This was just the beginning of what we were to encounter. With more than one dam being built, much land was now submerged. An entire river to the north had been flooded and drowned. Other places, once filled with water, were dry. Farther on, there were larger vistas and missing islands. Dora-Rouge said the mouths of rivers had stopped spilling their stories to the bays and seas beyond them. New waters had come to drown the old. Other rivers had dwindled to mudflats. Dora-Rouge cried to see it, and it was after that when Agnes complained of a headache and developed a fever. Bush boiled willow bark to make tea for her, but Agnes was not cured by it. Nor was she helped by Husk’s letter and her coat. Dora-Rouge looked at her and said, “If only we had some wolfsbane or redroot, I think it would help. We should be at the Islands of Flowers soon.”
EARLY THE NEXT DAY I saw what looked like snow. It was a long while before I realized that what I saw were petals floating on water. We had reached the flower islands, two large parcels of rich land. It was said about these islands that the wind had carried flower seeds inside a tornado above water and dropped them down upon the dark earth. So many blossoms had piled up on the land that I could see their color even from a distance, and as we drew near I saw another bog fire burning behind the islands, so that the sky appeared deep gray. As we approached the land, petals blew into our canoes from the trees. Small, delicate flowers fell on us. What a tender place, one where spring seemed again, newly present. I removed a petal from Dora-Rouge’s hair.
“We’re very close to Ahani, the old land,” Dora-Rouge said to me. She looked in the direction of the north. “Maybe only another two days. But Agnes is very sick and we must get her the herbs. Her blood’s not right. I can see it with my eyes.”
I nodded. I’d noticed myself how bad Agnes looked. Agnes was exceedingly cold, even with her coat and the beaver skins placed around her. She remained chilled and exhausted in a way that was alarming. She was chalky-skinned and clammy.
Dora-Rouge tried to calculate the distance where the redroot grew. It was decided at first that the rest of us would wait on this island of flowers while Bush went for the plants. I would remain at the campsite caring for the two older women. This was the logical thing. Next to Dora-Rouge, Bush was the best navigator, and she was strong. But then, Dora-Rouge reconsidered the plan “Angel, you are the one who dreamed the plant. I think you should go. Maybe the plant will call to you. Maybe it would be easier for you to find.”
Bush argued against my going. “It’s too far for her to go alone.”
This was true. I had only followed along on this journey. I hadn’t once guessed where we were. I preferred it that way. But like a woman, I said, “It’s okay. I’ll go for the plants.” Besides, since surviving the Se Nay, I thought I could live through anything, that something or someone was on my side. I felt almost immortal.
BUSH PACKED FOOD in a small bag for me to take along, and before I knew it, I was leaving the place of flowers on my own, paddling, according to the cannibal’s map, toward the medicines. I was to dig redroot at night. That was the best time to collect it. Then I would go to another place where Luther had told Dora-Rouge the wolfsbane grew. As I left, I glanced at Agnes and thought how small she looked.
Alone, the canoe was easier to navigate. The smoke that rose behind the flowered islands would be a helpful guide. The piece of map Bush insisted I take with me was in my pocket alongside the man’s drawing, both wrapped in plastic in case it rained or I capsized. The islands the man had mapped out were over a half-day away and to the west. I’d be traveling against currents some of the time.
I fell into the rhythm of the paddle, the water. The boat moved as if with its own life now that I was alone. I glided through a reedy passageway, a channel shown on the man’s map. I tried not to think how, in such channels, it would be easy to get lost. It turned out to be an entrance to a lake with calm waters. There was a new face to the land and the water looked like glass. I became deeply silent, taken in by it, as I pulled the boat through what looked like blue sky. A wonderful silence set into my solitary journey. Even though I needed to move quickly and was worried about Agnes, I felt peaceful. A loon called now and then. A hawk floated above me, whistling. Even with the mission at hand, I felt newly created in a fresh, clear world, as if seeing for the very first time.
When I reached the first island I combed the ground, every bit of it. I was certain it was the right place because the man had mentioned cast-off whiskey bottles. I searched for the redroot with all my soul, but it was not there. Nor, as it turned out, was the map accurate. I wondered now why we had believed the lost man Agnes had feared.
By then the sun had curved around the sky to the other side of heaven. The day had deepened into a rare gray-blue. Soon, clouds formed and moved with frightening speed across the circle of sky, carrying the possibility of a storm. I wondered if I should make a camp, but I worried about Agnes and had a feeling that told me to go farther, around the little circle of islands.
And so I followed this instinct, as Dora-Rouge would have done, and at the next landing there were more green and amber bottles, a large pile, and it was there that I found the red-rooted tubers. According to Dora-Rouge’s directions, I was to dig them at night. I waited until what I thought was deepest night, the ideal time for picking roots. When it felt right, I carefully moved earth aside and dug out some of the roots, thanking them. I put the plants in the bag, then went on into the strange green light of short nights, my paddle at times soundless. I loved the water and traveling alone. I sat back and closed my eyes a moment, drifting, and when I jerked awake, I realized some time must have passed. How long, I couldn’t say. It was as if someone had put a spell on me, to make me sleep. There was rainwater in the canoe and I was cold and damp. I was unsure of where the water had taken me. How could I have slept through a rain, I wondered, angry at myself.
The next plants, the wolfsbane flowers, had to be cut in early morning and so I traveled on quickly, through the yellow light of what I hoped was dawn. The new yellow cast of the sky made all the plants look as if light shone out of them, and they made odd shadows, clear and sharp.
With more ease I found the wolfsbane. I cut the blooms and put them in paper in order to dry, then turned to hurry back, still confused about day and night, wondering how long I’d been gone.
AS I RETURNED to the island bright with flowers, I saw something floating and blue, far out on the shining water. It was a few moments before the small raft of blue flowers, all in a mound, took shape in my eyes. Even though they were far away, I thought I saw butterflies, and I thought, too, that I could smell the blooms, a sweet, intoxicating perfume.
Bush had been watching for my return. As soon as she saw me, she came to help pull the canoe to ground. I sat down to get my wet socks off. “What’s that out there?” I asked, pointing toward the flowers on the lake. I pulled off a shoe.
She said nothing. I looked at her more closely. She had swollen eyes as if she’d been crying. Dora-Rouge, too, sitting on the ground, was silent. “What’s going on?” I wanted to know. I felt a panic in my chest.
All of us looked at the blossom-laden canoe afloat in clear water.
“It’s Agnes,” Bush finally said.
“Agnes?” And then I noticed that the blue-gray coat was across Dora-Rouge’s lap. I looked at the canoe of flowers and understood immediately that Agnes was dead. She was what floated. But still I stared at Bush in disbelief. “What? That can’t be,” I said. “I have the plants.” I opened the small bags, desperate and in a hurry. Shaking. Some of the roots fell to the ground. “Here they are. Here.”
Bush put her hand on my arm.
I pulled away. “But they’re right here!” I bent over and picked up the plants I’d dropped. I held them in my open palm as if offering them. As if begging for time to reverse.
“It was supposed to be me.” Dora-Rouge started to cry. She held a dirty hanky to her eyes.
BUSH, out of habit, unloaded the canoe. Seeing that I
hadn’t touched the bag of food, she heated soup and gave it to me in a cup. I drank it quickly. I was thirsty and drank long and deep from the water jar, too, and then fell asleep on the ground, my eyes still crying. At some time while I slept, Bush covered me with Agnes’ coat. Once I woke up crying because I saw Agnes and the bear walking together in the yellow sky. I thought the flowered boat floating in water couldn’t have been real and that I was only dreaming, and I heard Agnes singing along Poison Road, the way she did, coming back from water. The bear walked beside her, blue and nearly beautiful as it had been when Agnes was a girl.
I had been gone nearly three days, Bush told me later, though it was hard to tell with the days lengthening and the cloudy storm that passed over.
Above the canoe were butterflies, large and white. I begged God to let Agnes rise. I willed it, certain God would feel my pain, strong as it was, and would listen, would let Agnes step out of the boat, floating like the moths and butterflies just above the water, and come toward us.
“We’ll have someone come for her,” Bush said quietly. “We’re not far now.” She folded some clothing and packed it inside a bag.
It seemed wrong that there was nothing to do. There were no officials to report to, no one to tell of the death. All we had was the small body of Agnes, whose last desires were, as she had told me, to be eaten by birds and wolves.
“I’ll remain,” Dora-Rouge insisted. “I want to stay with Agnes.”
“No, Grandmother. We can’t leave you.” Bush lifted her.
“No! Leave me here,” Dora-Rouge insisted. “I’m staying.” She began to wail about having to go away from the flower-laden boat that held her daughter. “Agnes. Ahi!” Speaking the old language.
“I’m so sorry, Grandmother.” I wept.
Dora-Rouge struggled against Bush as she picked her up.
“God damn it!” Dora-Rouge hit at her with her frail fists, crying. “I can’t even walk away from you. I can’t even escape. I have to stay!” she said, but we lowered her into the boat, cradled on top of the coat and the beaver furs. She covered her eyes with her small crooked hands, held them over her face.
The smoke shifted to the south, and as we left, all three of us in one canoe, I looked back at the flowers adrift on the lake.
AFTER THAT, it seemed to me we merely drifted, that there was only an appearance that everything moved, only an illusion that we traveled, that light and shadows shifted about us.
We talked only about things that needed doing. “Hand me the pot,” Bush would say. Or, “Is there enough firewood?”
Death had tricked us. Dora-Rouge’s life would be unbearable after Agnes’ death. And she blamed herself. It was only later that I learned how she believed Agnes’ death was part of the deal she’d made with water.
A chilly drizzle fell. For part of one day we didn’t travel in it, but finally, since the tent was damp, our clothing soaked, and the rain showed no sign of letting up, we decided we might as well move on. Soon it became a cold, downpouring rain.
I wondered, later, if they’d told me that Agnes had died not long after I left just to protect my heart. I’d taken too long to return. Maybe they’d changed time around to spare my feelings. I could never know, but the flowers looked fresh. They might have put her out on the water that very day. Or perhaps it was the odor of decay that had made them cover her with sweetness and cast her adrift. Whatever it was, the vision of the boat of blue flowers, floating between blue sky and water, would live in my eyes forever.
FINALLY, we came to the last island, the last portage. On the trail were plentiful moose tracks. “This is a good sign,” said Bush. We followed the tracks. But when we came to the crest of the portage, we were shocked to see that there was no lake. Where water had once been was now only a vast region of mudflats. For much distance, all we could see was mire, some of it still wet enough to reflect light as it stretched about us.
Suddenly Bush cried out, “A moose!”
I looked, but could see nothing.
Bush pointed. “Right there. Look.”
The moose, with its antlers, looked at first like a branched tree. It was sinking into the mire. It wasn’t far from us and it was desperate, trying to escape. We were close enough to see both fear and fire in its eyes. Trapped in earth hunger, the great maws and teeth of land that swallow all things, it bent its forelegs and tried to pull itself out.
Bush could not bear it. She rummaged through the pack, looking for rope, her hands shaking, but soon she realized it was a poor, weak gesture on her part. The rope was tethered to the canoe with flowers. The rope would have seemed a tiny thing, anyway. The moose was large, gravity even larger.
We thought of every way to save it—branches, logs—but we could find nothing that worked and the moose shook its head, hunched its muscles in an attempt to climb from the liquid earth, and then rested, becoming a great and deep stillness, trying once more to keep its head out of the mud. “Swim!” I said beneath my breath, my eyes closed, “swim!”—but it was with the same futility of my prayer for Agnes to come out of the flowers and walk toward me. The moose cried out with a woman-sounding cry and, finally, it was embraced and held by a hungry earth with no compassion for it. Bush held my hand; I buried my face against her, arms tight around her, and wept. For the moose and for Agnes.
When I last saw the moose, its eyes were focused inside its life, in the last spark of being. I would remember this, its head back as if to breathe one last, precious, sustaining breath of air. Then, when I opened my eyes, it was gone. “I hate God,” I said, wishing the mysteries of creation, the fire of stars were a nature separate from that of death.
“It isn’t God that did this,” said Dora-Rouge.
THE MUDFLATS were vast. They were what had been lake before the diversion of a great east-flowing river to the west of them. The ground stank of decay and rotting fish and vegetation. We could not get across the mud; we had no choice but to turn back and go in another exhausting direction. Knowing we were near had kept us going, but now we felt hopeless. Now, too, there was nothing left to eat but a few oats and rice, and we were uncertain how much longer it would take to reach Two-Town, our destination. The world had changed as we traveled, and in such a short time. For all we knew, the next corner we rounded would be just as unpassable as this, just as ruined.
THIRTEEN
A LARGE SKY OPENED ABOVE us, bright and wide. After all travails of our journey, our landing should have been a momentous event. We’d crossed time and space to be there, had lost Agnes and our other moorings, had seen the order of the world reversed. Now we were nothing more than survivors no one knew or cared about, in a place that smelled of rain that wasn’t there, a place where light and mud, the first elements of creation, seemed to be turned against themselves. For what had we done this? For two women to die? For me to find a mother who had only injured me in the past? For Bush’s ideas about justice, and her rage over how governments treated their earthbound people? Now the absence of Agnes was a felt thing and we’d endured hardship to be in that place where mud and silt wanted nothing more than a misplaced foot so it could swallow us the way it had swallowed the moose. We’d been beguiled.
I gathered Dora-Rouge up in my arms and carried her to a soft place in the grass which Bush had covered with the furs. As I carried her, I smelled the tender odor of old skin and felt her hair against my shoulder. It was whiter than before, her skin sun-darkened and lined more deeply.
• • •
THE TWO-TOWN POST, only ten minutes from where we landed, was the meeting place for the towns on either side of it. In it was the only telephone for public use, the makeshift infirmary where a visiting doctor examined the sick once a week, and where the schoolteacher was flown in to teach the few remaining young people to read and tally numbers. Mail was delivered and picked up there, news exchanged. It was where boys, home from boarding schools for Christmas, flirted with girls, and where men winked at women in winter scarves, and where old women condemn
ed them all for such behavior, even though they remembered their own youths. Under ordinary circumstances it would have been filled with people who gathered there to shoot the breeze. But these were not ordinary times. The townspeople were all gathered elsewhere to talk about the continued building of dams. And despite the abundance of dry goods and packaged foods, the store felt empty and unpleasant. Maybe it was what had happened there, long ago, when early owners starved a band of people and locked them outside in the cold of a miserable and hungry winter.
The dark building sat beside a few thin-looking conifer trees. It was nothing like the store at Adam’s Rib, or even the dank, wet interior of North House. The town store, Two-Town Post, had thick, bulletproof walls. At the Two-Town post, a person could purchase live bait, cloth, shotguns and gun oil, traps, and Campbell’s soup. There was a sturdy scale for weighing hardware, and in a glass counter were knives of all sorts, those for skinning, bone-cutting, and Swiss Army knives with corkscrews and bottle openers. But now the building was partly empty. It smelled musty and of tobacco, all kinds and shapes of it—snuff, Bull Durham, cigarettes. Flat, brown bottles of whiskey, the kind that fit in a man’s back pocket, stood undusted on shelves. Red cases of ammunition looked as if they’d been there for years. But this was deceiving because both ammunition and whiskey had a high turnover in this territory.
Just then, from behind the store, we heard the noise of a chain saw. We followed its ripping sound, past the chained, barking dogs that, like all the tethered dogs in the north, tested the limits of their chains. The owner-through-inheritance, Mr. Orensen, was outside between two sawhorses, a jumble of cut wood beside him, and sawdust in the air like an autumn tempest.
He caught sight of us out of the corner of his eye. Slowly, he straightened up. He was tall and angular, with enormous hands, larger than I’d ever seen before, larger even than Tommy’s. He wiped sawdust off his glasses with a handkerchief. In no hurry, he brushed the shoulders of his red shirt, then walked toward Bush and me. The chain saw idled behind him. He didn’t expect this interruption to take long. “What can I help you with?” He walked with us to the door, brushing the yellow dust off his sleeve.