Near sunset of the third day, he reached the mission on the Iron Lake Reservation. It was a small, white clapboard building in the middle of a forest clearing between the tiny communities of Allouette and Brandywine. Behind it lay the cemetery, enclosed by a low wrought-iron fence. The clearing was empty and quiet. The sun threw a soft blanket of yellow light across the meadow, and the mission walls were the color of buttered bread. Henry stood at the cemetery gate looking at the assortment of headstones and memorials and grave houses and at the long shadows they cast. He’d been here many times in the past. Under the white man’s authority, Henry’s people died too easily. Diseases, especially tuberculosis, took them in great numbers.
He eased the gate open. The hinges cried like a hurt dog. He knew the place where his mother was buried. Beside her marker was another: a smooth, varnished wood plank with his father’s name burned across the face, and below that the figure of a cormorant, his father’s clan, upside down to indicate death. He sat down cross-legged, weary to the bone. He’d determined along the way that when this moment came, he would not cry. At the boarding school, he’d never cried, though many nights he’d listened to the sobbing of other lonely, homesick boys. He understood that crying did no good. It could not change what had passed. It could not change what was, nor what was coming. Even so, he felt like spilling tears, felt more empty and alone than he ever had.
He lay down in the uncut cemetery grass, more tired than hungry, and went to sleep.
That night he had his first vision. It was like a dream, but it was not a dream. He stood outside himself, watching the part he played, feeling everything that occurred but at the same time remaining a separate observer. This was the vision: A huge white snake slithered among the stones and markers and grave houses of the cemetery. It swallowed Henry. Then it sprouted wings and took him on a long journey deep into the wilderness, far beyond Noopiming, the great woods of his home. It disgorged him on the shore of a lake he did not know. The lake glowed, as if a fire burned at the bottom. Fire under the water? How could this be? When he turned back, the snake had vanished.
He woke on the ground, curled and cramped, his blanket covered with dew. Dawn was just breaking, and he was hungry. It was midsummer, blueberry season, and he knew where the patches grew. He feasted on ripe berries as the sun rose above the pines and he continued his way north, toward the cabin his father had built. He figured the boarding school had probably alerted the local authorities that he’d run away, and he kept off the main roads, following instead the forest trails he’d known since childhood. He saw not a soul that morning, a good sign, he decided.
It was nearly noon when he reached the small cabin where he’d been born—and his sisters, too—where he’d spent the first twelve years of his life collecting fine memories that would remain strong even when he was an old man. The cabin stood at the edge of a pond. The water was still and blue and full of reeds along the edges. Wild grass had grown up around the cabin, and honeysuckle vines crept up the log walls. Henry came toward it slowly, with the knowledge that what awaited him there was little different from what the cemetery had offered. But he had nowhere else to go. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
It was one room, mostly bare now, with a plank floor. The table where his family had eaten was overturned. One chair remained. The black stove that had heated the cabin and on which his mother had cooked was there, the stovepipe still thrust through the roof. The frame of the bed his father had made for himself and his wife stood against the far wall beneath a small window that had once been covered by oilcloth. The oilcloth was gone. The bedding and the straw mattress were gone, too. He checked the cupboards. Empty except for a few cans with flour and salt and baking soda and one dented pot. He also found a can of kerosene that had been used to fill the lamps that were no longer in the cabin. Henry knew it was possible that Shinnobs on the rez had stripped the place, come and cleared out what was usable, but it was more likely white people looking for things they could take for themselves or sell as Indian souvenirs.
The floor was covered with dust, the corners hung with cobwebs. This day he did not feel like weeping. He wanted to bring life back to his home. He left the door open to let in the sunlight and the evergreen-scented air. Outside he used his pocketknife and cut pine branches with thick needles and bundled them together to use as a broom. He swept the floor and every surface. He cleared the cobwebs. From the cupboard he took the one remaining pot and filled it with water from the pond. His shirt became a washrag, and he scrubbed the place clean. He cut more pine boughs and laid them on the bed frame as a temporary mattress.
In the late afternoon he gathered wood for the stove and built a fire. He made biscuits with what he’d found in the cans. He ate the biscuits with the last of the blueberries he’d picked. Afterward, he sat outside and watched the night come on and tried to think what he should do. He was fifteen years old. His parents were dead and buried. His sisters were far to the east. In the letters they’d sent him, his sisters told him they liked the school in Wisconsin. The people were decent to them there. Henry didn’t want to go back to the boarding school in Flandreau, ever. He knew the white authorities would be looking for him. Maybe even some Shinnobs who thought it best to do what the white men wanted. If he went to anyone on the rez for help, it might mean trouble for them. The last thing a Shinnob needed was trouble with white men.
In the long dark before the rise of the moon, Henry listened to the woods, which were alive all around him. Tree frogs and crickets. The hoot of an owl. The wind dancing in the tops of the pine trees.
Even if they found him tomorrow and dragged him back to Flandreau, he was glad he’d made the journey. He was glad to be home.
TWENTY-ONE
Wake up.”
Henry felt a shove and opened his eyes. The words had been spoken in the language of his people, the first he’d heard in that tongue in a great while. Henry lay on the blanket he’d spread over the pine boughs on his parents’ bed. He rolled over to see who’d rudely awakened him.
It was not yet dawn. Barely any light came through the cabin windows. The door was open.
“You sleep like a deaf old dog, Nephew.”
Woodrow Meloux, whose Ojibwe name was Miskwanowe, which meant “red cheeks,” was not tall. Several inches less than six feet, he was broad across the chest, and strong. He wore his black hair in a long braid. His eyes were deep brown. He resembled Henry’s father in many ways, but harder. He had never taken a wife, never fathered children.
“Uncle.” Henry sat up on the bed and rubbed his eyes. “How did you know I was here?”
A leather pouch hung from Woodrow’s belt. He undid the pouch, reached inside, and took out a strip of deer jerky, which he handed to Henry. He sat on the bed beside the young man.
“Everyone on the rez knows you’re here. The smoke from the stove.”
Henry chewed on the jerky. He loved the texture and flavor, which he hadn’t tasted in three years.
His uncle said, “The whites were in Allouette yesterday. They warned there will be trouble if we do not send you back.”
“I won’t go back,” Henry said.
Woodrow took a piece of jerky for himself and gave another to Henry. They ate in silence while the sky turned red, filling the cabin with an angry hue.
Woodrow looked around the room and shook his head. “White people came here after your father died. They took what they wanted. They are like fat, greedy squirrels. They pile nuts they will never eat.” He stood up and retied his pouch. “We have a long walk.”
“I’m not leaving the cabin.”
“They will look for you here, and they will take you back to that school.”
“I’m leaving. But I’m not leaving the cabin my father built. I don’t want the whites or anyone else in here again.”
Henry got off the bed. He put on his government shoes and walked to the corner where the can of kerosene sat, useless without the lamps it was meant to fill. He remove
d the cap and began to spread fuel across the cabin floor.
“You have things?” his uncle asked.
“Only what I’m wearing,” Henry replied.
Henry took the box of matches from near the stove. He stood at the door with his uncle. He struck a flame and threw it into the wet line that lay across the floor. Fire crawled through the cabin like a yellow snake. Henry waited until he was sure the logs were burning well, then he turned away with his uncle and never looked back.
They walked for several hours, keeping to the trails, skirting Allouette and the cabins and shanties that spotted the woods. Henry knew where they were headed. His uncle had a parcel of land in the northwest corner of the reservation, a small, rocky finger that jutted into Iron Lake. It was far from Allouette, far from any other dwelling. Woodrow had named it aandeg, or crow, because the trees were a favorite rookery for the crafty black birds. His uncle had built a wiigiwam, a traditional Ojibwe dwelling, a simple framework of ironwood poles covered by bulrush mats and roofed with rolls of birch bark. There, in the summer of his fifteenth year, Henry Meloux began to live in the old way.
* * *
His uncle didn’t work at the jobs the whites offered most Ojibwe— logging, mining, serving the tourists who came north in greater numbers every year. Woodrow trapped and fished and hunted in the vast forest to the north, which the whites called the Quetico-Superior wilderness. Through an outfitter named Aini Luukkonen, who operated on Iron Lake near the town of Aurora, he sometimes agreed to hire on as a guide to take white people into the wilderness and see that they came out safely. Because he knew the northern forest and the lakes better than any other man, he was always in demand.
Through that summer, through the season of the wild-rice harvest that followed, through the long winter when Grandmother Earth slept and the time for storytelling came and passed, through iskigamizigegiizis, the time of collecting maple sap and boiling it into syrup, Henry Meloux watched his uncle and listened and learned. Woodrow could track an animal over stony ground. With his rifle, he could bring down a deer at over a hundred yards with a single chest shot, even in thick cover. From the shoreline, he could read the depth of ice across a frozen lake and see where to cross safely. He could take a canoe through white water and knew portages no white man had ever walked. He knew how to start a fire with tinder, flint, and steel. He knew the old way of making a bear trap. All this knowledge he passed to Henry.
Woodrow didn’t spend money on food. Food came from the forest, and if you could not get food, you did without. Sometimes, especially in the deep winter, Henry learned that to fast was a useful discipline. Woodrow traded for most of what he needed that he could not shoot, trap, gather, or manufacture. He traded furs or wild rice or syrup for an ax or knife or gun oil. That first year, he traded for many cartridges and patiently taught Henry how to shoot the rifle. Woodrow possessed little—a conscious choice—and his rifle he prized above all else. By summer, Henry could put a kill shot in a moving buck at nearly a quarter mile.
One morning in early May, Woodrow said, “You will go with me to see Aini Luukkonen.”
Occasionally Henry had accompanied his uncle to Allouette. Although there were Shinnobs on the rez who wouldn’t hesitate to report his presence to the white authorities, his uncle didn’t worry.
“White men are too lazy to come all the way to Crow Point for a runaway Indian,” he said.
As nearly as Henry had been able to tell, Woodrow was right. He’d seen no white people anywhere near his uncle’s wiigiwam. But he knew that Luukkonen’s place was not far from Aurora, a town full of whites, and Henry had no desire to be snatched by a cop and sent back to the Flandreau boarding school.
“You have grown,” Woodrow told him. “Your hair is long now. You are not the boy you were. Do not look at the whites or speak to them. They will not even see you.”
They took Woodrow’s canoe, a twelve-foot canvas Old Town, one of the few possessions Henry’s uncle had paid cash for, cash he’d earned as a guide. They paddled steadily the five miles to Luukkonen’s. Wraiths of white mist crept over the surface of the dark water. As the sun topped the pine and spruce trees, the mist turned to fire and burned away. Among the trees along the shore, Henry could see that cabins were appearing in greater number. The whites were spreading farther and farther north. He feared for the woods and the animals in it. And he feared for his people. The whites went wherever they wanted and took what they fancied, and the laws that the grandfathers of the Anishinaabeg had agreed to were ignored.
They drew the canoe onto the shore near the dock behind Luukkonen’s and tipped it onto the grass. The old Finn operated out of a big log structure built thirty yards off the lake. A Ford pickup stood parked in the yard. Attached was a trailer with a rack that cradled half a dozen canoes. On the wall of a shed to the left, someone had stretched a black bearskin. As they approached the porch, Henry spotted snowshoes hung near the front door. When they stepped inside, a bell over the threshold jingled. The place smelled of coffee and frying bacon.
“Yah,” called a voice from someone out of sight. “Be dere in a minute. Hold your horses.”
The outpost was full of goods a man might need in the woods. Axes and hatchets, knives in a display behind the counter, wool blankets, rope coils, fishing gear, lanterns, small stoves, hats, gloves. Henry hadn’t been in a store in a good long while, and he stood silent, feeling weighted by the wealth of goods around him.
A man came through a door near the rear. He was stout, bald, but with a big walrus mustache that nearly hid his mouth. The mustache was salted with gray and, at the moment, stained with crusted egg yolk.
“Woodrow,” he said in hearty greeting. “Been expecting you.” He came close and eyed Henry in a friendly way. “Dis da boy, den?”
They’d talked about him, Henry understood. That made him nervous.
Luukkonen put out a hand, which was missing the index finger. Reluctantly, Henry took it. He didn’t like shaking hands. It was a thing white people did.
“Does he know?” Luukkonen asked Henry’s uncle.
Woodrow shook his head.
Know what? Henry wondered.
“Well, let’s do it, den.”
The Finn disappeared through the rear door. Henry and Woodrow waited in silence. When Luukkonen returned, he carried a rifle in his hands.
“Came in yesterday, just like I told you,” he said to Woodrow. “Been dealing with dese folks a long time now.”
He handed the rifle to Henry’s uncle, who inspected it and nodded his approval. Woodrow held it out toward Henry.
“Yours,” he said.
For a moment, Henry couldn’t move. The gift stunned him. It was what he’d dreamed of but never expected. A rifle of his own.
“Well, go on dere. Take da blasted ting.” Luukkonen smiled big under his walrus mustache.
The moment his fingers touched it, Henry felt the magic. It fit in his hands like something he’d been holding since he was born. It felt alive, intimate. It felt like a brother.
“A good piece dat. Your uncle, he knows.” Luukkonen winked.
Henry lifted his eyes briefly. “Migwech.”
Woodrow nodded, accepting the thanks.
“Say, I got a job for you, you want it.”
“What job?” Woodrow asked.
“Two men itching to go up near the Quetico. Need a guide. Say they’ll pay premium for someone good. I mentioned your name.”
“Hunters?”
“No. Ain’t fishermen neither. Prospectors, I’d guess.”
“Gold,” Woodrow said.
“Gold?” The first white word Henry had spoken that morning.
Luukkonen tugged at the corner of his mustache and said to Henry, “We get ’em sometimes. People been talking a long time about da possibility. Dey say da geology’s right, but nobody’s found gold yet. Tank God. Imagine what’d happen if dey ever found anyting. Be de end of dis beautiful place, you betcha. So, Woodrow, what you tink?”
“I don’t know if dey’d pay for two guides.”
“He will not be paid.”
“A free hand? Hell, what dey got to lose? Be here sunup day after tomorrow. Enjoy da rifle, Henry. She’s a beauty, dat one. You’ll need cartridges. Here.” He handed over two boxes of shells. “On da house.”
They were quiet paddling back to Crow Point. Henry thought about the rifle his uncle had given him. He’d never been given a gift so extravagant, and it confused him. He’d grown up on the rez with so little. Everyone on the rez had little. Having more than others, having too much, this was not Ojibwe.
As if divining his nephew’s thoughts, Woodrow said from the stern, “The rifle you will need. Use it to eat, and what you don’t eat give to The People.”
Which made the gift different. It wasn’t just for Henry. It served a greater purpose. With it he could provide for the elders and widows and others who could not hunt and did not work.
“These men,” Henry said, speaking of the other concern that had settled on him that day. “What will they be like?”
“Some are good, some are not. The good ones will respect your skill and respect the land you take them into. The others will not. The worst are the ones with much money. Often they believe that the money makes them better than you. They might try to hide this, but it’s what they believe. Many do not bother to hide it at all.”
“Do you get angry?”
“Why would I be angry? Because they believe a thing does not make it so. There is no dignity in anger. But I am also not a kicked dog.”
“If they treat you that way, what do you do?”
“I leave them.”
“Alone? Up north?”
“It is a good lesson.”
“How do they get back?”
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