The Lake
March month, 1819
The infant woke her crying to be fed and she lay him naked against her breast in the shadowed river-bottom light of early morning. No one else in the shelter stirred and she almost fell back to sleep herself in the stillness. She could smell a clear winter’s day in the air, an edge of sunlight and frost cutting the scent of leather and spruce.
A crow called from the trees outside. The gnarled voice of the forest’s appetite. She sang crow’s song under her breath while her son’s mouth tugged at the nipple.
When he was done nursing, she lay the child beside her husband and pulled on her leather cassock, tying the belt at her waist. She stepped to the entrance, pushing aside the caribou covering. Outside, the glare of sunlight off the ice made her eyes ache and she stood still for a moment as she adjusted to the brightness. The cold in her lungs pricking like a thorn. Thickly wooded hills on the far shore, a moon just visible in the pale blue sky above them. The crow called again, the brindled sound in the clear air like a shadow cast on snow.
She had turned and begun walking towards the trees when the stranger’s voice carried across the clearing. He was standing on a finger of land behind her, a single figure in a long black coat, one arm raised in the air. A current of blood rushed to her head, the roar of it in her ears, and she screamed a warning then, running for the entrance of the mamateek. Inside she gathered her child in her arms as the others startled up from their berths around the firepit. A tangled maze of shouting and a panic for the light, adults carrying children outside, heading for the forest behind the shelters.
She followed a small group led by her husband, running down onto the ice and making towards a distant point of land. Over her shoulder she saw the one who had called to her and the others who had lain in ambush, eight or ten of them moving on the camp, carrying their long rifles.
The baby had come only three weeks before and the tearing pain below her belly burned into her legs and up the length of her back as she ran. The weight of her son like a beach-rock in her arms. She called to her husband and he came back to take the boy, still she fell further behind them. She heard the voice of the white man she had seen on the finger of land again and when she looked over her shoulder he was nearly upon her. She ran another hundred yards before she fell to the ice and knelt there, choking on the cold air and crying.
She turned without getting to her feet and undid the belt at her waist, lifting the cassock over her head to reveal her breasts. The white man had taken off his long coat to chase her, his hair was the colour of dead grass. He set his rifle on the ice and kicked it away, then the smaller gun as well. The rest of the black-coated men were straggling up behind him. He spoke and came towards her with his hands held away from his body. He was terrified, she could see, although she could not imagine the source of his fear. He slapped his chest and repeated several of his words. She looked over her shoulder a last time to the point where her people had disappeared. She turned back to the man approaching her then and she covered herself and stood to meet him.
This was before her husband came down from the distant point to speak to them, before her face was pressed into the grain of a coat as pliant and coarse as deer moss, before the first muffled gunshot was fired. But even as she spoke her own name and reached to take the white man’s proffered hand she knew what was lost to her. Her child and husband. The lake. The last good place.
The white man nodded and smiled and then he turned towards the others of his party as they came up to them on the ice.
Part 1
Hag n cp OED ~ 1 c obs (1632, 1696) for sense 1 …
1 The nightmare; freq in form old hag…. 1896 J A Folklore ix, 222 A man … told me he had been ridden to death by an old hag…. 1937 Bk of Nfld i, 230 Nightmare is called by fishermen the “Old Hag.”
— Dictionary of Newfoundland English
The Face of a Robber’s Horse
1810
have the face of a robber’s horse: to be brazen, without shame or pity.
– Dictionary of Newfoundland English
ONE