Timber Wolf

by Caroline Pignat

  Kijick brings in the last two stones. At first, I don’t know who he is. Sweat stings my eyes and I feel as though I’ve left my body.

  Why shouldn’t I? I’m all alone. I’ve no family. No one cares if I live or die. And I’m so tired, so very tired.

  I don’t know if I’m in a tent on Grosse Isle, or the Wawaties’ lodge, or maybe hell itself.

  Grandfather’s face floats in and out of the steam. Voices sing in the darkness. Wolf’s face appears as it did that night at the lean-to and, as I reach out to touch his fur, he raises his muzzle and joins the song ... hooOOOoooOoowl. I’m back on the island, lying among the sick and dying, and a girl’s voice carries echoes in the distance ... who-who-who ... she’s calling a name, my name, if I could only hear it ...

  The men’s song grows louder and louder in the lodge. Melting into the who-who-who beating in my head.

  And then I see her entering the sick tent. Smaller, skinnier, ragged, and rough from the journey, my older sister, Kit. I thought we’d lost her back in Ireland. But she’d made it. She was alive! With every ounce of strength I have left, I push myself up and then she sees me. Runs to me. Wraps her arms around me. “I found you,” she cries, squeezing me. “I found you, Jack.”

  JackByrne–JackByrne–JackByrne—my heart pounds the truth. It pulses through my veins and throbs in my very soul. I scramble for the door and rush into the night air. Emerging as slick and naked as a newborn, steam rises like incense from my sweating body as I stand and gaze at the great wide sky.

  “Jack ...” I whisper at the net of stars. “I am Jack Byrne.”

  CHAPTER 46

  The next day, life is very busy at the Wawatie camp. As well as their regular chores, the women are making baskets and whittling cedar spigots. Chiki tells me the maples are running. I look outside but they’re still there. After my experience with the grandfathers in the sweat lodge, seeing a tree pick up and sprint over the hill isn’t all that ridiculous.

  “The sugar water, the sap, is running, Jack,” Chiki explains.

  I smile at the sound of my name. I love hearing it. I’ve even added it to my belt carvings just to see it boldly there.

  She scrunches up her nose and looks at me. “Haven’t you ever made maple syrup? Or pigiwizigan?”

  “Taffy,” her older sister Anami adds.

  I shake my head. My inexperience, that so frustrates Mahingan, greatly fascinates his younger sister. I suppose with no one younger than her but the baby, Chiki loves having me as a student. And she’s a better teacher than her older brother.

  “Today’s the perfect day,” she says, piling the newly made birch-bark cups on the toboggan. I offer to pull it and she leads me and Anami into the woods. “The sap runs the best on sunny days like this, when there isn’t much wind.” Anami rolls her eyes at me as we follow behind Chiki, who chatters non-stop. For a wee thing, she sure knows a lot. “... And you have to make sure you don’t tap too close to where you did last time, and put it on the white side of the tree, because the sap is better there.”

  Anami scouts the best trees, notching a small v in their trunks with her hatchet. I set the spigot in the v and Anami taps it in with hatchet’s back end. After a few good thunks, the clear sap moves to the end of the spout and into the bark cup Chiki has hung beneath. Drip by drip by drip. I see now why Grandfather Wawatie teaches patience. Over the next few days, we tap a few more trees and go back to check our cups. We empty the sugar water into the large birch-bark basket on the back of the toboggan and lug it back to the clearing in the center, where Mahingan’s mother and aunts boil the sap all day long over a great fire.

  “How come you don’t hunt with the boys?” Chiki asks me on a trek back.

  “And risk getting accidentally shot in the back again?” I’m joking, sort of.

  “That was no accident,” Chiki says, her dark eyes serious. “Mahingan can hit a leaf bud from fifty feet away. He has a hawk’s eye, him.”

  I frown. That hooligan did shoot me on purpose. I’d kind of hoped ’twas his aim that was off, not his character. But I should have known; the other three arrows hit within seconds and within inches of one another. He knew exactly what he was doing.

  “Anyway, I didn’t go with them because I wasn’t invited.” I say, thinking of Mahingan and his three cousins laughing at me that morning, as Chiki showed me how to wrap the bannock around the stick.

  I don’t know why he hates me so. He may be grieving, but so am I, truth be told. Maybe he’s still angry about me being in the sweat lodge. Or maybe it’s the knife. Grandfather Wawatie still has not given Mahingan his father’s knife. Not even after the bear kill. I wonder what sort of feat Mahingan needs to do to get it. No doubt, Mahingan wonders that, too. Everyone else has been more than welcoming to me. But any fool can see he doesn’t want me here at his camp.

  Either way, it’s clear he’s sorry that he didn’t kill me along with the bear.

  CHAPTER 47

  We take a moment to rest before moving on to the next grove of maples. I wipe my brow and rest against a trunk. The load is getting heavier with each stop. Chiki puts seeds in her bare hand and holds it up in the bright sun. Little black-capped birds flit past, settling in the branches above us. “Chicka-dee-dee-dee,” Chiki sings, and the birds echo. One or two perch on the edge of her cupped palm, rewarded for their bravery with a few seeds.

  “Thanks for helping us, Jack,” Anami says.

  “’Tis no bother at all. I’m happy to help out. My sister, Kit, and I often did the chores together back home in Ireland.” It feels great to say it. To know it. To remember it all. And I do. Though some parts are painful to think on. “I haven’t seen her in months. After our quarantine ended, she wanted me to come with her to Bytown to find our younger sister, Annie. But I had other plans. We had a huge fight, right there on the wharf. She was always telling me what to do, that Kit.” I continue. “Ever since I can remember, she’s been bossing me around. Do this. Stop that. Stay here. Get that.”

  “Sounds like me and Mahingan,” Anami says.

  “Oh, but he needs to be told,” I say, and we both laugh. “Still, Kit’s only three years older than me, barely, and yet she acts like she’s my mam. Well, that day, I told her she wasn’t. I knew it hurt her. But still, I can’t have her fussing over me like that, and I had great plans to go up the river and work the farms and lumber camps.”

  I pause for a moment, embarrassed at how those great plans had worked out.

  “What did she say?” Anami asks.

  “She just laughed at me like she always did. So I let her have it. Where were you when Mam was sick? I’d shouted at her. When Annie cried? When Mam took her last breath? Who do you think took care of the family then, Kit? Not you. ’Twas me! I did!”

  I pause. “And what’s worse, she blamed me. As though ’twas my fault Mam died and Annie was taken.” My face burns at the thought of it. I’d done everything the best I could, but Kit always made me second-guess myself. I always had to prove myself to her and I was done with it. Done with her. “So I told her she didn’t need to worry about me anymore. As far as I was concerned, she had no brother.”

  Why is it I can recall so clearly what I’d rather forget? I kick the snow at my feet. “That’s the last time I saw her.”

  Anami’s eyes hold no judgement. She knows all about brothers. Sure, isn’t hers Mahingan Wawatie? The poor girl.

  “You miss her,” Chiki asks, brushing off her hand and slipping on her mitten, “your sister, Kit?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is sad.” Chiki tilts her head and looks at me for a moment. “You could go find her.”

  Chiki holds her idea out like a small seed. But I haven’t the courage to take it. Kit wouldn’t want to see me, anyway. Not after what I said to her at Grosse Isle. Not after what I did to Mick. I know Kit sent him to take care of me in the lumber camp. I know they loved each other—begob, I knew that before they did. No, I can’t face her. Not after all the pain I’ve ca
used her.

  “I bet she misses you, too,” Anami adds. “Me, I miss Mahingan, when he’s out on the traplines.”

  “Now, that is sad,” I say. And the girls laugh.

  CHAPTER 48

  Chiki’s mother drizzles hot, tawny syrup on the snow in three lines. Another thanksgiving prayer. Or so I thought.

  “Pigiwizigan!” Chiki shrieks and kneels beside it, stripped twig in hand. The hardening syrup sticks to the tip of her stick and, with a few turns, Chiki swirls the gooey strip around the end. A great gob of glossy amber. She does the same with the other two strips and then hands them to Anami and me where we sit on the wide tree stump.

  Copying the girls, I put mine on my tongue. ’Tis like I’ve died and gone to heaven. I’ve never tasted anything so sweet. Coating my lips in sticky goodness, the ball of maple taffy softens and stretches, melting in my mouth. I swear my eyes are rolling back in my head.

  “I think you like pigiwizigan,” Chiki says, her gap-toothed grin a sticky mess.

  I’m still sucking on the bare twig by the time their mother calls the girls in to help with the meal. Grandfather settles on the stump with me. We sit in silence for a while until Mahingan shows up from his hunting, then Grandfather tells us each to pick up the great snow boulders someone has left beside the camp.

  “Follow me.” He strolls into the woods, hands behind his back, while Mahingan and I grunt and labor with our boulders, trying to keep up. After about an hour, he stops, then, and faces us.

  “Our ways teach us that when a boy reaches his twelfth winter he is taken by his father to a place of visions. Alone there, he goes on a solitary quest. He faces hunger and thirst. Loneliness. Darkness. He faces all that he most fears.” Grandfather Wawatie pauses, thinking deeply on each word he speaks.

  “I have taken this quest, Mishomis, last summer,” Mahingan says. “You brought me there yourself.”

  “For days the boy must stay there,” the old man continues, “away from all he knows, to face all that he doesn’t. It is not easy. Many are not successful in their quest. Even after a few times, not every boy learns his true purpose. His true self.”

  Mahingan lowers his gaze.

  Grandfather Wawatie glances at me from under his thick white brows for a moment. “But not every boy has such a strong animal spirit to guide them as you both do.”

  Mahingan looks at me, then back at his grandfather. “Him? Are you saying he has done the quest?” His voice is rising and he struggles to keep hold of the boulder. “He is not even one of us. How can he—”

  A look from his grandfather silences him.

  Grandfather Wawatie is right. I don’t know the Anishnaabe way, but I have been on a quest of my own—alone, without food or family. Afraid of the dark. Of the cold. Of starving. Afraid of the Windigo. I faced all kinds of fears out here in these woods. I learned who I was and where I came from. But one thing still remained unanswered: what now?

  “Every person travels their own road, Mahingan,” his grandfather continued. “Our paths cross for a while and we walk together. We learn from each other.”

  “I have nothing to learn from him,” Mahingan says, glaring at me.

  Sighing, Grandfather Wawatie sits on a fallen oak. “What about you, Jack?”

  “I learned not to turn my back on Mahingan Wawatie,” I say, meeting Mahingan’s burning look. “Chiki told me about your skill with the bow. You shot me on purpose!”

  “Of course, I did,” Mahingan says, rolling his eyes at me like I’m some idiot. “You were in the way!”

  “So you shot me?!”

  “I wasn’t going to let some shognosh get in the way of my bear kill. I saved your life—you should be thanking me.”

  I’m seething, so I am. Look at him—that smug face. The boulder shifts in my mittens and I lift it with my knee, trying to get a better grip. I still don’t know why he’s made us carry these all the way out here, just to ask us these questions.

  “One last thing remains before a boy becomes a man,” Grandfather Wawatie says. “An act of courage.”

  “Isn’t killing a bear courageous enough?” Mahingan blurts. I have to agree. Just facing it took more courage than I ever thought I had.

  “You have each met fears in the world around you.” Grandfather Wawatie waves his hand at the woods before us, then raises one finger and points to his chest. “Have you the courage to face the ones in here?”

  He picks up two handfuls of snow and holds it in front of Mahingan. “Anger,” he says, adding it to Mahingan’s boulder.

  He turns to me and scoops another two handfuls. “Guilt.” He sticks it to the weight in my already aching arms. Then, without another word, he turns and leaves us alone with our burdens.

  CHAPTER 49

  We stand there as Grandfather Wawatie’s footsteps crunch into the silence. Are we supposed to wait here? Follow him? I don’t think I can carry this great snow ball around much longer. It weighs a ton.

  “Anger?” Mahingan scoffs and drops his boulder. It crumbles on impact. “I don’t have anger.”

  I almost have to laugh, but the look he gives me makes me think otherwise.

  “Well ... if I am angry—and I’m not saying I am,” he picks up a piece of his broken boulder and adds it to mine, “it’s your doing. You stole my rabbit.”

  “Are you still on about that?”

  “Feeling guilty?” he taunts. I throw the boulder down, relieved to be free of it.

  “No,” I snort. “He got your anger spot on, but I’ve no idea why he says I’m burdened by guilt.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ve done some stupid things, shognosh. Think hard.”

  “What do you know?” I start walking in Grandfather Wawatie’s footsteps. I don’t need to stand around and let Mahingan take shots at me.

  He runs along beside me. “It wouldn’t surprise me if your dumb actions got people hurt ...”

  Now ’tis my turn to glare at him.

  “... or even killed.”

  I stop dead in my tracks. “Shut your gob, Mahingan Wawatie. You don’t know anything about anything.”

  “You did, didn’t you?” A grin spreads across his face. I want to wipe it off with my knuckles. “I knew you were an ininigoban, but, still, killing someone?”

  I lunge for him and ram him into the oak before toppling him to the ground. Straddling him, I let my fists fly, hitting his face, his side, anything I can get at. “He wasn’t supposed to die!” I scream. “He wasn’t!”

  Mahingan squirms beneath me and bucks me off. The force of it crashes my face into the oak as I land on all fours, but Mahingan’s on me before my head clears. “It’s your fault—” he pummels my head with both fists and I raise my arms for protection. “You killed him, shognosh, you killed him!”

  “I didn’t mean to!” I cry. “I didn’t mean it ... I’m sorry!”

  Something in me breaks, not from Mahingan’s fists but from my words. I lower my arms.

  He’s right. I did kill Mick. ’Twas my fault. Why should I get to live when Mick doesn’t? When Da doesn’t?

  Mahingan’s fists are relentless, but a part of me revels in the pain. I deserve it, after all.

  “Why did you come here?” Mahingan yells. “Why couldn’t you Irish just stay where you were? Maybe then my father would still be alive.”

  His father?

  I’m seeing stars by the time the last of Mahingan’s punches hit, my eye is near swollen shut and wet with blood, sweat, and slush. But through it all, I see something I never thought I would. Mahingan’s crying. With a final shove to my chest, he crawls off.

  It takes me a few minutes for the sky to stop spinning; when it does, I sit up and put a handful of snow on my burning brow. My lid is fat and pinched shut. I spit red and wipe my mouth on my sleeve. Mahingan sits with his back to me, sniffling.

  “What are you looking at?” he says, his voice low.

  “I’m just checking to see if I got in even one punch.”

  Mahinga
n turns. His cheek is swollen, lip cut, and one eye has a purple ring beneath.

  “Not bad,” I say, wincing as my grin hits my cheek.

  We sit there in the snow until our breathing calms and the chill cools our tempers. Finally, I have to ask. “What was that you said about your father?”

  Mahingan’s eyes flash at me, but there’s no fight left in him. His voice is low. “He caught some sickness you Irish brought over last summer.”

  I know it well. Hadn’t I the fever myself? Hadn’t I lost my own mother to it? “Typhus?”

  Mahingan nods. “He sometimes traded at the Bytown Market. I guess he caught it there.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I say. For what can you tell someone who’s lost their father? “I miss my father, too.”

  I throw down the bloody snow and take another scoop against my eye. “Did he teach you how to fight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he surely did a great job of it.”

  We start the long walk back to the cabin. Along the way, we talk about the men who were our fathers. The men, in truth, we long to become. We brag about their strength, tell their stories; we share their favorite jokes. By the time the cabin comes into view ’tis as though our fathers are walking there with us, they seem so real. So alive.

  “Mahingan!” his mother exclaims as she takes in the sorry state of us, battered, bruised, and bloodied. “What happened to you? Just look at your lip!” She takes his face in her hands. “And your cheek!”

  She lifts my chin and winces. “And that eye!”

  His mother rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “You do not look like the two boys that left here a few hours ago.”

  I look sideways at Mahingan, but this time he doesn’t scowl at me. In fact, he smiles.

  CHAPTER 50

  The old wagon rattles and rumbles along the country road, leading me and Da back home. Da lets the reins hang loose in his callused hand, for Squib knows the way well enough. As the winding road crests Killiskey hill, Da stops the wagon for a minute. He takes off his cap and looks around.