Kiss of the Fur Queen Read Free Page A

by the terrified animal because Kookoos Cook had refused to let go of his only axe. Before Abraham could say
“Weeks’chiloowew,”
Kookoos Cook had shoved the ratty old instrument into the musher’s hands.
    “Play my dead wife’s favourite jig, play
‘Kimoosoom Chimasoo’
or I’ll never talk to you again.”
    So the caribou hunter pumped and pulled his screechy old accordion, playing
“Kimoosoom Chimasoo”
like it had never been played, which is how Mariesis Okimasis first saw her husband after three whole weeks: through her kitchen window, her apron bloodied by the shank of caribou she was wrestling with, Mariesis Okimasis, forty years of age, black-haired, brown-eyed, lovely as a willow tree in spring. Her bloodied butcher knife missing Jane Kaka’s left breast by half an inch, she zoomed through the door and flew into her husband’s arms.
    A mere two hundred yards south of the Okimasis cabin, one could have seen the priest in his study, a nail in one hand, a hammer in the other, poised to nail a brand-new crucifix into a wall. No good Catholic danced on Sundays, Father Eustache Bouchard had told his flock repeatedly. He considered marching over to tell the revellers to go home to supper and do their dancing some other day. His hammer came down, very hard, on his left thumb.
    One trillion miles above the aboriginal jamboree, the ghostly foetus continued its airy descent towards Earth. And only medicine women, shamans, artists, and visionaries were aware that a star-born child would soon be joining their dance.
    Mariesis Okimasis had once won a contest for which the prize had been to have her picture taken by an itinerant British anthropologist who had claimed that never in all his travels had he seen cheekbones such as hers.
    “That guy never did send us a copy of the picture,” moaned Mariesis into her husband’s tingling ear as she slipped under him, he over her, their mountainous, goose-down-filled sleeping robe shifting like an earthquake in slow motion. Mariesis could see the left side of her husband’s face, and for this she was glad, for nothing in life gave her more pleasure than the sight of his thick, sensuous lips.
    The moonlight drifting in the little window over their bed made them look like large ripe fruit.
    “That’s all right,” the large ripe fruit breathed into her ear as she struggled with her white flannel slip. “I don’t need a picture when I have the real thing.” He slid out of his underwear.
    The moonlight led Mariesis’s eyes to the floor beside the bed where her sleeping children lay, those four still at home; she listened to their delicate snores wheeze their way in and out of her husband’s heavy breathing, a sweet kitten’s purr floating up to her. Then the light took them to the dresser top, where sat the trophy her champion of the world had brought for her from the distant south. Beside it stood a photograph: Abraham cradling in his arms the silver bowl, his cheek being kissed by the young woman radiant in her white fur cape and her silver-beaded fur tiara: “The Fur Queen,” he had explained, “the most beautiful woman in the world. Except for Mariesis Okimasis,” of course.
    Suddenly, the light was coming from the Fur Queen’s eyes. Mariesis half-closed hers and let this moment take her, out the little window above the bed, out past the branch of the young spruce tree bending under its weight of snow, outto millions of stars, to the northern lights: the ancestors of her people, ten thousand generations, to the beginning of time. Dancing.
    And somewhere within the folds of this dance, Mariesis saw, through tears of an intense joy — or did ecstasy inflict hallucinations on its victims? — a sleeping child, not yet born but fully formed, naked, curled up inside the womb of night, tumbling down towards her and her husband.
    The ancestors — the women — moaned and whispered. Mariesis could hear among them her mother, who had left this Earth mere months after