Free A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe Page A

came to hand, smashed and torn and bleeding, being flung everywhere into the lake. The small island blazed with the necessity of destruction. The Yellowknives were attacking their canoes, breaking the very guns with which they were to hunt.
    “Why are they doing this?” Lieutenant Franklin demanded of St. Germain.
    “Dead,” he said stoically. “They cry, make themselves poor.”
    Even Richardson felt suddenly afraid. “Will they destroy everything they have, that they must have to live?”
    “Maybe. Sad, very big. Always cry, dead.”
    Though required Empire authority might drive him to the threatened brink of execution, Lieutenant Franklin’s reverence for life would not allow him to kill so much as a mosquito; but here, under his very eyes, a boy was about to slash open a terrified dog. He scrambled ashore and seized the boy’s shoulder, shouting, and the boy wheeled around, might have disembowled him if St. Germain had not knocked up his arm.
    “No! No!” the translator yelled. “Don’t grab — hide what you can — don’t grab ’em!”
    Several reluctant voyageurs stepped from the canoes, seizing what possessions they could and piling them farther from the shore, higher on the island. Hepburn trudged up and began to assist as well. No Yellowknife protested or hindered them. Richardson led St. Germain from one man to the next, persuading them that they must stop smashing the guns, which, after all, he explained, had been given them by their Great Father in England, who would be very angry if his gifts were destroyed, even in deep grief. The men dropped the firearms but continued to tear at their clothes in the frigid air, wailing; their mouths gaping, insensible holes in their suddenly grotesque heads, their eyes untouchably vacant, stunned with sorrow.
    “They seem thankful if we stop them, yes,” Lieutenant Franklin insisted, believing he understood something profound at last.
    When the violence of their grief gradually eddied into a wailing dance, he ordered St. Germain to remain and guard what had been saved; the rest of the party must continue looking for the trees.
    Richardson discovered that he had lost his notebook. St. Germain was pushing the rifles aside for him, looking for it, when Greywing came over the hump of the island dragging the slashed, sodden mass of her family’s lodgeskins. The lake had given it back, she told St. Germain, wide-eyed.
    Richardson could have wept. The child stood with nothing but a scrap of leather over her shoulders, and he could not keep his eyes from her slender, sturdy legs, her tiny breasts, the innocent fold of her sex, hunched together in the fierce, cold sunlight off the lake. He turned quickly then, almost wishing it were possible for him to wail as they did, beating themselves into exhaustion and emptiness. A grief to end every known grief here in this ultimate barrenness of the world, an island so tiny he felt for a moment lost as in a vacant ship on an empty ocean.
    Hood appeared lugging a half-smashed canoe up the rocks, his face running tears.
    “They want us to save their things, we aren’t Yellowknives, we can save their things,” he gasped.
    “They are so…” in all his English the doctor could not find a suitable word, “ … intemperate.…”
    “But they’ll freeze, to death,” Hood insisted, as if his saying it were somehow a prevention. “Marooned on this bare rock!”
    “Now, now.” Richardson shook himself into thinking reasonably. On this wailing island Hood’s emotion was clearly inappropriate, as was his own. “We know our duty. These people have mourned before, and they still live.”
    “But they were hunting for us!”
    “Now now,” Richardson said again, and took the useless husk of the canoe in hand. “They contracted to hunt for us, that cannot harm them.” The notebook was gone. Perhaps it too had, inadvertently of course, been thrown into the lake. He would make up certain details again from memory and the notes