• • •
The next morning Achille and Theotiste set out to paddle to Wobik in René’s canoe, but less than three miles from the house something whistled overhead.
“Vite! To the shore!” said Achille through clenched teeth, swerving them under hanging willows. The canoe scraped through tearing branches. Before the willows played out they crept up onto the bank and dragged the canoe behind them.
“The forest is alive with bounty hunters. Let us leave the canoe here and go by foot. But warily.”
Theotiste touched Achille’s shoulder in assent and they began to weave through the trees.
• • •
“What, sell René’s house?” said Captain Bouchard. “Yes, such a thing can happen. There is a man, Jean Mague, a farmer from France looking for a property with cleared land and a house. He does not intend to waste the good years of his life chopping trees. I think he would pay a fair price. He will soon be here.” Jean Mague, he remarked, had two brothers, three grown sons, their wives, two nephews and their wives to farm with him. They were a strong group and handy with firearms. As the old man spoke, Jean Mague himself came through the door, a lipless face, legs and arms as long as wikuom poles.
Mague was interested to hear about René Sel’s place and wondered how it had come in the possession of these Indians. He liked the sound of a sturdy French house, a potash kettle, cleared land. He looked Achille and Theotiste up and down rather insolently but agreed to walk back with them to see René’s property.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said when they mentioned René’s death. “Bounty hunters will never molest my family.” And because he was who he was he wished he had brought some beads and cheap whiskey to trade. He carried his gun and followed.
Before the house came in sight Theotiste ran ahead. He dug quickly in a certain place and put what he found in his pack basket, then rushed to the house to tell Elphège and his sisters that Jean Mague was coming. Noë ran into the back room and rummaged for the small birch-bark box decorated with colorful quillwork, a box from Mari’s childhood and precious to Noë. Inside the door Theotiste reached up to the high shelf. His hand grasped René’s old snow snake. They went out where Achille was already talking with Jean Mague, the newcomer looking around the property with narrowed eyes to show no one could put anything over on him. His squared shoulders and long heavy steps showed he already felt himself the possessor.
“Will we give him the potash I made?” Achille asked Elphège in a low voice.
“Yes.”
• • •
Before the talk of price even began, they were interrupted by Renardette and Démon Meillard, who came out of the trees riding tandem on a black horse. They were sober and grim. Démon, his rum-red face shaped like a hazelnut, the modest chin augmented by a pointed black beard, spoke only to Jean Mague and said that the previous owner, René Sel, who had held the notarized title to the property, had bequeathed it to Renardette, his adopted daughter. René and Renardette, he said knowingly, were both pure French. Renardette owned it, not the half-breed Indian squatters who claimed it, who said they were René’s children. Demonstrably a falsehood. What Indian knew his true parentage? None!
Démon spoke directly to Jean Mague. “Renardette will sell this good property to you. We will record the sale in Captain Bouchard’s great ledger and all will be legal and binding. This is white man’s business. These Indians have no claims, they are nothing at all. Nothing.”
Achille whispered to Theotiste. “But is it not recorded in the ledger that the house belonged to René? And that René married Mari, our mother, following the whiteman law?”
Theotiste whispered back: “Perhaps it was, but when I asked Captain Bouchard he went in the back room with the ledger, came out a moment later and showed me there was nothing. But I could see rough bits of torn paper in the cleft of that book.”
In the end Jean Mague, Démon and Renardette Meillard stood apart under the trees and made their arrangement. They shook hands, turned and faced Elphège, Theotiste, Achille, Zoë and Noë. Jean Mague said, “I have agreed to buy the property from the owners. You must now leave.” He raised his gun, ready primed and loaded, to his shoulder.
Achille stood stiff with rage but Elphège touched his arm and said in a low voice, “Brother, it is only a whiteman house. You do not wish to be tied down to a potash kettle like such a one. Let us go. We will hunt and fight. We will not burn trees into dirty ashes.”
Achille’s voice was tight. He felt his blood curdling with poison. “It is clear that Captain Bouchard informed them, that he removed René’s claim from the ledger. He was friendly to our father — for our father was a white Wenuj. But to our mother and to us his friendship was false.”
“What does it matter? Before you there lie many good years of hunting. That is a better life for you.”
Achille stood silent for many heartbeats, then said, “We will come with you to our mother’s country.”
“Good. First we go to Odanak.”
26. Mi’kma’ki
At Odanak, Zoë, Noë and Achille turned shy, unused to such a moil. The village, with its wikuoms, and even some log cabins, frothed with people working, cooking, softening hides, splitting canoe ribs, lifting a tangle of gaudy roots from a dye kettle. Two men played waltes, the bone dice leaping up when they slapped down the wooden bowl. Jen, a round-faced Mi’kmaw woman with three children, looked at Zoë and Noë, at their soiled whiteman dresses.
“Sit down. Eat,” she said. “You are good strong girls who will make a journey to Mi’kma’ki.” Zoë and Noë, starved of female company for years, began to thaw. Noë had brought three of her baskets, which she presented to them, but these were not admired. In Odanak there were basket makers of great skill and the women brought out several to show her: an oval birch-bark container sewn with spruce root and worked with such intricate designs the eye could not hold them. Noë touched a basket with a decorative rim of artfully twisted black root. Some baskets were tiny, woven of sweet-grass, some were splendid with red- and green-dyed root strips.
“I wish to learn how to make such beautiful baskets,” said Noë, kicking at her own poor efforts.
“We will show you,” said a young and heavy woman with callused hands who told the story of Ai’ip, the lazy woman who split and twisted roots around her fingers and somehow made the first basket. “No person could name this object. And they had to call it ‘that root thing.’ ”
“I am choking with new thoughts,” said Zoë. “We know nothing,” for they had only ten winters.
Theotiste, Elphège and Achille wanted to start at once for Mi’kma’ki, but Sosep, an old trapper sagmaw, took them aside and spoke at length.
“I am going with you. But it is not good to go now when winter is advancing. There is nothing to eat at that place in the winter. People go up the river. We better wait until spring.”
Achille itched to go.
“What does he mean, there is no food at Mi’kma’ki? Mari our mother told us it was a place of great richness, fish, lobsters, clams and oysters, birds by the thousand, succulent plants.” Sosep overheard this and laughed. “Mi’kma’ki is a summer place. Winter very hard there unless you cached ten moose and sixteen bears.”
For more than four cycles of the moon the Sels waited at Odanak. Theotiste, Elphège and Achille hunted and fished, talked with the men about the best route to Mi’kma’ki. The women helped Noë and Zoë dry and smoke venison and eel for their journey. Noë, determined to become a maker of fine baskets, worked at it until her fingers blistered.