The Marsh King's Daughter(45)
We turned east and walked downstream along the river. I was Erik the Red or his son, Leif Eriksson, setting foot on the shores of Greenland or North America for the very first time. Every tree, every bush, every rock, was a rock or a bush or a tree that I had never seen. Even the air felt different. On our side of the river, the marsh was mostly flat grasslands covered in standing water with only the occasional ridge. This side was all solid ground, with towering white pines so big that two people couldn’t have wrapped their arms around them. There was enough wood in this forest to build a thousand cabins like ours, enough firewood to keep the families who lived in them warm for dozens of years. I wondered why the people who built our cabin didn’t build it here.
As I snowshoed behind my father, I felt like I could walk for miles. Then I realized I could. There was nothing stopping me from walking wherever I wanted because I was no longer bounded by water. No wonder the marsh felt small.
Of course I also realized that however far we walked, at some point we were going to have to turn around and walk the same distance back. We were also going to have to cross the river again, and if we didn’t time our return trip right, it could be dark by the time we did. I had no idea how we’d manage if that happened, but I wouldn’t think about that now. My father had gotten me across the river once; he could do it again. All that mattered was that at last—at last—I was seeing and experiencing something entirely new.
The river got wider. In the distance I heard a low rumbling. At first the sound was so faint, I wasn’t sure if it was real. But gradually the noise got louder. It sounded like the noise the river made when the ice broke up in the spring, only it wasn’t spring, and the river was frozen solid. I wanted to ask what the rumbling meant, why it was getting louder, why the current was running stronger, but my father was walking so quickly, I could barely keep up.
We came to a place where a thick cable made of strands of wire twisted together was strung across the river. On our side the cable wrapped around a tree. The bark had grown over the cable, so I knew the cable had been there a long time. I imagined the cable was similarly anchored on the other side. Hanging from the cable in the middle of the river was a sign. Except for the word DANGER at the top in big red letters, the writing was too small to read. I didn’t understand why someone would go to all of the trouble of hanging a sign in a place where the only people who could read it would have to be in a boat. And what was the danger?
We kept walking. The snow got slippery and wet. The trees were coated with what looked like frost, but when I tugged on a branch, the coating didn’t fall off like frost should.
And then the river disappeared. That’s the only way I can think to describe it. Beside us, the river flowed swift and wide. A hundred yards ahead was nothing but sky. The river simply stopped, like it had been cut off with a knife. The disappearing river, the frost that wasn’t frost, the roaring that sounded like thunder but never stopped—I felt like I’d stepped out of the real world and into one of my father’s stories.
My father led me through a break in the trees toward the edge of an icy cliff. For one terrifying moment I thought he expected me to link hands and jump off like in the legends about Indian warriors and maidens forbidden to marry. Instead he put his hands on my shoulders and gently turned me around.
I gasped. Not fifty feet from where we were standing, the river exploded over the side of the cliff in a great wall of brown and gold water, crashing down endlessly onto the rocks below. Chunks of ice as big as our cabin clogged the river at the bottom. Thick ice coated the trees and the rocks. The sides of the waterfall were frozen into massive ice columns like the pillars of a medieval cathedral. Directly across from us a wooden platform extended over the top of the waterfall. Stairs led from the platform up a steep hill and into the trees. I’d seen pictures of Niagara Falls in the Geographics, but this was beyond anything I could have imagined. I had no idea that such a thing existed in our marsh—never mind that our falls were less than a day’s walk away.
We stood and watched for a long time. Mist coated my hair, my face, my eyelashes. At last my father tapped my arm. I didn’t want to leave, but I followed him into the trees and sat down beside him on a fallen log. Like everything else in this magical forest, the log was huge—at least three times the size of the biggest fallen log that I had ever seen.
My father smiled and waved his hand expansively. “What do you think?”
“It’s wonderful,” was all I could say. I hoped it was enough. The noise, the spray, the endlessly pounding water—I had no words to describe the magnitude of what I was thinking and feeling.
“This is ours, Bangii-Agawaateyaa. The river, the land, this waterfall, all belong to us. Long before the white man came, our people fished these waters and hunted these shores.”
“And the wooden platform? Did we build that, too?”
My father’s face darkened. Instantly I wished I hadn’t asked the question, but it was too late to take it back.
“On the other side of the falls is a place the white men call a park. The white men built the stairs and the platform so people would give them money to look at our waterfall.”
“I thought perhaps the platform was for fishing.”
My father clapped his hands together and laughed loud and long. Normally I would have been pleased with his reaction, but I wasn’t trying to be funny. As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized there were no fish in these waters. My father had told me our river emptied into a big lake called Gitche Gumee at a place the Ojibwa call Ne-adikamegwaning and the white people call Whitefish Bay. I also knew from the Geographics that salmon swim upstream through rapids to spawn in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest, but no fish could swim through this.