Free A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe Page B

the other officers had kept, as far as that was possible. “Guard this canoe too,” he said to St. Germain, unnecessarily.
    “They don’t leave,” the translator said. “Not yet, so quick.”
    “How long will they remain and … grieve?”
    “When they feel.”
    “Guard the canoe too,” Richardson said again. “The children will certainly need every bit of shelter during the night.”
    And after a short paddle, like a blessing poured out by their encounter with unimaginable grief, at the end of the lake where the Winter River (as they called it) drained west over rapids, they found Keskarrah’s forest. Exactly where, they recalled then, the old man had promised it would be. Inexplicably in these barrens a sudden island of huge intermittent spruce, as much as two feet thick and forty or fifty feet tall, rooted in the valleys and rims of muskegs and especially on the high sandy ridge of the esker that spread the river below them from Winter west to Roundrock lakes. Northeast beyond bare ridges loomed the dome of Dogrib Rock, indelibly shouldered in grey, and south across the river a massive erratic sat on a straight skyline of ridge as if balanced by primordial giants. Back shouted out, “Big Stone!” just before Hood, studying it in the evening light through the telescope, saw what he thought must be a tundra grizzly grazing moss across the slope below it. After the endless low marshes and rocks, the beauty of green vistas swirled likefingers over hills — in the distance imaginably the English winter downs — was beyond his hopes.
    Doctor Richardson returned from a quick wider survey and declared the situation most suitable: stream water, many large trees, the shelter of the esker against the northern winds and its dry, coarse sand for a foundation; also, a bit farther into the trees was an extrusion of excellent white clay (amazing in a land of moss and rock) for chinking between house logs. All that, and they were on a straight line between Dogrib Rock and the Big Stone, so that even without a compass, if they were within sight of either, they could not be lost. Altogether (Richardson getting as close to excitement as a scientific Scot might be permitted) quite the proper situation to be chosen for the proposed wintering residence.
    Deeply grateful, Lieutenant Franklin performed Sunday evening divine service before a great fire, the voyageurs piling on torn spruce branches still snapping with summer sap.
‘Thus saith the Lord, heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is my place of rest? … For I know your works and your thoughts: it shall come to pass that I will gather all nations and tongues, and they shall come and see my glory. And ye I will send to the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame, and ye shall declare my glory among the Gentiles.’ This is the very Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
    Robert Hood stood steady, head bowed, hands folded. Behind his eyelids he saw the children again, a few of whom healready recognized, on that rock in the windy lake, huddling under wet, torn hides supported by the splintered ribs of canoes, bent guns, sticks. In the pause after the responses he thought he could still hear that harrowing lament. Somewhere beyond the feather of wind in spruce, beyond the waterfall and the lake’s deepening darkness. It seemed to him he was praying — for a revelation. How could they have existed here ages before they were known of? How would he draw a sorrow he could barely hear?
    The lament was still there next morning, faint but clear as the icy air, and it carried on the wind all day as they measured out and drove stakes for the three buildings of “Fort Enterprise” into the hard sand. George Back was everywhere, gashing timber to be hewn for the houses, pointing, issuing orders. But by noon the distant sound seemed to have drifted away. It was the Mohawk voyageur, Michel Terohaute, who pointed out that