Translation: Wearing the skin of a lion (beginning part)

Translated by Li Yousheng; written by Canadian author Michael Ondaatje (1943-).

Title page 1

Joy will bow down to sorrow and grief. After you depart for the underworld, I will let your hair grow long, and you will wear the skin of a lion, wandering the wilderness. —The Epic of Gilgamesh

Never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one. — John Berger

Translator’s Note: The Epic of Gilgamesh is a famous ancient poem from the Mesopotamian civilization of ancient West Asia. According to the poem, Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, was deeply grieved by the death of his friend, the savage Enkidu. He wandered the wilderness, draped in animal skins, in search of the elixir of immortality, enduring many hardships before failing and returning to Uruk. John Berger was a contemporary British writer, born in 1926.

Title Page 2

This is a story a young woman collected in her car in the early hours of the morning. The car drove through the darkness, and the woman listened, asking questions. The Canadian countryside outside was still shrouded in mist, villages and trees indistinguishable. The driver said, “There’s a castle in that field…” The woman believed him.

The girl listened attentively. The man searched for every corner of the story, weaving them together, then draped them over his arms. He was tired, sometimes as absent-minded as driving, sometimes excited. “You know now!” he said, turning to look at her in the dim light of the speedometer.

They drove to Marmulla, a journey of four hours. In the sky, a waning moon and six morning stars shone.

She tried her best to stay awake and keep him company.

Part One:

Chapter One: The Tiny Seed

If the boy woke early enough, he would see a group of men walking along the lakeside road past the farmhouse. Standing at his second-floor bedroom window, he would see a few lanterns flickering among the indistinct outlines of maple and walnut trees. He would hear the sound of their boots hitting the pebbles on the pavement. Thirty lumberjacks, shrouded in the darkness, carrying axes and lunch bags hanging from their waists. The boy ran downstairs to the kitchen window, from which he could see the driveway. They ran from right to left. The sun hadn’t yet risen, and they already seemed exhausted.

The boy knew that sometimes these strangers would encounter a herd of cows coming from the pasture to be milked. They would stand on either side of the road, lanterns held high (a step back revealing knee-deep snow), politely remaining silent to let the animals lazily pass through the narrow path. Sometimes they would place their hands on the animals to warm their frozen hands. The black and white creatures were difficult to distinguish in the pre-dawn darkness. Pairs of hands, thinly gloved, rested on them. The men had to be careful not to be suspected of attacking or encroaching on the livestock. They were not the owners of this land; the owners of the cows owned it.

The cows walked past the group of men lined up along the roadside with their hands outstretched. The farmer driving the cows followed behind, nodding frequently. He passed this strange group of men most winter mornings. These silent companions comforted him. It was five o’clock in the morning. But he had started driving the cows together an hour earlier to milk them.

The boy had seen the procession with his own eyes, even dreamed of it, and observed how the men worked in the dark woods miles away. He had heard their shouts, the clanging of their axes against the cold tree trunks like metal, and seen the fires burning beside the stream. Beneath the thin layer of ice, the water was molecular and gray.

Sweat sloshed between their stiff bodies and cold clothes. Some had died of pneumonia, others of sulfur inhaled during the rest of the year while working in factories. They slept in shacks behind the Bellstone Inn, their lives largely detached from the town. Neither the boy nor his father had ever entered those gloomy houses, those houses with their masculine warmth. A rough table, four bunk beds, a tiny window the size of a person’s back. All built in December and demolished the following spring. No one in Bellstone knew where these men came from; that would have to be told to the boy years later by others. The lumberjacks’ only connection to the town was when they skated along the river. Their skates were homemade, made from old knives. For the boy, the passing of winter meant the appearance of the blue river, and the disappearance of those men.

* * *

He longed for summer nights, for the moment he would turn off the lights, even the small cream-colored funnel lamp next to his father’s bedroom, plunging the entire house into a soft darkness except for the kitchen. He sat at the long table, flipping through a primary and secondary school geography textbook with a world map. Under the lamplight, a vast expanse of white pages turned, and he wanted to see if he could remember the names, if he could utter those exotic words himself. Caspian, Nepal, Durango. He closed the book, running his hand over it, feeling the texture of the pebble-patterned cover, feeling the colors of the dye on the map of Canada.

Later, he groped his way through the dark living room and returned the book to the shelf. He massaged his shoulders in the dim light to regain his strength, forcing himself to stay awake so he would have plenty of time. It was still hot; shirtless, he walked back to the brightly lit kitchen, checking every window for the moths flapping their wings and clinging to the shimmering screens. They must have seen this only lit room on the other side of the field and rushed here—a summer night’s inquiry.

Insects—leafhoppers, grasshoppers, rusty black moths. Bertrick stared blankly at the little creatures. They flew in through the warm layer of air above the ground, slamming against the mesh of the screen window with a “whoosh.” As he read, he heard their muffled thuds, and his hearing seemed to anticipate that sound. Many years later, he would learn in the Valley Library how the glittering leaf-pecking beetle destroyed bushes, how the flower beetle sucked the sap from decaying wood and tender corn. In his mind, those nights suddenly became clear and meaningful. After giving each insect a fictional name, he would learn their official names, like studying a ball guest list—the spiky-throated locust! The Archbishop of Canterbury!

Even their real names were beautiful. Amber-winged water dragonfly, bush cricket. He spent the whole summer recording the insects’ visits, sketching the constant stream of visitors. Was it the same insect? He drew the inchworm’s orange wings, the crescent moth, and the soft brown of the bush moth, its fur shimmering like rabbit fur, in his notebook with crayons. He wouldn’t open the screen to catch the dusty insects. He only tried once, and the moth struggled in fright, startling the boy—the pinkish-brown moth left its colorful powder on his fingers.

He peered closer and realized they were prehistoric. The insects’ mandibles were chewing. Were they eating tiny things? Or was the food invisible to the naked eye, like the food his father chewed in the fields? The kitchen light shone through their thin wings. Even those tiny creatures, curled up like peach-green aphids, seemed to radiate power.

Bertrick pulled an orica double-pipe flute from his pocket. Playing it outside wouldn’t wake his father; the sound would rise naturally, nestling in the embrace of the maple trees. Or perhaps his flute’s melody would haunt the insects like a spell. Or perhaps the insects themselves made sounds, but he couldn’t perceive them. (When he was nine, his father found him lying on the ground, his ear pressed against a pile of dry, hard cow dung, listening intently to the fluttering and thumping of insects inside.) He knew that cicadas, with their tiny bodies, could produce powerful sounds. He wanted to communicate with them—the language of the fly girls. Just as he needed a flute to speak for him, to make sounds that could cross regions and float over walls, the insects also needed something like a flute to translate their conversation.

What do those insects show him every night? Or does he possess a magic that captivates them, like when he steps out of the dark house and into the dim light of the kitchen window, saying to the open fields, “I’m here! Come visit me!”

He was born in an unnamed little place, although his family had lived there for more than twenty years, and although the area had been designated as farmland for new immigrants since 1816, it was not until 1910 that the area was marked on a map.

On the school map, the area was a nameless pale green. A small river flowed quietly from an unnamed lake, appearing on the map as just a winding blue line, until it flowed south for twenty-five miles to become the Bernie River. Due to logging, it eventually became known as Warehouse Creek. The water deepened, becoming a warehouse.

His father worked on two or three farms, cutting down trees, harvesting hay, and herding cattle and sheep. The cows crossed the river twice a day: in the morning they leisurely strolled to the south bank, and in the afternoon they were herded together for milking. In winter, the cows were driven to the grazing sheds along the way, but one time, one cow ran towards the river, trying to return to the pasture.

The cows walked slowly, taking a full two hours to finally disappear from their sight. The father began to run towards the river, calling to his son Bertrick, and to follow the herd of horses in the field. Bertrick rode on the bare back of one horse, leading the rest across the deep snow with a long rope. Through the bare branches, he saw his father riding down the hillside, rushing towards the swimming bay.

In the middle of the river, a cow lay submerged in the icy water. It belonged to a nearby farmer. The winter landscape was devoid of color. Dead mulleins were reduced to withered stems, the woods were a greyish hue, and the swamp a pristine white. The father, with a rope slung over his shoulder, crawled across the ice, slowly moving towards the black and white animal. Louis stopped, waiting for the animal to calm down before crawling forward. He had to loop the rope around the cow’s belly twice. Bertrick slowly crawled to the other side of the cow and knelt there. The father held the cow’s neck with his left hand, and reached into the icy water with his right, offering the rope along the cow’s belly. Bertrick’s hand also went into the water, groping back and forth, trying to reach the rope his father offered, but the two hands could only touch underwater. Bertrick lay on the ice so that his entire arm and shoulder were submerged, but his wrist began to go numb. He thought his hand would soon become numb and lose all feeling, and even if he touched the rope his father offered, he wouldn’t know it.

The cow shifted its body, water seeping into Bertel’s coat and into his chest. His father also stepped back, and the two of them knelt on either side of the cow, waving their soaked arms and pounding their chests. They remained silent; they needed to succeed quickly. The father warmed his hands by touching the cow’s ears. He lay on his side on the ice, then plunged his arm back into the water with a splash, icy water slowly trickling down his face. Bertel, on the other side, did the same to his father, groping around in the water, but finding nothing.

“I’m going to dive into the water, you have to be quick!” the father said.

Bertrick saw his father’s waist tremble slightly before his head plunged into the icy water. Bertrick gripped his father’s arm, which was draped over the cow’s back, tightly with one hand.

Bertrick then dove his head into the water, reaching out towards his father. Under the cow’s belly, Bertrick finally touched his father’s wrist. He dared not let go, quickly groping for a firm grip on the thick rope. He pulled hard, but couldn’t budge it; he realized his father’s body had pressed against the rope as he sank. Despite the chest pain and his need for air, Bertrick couldn’t give up. His father surfaced, gasping for breath, lying on the ice, gritting his teeth against the pain, struggling to breathe. Suddenly realizing he was on the rope, he immediately rolled away, freeing himself. Bertrick began pulling on the rope, pushing off with his feet, and emerged from the water. He glided across the ice, away from the cow.

Bertrand sat up, looked at his father, and raised his hands in a victory sign. His father frantically wiped the water from his ears and eyes, which would have frozen solid if he hadn’t acted sooner. Bertrand wiped his face with his dry sleeve, tucking his hands inside, and then using his fingers to rub his ears and eyes against the sleeve. He felt the water on his chin and neck freezing, but he didn’t care. His father rushed back to shore to get a second rope, tied the two ropes together, and Bertrand pulled the ropes under the cow so that both ropes were wrapped around its body.

Bertrick looked up at the massive gray rock at the edge of the swimming bay, where an oak tree, as tall as a tower, sheltered dwarf magnolias peeking out from the snow. The sky was clear and cloudless. The boy seemed to feel as if he hadn’t seen such sights in years. Before this moment, Bertrick had only noticed his father, the black and white coat of the cow, and the terrifyingly dark water he had seen when he opened his eyes under the ice.

The father tied the ropes to the two horses, but the cow, its large eyes drooping and half-submerged in the water, seemed unmoved. Bertrick, finding the cow uninteresting, began to chew. He parted the cow’s upper lip and placed his cold fingers on its gums to warm them. Only then did he climb back onto the shore.

Bertrick and his father each controlled a horse, gripping the bridles and shouting, urging the horses to pull. The two horses showed no fear of the cow’s weight. From the bank, Bertrick watched as the cow, tongue lolling out, was pulled towards the shore, repeatedly breaking through the oncoming ice. The cow’s usual smug expression vanished, replaced by anxious concern. When they were about ten feet from the shore, the ice thickened, increasing resistance, and the horses stopped. Bertrick and his father switched positions, the horses galloped, and the cow was miraculously lifted off the ice, its four legs stiff and pointing skyward, pulled ashore on its back, lying on the brown tufts of straw.

They released the horse and tried to untie the cow’s ropes, but it was difficult. The father then grabbed a knife and cut the ropes. The cow, lying there, snorted, its breath steaming in the cold air, and wobbled to its feet, staring blankly at Bertrick and his son. What surprised Bertrick most was his father. His father was always obsessively frugal. He had repeatedly admonished Bertrick to conserve ropes, to always untie the knots, and never to cut them with a knife! This time, his father’s forceful slashing of the knots was a momentary act of extravagance born of his anger.

They started running home, glancing back to see if the cow had followed them. The boy, panting, said, “If that beast runs back into the ice, I don’t care at all.”

“Me neither!” the father shouted, bursting into laughter.

By the time they got back to their kitchen, it was already dark. They both had stomach aches.

Inside the house, Louis, the father, lit an oil lamp and started a fire. At dinner, the boy shivered, and his father granted him permission to sleep with him that night. Lying in bed, the two shared a blanket, but neither spoke. The father lay there so quietly that Bertrand couldn’t tell if he was asleep or awake. Bertrand gazed at the kitchen, watching the fire slowly die down.

He imagined himself surviving the winter, entering midsummer, becoming a white shadow beside his father. In summer, his father would drip gasoline onto the cocoons of caterpillars. With a “whoosh,” the gray web would be engulfed in flames. The caterpillar would fall onto the grass, its putrid stench assaulting Bertel’s palate. In the moonlight, the two of them would carefully search the farmland and pastures. Bertel would point out a nest his father had overlooked, and they would slowly make their way deeper into the pasture.

He was almost asleep. In the kitchen, another flame ignited in the darkness, then went out and vanished.

* * *

In the shed, the father, Louis, told his son to stand against the wall. Louis then used green chalk to trace the outline of his son’s body on the wooden planks. He then threaded electrical wires back and forth within the outline, like rearranging the blood vessels in his son’s frame. The muscles were the explosives, the spinal cord the black fuse. This is the boy’s memory of his father: he stared silently at the outline his son had just left, watching the fuse slowly burn, blowing away the part of the wooden planks where his son’s head had rested.

Louis was a timid and withdrawn man, detached from the world around him, focused only on what his eyes could see, and utterly uninterested in other aspects of human civilization. He rode his horse, pulling on the reins, as if he were riding a train, as if flesh and blood simply did not exist.

In the winter months, Bertrick walked to the fields north of the stream to bring his father lunch, where his father spent the day chopping wood alone. In that white palace of ice, snow, and towering trees, his father appeared so small, so insignificant. But when Bertrick was fifteen, his father took a significant step in his life. At some point, as his father swung his axe at the hemlock, listening to the sound of the blow and the echo swirling overhead, he must have imagined the forest, the eternal permafrost, and the cauldron of maple syrup suddenly boiling over, shaking the ice and snow off the surrounding trees. One afternoon, he abruptly stopped, went home, took off his bearskin boots, put down his axe, and bid farewell forever to his lifelong lumberjacking career. He wrote to order books and rushed to Kingston to buy timber. The idea was sparked by an explosion in the forest as he pulled his axe from the hemlock trunk for the last time. He bought nitroglycerin, detonators, and fuses, sketched a plan on the wooden wall of the wagon shed, and took the explosives into the forest. He placed explosives beside rocks, in ice, and under trees. He tossed a spark into the cartridge, his eyes fixed on the snow clinging to the branches as it fell in the air, everything that fell became a radiating image of the blast wave in his mind. Before spring arrived, Louis rode to the headquarters of the Rasbon Timber Company. He demonstrated his skill, precisely positioning a log to a specific spot, blasting away half a ton of shale, and was hired along with other river driftwood drivers. He secured a place for himself in the soon-to-be-formed Warehouse Lake and Napani River timber industrial area. Years later, when the company closed, he was hired by Richardson Mining Company as a blaster in feldspar mines near Navarrena and Godfrey. The longest speech of his life was that to the Rasbon Company, explaining his abilities and purpose. In his view, only two jobs were truly practical: blaster and cook.

Along a series of lakes—from Warehouse Lake I to Warehouse Lake V—loggers arrive in winter, disappearing into dilapidated barracks, walking over thirty kilometers into unfamiliar land. Throughout February, March, and April, the timber in the center of those lakes is piled into pyramids reaching into the sky, hauled there by sleds. The men begin work before dawn, enduring the harshest blizzards in sub-zero temperatures, finishing at six in the afternoon. Double-handled cross-cutting saws fell pine trees. Those sawing stumps bend twice as far down, sawing the stumps flat to the ground for pulp. This is the worst work. One man uses a turnip saw, twice as fast as a cross-cutting saw for spruce, but they have to roll up the saw blades when moving to new forests to make new handles.

In April, as the lake ice melted, the work of clearing floating timber down the river began. This was the easiest, yet also the most dangerous, task. From Zhongshi Town to Napani City, workers stood guard at every point where the river narrowed. At bridges or where large rocks in the middle of the river divided the channel, two or three people were always on watch to prevent the drifting timber from clogging the river. If the clogging timber wasn’t cleared in time, hundreds of logs would pile up behind, blocking the entire stretch of river. At that point, the timber clearing workers were powerless and could only send someone on horseback to call for explosives. A log nearly two meters long shot out of the water, knocking a man aside and wounding him in the chest.

Louis and his son rode to a spot in the middle of the river where there was a large rock. The burly man lingered where the timber was blocking the river. He inserted a bolt, lit the fuse, and had the boy warn pedestrians to step back. Several pieces of timber shot into the air and landed on the bank, and the river flowed freely again.

In an extremely difficult situation, Berthelic stripped off his clothes, smeared his body with oil from the steam engine’s crankcase, and plunged into the water with a splash, creating a wave. He swam among the logs. Wherever he went, he raised his hand every half minute to reassure his father. Finally, the boy found the log his father had specified, caught the explosive charge his father threw him, and used his teeth to bite the detonator onto the fuse, igniting the explosive.

He emerged from the water, walked back to where he was riding, took a towel from his backpack to dry himself, and like his father, never looked back. The entire river exploded behind him, and crows soared into the sky like leaves growing wildly.

The work of driving the drifting timber along the river lasted for a month. He watched men stand on sawn logs, using long poles to propel themselves through the water, drifting past them towards Yark and all the way to Pani. The piles of timber were hauled ashore one by one and taken to the factory. The boy was always by his father’s side, standing lazily in the sunshine by the bridge, waiting with his father.

At midday, the cook walked along First Warehouse Lake, carrying two buckets of butter. One bucket contained tea, the other a thick pork sandwich. The aroma of the food drew them in, and crows circling and cawing overhead served as a signal. The men working came from various bends in the river. After lunch, the cook picked up the two empty buckets, jumped onto a log by the water’s edge, and floated downstream back to the barracks. He stood upright in the middle of the river, his pace controlled by the current. Crossing bridges, his head barely touching the bottom, his posture remained unchanged. He kept nodding to the lumberjacks on the bank. But the flock of crows followed him from the air, breaking his heart. He landed on Goose Island near the barracks, his shoes completely dry.

Louis was reading his pamphlet, drying gunpowder on a stone. Even with his son beside him, he seemed sullen. His entire focus was on the imagined fuse, burning within two minutes into the yard beneath the floor, winding around a few tree trunks, and finally reaching someone’s pocket. The image kept replaying in his mind: the man might be sleeping by a campfire, the fuse burning horizontally into his shirt pocket, exploding his heart. In his long-held prejudice, the fuse was like a greyhound’s nose, meandering across the ground, lying still until one day it suddenly turned into a red lichen.

Louis didn’t teach his son anything, there were no legends or theoretical foundations. The boy watched his father prepare the explosives, how he neatly put the used equipment back into the wooden box. His father carried no metal, no watch, no belt buckle. He was a man who could work independently with just a few tools, a man who tried to remain unnoticed. He could blast logs out of the water one by one without damaging them. Along each warehouse lake, a series of half-inch-deep holes were left in the granite rocks on the shore. But those holes, like him, were restrained, as small as possible. Holes left by woodpeckers. He never wore a hat, was a large man, six and a half feet tall, with a heavy body. He wasn’t a good horseman, and later he wasn’t a good driver either. He could assemble explosives on the ground with his eyes closed. Every night he carefully washed his clothes to prevent particles of explosive from sticking to the collar and cuffs, to prevent any residue of explosives from being inside the clothes. Bertlick despised his excessive caution. His father threw his shirt into the campfire the workers had built; the shirt hissed in the fire, sparks flying up to the lumberjacks’ knees. The father would inevitably give his son a sudden scolding like this.

Years later, Bertlick strangely realized that he had learned many important things from his father in this way, just as many children learn by watching adults tilt their hats slightly or approach a live dog cautiously. He knew how powerful a piece of dynamite the size of a bullfrog could be, and how much destruction it could cause. He learned it from afar. The only time his father spoke was when he was dancing the baluster in the Yark and Tams Inn, during April and May when the workers were driving away driftwood. He was always called to the stage, and he seemed to feel it was his duty to circle the guitar and violin, reciting a few rhyming lines, the last of which was always hurried and rushed, abruptly ending before reaching the rhyme. Otherwise, his father remained silent, even when calling out the baluster. His words slid onto the stage without any sense of engagement. The boy watched his father from the sidelines, silently repeating his lines. His father shouted, “Little car, axle and rut,” without a single muscle moving.

A tongue devoid of emotion. Bertlick found himself running back and forth on stage, arms bent, head held high. Later, during the day, he would mutter to himself, “Birds fly out, crows fly in. Crows fly out, birds fly wildly.”

When Bertrand was eleven, one winter evening, he emerged from the long kitchen. A blue moth landed on the screen window, fluttering its wings in the lamplight, but quickly flew away and disappeared into the darkness. He thought the moth couldn’t have flown far. He picked up a kerosene lantern and went outside. A rare winter moth, this one flew along the snow, constantly touching the ground, seemingly injured; Bertrand followed it effortlessly. He hadn’t seen a moth in a long time; how could it appear in winter? Perhaps it had grown in the chicken coop. He placed the lantern on a rock and looked out over the fields; in the distant woods, there seemed to be more insects. In the woods by the river, many fireflies were flying. But it was winter, he thought, carrying the lantern as he continued onward.

It was farther than he had imagined. He was wearing untied boots, the deep snow reaching his ankles. One hand was in his pocket, the other clutching a lamp. The moon hid behind thick clouds; otherwise, Berthelic would have been able to see the path leading to the woods. Now he could only run towards the shimmering lights. But by then he knew they weren’t fireflies. (Years later, when Clarence was making love to him in the car, she caught his semen in a handkerchief and tossed it into the bushes beside the trees. “Hey, fireflies!” he said with a laugh, offering no explanation.)

He trudged through the snow, across a group of granite boulders protruding from the ground, and into the woods. The snow wasn’t as deep in the woods, and the light still shimmered before his eyes. He began to hear laughter. Now he knew what it was. He tiptoed into the familiar woods, as if trying to enter a haunted room. He knew who it was, but he didn’t know what he was about to see. The river was just ahead. He placed his lantern beside an oak tree and walked toward the riverbank in the darkness.

The river ice glittered under the lights. For a moment, he felt as if he had stumbled upon a wizard’s secret gathering, a bizarre and outlandish witchcraft ritual. Standing deep in the woods in the dead of night, the eleven-year-old boy clearly recognized that everything before him was good. A joyful thing. A gift.

There were about ten people skating, but this was only part of the whole game. One person chased another skater, and when someone was touched, that person became the new chaser. Each person held a torch made of cattails. These were the fireflies that Berthelik had seen from afar.

They were racing, suddenly turning, falling and tumbling on the ice to make way for others. They were all jostling and pushing, unwilling to stop for a moment. When they collided, sparks fell onto the ice and onto their grey clothes. This caused bursts of laughter. One man stopped, frantically shaking his arms, trying to shake the sparks from his sleeves. He shouted for everyone to stop.

Bertrick was stunned. Skating on the river that night, each person led a wedge-shaped beam of light piercing the darkness, miraculously illuminating the grey woods on the bank. It was their own bank, their own river. A branch stretched out from the bank, its far end frozen in the ice. A man glided under it, crouched down, his torch behind him like a long, burning rooster’s tail.

The boy knew they were lumberjacks from the barracks. He longed to shake their hands, to skate home with them, to cross the river, to slow down at bridges or where rocks jutted out of the water. He knew they lived in dark huts next to the factory.

It wasn’t just the fun of skating. They could skate during the day, but this was skating at night. The hard ice was so calm and certain. They could leap into the air, fall, and the hard ice would catch them. In a new sprint forward, they switched to lanterns so they could skate further, far beyond the boundary. Speed! Romance! The men were waltzing with the lanterns in their hands.

The boy entered his twelfth year. He had always lived on the farm, working by day and resting by night, but everything was about to change. That night, distrusting either himself or the men who spoke different languages, he didn’t go forward or join them. He carried his lantern home, crossing the woods and walking across the fields, each step breaking through the thin ice that had formed on the surface of the snow, making him appear clumsy and slow.

Thus, at this moment in his life, his mind far outpaces his body.