Cormorant Books

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New Under the Sun (Preview)

SHANNON

Home is never home anymore. Shannon anticipates nothing but the landscape.

The rest of the country at her back. This, the final thrust of the journey begun on the edge of the Pacific a week ago — the frigid swat of the North Atlantic on deck, across the Cabot Strait, dead in the face, Shannon bundled in a ski jacket, some space-age fabric gloves and a boiled-wool toque.

It is May. She loves it.

In British Columbia everything grows. In Newfoundland nature is a blessed snarl, humans an imposition. You have to want to come here; you have to want to fight to stay. You are not seed on fertile ground. You are a fish washed up on rock. She feels welcomed just for making the decision to return. And when the ferry’s horn announces the docking, it is a blaring decree to take hold or be left sputtering for air.

She has never seen the ferry terminus at Port aux Basques except with fog licking its barren rock, its clusters of houses some rarefied spectrum. Who would paint a house turquoise but someone fraught with hope? Or that fog-burning yellow?

She drives off the boat with a resolve that hasn’t penetrated her skin in years. The place names up the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland are fuel to the homecoming — Steady Brook, Bonne Bay, Port au Choix, Bide Arm.

Begin again at the beginning. Demarcate the past.

She grew up in a place called Conche, on the northeastern edge of the peninsula. Then it had six hundred people. Now there’s half that number. The closest of the three Parks Canada sites included in her new job — the Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows — is more than a hundred kilometres farther north. The others — the Basque site at Red Bay and the Maritime Archaic Indian site in L’Anse Amour — are both in southern Labrador, farther away still. A safe enough distance between her past and her present.

Yet she decides she must first set herself down in Conche and dutifully impose herself on her relatives. Otherwise, once they get wind of her return, it will only confirm her status as a thoughtless prodigal. In her twenty years away she’s lost the Newfoundland trait of arriving at the home of relatives unannounced, expecting food and lodging.

Instead, she’s emailed ahead to a nearby b & b, and it’s there she turns up, at the end of a long day’s drive from Port aux Basques.

Her name is a dead giveaway, of course, and she has to own up to being related to the Carews who live in Conche. And once Isabel, the owner of the b & b, has figured where to put her on the Carew family tree, she feels it necessary to offer an excuse for choosing her establishment over the home of a relative. ‘My sister moved away, and Aunt Bertha is not getting any younger.’

‘She’s not well, certainly, not since the cancer.’ Shannon’s inadequacies as a blood relative are suddenly glaringly apparent.

‘Of course,’ is what she manages.

‘Her girls are after her to go to the Home in St. Anthony, but she says no, not as long as she can cope by herself. She’s been going downhill since Billy died.’

That would be Shannon’s Uncle Bill, Bertha’s husband. She knows that much, that he died, three years ago. She still sends and receives Christmas cards, if sporadically.

‘They were very close.’

‘They was so, too.’

Isabel seems to have bonded with her despite any qualms she might have. Shannon feels redeemed.

Her tiredness proves a tenable excuse to take to her room for the night. What she wants is a shower and a bed. She escapes the offer to join Isabel later for tea. There’s a need to quit her company while she is ahead. After the shower and completion of her nightly rituals, she props herself up in bed with a pen and notebook. Her goal is to make a list of relatives. Some will have died, and no doubt there’s a batch of youngsters to be added to the list, but she will at least have the congenital core straight as possible in her mind.

There are deplorable gaps in her memory, but this Shannon conveniently attributes to fatigue. She slithers down between the sheets, her dread of the day ahead only partially dulled. Her dreams are of frightful meetings with nameless, but vaguely familiar, relations.

She wakes too early. Not managing to get all the much-needed sleep. The incomplete list of relatives rests on the bedside table, tangible proof of her ragged connection to her past.

What Shannon has is a roster of relatives whom, as ashamed as she is to admit it, she cannot call by name. Some of the younger ones will have moved away, to Alberta mostly, it can be assumed, but there remain a number, generally advanced in age, and in various states of health. Of them, only with Aunt Bertha, her mother’s much older and only sister, has she maintained contact.

When her mother was alive, Shannon could count on her to keep her up to date, but a dozen years is a long time to be getting only a few lines scratched below Season’s Greetings.

Breakfast for her usually doesn’t extend much beyond coffee, but she yields to Isabel’s expectations and agrees to toast, a poached egg and bacon. Something to last her into the day, given she doesn’t know what the day will bring. ‘Light on the butter,’ she says.

‘Bertha will be surprised to see you,’ Isabel calls out from behind the kitchen counter. It’s as subtle as she is capable of making it. It does at least channel Shannon into a possible starting point for when she actually arrives in Conche.

‘I’m thinking it’s a bit early to be barging in on anybody.’

Isabel turns to her with a smile that suggests she sees her as the ‘mainlander’ she has been the past twenty years.

By the time she finishes eating it is still not clear to Isabel, who is now sitting across from her with a cup of tea, how her day will unfold. Isabel’s rural sensors have detected a need for action.

‘Would you like me to call her, dear, to let her know you’re coming?’ Shannon is quite capable of doing that herself, of course, and to have Isabel do it would only acknowledge her self-doubt. Yet, the proposal spreads over Shannon like a mild sedative. She’s sure that once she is past the hump of that initial encounter, the day will be much simpler. ‘That would be good of you, Isabel. If you don’t mind. If she’s not well, then perhaps a more familiar voice would be better.’

Isabel has risen to her feet and is on her way to the phone before Shannon finishes. Shannon takes to the washroom to brush her teeth and fix her hair, thinking it best if she keeps up the momentum she has now inherited. When she shows up again in the kitchen she’s in a rain- and wind-proof jacket, a daypack hanging on her shoulder. She’s ready to head off.

‘She remembers you, dear, well enough. I told her not to go to any trouble. But you know Bertha, she likes to be good to people. She’s gone off now to make a few tea buns.’

Perhaps the extended breakfast was not such a good idea. Nevertheless, Shannon is set now, and soon out the door, with one final piece of advice from Isabel. ‘Bertha’s hard of hearing. But don’t let on you know that.’

Conche, Shannon admits, is a strikingly beautiful place. She gave no credit to its scenery when she was growing up there. What teenager pays attention to where she lives, except to wish it were someplace different? Only after she moved away did she realize what she’d left behind.

For three centuries Conche was part of the French Shore, a portion of the Newfoundland coast where the French held fishing rights. Every summer ships loaded with cod fishermen from Brittany and Normandy sailed into the harbour. In the middle of the 1800s the Irish turned up, too, settled in and scraped a living from the ocean under the noses of the French, their faith in God and St. Patrick their dubious protection.

Whenever Shannon summons up her childhood, it is invariably with a sense of the staggering presence of religion in the place. As she drives into Conche the first building to seize her attention is the Catholic church. She often thinks it was the Church as much as anything she was escaping when she left.

Her relatives could never understand or forgive her suspicions about the Church. Especially her maternal grandmother, who immersed herself in Catholicism. Her life was her family and the Church, in importance the two often in the reverse order. The same couldn’t be said of her grandfather, whose faith, she suspects, was never as strong as his weekly piety made it appear. She never knew him to miss Mass on a Sunday, except if he was away to the Labrador fishery, or for the months he spent in the hospital in St. Anthony when he was dying.

She grew up in spite of the Church, perhaps, then grew beyond it. Except for funerals and weddings, she hasn’t darkened the doorway of a church since she left. Yet the primacy of religion in her youth comes rushing back the minute she enters Aunt Bertha’s house. A framed picture of the Virgin Mary hangs in the back porch, and below it a mirrored crucifix.

A door leads from the back porch into the kitchen. It’s an older house, built by Uncle Bill in the late forties, she would guess, after he and Aunt Bertha were married, once he came back home from his time in the navy.

The house is two-storey, a variation on a saltbox, square and simple. She remembers it as being immaculate, rightfully enough.

Aunt Bertha is still house-proud, even if she is no longer as able a housekeeper. Shannon knocks at the door and opens it at the same time. Aunt Bertha rises from the kitchen table to meet her. She must be over 80, a mite of a woman in height, though she has not gone thin as women of such an age are inclined to do. She’s not lost the squareness of her build, her breasts and stomach of near equal extension. She was always a solid woman. Shannon’s mother, in an uncharacteristically candid moment, once said that she had to be built like a concrete block to hold her own against Billy’s temper.

Shannon remembers her trying to compensate for her height by wearing shoes with a bit of a heel. Those days are past. She shuffles toward her in home-knit slippers. The smile that spreads across her face is only slightly reticent, despite the fact that she hasn’t seen Shannon in so long.

‘God bless ya, my love,’ she says. ‘God bless ya.’

Bertha’s embrace is brief and somewhat spiritless, but that is due more to her health than the length of time that has passed since Shannon’s last visit. The touch of Bertha’s cheek against her own causes Shannon to stiffen slightly. The skin is loose and chilled, and there’s a faint sour smell, an indication that Bertha’s age is catching up with her ability to take care of herself.

‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ Shannon says.

She has changed, of course. In any case, Bertha is indifferent to such comments, except that this one leads, conveniently enough, to the state of her health. It’s the natural starting point of their conversation, and it settles Shannon comfortably into place at the other side of the kitchen table.

‘Since Billy passed on I haven’t been meself. That’s what they tells me anyway. I’m not too far gone, I s’pose, thank the Lord. It’s not yer mind you got to worry about, is it, maid? If you goes in the head, then you don’t know the difference anyway. It’s the rest of you you got to live wit’. Me stomach’s been awful queer the past few months, and I half thinks the darn ol’ cancer is back. They said they got it all the first time, but you never knows wit’ that stuff, do ya? I haven’t told me doctor. I haven’t got the strength to go through another operation. If the good Lord wants me, He can take me.’

Which is an admirable attitude, although Shannon thinks better than to acknowledge the fact. ‘That’s hardly like you, Aunt Bertha.’

All that’s needed is a few words to lead her on. Shannon gets the full account of her condition, or as much as Bertha is able to keep straight in her mind. As she runs out of narrative, the timer on the stove buzzes, signalling a natural intermission. Shannon takes on the task of retrieving the buns from the oven, as well as steeping the tea, and the pouring of it into the pair of china mugs that Bertha has previously placed on the table.

‘I can manage, you know,’ Bertha says, ‘but I’ll take a hand when it’s offered.’

Shannon’s busyness is taking the dread out of her entry back into the fold. She had anticipated something much more awkward, more directed toward her and what she has been doing the last dozen years. There’s no escaping some of it.

‘You’re not married?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Good for you. Do what you wants. Marriage is not for everyone, is it?’ Coming from Aunt Bertha, it’s a surprise, a relief. ‘Tiffany had her man — if you can call ’en that — and then had to get rid of ’en.’

Where Tiffany is positioned on the family tree Shannon is not quite sure. She presumes Tiffany is a granddaughter.

‘Not before she born three of the sweetest little boys you ever laid eyes on. Lucky thing they is in Grand Prairie, I say. She’d never make any life for them around here. Her mother does what she can for her, and that’s not easy either, wit’ her arthritis.’

That would be Gail. Or Beverly.

‘I misses her. She was such a good help to me, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Fred had no work once the plant cut back. They all goes where the grandchildren is. I s’pose you can’t blame ’em. Gail thinks the world of them boys.’

‘And where’s Beverly now?’

‘Still in St. John’s. She haven’t moved. She retired from the job she had wit’ the government. I never sees her much. She comes home once a summer, that’s about all. It’s a long way to drive, maid. I could go live wit’ her and Reg, but they got the dogs, you know, and I got no friends in St. John’s. Or St. Anthony, either, except Cy’s oldest is there. As long as I can do the few things I needs to do for meself.’

‘You’re happy enough.’ It’s lame, but it’s what Shannon can manage and still sound as if she has followed the trail of relatives laid in front of her.

‘As happy as the Lord needs me to be, I s’pose.’ At that she blesses herself and nods her head in affirmation of her lot in life.

Tea buns at mid-morning needs a major readjustment of the dietary ethos that took hold during all those years in BC. There’s no disappointing Aunt Bertha, however, and with dabs of butter melting over the opened buns, and a touch of bakeapple jam, it doesn’t take much for Shannon to give in. Aunt Bertha has always been known for her way with a tea bun. Shannon thinks of it as a perfect homecoming ritual.

She has a second one with a second cup of tea and her Aunt Bertha is charmed.

Shannon works at trying to settle herself even more, for there is more family business at hand. It is useless to try to avoid it, for she knows it will only surface behind her back once people know she was in the place.

She decides she would rather pre-empt the gnarly speculation that is bound to fill the telephone lines.

‘And what is Jerome up to these days?’

Her directness confuses Aunt Bertha, even though she tried covering the question with an indifferent tone of voice.

Bertha starts to raise her teacup, but puts it back onto the saucer. ‘I hardly ever sees ’en, to tell the truth.’

‘Did you wonder about Mom? Did you wonder what was going through her mind when she married him?’

It’s out of the blue. It’s not that Shannon wants to be unkind, but something tells her it would be no better if she tried working her way around the questions. They came blundering back as soon as she was in sight of Conche.

‘Your mother ...’ Bertha sits, searching for words.

Shannon knows she should feel like a shit. But doesn’t. She figures it takes someone who feels less sorry for herself to feel like a shit.

‘Your mother didn’t have it easy,’ Bertha says.

Shannon has heard it before, anticipates what’s next.

‘She was left with the two of you after your father died. No insurance to speak of. Not enough education. You knows that yourself. She had her hours in the plant, like they all did.’

‘So Jerome comes along ...’

‘He didn’t just come along, maid. He was here all the time.’

Shannon won’t say anything else. She knows it’s ungodly selfish of her to be dragging Bertha into it. She also knows Bertha is the only one she is willing to talk to about it.

Jerome, as long imbedded in Shannon’s mind, is the prick of a man who set his sights on her mother and dragged her into a marriage that turned out to be hell for her, and hell for her two daughters. Contrary to what it now must seem to Bertha, Shannon has dealt with it. Otherwise, she knows she would have never come back to Newfoundland, and certainly not to Conche. Dealt with it as far as she has ever been able to deal with it, given that she hasn’t set foot in the place since her mother’s funeral. Of course, there are questions. There are always questions.

Shannon just wants to breathe the air of Conche. To think herself as deserving as the next person of filling her lungs with it. Like the teenager she was when she left. Sucking in the first draw of a cigarette on a Friday night, after all day determined to never smoke again.

she spends a couple of hours in the afternoon walking about, chatting with people in a convenience store, rediscovering a few relatives. Bertha insisted that she come back for supper, which she agreed to do, partly to make up for her behaviour, partly because she is wondering if there’s not something more Bertha might be telling her.

The house where Shannon grew up is there. She feels little attachment. It now has insipid pastel vinyl siding, and a new side porch. The house is set back from the main road. The path leading to it is the path that defined her teenage years. It was a path she took at the end of high school and never truly set foot to again.

She assumes Jerome and his wife are inside. Jerome’s ‘new woman,’ as they used to say. The woman who set up shop less than a year after Shannon’s mother passed away. Shannon knows nothing about her, other than she was from somewhere in Labrador. Nor does she wish to know anything. When her mother died the house was there as her mother left it, and anything that should have been passed on to Shannon or her sister Patti was there as well.

Her mother’s will, in all its simplicity, said everything was to go to Jerome. Whether the will was made under pressure from him, or whether her mother didn’t have the strength of mind to realize what interest Patti and Shannon had in anything belonging to her, Shannon could never be certain. And at the time didn’t much care. She had no wish to contest the will. What little the house was worth would have been soaked up in lawyer’s fees. Shannon had memories of her mother that didn’t include Jerome, and a few pictures, and that was what she wanted. A few months before her mother died — and, Shannon likes to think, unknown to Jerome — her mother had given her the wedding ring from her marriage to Shannon’s father. To Patti she gave the engagement ring. They had been bought in 1967 in Corner Brook as an interlocking pair.

There were times in recent years when Shannon wished she had a few things she valued — a Royal Albert plate that had belonged to her mother’s own mother, a jewellery box, a certain few Christmas ornaments. When she again saw her sister, some years after the funeral, Shannon discovered she felt the same, that there were some things more rightfully theirs, things they didn’t know the whereabouts of anymore. Eventually, Shannon wrote Jerome and asked for them. The letter was never answered.

Which led her to think he doesn’t have them anymore, or that neither he nor his wife have any wish to give them up. Or give in to a request of Shannon’s, given he knows how much she detests him. She takes it for an assertion of control over her that he never had when she was growing up. Her walk about Conche is not without its positives. She revisits some of the places she would go to as a teenager to work her way through what was happening at home. They are oddly very much the same, not that nature’s formations shouldn’t be after twenty years. In the face of how much she has changed, she expected a difference. There is a narrow channel between some shoreline rock that hid her, where she studied for final exams, where Jeffery Walsh had most of what he wanted, but not all. It was the retreat, if only ever for a few months of the year, for mostly the shoreline was lashed with freezing cold wind and drifted in with snow. When she thinks of Conche, it is not the natural beauty she remembers, but the endless housebound months. What happy memories there are come from summer bonfires, the few temperate days of autumn. When she went to the Caribbean for the first time, for the inevitable beach holiday in her mid-twenties, what she noticed immediately was how teenagers growing up there live most of their lives outside the house. It struck her as entirely liberating.

Her own teenage years led her, after the ride of university, to seek a job with Parks Canada. It dropped her into the great, endless outdoors. Over time, she became somewhat more domesticated, and created within the confines of the various apartments she rented quite attractive and liveable space. But there remains the untempered urge to get out from under anything that entangles her for long.

When she dwells on her teenage years now, she realizes it is something of a miracle that she came through them without getting pregnant. It is one of the great ironies of her life. Now, when she feels the urge to have a child, the man of the hour is not to be found.

When she was sixteen, not only were they to be found, but she could hardly get rid of them fast enough. They had picked up the scent of sex, amplified by the towering guilt emanating from the Catholic Church. She had a steady stream of boyfriends over the last two years of high school, though none for very long. Not that she was anything but poised and level-headed through it all.

She was an honours student, bound for university, and, unlike most girls in her class, had set a direction for herself — to get out of Conche the minute she graduated. Still, she realizes now the pattern of relationships must have generated a reputation of sorts. She hardly thought about it at the time, nor truly cared. There was not the remotest chance of a long-term commitment, and they all knew it. They all knew she would have them forgotten as soon as she was free of Conche. And indeed they have been obliterated from her memory, except for the first, of course, and the intermittent awkwardness of a succeeding few.

Including Jeffrey Walsh, whose penis she remembers as never being able to make up its mind what it wanted to be doing. Between the wedge of rock, on succeeding summer nights, she discovered that bravado and actual performance don’t necessarily bear a close relationship, that the male can be as intimidated as hell by a female with greater expectations than his own. Jeffrey eventually rose up from the intimacies, so to speak, with his self-respect intact, but it was only with considerable patience on her part. She suspected his version of them was somewhat different from her own.

She even suspected him of being eager to break off the relationship so he could enhance a version of it for his friends and not feel guilty. It was her first, and lasting, demonstration of male self-absorption.

A lesson learned and carried on to university, though she had less cause to make use of it. By that time she had tamed considerably. Her first roommate in residence, also a girl from the outports, but with considerably more common sense, led her to being more selective in her dating practices, and led her to the student clinic and the pill. Oddly enough, taking the pill coincided with diminished sexual activity, forcing her to the realization that her outport high school view of the world was rather all too perverse.

The university years in St. John’s worked a miracle. After some initial floundering, she fell into courses which began to unleash her thinking. She gravitated eventually toward Cultural Geography and Ecology. It was something more than job training, but as it happened Parks Canada and her honours undergrad degree proved a practical and useful fit. During her first posting in the North she was met head-on by a crisis involving the local Aboriginal community over hunting rights. She was at the bottom in the management and decision-making hierarchy, but her input turned out to be constructive, and, in the long run, avoided a nasty confrontation. Word of it must have found its way to the bureaucracy in Ottawa, for within a year she was offered a second posting, this time on Baffin Island, with significantly more responsibilities.

On Baffin she came to terms with what she was all about. It was an interval of what she liked to think of as substantive personal release. Her life in Newfoundland was a distant, but vivid, memory. Her friends were all from somewhere else; none of them had ever set foot in any part of the country east of Montreal. She dragged her closest friend, Marta, into the dregs of her youth, until she concluded Marta must have been thoroughly sick of hearing about it. Marta pressed her for the stories, and drove Shannon to tears half the time. It must have been Marta’s Scandinavian penchant for the dark recesses of the soul. Whatever it was, it was therapeutic.

And then they would laugh and laugh, and get steadily drunker on tequila. It was Marta who went with her to Jamaica. It was with Marta she shared that first beach holiday, and with whom she shared their beach-roaming Rodney for a night.

When all was said and done, and she and Marta went in different directions — Marta back to Norway one year and Shannon on to British Columbia the next — she was left thinking she’d forged a whole new take on herself and what the years ahead might bring. She and Marta still keep in touch, and she was, in fact, the first person Shannon told about the new job. Marta has promised to come to Newfoundland, especially since the job encompasses the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows. Marta has promised to come and bring her husband and their threeyear- old.

Shannon is pleased Marta managed to get what she wanted. The job and the husband and the kid. She’s entirely happy for her and has told her so. And Marta, she knows, is entirely hoping the new job works out for her.

It was marta who shored her up when, on long cold Arctic evenings together, certain realities struck their deepest. It was she who kept telling Shannon that she was very good at what she did, that she had a decisive level of comfort with Aboriginal cultures, a durability in the face of tough situations.

In other regards she couldn’t boast equal success. When she left the Arctic behind, post-Marta, Shannon fell into a number of relationships, all, ultimately, to no end.

The successful relationships were with unmarried women of her own inexplicit age. As always, she had proven to be a listener, an empathetic friend. She would sincerely miss a number of them. She called them her sea-kayaking sisters, for that indeed is how they spent a good deal of their time together.

She purposely sold her kayak in preparation for leaving British Columbia; a fresh start her intent, unencumbered by defining paraphernalia. Perhaps take on an indigenous activity. Snowshoeing. Something to thrust her into the landscape. She wants to feel that she has parted ways with the rest of the country, that she is truly coming home. The parables have always been the most memorable aspect of her Catholic upbringing.

British columbia she never found to correlate particularly well with her take on the world, such as it is. She never thought bc entirely true to anything, except how it blends its multitudes of retirees with its furtive pot growers. It seems to her a place of huge secrets sunk among huge trees. All the while she was there she longed for a lengthy vista, but rarely got one, except over salt water.

She wanted the place to come clean. She was speaking personally of course, perverted by her liaison of the two years just past. His name was Kim. Like his name, never quite real. The name Kim, like Jamie or Crispin, always struck her as rather lame, never quite right for a man. It sounds good on a curly headed tyke, but on a six-foot-two male it never measured up. And couldn’t even be shortened to something with some heft.

Of course, in bc such insight is meaningless, given its population mix, even though the Kim in question is thoroughly Caucasian. He was raised in Prince Rupert, the son of a logger. A no more white, wholly British Columbian male is likely to be found. He smelled of Douglas fir.

He is a strapping brute of a Kim, and in the shower, water falling from his pecs and suds streaming to the forest between his legs, his name seemed irrelevant. She could lose herself in that charmer, and often did. In the broad sweep of the bed, it was the same. The morning following, invariably a different matter. Even on weekends Kim liked to be up and away. Doing something. While she would have been content to lie there reading, her head propped against his chest, Kim was wanting out of the bed and in motion. She found that to be a disadvantage of bc’s subtropical climate. It rarely gave cause to hunker down, surrendering to a snowstorm. It lacked weather extremes of most sorts, and although it had more than its fair share of rain, it was generally warm rain, and Kim, she sensed, relished the way wet clothes outlined his physique.

Was there conceit at play? Undoubtedly. A reasonable amount of conceit she has no problem with, especially when it is enveloped in such pronounced physical attributes. Unfortunately, Kim’s conceit weighed heavier than most.

He was 35, somewhat younger than his housemate. Her house, his mate. It was at her invitation that he took up residence, and therefore she had no cause to resent it when she left for work in the morning and he was sitting on the front steps finishing his coffee, in anticipation of where his day would bring him. He had a job — a tour guide for a private outfit in Port Alberni — but it was seasonal, which meant he had months of lingering within daily reach of her place. Doing what was never entirely clear, so she gave up pretending to be interested. Without exception though he was back in the nest by dark, as food was about to go on the table.

Theirs was a traditional arrangement. He provided the sex, she provided the food. She was confident he wasn’t two-timing her, for he hardly spent a night away in the off-season. Life was reasonably good, and they talked of making it permanent.

The idea of a husband and two kids — she thought two was a reasonable number to fit in during her remaining fertile years — sounded appealing. Not desperately appealing, for she is never desperate about anything. In any case, it never found its way beyond the talk stage. And the talk stage came to an abrupt end the night, more than a year and a half into the relationship, when he revealed he was already a father. To a four-year-old in Port Alberni.

Her reaction: a year and a goddamn half into the relationship.

‘What the hell are you? An ingrate who thinks I would be indifferent to the fact that the man I was expecting to be the father of my children has spawned one already? As if it were a blip in your past that has nothing to do with me? Is that the goddamn world you live in?’

‘Just hold on a minute —’

‘As if being a father is something you did to pass the goddamn time of day?’

‘I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to mess up our relationship.’

‘Right.’

‘It’s the truth. I wanted to give it a chance to ... mature.’

‘And today it finally matured. How fuckin’ reassuring.’

‘Don’t swear at me. It doesn’t become you.’

‘It doesn’t fucking become me. Really?’

‘Shannon —’

‘KIM!’

She calmed down after that. Screaming his suck of a name seemed to vent all she needed to vent.

It turned out he’d been paying weekly visits to Port Alberni, spending the day with the kid, returning in time to fill his unconscionable gut with whatever she had been toiling over in the kitchen. Occasionally he did stop along the way and purchase a bottle of wine to do his bit for the meal. How bloody good of him.

Nothing was the same after that. She gave him credit (as she said after to her female friends — a fraction of the credit he dared to think he deserved) for trying to make it up to her. He set more than a passing foot in the kitchen. It didn’t become a logger’s son from Prince Rupert. Two months later he was gone permanently. Word had it he eventually moved in with the mother of his child. Perhaps, in the end, it all led to something worthwhile, Shannon reasoned. Perhaps the kid was better off with a live-at-home dad. Cheer up, Shannon, was the word from the sea-kayaking sisters. It wasn’t meant to be.

Strange what truths arise as one paddles the open ocean. Strange what devastatingly accurate analyses of interpersonal relationships emerge in the face of salt-sea air. She’d had her fill of Kim, as she bluntly added, and it was time to move on. Eight thousand kilometres on, as it turned out.

She looked on the bright side. If Kim hadn’t screwed up, she would never have given more than the usual passing attention to job vacancies. By that time she had been Kim-less for only a few months, but she swore, as the flakiest of the sisters liked to say, she had ‘centred’ herself again, had re-established ‘an equilibrium at the core.’ She was just goddamn ready to move on.

NONOSA

The land lured him, secured him.

It was the slope of the hills in the distance, how it fell together, the belly and thighs of a pregnant woman. It was memory of Démas. There was time without the lure of land — his people told of such a time — but Nonosa had no mind for it. Such headfuls did not feed his people. Broodings did not answer his question — what spread itself beyond those hills?

Frost still stiffened the moss underfoot, tufts of snow lay everywhere but on the open rock. Bare ice-worn rock, no noiseless trek as in summer, his skin boots brushing and scraping a crust. Ready game he was. Though Démas was near birthing and the sun had hardly loosened the earth, Nonosa’s curiosity had run too deep for him to stop any longer at the camp. Nothing could keep him from setting off at the first break of spring. Gone in the direction of the ascending sun, back with the story of what new the land held for his clan. Even if winter had been good, always there was the summons of something more.

Once, what he found so gladdened his heart that the three days of his journey back he pressed to two.

‘Caribou in numbers to numb your eyes!’ Conceit it was to some. Old men rubbed their hands in tight circles about their chests. Women laughed at his gestures to the night sky. It bred a fire-story as mesmerizing as any ever told to them.

‘Only you,’ Démas murmured and wrapped herself in him at every word. His heart swelled even more.

He curved his outstretched hands, held them apart. They twitched as if in the air between them he were about to grasp a dripping hunk of meat.

Now, what sights to fill his eyes? Nonosa quit his canoe. His muscles spurred a lissome, heedless stride. Only a bare notion of what lay underfoot, enough to skim past bog ice and not break through. He was a relentless shank of a man, sinew taut beneath the covers of bear and caribou. Mantle hood bunched about the back of his neck, thin-worn skin cap loose about his mane of hair, its chin strap hanging.

In his head rumbled the words, their doubts bare. ‘Follow the scrapings. Mark where they veer and scatter.’

The anticipation was too much for such rigour. Over rocks he ran, past scrub thickets, with joy as plain as daylight, unclogging his head of winter.

‘Eager, Nonosa! So big in yourself!’

It cut his stride. He stumbled and pitched.

Still, Nonosa was the one to laugh, in the face of the foolish trickster. ‘And shameless, too, Nonosa.’

Now the trickster laughed. Nonosa heard it through the scrawny fir and shook his head. He pressed on, reclaimed his stride, as wilful as before.

Over the scruff tearing at his skin boots, twigs stabbing at the soles of his feet. Had he more mind, less heart, he would have skirted the worst of it. No stopping now to amend his ways.

A fresh spring wind blew about him, too fine for laughter. Cooled the sweat on his face. Nonosa hauled away his skin cap, let the wind whisk the hair matted to his forehead.

Mantle and leggings fur clung to him, sweaty, vexing. Yet he bounded up the bare knob of the hill. So much will left in him yet.

It was as if Démas were giving birth at that very moment.

What lay before his eyes! He stood upright, leaned against the shaft of his spear, out of breath. Sensed the moment the mass of land had heaved and split, disappeared and reappeared for his forerunners. Thunderclouds encasing it, weighing it down, breaking it to pieces, casting it adrift. Water roaring against the land, the land rearing, only to fall against itself.

He had hardly believed.

His doubt, the fault of time? He needed this breadth of rock before him, snatching itself through time to water. Water with only the palest edge of shore, far, far beyond it.

That in one direction, and in the other — nothing. Endless water, as endless as ever was!

Even on such a clear day, even when he squinted his eyes again and again. Could water stretch so far? What would hold the fish? In the stories of his people there was such talk, of countless seasons past when such a place was known.

Laughed at the sight of it he did, in hope the trickster would hear him. No voice, no wind. No one to believe in it but him.

He loomed above the crest of the hill. He slowly trod down it toward the water. All the while his head raced with the tale he would tell, though his footsteps were fitful, in dread of reaching the point where he could step no farther.

He stood on rocks, water swirling to kiss his skin boots. Before him the wild span of water. He bent down, touched it with caution, put the wet finger to his lips. His mouth twisted ruefully.

Nonosa took the full measure of his breath and struck both hands against his chest. The meeting place, water’s ceaseless breath on rock, drawing in and heaving out, calling in rhythms for which there was no measure.

At the close of daylight he came to the land’s end. Never again could he set out on a spring journey toward the sun.

on nonosa’s return a great fire was built. Impatient young bucks of men — among them his brother, Tuanon — hauled hides from a storehouse and spread them around the fire. If they were not dry, if they had no heat, the aged would be forever grunting, breaking the spell of the stories with their coughs and farts, with mutterings about what the chill was doing to their bones. With the steam gone from the fur, they shuffled to their places, smiling faintly. The oldest, Coshee, nodded. The evening could begin.

The rest of the clan gathered, mindful not to keep a distance from the old ones. The children flung sticks into the fire as they would spears. Then curled among their mothers and stared at the fire, eyeing their sticks, watching to see whose would be the one to last the longest. Only Démas sat apart from the others. Worried what they would think of her husband.

Nonosa rose to his feet before them, not without thought that the longer his silence the more they would hold to his words.

This night his thankfulness rang but briefly into the sky. ‘You are the Spirits and we are the people. You are the Spirits and we are forever thankful.’

His haste brought the disapproving eyes of the old ones.

Nonosa found more words. ‘The Spirits fill the land, fill rock, fill trees. The Spirits are the animals that feed us, the Spirits are the fish that fill ... seas.’

A good word for what he had seen. He had been the first to set eyes on it. To him fell the choice of what to name it.

‘Seas? What are you saying, Nonosa?’

‘Water so far it has no end.’

Laughter broke among the old ones. Licence to all the others, loudest the heedless children.

Except for the embarrassed turn of Démas’s lips, it was of no consequence to him.

‘Seas.’ The word was raw, unyielding. He said it again. ‘Seas.’ It quelled some of the laughter.

‘There was another name.’ Coshee looked around him. Mothers buried the blather of their children in their chests. ‘I have forgotten it. Somewhere past was such a place.’

‘Seas?’

‘We will take your name. It is as good as any.’

The story was his. From the sack he took his treasure, wrapped in moss and tender young fir boughs. Wound precisely, reverently with strips of hide. He loosened the strips gently with his teeth. Held it high for them all to see. ‘Sea-fish.’

Their eyes narrowed. No slender salmon or trout. Thick in its fore half, scraggly thin behind. Big eyes and a big fish mouth with a hanging stringy bit beneath the jaw. Blotchy brown except white along the gut.

A graceless fish, bereft of any charm.

But cooked it revealed its charms. A bowl of it was passed around. They peered and poked at it and pronounced it the tastiest fish to pass their lips. Flesh so soft, white as snow?

Nonosa enticed, encircled his people, wrapped them in his stories. Charmed away their doubts with words — cod-fish, sea-bird, sea-beast! Stirred words about in the wake of winter. The outright vow of a fresh kill warmed away the last lingering days of frost. Drew them from their dwelling place. They gave up their comforts for better days ahead. For seasons yet to show their barren ways.

‘What good is resting here, if there is a journey to be made? What we do not know, do we not long to know?’

‘You make your way with words, Nonosa.’

His people did the same. They followed Nonosa and his words all the way to the sea.

That night nonosa curled into the back of Démas, his hand stroking the taut bulge of her belly. They chuckled at the sudden pokes beneath the belly skin. A hand or elbow, perhaps a knee. Nonosa smothered his laughter in her hair. Perhaps a little cock.

Démas clenched Nonosa’s own cock. Surprised him, sharpened his glee. Stroked the swollen head to a mad and frenzied eagerness. Nonosa moaned at the throbbing bliss of it, and thrust and thrust wildly in the grip of her. He erupted, and sagged with unrelenting joy.

Within the barest sight of the sea, Démas felt the baby drop. Nonosa helped her from the canoe. Along the riverbank, they kept a pace as slow as that of Teraset, the midwife. His people never let childbirth stop what needed to be done. Clansmen had told him rough travel was good for a pregnant woman, helped clear the passage for the infant.

Démas grimaced, gripped his shoulders with both hands, her whole weight falling into him. Nonosa sank under her, straining to keep her upright.

The women came running. Scowled at Nonosa, as if he had been the reason for it. Teraset barked for shelter for his desperate wife. Nonosa summoned Tuanon to their floating raft of framing poles. Found a patch of thick moss and circled it with poles, bound their tops together. Hastily covered it with hides.

Nonosa claimed the softest of the hides and cast it inside, then quickly built a fire.

‘Démas.’ He clenched her hands and raised her to her feet. Walked her to the shelter, his eyes pressed into hers, strained and narrowed. ‘A child blessed by the Spirits. Your pain will pass.’

It was untrue. For with each surge Démas grew weaker. Outside the shelter Nonosa cringed at her deep-throated cries.

Three women surrounded Démas. They tied and tucked her hide robe above her rigid belly, strapped thicker leggings to just above her knees. They tied her unruly hair from her face, draped her arms about the necks of two of them to keep her upright. Her hands tightened into theirs, fell slack at the end of each spasm.

Teraset knelt before her, massaging her cold, naked thighs to keep away the cramps, all the time chanting, luring the child out. From time to time she would probe between Démas’s legs, then shake her head. Then quickly nudge the legs apart.

Sweat streaked Démas’s face. Rivulets of sweat reddened by ochre marked her neck. One of the women snatched a handful of moss and wiped her brow, then wiped blood seeping down her legs. The moss cast a shiver through the pregnant woman. For the moment it passed, but returned, a near-violent trembling.

Her helpers could hold her weight no longer, and let her slouch to the patch of hide. She squatted, both women kneeling behind her. They leaned her backwards while Teraset ran her hands to all parts of her belly. The midwife kept returning to a single spot, pressed her palm flat against it.

The contractions grew stronger, barely a pause between them. Démas — sodden, chilled, drained of strength — moaned and moaned louder.

Nonosa slipped inside the shelter, squatted nearby, both hands clutching a stick for balance, his heart stricken by what he glimpsed. His wife fell back on the hide in exhaustion. One woman sat under and behind her, Démas’s head and shoulders in her lap. The other knelt to the side, gripped a hand. Joined loudly in Teraset’s chant, her voice ringing above it all.

It was the next day before the child showed itself.

A tiny hand oozed out of the birth passage.

The fingers separated. So slowly, so fragile and extraordinarily pure. The women stared, incredulous. Their silence thickened the shroud of fear covering Démas.

As tenuously as it appeared, the tiny hand withdrew.

Not long after, the crown of the child’s head emerged. In time, the sodden amalgam of its infant face. Teraset stroked the face with her thin, arthritic hand. She freed the air passages of their clogging slime. The child filled its lungs with crisp and frosted air. The surprise of it, the elation of it, thrust the infant out.

Into the world came a girl, crimson with blood. Teraset tied her cord with sinew. The child fought for her life and lived, by the quick sense of the women who enveloped her and by the furs Nonosa had kept warm by the fire.

Her cry proclaimed a stalwart creature, soundly formed, blessed with an ardent will.

The women who surrounded Démas chanted now the mother’s song. But the blood that flowed with the afterbirth did not stop. The women soaked it with moss, forced together her legs. The birth had made of Démas a wretched mortal. The force of her life drained away. ‘Démas.’ Nonosa called to her as the three women made way for her husband. ‘A flawless girl. What shall we name her?’

‘Shanaw,’ she said, for they had decided long ago.

Démas hadn’t the strength to open her eyes. Nonosa tried to warm her hands in his. They grew steadily colder.

Nonosa stared intently at her barren face and heard the thumping of his heart.

They took démas’s body to where a rock face met near-level ground. They cleared the ground as best they could, then wedged the body, coated with red ochre, against the rock, the head turned inward. Then encased the body with a thick shroud of moss. They gathered rocks to cover the moss, though only a few were of the boulder size they wished. They implored the Spirits to take her before vile creatures came near.

The clan lingered in silent petition. Then only Nonosa remained. Many times he returned to pile more rocks upon the grave, and to sit, then lie, entirely sore of heart.

What drew him away were the hunger cries of the little one. No mother among them with milk in her breasts. What was he to do?

‘Wait for the infant to die. Make a place with the mother for her child.’

‘Not so, Teraset! Tell me another way.’

Such boldness vexed the old ones, turned them sullen at the sight of him.

Nonosa hacked the hair from his head and burnt it, in homage to the Spirits.

It did no good.

Again and again, day and night, the little one cried herself to exhaustion. Her crying turned to frightful whimpers, and less and less was the courage that it bore. Nonosa melted snow, encouraged her to suck water from his finger. It prolonged the agony.

He would go in search of another clan. It was all the hope he had. Among the clan perhaps a nursing mother with milk for the child. He would walk the course of the river back to the camp. Follow a branch of the river north to where the Nookwashish should be.

‘The girl will die before you find them. Stay.’ Coshee was not one for patience, yet he could hardly deny Nonosa his grief. ‘Death we must abide.’

Nonosa refused to take his words for truth.

‘You know little of this world, Nonosa, and nothing of the next.’

‘It hurts no one for the child to live.’

‘All around us — Spirits angry at your taunting!’

‘I do not fear such Spirits!’

‘Banish you, we will! For the sake of every one of us.’

Nonosa ran off, holding the child to his chest. Clutching a spear and a pouch of firestones, taking no time to gather provisions. He would hunt and fish, stave off the cold, question the sky, find shelter before foul weather struck. He escaped the eyes of Tuanon, ran past other hunters, the scampering children, the huddling old ones. Not thinking of himself, thinking of his infant daughter.

Only once did he stop while still in sight of the smoke from their fires. He tucked the infant inside his mantle, against the fur and his own flesh. He strapped her blanket fur to his waist and ran on. He ran to nightfall.

He knew the place for him and the child to rest the night. When he reached it, weary, wet with perspiration, he found the moss beds and fire pits where his clan had stopped on their way to the sea. He made a fire, in hope the sway of his body with hers was what had calmed her hunger cries.

The fire took hold. Nonosa uncovered his infant. Laid her naked on the blanket of caribou fur, a sorrowful wrinkle of a child. A piteous mound amid the long, mottled hairs of brown and yellowed white.

She was alive. Barely so. Too weak to cry, a silenced slip of an infant. ‘Shanaw.’

He called to her over the crackle of the fire. She glistened with his sweat, and stirred, if only with the slightest motion, the fire steaming the sweat away. He touched water to her lips and saw them part for more. A faint, piteous cry, barely human.

Nonosa wrapped her in the fur and held her to within a breath of his face, the child unable to open her eyes. He chanted charmed words, faraway words, words chanted to him by a mother and father long dead.

‘Little one, cherished one, blood of mine, Spirits’ sign.’

This little one, this cherished one, this withered one — a sign? Why would Spirits loose such pain? Was he not mindful of the Spirits since his first kill as a boy? Ever knowing it was them who gave of their store, not he who took it.

Why would they take his child?

He seldom tramped back from the hunt without a kill. Was it not the pitch of his spear, the keenness of his eye, his cunning tricks to outsmart his prey? Was it only at the pleasure of the Spirits that he made such kills?

Such thoughts dared enter his head and bring him grief! When all around him others had no doubts. ‘You question too much, Nonosa.’ Always said of him. Without fail, yet they had come to praise his skill with the spear. Depend on his clever ways.

He was the doubter, the questioner. Now the widower, the nearchildless outcast.

He lay as near to the fire as was safe. Shanaw he held tight to him, bundled in the curve of his arm. He droned into the darkness and wished her sleep, all the while dreading she might not last the night.

The whispers of the wind, the trickster, were nowhere heard. The stillness fell around Nonosa with a fearsome gravity.

The break of morning revealed the land, shepherded the contours of the hills. Shanaw was still alive.

The hills brought the memory of the infant’s mother. The sun rose over them. In the rays of early morning, he found berries beneath the tufts of snow. Frosted red-berries left over winter. He burst their skins in his mouth, burst an icy tartness.

He dared not think the juice would feed the child. It might be poison to her tender stomach, might end what moments remained.

He crammed the fruit into his mouth.

He revived the fire and laid Shanaw near it. Promised her that before the day was gone, she would have her belly filled. He returned the child to her pouch against his chest and carried on. No prayer to the Spirits passed his lips. Alone, he would make good his promise, or see her die in the womb he had cast for her.

A warming sun filled the sky, glistened off the snow patches. A treasured day of spring.

Suddenly, he heard the trickster laugh. Nonosa embraced his swirling voice. ‘Bold one,’ he heard. ‘Bold in your love.’

He hesitated. His broken step witness to unspoken words.

Nonosa strode with a plan. He sought the familiar signs, the markings, the rubbings, the ways of the caribou. He knew them well enough, could spot the shrubs where caribou had stopped to feed and then passed on. He caught the scent of animals moving fast.

Animals intent on getting to their calving grounds to have their young in peace, far from the herd of males. Away from other birthing cows he came upon a mother and her newborn calf. A calf so new it could not stand on its legs, but fell to the ground each time, its mother licking it still, the calf seeking her teat.

Nonosa lurked in the scrub. His instinct was to grip his spear and fling it at the easy game. He dropped the spear. He slipped the child from inside his mantle, wrapped her in her blanket fur. Her newborn scent lay open to the air. Near lifeless now, a limp, unknowing stray venturing near a nursing mother.

The mother, stretched on her side, raised her head to catch the scent. She dared not run away, her calf not strong enough to follow. Her ears twitched, her nose caught a foreign scent. A hunter playing his hunting games.

Nonosa approached the caribou with low, light-footed strides. The mother suddenly dropped her head. She lay rigid, confused. A lifeless beast, not knowing how to guard her calf, in dread of what might happen next.

Nonosa lay a hand on her flank. Her bony leg flinched, the hoof reared in defence. Nonosa’s hand glided down the quarter — firm, faithful — and smoothed it to the ground. He held it there, knowing well it was her choice that it stay. He slowly withdrew his hand. When the leg did not heave, his fingers moved to the deep fur of her back.

His hand lay against the broad muscle, until the caribou knew the gentle weight of it, the steady measure of his intent. He stroked the spot and loudly hummed, his voice a firm and peaceful drone. It eased when he sensed a calm, rose again when she abruptly raised her head. She eyed her sleeping calf, then settled back.

When Nonosa felt her quiet, he moved the calf to a teat. In its halfsleep the calf carelessly mouthed the nipple. It slipped past the calf’s lips and out again, drips of milk left hanging there.

Nonosa withdrew one of his arms from his mantle. He loosened the infant from her nest and gently led her along the sleeve until her head emerged. Her ghastly features had sunk deeper into themselves. Just as it looked as if there might arise a meek and sorry cry, Nonosa brought her to the teat. Drips of milk fell across her lips.

Seeped into her mouth. Shanaw stirred enough to like the taste.

Her father led her lips to the teat and saw her face twitch faintly at the touch. Her lips settled around the teat. The infant began a weak, sluggish suck, enough to coat her mouth with milk.

Enough to fill her belly.

‘Nonosa! Cousin!’

At the edge of the calving grounds stood a hunter. Tall as Nonosa, thickset, hair hanging past the beaver fur that cloaked his shoulders. A half-circle of polished incisors traced the neckband of his mantle. A Nookwashish. Remesh by name.

‘What are you about, Nonosa?’

The caribou sprang up, tossed Nonosa, and Shanaw with him, backwards onto the moss.

Remesh’s spear pierced her chest before the beast’s four legs had found the ground. Long before she could nudge her calf in hope it might hold itself upright.

The spear felled the animal. Remesh rushed and cut its slender throat. With the struggling, bewildered calf he did the same. Remesh’s lips broadened to a smile, hardly less glaring than the teeth he bore about his neck.

‘Your clan moved again. I saw the deserted camp, the trail of you in the distance,’ he said, gutting the animals as he talked.

Nonosa told Remesh his story. From the pouch he revealed the head of the child, her milk-soaked face.

Remesh, arch-hunter of the Nookwashish, head man at every test of strength, saw no wisdom in it. ‘She will not live. She is too weak.’ Though he had no mind to view more than her face. ‘Milk of the caribou....’ He twisted his mouth.

‘Who among your women has milk for her?’

‘Biesta, the only one.’

Nonosa could hardly think it — Biesta, Démas’s sister. ‘We have a newborn son!’

More news to astonish him. ‘Biesta has taken to your marriage bed?’

‘Lerenn gave me no boy children who lived.’

Nonosa did not dwell on it. ‘We must hurry. Before the child dies.’

‘A girl nursed at the teat of a caribou? If she grows into a woman she will be a rangy, hairy one,’ Remesh declared, his amusement clear, as he took to gutting his game. ‘Now, Nonosa, you expect the breasts of Biesta?’

‘Are they not full? Is your son not growing strong like his father? One day he will want to wear a cord of polished teeth.’

Remesh, his hands red with blood, walked past Nonosa. He tramped off and cut two slender lengths of spruce. Crossed the legs of the carcasses, lashed them to the poles.

The two men set off.

Against his chest Nonosa felt Shanaw stir, felt the spit of milk mix with his sweat. In time another trickle. Nonosa lowered his head to sniff the air inside his mantle. Piss. A smile edged across his face. Remesh stopped to strip away his upper fur. He fixed the fur beneath the poles set atop his shoulders.

‘Sun on the bare chest. After winter, it does me good.’

At each shift of the poles, thick muscle swelled his shoulders. Sweat glistened across his back.

Remesh set a cruel pace. Tramped on without another stop until finally the poles were set to ground near his canoe. Nonosa groaned against his will, his shoulders chafed raw, the fur around them matted wet with blood.

The pair emerged along the path from the river, children scampering ahead of them. Sabbah, his aging aunt, the mother of Remesh, stood before Nonosa, dismayed at his squalidness, especially his senseless crop of hair.

Still, charmed she was to set her eyes on him. ‘You have come alone, Nonosa?’

With stiffened arms he drew Shanaw from her pouch. The infant lay in his hands, scrunched and naked. She quickly soured and expelled a piteous cry. Though a cry it was, for all of the Nookwashish to hear.

They stared in disbelief. His aunt sent a young girl scurrying to a lodge and back again with fresh, warm fur. She covered the child with it, scolding Nonosa all the while.

Nonosa looked about. His eyes fell on Biesta, a child in her arms. His head stilled in surprise, she the pure portrait of her sister. She stood in a winter dress of doeskin, patterned with antler beads, fringed with bright breast feathers. She did not draw near, though ears she had for his every word.

The camp fell silent at his story. And at its end their eyes turned to Biesta. Women gathered around her, one taking her child. She leaned against another, silently weeping for her sister.

The question of Shanaw remained. To Remesh they looked for their answer. The infant gave another cry, hardly to be heard.

There could be but one response. ‘What we have we share. The Kindred are one people.’

Sabbah gathered the infant from Nonosa and walked across the open ground. Biesta took the child in her arms. Kissed her amid her own tears. Quietly disappeared inside a lodge.

Remesh said, ‘There will come a day when a Kanwashish mother will do the same for one of us.’

But no one gave Remesh the attention he expected from his words. He strode off, calling loudly to a bevy of young hunters to help him hang and skin the caribou. The rest of the clan encircled Nonosa, to share in the loss of his cherished wife.

And in time, to ask of the Kanwashish. Of Coshee and his health. Of the other old ones.

‘None of them lost this winter, Nonosa. That is good. And your people shifting place again?’

‘Yes.’

‘A restless lot. No need to move on. Not yet.’

They pressed him for stories of the winter hunts.

‘The Spirits are as pleased with the Kanwashish as they are with us.’

‘But there is good reason to move. Seas I have found!’ He charmed them with stories of the vast and wondrous seas, of endless sea-fish. He went on and on. Many shook their heads and laughed.

‘Keep this notion, Nonosa, and you will become Nonosa, the crazy man. The man wild with words.’

The Nookwashish recalled the Nonosa they knew as a boy, the boy who told impossible tales, the son who would not heed the wishes of his father, the cause of constant torment for his mother.

His father had died one spring by drowning, his mother the next winter with fever. Nonosa showed up in the Nookwashish camp the spring that followed, a young man with the gift of a yearling carcass strapped to his back. Seeking to take Démas home as his wife.

The Nookwashish took pity on him, against the doubts of the girl. But Nonosa proved himself to her, turned into a sharper hunter than any among his clan. Démas bestowed on him her deep, enduring love.

nonosa stretched the length of the sleeping pit his aunt had set aside for him in a corner of her lodge. His arm curled around his infant daughter, his sleep disturbed by thoughts of Remesh.

Boys together they had been, constant rivals whenever the clans had come together, Sabbah and his own mother forever scolding the pair of them. Nonosa’s forehead still bore a scar where Remesh had flung a stick that cut it to the bone.

Their boyish games had given way to fiercer tests of strength. Remesh grew in bulk, just as tall, and broader than his cousin. With a boastfulness to match his size.

‘More boulders needed for the fire pit. Which do you choose?’ Nonosa recalled the ring of his voice.

Rocks Nonosa could not dislodge. Remesh staggered under the weight of them, all the while Nonosa prodding him with names. Foolish names Nonosa had concocted, vexing his cousin at every step.

Then prowess of a different sort filled Remesh’s head. ‘Your cock no more long-lasting than the muscles of your arms! Don’t you long to know the secrets of fortune between the furs?’ He bent his arm stiffly in the air and laughed aloud.

Now, when their paths crossed, never was it without respect. Hunters more than cousins, the best in each clan. Few were the times their people went without meat. Nonosa had seen the spite in Remesh’s eye when he told of the vastness of the sea. In the hunter’s mind, he was certain, stirred a notion of some new prowess to be had.

Nonosa drifted finally to sleep.

Past daybreak he woke. Shanaw had gone from the curl of his arm. He jolted upright. Had he rolled atop her, smothered her?

‘No worry, nephew. The little one cried again for milk. So fast asleep you were you did not hear. I took her to Biesta.’

Nonosa rose to go to Biesta’s lodge. Sabbah motioned him to sit again, handed him a bowl of soup made from ptarmigan.

He ate with eagerness, for he knew Sabbah’s way with cooking. In the soup floated young nettle sprouts, freshly picked.

‘With Biesta I shared my secrets at the cooking pot. I do not say the same for Lerenn.’

‘No fondness for Lerenn?’

‘Fondness for her, yes.’ She chuckled. ‘For her cooking, no.’ She poured more soup.

‘Remesh has fondness for her. She was the prize of the Dohwashish. There were countless stories of her charms.’

‘Remesh returned with Lerenn, proud as if he had felled a herd of stags.’

Nonosa had caught a glimpse of Lerenn when he first arrived. A potent lure, there was no doubt.

‘Beauty of face not a good wife makes.’ Sabbah’s scrap of wisdom.

Nonosa finished the last of his soup. Sabbah took the bowl from his hands.

‘Lerenn bore him two sons,’ she said, more quietly now. ‘The first lived but a morning, the other not at all. Remesh was not to be without a son. Biesta bore him a fine boy. Sojon will be as strong a man as his father. As good a hunter.’

‘A clan must have its sons.’

‘There will come many days when the Nookwashish will feast on his caribou.’

No more to be said. Sabbah’s love rested first with her family. Her nephew — as much as she cared for him — would not be with the Nookwashish for long.

‘This sleeping pit is here for as many days as you wish. The child will have her milk and grow. And Remesh will never go against the wishes of his mother.’

nonosa found shanaw asleep at the feet of Biesta. At her breast a second child, one old enough that his hand wandered about her neck, played with a string of antler beads.

‘Already I feed him caribou broth. His father wants to give him bones to gnaw. Too hard on his belly.’ She smiled. ‘Besides, he has no teeth.’

Remesh suddenly filled the doorway. Biesta’s smile fell away.

‘Ah, Nonosa, your little one has found much to enjoy at my woman’s breast.’

Nonosa stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him, close enough that he smelled his sweat.

‘The child is alive. I have your mother to thank, and your wife.’

‘Do you forget who led you here?’ He let the question settle, then cast it off at his will. ‘You owe nothing to the Nookwashish. Stay and make yourself one of us.’

Nonosa said nothing.

He could not rest with the Nookwashish. Nonosa’s skill at the hunt made Coshee’s threat to banish him a vacant one. The clan knew well what would become of them if their storehouses were not filled. As much as they honoured the Spirits, they had no wish to join them before their rightful time.

Nonosa would go, then return for Shanaw before winter reappeared. Later he came upon his aunt in her lodge, near the fire, hunched over Shanaw lying naked.

Sabbah looked up. ‘Your daughter made you proud! Her first shit. A strong one. Her little body works well.’

She charged Nonosa with finding dry moss. He returned with so much his aunt sagged with laughter.

‘Take enough for an infant bottom. Warm it by the fire. Rid it of twigs.’ Sabbah laid out a tiny covering of softened hide. ‘Sojon’s, when he was born.’ She lined it with moss, wrapped it between the child’s legs and around her waist. Secured it tight with thongs of hide.

‘Now, little one. Your father will hold you in his arms, fearlessly.’ Chuckling, she lifted the child and presented her to Nonosa. Nonosa gazed into her face. Content she was, free of pain. Her preciousness filled his heart.

Nonosa woke at daybreak. He kissed the forehead of his daughter and placed her gently in Sabbah’s arms. He smiled at Sabbah, gripped her hand for a moment, took his spear from where it rested against the wall, and left the lodge.

He found Biesta alone outside her lodge, airing sleeping furs. It was another day of melting snow.

Biesta stood up slowly. The morning sun caught her ease, revealed the full detail of her face.

At once it was Démas — the wideness of her eyes, the turn of her mouth, markings of a generous heart.

Nonosa saw no shyness, no worry at who might be watching them. He kept a distance, for Remesh would hear of their meeting. Nonosa stood boldly tall, his spear resting against his shoulder.

He gathered relief in the way her eyes agreed with his. His daughter would not be without affection.

He took up his spear and walked away.

He strode a safe distance from the camp, only then looked back.

Biesta was bent again over the furs, her head in his direction now, her eyes catching a glimpse of his passage through the scrub.