To the Bright Edge of the World

by Eowyn Ivey

Your brother, Harry

Hes alive?

And I will tell you this: as an officer and leader, you will soon discover that adventure is a romantic notion, best left behind with childhood, and that you ought to be grateful for the opportunities allotted you.

called for her, and when she didn’t respond, I called more loudly, and I am afraid I must have sounded the alarm, for when Charlotte appeared, she had some kind of weapon in hand! “Good heavens, don’t shoot,” I said, only partly in jest. “Sorry ma’am,” she said. “Thought something was amiss.”

I asked about the contraption, a Y-shaped piece of wood with a length of rubber tubing stretched between. She called it a “sling-shot”

“Ma’am, I swear I didn’t tell Mrs Connor a thing. I don’t say two words to her ever.” It was clear she spoke the truth, and I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before—of course it was Evelyn who told the women!

teased that next time I call for her to come look out the window with me, she need not come shooting, but she remained serious and unsmiling, so I reassured her I was glad to be under her protection.

Sad

All his wages spent on marble, even when we owed the grocer.

For a few precious minutes as the sun descended, through the doorway I could see that the hall and kitchen was cast in a golden glow, and as Charlotte swept, the dust specks were suspended in the shafts of light. Father would have thought the scene very pretty. The fairy hour, the magical hour, when light moves from gold to silver. A bittersweet nostalgia settles upon me.

“Why Sophie—I finished it long ago. Don’t you recognize me?” Why had I not seen it before? “You have,” he said. “You know it well.” It was some sort of riddle, a trick. I tried to guess. Is it the figure with hood and staff? Not the horse with the long mane, or the sea serpent, dipping in and out of the earth? No. No. His laugh more like a cough, and he grabbed me up in his strong arms. “There I am,” he said, and he pointed to the bear. I should have known, for it had always been my favorite. I wish I had told him

A dozen or so ravens & magpies were gathered at the bone piles. They behaved strangely. They did not flap their wings or make to fly off, as one would expect, nor did they utter a sound. They were silent, watchful, & I felt their black eyes upon us as we turned our backs to them.

He advises us to salute the Indians with gunshot when we near them. It is a show of greeting & strength. The more rounds we fire, the more respect we earn in their eyes. In turn, the Indians will likely throw a feast in our honor. I hate to waste the ammunition.

In the palm of his hand he held a small plate of bone with strands of long, dark hair attached. —Looks to be part of a skull, he said.—Judging by the small leg bone, it was a child, I would guess. At this, Tillman let out a yelp, flung the leg bone to the ground.

—Those teeth marks, you think they might have been human? —Could be, Samuelson mumbled as if he had been woken. Boyd groaned.—Lord, why’d you have to go & ask that?

We shot seven rabbits, which we ate before the meat was fully cooked. We become more like the Indians every day. Our hunger, however, is not abated. A drizzling rain turned to snow, yet still we made good time. 14 miles.

Contrary to our fears, these Midnooskies proved to be a woebegone band. The children peeking from behind the hides were rail thin & vacant eyed; the adults crouched outside, clothed in the most ragged of furs. It was just as the skilly had warned us—a starving land.

When he ordered one of the children to fetch us the salmon, an old woman began to shout at him & gesture wildly. He will kill his own children if he takes this food from their mouths, the woman cried. It is all they have, Samuelson translated. The Indian ignored her pleas, showed the dried salmon to us. —Good God, I won’t touch the stuff! Tillman said.

—His people go to those mountains only after they die, Samuelson said.—They say it is a kind of spirit world. On the other side, you’re in the territory of their enemies.

With black wing, beat down the subterranean flames, whisk away ash, bare the dead black in our hearts and the mad glint in our irises: copper knives, flakes of gold, bullets, and brass buttons. Do you not see? Savage white man and Indian alike, our eyes are agleam with it.

I asked her outright if she had told Mrs Connor of my pregnancy. “Well of course,” she said. She seemed bored by the conversation. “Surely everyone will know eventually. You can’t keep a baby hidden in your skirts forever. Why bother with all this secrecy?”

And what of humming birds? “Yes ma’am,” he said, “they do buzz about in the summer.” I explained that I would very much like to observe their nesting behavior, but I suspected I would have to venture up the hill away from the barracks.

Are timelines intercepting ??

I wondered aloud, then, if the humming birds here are much like those back East. In Vermont, the ruby-throated humming bird often builds its nests near fresh water, I said, in the branch of an oak or maple tree. Certainly there are different species of trees here, but perhaps the Rufous share these same preferences. He was, I think, taken aback that I should be knowledgeable and curious in such a way.

We are hungry, it is true, but I have been nearer starvation & not suffered such hallucinations. Is it possible we have encountered a natural intoxicant? I can think of nothing unusual we have ingested. We have not even eaten the salmon we received from the Midnooskies, as we were saving it for more desperate times.

Hallucinations

The Indians lowered their bows. Those geese that had not been killed were now airborne & out of reach. The women had vanished, all but the one who had been struck. We walked upstream to her, with several Midnooskies trailing us. At first I thought the arrow pierced her, but as we neared, I saw that it passed harmlessly through the skin shift at her side & pinned her to the trunk of the tree.

Her grasp was wet & leathery. I then saw that a slick membrane webbed her fingers. Her nails were black, slender & sharp. She turned her head slightly to look at me through one of her peculiar eyes. She blinked—so quickly that surely I am mistaken—but it seemed her eyelid flickered from bottom to top in an uncanny way. She lowered her head & hissed at me, a frightful sound like a cornered snake.

Omg

—Course, then he’s got the trouble of bringing her home & trying to tame her. Samuelson chuckled, as if this was surely the hardest part to believe. Tillman paced about with some nervousness. —You’re saying that’s what we saw, out there in the marsh today? —I’m just passing along a story I heard told. Make of it what you will. —It’s ridiculous! Pruitt said. It all amused the trapper. —So, he said,—a woman from a rib you’ll have, but not from a goose?

Cannibal ?

A small number of Mednovtsy Indians have accepted the Orthodox faith, but their nomadic life and distance from the Konstantin redoubt, as well as their casual attitude toward their new religion, means that they very rarely participate in religious ceremonies, and many have even forgotten that they are Christians.

Bc Theyre not

Their language is related to those of the lower river but has a distinct accented quality. The men’s noses & ears are pierced with ornaments made of sinew & hammered copper; the women only their ears.

One man treated me with clear disdain when he learned that I was the leader of our party. He did not stand to greet me, looked me up & down. Samuelson explained that it is because I carry a pack as large as those of my men. Among these nomadic Indians, it is a sign of status & wealth to carry nothing.

Much of the work falls to the women, who travel with heavy loads on their backs even as they care for children and manage the half-wild dogs they use for packing.

Sad. What tribe?

a Midnoosky woman appeared from the forest. Her back was bent beneath a pile of firewood, bound together with hide straps. It was only as she neared that I noticed an unexpected detail—atop this heap of sticks was a swaddled infant, strapped in like any other piece of wood, & contentedly asleep.

—Look there, he said.—I do believe that’s our missing company. Coming down the steep bank was the Indian woman Nat’aaggi & the dog.

Knew it

Tillman offered his hand to assist Nat’aaggi getting ashore, but she did not notice or chose to ignore it, climbed from the baidarra on her own.

but compared to the near-black shade universal amongst the Indians & the mostly bare faces of their men, our appearances must be unexpected.

When she tried to climb higher into the mountains, she ran into snowstorms & ice fog. Boyd spoke up then. —She ever seen any sign of my wife up there? When she was traveling through that mountain fog, did she cross paths with a woman? Nat’aaggi shook her head. —Why did she come back up here with us at all? Why didn’t she just go home? Pruitt’s tone was blunt, even insolent, but I shared his interest. —I do not want home, she said.—I want to see. It was unexpected. Not just to hear her speak English, haltingly but with clarity all the same, but also the sentiment she expressed.

Her mother was a Midnoosky from the lower Wolverine River, her father a Russian–Eyak creole.

She was taken in by her uncle’s family, who treated her as a servant. Many times she ran away, often surviving for entire seasons on her own along the Wolverine River, though she had never come so far north as the canyon. Each time she was found by someone in the family, she was brought back, beaten, & misused.

This explains why she fled with the stranger who came for her. She yet contends that he was an otter man, that it is his fur she wears across her shoulders. It puzzles me that she can be so self-assured & clever, yet hold to such absurdity.

A bird’s eye ought to be flattened in shape, with a dark iris surrounded by a dark-gray sclera, and entirely unmoving in its socket. Yet this eye was round, with white sclera, and it rotated about in the socket. It looked nothing like a bird eye, but rather that of a mammal. More to the point, a human.

Not Mrs Connor. Five miscarriages, two stillborns, three live births. She should be decorated with more medals than her husband, she said, her pride matter-of-fact. She survived. She implies that I will do the same.

Dr Randall says it is unlikely I will ever give birth to a living baby. If I try, he says, it could be the end of me. My womb, so ill-formed for motherhood, could rupture. I could bleed to death.

After all his shenanigans, I was no more pleased to see the Old Man. How is it that he, elderly & with a lame leg, could have traveled faster than us up the river valley without our notice?

Is he the raven?

A silver hair comb. I took it from him. The same size, shape, the same fern frond engravings. If it weren’t for the missing teeth, the tarnish & gouging as if it had been left out in the weather for many seasons, I could almost swear it is Sophie’s.

A group of native men stood outside and said they had watched the sorcerer fly to his location. It was dark and difficult to see, but I am horrified to report that indeed I saw a black shape atop our blessed chapel.

the feeling here that civilization is still just a speck, and it makes me feel small in a good way. Seattle made me feel small in a bad way, if that makes any sense.

Yes!

but they mostly want to gripe about how the new hires don’t know how to plow the roads, or tell me about their grandkids or their golf scores, which is all fine and good but not of much interest to me.

The ground was wet & spongy beneath my hands & knees, squelched as if saturated. It struck me as odd, as usually such sheltered ground beneath an evergreen is entirely dry.

It was much like the birth of a foal, slick & bloody & a frightful mess. As I pulled it free of the root, clear fluid gushed from the opening. Trailing from the infant’s belly was a long umbilical string, blue tinged, throbbing with life. I held the baby with one hand, tugged the cord with the other. As the umbilicus continued to snake out of the ground, I began to dread what I would find at the other end. Gradually the cord turned rough & coarse & coated in dirt. I had pulled several feet when it stopped fast. Here at the end the umbilicus was no longer malleable & fleshy. It was a tree root!

—I think he’s asking if you are a father, if you have children back home, Tillman said at last. The question was unexpected. —Soon, I answered.

And then there is this: Does not love depend on some belief in the future, some expectation beyond the delight of the moment? We fall in love because we imagine a certain life together. We will marry. We will laugh and dance together. We will have children. When expectation falls to ruins, what is there left for love?

It was the woman’s face, shaped into a melting and howling cry, that horrified me, but also something about the awful weight of the dead man laid out across her lap. He was too heavy for her, he nearly crushed her, and even though I could not understand it fully, it seemed to me an unnatural scene. “It is her own son, her dead child,” Father said. He would not look away. Everywhere, even in the blackest abyss, he believed one might witness the divine. The shadows and contrast—absence itself—as important as the light and marble, for one cannot exist without the other.

Yikes