Daughters of the Deer by Danielle Daniel

Author:Danielle Daniel [Daniel, Danielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2022-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

20

NOCTURNAL INSECTS CHIRP, calling each other under the night sky, stars above like a glowing map. Jeanne waits until her family is asleep, her father’s snores rising steadily to the pine ceiling, then slips from the bed she shares with Angelique, her younger sister. She promised to meet Josephine by the creek where the old cedar tree has sent out a low branch that forms a perfect seat. Thoughts of her beloved swirl around her like a flock of moths as she creeps past the curtain separating her bed from her brother’s, then past the curtain behind which her parents sleep, all of them in the same main room of their stone home. She shuts the front door quietly behind her, then sprints across the yard into the soaring trees.

Jeanne loves to run through the forest in the dark—the only time she truly feels free. On this June night, fireflies dance around her, and she laughs at the sheer beauty of them.

She and Josephine grew up together in the Saint-François Seigneurie, a two-day canoe journey south of Trois-Rivières—longer in the winter when they have to travel by dogsled borrowed from her godfather Jacques. Her parents left her mother’s village when she was a baby and began farming here on land flanked by the Saint-François River, far enough away from the well-travelled Saint-Laurent to keep them clear of Iroquois raids.

Most of the time, Jeanne forgets that there is anywhere else in the world but here. She has only been to Trois-Rivières once, on a family trip when her father needed supplies to build their barn. Jeanne has no desire to return. She remembers the crowds in the square, soldiers in uniform walking in pairs, voices bellowing around her—the many white people. Where were all the Weskarini her mother spoke about, the People of the Deer Clan? She did see faces like hers—mixed children. Not white and not Indian, something in between. And she remembers the French woman who pulled her daughter closer to her when she saw Jeanne lingering on her own outside the store, waiting for her father to purchase nails and a new axe. The white woman wrinkled her nose and looked down at Jeanne’s deerskin tunic and trousers, clothes that none of the girls in Trois-Rivières wore, mixed or otherwise.

Jeanne just feels more comfortable in pants, and always has. Not only do they protect her better from bug bites and scrapes but also she feels more like herself, like Jeanne, in them. Still, she’ll never forget how her cheeks burned when the little girl pointed at her. The way she laughed. How the mother looked so disgusted, like Jeanne had done something wrong, just by standing there. Like she was wicked.

Then there were the two French soldiers she saw with their hands tied behind their backs, near the fountain in the square. One of the soldiers in his bright-blue uniform looked like her godfather Jacques, with a thick brown beard and his hair tied in a knot. People were pointing and snickering at them too.

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