A Discovery of Strangers

Chapter 1

The Animals in This Country

The land is so long, and the people travelling in it so few, the curious animals barely notice them from one lifetime to the next. The human beings whose name is Tetsot ine live here with great care, their feet travelling year after year those paths where the animals can easily avoid them if they want to, or follow, or circle back ahead to watch them with little danger. Therefore, when the first one or two Whites appeared in this country, an animal would have had to search for four lifetimes to find them being paddled about, or walking, or bent and staggering, somewhere on the inexorable land.

About that time some of the animals did begin to hear strange noises, bits of shriek and hammer above the wavering roar of rapids or the steady flagellation of wind. These were strangers, so different, so blatantly loud the caribou themselves could not help hearing them long before they needed to be smelled, and some animals drifted around to see what made the trees in one place scream and smash that way, the rocks clang. They noticed creatures that looked like humans standing motionless here and there, abruptly pointing and shrieking, pounding! pounding! scuttling about all day and sometimes at night as well, when tendrils of bush along the river might spring up suddenly into terrifying flame. And the animals understood then that such brutal hiss and clangour must bring on a winter even colder than usual.

And shortly after, when wind hammered the snow hard as folded rock under the thickest trees, and growing ice choked the rapids into silence, they knew that of course they had been right. Then an erratic cracking open, or a tree splitting, could be heard so far it seemed they were alert to every sound happening anywhere in the world, and the racket these strange human beings made in one place mattered nothing at all. The animals simply moved away into their necessary silence, travelling where they pleased, as they

RUDY WIEBE's novels, stories and essays stand at the forefront of Canadian literature. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction twice, for The Temptations of Big Bear and for A Discovery of Strangers. He is also the co-author of Stolen Life, which won the Viacom Canada Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Alberta Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. His memoir, Of This Earth, won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and was a national bestseller.

What is remarkable about Wiebe s achievement in [The Temptations of Big Bear and The Scorched-Wood People] and now, in A Discovery of Strangers is that he is able to be, it seems, both Faulkner and Balzac at once. That is, Wiebe can construct scenes of painstaking detail and psychological insight, and combine them or frame them in exciting historical situations . . . . A Discovery of Strangers is vintage Wiebe. Books in Canada

Clash, crash, shock: there are plenty of clichéd verbs of collision to describe encounters between cultures. In A Discovery of Strangers, the meeting of the English and the Yellowknife Indians on whom they rely to guide them through the northlands is seldom so dramatically violent; it is, as the title hints, a gradual discover of strangeness, and all the more affecting for that . . . . A Discovery of Strangers is a triumph of translation: with unflinching understanding and the powers of a very fine storyteller, Rudy Wiebe has once again delivered us our past. Quill & Quire

The author is a master of descriptive prose . . . . This memorable novel will add to the author s reputation as one of Canada s most gifted writers a peerless delineator of his country s history and soul. Canadian Jewish News

Wiebe continues to do what he does best: capture on a broad canvas many of the epic events in Canadian history . . . . a major work of art. Wiebe provides some of the most evocative prose yet about the Canadian North. Maclean s

Its fascinating events are solidly rooted in history . . . but in Rudy Wiebe s rendition it becomes a history transmuted by art into a strangely original, intensely personal vision . . . . It is a pleasure of the first order the pleasure of true art. Josef Skvorecky

A circuitously told, poetically charged work that resonates long after the book is closed. Edmonton Journal

Magnificent. A love story . . . an adventure story . . . a dramatic tale . . . a winner. The Calgary