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JOHN FRANKLIN’S FIRST ARCTIC LAND EXPEDITION THROUGH A DOUBLE LENS exacts. It is plausible that draftsman and midshipman Robert Hood could have fallen in love with her after drawing a portrait in the camp. However, Wiebe developed an entire intricate love affair between the young girl and not only one man in his fiction. THE NATIVE PERSPECTIVE The civilisational point of view in A Discovery of Strangers is dramatically disparate when set against Franklin’s travelogue hypotext: the landscape itself assumes the features of an omnipresent supernatural being which provides the inhabitants with food, clothing, tools and other necessities, on condition that they should obey the strict rules and taboos of natural survival. Chapter 1 bears the indicative title “The Animals in This Country” and alerts the postmodern reader to the powerful links between the Natives and wildlife, many species of which function as totemic animals in the respective tribes. Thus caribou, capable of withstanding even the northern winter, appear in the introductory pages of the novel, and recur throughout the text as the source of food and garments, but also as the paradigms of steadfastness and communal behaviour. In historical and geographical context, the motif is a mainstay of Tetsot’ine life, which Franklin was ignorant about before reaching those northern latitudes. According to Robert Janes, the tribe was indeed an edgeof-the-forest people. They spent their summers on the barren ground, customarily following the movement of the caribou and catching abundant amounts of fish in the numerous lakes, rivers and brooks. In the winter they would return to the forest edge, where they went on to hunt caribou, moose and some kinds of small game (Janes 41). A passage will serve well to illustrate the all-permeating force of life in the Native worldview: Lying safe, alert in this instant of rest, they were reassured that when that blazing sun stands three times its height over the glazed levels of this lake, they will feel the restlessness of their young grow heavier within them. And then they will move again into their continual travel. [...] From every direction more and more of them will drift together, thousands and tens of thousands drawn together by the lengthening light into the worn paths of their necessary journey, an immense dark river of life flowing north to the ocean, to the calving grounds where they know themselves to have been born (Wiebe 3). The narration in such instances gradually transports the reader into the sensations, and then even the thoughts of the animals the tribe draws its sustenance from; it is by no means an error on the narrator’s part to declare that the caribou possess some knowledge of their own birth, which sets this novel far ¢ 155 e
