Once, it was said, a man and a woman floated up from the depths of water in a boat made of human skin. They appeared on a path of light, came over the horizon. It was an old, old story. They wanted to devour humans. The woman gave birth to twins that were war and starvation. They had a white wolf with them.
Wolverine, they say, was the one who saved them. He sprang the human woman from the trap and he made two skin bags of the murderous infants called hunger and war, and filled them with berries and meat and offered this to the humans.
IT WASN’T LONG after meeting the young couple, after wishing for lipstick, that I felt once again strange and wild, as if we hadn’t crossed paths with other people at all, as if we were the only ones who moved through this world. Agnes returned to talking the bear language, Dora-Rouge to saying “Go around this bend,” and Bush once again retreated into her own world, inexhaustible and animal. Out of the four of us, I was the most stable. I had my two feet, if not on the ground, close to it.
FROM THERE we traveled northeast. Ahead of us, just as the young man had said, was the peat fire burning in the bog. Bush shaded her eyes from the sun and looked at the gray smoke and waves of heat that rose. It had burned for over a year, the gases from underneath fueling the flame.
From somewhere behind the smoke and heat came the hypnotic sound of frogs, rhythmic as a heartbeat from the swampiness of beginnings. Ravens flew up, calling out as if they were the voice of smoke. The fire itself seemed to be alive, a red-and-black animal that grew, sparked out of the richness and rot of underground, out of ancient plants and insects that had fallen there. Moths flew toward it.
The smell of smoke burned our nostrils and eyes. We tried to make a wide circle around it, passing through a shallow swamp with tall dark reeds and a breeze that made a shushing sound as it bent grasses. I stepped out of the canoe into the mud and pulled Dora-Rouge along through liquid earth. As I dragged her, Dora-Rouge looked me in the eye and asked point-blank, “Do you think Agnes is sick?”
“Watch out for the branches,” I said. I waded through the silty water. The mud pulled at my boots.
A branch nearly hit her. She ducked. “Do you?”
The same thought had crossed my mind more than a few times. I cast a glance toward Agnes. She looked pale. “I think she’s just tired.”
I didn’t notice when Agnes had first begun to look sick, but now, she looked drained of energy. Her ankles were swollen. In one place on her leg the skin was cracked and fluid seeped from it as if she were waterlogged. But she hadn’t complained at all.
Bush, too, had been watching Agnes, and when we came to dry land, she said, “Let’s stay here for a day and rest.” She’d already pulled her boat to land, not caring if there was any argument from the rest of us. We weren’t far now, Bush was certain, from North House, a point that indicated we were returning to humans; we were not far from our destination. “We’re already way past due, another day wouldn’t mean much.”
I went to gather wood for the fire. Luckily, there’d been a hot, clear sun. Wood was plentiful there and ready to burn. Agnes followed me. “I’ll help you,” she said. She breathed heavily.
“That’s okay, Grandmother. I can do it.”
But Agnes still followed. I walked slowly so she could keep up, and when we walked into a stand of trees, she said to me, “Listen.” She fumbled for the right words. “Listen, if something happens to me, I want you to let me lie out for the wolves and birds; would you?”
I studied her face, but said nothing.
Agnes didn’t look back at me. “That’s what I want.”
“Okay.” I broke off a dead branch, bent down, suddenly awkward, and picked up several pieces of wood. I handed two of them to Agnes, then picked up some more and laid them across my own arms, smelling the sharp, resin-sweet odor of trees, and we went back to the camp.
“What did she say back there?” Dora-Rouge asked, when Agnes was out of hearing distance.
I put down the wood.
“I saw her talking to you.” Dora-Rouge looked concerned.
I struck a match. “Nothing,” I said. I changed the subject. “I think I’ll wash some clothes. Do you want a clean dress?” We would be meeting people at North House. I wanted a clean shirt.
But I paid close attention to Agnes after that and avoided Dora-Rouge’s sharp questioning eyes.
That night, Dora-Rouge hardly slept at all. Strengthened by mother love, she sat by the fire beside a sleeping Agnes. She leaned toward her daughter and covered her with beaver skins. Agnes didn’t wake when the older woman touched her.
Inside my sleep that same night, a rust-colored root grew in a circle around itself, forming new bulbs and connected tubers, splitting and multiplying. A first green shoot moved toward light. I saw it clear as daylight.
“Redroot. I believe that must be redroot,” Dora-Rouge said the next morning, when I described it. “I can’t be sure. But if you dreamed it, it’s what we need.” She squinted at Agnes. “Wolfsbane, too.”
LATER, as I knelt above the pan of warm water, I thought of the ancestors who showed Dora-Rouge the directions for travel. My life, before Adam’s Rib, had been limited in ways I hadn’t even known. I’d never have thought there might be people who found their ways by dreaming. What was real in those land-broken waters, real even to me, were things others might call the superstitions of primitive people. How could it be, I wondered, that all people who came from their own earth, who lived there for tens of thousands of years, could talk with spirits, could hear land speak, and animals? Northern hunters were brilliant hunters. Even now they dream the location of their prey and find it. Could they all have been wrong? I didn’t think so.
The old world dawning new in me was something like the way a human eye righted what was upside down, turned over an image and saw true.
IT WAS only a short time later that we once again came across the pale woman and man. Agnes looked at them with foreboding. “They’re following me,” she said.
They weren’t happy to see us, either, nor had they expected it. They were sheepish and embarrassed about leaving in the middle of the night.
“Are you guys lost?” the man asked Bush, but he already knew the answer; he’d been in these parts before. He knew he was the lost one. Even so, he looked at Bush in hope that she would say yes. She reached inside the pack for a piece of map. This time, she knew for certain where she was. The presence of smoke from the peat fire was still a gray cloud in the far south sky. If they had gotten turned around with the thickness of smoke to show them the way, it didn’t look good for their survival skills the next winter.
The couple pulled their canoe alongside Bush’s. I paddled over to them, too. On a fragment of map, Bush pointed out where they were.
The water was deep green there, with algae and plants. As Bush went over the map with them, holding two pieces of it together, Tyler looked into the water, panting, ready to leap on quick-striding water bugs. I didn’t talk to him; he would have overturned their canoe.
“We must have gone in a circle.” Without hesitating, he said, “Thanks,” turned the canoe around, and started away.
“Wait,” Dora-Rouge called after him. “Do you have a pencil?”
He reached into his shirt pocket. His pen was hooked to a credit card. Bush tried not to smile.
“Thank you.” Dora-Rouge took the pen and handed it to me. “Do you have any paper?” she asked him.
He looked at his companion. She was thin-lipped. She shook her head no. She was anxious to leave, and probably happy we didn’t ask why they’d pulled up stakes in the middle of the night, but I could see that she was simply too exhausted to dig around for paper. By then, Bush had handed me another paper bag.
Dora-Rouge said, “Just a minute.” She held up one scrawny finger to the man. “Go ahead. Draw the plant,” she told me.
While I sketched it, the man paddled away from us, eased back, only to pull away again, as if he thought he could vanish when we were off guar
d. When I was done, I said, “This is it,” and handed the brown paper to Dora-Rouge.
“Have you seen this plant growing anywhere?” Dora-Rouge held out the drawing to him. “It used to be up here.” The light of the water reflected on her skin.
“Tyler, be still!”
The man studied the drawing. “Yes,” he said, and in this, at least, he seemed knowledgeable. “Yes, I’m sure of it. It wasn’t this year, but for the past two years I saw it growing. It was on the far side of North House last year. Close to the Flower Islands. Here, give me the pen.” He made a map for us. It showed a place with numerous tiny islands scattered through the water.
“I know where those are,” said Dora-Rouge.
Two large twin pieces of land he diagrammed, writing beneath them “Flower Islands.” Then, quickly, as if to make up for lost time, the couple said good-bye and paddled south. We watched them depart. The pale dog with blue eyes looked back at us. The blond hair of the woman looked white in sunlight.
“Agnes needs this plant,” said Dora-Rouge to Bush. “We’ll have to go up there.”
I could see that the little string of islands was far away, would take us out of our way, but not, I hoped, by far.
As we neared the Se Nay River, our plans to bypass it had to be given up because some of the waters leading to it were now only mud and our canoes could not pass through it. We’d have to risk the river even if it was all rapids. The river itself was now the force of two rivers, the Big Arm River having been diverted into the Se Nay. This added distance to our journey.
As we neared the Se Nay River, the land began to change. It was rocky and darker. We felt the breeze from the river. First, it was soft, but that was only its deceptive voice, whispering. As we neared the river, it strengthened into a cold, stiff wind, and even that was a lying breath. In truth, the river was a deafening roar and was virtually impassable. As we reached it, I saw how it rushed down, overfull, and was held in check, in some places, only by rock walls and steep cliffs. The water of two rivers, forced into one, was deeper and wider than it should have been, hitting the walls far up the sides and spreading out wherever it could in other places, taking down trees.
“This can’t be the Se Nay,” Bush said. She shook her head. In places, the muddy brown bank was washed away. She looked pale. I was panicked.
Bush worried about the details, trying to understand how this river had been affected, how much the land and waters might be changed. It was a puzzle. If they’d diverted the Big Arm River, as the man said, it would mean that certain waters ahead of us might be closed, others flooded. Bush tried to see the large picture, but it seemed impossible. She checked the pieces of maps that were, by now, committed to her memory, as if there were something she might have missed. She tried to figure out the lay of the land, to predict what we’d find. We’d already seen some of the flooding, mudflats where other rivers had failed to empty into their destinations.
The Se Nay yelled out in a voice so loud, nothing could be heard above it. “It’s angry,” said Dora-Rouge. I leaned toward her to hear. “The rivers are angry. Both of them.” That was why it was a strong roar, she said, so loud it sounded like earth breaking open and raging.
“Come with me, Angel,” said Bush, already walking toward the Se Nay. The wind whipped up off the water. It swept Bush’s hair from her shoulders. Her sweater blew tight against her as she tried to walk along the edge of the water, hoping we could find a way to travel some of it on foot. I hoped, too, that around a bend or over a rock, we would find a calmer river. But the stone walls that held the fierce river were high, much of the ground impossible to pass on foot, let alone carrying a boat and a frail old woman. Everything was slippery with moss and spray. We turned and walked back.
“We can’t do it,” said Bush. “It’s like this all the way down.” She looked worried. “We can’t travel it.” She shook her head. Her words were nearly drowned out by the noise.
Dora-Rouge nodded at Bush, her own white hair blown back from her face. “Yes,” the nod meant. Reading Bush’s face. Yes, we could do it. We would travel it. The old woman knew this. We would have to risk the water. The only other thing was to turn back. Who could say what might have happened to the world behind us? It could be a closed place by now, what with the building of dams, the waters dry in places we had canoed through. Not only that, but if we turned, we’d have to go against currents.
Standing against the wind, Bush and I looked at each other. Should we turn back? we both wondered. We could overrule Dora-Rouge. Our faces were hopeless, our eyes contained a question. But neither of us knew the answer to this. There was no longer a thing such as “should.” Everything had changed. We’d gone too far to turn back. Not too far in distance alone, but too far inside ourselves. No longer were we the women who left Adam’s Rib. And as for me, the girl I had once been could never have paddled through rain as if it were not falling and camped in wet mosses. Those women would never have sung ancient songs at night so assuredly, or spoken to spirits that walked through forests and gave us their permission to enter. That girl would never have known how spirits hung above the water like fog, would never have heard stories in the land we passed over, or given herself up to a trail that went any map’s wrong way.
Now our arms were strong and we were articulate in the languages of land, water, animal, even in the harder languages of one another. I’d entered waters and swamps, been changed by them. I’d dreamed medicines, some that could be found in this world no longer, like the one for arthritis, and I remembered the plentiful days of ongoing creation.
It was for all these things that Dora-Rouge was going to talk to the churning river, the white and muddy foam of it, the hydrogen and oxygen of it, and convince it to let us pass safely. All this she did while we watched.
It would have been a lie if any of us had said we weren’t afraid, and it would have been a lie, too, if we’d said we believed completely in Dora-Rouge as she sat on the bank of the river and spoke. We could only see her lips move. We heard nothing she said. But after a while she nodded at us. “It will let us go,” she said loudly, and that was the final word. Before we placed the canoes into the fierce, charging dark water, Dora-Rouge said a prayer, opened her hand, and tossed tobacco into it. Her eyes were closed, a high-pitched song coming from deep inside her. I could barely hear her for the sound of water. I only saw her sing as her voice was taken away from her by the windy river. But I could see she was loud and strong. When the tobacco disappeared into the water, I was without faith, but I did what Dora-Rouge said.
My canoe went into the water first, and from the moment it was there the current tried to swallow it. My arms shook as I held it, the spray hitting at my face as I watched Bush lift Dora-Rouge and, knee-deep in water, carry the old woman toward the rocking canoe. I was soaked to the skin already and shivering and the strong current pushed against my legs even where it was shallow. It took all my strength to stand there. I held the canoe while Bush lowered Dora-Rouge inside it. The cold spray of water blowing against us was muddy and violent. And then Bush held the other canoe while Agnes climbed inside. Agnes was pale with terror, her legs wide apart in the water. She eyed the churning of water about the rocks. Even where it was deep, it looked rocky. And she was the one who was fearless in rivers. Unsteadily, she sat down, holding her shirt tight at the neck, as if it would keep the cold water from seeping to her skin, but she, like the rest of us, was already wet and her hair had come down around her face and neck.
And then Bush knelt inside the canoe like she was praying. I watched as she tried to paddle, but suddenly, Bush’s canoe was gone and before I knew it, we were behind her, dropping down. I screamed out, though no one could hear me. Even Dora-Rouge looked afraid, and she was the one who’d been certain we would make it through, the one who’d worked out a deal, whatever it was, with water. Her eyes squeezed shut. She dropped down deeper into the canoe. There was the sound of a rock hitting against the underside. My heart beat with fear. I’
m dead, I thought. If we didn’t make it, we’d surely drown. We hit eddies and whirling currents that tried to turn us sideways. All the time, the cold water pelted us, wetting our hair, chilling our skin. I tried to paddle, and my arms hurt, but it was no use. For a moment I’d catch a current just right and then the canoe would shift, would seem to enter air, turn, then drop. The water carried debris in it. I was afraid of being hit by one of the long trees with still-green leaves. There was no hope of stopping or slowing. These two rivers had probably never liked each other in the first place, I thought. We were held in the hands of fighting water. We were at its mercy. Then I remembered John Husk telling me to catch the current and ride it like an animal, and finally, I gave up, giving in to gravity and to the motion of it, allowing my hips to move with it, not against it. Like riding a horse, he’d said.
I tried to watch the willows and branches that grabbed at us. For brief seconds the water would be slack, then treacherous again as we sped past hills and groves of trees, moving through shadows and blinding flashes of sunlight, all of it so fast we couldn’t see how birds flew up along the river edges, could only see everything else that was falling with us down the cold, muddy waters. In places, it narrowed and snaked off in new directions. But we passed through, passing places where the riverbanks had collapsed and the torn roots of trees reached out of a loamy smell, as if to keep us from going north where winter lived. We passed burned woods, traveled through darkness and mud and silt, and finally we were taken to the end of the rapids, and something godly brought us through. Maybe it was the words of Dora-Rouge, after all, that saved us, words both Bush and I would later wish we’d heard and remembered. Or maybe it was blind luck, pure and simple. But whatever it was, the four of us, drenched and breathing hard, climbed out of the water and lay down cold and exhausted on firm ground. Even Dora-Rouge worked up the strength to pull herself along by her hands. After a while, Dora-Rouge, wet, her muscles strained, said, “Those women are crazy,” and began to laugh. She had tricked something, all right. She was sure of it, even if she wouldn’t tell us what it was. Maybe it wasn’t water she’d bartered with, after all, but she’d struck up one hell of a deal with something, Bush said. What she’d traded in exchange, she wouldn’t say, but this much was clear: something godly was bringing us through.