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A few have survived in the notebooks and journals of the curious, of
the scientifically minded who collated skinny vocabularies in the days
before the language died altogether. Annoo-ee for tree or woods or forest.
Gidyeathuc for the wind, Adenishit for the stars. Mammasheek for each
of the ten thousand smaller islands that halo the coastline, Kadimishuite
for the countless narrow tickles that run among them. Each word has
the odd shape of the ancient, the curiously disturbing heft of a museum
artifact. They are like tools centuries old, hewn for specific functions,
some of which can only be guessed at now. Kewis to name both the sun
and the moon, the full face of pocket watches stolen from European settlers.
Whashwitt, bear; Kosweet, caribou; Dogajavick, fox. Shabathoobet, trap.
The vocabularies a kind of taxidermy, words that were once muscle and
sinew preserved in these single wooden postures. Three hundred nouns,
a handful of unconjugated verbs, to kiss, to run, to fall, to kill.
At the edge of a story that circles and circles their own death, they
stand dumbly pointing.
Only the land is still there.
The Lake
March month, 1819
The infant woke her crying to be fed and she lay him naked against her
breast in the shadowed river-bottom light of early morning. No one else
in the shelter stirred and she almost fell back to sleep herself in
the stillness. She could smell a clear winter’s day in the air,
an edge of sunlight and frost cutting the scent of leather and spruce.
A crow called from the trees outside. The gnarled voice of the forest’s
appetite. She sang crow’s song under her breath while her son’s
mouth tugged at the nipple.
When he was done nursing, she lay the child beside her husband and pulled
on her leather cassock, tying the belt at her waist. She stepped to
the entrance, pushing aside the caribou covering. Outside, the glare
of sunlight off the ice made her eyes ache and she stood still for a
moment as she adjusted to the brightness. The cold in her lungs pricking
like a thorn. Thickly wooded hills on the far shore, a moon just visible
in the pale blue sky above them. The crow called again, the brindled
sound in the clear air like a shadow cast on snow.
She had turned and begun walking towards the trees when the stranger’s
voice carried across the clearing. He was standing on a finger of land
behind her, a single figure in a long black coat, one arm raised in
the air. A current of blood rushed to her head, the roar of it in her
ears, and she screamed a warning then, running for the entrance of the
mamateek. Inside she gathered her child in her arms as the others startled
up from their berths around the firepit. A tangled maze of shouting
and a panic for the light, adults carrying children outside, heading
for the forest behind the shelters.
She followed a small group led by her husband, running down onto the
ice and making toward a distant point of land. Over her shoulder she
saw the one who had called to her and the others who had lain in ambush,
eight or ten of them moving on the camp, carrying their long rifles.
The baby had come only three weeks before and the tearing pain below
her belly burned into her legs and up the length of her back as she
ran. The weight of her son like a beach-rock in her arms. She called
to her husband and he came back to take the boy, still she fell further
behind them. She heard the voice of the white man she had seen on the
finger of land again and when she looked over her shoulder he was nearly
upon her. She ran another hundred yards before she fell to the ice and
knelt there, choking on the cold air and crying.
She turned without getting to her feet and undid the belt at her waist,
lifting the cassock over her head to reveal her breasts. The white man
had taken off his long coat to chase her, his hair was the colour of
dead grass. He set his rifle on the ice and kicked it away, then the
smaller gun as well. The rest of the black-coated men were straggling
up behind him. He spoke and came towards her with his hands held away
from his body. He was terrified, she could see, although she could not
imagine the source of his fear. He slapped his chest and repeated several
of his words. She looked over her shoulder a last time to the point
where her people had disappeared. She turned back to the man approaching
her then and she covered herself and stood to meet him.
This was before her husband came down from the distant point to speak
to them, before her face was pressed into the grain of a coat as pliant
and coarse as deer moss, before the first muffled gunshot was fired.
But even as she spoke her own name and reached to take the white man’s
proffered hand she knew what was lost to her. Her child and husband.
The lake. The last good place.
The white
man nodded and smiled and then he turned towards the others of his party
as they came up to them on the ice.
Excerpted from River
Thieves by Michael Crummey Copyright 2001 by Michael Crummey. Excerpted
by permission of Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
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