hesitating-but he hesitated here, at the entrance to Walks-In-Deep-Woods’ tent.
Walks-In-Deep-Woods did not speak. He placed his hands before him, as if warming them at the fire; then he touched them to his temples, his cheeks, and his breast. Strong-Arm watched each hand motion, perhaps attributing meaning to the gestures…but Walks-In-Deep-Woods smiled inwardly to himself, knowing that they were for show, like most of what a shaman did.
Just for show, he thought to himself, but did not permit a hint of it to appear on his face. Solemnly (very solemnly, he reminded himself) he looked up at Strong-Arm, awaiting the chief’s first words.
“You are working some medicine,” Strong-Arm said. “I will come back later.”
“You are welcome in my tent, mighty chief,” Walks-In-Deep-Woods said. “How may I help you?”
He gestured to a seat opposite, upon a blanket that a daughter of a chief had made for him when he was much younger. Strong-Arm seemed to hesitate again, as if unwilling to enter a shaman’s tent, but after a moment he entered, bowing his head to come through the tent-flap, and took the offered seat.
“You are working some medicine,” Strong-Arm repeated.
“Only the beginning,” Walks-In-Deep-Woods answered. He touched his temples and his cheeks again; Strong-Arm followed his gestures, perhaps again attributing some meaning to them. “I am trying to make clear that which is clouded.”
“By looking in the fire?”
“In part,” Walks-In-Deep-Woods said. “I have seen…the trail of our enemy.”
Strong-Arm was suddenly alert. “Enemy? You mean-”
“The great servant of the Onontio. Yes.”
“He is old now.”
“But still cunning, great chief. And still dangerous. For him to be defeated requires great medicine.”
“Our medicine has never worked against Champlain,” Strong-Arm said, and he picked up a bit of earth from the ground beneath his blanket, tossing it behind him to ward off any curse that might come from speaking the white man’s name. “Not in my father’s time, not in mine. Can you do what no one has done? Can you do what you have never done?”
“I can,” Walks-In-Deep-Woods answered, letting his face settle into a thin-lipped smile. “I can.”
Outside, in the dark, a night-bird hooted. Walks-In-Deep-Woods thanked the Great Spirit for His timing.
Strong-Arm rubbed his hands together and then spread them before the fire.
“What do you intend to do, shaman?”
“It is Champlain that opposes us, great chief. It is Champlain who makes common cause with the Hurons and goes to war against us.”
“Yes, yes,” Strong-Arm said. He was clearly uncomfortable that Walks-In-Deep-Woods was repeating the name.
“Then it is clear that he must die.”
“You…can cause his death?”
“Only at the proper time,” Walks-In-Deep-Woods answered.
Strong-Arm looked a bit disappointed.
“But this is the proper time,” Walks-In-Deep-Woods added. “With the harvest moon in the sky, and the first trace of chill in the air. I will cause the cold to creep into his old white bones and drive him to his bed.” He slapped his hands on his thighs, making Strong-Arm jump slightly. “And once he lies down he will not rise again.”
“When will you make this medicine?”
“When?” Walks-In-Deep-Woods let himself smile again, but this time he bared his teeth. “When, the great chief asks. It is already done. The cold is in his bones already.”
Now it was Strong-Arm’s turn to smile.
2
Champlain felt his age when he awoke in the morning, when he knelt to pray, when he bent over a map that had once been so easy to see, and when he laid his tired bones for sleep-and a hundred other times during the day.
Whenever he returned to France, his friends and the courtiers in Paris would ask: why go back, Samuel? Why return to Nouvelle France, where the winters are cold and the nights are long?
You are not accorded the dignity of being named Governor. While the king and the cardinal- and there was only one cardinal, whenever the title was spoken- grant great seigneuries to everyone around them, you are left humble and modest, with no honors heaped upon you.
Why go back?
Why indeed, he often thought to himself. But the answer was always the same-when he first set foot upon land it reminded him: the pure, clean air, the incredible variety of colors…Nouvelle France was in his blood. It was here that he first realized what he was meant to do.
And it was here, not in some comfortable salon in Paris, in the heart of the world, where he would die. He knew it, just as the cardinal had known it two years earlier at an interview when he had learned of the great extent over which New France was to spread. All of America north of the Spanish possessions belongs to the crown of France, Richelieu had told him, and then granted him the title of lieutenant-general.
In the spring, seven months ago, a confidant in Paris had sent him a scrap of parchment-a sort of engraving, a perfect reproduction of an up-time book, somehow procured from the Americans. It was a page from a great encyclopedia; and it was about him.
According to the book of the future, there was a calamity awaiting him-an imminent one. He was to suffer something that the English text termed a “stroke”-his correspondent had translated it as congestion cerebrale, an affliction of the head. It was written that the disease lingered for some time, giving him the opportunity to settle his affairs and contemplate, during the time left to him, how he would approach the Lord of Hosts when his spirit passed from the world.
The book had been vague about the exact date of the event, placing it sometime in October though it did state that he was to die on Christmas Day. By his own reckoning, the fate that God had ordained for him should logically take place eighty days earlier: forty days from Ash Wednesday to Eastertide, he thought, and forty days from Easter to Pentecost-eighty days placed the event on October the fifth.
All during the summer, Champlain had made his preparations. Confiding the contents of the scrap of paper to no one, not even his confessor, the Jesuit Father Charles Lalemant, he made a number of revisions to his will, providing a number of additional bequests of cash and property and making provisions for the servants of his habitation, his Montagnais godson Fortune, and even the old greffier of Quebec, Jacques de Laville. Lalemant took all of these changes in stride, asking Champlain about his sudden decisions…and, to his shame, Champlain dissembled (even under the seal of the confessional; he told his beads many times for those minor sins).
He would face his death with dignity, with his affairs in order, with his mind clear and his debts and responsibilities discharged. God had vouchsafed him an opportunity to do it before the congestion cerebrale struck him down.
By the Feast of Saint Michael all was in readiness. There was by then nothing to do but wait.
3
From his own Oneida longhouse to the Tree of Great Peace at Onondaga, the Council Fire of the Five Nations, was six days’ travel on foot. Strong-Arm expected Walks-In-Deep-Woods to go with him to speak with the other chiefs about war with the servants of the Onontio, but Walks-In-Deep-Woods declined. It was too far a journey for his old bones, with winter’s icy breath following just behind.
“I need your sage advice, shaman,” he said to him, but the older man shook his head.
“It is no place for shamans.”
