Slypaws liked the young female commander in her cockade hat. So determined to do the will of history.
They resumed their stroll along the darkened avenues toward the river in a mood of mounting excitement. They watched more street barricades go up, more of the City’s restless young joining the struggle. A constant tribal drumming and shouting of Primates from the direction of the water. When they got close to the park with its smell of food, they met a fog coming off the water. The wind had gently shifted to the north, spreading cold air. Soldiers called at them through the mist – rough city voices, but led by officers who sounded distinctly like Creekers.
“We’d better get back to our tree, Citizen Sister,” Twitch said.
“I believe I’m alive in the Historical Moment,” Slypaws declared.
40
“T he wildest and most beautiful of forest streams.” This is how a nineteenth-century settler described the river where these stories take place. Its name is Otonabee. We pronounce it O-tón-a-bee, a mispronunciation probably originated by Irish settlers who stressed the second syllable of names beginning with O. Its name in the language of the Indigenous Anishinaabe people is Odoonabii-ziibi. It is a river (ibi) and a racing heart (ode) turbulent like boiling water (odemgat). A rapidly beating heart. You might think this agitation belongs to the river because it once pulsed through continuous sets of rapids. Or maybe it is the excited heart of a paddler shooting those rapids. But it is probably the heart of Mother Earth. In Anishinaabec belief, the streams and rivers are her veins and arteries.
With the coming of modernity, hydroelectric power dams were put above each set of rapids, pooling the river into a series of reservoirs. Yet the wilderness found a use for these holding ponds and they are now full of geese and ducks and turtles and muskrats who value a reedy shoreline. The European settlers found a home on the river too, and on the biggest of the abeyances, named Little Lake after an early farmer, they founded a city. Here where the water partially surrounded a hill they built a cemetery in the style of the Victorian burial parks in London, with artistically placed trees, circular roadways for horses and carriages, and on three sides a view of the lake.
Today, the tombstones tilt and nod solemnly with pious inscriptions about the brevity of mortal life in relation to human aspiration. A Daniel Macdonald (1838-1871), famous in his time as a weightlifter, paid the price for his vanity:
Ye weak beware, here lies the strong,
a victim of his strength.
He lifted sixteen hundred pounds,
and here he lies at length.
Point taken. But the person I have learned much from has a simpler inscription carved on a tall Celtic Cross:
Isabella Valancy Crawford
Poet
By the Gift of God
Not much is known about her early life – tragedy fell on her family like a shroud. But one thing for sure, she was a firecracker. She was the only woman in Canada to make a living from her writing during a time when the literary world was the preserve of gentlemen. And she did it while being outspoken about the social pieties of her day: patriarchy, racism, war, social class, inhibited sexuality. For this last concern, see “The Lily Bed.” It begins:
His cedar paddle, scented, red,
He thrust down through the lily bed;
Cloaked in a golden pause he lay,
Locked in the arms of the placid bay.
Trembled alone his bark canoe
As shocks of bursting lilies flew
Thro’ the still crystal of the tide,
And smote the frail boat’s birchen side.
Somehow Isabella’s poetry manages to be genuinely awful and full of awe at the same time. This is often the case with mythic people writing for a conventional society. Outwardly, she is “an intelligent and industrious female songbird of the kind that fills so many anthologies in the nineteenth century.” The words of a literary critic – but a great critic, Northrop Frye. He sees that deep inside herself Isabella faces the world with a soul torn open by Romanticism. Her visionary images turn reality inside-out. At the bottom of her writing is an insight that the interior of nature is a wild culture in which trees, animals, and the spirits of the forest are equals. For glimpses of this unborn commonwealth, I prefer her lyrics, but I take note of her long poem, a domestic idyll set in myth.
Isabella Valancy Crawford, 1846 to 1887.
Little Lake Cemetery has other memories in its soil. Some of my partner’s family are buried here, and as a young girl she stole in at night with two of her girlfriends to hold a séance. It was the site of a battle between Mississauga and Mohawk warriors. It is the site of a battle in the scene to come, a contest between visions best understood in Isabella Valency Crawford’s terms.
41
Soon after nightfall, a host of raccoons swam the narrows between Creek Town and the Sanctuary of the Dead. Clutch watched with satisfaction as the First Wave crossed and vanished among the trees and standing stones. Hearing no calls of distress from them, he sent his Second Wave. Then he took to the water himself with Sleekfoot and Lightfinger, and the female friend whose name he forgot but who insisted on being his bodyguard since the day she had nursed his wounds. She always stood behind him silently, and after a while it became easier to accept her presence instead of asking her to go away.
It wasn’t fun in the water. He’d never swum far in his life and he felt exposed under the limitless sky. And there was a noticeable current where the lake funnelled into a river drawn by the plunge at a dam. A light westerly would put his army downwind of the Protector’s forces, giving him an advantage. But where was the Protector? And how many warriors would he bring with him? The anxiety went away once he reached the far bank and felt ground under his paws.
A runner from the First Wave waited while he shook water out of his fur.
“Compliments from Floppy Ear. She wishes you to know that her hunting groups are deployed wide open across the western side of the Dead Zone. No sound or scent of the enemy.”
The forager groups, led by clan mothers and operating like families, had the advantage of speed and agility. In contrast, the High Guard was said to move slowly together in a line, bunching and loosening like a caterpillar.
“Very good. Has she captured any scouts?”
The runner’s face went blank.
“Why don’t I know this?” Clutch barked so loud that his bodyguard jumped. Sleekfoot and Lightfinger frowned. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t the runner’s fault either, though he looked like he wanted to sink into the soil of this morbid place.
“I’ll go back with him and find out,” Lightfinger said.
“Very good. I’ll be at that building on the top of the rise. It appears to be a place of Ancestor worship. Sleek, would you go to the southern fenceline and send a runner to me when the Second Wave has deployed?”
Sleek nodded his head and became a shadow flitting through the stones.
