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JOHN FRANKLIN’S FIRST ARCTIC LAND EXPEDITION THROUGH A DOUBLE LENS
a caribou calf, the universal order comes to light and hints at the human
dimension, perhaps seen from a more helpless pair of eyes than a scorned wolf
possesses.
The portrait drawing offers an ample space for a narrative lacuna to be filled
in by Wiebe’s fictionalised, but convincing account of the kindling of amatory
flame between the two young people; when both Keskarrah and Greenstockings
arrive at Fort Enterprise to do business with the local merchants, the young
man is dumbstruck with emotion:
a ”
‘I... she is the most ... beautiful woman I’ve ever seen ... I...
Even very softly, Robert Hood can only say this because neither he nor they under¬
stand a single sound either can utter. He does not consider what they can obviously
see; it is enough for him that the meanings of their two incomprehensible languages
pass each other unscathed in the close warmth of these hide walls... (Wiebe 82).
Due to the absence of an all-covering, supremely assured narrative voice, the
reader will have to make an additional effort in order to grasp the resonance
of this text, now deprived of its traditional male-centred focus. The strenuous
communication is established between two disparate communities, and only
a reader aware of the advantages of polyphony will be rewarded with a fuller
understanding of the role of both the Natives and the Westerners in the crea¬
tion of a hybrid Canadian identity. While Hood is making her portrait, the
girl’s father is telling a creation story, as if to protect her from the possible bad
medicine of “These Whites,” and that motif also reinforces the wealth of cul¬
tural negotiation, quite absent from Franklin’s report: “That was when Sky
came to Earth and they lay together. Their joy began then, and all day they lay
together and when they separated in the evening the ground appeared, because
ground is nothing more nor less than their happiness together, born between
them with rocks and sand and water running” (Wiebe 88-89).
The act of mating between a male and a female pervades the entire world¬
view of the Tetsot’ine tribe, and the chapters with cosmogonic plots demonstrate
a consonant attitude towards the Native acceptance of the course of nature.
The novel abounds in examples of isomorphic variations of this seminal
encounter, whether it is between supernatural beings, between humans, or
between animals, even the vegetable and mineral levels may play their part in
the broader sense of the term. The main female character does not object to
being courted by several men simultaneously, and she seems to enjoy these
flirtatious activities just as much as any European coquette would; seaman
John Hepburn explains in his deposition after the expedition that she was the
very reason midshipmen George Back and Robert Hood fell out with each
other. Hepburn mentions the reason Back and Hood had their abortive duel
in the icy wasteland: “It was the usual matter of white men in primitive lands:
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