The dead, they don’t look at me as they stumble into the unchained night. And I smile. In six hours and thirteen minutes, the water will recede as quickly as it came, back out to the dark dead ocean. It will leave nothing behind but wet and desolate rocks the color of sun-bleached bone.
Those Beneath the Bog
Jacques L. Condor
Prunie Stefan, wearing a plaid shirt and men’s trousers cinched at her waist with a rope, toiled at flensing a fresh moose skin. Her hair was in two braids tied together across her back so it did not fall in her way. Her husband, Martin, trimmed sinews from a moose carcass hung on a crossbar in the forks of two trees. The work of trimming and flensing was tiresome, but necessary for both of them.
A campfire blocked the entrance to their campsite against marauding bears attracted by the moose kill. Prunie pushed the flensing tool against stretched skin to remove fat and fibers. The final tanned skin would be smooth as the velvet cloth sold at the Nelson River trading post.
Bot flies darted around Prunie’s head and arms so she ran to the enveloping alder wood smoke of smudge fires where she was free of the buzzing pests. Prunie used the tail of her blood-spattered shirt to wipe her watering eyes. She left the smoke and walked to the riverbank fifty paces away. Prunie scanned the lake. Something moved far out on the water. She shaded her eyes with her hands to make out the object. A freight canoe with a single sail moved far out on the water. The canoe came closer and she recognized the man at the tiller.
My Uncle Alex from Cranberry Portage, Prunie thought. Coming to visit his relatives at Reed Lake.
Wind scudded across the water and threw up spumes of white froth. The man turned the canoe into the sudden gust. The sail lofted. Prunie saw the painted clan symbol on the canvas and recognized several people in the canoe.
“Hey, husband,” she called out. “People are coming: Uncle Alex and my aunties. There are other men with him.” Martin turned from his butchering. “They smelled my moose meat over there in Cranberry.” He laughed. “I know your relatives. They can sniff meat twenty kilometers away. Am I wrong?”
“Yes, wrong. Perhaps they come just to visit,” Prunie said. “We’ll feed them, no? It’s good I shot this moose. You’re lucky your husband is a great hunter.” He planted a kiss on her nose and laughed. The woman laughed with him and rolled her eyes.
“You should get to cookin’,” Martin said. With a knife as long as his wife’s forearm, he sliced through the carcass and pried loose a section of ribs.
“I’ll roast these over a slow fire,” Prunie said. “But I need meat for stew. They’ll need hot soup. It’s cold on the lake.” Martin cut several lean strips from the belly of the moose. Prunie went to her cooking fire with her arms full of meat.
Martin walked to the rock ledge boat landing at the river’s mouth and waited for the canoe to nudge into shore. He saw the guns and the backpacks and knew the relatives were not just visiting, but hunting.
Old Alex climbed from the canoe bobbing in shallow water. The old man waded to shore. As tribal elder and leader of a hunting party, it was his duty to be the first ashore.
The old man shook Martin’s hand. “Hello, my relative.” Prunie’s cousins, both in their early thirties, greeted Martin.
“Remember me? I’m Peter and this is my brother, Freddie.” Freddie pumped Martin’s hand.
“Uncle, good to see you,” Prunie embraced the old man. “Good to see you, niece. It has been a year.”
Martin waded out to the canoe and picked up an auntie in each arm and carried them to shore. There were squeals and laughter.
“Don’t drop them!” Old Alex shouted. “They are the only ones to cook and take care of me.”
Peter tried to help the third and eldest of the aunties ashore. The old woman waved him off. She crawled out of the canoe, lifted two layers of long skirts above her knee-high rubber boots and plodded through the water. A large black dog leapt out of the canoe and splashed behind her. One of the strangers whistled a shrill command. The dog dropped on his belly on the gravel shore.
The visitors followed Prunie to her campfire where they drank hot soup and warmed themselves. The oldest woman stirred the ashes of the fire with a willow stick before she dropped in a bundle of tobacco, cedar twigs and red yarn. Her offering flared for a moment and the fire smoldered as before.
“I had to do that, Prunie,” the old Auntie Rose said. “That’s my prayer offering to Manitou. I been prayin’ since we left home. That lake is dangerous with the crosswinds rushin’ in.”
“Oh, Sister Rose, you worry too much about everythin’. You’re always praying for somethin’ or other,” Alex said.
“Somebody’s got to do the prayin’ or we wouldn’t have any protection at all.”
“I’m glad you pray, Auntie Rose. It makes me feel safer,” Prunie said. “Do you pray too, Auntie Sophia?”
“I sure do, but when Rose tells me I ought to be prayin’ to the Old Ones, I get peevish. I’m a good Catholic, Prunie,” Auntie Sophia said.
“Well I wish prayers could kill these pesky bugs!” Young Aunt Nettie swatted at a circling ring of black flies swarming around her head.
“Hard freeze works better than prayers on bugs,” Uncle Alex said.
The youngest of the aunties made a sound like “Pish” and walked downwind of a smudge fire and let the smoke discourage the pests.
“We haven’t seen moose on our side of the lake. Don’t know where they gone to,” Alex said.
“Alex is too old to hunt moose.” Aunt Sophia said.
“I am not too old,” the old man replied.
“If I say you are—then you are,” Sophia replied. “That’s why these two boys came along—to get some moose meat for us—forgot to introduce them.”
“These boys are from our village,” Auntie Rose explained. “The tall one is Nikolas. That black dog is his. It’s a good duck dog. This skinny one is Ephraim. They is good boys.”
“And good hunters, too,” Sophia added.
The man called Nikolas whistled again and the black dog came and crouched at his feet. “This is River. I call him River ’cause he takes to water every chance he gets. Never go any place without him,” Nikolas said.
“You never go any place without that silly cap either,” Auntie Sophia pointed to the leather hat the man wore. It was decorated with fishing lures, bits of shell, dangling beads and animal fetishes. The hat was firmly tied under the man’s chin with leather thongs.
“He sleeps in that damned hat,” Alex said. “Come on, we got to talk huntin’.”
“You’re a pushy old man bringing up the main subject without first jest visitin’,” Sophia said.
“And you won’t let a man talk about huntin’ in peace.” Sophia kicked at Alex’s moccasin-shod foot and missed. She shrugged and walked away to join Prunie and Nettie at the cooking fire. As she passed her eldest sister, Sophia noticed that Rose held a spruce root basket in her hands and a tattered red blanket was draped over her arm.