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Winter among the Mystassins
- The University Press of Kentucky
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26 Winter among the Mystassins Fr. Jerome This cabin of poles and birch bark fills with the smoke of a smoldering fire. My clothes and hair reek with it. My eyes burn and weep with it, by morning swollen shut so tight I stumble out into the cold rubbing off a thin crust of dried rheum and collapse in a coughing fit. Cold is everywhere, blowing through the bark walls, seeping from the ground through my fir-branch bed. My head feels tamped with woolen lint. I eat from a dish cleaned with greasy hides, or licked by dogs. I wipe my hands on their fur as they press forward. They growl as if they mean to do me harm, but do not bite. This morning I awoke with five standing around me. The Mystassins ignore me, but their dogs must think me a weak and dying meal. Ka-wa-ska’s sick son sleeps near me and the rotten smell of his scrofula 27 turns my stomach. We eat from the same bowl and pick deer hair from our meat. Daily despite the cold I shake out my cassock and stockings to throw off the vermin that infest me. Never have I seen savages so dirty. I fear my death among them, yet must not complain confronted with the suffering of one before me—the slow death and torment of Father Jorges in the camp of the Hiroquois. Here with the Mystassins, I endure only what they endure, a hard life in a cold hard place. I accept my fate among them, and to my faith bear witness. God grant that I may live out this winter and go on to the southern tribes on La Belle Riviere before I die, a worthless servant of the Missions. ...