Chapter Six
In the year since she became a wife, Keasik has learned to keep most of her thoughts to herself.
So if her husband, Nabayah, really believes that going north with his father is the best thing to do, even though when they hear about Datsanthi’s plans, the other men in the band—all six of them—seem to think it a terrible idea, dangerous and pointless, then she’s not going to complain or disagree even though she’s scared of meeting the Esquimaux and hates the thought of being separated from her mother and her sisters for so many months.
At the beginning, when the marriage was completely new, because they’d known each other since they were children playing with sticks and pinecones in the woods, she tried to treat Nabayah like a brother or a friend, but she soon realized that wasn’t what he wanted.
Whenever she tried to make jokes or poke fun at him, he frowned and looked stern, and if she carried on or went even further, he sometimes got angry and told her to hold her tongue.
She didn’t know what to make of his anger at first—she was upset and confused—but then she realized that the older men were watching and judging him, or at least he thought they were, and he didn’t want to appear weak or foolish in their eyes.
When she told her mother, her mother said that it was normal for things to change like this when a boy became a man and Nabayah would probably calm down after a while and stop worrying so much about other people’s opinions, but for now, even though he was only a few years older than Keasik, it was best for her to treat him more like an uncle or an elder cousin.
“Don’t speak too much,” Keasik’s mother said, “and if you have to disagree with him, do it gently and find some way to flatter him at the same time, so he doesn’t feel disrespected. ”
Keasik has been following her mother’s advice ever since, and things have improved.
Nabayah doesn’t get angry as often as he used to, but he’s not especially kind or friendly to her either.
Her sisters and friends tell her not to worry, because the truth is that most men are gruff and short-tempered when their wives are around, but even though she knows that’s the truth, she can’t help feeling disappointed in her marriage and wishes things were better.
If she only had a child, she thinks, that would make a difference, especially if it was a boy.
If she could give Nabayah a good strong son, he would be grateful, and instead of ignoring her or treating her as an annoyance, he would want to cherish and protect her.
She has done her very best to get pregnant—they fuck every night without fail, often two or three times, and she eats blue cohosh and lingonberries like people say you should—but every month she bleeds again as if she’s still a virgin.
She just needs to be patient, her mother says; sometimes these things take a while.
But Keasik is starting to think it might be a curse.
She can’t remember breaking any taboos—she’s always careful when she’s cooking eggs or standing near a corpse—but maybe she was careless once or twice, or maybe Nabayah was.
If that’s what’s happened, they’ll need a seer to help them lift the curse, but she daren’t suggest that to Nabayah, not yet at least, because if a seer gets involved, then everyone in the band will know about their problem and there’ll be mockery and endless gossip as there always is.
So all she can do is carry on hoping that things will get better by themselves and that next month, when the full moon comes, there won’t be any blood.
Moving quickly and carefully, Nabayah follows the hoof marks in the snow until he finds the deer standing pressed together in a hollow by an iced-over stream—one bull, one yearling, three does—all of them skinny and ragged, their long winter coats pocked and lumpy with weevils and worms. Close behind them there’s a dark outcrop, patched here and there with snow and ice, and above it, a thicket of dwarf shrubs and willow.
Stooping so as not to be seen, he circles around until he reaches the place above the outcrop, then he loads the musket and takes aim at the bull.
When the bullet hits, the bull bellows with surprise, stiffens, and folds to the ground, spasming.
The other four deer wheel around in a wild panic, colliding with each other and kicking up flurries of snow.
Nabayah reloads the musket as quickly as he can and fires again, but they’re already in the trees and the second bullet is wasted.
He wipes the scorched powder off the pan with his thumb, re-closes the lock, then steps out from the hiding place and walks down into the snow-filled hollow to begin the butchering.
He’s been a hunter so long now that he does it all without having to think.
First the head, then the legs, then the bowels and innards all purple-blue and steaming.
The job is almost finished when Datsanthi appears.
Nabayah offers him a thick slice from the tongue, and the old man takes it with a nod and swallows it down.
Nabayah calls Datsanthi his father, but the truth is more complicated than that.
As a child, he was discovered wandering in the woods one winter, frostbitten, bewildered, and half starved, and Datsanthi took him in and fed him and then, after a year or so, when it became clear that no parent was ever going to appear to claim him back, he adopted him as one of his own.
No one knows for certain where Nabayah came from and why he was left in such a desperate state, but from the way he talked when he was found and the clothes he was wearing, they guessed that his people were probably Yellowknives or Dogribs who had wandered east from the Great Slave Lake searching for food and ended up starving to death.
These vague and peculiar origins became, as he grew older, a source of shame for Nabayah; they were something he wished he could forget about or escape from but knew he never would.
His adoptive family were careful not to say or do anything on purpose to make him feel different or unwelcome, but growing up he had a sense, nonetheless, like a faint whispering in his ear, of being not quite the same as the others and existing always at a very slight remove.
As a consequence, even more than most young men, he was aware of every subtle slight or insult, whether intended or not, and would hold them in his mind until he could find some way of striking back.
The fights and arguments that followed gained him a reputation for being hotheaded and unruly, and several times Datsanthi was forced to use all his guile and good reputation to get him out of trouble or keep him safe.
As soon as he was old enough, both parents had encouraged Nabayah to marry, in the belief that having a wife and children would help to calm him down, but it had made hardly any difference at all.
As a husband, he was still thin-skinned and irascible and still, whether he realized it or not, seeking in different and sometimes contradictory ways to prove his worth and justify his strange beginnings.
He had joined this present expedition when everyone else had refused, intending to please his father.
But now, having done so, he feels a new need, equally strong, to separate himself and demonstrate that he is not so young or helpless as to crave another man’s approval or praise.
He looks about for suitable opportunities to argue and finds them easily enough.
If Datsanthi ever speaks about the Englishmen’s cleverness or their unusual powers, Nabayah is always ready to quibble or disagree.
“If they’re so clever,” he will say, “why can’t they get their own food or find their way to wherever they are going?
If you ask me,” he goes on, “you give them far too much respect. We should pity them, perhaps, but not flatter them or act like their slaves.” Datsanthi knows his son’s character too well to let himself be drawn into one of his endless arguments, however, so most of the time he allows such provocations to pass with just a shrug or a smile.
Now, as they stand there in the snowy hollow chewing slices of the butchered bull’s tongue, the older man frowns and looks about with a puzzled expression.
“That’s very strange,” he says. “I heard two shots, but I only see one dead deer.”
It’s the usual joke. No matter how many deer you kill, no one lets you forget about the ones that get away. Nabayah shakes his head at first and looks annoyed, but then he can’t stop himself from smiling.
“I must be getting old,” he says. “Wait another year or two and I’ll be nearly as bad at hunting as you are.”
Datsanthi laughs, then puts his blood-stained fingers in his mouth one by one and licks them clean.
“Fuck you,” he says.
“And fuck you too, you wrinkly old cunt.”
Keasik is good-natured and placid, Pawpitch thinks, and intelligent in her own way, but she’s not the best worker.
For one thing, she’s too slight and scrawny to carry much weight on the sledge, and on top of that she’s so dreamy and easily distracted that if you give her a job to do, it either takes twice as long as it should or never gets properly finished at all.
Just yesterday, for example, Pawpitch thinks, when I sent her off to gather firewood, she came back with barely half a dozen sticks in her basket and a long story about how if she listens carefully to the sound of the wind in the trees she can sometimes hear her sisters’ voices.
She gets all the dreaminess from her mother’s side of the family, of course.
Her grandfather was Idotleezey, the famous seer, and almost all of them claim some kind of unusual power—either foresight or healing or speaking with the spirits.
If Keasik says she hears voices on the wind, then she probably does, Pawpitch thinks, but it’s a long walk to Ox Lake, and hearing your sisters’ voices won’t help build a fire or pitch the tents or boil the meat for supper. That’s the problem.
Of course, Keasik is lonely too; that doesn’t help.
She’s used to having everyone around her, the whole band, and now it’s just me, Pawpitch thinks, and two men who barely speak to her.
For the first two days, after we said our goodbyes to the others, she could hardly stop crying; it was pitiful to witness.
She’s calmer now, but even so, you can tell she’s hurting.
If Nabayah was a better, more thoughtful husband, he’d notice her sadness and try to do something small to cheer her up, but there’s no chance of that.
He’s just as self-centered as he always was.
All he cares about is hunting and trying to impress the other men.
In truth, she feels a little guilty now for encouraging that marriage as much as she did.
At the time, she thought it would be a good match.
She thought having a wife like Keasik, cheerful and lively, would make Nabayah more contented and less troublesome, but in fact, Nabayah is just the same and marriage hasn’t improved him at all.
She shouldn’t blame herself, though, she thinks, because really, there’s only so much you can do to help other people.
That’s one thing she’s realized over the years.
People have to learn to help themselves.
You can encourage and cajole and offer good examples to follow, but once they reach a certain age—eight, maybe, or possibly nine—you can’t force them to change if they really don’t want to.
Nabayah’s personality was already decided when we found him lost and wandering on his own in the woods; that’s the only way to explain it, she thinks.
If we’d known who his parents were, we might have guessed how he’d turn out, but as it was, we had no idea.
And as for Keasik and her slackness, well, her mother, Wonawogen, should have been the one to take her in hand when she was smaller, but Wonawogen is not the forceful type.
She’s not lazy, exactly, but she’s not especially energetic either.
What earns her respect is her skill with the needle.
The clothes and shoes she stitches are the best around.
When you have a special talent like that, people are kind and you don’t have to work quite so hard at other things, but Keasik’s needlework is nothing special, so she can’t expect to get away with nearly so much.
She’ll have to toughen up eventually, Pawpitch thinks, and realize what is required of her.
A long, hard journey like this one might be good in its way.
She won’t enjoy it much, she thinks; she’ll be wishing every day that she was back with the others.
But if she learns a thing or two from all that suffering and ends up stronger and wiser by the end, more of a woman and less of a little girl, then when it’s all over she can look back and be grateful.