I almost met my Waterloo the other night. George was away and I was sleeping soundly when awakened by a thump on the back door. I thought I was dreaming, so I put my head back on the pillow and closed my eyes. It came again, so I rose and went to the window, wondering what the deuce was making that mysterious sound.
Everything was illuminated by a wash of bright silvery light. In the moonlight, I saw Riley fly around the side of the house, with a pack of wolves behind him! He was throwing himself against the back door as he circled the house, but he had to be off again before the wolves caught him up!
I dashed into the back kitchen and threw open the door. The poor dog hurtled past me like a cannonball and kept running, his feet scrabbling on the linoleum.
At the bottom of the steps, the wolf pack skidded to a halt. For a moment we stood motionless. The beasts stared at me with their yellow eyes, and I could almost hear them thinking with one brain, assessing my vulnerability. But then, as one, the pack reached its collective decision. They whirled and ran across the yard and into the field, their bushy tails streaming out like banners against the moonlit snow.
I slammed the door and leaned against it, frozen with fright. After I collected myself, I found Riley hiding under the dining room table. He licked my hands and whimpered while I stroked his head. At last I left him in the back kitchen and returned to bed, although I couldn’t sleep for hours. Until then I hadn’t understood that I was living in a place where I could literally be killed and eaten by wild animals!
When George heard the story, he looked grim and said we would take care of those creatures once and for all. He dragged home a dead horse from the reserve and set it up in the yard as bait. Then he perched on a kitchen chair with his rifle sticking through the open window, keeping watch with the brass field glasses he brought home from France. My task was to feed the stove, as it was very cold in the house with the window open, even only a few inches.
While waiting for the wolves, we admired the beauty of the moonlit landscape. The silver fields glowed as if they had been polished. The lavender tree shadows were like lace against the snow, and the cold brilliant sky was spangled with dancing stars. George quoted Alfred Lord Tennyson: “Many a night I saw the Pleiades, rising thro’ the mellow shade, glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.”
After an hour or two, we heard a bone-chilling call in the distance. When the wolves came stealing around the corner of the barn to attack the dead flesh, George got down to business and picked off three of them. I did not feel sorry, not a whit. They are miserable brutes that eat any horses or cattle they can pull down.
We haven’t seen them since although we often hear their concert in the distance. Their hunting call — a long series of high notes, persistent and savage, curdles my very blood. Perhaps they have found some other poor homesteader to torment.
Days remaining: 249.
16
December
No need for our artificial white Christmas tree this year. We were surrounded by thousands of living trees, all shapes and sizes, shimmering with frost in the silver sunlight. Bridget and I spent an hour searching for the perfect tree at the edge of our own wildwood. I broke trail in the soft snow by shuffling along with my boots close together and she followed my path.
“It’s hard work clumbering around in the snow, isn’t it?” Bridget panted.
“Clumbering, that’s a good word.”
“Thanks, I made it up myself.”
Finally we decided on a bushy eight-foot spruce. I cut it down with my little hatchet as easily as George Washington chopped down his cherry tree, and we dragged it back to the house on the wooden toboggan we found hanging in the barn.
We were rounding the corner of the log cabin when Bridget called from behind. “Mama, look! A fairy tree!” She pointed to a tiny triangle peeping out of the snow. “Can we take this one, too?”
We cut down the seedling and Bridget carried it home cradled in her arms. “It’s the perfect size for Fizzy, isn’t it? He can have his own tree!”
I dragged the big tree into the living room. There wasn’t room for it in the dining room, and I was reluctant to place it near the kitchen stove. Just for the Christmas season, I would open the big double doors between the living and dining rooms.
I built a crackling fire in the stone fireplace, fanning it with a set of homemade leather bellows with wooden handles that I had found in the basement beside the furnace. I couldn’t figure out how to keep the tree upright until I placed it in a bucket of earth scraped from the basement floor.
We searched the attic and found a box of ornaments. It was so cold up there that the nail heads on the underside of the roof were covered with frost, like white polka dots.
When we unpacked the single cardboard carton bearing my great-aunt’s handwriting, we found two dozen mercury glass ornaments shaped like silver and gold pine cones, a box of coloured balls in red and turquoise and green, and even a tiny ceramic leprechaun seated on a sleigh. No electric lights, of course.
“Look, Mama, an angel!” Bridget held out a nest of tissue paper containing a tiny glass angel with a hand-crocheted dress.
“Oh, how pretty! We can put her on the top of the tree!”
It was a modest collection, but the tree itself was so luxurious and fragrant that it hardly needed decoration. We added paper snowflakes and popped a batch of popcorn. Bridget spent the next hour stringing together popcorn garlands.
She then turned her attention to Fizzy’s tree. In the chest of drawers upstairs I had found a wooden box filled with costume jewellery. Bridget hung necklaces and clipped vintage earrings on to the branches of Fizzy’s tree while I wrote Merry Christmas on the kitchen window with a bar of soap.
As we were putting everything away, Wynona appeared and helped me carry a dozen armloads of firewood into the back kitchen. Now that we had expanded our living area from two rooms to three rooms, we were burning more wood. A lot more.
“What are you doing for Christmas, Wynona?”
“Dunno. Watching TV, I guess. Or playing video games.”
“Are you spending it with anyone else? Or just your father?”
“He probably won’t be home. He likes to party with his friends around Christmas.”
“Why don’t you come over on Christmas morning and spend the night with us? You can sleep on the couch. Would your father mind?”
“He probably won’t even notice.” Her voice was dull, like her expression, what the psychiatrists called flat affect, as if nothing made any difference.
We had plenty to eat because I had bought extra groceries on Town Day, including another giant bag of dog food. Unfortunately, that left very little money for gifts.
“Mama, how will Santa know where I am?” Bridget’s face was tragic as I tucked her into bed on Christmas Eve.
“He knows everything. We’re so much closer to the North Pole here that this will probably be his first stop!”
The next morning, I rose early and touched a match to the paper and kindling already laid in the living room fireplace. Pulling a quilt around my shoulders, I snuggled into the couch while the room warmed up. Then I heard the patter of little feet.
“Mama, did Santa come?” Bridget ran into the room and threw herself onto my lap.
“Why don’t you look under the tree?”
I watched anxiously while she surveyed her gifts — all four of them.
For the past couple of Christmases, Bridget had done very well. The annual holiday Barbie, complete with a fully furnished pink Barbie castle. Craft supplies, Lego, Disney movies, picture books, stuffed animals, puzzles, and toys.
This year was going to be quite different.
Bridget began with her stocking — a man’s woollen sock — which didn’t contain much except nuts and chocolates I had hidden at the bottom of the shopping cart while her back was turned. And a single gift: a small silver hand mirror with a filigreed back that I had found in one of the spare bedrooms.
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“Mama, look! My own mirror!”
She spent a long time admiring herself in the mirror, and even held it up to Fizzy’s face so that he could see himself. Last year she had barely opened one gift before flinging it aside and tearing into the next one.
Finally she set aside the mirror and turned to the presents under the tree. As each one was revealed, she screamed with satisfying delight: “Mama, look!”
The first gift was a patchwork lap quilt sewn from green and blue scraps of silk velvet, to use when she sat on the rocking chair beside the stove, with “Bridget Jane Bannister” embroidered across one corner in my best hand-stitching. Adorning each scrap was an antique button, chosen from a jam jar full of buttons found in the sewing trunk.
There was a brass button from a First World War army uniform, a filigreed silver bird, a carved coral flower, a square piece of amber Bakelite, a blue enamel butterfly, an amethyst glass shoe, a piece of bone, and several coloured glass buttons. Bridget examined each one carefully. She stroked the velvet lovingly and rubbed it against her cheek, then Fizzy’s cheek, before opening her next gift.
“Mama, look!” She held out an oversized blank scrapbook that she could use for colouring. I had discovered it in the dining room sideboard and made it pretty by gluing flowered cotton fabric over the cardboard covers.
The third gift was a batch of playdough I had mixed up after she was in bed, dyed pink, blue, yellow, and green with food colouring. “Mama, look!” Each colour was inside its own pretty glass jam jar, tied with a matching ribbon.
The big present, the one from Santa, was something else I had found in the barn. It was a child’s wooden sled with wrought iron runners, and a handsome red leather dog harness.
“Mama, look!” Bridget shrieked when the box was opened. “It’s a sled! Santa knows I’m living in the snow now! But what’s this strappy thing?”
“It’s a little harness for Riley. We’ll hitch him to the sled so he can pull it around.” I had tried it on him one day in the barn and it fit perfectly, although I couldn’t help wondering why there was a children’s sled in the barn. Perhaps the kids from the reserve had played with it many decades ago.
Fizzy was having a great time batting the wrapping paper around the room and getting himself tangled up in the ribbons. Now Bridget held him in front of his tiny tree while he “opened” his gift, a toy mouse with bells on it from the grocery store.
“Now he won’t have to kill real mouses, right?” Bridget didn’t enjoy having a dead mouse laid at her feet any more than I did.
“Maybe. Something tells me he would rather chase the live ones.”
“I have a present for you, Mama.” Bridget went into the other room, and pulled her gift out from under the bed. “It’s not much,” she said shyly when she handed it to me. But I exclaimed with real pleasure when I unwrapped my small package. It was a feather from a blue jay, perfect in its intricate beauty. “I found it out in the yard before the snow came and hid it for you.”
I hugged her tightly with tears in my eyes as I remembered when Dr. Cassalet had told me that Bridget’s medical diagnosis may be linked to autism. I was convinced that this was a mistake. One symptom of autism is difficulty in connecting with other people, in empathizing with their feelings.
This was definitely not Bridget’s problem. Even when she was a tiny baby, whenever I picked her up and patted her back, I would feel her tiny hand opening and closing as she patted my back in return, as if she were saying: “Don’t worry, Mama, I’m here for you.”
When Wynona arrived later that morning, she brought us each a present in a plastic grocery bag. I don’t know whether Bridget or I was more delighted with our gifts — beautiful beaded moccasins with a pattern of blue quills. We put them on immediately.
“Wynona, these are gorgeous!” I exclaimed, while Bridget hugged her.
The older girl looked tremendously shy and turned her head away. “This lady I know on the reserve makes them. They’re pretty good around the house.”
We each had a gift for Wynona, too. Bridget gave her a tube of pale pink lip gloss from the grocery store. She had also made Wynona a Christmas card with her name painstakingly outlined in glitter, signed “Love from your best frend.” It had taken her ages to copy out the letters.
From me, a gift that I had found in the attic, while leafing through an old photo album laced with green cord and falling to pieces. It was a photograph of Annie Bearspaw. I found her name on the back in my great-aunt’s handwriting.
The photograph measured four inches by six inches. It was printed on heavy thick cardboard, sepia-toned and highly contrasted in the way of old photographs, the quality clear and sharp. Annie was sitting on a kitchen chair outside our back door. She was wearing a shawl around her shoulders, a flowered skirt, and a pair of knee-high moccasins decorated with quills.
But it was her face that was so arresting. The force of the woman’s personality seemed to radiate from her photograph. Her intense, deep-set eyes looked as if she could see into your soul. Wynona’s eyes. It struck me when I first found the picture how much Wynona resembled her. Beneath her adolescent chubbiness, Wynona had the same high cheekbones and firm jaw.
Now she unwrapped the photograph and stared at it without speaking.
“Her name was Annie Bearspaw. Do you know who she was?”
“Yeah. She was my great-grandmother. She was one of our tribe’s elders. She was kind of famous for healing people.”
“I’ll bet you a loonie that she looked just like you when she was your age.”
Wynona didn’t answer. She continued to study the photograph silently.
“I read about her in my great-aunt’s diary. She admired Annie very much. You’re right about her healing powers. She was a medicine woman who hated alcohol and all the troubles that it brought to your tribe.”
Wynona spoke without raising her eyes.
“And she didn’t even know about coke or crystal meth or any of that stuff. Annie would be sad if she could see what was happening today.”
“I’m sure she would.”
“The government took Annie’s kids away from her, you know.”
“Took them away! Why?”
“Annie had three kids, my grandmother and her two brothers. The government came to the reserve and got them, made them go to residential school. My grandmother was real messed up after she came out. She moved to Edmonton and had five kids with five different fathers. The youngest one was my mother.”
“Oh, Wynona.” Words failed me.
Before leaving Arizona, I spent what little free time I had reading Canadian newspapers online. I had run across several articles about the residential school system in Canada, but I had no real idea of their lasting impact, never imagined I would meet someone who was still experiencing the terrible aftershocks, two generations later.
I looked over at Bridget, tried to imagine her being taken away from me and forced to live in a strange place, unable to speak her own language. I felt a scorching wave of guilt and sorrow. Wynona’s people had once roamed freely throughout this region. The Whites conquered them, granted them a tiny fraction of the land they had once considered theirs, and then imprisoned their children.
Wynona was still gazing at the photograph. “My great-grandmother looks so wise. I wish I could have met her.”
“Me, too. She sounds like a wonderful person.” I turned and stared into the leaping flames. “Wynona, do you ever feel like some people are still around, leading the way, telling us what to do? Sometimes I imagine I can even hear my great-aunt’s voice.”
“Yeah, I heard this place is haunted.”
“I didn’t mean that exactly. I’m not afraid of ghosts, at least not her ghost. She’s my guiding spirit. We can learn so much from our ancestors, and all the people who came before us.” I thought again about my own parents.
Reverently, Wynona closed the cardboard flap on the photograph and wrapped it up again. “Thanks,” she said, with a rare
direct look from her dark eyes. “I really like this picture.”
For breakfast we wolfed down buckwheat griddle cakes from the Five Roses Cook Book. The instructions read: Bake griddle cakes until porous and wrinkly at the edges. We smothered them with homemade blueberry jelly that I had purchased from the hockey team’s fundraising booth outside the grocery store. All three of us agreed we had never tasted anything so good.
Then we bundled up and went outside to try Riley’s new harness. It was noon and the sun still wasn’t high in the sky, but it was as high as it was going to get today — almost the shortest day of the year. I experienced the usual quick sense of pleasure at the purity of untouched snow, like a blanket of silver sequins.
With difficulty, I buckled the harness onto a squirming, panting Riley. At first I walked around holding him by the collar, while Bridget sat on the sled. His bulky shoulders leaned into the straps and he trotted along so obediently that I handed the reins to Bridget.
As soon as I let go of his collar, Riley bounded across the yard like a jackrabbit while Bridget howled and dragged on the reins. Three more leaps, and the sled overturned, throwing her upside down into a snowbank.
“Bridget, are you all right?” I brushed off her face with my mittened hands, expecting tears and recriminations. Instead, her face was stern.
“Mama, bring him back here! I’m going to show that dog who’s boss!”
Three more times Riley ran away while Wynona and I yelled at him to slow down, but on his fourth circuit around the yard he finally dropped into a trot and pulled the sled smoothly. We petted and praised him and gave him the hambone we had saved for his Christmas treat.
After a late lunch, the girls played “beauty parlour” and washed their hair. I helped Wynona rinse hers with a kettle of warm water and now it hung, glossy and luxurious, halfway down her back. I handed over my makeup bag, and the girls liberally applied eyeshadow and lipstick to each other. It was a very quiet game since neither of them spoke. They had their own way of communicating with sign language. A few times I heard them giggling.
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