Enter, Night

Chief and some of the Savages took my measure gravely, and with what appeared to be suspicion. Askuwheteau turned his back to me and spoke to them in a low voice. Over his shoulder, the Chief and the men with him continued to regard me with something I took to be either anger or fear, or indeed some mixture of both. Anger I had seen before, during my year in New France, but their fear was something with which I was unfamiliar.

Clearly, at Trois-Rivieres the Indians were used to us, and even farther afield than the settlement there, we Fathers were more likely to be met with contempt than fear. And yet there it was in the eyes of the chief and his men: fear, or so it appeared to me.

Finally Askuwheteau turned to me and spoke in French. “Black Robe,” he said. “The Chief wants to speak with me alone. Go through the village, to the water’s edge and wait for me.”

I answered him in Algonquian, asking him what was wrong. I had a notion that the Chief might more kindly consider me if I spoke one of their languages.

Again, Askuwheteau spoke to me in French. “Go, Black Robe,” he said gruffly. “Go wait by the water. Do not answer me in Algonquian. Do not speak my name. Do not answer me at all. Go, now.”

Without a word, I turned and walked towards the village, which was not itself dissimilar to others I had seen: huts of birch-pole and tents, the whole place a seething, untidy coil of Savages, their filthy children, and their verminous dogs, all intermingling hither and thither in the mud, or squatting on their haunches, men and women both, in apparently earnest debate or parley. The acrid smoke from the wood cooking fires and the odour of the Savages themselves, combined with the noise of their squalling children and barking dogs, became almost overpowering. I was more eager than not to obey Askuwheteau, and so I went to the edge of the lake and waited for him there.

After a time, Askuwheteau came to where I was sitting. I had not heard him approach until he was standing behind me. I turned and looked up. The sun was behind him, so his face was hidden from my sight.

“Black Robe,” he said. “We may stay here tonight, but only tonight. And we are told we must stand guard over you until the dawn. Also, you may not sleep in the village. You must sleep here, near the water, away from the people.

“Why?” I queried, rousing myself to a standing position. “For what reasons?”

“They fear you,” Askuwheteau replied. He stared at me with no expression. It was as though the fact of the Indians fearing me was so entirely reasonable that it required no elucidation.

“What is there to fear?” I scoffed. “They know of us. They have seen Black Robes before. Surely we have more to fear from them than they have to fear from us.”

“They have seen Black Robes before,” Askuwheteau said, with that maddening, implacable stolidity of the Savages. “They are not afraid of Black Robes. They are afraid of you.”

“Of me? Why?”

“They believe you are Weetigo. They believe you are like the other Black Robe. The one you go to.” Askuwheteau was silent for a long moment. Then, he spoke again. “You will sleep here, Black Robe. I will guard you. I am not afraid of you. I do not believe you are Weetigo. If you go to the village tonight, they will kill you. And tomorrow, we leave.”

“Why do they believe this?” I was again outraged. “This is nonsense. It is blasphemy.”

“They speak of the other Black Robe. They say he eats flesh. They say he drinks blood.”

“Askuwheteau,” I said, trying to calm myself. I spoke slowly, enunciating carefully, in French, which Askuwheteau rudimentarily understood. “We have told you the meaning of the Eucharist. You know of the rituals of the Black Robes-how the bread and the wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ through the miracle of transubstantiation. We do not eat the flesh of human beings, nor do we drink their blood. The very thought is an affront to God. The people of this village do not understand. You should have explained it to them better. You speak their language. Tell them they are mistaken.”

“ Weetigo eats the body and drinks the blood,” he insisted stubbornly. He gestured to the village behind him. “There are many stories of Weetigo here. People have seen the Weetigo in the village where we go to your Black Robe. There are many dead.” He gestured again, this time towards the lake. “Many dead in the water. They fell from the sky.” He gestured overhead. “This Weetigo flies at night, like the owl. He runs like the wolf. He has killed many.”

I was frustrated by Askuwheteau’s dogged insistence that this gruesome Indian legend of a mythical demon (as I then understood it, an evil spirit that enters a human body and possesses it, turning the unlucky vessel into a cannibal monster) was true. I was horrified that it should be so blasphemously entangled with our own holy ritual of Communion. I was reminded again of Dumont’s disquieting raving on the shore at TroisRivieres about Father de Celigny being something other than human.

While it had been relatively easy to dismiss Dumont as mad, it was harder to be as sanguine in the face of Askuwheteau’s declaration that he was all that was standing between me and a terrible death at the hands of an entire village of Ojibwa Savages who believed I was in league with a living demon.

Worse still was the ever more likely possibility that Father de Celigny had been murdered by a group of terrified Savages who believed they were ridding their village of a monster.

I opened my mouth to protest again, but Askuwheteau silenced me with a sharp gesture. “Be quiet, Black Robe,” he said. “You stay here. I will guard you. We leave in morning, when sun rises.”

That night in the moonlight, at several separate intervals I was aware of the sly sound of moccasin-shod feet on dirt and stone as the Indians came to stare at me whilst I lay under my blanket, feigning sleep and listening to the sound of my heart in my chest.

Their gruesome legends, their tales of flesh-devouring, blooddrinking demons, and the spirits that walked their forests at night, were easier to dismiss in the daylight. But when, like at that moment, the dull moon was the only light able to pierce this infernal darkness at the edge of the world, the borders between our world of the living and their land of the dead seemed to shimmer and grow indistinct.

The Indians did not come too near. From their soft, fretful whispering, I came to believe that they were not keeping their distance simply because I was under the protection of Askuwheteau, but also because the Indians were afraid of me.

That morning, I again woke, shivering, to a light covering of snow upon the ground. The dark green trees were likewise wreathed and crested with white and stood out starkly against the deadened sky. The sun remained hidden behind lead-coloured clouds that seemed an advance guard of the deadly coming winter.

As I prayed that morning, I entreated God that we might find Father de Celigny alive and well, presiding over his Christianized congregation at St. Barthelemy, and that I might either return with him to TroisRivieres or winter with him in Sault de Gaston if the route back became impassable because of the killing cold.

We again loaded the canoes in preparation for our departure. Askuwheteau and his paddlers were solemn that morning, entirely different in their demeanour than they had been every morning during the last month of our voyage inland. They whispered amongst themselves and, though I may have been imagining it, I caught them looking at me when they thought me unawares, glancing away quickly when I returned their gaze.

At one point, a near brawl appeared to break out between Askuwheteau and Chogan, one of the younger men in our party of paddlers, who had been glaring at me all through the morning. Askuwheteau struck him about the shoulders and rebuked him in Algonquian, though I was too far away to understand his words. When Chogan pointed at me, Askuwheteau seized the younger man’s arm and forced it down to his side. Askuwheteau addressed him sharply, but in a low voice, and Chogan looked vindictively in my direction one more time, then dropped his eyes in submission to Askuwheteau, my protector.

Of course, I had seen the entire exchange, but still I pretended that I had not, as much for my own security as for Chogan’s pride.

As we launched into the water, I saw that the entire village had arrayed itself on the shore, as though to assure themselves that we had indeed departed from their midst. They stared solemnly in our wake as the canoes glided into the morning fog, not speaking nor shouting, but entirely, raptly following the trajectory of our canoes with their eyes.

So general was the ghostly silence, that when one of the paddles rapped against the side of the boat, I cried out in shock. The Indians kept their heads down and paddled, showing no reaction to my outcry, no laughter this time, and none of the usual well-meant mockery. Instead, we paddled in silence until the mist enveloped us and the land behind us vanished from sight.

After five hard, uncomfortable days of mostly silent paddling, we made a gruesome discovery in the early