Warbird (5 page)

The priest with Father Brébeuf ignored the boys. A thin, wispy beard circled his deeply lined face. His hawklike eyes darted from side to side.

“And the other?” asked Etienne.

“Father Mesquin has been here since the day they hung and locked the great gate for the first time,” Nicolas said. “The Hurons think he is a sorcerer.” He narrowed his eyes. “He looks for the devil in everything.”

As the visiting Hurons made their way across the compound, they lifted their hands in greeting. Etienne and Nicholas returned their salutes.

Etienne filled his water bucket again. The boys had to haul every drop of water used in the hospital. He pushed open the wooden door of the apothecary. The air was heavy with the fragrance of dried grasses and herbs hanging from the rafters. Even though Master Gendron had bottles of castor oil, friars' balsam and sulphur on his shelves, remedies of dried bits of bark, roots and crushed leaves stood alongside them. Sacks of hickory nuts, butternuts and acorns and baskets of wizened blue and red berries sat below.

The doctor stood at a wide wooden table grinding in a small stone mortar.

“I need a basket to collect the eggs,” Etienne said.

“
Onnonkwarota?
” the doctor asked with a smile.

Etienne shrugged, not understanding.

“Have you got any money?” the doctor asked. “The Hurons use fancy beadwork as money,” he explained. “Our visitors are wearing lots of it to show their wealth.”

“Oh,” Etienne said, realizing the beads around Tsiko's neck weren't just for decoration.

He watched the doctor take a bottle from the shelf. He measured out a dram of liquid and added it to a wooden bowl. From his mortar he tipped the dry, flaky contents. Using his fingers, he mixed the two until they formed a paste.
This doctor is always crushing and stirring different leaves and berries
, Etienne thought.

“Well,” the doctor said. “You'll have to make a trade.”

“I haven't got anything to trade,” Etienne complained.

“Not even a button?”

The word “button” jogged Etienne's memory of what lay hidden beneath his bed. Inside the brown sack was a tin of horn buttons. He filled the large iron kettle hanging from a hook over the fire. “How many buttons would it take?”

“Speak to Thomas's grandmother,” Master Gendron advised. “She'll make a fair trade.”

Etienne took the bucket outside to the garden. The plants used for medicine always needed water, and the more he watered, the more he had to weed. Fortunately he had a good memory. It only took a day to learn the names of the important plants and the unwanted weeds. There was a kind of rhythm to saying them. Etienne liked rhymes and the rhythmic sounds of nature. After reciting all the Latin names correctly, the doctor slapped
him on the back. “It's in your blood,” he said.

Returning to the well, Etienne worked his way through the crowd in the common area.

A Huron man watched from the gate. His glossy long black hair framed a face with a huge nose and full, rounded lips. He was dressed from head to toe in fringed skin garments, and his hand rested on the stone hatchet hanging from his belt. Etienne marvelled at his fierce look.

He felt a light tap on his shoulder. It was Tsiko.

“Look.” He pointed to the man by the wall. “Satouta is a great hunter,” he said. “He brings many furs to the village.”

The man's nut-brown eyes glittered in his hardened face as he turned their way. His flat nose seemed to reach right to his lower lip. Etienne knew it was a face he would never forget.

Tsiko ran to the warrior and chattered in his own language. The warrior stood with his arms crossed, gazing straight ahead.

Etienne remembered the doctor's advice about the basket. “Can you take me to meet your grandmother?” he asked when Tsiko returned.

“You want to go now?” Tsiko asked in surprise.

“Why not?” asked Etienne. He would be able to retrieve the small silver embossed tin on the way.

“Grandmother's not in
yannonchia
,” Tsiko told him with a quick short smile. “She lives in Teanaustaye, the village where Satouta lives. But it's far from here.”

“Oh,” Etienne said. “Why does she live there?”

“She'll never give up her heathen ways,” Tsiko said. “The mission longhouse is only for Christian Hurons.”

That night under the smoky rafters, the Council of Black Robes took place. Twelve Jesuits sat round the long rough wooden table as Etienne and Nicholas served bowls of stew.

Before eating, Father Rageuneau, who held the place of honour, stood up. “We will begin with prayer for the soul of Father Isaac Jogues,” he said bowing his head.

“Who was Father Jogues?” Etienne asked when the boys went back to the kitchen.

“A priest that was put to death by the Iroquois,” Nicholas replied in a hushed voice. “They said his prayers ruined their crops.”

At the end of the prayer, Father Rageuneau spoke again. “We thank God everyone arrived without mishap: no one fell into a stream or river.”

There was quiet laughter.

“Father Daniel often falls out of his canoe,” Nicholas explained to Etienne as they watched and listened through the crack in the door.

Each mission gave a report. Father Rageuneau recorded everything with his quill pen.

“These hordes are never long at rest,” one of the Jesuits complained. “We must follow them by lake, forest and stream. At night, my bed is the rugged earth or a bare rock.”

Father Rageuneau nodded sympathetically.

“We have no means of controlling our converts,” another said. “They backslide into their heathen ways.”

“They should get twenty-five blows for each lapse,” Father Mesquin said in a loud voice.

Etienne and Nicholas exchanged looks as the council dissolved into discussion.

“I have visited over twenty villages,” Father Brébeuf began quietly.

But Father Mesquin would not let him continue. “They need to be beaten.” He looked around at them all and said, “The way they beat their drums when calling up the devil is sinful.”

Father Rageuneau looked up in surprise. “I believe you are being too severe.” He put down his pen. “One must be careful, condemning the Huron customs.”

“There has been an edict from Rome,” Mesquin said. “Are we to ignore it?”

Father Rageuneau drew his hand down his beard. “We should not forbid things that are done in innocence,” he said. He looked at his Jesuit brothers with troubled eyes.

“Their drums are tools of the devil,” Mesquin said, rising from his seat.

“The drums should be forbidden,” another Jesuit murmured in agreement.

Others nodded.

“The drums should meet the very fires of hell that they call upon,” Father Mesquin thundered as he pounded the table with his fist.

“Just wait until the Huron hear about this,” Nicholas said as he latched the door. Then he stopped and scratched his curly head. “How are they going to dance without their drums?”

Like the Jesuits, Etienne rose before sunrise and dressed in the dark. After mass, he went about his duties. The days at the mission soon became like those on the farm. He hauled water to the troughs for the pigs and ragged goat that grazed behind the stable. He fed the chickens, watered the gardens and ran errands for the fathers.

Tsiko watched Etienne work, never offering to help. “Hunting and fishing is men's work,” Tsiko told him firmly. “Carrying water and gardening is work for women.” He also told Etienne his chickens were not real birds because they had nothing to say. When Tsiko listened to the birds of the forest, he understood what they said.

When Etienne entered the apothecary, Master Gendron held up a hairy, yellowish root. “This,” he said to Etienne, “lurks somewhere in the cool earth of the forest floor.”

“What is it?” Etienne asked.

“Golden root,” he said. “You make tea with this root, a cure for many ailments.” He rattled what remained of his supply in the basket. “I need to visit the Huron village,
Teanaustaye, for some more,” he announced.

Etienne grinned. “May I come along?”

“It will be a good long journey,” the doctor said. “Teanaustaye is at least five leagues away.”

To the tin of horn buttons, Etienne added an iron needle, the two metal pins and the thimble. He hoped it would be enough for a trade.

Tsiko, Etienne and the doctor left their canoe on the grassy river bank beside the drying fish nets. They followed a narrow path along a small stream. The trail led them through a thicket of pine and sumac. The sun filtered through the branches, making the light dance in front of them. The squirrels chattered and scolded as they passed.

Soon the trees closed in, cutting off the sky. Hearing the sound of a breaking branch, Etienne looked up. Within this cool green tunnel, a squirrel leaped from tree to tree.

Tsiko removed an arrow from his quiver. Following the animal with his bow, he waited for its next leap. With one shot he brought it down.

“Good for cloak,” he said, picking it up by its tail and tying it to his waist.

The three climbed upward across lichen-encrusted granite. Small trees and tufts of grass sprang from rocky pockets. Etienne paused at the edge of a mossy outcrop surrounded by leagues of wilderness. Beyond ancient pines that stood like feathers, a small lake sparkled in the sunlight. Other than the scream of a jay, silence surrounded them.
It was a peaceful silence, not the disapproving, unhappy silence of his father.

The clean, green smell filled Etienne's nostrils and the sight filled his heart with pleasure.
This must be how Champlain felt when he saw it for the first time
. If only he could share it with his mother.

They walked on to the village that sat above a fork in the stream on the highest part of the ridge. Fields peppered with rocks and tree stumps surrounded it. Several women hoed around tasselled stocks of corn, entwined with vines. Green-turning-to-gold pumpkins grew at their base.

As they drew closer, shouts of children and the yelping of dogs filled their ears. Etienne recognized the dull, thumping beat of women pounding their corn.

He was surprised to find there was no main entrance, as at the mission. The walls of this palisade folded over each other, creating a long passageway. Etienne followed Tsiko and the doctor along it into the village.

A group of girls chatted as they wove baskets of reeds. Little brown faces peered from cradleboards propped up in the shade. Naked infants crawled in the dust nearby. One woman shaped balls of clay while another punched holes into them with her fist. A third scraped the inside with a wooden paddle. The doctor stopped beside a woman scratching out a design.

“
Yanoo
,” she said, holding it up for him to see.

He took it in his hand and examined it. “A fine pot,” he said and handed it back.

Etienne watched four young boys play “follow the leader” as they dipped and dove under the racks of drying
fish. Their bare feet pattered towards the new group then stopped. All of them stared.

“They never see white boy before,” Tsiko explained, “only the priest and doctor.”

A man was molding a sheet of stitched birch bark over a shaping trough. Once again the doctor spoke their strange language. The man answered, and the doctor laughed.

“The Iroquois don't understand birch,” the doctor said. “He says they use elm for their canoes, which makes them heavy and slow.”

The man spoke to Tsiko, who lifted a torch from the fire close by as the man picked up a wooden bowl. Etienne watched the man pour the sticky substance from the bowl on to the bark and melt it with the torch. “You go,” Tsiko said with a wave. “I'll stay to help.”

Etienne followed the doctor to the largest longhouse. Animal skins stretched across circular frames resting against its walls. Fish hung head down from poles in the shade of the building. The man who was working at digging out a log nearby didn't seem to notice the powerful raw smell that made Etienne cover his nose.