A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe

Author:Rudy Wiebe [Wiebe, Rudy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-36714-3
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 1995-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Greenstockings cooks her favourite food for Hood. Keskarrah and Greywing sleep in a mound of robes; Birdseye breathes her implacable dream into the fur under which she has buried her face. The firelight, wavering smells, contains the cone of the lodge around them, the delicate seams of it doubled and sewn against the wind along the line of the generous animals cut open and skinned to protect them. Greenstockings stretches her bare arm, hand, fingers the deer stomach hung low in the heat of the fire braiding upwards; it swings like a bird’s nest, rocking, its shadow bulges, floating on the smoky hides.

“The round, beautiful kettles you bring,” she tells Hood, gently because she is not using one, “are strong, but also very heavy. They cook slower than hot stones in a bag. But they hold the heat of the food so well inside them, and there is never stone to eat then, hot stones in soup break themselves so often, you can never tell when one will do it, just split itself! and then you have to pick the biggest pieces out of the blood-soup as you eat, but there is always some left, stone cooking is hard on good teeth.”

She laughs, glances up for an instant at his listening intensity, laughing. “There is such strength in stone. It cleans you, scours you clean, you’re washing inside with sand whenever you shit!”

Robert Hood laughs to see her laugh, to make her laugh again, to lengthen the sound of her singing voice. Not understanding a syllable of any word she has ever spoken. And not wanting to, nor thinking about that because her obsidian eyes flame firelight at him. She is laughing, and her head and naked shoulder flicker light so variously dark and lighter against the flames; the shadows beyond her on the sloping wall move continuously, this warm circular place where she has always lived, as if the lodge were breathing. The muscles at her shoulder and neck interfolded, lengthening under her copper skin.

“There is so much to eat here,” she murmurs.

The sounds she makes skim fondly about in his ears, sing, as every concentrated minute he watches her mouth, the bright tip of her tongue against her teeth, her lips — he has been trying to draw her lips for two days, to catch that bottom curve, the tilt of the corners where the sounds she makes seem to catch sometimes like a quick surprise — he does not want to understand any word she ever speaks. None. The freedom of watching, of listening with incomprehension, fills him with staggering happiness: all the reports they are duty-bound to write, the daily journal, the data piled in columns upon page after page — but in this warm place thick with indescribable smells there is no listable fact, not a single word. Never. Simply the insatiable influx of eye and uncomprehending, musical ear, of fingertips and skin. As if time could be eaten out of her hand, ingested and lived into one enveloping physical containment, all thought, all necessary decision, all duty gone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.