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CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS a woman of the country” (Wiebe 98). In fact, the historical source must be lent credence here, since Franklin spoke to several more reliable witnesses soon after the deed committed in the treeless wilderness, and Dr Richardson and seaman Hepburn were close to the spot when (in all likelihood) Iroquois voyageur Michel killed Hood from behind with a rifle: [B]ut the conduct of Michel soon gave rise to other thoughts, and excited suspicions which were confirmed, when upon examining the body, I discovered that the shot had entered the back part of the head, and passed out at the forehead, and that the muzzle of the gun had been applied so close as to set fire to the night-cap behind. The gun, which was of the longest kind supplied to the Indians, could not have been placed in a position to inflict such a wound, except by a second person (Franklin 11 338-339). The explorers set out into the unknown territory not heeding Indigenous wisdom, accumulated over centuries of struggle with the extreme forces of the natural surroundings, to which Greenstockings makes a mental note: “Only Whites would enter the long darkness with such an interminable, annihilating walk. Only Whitemuds” (Wiebe 137). While she does not give that fact deeper consideration, but immediately flirts with the hunter Broadface in a vividly lascivious language, her father has already found an explanation in the animistic tradition of his people, ironic when placed in the appropriate European context: “[T]hey don’t need the animal circle that gives us life every day. They want to live inside straight walls, as straight as round trees can make them — maybe they have to live inside the crossed-together corners of the trees that gave them their endless sorrow and wrong!” (Wiebe 129). He goes on to say that crossing the trees is unnatural, and that the Whites even smear the trees with their first ancestors, so that multiple destinies are accumulated in a limited space — many conclusions like this may be found in the novel, and they dispel any romantic notion that the Native Canadians hold the unmistakable truth of all of life’s aspects. Simply put, the English explorers display arrogance in the face of clear signs of the oncoming winter, but Keskarrah remains imprisoned within his deterministic system of animals and plants as living beings coequal with man. At several places Back infantilises the Natives when he says that the expedition is made up of the King’s warriors, and that the tribe will be richly rewarded if they hunt enough caribou for the needs of the English (Aspenlieder 81). In comments like this, the two worlds of Europe and the Northwestern Territories could hardly be more apart and stranger to each other. The process of geographic discovery is never actually the uncovering of an absolutely uninhabited land, which the Eurocentric “Adams” could name and shape to taste, but usually a friction-filled coexistence of the newly arrived s 158 e
