Dream Wheels

by Richard Wagamese

  “Only when the wind blows,” he said.

  He got up and placed another log on the fire. They watched the flame gather itself around the base, lick at it appreciatively and then begin to alter it, heat it, burn it, render it into yellow, orange, blue, purple, red. Sparks flew off the blistering bark and spiralled crazily into the dark, snapping and popping. The smoke funnelled in the wind, climbing with the drafts of whirling air.

  The bear stirred. She rolled her massive shoulders slowly and clambered up onto all fours. It was deep night now. She sniffed the air and caught the smell of fire in the distance. There was smoke to it and she could tell that the man beings had let it dwindle when they tired and that by now they were asleep in their hide dens. She began to move. Against the night her massive bulk was shadow, and she slipped between rock and tree easily, treading patiently, carefully, the ground beneath her compressed, surrendered to the sheer weight of her. Soundless. She worked her way to the edge of the meadow and then stood on her hind legs to sniff about. Mixed with the fire was the scent of food. Fruit. Berries. Her hunger was an ache she felt keenly, and she arched her head around to ascertain correctly what she would face at the man camp. Three. Two horses. She sniffed harder for the smell of dog but none came and she lowered herself to the ground and prowled closer.

  Halfway across the meadow she froze. Stock-still against the darkness she lifted her snout and breathed. It was there—the high, piercing, primordial presence, like blood in the breeze. A growl rumbled lowly in her chest and she stepped cautiously forward. The horses hadn’t got a whiff of her and they stood with their heads lowered, sleeping. She wanted fruit. That and anything else they may have left about. The horses didn’t interest her. As she moved closer she could see the white sack hung from a branch beyond the fire and dens of the sleeping man beings. But each step brought the old scent closer, as though the measured walk to the camp was a procession to a spectacle, the sharp odour of it becoming more feeling than scent, a ragged anxiety in the gut of her, gnawing, growing more intense. She hadn’t felt anything quite like it and it excited her.

  She circled now, moving beyond the horses, arcing slowly toward the tree where the white sack hung. She could feel the edge, the weight of moment deep within her, and she kept a close eye on the man dens, knowing the danger of thunder sticks and wanting none of their explosive threat. A horse nickered. She stopped. Long moments went by before she walked again, and in the breeze the food sack swayed slightly. When she got to it she scanned the area once again before launching herself to her full height and stretching out her great claws toward the promise hung in the tree. They hadn’t anticipated the size of her. She snapped the branch off along with the sack, and the loud crack of it sent the horses into paroxysms of panic, her scent reaching their flared nostrils. The night exploded around her and the ancient smell was high in the air.

  Two men burst from their dens and the horses in full fear broke free of the rope that tied them in place. They galloped crazily across the meadow. A third, smaller being, a female, struggled out of her den and there was shouting, the man voices quick, hard and filled with the shock of fear.

  She swatted at the sack and her claws shredded the sides of it, spilling the contents on the ground in front of her. There was the sweet smell of berries and she licked at a spot of liquid, her tongue rewarded with the slick, gummy wash of fruit. The men edged closer together and she looked out the tops of her eyes as she licked at the stain of fruit. One of them separated and approached, something clutched in his hands. It was their chopping tool. He held it up, yelling, and it glinted severely in the light of the half moon. She growled, loud and long. The man being stopped and she raised herself up on her back legs again to show her girth, her power. She bellowed, a terrible roar that rattled off the sides of the cliff and sent the man being backward a step or two. When he stepped forward again the other male moved with him, this one clutching a smaller, shinier thing and walking purposefully toward her. She roared again and dropped to her four legs, swivelling her head in response to their brazen approach. They used their throats to call at each other, high, shrill notes that angered her. The blood drummed in her ears, and as she clawed at the ground in front of her the ancient smell asserted itself like a cloud around her and she stood once again to declare her dominance over the two smaller beings walking slowly, crouching, toward her. She roared, dropped down to all fours, and as she did the female ran up beside the two males, all of them now, screaming, waving their arms in the air, stepping forward, jumping up and down making a horrible noise in the night. It was the noise of fear, but riding its crest, balanced there, was the smell of the challenge. The bear welcomed it.

  She bashed away at the ground, sending sprays of dirt and grass to each side of her. The men stopped. She swivelled her head and growled, then bellowed again, a great air-splitting roar meant to dissuade any further advance. But one stepped forward. One of them calmly walked closer, one arm raised, clutching the chopping tool in his hand, out and away from his body. The great bear shuddered. Its fur rippled, making it look bigger. The other two stepped to the side, arms raised, calling out to the one who approached her. The bear sniffed the air and the call pierced her nostrils, burning like an ember from the fire that lay in a weak orange lump near the man dens. She growled and stepped closer.

  The man stopped. She growled again but he did not retreat. He stood there, and as she stepped closer he raised his hands. She swung her head back and forth in front of him, telling him the moment had arrived, that this was the point the call had brought them to.

  He called to her.

  The bear stopped. Unsure of what was happening, she held herself still to concentrate on the man. The man talk rolled smoothly into the night and he stood there in front of her, crushable, breakable, letting the flow of the talk meld with the high presence of the ancient beckoning. She growled, lower this time, slowly. The man being stepped closer. She let him. She could not smell fear on him. Instead he was calm, stepping closer with his arms outstretched, raising them higher like the wings of the great eagle. The bear shifted her weight from paw to paw. When she raised herself up on her back legs again it was to show respect for this bravery, this surrendering to might, to power, to fate. The other two man beings stepped up beside the brave one and the bear roared, twisting its tremendous snout back and forth, spittle spraying from its jaws. They stood together in front of her and she let them have the moment.

  She dropped to all fours and turned halfway around. The man beings held their place. She walked away a few steps, then looked back over her shoulder. Still they stood watching her. She walked another few steps and looked over her shoulder again. She kept doing this until she reached the edge of the meadow. The man beings stood staunchly in their place. There was a whiff of the ancient smell, and when she reached the trees she stood and bear-walked toward them and bellowed a triumphant roar for the courage of the man beings before dropping to all fours and disappearing into the trees.

  The call drifted away on the wind.

  They held each other. They encircled themselves with their arms and bent their heads close together, breathing in a collective relief. Claire wept quietly and her shoulders shook. Aiden fought to get his breath back. It felt as though he’d held it so long his brain had forgotten the rhythm of breathing. It took some doing to breathe normally again. Joe Willie felt a chill from the sweat he’d broken and he shivered tightly, his head clear of all thought. They stood like that for a long while until they felt security return, the sounds of the night resolving into thick alpine quiet. Finally, they broke and walked to the fire that Joe Willie stirred to life, and after he added wood and allowed the flames to climb higher into the night, each of them heaved a ragged breath, staring out into the mysteries of the dark.

  “I can’t stop shaking,” Claire said. Aiden wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and hugged warmth into her. “I’ve never been so scared.”

  “Me neither,” Joe Willie said.

&nbs
p; “What? You walked right up to it,” Aiden said. “You talked to it.”

  “Don’t mean I wasn’t scared,” Joe Willie said. “And what the hell were you two doing walking up there?”

  “I don’t know,” Claire said. “It was a reaction.”

  “Mighty strange reaction.”

  “When I saw what you were doing, I thought me with the knife was better than you out there all alone with that axe,” Aiden said. “If I was only gonna get one poke it was gonna be a good one.”

  “Thank god it didn’t come to that,” Claire said.

  “Did you feel it?” Joe Willie asked.

  There was a silence. They looked at each other in the flicker of firelight and sat down on the log beside each other. They stared into the flames, and only when Aiden added another log to it was there room to speak again. “It felt like time stopped,” he said, poking the embers under the new wood. “Like there was nothing else. Like there was nowhere else. Just us. Just us and the bear.”

  “It was like existing without breathing,” Claire said. “Like air didn’t exist. Only energy. Like I breathed energy through my skin.”

  “It felt old,” Joe Willie said slowly. “Like you said before about this place. Like I’d done it before. But there was something else, something swimming underneath all that. Something strange but familiar too. Did you feel that?”

  “Like fog,” Aiden said. “Like fog inside.”

  “The oddest thing,” Joe Willie said. “I knew what to do. Knew that I needed to walk up to her, look at her head on and say something.”

  “How do you know it was a she?” Aiden asked.

  “Because I’ve seen her before.”

  “Up here?” Claire asked.

  “Yes. But in dreams mostly.”

  “Dreams?” Aiden said.

  “It was always so clear,” Joe Willie said. “Like life. Like real. After the ride, in the hospital, I saw her for the first time. I thought it was the drugs, but she kept coming back. Even here. And she never felt threatening. I never felt in danger, and that’s how I knew what to do tonight.”

  For the next while he told them about the dreams of the bear. They drank tea, smoked, and Joe Willie talked. He told them about the ride. There were details he recalled for the first time and he described See Four, how magnificent he was in his brutal strength and how he felt slipping into the rigging that night. Eight seconds. He spoke about the eight seconds that separated him from cowboy legend and the feeling of that in his chest, how it lived in every motion of preparation and cracked like lightning when the rope man pulled the chute. He talked about the pocket disappearing and the helplessness of being latched to a thousand pounds of enraged bull. Then he talked about waking in the hospital, the rage he felt, the black hole he fell into, and how the bear had come. When he spoke about the arm he reached out with his right hand and rubbed the shoulder, letting his fingertips slip into the trench where the joint had been. He told them what a cold thing rage could be and how it took forever to be able to discern warmth again, how the bear had walked him straight into the heart of his wrath and allowed him to feel it, inhabit it, and then to crave emergence like a hunger in the belly. It took rage itself to climb out, and he told them how that had confused him and how climbing the mountain had become his release, how the trail allowed him to leave bits of it, shards of it, at each turnaround point, how the bear when she had appeared at the edge of the trail had shown him that.

  “So what did you say to her?” Aiden asked.

  “Nin-din-away-mah-john-ee-dog,” Joe Willie said.

  “What’s that?”

  “My father’s talk. Ojibway.”

  “Bear talk?”

  “Yeah. I guess it is.”

  “What does it mean?” Claire asked.

  Joe Willie looked away from the fire in the direction the bear had gone. “It means … all my relations.”

  “I’d have said something a lot stronger,” Claire said.

  “There is nothing stronger,” Joe Willie said “It’s an honouring phrase. It means that you see everything the way it’s supposed to be. Clear of illusion. You see the relationship you have to everything, how you’re tied to it, how it’s all a part of you.”

  “And you’re a part of it,” she said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “But there was more,” Aiden said. “You said a lot more than that.”

  “Yeah. I did,” Joe Willie said.

  “What?”

  Joe Willie stood up and stretched. He took the long alder stick and knelt to poke at the fire, his face sombre. “It was Sioux,” he said. “My mother’s talk. I didn’t know I remembered. But it came back to me clear as a bell. I haven’t spoken it for years.”

  “Another honouring thing? A warrior kind of thing?” Aiden asked.

  “‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ actually,” Joe Willie said. “It was all I could remember.”

  Their laughter rolled out across the meadow. The guffaws and knee slapping spilled outward from the fire like a spark, its energy careening wildly in its sudden freedom. Tears rolled freely down their faces, and in the light of that fire, their eyes shone when they looked at each other, a tribal glint, an ancient light culled from the depths of the shadows of the night and stoked by the light of a common fire. High up in the darkness, the bear heard their celebration, huffed her breath and moved deeper into the backcountry.

  Aiden had gone off to sleep. There was a trace of indigo light at the edge of Iron Peak and the bird sounds told them it was approaching morning. Claire and Joe Willie sat by the fire, its light dwindling, more smoke than flame now, and flakes of ash floated up and away to land in the meadow grass yards away. They watched them float downward, drank tepid tea and watched the world shrug itself into wakefulness again.

  “Why did you say what you said to the bear?” Claire asked.

  He looked up at the peak before he spoke. “I spent every morning of my life as long as I can recall walking out onto the veranda. I’d sit there and look out over everything and feel like the colours of things seeped into me, like the land entered me. Like I breathed it in.

  “But when I got busted up I lost it. I could go there once I got home but it was hollow, like there was a note missing, and I couldn’t figure how to get it back. Then Grandpa give me that truck, and sitting in her, I could feel the stories she carried, the stories of my family, my people, and it was like the note was there, shimmering in it, in all of it, but I didn’t know how to coax them out. Then the bear came. She walked toward me, looking at me out the tops of her eyes, and it was like she was telling me something. It took a long while to hear it.”

  “What was it?” Claire asked.

  “She told me to go ahead and growl.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No,” he said. “It was like she gave me permission to be pissed off. Pissed off about all of it. Not just being busted up but everything that came with it. My girl. My girl I was with for four years come to see me, got one look at my arm and took off. Never seen her since. She never called. Nothing. Guess she couldn’t bear the thought of being seen with a cripple. I hated it for that. The arm, I mean. Hated it for its ugliness. Hated it for its useless weight. Hated it for how it made me look to people. Powerless. Useless. Helpless. Like I wasn’t a man anymore. I wanted to rip it off. Tear it right off and be without it. Like if I was only gonna have one arm then I just might as well only have one arm. Just looking at it filled me with anger.

  “But seeing that bear told me that the only way I was gonna hear the stories that old truck held was to walk through the rage. Growl and spit and swear. So I did. I did everything left-handed. I made that arm work. Took all the spit and venom I had inside me and put it to work. Took a long time to walk through it. To get to what the bear meant.”

  “What did the bear mean?” she asked.

  He stood and watched the clouds slip over the edge of the peak and the faded blue sky of morning ease higher, wider where night
had been. “In rodeo you always have to qualify for the big round. To prove your worth. She meant that life isn’t rodeo. That I qualify. That I’m a part of things regardless. Guess I forgot that. Or never learned it in the first place.”

  “I know what she meant,” Claire said.

  “Yeah?” He went back and sat down on the log beside her. When she didn’t speak right away he picked up the fire stick and poked around at the embers until a tiny lick of flame climbed up and caught the logs again. They watched the fire grow.

  “Yeah,” she said in a faraway voice. “The last man I was with beat me. Beat me bad. Before that he used me. Used my body. It was like I wasn’t a person, I was a device, a toy. He didn’t care about me or about Aiden. All he wanted was the sexy black woman. His fantasy. His reward. When he punched me it was like an indictment, a judgment for every man I’d ever served it up for. Because he wasn’t the first. Sure, he was the first one to hit me but he was far from the first I ever gave it all up for. All of me, I mean.

  “I swore I wouldn’t let myself do that again. I wouldn’t be a body. I swore I wouldn’t let a man touch me. I set out to become independent, and I did. When Aiden got sent to jail it was the perfect opportunity for me to lose myself in my chase for liberty. I buried myself in work and achievement. I thought about men, found myself craving that heat, but I let it pass.

  “But your mother and your grandmother taught me something. They taught me that there’s a big difference between being free and being independent.”

  “What’s that?” Joe Willie asked.

  She looked up at the peak and smiled. “You can share freedom. Independence you hang on to like you hang on to a bull—alone, with all you got.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was the bravest thing I ever saw,” she said, looking at him directly.

  “The bear? No choice, really. Not a lot of room for bravery when you got no choice.”

  “I don’t mean the bear. I mean telling me what you just told me.”