WHEN I OPENED my eyes Agnes smiled simply and said, “Did you remember to pack the rice?”
I nodded.
She must have watched us sleep for a while before she woke us, looking at our bare arms casual in the square light from the kitchen, our hands half-open in that sleeping kind of faith bodies have that they are safe, a trust lost in daylight.
For a moment Agnes busied herself folding blankets, then she turned away and went to the kitchen so that we could get up without embarrassment.
Through the window the first morning light was a line of red.
Beside the cot, Tommy’s boots sat in an angle of yellow kitchen light. They looked comforting in a domestic kind of way.
The bacon smelled good and it was already cooked. Bush sat at the table. She studied the maps in a last, almost desperate, effort to understand the territory.
“You can never be sure,” Dora-Rouge teased. “But we’re already lost.”
There were last-minute details. Agnes put an extra shine on the stove, arranged the wilting carnations, and dusted a shelf that she usually overlooked. For Tommy, Husk cracked three extra eggs on the side of the black iron skillet. They sizzled in the grease.
No one said a word about Tommy’s presence. It was a natural thing. I was the only one nervous about it, not that we’d done anything but sleep. And how unlike me that was. I thought how different my own people were from the ones I’d lived with in Oklahoma. Here, sleeping with a man wasn’t an offense. True sin had nothing to do with love; it consisted of crimes against nature and life. But it might have been that they all wanted me to love Tommy so I would never leave. Whichever it was, I liked it.
IT WAS A MORNING full of fire smoke. As we loaded our supplies into the rusting truck, I hung back a little. Whenever I looked at Bush, we shared a gaze of common concern. We were caretakers on this trip. Most of the work was up to us, and neither of us knew for sure how we’d get Dora-Rouge across all that space. God only knew how many portages. Dora-Rouge, of course, insisted there would be few. There would be roadblocks, we were sure, as the police tried to keep all but the local Indians out of the Two-Town area. That’s what the Fat-Eaters’ territory was called on maps. And for all we knew, the waterways might also be closed off by the time we reached the Fat-Eaters. Then we’d have to turn back. Or worse yet, they might shoot at us.
Dora-Rouge said, looking at me, as if reading my mind, “We’ll find a way.” She was composed and seemed larger than usual, with calm eyes.
Agnes rummaged through the packs at the last minute. She stretched tall to reach one that had already been loaded into the truck bed. Awkwardly she unzipped pockets, searching inside, still anxious that she’d forgotten something. She looked weary. When the truck was finally all packed, she returned to the house to look things over one last time. Leaving, she could not bear to close the door behind her. She left it open.
Bush boosted her up into the truck. Then, after Bush was in, Tommy put Dora-Rouge on Bush’s lap. Dora-Rouge glared at Husk, still mad at him from the night before. “This better be easy on my kidneys.”
“I’ll drive slow,” he said.
Bush said didn’t the air smell good.
After Tommy and I climbed into the rusted truck bed, we were off. I turned and looked back at the house one last time. The torn screen had been sewn a few days ago by Agnes, a last jagged touch, with blue thread. The red chair sat beside the door. The door itself watched like an open eye, waiting to see us return to simple fires and sleepings. Inside were the closed cupboards and cleaned-out drawers, the for-once empty kettles.
We rattled down the road as morning rolled across the lake, its first sunlight a red fire on the windows of buildings we passed.
A FEW CARLOADS OF PEOPLE waited to see Dora-Rouge off. I was surprised to see them. Frenchie stood and wiped at her eyes with a perfumed handkerchief embroidered in yellow silk, Justin at her side. The two young men had slept by the lake all night, and now, with dried grass in their hair, they looked surprised that the party-goers were present.
From behind the sound of tackle boxes I heard water lapping at the land and the clanking of fishermen loading up their boats for the day. Tommy and I unloaded the gear and carried it, bit by bit, to the rocking boat. It was going to be a tight fit. A loon spoke a solitary word. Suddenly everything was ready, and then it was a tearful good-bye as John Husk started the motor and The Raven began to cut its way across the lake. Agnes hollered something at Bush. Bush leaned forward to hear her, but Agnes’ words were whipped away by cold wind as soon as they left her mouth.
“Did you get the mosquito net?” Agnes asked. I nodded.
OUR FIRST PORTAGE, the first real step of our journey, was long, steep, and rocky. The men helped us over this first stretch of land. Tommy slipped the food pack onto my back. It was an enormous weight, more than I had imagined. I thought this didn’t bode well. Day one and I was already overloaded. It wasn’t just food, but pots and pans as well, even a stove. He patted it as if that would make it lighter. “How’s that?”
“Okay,” I lied. I started up the rocky path. My ankles felt as if they would break under the weight, and it was difficult to breathe. I stumbled. Once, Bush came up behind me, loaded like a pack burro, and I complained to her. “This is killing my ankles.” But then I looked at her and wanted to laugh. She carried a pack of clothes, tents, and a tarp, all on her back, with paddles and seat cushions in her hands.
“The boots,” she said. “You need them.” She put down her bag and rummaged through it until she found them and sat them on the trail. “Put these on.” She leaned backward, bent to an almost sitting position, and struggled into her pack again.
With Bush’s help, still nearly falling, I worked myself out from under my own pack and sat it on the ground. I took off my shoes and pulled the army-colored rubber boots onto my feet. They didn’t feel much better, but at least they had laced-up ankle support.
Bush picked up the seat cushions and paddles.
“Wait a minute,” I said. I couldn’t lift my pack onto my own back.
She put down the paddles and cushions to help me.
Then I loaded up, trying to stand beneath the weight. I handed her the paddles.
“We need a choreographer,” Bush said. But I didn’t smile. Not even a hint of a smile. Already I was exhausted and we’d have to lug the heavy furs, too, next portage, without Husk and Tommy. Not to mention carrying Dora-Rouge. Discouraged already on our first day, I followed Bush up the hilly portage and half-slid down the other side. It was treacherous, with loose stones and muddy, slippery places, a hint of what was to come.
I wasn’t the only one with doubts. Once, on that first day’s trip, we realized Agnes had not kept up with us. Bush backtracked and found her sitting on a stone, breathing heavily. Her hair was damp with sweat. When I saw her I felt a sinking sensation. I didn’t hold out much hope for this trip. I was sorry Bush had ever told Dora-Rouge about this idea. We wouldn’t reach our destination for two weeks, longer if the men at Frenchie’s party were correct.
For day one, I had a bad attitude. I fell into step beside Bush, wondering aloud why we couldn’t find a way to break through all the highways, rails, and airways that were closed to protesters, and why Dora-Rouge couldn’t wait a little longer to die. I’d thought all along that if we remained, Dora-Rouge might live longer, that it was a way of keeping her. “I don’t want her to die, anyway. Besides, why can’t we just drive there? Why does everything always have to be so hard with you?” I said this, though I knew why we couldn’t just drive. It wasn’t just that we would never have reached our destination, but that there were herbs to gather, places Dora-Rouge wanted, needed, to visit.
Just then Tommy came up behind us and I tried to look like all the work was a breeze. He carried Dora-Rouge as if she were a bag of feathers. She was bright with excitement. It was the land of the voyageurs and she said she could almost hear the French songs coming out of the ground. “Can’t you hear them
?” she asked. She said the older, Indian songs were just behind them. Tommy carried her past us, his boots noisy on the gravel. She looked back at us and gave the sign for okay, joining her thumb and index finger together as if she were doing all the work herself and it was nothing. But even Dora-Rouge didn’t cheer me. Nor was the green beauty of the land any consolation.
Even so, underneath it all, something beckoned, more than my mother, more than healing plants or dams. For Bush, water was the summoning thing. For me, it was something I had yet to understand, but it compelled me.
By the time we reached the place where land ended and new water began, John Husk was walking beside Agnes, carrying some of the furs. I could see he refrained from voicing his concerns. Tommy, with his muscular legs, had passed three effortless times to my one, the last time carrying the new camouflage canoe with his head inside it, as if it weighed nothing. Paul Bunyan, I thought, smiling at him.
Then, too soon, we were at the water, ready to strike off on our own. “You might need this,” Husk said, offering Bush the handle of a pistol. “The ammo is in the waterproof case.” He pointed it out. The red case sat on top of the food pack.
Bush took the gun without a word. Her hopes, like mine, were sinking, and everything added to the weight we had to carry—the gun, even the heavy hopes—and then suddenly it was solemn, it was the time I’d dreaded. We were leaving. Husk looked tired. He kissed Agnes. A long kiss, caressing her back. He held Dora-Rouge in his arms a long while. He called her “my mother,” and he stumbled when he turned away with tears in his eyes.
Dora-Rouge looked at Husk and Tommy and at all the things and places she’d never see again. This world was a beautiful place, filled with life. Even the air was a soup of love and pollen and stars; that’s what she’d always said, and then she settled down into the canoe as if sue had always lived there.
As we paddled away, both Dora-Rouge and I looked back every few yards and waved to the two men standing at the water. Each time we looked, John and Tommy grew smaller and farther away. Then, one time, I turned back and they were no longer there. Where they had stood a moment before was just emptiness. I waved anyway, feeling a sinking in my stomach and chest. Above us, the ravens called out.
Agnes and Bush were in the larger canoe, both paddling, although it was only a halfhearted attempt on Agnes’ part. Dora-Rouge, the furs, and I were in the other.
Soon Bush pulled up alongside our camouflage canoe. “The waters are swollen. That’s to our advantage.” She softened when she looked at Dora-Rouge, who was curved into the canoe, seeming at peace, with the furs about her. “How are you doing, Dora?”
“Never better,” she said, the light reflecting on her glasses. “Just look.” All around us was the green of opened spring, the new leaves reflected by water, the gleam of sky beneath the canoes.
WE PADDLED long and hard that day. Sometimes I fell into the rhythm of it. Then, it seemed effortless. But the rest of the time, I hid behind my sunglasses and windblown red hair, and cried. And when we portaged, even with the new boots, I cried when I walked, from the weight, from the ache in my ankles, from my belief that this trip was a pipe dream. I cried when I lifted Dora-Rouge, and when I sat still. On top of all that, I, who had never admitted to being lonely, had a terrible first touch of loneliness seeing John and Tommy vanish, and it all was made even worse knowing Dora-Rouge would soon be gone from my life forever. If anyone noticed I cried, she kept silent about it.
The shadows lengthened into late afternoon and we were settled into a rhythm when it dawned on Agnes what she had forgotten. She sat bolt upright. “Oh no! My coat!” Her hand flew to her throat. “I forgot my coat!”
Bush and I stared at her.
Agnes’ eyes filled with tears.
“It isn’t too far yet,” Dora-Rouge said. “We should go back for it.”
We stopped paddling, the two canoes side by side. With the late sun reflecting off its surface, the water rocked us, the trees behind us, all around us. I knew if we turned around, we would have to cross the long portage again by ourselves, and we would have to say another good-bye to John and Tommy. As it was, I could think of nothing but sleep.
For a long time Agnes considered this. “No,” she said. “It would take at least another day to get back to Adam’s Rib on the lake. Look how long it took them to tow us.” She seemed unconvinced, though. I think she hoped we’d ignore her words and insist on returning, but she said, “I’ll just have to do without it.”
Dora-Rouge meant it when she said again, “We should go back.”
And Agnes meant it when she said, “No,” and waved us on.
EARLY EVENING we stopped to set up camp. I was exhausted beyond anything I had ever known. With a clattering of poles the tents went up, and Bush and I unrolled the sleeping bags. It was only around six o’clock, and there was a beautiful, rosy light to the sky, but I fell immediately into a deep sleep, leaving Bush and Agnes to cook, clean up, and put the food pack on a rope high up between trees, far away from bears. I didn’t even smell the chicken of that first night’s feast. I slept on a rock that would have been unbearably miserable at any other time in my life.
The next morning I woke with aching muscles and blisters on my feet that had gone unnoticed the day before. I ate the leftover fried chicken hungrily while Dora-Rouge stared at the sky with its soft clouds.
Once under way on that second day, we made good time, and in the warm sunlight of late morning, the pain in my arms dropped away.
The current was with us most of the day, and so was the wind.
All around us were the wide shining spaces of my dreams. Sometimes it seemed as if we were the first people who’d passed here. Near one island, we paddled through strands of spider silk, the paths and creations of other lives reaching out from themselves, drifting sheer behind us, and stuck to our clothing and boats as if we were carrying away the threads of what we were leaving, or unraveling some fabric of the past.
There were only two portages the second day. Both were short and both were on Bush’s map. Along one of them were unfolding ferns, horsetail, and deep, cool shade, a beloved darkness of the earth. Turtles out in the lake had pulled themselves up on rocks and logs, and the sunlight glistened on their shells. Beneath sky, the water was blue.
At midday we stopped at the first island to rest and eat lunch. “The vichyssoise is highly overrated,” Dora-Rouge said, drinking powdered, reconstituted soup.
At this place, Bush cast out a line and caught three shining fish. Northern pike. Not wanting to build a fire just yet, she wrapped them in plastic and placed them in water to keep cool. We ate them that night, laying them on evergreen boughs to let the grease drip off, according to Dora-Rouge’s recipe and direction.
DORA-ROUGE, the woman going home, was going backward in her memory as well, in that way a single life travels a closed circle. As she floated in water, she thought about the time when the Indian agents came to take her away to school.
She was twelve, she said, lithe as a snake.
I was a tomboy. Always scrambling up the trees. I caught the most bottom fish of all, you know, and I was just a girl. My nickname was Walleye. “Hey, Walleye,” the boys would say. I was just tiny.
The agents from the school caught me, but I managed to escape from their big, pale hands, the way a fish would; I slipped out.
They scared me to death. Their eyes were so blue, I thought they were evil spirits. They were tall, too, more than any men I’d ever seen. I escaped. I ran. I felt the thickets grabbing at my skirt.
Once, when I looked back, I fell over a rock. I knew my leg was broken, I heard it break. But as bad as it hurt, that’s how bad my fear was, too. I crawled home, crying. I cried all the way. The skin of my palms and elbows was all broken open by the time I got back.
Ek, my mother, set the leg and she made a splint of willow bark.
The next year, when they came again to round up children for school, I was slower. They caught me. I held to my l
ittle sister tight and wouldn’t let go. The men hit us to get us apart. It was so sad. When they carried me away my little sister held out her arms, her nose bleeding, her eyes streaming tears. “Ena,” she said, “Ena, don’t leave me. Somebody please help us, please!”
I can hear her and see her. She wore a brown dress, a dress that had been mine. She held her arms out to me. It still breaks my heart to remember. It was just a few years later when little sister, taken to another school, walked into the snow, lay down on it, and froze to death. I wouldn’t have even known except some boys came by the school and told me. I went home. Thirty-two miles, too, and it was winter. I wore seal boots I’d stolen from a teacher. Some stolen sunglasses, too. Because of snow blindness. Oh, it was a terrible walk. That long night I slept in a cave of ice. I knew about winter spirits that prey on the souls of young girls, but I was too tired to fear them. I heard when you freeze to death, you get sleepy first. You see things. I saw my mother stirring a kettle. She looked so beautiful. We were always happy. We had such love. I shook my head to keep awake. But I saw my father walk right out of winter with frozen meat the way he always did, a lynx on his back. Like he just stepped out of a blizzard. He looked like he was made of snow. I dreamed of my brother. He used to swing me up in his arms. “Ena,” he would say, “I hope you grow up ugly, so no man will want you. Then you have to stay here with us. We get to keep you.”
By the time I got home, my fingers were frostbitten. But it was a small pain next to that memory of having seen my sister cry and call out my name, begging the righteous men to let me go.
DORA-ROUGE LOOKED at her hands as if she was seeing them young, new in all this history. They were full of memory—the soft touch of her sister; the father who’d taught her to drive a team of dogs along their trapline, their faces nearly covered with cloth and fur to keep them warm. Through her I could see into the past. I saw the deep past, even before the time of Dora-Rouge.