too large for me.
That night I swallowed the potion Dora-Rouge had prescribed for my sleeplessness. In the dark, chilled room, I undressed and slid into bed, covering my face with blankets, feeling the safety and warmth of my own breath. But I could not block out the helpless vision of the moose.
Bush, too, looked out the window some days. By now the wind was blowing snow under the door and knocking at the window. It sounded like someone wanting to come inside. As she stood there I smelled and sensed that there were things Bush did not say. What wasn’t spoken was as cold as what was said. Ice heart. That was Hannah.
But I had my secrets, too. For a long time I kept to myself a missing part of my own story. In the early part of my search for kin, I’d found a sister in South Dakota, my blood sister, Henriet, younger than me. I never told anyone how I’d stolen the money to find someone to track her down, had walked into a neighboring house one night and taken the money off a nightstand while the people slept. It wasn’t really like stealing, I thought. It was dire necessity. Fifty dollars was what I paid a man to find her, and I had slept with him, too. No one could ever prove who’d stolen the money, though everyone suspected me. I’d had such hope when first I found my sister. It was like finding my true name. That’s how it felt. I hitched rides across the plains to get there. Finally, I found my way with a truck driver, delivering cattle to a feedlot in a silver truck that smelled of the animals, was weighted with them.
Henriet wasn’t related to Agnes. She had a different father, so I told myself it was all right to keep her secret. But the truth was, I didn’t speak about her because her existence both horrified me and filled me with despair. She was lovely and quiet, but she was a girl who cut herself, cut her own skin, every chance she had. Her eyes were innocent and trusting, but her skin was full of scars. She cut herself with scissors and razor blades, as if she could not feel pain. Perhaps it was more than just wounds. Perhaps it was a language. She spoke through blades, translated her life through knives. I took a bracelet to her, but when I saw its sharp edges I pretended I’d gone empty-handed and gave her instead some of the cash I’d stolen. She never spoke. We just looked at each other. We sat and smoked one cigarette after another. Only she put hers out by pinching the end with her fingers. She could not be hurt. That’s what she wanted to show. Not by anything outside her, that is, not anymore.
AT NIGHT, as the wind blew against the Black House, I lay in bed and thought of Hannah. Some cold nights I felt myself close, come together in the way ice grew across water, at the edges first, then suddenly, all at once, in the same way Bush said winter fills in the world, like a scar. At first the ice could be broken
easily, then only with an ax, then it could not be broken at all. It locked in whatever was there—boat, fisherman, floating wood, all stopped in place. A cold firmament, beautiful and frightening, solid and alive. I could hear it, the tribe of water speaking.
Winter was such a place of shifting boundaries that I remembered, heard, and felt things that had not been there before. I began to understand Dora-Rouge’s memory, especially on nights when I heard the sound of drumming inside the lake. It came from the frozen water. I believed what the old people said, that fish were a kind of people, like the wolves, and that they wanted to live as much as we did, those of us who had been born to a destiny of death and survived, passing through like small fish through a hole in a net.
During the long dark nights, I remembered or dreamed of the animals taken, marten, beaver, wolverine. I saw their skinless corpses. I heard their cries and felt their pain. I saw their shadows cross snow, ice, and cloud. We Indian people had always lived from them and in some way we were kin, even now. Behind my eyelids were the high loads of furs on freighter canoes going down a river, and thin, tall men in dark clothing walked toward me. There were women who looked like me and carried pictures of Mary and Jesus. They wore mirrors as if they were gold, on their belts, around their necks, pinned to dresses. The light caught on them and threw a glare on me, my face in every one. The people wore rags by then. There was nothing to warm them. Then the mixed-bloods turned against the others the way dogs will turn against their own ancestors, the wolves, in order to eat, to live. Loretta was sold into sickness and prostitution, and those things followed Hannah into dark, dark places.
IN THE SHORT HOURS of day light we were busy. Now Bush and I made skirts. Our time was spent gathering cloth. The table was covered with patterns made of newspapers, folded fabric, and ribbons on spools.
Time vanished when we were frozen inside. As we pieced together cloth, it snowed. Wind opened the door of the shed and banged it closed again. Together we went outside and as the wind inhaled there was a moment of silence in which we heard the sound of the northern lights. “Listen,” Bush said, and I heard the shimmering of ice crystals, charged by solar storms.
One below-zero night, as streams of light moved through the sky, and the solar winds were strong enough to blow snow, I dreamed that the wolves of the island, torn out of their deaths, were stirring about and holding counsel and looking for their human children. Another night I dreamed a plant. I drew the plant on paper and the next time I went across ice and cold to the mainland, I took the drawing to Dora-Rouge. “Oh, I know that one,” she said, when she saw it. “That one grows up above us.” She looked at me thoughtfully, as if it weren’t at all unusual that I had dreamed such a plant.
Those dreams of mine, if that’s what they were, lived inside the land. Maybe dreams are earth’s visions, I thought, earth’s expressions that pass through us. Although sometimes, to make myself seem larger than I was, I liked to think I had visions.
“There were always plant dreamers,” Dora-Rouge said, picking a thread off my sweater.
In bed at night there were times I could see in the dark. My fingers grew longer, more sensitive. My eyes saw new and other things. My ears heard everything that moved beyond the walls. I could see with my skin, touch with my eyes.
ON THE MAINLAND when I visited, while Agnes pared potatoes, Husk told me and Tommy the news—that in a magazine he’d read he learned how we are made from stars. He said maybe visions, dreams, or memories existed because time, as Einstein thought, was not a straight line. He said it explained why I saw things, like the ancestors glittering with mirrors and carrying iron kettles. I lived in more than one time, in more than one way, all at once. “That explains Dora-Rouge, too,” he said. “How she talks with Luther.”
Yes, I thought. I understood. I saw yesterday and sometimes it looked the same as tomorrow. That’s why Bush was dreaming her way north in the short hours of daylight, dreaming the way a bird studies the stars and waits for spring, for a certain moment, agreed upon, when all the birds would fly away. That’s why the words of the two men from the north had created a need in her, I think now, a feeling that she should go there, up to the far land of the Fat-Eaters. It was that time in our history when the past became the present. There was the death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, the old Lakota man who was tortured and killed in a VFW lodge in Nebraska by God-fearing, God-loving men and their wives. There was the formation of the American Indian Movement. Red women and men all coming to new life. But Bush’s determination rested on other things as well. She was a woman of heart, of land. She and the world were all of a piece. She would not permit any more worlds to be gone or taken. The dams would not be built. It was simple, her feeling. “The river cannot be moved,” she said out loud one day, as she looked at maps of the north.
Because roadblocks would again be put up in the spring, she decided to travel there by canoe. Since my mother was thought to be up there at a town called Ohete, or New Hardy, I would go along.
FOR HOURS, when she wasn’t sewing or reconstructing a badger for LaRue, Bush bent over maps. Then she squinted out the window as if she, too, had once been snow-blinded, or could see in the darkness around us the labyrinth of waterways that went all the way north. She called her plan “our secret.” She spoke about which ways the currents ran and wondered aloud where side currents were likely to be. She sat close to the heat of the fire and plotted first one route, then checked it against another, working us through a maze, gauging distance, time, and space with the precision of a mathematician. This was no simple operation we were undertaking, I could see.
Sometimes I called her Marco Polo as she kept a list, writing down what we would need to take with us that next spring when thaw came rushing over the land. We would need an ax, she said, a little saw, and cooking pans that fit one into another. We would carry a small amount of dry wood in the canoes and take Sterno to cook on, in case it rained, and in case the wood along our way was also wet. We would have to find our way around obstacles, maybe the floating logjams of foresters, possibly dangerous rapids. According to “our secret,” we would leave early in the year, because that was when the fish would still be hungry and food plentiful. But it also meant we would encounter swarms of mosquitoes and blackflies. If we waited until later, she said, who could predict if the dam would already be built or not?
It seemed to me that the weight of our journey increased tenfold each day. From inside the house made of dark gray ballast, I felt us sinking, the way a weighted boat drops down water, falling to the bottom, resting there like the Skidoos and bodies and skinned animals in the Hungry Mouth of Water.
It was my fear all along that we would be lost and that there would be no way to get our bearings. And from everything Bush said, from all the maps with their different topographies, I knew we were going, however much she planned, into strange waters, a geography that was whimsical at times, frightening at others.
Obsessed with the faded squares of paper that represented land, she tried to unravel all earth’s secrets. I saw that she searched for something not yet charted. Besides, like a compass in this northern place of underground iron, the maps were not reliable.
Outside our windows, the icicles looked like teeth, as if we lived in the open mouth of winter. There were white passages of animals, and the drifting, changing boundaries of winter.
ONE DAY Bush looked up at me where I stood before the blue-gray light of the window. “Look at this,” she said. She sat at the green table, a map in front of her, a cup of tea beside it. “These are almost all connecting.”
It was true. The waters were linked together like a string of beads connected by a single thread. The rivers and streams all looked wide enough, according to her, to be passable by canoe. It was a replica of an ancient map. Bush turned the blue map over and examined it for a date. There was none. “This had to be made sometime between 1660 and 1720.”
I stared at her. “How can you tell?”
“Because those y
ears there were no northern lights. There are stories about it. It tells how the people were deserted by the lights from the sky. At the same time the lights abandoned the people, the tribes came down with the breathing illness, the spotted disease, and were invaded by French fur traders.”
I looked at her. I didn’t understand the connection. Maybe it was the spell of winter that had come over her, I thought.
“Don’t you see? There would have been more thaw without the protection of the solar dust. See the difference in the amount of water?”
She opened another map to show me the discrepancy. I studied it as if I understood, but the only thing I knew for certain was that Bush could put together things far and beyond shirt patterns and the bones of animals and the stories of lost children. With my own eyes I saw that none of the maps were the same; they were only as accurate as the minds of their makers and those had been men possessed with the spoils of this land, men who believed California was an island. Bush said those years also showed up in the rings of trees.
I was intrigued by the fact that history could be told by looking at paper. I’d wondered before what it was about the maps that occupied Bush’s time, and now I, too, became interested. I could see it myself. Just as I saw sleds with frozen animals. A deeper map. At times I would pore over them beside her, the lantern lighting the table in front of us. They were incredible topographies, the territories and tricks and lies of history. But of course they were not true, they were not the people or animal lives or the clay of land, the water, the carnage. They didn’t tell those parts of the story. What I liked was that land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps. Land had its own will. The cartographers thought if they mapped it, everything would remain the same, but it didn’t, and I respected it for that. Change was the one thing not accounted for. On the other hand, it gave me no confidence in the safety of our journey that we were venturing into such a vast unknown terrain that might mislead us, a terrain that had destroyed other human missions and desires. It was a defiant land. It had been loved, and even admired, by the government’s surveyors, for its mischief and trickiness and for the way it made it difficult for them to claim title. Its wildness, its stubborn passion to remain outside their sense of order made them want it even more.