Medicine Walk

by Richard Wagamese

  “You won’t make it forty miles,” the kid said.

  “You didn’t walk here, did you?”

  “Well?”

  “I’ll ride your horse.”

  “So it’s my walk then?”

  “Jesus, kid. I’m dying. Where’s your heart?”

  He turned from his father and looked out across the slick black of the water.

  “All right,” his father said. “You won’t do it.”

  The kid slapped at the table with one hand. He stood up and there was silence behind him as everyone stopped their talk to watch. He shook his head and rubbed at his chin with one hand.

  His father sat leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and lit another smoke. “There’s things need sayin’.” He said it flatly, looking down at his shoes.

  “Why? So you can feel better?”

  “I was thinking about you.”

  “You never thought of me before.”

  “I did so.”

  “Yeah. Right.” He reached out and took the bottle off the table and held it up and studied the level of it, sniffing at the top of it before setting it back down and kicking at his father’s chair. His father raised his head slowly and peered at him sideways. The kid sat down.

  “I need you to bury me facing east,” he said. “Sitting up, in the warrior way.”

  “You ain’t no warrior.”

  His father sat and sucked at the smoke between the pinched ends of his fingers then tossed it over the railing. He stood and reached out and took the bottle and raised it to his mouth and swallowed twice, hard, and then pitched the bottle over the railing too. He turned to the kid and he weaved some but put a hand down on the tabletop to steady himself and looked at his son with half-closed eyes. “I was once,” he said. “Need to tell you about that. Need to tell you a lot of things.”

  “So you want to walk and talk about the good old days?”

  “Weren’t no good old days. But you need to hear still. It’s all I got to give ya.”

  “Ain’t never gonna be enough.”

  He looked at the kid and there was no more talk so he turned and made his way slowly across the deck and through the door into the barroom. The men at the other tables watched him go. They looked at the kid. He sat with his feet propped on the chair his father had just occupied and rolled a smoke. When he was finished he set it between his lips and held it there without lighting it, content to stare away across the water to the black hulk of the mountain. Then after a few minutes he stood up slowly and made his way to the door and walked through the bar without looking at anyone and out into the flat dark of the street. He looked up for the shape of his father making his way back to the house but he was nowhere to be seen. There were few people on the street. The kid stood there looking at the outline of his shadow spilling across the street. He could smell sulphur from the mill and the mouldy smell of cheap beer and he turned finally and followed the stars north through town, stopping to buy a few sour apples that he fed to the mare before bedding down beside her in the familiar dilapidated warmth of the barn.

  5

  HE COULD SEE THE MOON through the slats of the barn when he woke. It was early morning and it was in its descent but it hung in the sky like a glacier pouring down light with the sheen of melting ice. There were shadows everywhere. It was bright enough that he could see his way to the back door of the old barn and he got up and walked there to smoke. There were coyotes in the field. He could see the sleek shape of them trotting and bounding near the fence. Six of them. Cavorting. Celebrating moonlight. From where he stood leaning on the bottom half of the door he could see the huff of their breath. Clouds of it roiling then dissipating in the early morning air as they chased each other, and the kid thought of fog and the way it shrouded the land in the frosted wet of spring and autumn, the punch of ridge or scarp or mountain behind it sudden as a bear. They wheeled and dashed and now and then they yipped at each other and then stopped suddenly and looked at him. He cupped the smoke in his hand and turned his wrist so the lighted end of it pointed behind him. They waited. Silent. Still as the air around them. In the phosphorescent glow of the moon he thought he could see their eyes, dilating, peering hard at him with the ancient light of the wild in them, measuring and judging him in the dim distance. They lowered their heads, their snouts poking near the ground, and watched him. And then they began to dance, or at least that’s how it seemed to him. One by one they began to weave sinuously back and forth, cutting between each other, snout to tail, a walk then a half-trot until one of them nipped at the tail of another and they exploded into a frenzy of playfulness, abandon, and a joy so sudden and pure that the kid smiled and leaned harder on the door to watch it. Then the largest one broke the dash, halted, raised its nose to the air, whirled, and loped to the trees. The others followed in a dark line. They vanished into the trees, winked out of view as though the woods had folded itself around them, cocooned them, the chrysalis impermeable, whole, wound of the fibres of time, and the kid wondered what shape they would bear when they emerged into the moonstruck glades.

  It was cold and he shivered. There was some sacking hung on the near stall and he pulled it around his shoulders. It smelled of grain. The horse nickered behind him. He pushed the door open and stepped out into the barnyard. There was a scrim of frost on the rippled mud of it and his footsteps crunched some when he walked. When he got to the rail fence at the far end he straddled it and hung his boot heels on either side of the middle rail and looked around at the town and the mill and the mountains behind it that led to the valley above the river where his father wanted to go.

  His father. The kid thought of him with the whore in the sad little room in the house that leaned toward the water. It was a ragged life. To die in it seemed more sorrowful than he could imagine. If he simply left him to die he could go back to the farm and work it and hope for the best. Nothing would be different. There was nothing else for him. Truth was, he wanted nothing else because that life was all he’d known and there was a comfort in the idea of farming. He knew the rhythms of it, could feel the arrival of the next thing long before it arrived, and he knew the feel of time around those eighty acres like he knew hunger, thirst, and the feel of coming weather on his skin. Memory for the kid kicked in with the smell of the barn and the old man teaching him to milk and plow and seed and pluck a chicken. His father had drifted in and out of that life randomly and the kid recalled the first sense of him as the thin prick of the sawn door frame in the kitchen on his shoulder, leaning there, watching him smoke and drink and talk with the old man, trading furtive glances with him and then staring down shyly at his boot tops. The voice of him gruff and garbled with drink. When he disappeared again he always left money in a jam jar behind the sink. “Your pap,” the old man said whenever he doled out money from it, and for the longest time the kid had thought he meant the jar.

  He learned his name was Starlight when he was seven. Even then the connection between them remained loose and untied and the kid remembered saying their names over and over to the darkness in the attic room where he slept. Eldon Starlight. Franklin Starlight. Four blunt syllables conjuring nothing. When he appeared the kid would watch him and whisper his name under his breath, waiting for a hook to emerge, a nail he could hang context on, but he remained a stranger on the fringes of his life. The old man was gruff about it, sometimes even seeming bitter to the kid, and he never spoke at length of it. He was content to provide as well as he could and he had. It was the old man who had taught him to set snares, lay a nightline for fish, and read game sign. The old man had given him the land from the time he could remember and showed him how to approach it, honour it, he said, and the kid had sensed the import of those teachings and learned to listen and mimic well. When he was nine he’d gone out alone for the first time. Four days. He’d come back with smoked fish and a small deer and the old man had clapped him on the back and showed him how to dress venison and tan the hide. When he thought of the word father he could only
ever imagine the old man.

  He sat on the fence rail and rolled another smoke, looking at the spot where the coyotes had disappeared. The spirit of them still clung to the gap in the trees. But the kid could feel them in the splayed moonlight and for a time he wondered about journeys, about endings, about things left behind, questions that lurk forever in the dark of attic rooms, unspoken, unanswered, and when the smoke was done he crushed it out on the rail and cupped it in his palm while he walked back to the barn in the first pale, weak light of dawn.

  6

  THE FIRST THING HE REMEMBERED was the gun. He must have been three or four. It hung above the mantel of the stone fireplace and to him then, it seemed like it owned a silent form of magic. It seemed to hang suspended above everything, silent, calm, drawing all the light to it. It felt as though it rang with stories and adventures. He could sit for hours and just stare at it, waiting for the tales to fall.

  Now and then the old man took it down and set it in the middle of the hard plank table and he and the kid would just look at it together.

  “Can I?” he’d ask.

  “Go on then,” the old man would say, and the kid would reach both hands out and slide it slowly across the table so it lay lengthwise in front of him. He’d run his hands along the length of it. He’d come to love the feel of it on his palms. The slick, oiled blue-black of the barrel. The polished girth of the mount and the stock. The checkered and deliberate feel of the pistol grip. He’d poke the trigger guard with one finger, letting it swirl slowly around the bend and back before slipping it in and feeling the glassine curl of the trigger itself against the inside bend of his first knuckle.

  He’d always look at the old man then, thrilled at all the magic he could feel alive in that curl of metal.

  “What is she?” the old man would ask.

  “She’s a Lee-Enfield carbine,” the kid would say.

  “And what does she shoot?”

  “She shoots 18-grain 30.30 bullets in a brass casing.”

  “Shoot at what?” the old man would press though he was always grinning.

  “Bear, moose, elk, wolves. Anything bigger than a bobcat.” It was the kid’s stock answer.

  “Why?” The old man would always lean his elbows on the table and cock one eyebrow at him.

  The kid would purse his lips together, feigning deep concentration even though the both of them knew the old routine by heart.

  “Because you can’t tan a hide in pieces,” he would say, and the old man would cackle like he always did when he laughed and slap a hand on the table. Then he let the kid hold the gun.

  He knew the names of all the parts by the time he was four. He could break it down and reassemble it by the time he turned five and he became the gun cleaner and caretaker from that moment on. He knew how to oil the rifling in the barrel and how to bring the outside metal to a dull blue sheen. He took care to ensure that the trigger held just enough slickness to make it cool and reassuring to the touch. He rubbed the stock and grip with wood oil and used a light file on the checkering of the grip. He could handle it with his eyes closed.

  “Man shoots he’s gotta know what he’s shootin’ with,” the old man said. “No good to hunt with a stranger. Ever.”

  “She’s a tool,” the kid said.

  “Damn straight,” the old man would say and tousle his hair. “And what do you know about tools, Frank?”

  “They’re only as good as the care you give them,” he’d say proudly.

  “Won’t ever learn no better truth than that, Frank. See ya keep it.”

  He did. The old man got to trust the condition of the gun every time he took it down. But he always made sure the kid watched him check it out. When he was satisfied he would load the clip and shove it in the pocket of his orange hunting jacket and give it a firm pat. He never said a word. He didn’t need to. The kid’s eyes drank in every move.

  When he was seven the old man taught him to shoot. At first he plinked away at cans with an old .22. He got so he could hit them from a kneeling position, flat on his belly, and standing with the gun braced against his hip.

  “Sometimes you got no proper time to raise it,” the old man said. “Gotta know how to fire on the rise. Save your life someday. You watch.”

  The kid shot targets for a year. The old man gradually increased the distance until he could hit a bleach bottle hung from a branch from two hundred yards out every time. He learned to shoot with the wind, how to calculate drift, to know how much a bullet would drop over a long stretch of ground and how the impact decreased at the same time.

  “Gotta hit what you shoot at and you gotta drop it.” The old man made him repeat that to himself over and over until it lived in his head like a nursery rhyme. “Ain’t right to let nothing suffer.”

  “Gotta drop it.” It became the mantra he spoke to himself at his school desk.

  He never did take to school. In the beginning it terrified him. The beat-up old bus would pick him up and he’d be surrounded by yelling, screaming, frantic kids whose noise hurt his ears. Then they’d be made to sit in silent rows with their feet tucked together under the desk and their hands loosely folded on the top. The teachers talked too fast and they never repeated things like the old man did until he could cotton on to them, and he got lost easily.

  He knew his numbers and his letters. The old man had taught him that. He knew bushels, pecks, pounds, and ounces from harvesting, sacking grain, and feeding stock. He knew to write lists of food and chores that needed doing and letters the old man made him write to the man who came around every now and then to drink in the kitchen and eye him whenever he walked through the room. He could count and figure and write better than the others, but the lessons made no sense to him. Nothing seemed built to help him plow five acres with a mule, help deliver a breeched calf, or harvest late fall spy apples, so he mostly let the words fall around him.

  The school kids left him alone. He was the only Indian kid and they didn’t trust him. He didn’t hold out much trust for them either. They were mostly town kids who’d never gutted a deer or cut a dying heifer out of a tangle of barbed wire. They lived for games and play and talk, and the kid was used to being talked to and treated like a man. The edges of the schoolyard where he could get an eyeful of the trees poked up along the northeast ridge where he snared rabbits and shot squirrels became where he spent his time.

  The teachers called him aloof and cold. They called him difficult. They sent letters home that the old man would read and then toss into the fire.

  “No one’s meaning you over there, are they?” he’d ask.

  “No. They mostly let me be.”

  “Good. You’d tell me if they were?”

  “I’d say.”

  “Good. Do your best at what you can, Frank. There’s better and more important learning to be had out here on the land. That’s one thing for sure. But some things you just gotta learn to stand.”

  “What I figure,” the kid would say, “there ain’t one of those little towheads would know how to square a half-hitch or get a hackamore on a green broke colt. But they make fun of me cuz I won’t do the math or read out loud.”

  “How come you won’t do none of that?”

  “I don’t know. I can get the numbers sorted around in my head without scratching around on paper, and I guess if a guy’s to read he oughta be able to do it alone and quiet. Works best for me, least ways.”

  “Sounds right sensible to me,” the old man said. “But the law says you gotta go until you’re sixteen. Least ways, you got this place and we get out to where it’s real as much as can, don’t we?”

  “Yeah,” the kid said. “That’s what saves my bacon.”

  When he could shoot as dependably with the carbine as with the .22 the old man let him start to hunt. They’d take horses and cross the field and plod up the ridge and by the time they were down the other side the land became what the old man called “real.” To the kid, real meant quiet, open, and free before he learned to
call it predictable and knowable. To him, it meant losing schools and rules and distractions and being able to focus and learn and see. To say he loved it was a word beyond him then but he came to know the feeling. It was opening your eyes on a misty early summer morning to see the sun as a smudge of pale orange above the teeth of the trees with the taste of coming rain in his mouth and the smell of camp coffee, rope, gun powder, and horses. It was the feel of the land at his back when he slept and the hearty, moist promise of it rising from everything. It was the feeling of the hackles rising slowly on the back of your neck when there was a bear yards away in the bush and the catch in the throat at the sudden explosion of an eagle from a tree. It was also the feel of water from a mountain spring. Ice like light splashed over your face. The old man brought him to all of that.

  He taught him to track before he let him do anything else. “Any idiot can shoot a gun,” he’d tell him. “But you track an animal long enough you get to know their thinkin’, what they like, when they like it, and such. You don’t hunt the animal. You hunt their sign.”

  He had to learn to walk all over again. The old man showed him how to move in a half-crouch that played pure hell on the top of his thighs. They burned after half a mile and the agony was fierce but he could feel stealth building in his stride. He learned how to curl his foot from the outside in when he planted it to avoid snapping twigs or crunching gravel. It meant that he walked pigeon-toed. The motion was difficult to master and he worked deliberately at it. He’d go out alone to the ridge and practise through the evenings until he could navigate the length of it and back soundlessly. He learned upwind from downwind and came to know how sound was amplified in the still, half-lit world of the forest. He learned caution. He learned patience. He learned guile. Together, he and the old man would creep along behind deer, keeping a parallel tack, and follow them in that half-crouch for miles.