“We have little choice,” said Sosep with a puckered expression. And soon there were so many birds the sky rattled, so many fish the bay boiled like a pot. There was enough for all.
Despite the old man’s complaints that all was spoiled, the Sels were astounded at the unfolding bounty of Mi’kma’ki. The great bay with its powerful tides, its estuaries and islands, its freshwater rivers and the nurturing ocean supplied everything. The newcomers stared at the ocean beating in ceaselessly, stared agape as the tide went out exposing miles of mudflats riddled with tiny holes from which came the hissing noise of mud shrimp below. Equally fascinating was the swift return of the ocean, the saline water coming in stealthily.
They had to learn this new country, its red cliffs, the changing tides, the seasons for herring, for shad, a different pattern of weather and storms than they had ever known. At first the ocean seemed all-powerful, but they came to understand that the true richness of Mi’kma’ki was in its rivers. They had to learn the names of unfamiliar fish. Farther out from shore there swam several kinds of great whales, porpoises and dolphins. There were varieties of seals, lobsters as big as women. The Sel men, as hunters and trappers, had to learn their ways quickly.
They saw that the foolish Acadians were diligent gardeners and because of this they felt themselves superior. The local surviving Mi’kmaq lived on the edges of old trapping areas, somewhat away from the French settlers.
“But we newcomers have no wikuom. We have no shelter,” said Noë, who longed for the stability of a wikuom or even a house. A whiteman house was impossible. She knew that. There were several of those geometric structures at Odanak, but here people despised them and there was the example of the young Mi’kmaw hunter a few years earlier who had been to a white settlement and there he had seen English drinking brown water from a saucer. The saucer was very beautiful with a deep blue rim. Somehow he had gained possession of this saucer — or one like it — and brought it back to Mi’kma’ki. His scandalized and outraged neighbors saw him drinking from it and killed him for a traitor to traditional ways. The repulsive object was smashed on a stone.
“But,” said old grandmother Loze, “two families have saucers now and no one has killed them. Everything does change.”
27. blood kin
With some ceremony Sosep brought Cache Emil, Elphège and Theotiste’s uncle, to them. Cache Emil, a tall, powerful old man with hulking shoulders and a deeply lined face as though flint-gouged, stepped forward and put both hands on Elphège’s shoulders.
“Yes,” he said. “I know you, the children of my brother. Often my life has been heavy with loss and sadness, but today I feel so much joy that I have no good words for it.” He grasped first Elphège, then Theotiste; his cheeks were wet. For Elphège and Theotiste in that moment Cache Emil became the center of life. They had longed for a father without knowing it. Cache Emil said he had a son, Rouge Emil. Their own blood, their cousin.
“You,” he said to Achille, who had only fourteen winters. “You are the son of Mari, long-ago wife of my brother Lolan before he ceased his existence. I welcome you. When Rouge Emil returns we will have a feast. But come with me, Elphège, I will take you to some old places where my brother who was your father often got his quarry, fur or flesh. And good places at the river mouths for fish weirs. Sosep and I will speak together of choice trapping lines for Theotiste — and Achille.” Sosep pompously and formally assigned Elphège their father’s old trapping territory and told Theotiste and Achille they would have productive areas adjoining his own. No priest could do that!
But Rouge Emil made a face; neither his father nor Sosep understood that the old custom of assigning trapping and fishing territories was no longer in the power of Mi’kmaw men; white men and their rules of land division had taken over. Such territories were house sites, garden plots and cow pastures.
Achille respected Cache Emil but gravitated to old Sosep, not Sosep as a sagmaw, but Sosep the renowned hunter. Achille had been a natural hunter from childhood; René had been a wood chopper who hunted only when pressed by necessity. Now Achille became passionate. It was his new identity in this new world that had enclosed him. He preferred to hunt and stalk on land — and let others concern themselves with the life of rivers and the ocean.
• • •
At the welcoming feast Theotiste, who believed drink was an evil spirit’s brew, saw Cache Emil drank only one small cup of brandy, but Rouge Emil swallowed cup after cup.
“Will you not drink, Cousin?” asked Rouge Emil, but Theotiste turned his face away.
“I have ever disliked the white man’s whiskey,” he mumbled. Rouge Emil drank on until he surrendered to the weight of the spirit and fell senseless.
A few days later many Mi’kmaq came to help put up a big wikuom, large enough for all of them, on the edge of the forest overlooking the sea where a path bent down to the shore. Here they buried Mari’s bones. After a long search Achille killed a beaver and put its skin on the burial place as they did in the old times, but a few days later it was gone. Someone had taken it to sell.
Achille and Theotiste said they would later make small wikuoms in suitable places, but for now it was better if they all stayed together. Zoë laughed to see a band of Mi’kmaw seamstresses sewing their house as one would sew a garment, until they put her to work painting the moose-hide door in whirls and double curves of black, purple and red.
“Sister, there was never a more beautiful entrance,” said Elphège. Inside the wikuom was floored with reed mats, a central stone circle for fire. Inside was quiet. Inside was their haven.
“A fine wikuom,” said Cache Emil. “The French brag of their great tall houses in their home villages, but why does one need such a tall house? Men are not so high in stature. Perhaps they have giants for visitors? Nor can those houses be moved, they say. And if those houses and those villages are so fine, as we often hear, why did they leave them, leave their friends and wives and come here? Truly these must be the rejected ones from their own people so stupid, so hairy and grasping.”
The elderly Mi’kmaw grandmother Loze, who had been at Odanak, bossed the sewing. “But everything is changed,” she said, as she always said. “Because our fathers killed so many beaver to trade with the Europeans the beaver are angry and have left the country, and now strike us with illnesses.” She pointed at Alit Spot, who had ulcers on his neck and hands that refused to heal. Many of the old beaver hunters had suffered those sores, and when the disease went inside the body they had died coughing blood. “But you know well,” she said, “after eel, beaver meat is the best meat for the Mi’kmaq. We destroyed our best food to trade their furs to the white men. Now these people from far away try to push us off the shore, push us into the interior, where the biting insects live. Here, near the ocean, the breeze teaches insects kind ways.” She said enviously that she had heard a true story that at one place the Mi’kmaq had shot the settlers’ cows, but French soldiers came and arrested the hunters. “They should have arrested the cows.” She said that as a child she had been shown the place where the rattling plant—mededeskooï—grew, that magic plant that could cure many illnesses and even grant wishes. Even in the old days it had been elusive. Her accounts always ended “that was a long time ago.” Yes, that was the old life.
When the weather warmed she came with the Sels at low tide, showing them how to dig clams, their feet sinking into the rich mud, shorebirds running before them and crying out warnings to each other. Loze told Noë that the dog whelks made the beautiful purple dye the Mi’kmaw people liked.