Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [79]
(But those Indians came from the north. No one ever took the river route from the west and south.)
In stories like this, there is always – there is supposed to be – an old Indian who appears to the white men as they are planning to set out. He comes to warn them, because he is kind at heart and they are ignorant. “Do not go there,” he says. “That is a place we never go.” Indians in these tales have a formal manner of speaking.
“Why not?” the white men say.
“Bad spirits live there,” says the old Indian. The white men smile and thank him, and disregard his advice. Native superstition, they think. So they go where they’ve been warned not to, and then, after many hardships, they die. The old Indian shakes his head when he hears of it. Foolish white men, but what can you tell them? They have no respect.
There’s no old Indian in this book – he somehow got left out – so my father takes the part upon himself. “They shouldn’t have gone there,” he says. “The Indians never went that way.” He doesn’t say bad spirits, however. He says, “Nothing to eat.” For the Indians it would have been the same thing, because where does food come from if not from the spirits? It isn’t just there, it is given; or else withheld.
Hubbard and Wallace tried to hire several Indians, to come with them, at least on the first stages of the journey, and to help with the packs. None would go; they said they were “too busy.” Really they knew too much. What they knew was that you couldn’t possibly carry with you, in there, everything you would need to eat. And if you couldn’t carry it, you would have to kill it. But most of the time there was nothing to kill. “Too busy” meant too busy to die. It also meant too polite to point out the obvious.
The two explorers did do one thing right. They hired a guide. His name was George, and he was a Cree Indian, or partly; what they called then a “breed.” He was from James Bay, too far away from the Labrador to know the full and evil truth about it. George travelled south to meet his employers, all the way to New York City, where he had never been before. He had never been to the United States before, or even to a city. He kept calm, he looked about him; he demonstrated his resourcefulness by figuring out what a taxicab was, and how to hire one. His ability to reason things through was to come in very handy later on.
“That George was quite a boy,” says my father. George is his favourite person in the whole story.
Somewhere around the house there’s a picture of my father himself – at the back of a photo album, perhaps, with the snapshots that haven’t yet been stuck in. It shows him thirty years younger, on some canoe trip or another – if you don’t write these things down on the backs of the pictures, they get forgotten. He’s evidently crossing a portage. He hasn’t shaved, he’s got a bandana tied around his head because of the blackflies and mosquitoes, and he’s carrying a heavy pack, with the broad tumpline across his forehead. His hair is dark, his glistening face is deeply tanned and not what you’d call clean. He looks slightly villainous; like a pirate, or indeed like a northwoods guide, the kind that might suddenly vanish in the middle of the night, along with your best rifle, just before the wolves arrive on the scene. But like someone who knows what he’s doing.
“That George knew what he was doing,” says my father now.
Once he got out of New York, that is; while there, George wasn’t much help, because he didn’t know where to shop. It was in New York that the two men bought all the necessary supplies, except a gill net, which they thought they could find up north. They also failed to purchase extra moccasins. This may have been their worst mistake.
Then they set out, by train and then by boat and then by smaller boat. The details are tedious. The weather was bad, the meals were foul, none of the transportation was ever on time. They spent a lot of hours and even days waiting