I planned to make only one trip, but their food store was so large and ours so thin that I decided to return and take more. It was easier than I imagined to pass through their quarters and into their kitchen. I went in, first through the window, afraid, catching my foot on a nail. I took away what I could inside my clothing on that first trip; chipped beef, eggs, potatoes, canned fish, coffee.
I took the tins and packages to the trees behind the post and camouflaged them as best I could in the shadows of night. Then I went back to the Quonset hut for a backpack and returned once more to their kitchen. But on my second trip, as I moved about in the shadows of their kitchen, someone came inside the door. I froze, hiding behind a stack of flour bags. The light of a flashlight moved about the room, and before I ducked I saw a young man looking for a snack, perhaps, or stealing extra rations for a girl he might have in String Town. No one had been able to get food into the area, and many girls flirted with the men for food. I could hardly breathe for fear. My breath sounded loud as the ocean, but soon he turned off the light and I heard him walk away. After my eyes adjusted once again to the shadows of the room, I filled the backpack, and then, as Wolverine would have done, I poured out the flour, ripping the bags open with a knife. I poured their bottled water on top of it so it couldn’t be scooped up and salvaged, angry all the while that they’d ruined our water and brought in their own. Then I opened the bags of sugar and poured them out, as well, and when I left, with my pockets and the backpack full, I made a trail of white footsteps, the path of a ghost.
I’d learned this kind of thinking from Arlie. But my teachers were different. While his lessons came from Indian leaders, like Geronimo and Popé, mine came from stories. They came from the animals. From Wolverine.
The only thing Wolverine would have done that I didn’t was to pee on all the food he left behind.
TULIK AND AUNTIE seemed like different people once they were moved into one of the Quonset huts on Church Mound. Tulik began to close up in a way. Auntie became more angry. Against the advice of Bush and Tulik, she joined up with the young men who believed most strongly in violence. Not Arlie’s disciples, but the younger ones, the ones who were suspicious of Arlie’s group, believing even the emphasis on peace to be suspect, believing they might be traitors.
One day Auntie yelled out to a soldier she suspected of starting the blaze, “You son of a bitch!” Another day she tried to run over a group of soldiers with her red truck. They scattered like chickens, which pleased her, I could tell. With fondness, the young men called her “Hurricane Auntie.”
But now a conflict grew between Auntie and Bush, and one day Auntie said to Bush, “You’re too passive.” Bush said, in return, “You are out of control, Auntie.” It was a lost friendship.
And it was true, Auntie’s anger ruled her. It was another dangerous fire.
Bush, afraid for us, tried hard to be diplomatic and to meet with the enemies. Not to have peace, she believed, was to invite violence. She recalled the gun aimed at Dora-Rouge.
I worried for Bush. She was an outsider. Maybe she was wise, and maybe she knew how fear worked, but there were ancient animosities she didn’t know in that place, old memories and rage.
SOMETIMES, I think now, the thing in life that turns toward you, looks at you with cold eyes, eyes that shine in the night and blink and open and take you in the way night-shining eyes of animals glare for a moment and then look away. Sometimes it is loving, sometimes indifferent and chilling. What was done to our world was not right, and all of us saw the eyes of that monster. It was not true that wind had four corners like a room, that it was contained. It was not true that I helped fashion a bomb, although I would lie if I said I hadn’t wanted to. It was not right, having the world pulled away from us unable to catch it. I wanted my eyes to turn it over, to set something right, the way it happens between the lens and the brain, the way it happened one evening as I sat at the window and watched a bonfire burning on the hill and thought of Tulik’s house, black embers looking like hundreds of black crows flying away, crows that remembered the trees their ancestors once sat in. Like us, crows forget nothing.
I remember these events like an illness, and I wish I could forget what men do for small and pitiful power. And there are nights I lay awake and think of what we were in danger of becoming. Our lives in that place were being taken from us, the people removed from the land, water, animals, trees, all violated, and no one lives with full humanity without these elements.
And there was the day, caught in a web of anger and fear, that I walked toward the soldiers, a rock in my hand.
Bush laid her hand on me.
I turned my head and looked at her in all her quiet strength. I did not throw the rock. I know now what a single thrown rock would have done. Just one rock.
So easily, we could become a little society like their larger one. We argued strategy. We fought among ourselves. Within our own ranks, there were divisions as quick and malignant as cells. Some of our young men broke the windows of cars. They carried guns and hunting rifles.
One day, I supposed, the police would return to solving crimes rather than creating them. One day, no matter what happened, no matter who possessed the land, no matter whether there were dams or not, all of this might sink to the bottom of a sea or dissolve in rain. Perhaps fire would turn the land to glass and it might catch light and shine and reflect the sun back to itself. In time, all things would break and would become whole again. The soldiers would grow old and die and be placed in the ground with small white markers. The permafrost would melt, seasons would change.
By now, everything had a shining darkness about it. The days had become shorter, the light slowly faded. The lake, at times, looked red as blood. The world seemed to be breaking open. Husk would have said it was like the beginning of a universe. We did not know what would come from this unfolding.
DECISIONS ARE MADE in a person’s life by small moments of knowing, each moment opening until, like pieces of a quilt, one day everything comes together in a precise, clear knowing. It enters the present, as if it had come all of a piece. It was in this way that I began to understand who I was. Every piece of myself was together anew, a shifted pattern.
For my people, the problem has always been this: that the only possibility of survival has been resistance. Not to strike back has meant certain loss and death. To strike back has also meant loss and death, only with a fighting chance. To fight has meant that we can respect ourselves, we Beautiful People. Now we believed in ourselves once again. The old songs were there, came back to us. Sometimes I think the ghost dancers were right, that we would return, that we are still returning. Even now.
“There are still people who go to the past,” Tulik told me one day. “They know the road there and when they return it is with something valuable, a flint, a story, or a map. “It is what we are always looking for, we who were at the place of old rocks, worn and gray, at islands emerging and falling.
One day, one of the Indian men said he was so sorry but he’d taken a job at the Tip River, a new dam site. “I have to feed my family,” he said. “Please forgive me.” I could see just by looking at him how hard this decision had been.
Bush was a fair and compassionate person. “I understand,” she said. She knew he told the truth, that his children were growing thinner. But the younger men were angry. They saw the Indian laborers as traitors.
Two men, his cousins, rushed toward him in anger.
“Let him go,” Bush said, her voice soft, quiet.
“You stay out of this! This isn’t your fight.”
The two men attacked the laborer. Bush, small as she was, tried to push her way between them.
“So, death has not yet abandoned us, I see,” said Dora-Rouge.
ONE RAINY DAY, as if to mirror our division, a piece of land split off from all the rest and moved through the rain down toward the new river. When I see it now, in my dreams, it is noisy, that separation of land from land, but that day it floated a
way, moving without a sound except for the falling rain. As we watched it, I remembered what Husk had once said about the creation of the moon, how it split off from earth, leaving an ocean behind, salt tears. The moon left the body of its mother, both of them knowing there would be no return.
Some bushes floated away with that land. It was frightening and sad to see, but there was also a kind of defiance in that splitting, one that couldn’t be spoken except in the language of the earth, and it was a sign we couldn’t decipher, a meaning not known to us. LaRue leaped on it, as if to pull it back or save it. No one knew why he did that. He looked as surprised as the rest of us. But once he was on that swirling island, he could not get off and he was carried away by the muddy surge of water. He went with the land, past the sentries, to other places. How far he went we couldn’t know. But it made us think of a strategy, that we could take down a piece of dam, float parts of it away, and return the river to its natural course.
• • •
IT WAS no longer summer. The days were shorter now. Air and water had a different smell. Peat smoke breathed out from the houses. I was ready to return to Adam’s Rib, to see Tommy. Sitting beside Tulik, I dreamed of Tommy’s touch, his large warm hands, his dark eyes.
“You need your strength. Eat this.” Tulik handed me a bologna sandwich. I did as he said. The food tasted good in my mouth, bologna and ketchup on white bread. He poured a cup of coffee out of the thermos. He was always feeding other people. As I ate, I saw how the shadows were now longer, how some of the trees were already tinted by fall. The workers wouldn’t be able to work in winter when the cold stopped machines, so they worked quickly now, day and night, to get as much done as possible.
Gathered around the fire, we were silent. It had been a nerve-racking day. Now some of the women were hunched down, asleep, dead tired, and it was silent outside.
And then we woke to harsh, searching lights and the brash noise of helicopters. That day they brought in assault rifles, tanks, machine guns, and even APCs. And they, these men that came with such weapons, were really just boys who not long before talked about music and girlfriends. Yet they crossed a line. And now they were in a position to kill us. Already they’d cut through the edges of the world we’d known.
That day a bulldozer started up with a dark cloud of gas and tumult, and ran over rocks and into a clothesline and tree, over oil drums and an outhouse and the bedsprings that sat outside it and they came toward the post.
“We’ve got children in here!” one of the men yelled out.
Already I was crying.
“They’re shooting!” I heard someone shout and I heard the popping sounds of a gun.
They shot Mr. Orensen’s dogs, afraid they would attack them. It took so little. Within fifteen seconds, perhaps less, the course of things changed forever.
Then the trees that were still there were run over and folded like nothing, broke and bent beneath their will. I could not read the expression on Tulik’s face. He knew something true, that’s all I could tell. I think he knew that this fight would be forever, that it would never end, but he knew, also, that he was in it and would always be.
Dora-Rouge sat unmoved in her chair, shook her fist, and cried. “They shot the dogs!”
They even shot at the geese, the opening of wings as they rose up, afraid, into the sky. Guns in soldier’s hands, Bush would say, always shoot precious things. It was true, like one of Husk’s rules of physics. It wasn’t their heads that shot, or even their minds. I am trying to say they were not bad people. They were common as sons and brothers and that made it all the more frightening.
ONE MORNING, like a ghost in the early dawn fog, a wolf was standing in the shadows. It was thin. It was silent. “Grandmother,” I said to it. I thought it was Agnes. It stood and watched awhile, then walked toward the soldiers. “Don’t go,” I willed it. I could hardly breathe. I squeezed my eyes tight. But it went. I heard shots and my heart ached with a swollen feeling, as if something had set itself right in the center of it, between all the chambers, and whatever it was, it would remain, it would never come out again.
That afternoon, tear-gas canisters were thrown and fired. But the wind, the one we knew so well, changed direction, and some of the police and soldiers were the ones who had to run. We were happy to see that the wind was on our side. But the next morning Aurora was sick. She was feverish, her eyes tearing. Throughout the day she worsened. I sat beside her, gave her a corner of a wet rag to suck on. I wiped her forehead with a cool cloth. Her skin was sensitive. She cried when I touched her.
“It must be the tear gas,” I said to Tulik. “Do you think we could get a doctor past the soldiers?” We were inside the post. Orensen heard me. “No,” he said. “We’ll have to take her out. That way we won’t risk the doctor coming in here with a gun.” He was right. The doctor’s drinking had left him erratic; he wasn’t to be trusted.
By then, everyone was concerned about Aurora. Her fever had shot up and while at first she had screamed, now she was dull-looking, feeble.
Bush washed Aurora with cool water.
Orensen knew they wouldn’t shoot at him even if he wasn’t on their side, so he was the one who went out and talked to the soldiers.
When he came back, he said, “Come on.” In a hurry, he pulled on my hand. “Let’s go.” He was pale and I could see that he was frightened. In spite of his anxiety, we moved slowly, uncertain whether we would make it past the lines.
“Bush, too,” he said. “Come on. In case she needs you.”
I was afraid for Bush. “Are you sure we’re safe?” I asked.
“Just come.”
When we walked outside, I expected them to shoot. My muscles were tight, my heart beating too fast. The light was bright. I froze. Bush touched my arm. To my relief they let us through. Then Orensen put gas in the tank from a can and started the car. Bush, Aurora, and I sat inside it and were still.
But when we reached the turn to the doctor’s clinic, Orensen kept going.
“Stop,” I said, afraid, suddenly not trusting him. “Where are you going?”
At first he didn’t answer. Then he said, “The doctor here won’t help her. I already know this. I’m getting you out of here.” He looked directly at Bush. “You have to go. It’s going to get rough here. And they don’t trust you.”
I looked to Bush for support. She nodded at me. Orensen was right.
“I’m having Charles meet you,” he said. “We’re going to pick you up with the mail plane.”
But I argued. “The baby needs a doctor. Now.”
Bush looked at Orensen, then at me. “He’s right,” she said, but I could see she felt the same fear I felt.
As we waited for Charles to arrive, I thought how he, too, was now a suspect by both sides. Like Bush, he was another person in the middle, not to be trusted.
Bush put her hands on Aurora’s forehead. “She’ll be all right,” she said, trying to reassure me.
What happened after that, we only heard later. A railroad bridge was burned, transmission towers damaged. With bolts removed from them, they collapsed. It was as if the old warrior spirit, the Wolf Society, was resurrected. The people vowed to fight to the death before allowing the food, water, medicines, and burial grounds to be flooded, before allowing the wildlife to be killed, the fish poisoned.
Theirs was the job of healing the river, breaching a dike, letting water flow in its own way.
Later I would feel guilty for leaving, but that day as we left, I was relieved. We, at least, had somewhere to go. As outsiders, we were the ones fortune changed clothes for, the ones for whom she wore more than one dress.
Bush wiped Aurora’s drawn face with a cool cloth, to break her fever. I looked at this strange woman from the island, dressed in jeans and workshirt, holding in her arms the child of a child she had both loved and feared in another time, another place.
Then there was the familiar sound of the mail plane, the sound of propellers, the shaking of it. And t
hen we were gone. From the noisy plane, I looked back, and as we left, I saw how the place where I’d first stepped into the territory of my people, the Fat-Eaters, the Beautiful People, was now dust, the plants covered by it, so the land looked dull, and already the original road was beneath the water. Flying in a growing darkness, I saw the thin line of road that was String Town, like a necklace of artificial gems opened out along the land, the lights emerging from transformed water. It was against the will of land, I knew, to turn rivers into lakes, lakes into dry land, to send rivers along new paths. I hoped the earth would one day forgive this breach of faith, the broken agreement humans had with it.
It wasn’t long before the plane landed near Pinetown.
“We have a sick baby. Where’s the hospital?” Charles asked a man at the landing strip.
“Up there.” He pointed. We could see it.
We rushed toward it.
At the clinic, Bush rang the bell. Someone looked outside, but didn’t open the door. I held up the baby for them to see. Still, the door remained locked. “She’s sick!” I yelled out, but they wouldn’t treat us. As we were turned away, I screamed at them. “Why don’t you help us?” I went back and banged my fist on the door. “Help us!”
“Don’t fight them,” Bush’s voice sounded flat as she pulled me away. “It scares them.”
“I don’t care! How cowardly!” I accused her.
“They’ll arrest us. They’ll keep us from getting help.”
“She’s right,” Charles said. “It’s useless, your anger. Save it.”
It was only later that I realized how much they feared us, our darkness, our coming from the site of the dams.
“We’ll go to Chinobe,” Bush said.
Already Charles, now carrying Aurora, was running toward the water. We would have to travel by canoe, he told us.