Free A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe

their Indians since no one else could be here. They were jumping wildly about on a small island. Shrieking?
    Back shouted from the lead canoe, “Carnival, sir! They’ve discovered an eternal spring — of rum!”
    But Lieutenant Franklin did not answer him. The voyageurs’ morning song had died in their throats, their broken rhythm reflecting what emerged clearly now as wailing, as aboriginal dirge, fraying out along the line of distant rock that separated the water from the immense sky.
    In the last canoe, Robert Hood had been trying all morning to capture once more, on a small piece of paper, a coherent quadrant of the world through which he was being carried. But even after an exhausting year of continuously widening vistas, he was tempted to look sideways, tugged towards a periphery inthe corner of his eye that, when he yielded, was still never there. Riding motionless in the canoe on this usual lake, he felt his body slowly tighten, twist; as if it were forming into a gradual spiral that might turn his head off at the neck. Like one of those pathetic little trees, enduring forever a relentless side wind so that it could only twist itself upwards year after year by eighth-of-an-inching; or like the owl in the story that turned its head in a circle, staring with intense fixity, trying to discover all around itself that perfect sphere of unbordered sameness and, at the moment of discovery that the continuous world was, nevertheless, not at all or anywhere ever the same, it had completed its own strangulation. A tree at the treeline … a headless owl.…
    But his sketch must stop, must have frame!
    He found he could concentrate on what appeared to be a wash of river falling into the northern shore of the lake. Separating two scraggly trees, which seemed too tall to be there. Or was it simply the perspectiveless distance over water that made them appear so? He had been betrayed by this intense light distortion before: he must be careful. But a tall tree on either side — that was still a possible frame, if he drew them foreground enough.
    But he had drawn that so often! Scribbling in trees where none could exist; doing it now where they did seemed mere repetition … and then his eyes discovered that the falls, instead of falling down into spray, appeared to climb out of the bristle of brush, climb up into air above their surrounding rock — like a column of ice pasted against space and darkness. Amazing.
    Nevertheless, beyond any deception of light the roar of the falls emerged distinctly, and then vanished on the lake wind. But the island sound wavered over it. Those were people, certainlyYellowknives, twitching, spastic on that whaleback rock now clearly fruzzed with bushes. Hurling things that everywhere burst high in the black water.
    “What is that?” Hood asked the translator, St. Germain, beside him.
    “Somebody for sure dead.”
    “Dead?”
    The English officers could not in a lifetime have imagined such grief. That was what it was, though at first Doctor Richardson was convinced it must be a witches’ or (more likely) a devils’ sabbath, performed with typical native perversity in the glare of high noon rather than midnight. But it was Indian grief. A distant lake had taken two hunters, one of them Big-foot’s brother-in-law, the other his wife’s sister’s son, and as long as the two pillars of black smoke stood beyond the falls and the mound of Dogrib Rock to the north, they knew the distant lake had refused to give the bodies back for them to mourn over and then leave properly to the animals.
    “Double smoke, two men,” St. Germain explained. “All their relations.”
    From the island the smoke was now obvious enough to the officers, even against the clouds. But their minds were overwhelmed with bellows and weeping and screams so closely about them, with lodgepoles being broken and skins ripped, kettles crushed, axes splintered, dogs throats being slit and everything, any thing or animal that