The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 1

by Roy MacGregor

  Wolverines 1, Screech Owls 1.

  Next shift out for Travis, Dmitri’s speed caught the Mighty Geese on a bad line change, and the Screech Owls went ahead to stay. They went on to win 5–2, and when the two teams shook hands at the end, the captain slammed his stick into Travis’s shin pads, a salute of thanks for the stick. Travis couldn’t help but note again that several Mighty Geese had no gloves on. They had to be sharing gloves. No wonder the Owls had caught them short on line changes.

  Travis could hear the crowd applauding them as they skated off. He looked up and saw the Wolverines’ assistant standing on a bench, clapping. Rachel. He yanked his helmet off, then began pushing his hair down. It was wet, and he worried that it was sticking up where it shouldn’t be.

  That night there was a banquet to celebrate the start of the First Nations Pee Wee Hockey Tournament. The Screech Owls, all in team jackets, white turtlenecks, and dark pants, were seated at one long table to the side. Muck, the assistant coaches, and Mr. Dillinger, the team manager, sat at the end nearest the head table, and Travis, Data, Jesse, and Nish were at the far end. But it still wasn’t far enough away for Travis.

  Nish had brought some of his candy stash with him, and laid it out on his plate: a Caramilk bar, a couple of green licorice twists, a Twinkie, a pair of Reese peanut-butter cups.

  “A balanced diet,” he announced as he laid it all out and pointed deliberately to the licorice. “Right down to my greens.”

  What had got into Nish?

  Chief Ottereyes had announced that a traditional Cree feast would be held at the community hall. There were Cree drummers pounding as the eight teams playing in the tournament had entered: the Screech Owls, the Wolverines, the Mighty Geese, the Northern Lights, the Caribou, the Trappers, the Belugas, and the Maple Leafs. (Jesse Highboy had pointed out that there were no maple trees this far north, but they picked up the Toronto Maple Leaf broadcasts by satellite.) The Screech Owls were the only non-native team. The Mighty Geese were the only group without team jackets.

  The banquet opened with a long Cree prayer recited by an elder, then Chief Ottereyes talked a bit about life along James Bay. It was a speech clearly meant for the visitors from the South. She talked about the history of the area, a history that white people like to date from 1611, when the British explorer Henry Hudson sailed into this bay and anchored at the mouth of the Rupert River, “which you can see for yourself if you just step outside the front door here,” she added. The Crees, however, preferred to say that 1611 was the year they discovered the white man.

  The Chief told them the Crees had had to learn to accept other languages and other religions and customs, and that the visitors should feel free to ask any questions they might have about how the Cree lived in the North. “Tonight,” she said, “you will be eating traditional Cree food. This is the diet we have lived on for centuries–and we’re still here, so enjoy.”

  She sat down to great applause, no one clapping louder than the Screech Owls. They began serving the meal immediately, starting with bannock. Nish, however, would have nothing to do with it.

  “You can’t eat just junk,” Travis warned.

  “You’ll make yourself sick again,” Jesse added.

  “I’ll make myself sick if I have to watch you people eat,” Nish snapped back.

  The feast proceeded: huge bowls of boiled potatoes, moose stew, caribou steaks, cheese, smoked whitefish, fried trout. At one point, a large bowl was carried past the Screech Owls that seemed, at first glance, to have a small hand sticking up from it.

  “GROSS!” Nish shouted before Travis could even point it out to Jesse.

  “What is it?” Travis hissed at Jesse.

  Jesse Highboy was laughing. He stood up and excused himself as he picked up the bowl from the next table. Inside was, indeed, a small hand sticking up. An arm and a wrist and a…paw.

  “Beaver,” Jesse said, matter-of-factly.

  “BEAVER?” Nish howled. “WHAT’S NEXT…SKUNK?”

  Travis cringed. People were staring. Some were laughing at Nish. Some, like Rachel Highboy, were definitely not impressed.

  Jesse handled it perfectly. “Beaver is a very special food here,” he said.

  “I thought you trapped beaver for fur,” Data said.

  “We do. But even if no one in the world wore fur coats, we’d still trap beaver. It’s our food up here, same as cattle and chickens are your food down south. You think the original natives went after beaver so they could wear fancy fur coats?”

  Data had clearly never thought about this. Neither had Travis. He had presumed trapping was wrong because it hurt. But as Jesse had once said, did he think that cows and chickens volunteered for McDonald’s?

  “I’m gonna hurl!” Nish said, opening up his Caramilk and laughing a bit too loudly. Travis glanced down the table. He could see Muck was watching. He did not look happy.

  Jesse tried another approach. “Look, Nish, do you like crackle?

  “Crackle?”

  “Yeah, you know, the hard outside when your mom cooks a pork roast.”

  “Oh, that. Yeah, you bet, I love it!”

  Jesse signalled to a woman who was carrying a tray to the head table. She stopped and smiled as Jesse stood, checked the tray, then helped himself to a plate piled high with what seemed like slices of bacon that were all fat and no meat.

  Jesse took a fork and placed a slice carefully on Nish’s plate right beside the licorice twists–Nish’s greens. He stood back: “See what you think of ours.”

  Nish sniffed, then nodded happily. “This I can relate to,” he said.

  He picked up his knife and fork, cut a piece off, placed it in his mouth, and chewed happily.

  “First rate,” Nish pronounced. “My compliments to the chef.”

  “What about to the hunter?” Jesse asked.

  Nish opened his eyes, blinking. “You hunt pigs up here?”

  “Who said it was pig?”

  “You did–pork crackle.”

  “Call it crackle if you like,” Jesse said, “but it isn’t pork.”

  Nish stopped chewing. “What is it then?”

  Jesse turned to the woman carrying the tray. “Tell him,” he said. “He won’t believe me.”

  The woman smiled at Nish. “Moose nostrils,” she said. “Would you like some more?”

  Nish looked as if he was about to pass out.

  “I’m gonna hurl,” he repeated, spitting his food out onto his plate.

  Muck had seen enough. He got up and walked straight down the aisle toward Nish, who winced when he saw him coming.

  “Outta here, Nishikawa,” Muck ordered.

  There could be no fooling. When Muck used that tone, you jumped. When Muck used last names, you jumped twice as fast. Nish scrambled to his feet and, with Muck at his elbow, was escorted out of the banquet room.

  Travis had never seen Nish so quiet. They had all returned to their billets, and the Whiskeyjacks had put out hot chocolate and cookies for the boys, but Nish was hardly even sipping his.

  Travis had no idea what Muck had said to Nish, but he knew Muck wouldn’t have minced his words. Nish was clearly out of sorts. As they’d washed up in the bathroom, he’d told Travis he wished he’d never come. “If there was a road outta here,” he said, “I’d hitchhike.”

  “You haven’t even given it a chance,” Travis said.

  “It sucks.”

  “It’s just different.”

  “Gimme a break. No movie theatres, no McDonald’s, no corner stores, no buses, no cable TV, no video arcade, not even a pathetic T-shirt for me to buy.”

  “There’s more to going different places than getting a T-shirt.”

  Nish made a big face. “This is backwards, man. Open your eyes. We’re in the Stone Age here–the Ice Age by the feel of it.”

  There was no point in arguing. They went out and sat with Jimmy Whiskeyjack and his big family–father, mother, grandmother, two sisters, and three younger brothers–and drank hot choc
olate and talked while Nish kept looking at the TV in the corner as if he wished he could turn it on just by staring at it.

  Normally, that’s what Travis would have been doing, too, but the Whiskeyjacks showed no inclination whatsoever to turn to the TV. Instead of sitting in a half circle around it, they sat in a full circle around the kitchen table. The younger kids played and listened, and Travis and Jimmy–but not Nish–talked a bit about the hockey tournament. Most of the talk, however, came from the grandmother, translated either by Jimmy’s mother or father.

  In this house, the grandmother was like the TV. They all stared at her and listened as if she were some special program they’d been allowed to stay up and watch.

  It was fascinating. She and her husband had both trapped, and six of her nine children had been born in the bush, as she had been before them. Through her daughter, Jimmy’s mother, she told how two of them had died and how they had buried the babies in the bush and marked the graves, and how they would go back to visit them every year, right up until 1979.

  The old woman took a long, long pause. Travis couldn’t help but ask: “Why 1979?”

  Jimmy’s mother answered. There were tears in her eyes. “That’s when they flooded my parents’ trapline.”

  “Flooded?”

  “The dams,” Jimmy explained. “The hydro dams. The graves are under sixty feet of water.”

  “Didn’t anybody tell them there were graves there?”

  Travis’s question made Jimmy’s parents laugh. They translated this to the grandmother, and she shook her head angrily.

  “We tried,” explained Jimmy’s father. “But they didn’t even tell us they were going to do it.”

  The old woman clearly did not want to dwell on this part of her story. She launched into a tale that soon had everyone laughing again, but as Jimmy’s father translated, Travis realized it was really about her family almost starving to death.

  The grandmother told how, one year, the beaver had all but vanished from their trapline, and her husband had left her alone with the children while he followed the trail of the caribou herd, hoping to return with food before the little they had left ran out.

  He did not come back in time. The food was just about gone. Christmas was coming and she had nothing to give the children–usually she would have bought some sweets at the Hudson’s Bay store and hidden them until Christmas Day.

  Christmas Eve it had snowed. And when they woke the next morning, the sun was bright and the new snow sparkled like white gold, so bright they had to squint when they turned back the flap of the tent. The old woman told her children that it had snowed sugar during the night: a Christmas present for them. She made them line up at the doorway, and then she took a spoon, went out into the snow, and very carefully scooped some up. She brought it back and told the oldest child to close his eyes. He did, and when she gave him his present he licked his lips, saying it was the most delicious snow he had ever tasted. She then did the same thing for each of the younger ones, who were already waiting with mouths open and eyes closed.

  “It really tasted just like sugar,” said Jimmy’s mother. “I can still taste it today.”

  Later in the day her husband returned with his sled piled high with caribou meat. They would make it through the winter. And none of them would ever forget the Christmas it snowed sugar in the bush.

  Travis had never heard such a wonderful story. He was fighting back tears. His throat hurt. He looked at Nish, who was still staring longingly at the TV set as if he wished he were someplace else.

  They talked a while, and Nish surprised Travis by suddenly turning and asking a question.

  “What’s a Trickster?”

  Jimmy’s mother looked at him, surprised. She glanced at her husband, then back at Nish.

  “Where did you hear about the Trickster?”

  “The Chief,” Nish said. “She said if I got lost in the bush up here it would eat me.”

  Jimmy’s parents laughed. The old woman fiercely worked her jaw.

  “It’s just an old story,” Jimmy’s mother said. “Like a fairytale.”

  The old woman said something sharp. Everyone turned to listen, even Travis and Nish, who couldn’t understand a word.

  Finally, Jimmy’s mother explained. “My mother says the Trickster is real, no matter whether you can actually touch it or just feel it in your head. She says her own father said he saw it, that the Trickster came and punished a family that was being too selfish one winter and wouldn’t share a caribou they had killed.”

  “What happened?” asked Jimmy.

  His mother answered, but she didn’t seem to believe. “The Trickster came and killed them and ate them.”

  “The Trickster is legend,” Jimmy’s father explained to Travis and Nish. “Many tribes have it in their myths. It’s a monster that comes at night and either eats its victims or drives them insane. Myself, I think it probably grew out of tough times, people actually going mad in the bush and needing something to blame it on. People getting attacked by bears maybe and someone saying it was cannibalism.”

  Again the grandmother said something sharp. Jimmy’s father answered her in an apologetic tone. Then he addressed the boys: “She says Cree hunters don’t make things up.”

  “What’s it look like?” Nish asked.

  “No one knows,” said Jimmy’s mother. “There are lots of drawings, of course. Sometimes a monster with three heads. Sometimes with just one. But always with a head like a wolf and eyes like hot coals in a fire.”

  Jimmy’s father checked his watch. “It’s eleven o’clock, boys. We stay up all night, you’ll be in no shape for your game tomorrow. Let’s get to bed.”

  Travis and Nish were in bunk beds in Jimmy’s room down in the basement. The three of them lay awake for a long time, talking quietly.

  “You ever see this thing?” Nish asked.

  “Of course not,” answered Jimmy. “They used to warn us that he’d come and take us away if we weren’t good.”

  “Like the bogeyman,” said Travis.

  “I guess,” said Jimmy.

  “Sounds stupid to me,” said Nish. Then, after a long pause, he thought to add: “Sorry, Jimmy.”

  “Sounds stupid to me, too,” Jimmy said. But he didn’t sound particularly convincing.

  They were awakened at dawn the next morning by Jimmy Whiskeyjack’s father shouting down at them from the top of the stairs. They had an eight o’clock game against the Belugas, a team from a community called Great Whale, another hour north by air. But he wasn’t calling to get them up for the game.

  “Come and see the geese!” he shouted. “They’re back!”

  Jimmy kicked off his covers and was dressed in an instant, already scrambling up the stairs as Travis and Nish stood in their underwear trying to rub the sleep out of their eyes.

  “Didn’t we just play them?” Nish asked in a sleepy voice.

  “That was the Mighty Geese,” Travis said. “These are real geese.”

  “You expect me to run outside to see a stupid goose?”

  “You can do whatever you want,” Travis told him. He was tired of putting up with his friend’s complaining. “I’m going out with Jimmy.”

  Travis bolted up the stairs and out the front door, which had been left wide open as the entire family came out to see what all the fuss was about. Travis couldn’t believe his ears: the honking sounded like something between a traffic jam and a schoolyard at recess.

  The sky was filled with geese. There must have been half a dozen different V formations. One had only five geese in it, another, much higher, must have had two hundred. And the noise wasn’t coming just from the sky; almost everyone standing in the roadways held their fists up to their mouths, honking back at the geese as if to say hello.

  Travis went and stood by Jimmy, who kept pointing to new formations coming in from the south. “The spring goose-hunt is on now,” he said. “Our hockey tournament just lost half its spectators.”

  “How co
me they all come at once?” Travis asked.

  Jimmy laughed. “They don’t. This is just the start. They’ll be flying in for the next three weeks. It’ll look like this every morning–some mornings there’ll be twice this many. Aren’t they beautiful?”

  Travis agreed that they were. He had never seen such grace. He loved the way they seemed to be barely moving their wings. He loved the perfect distance they kept from each other, and the arrow-straight wedge they formed as they flew, the one in front sometimes dropping back so another could take the lead.

  He looked back toward the house. Nish had come out and was standing on the porch steps, blinking as he looked up. He was shaking his head. He didn’t seem impressed.

  The Belugas were already on the ice when the Screech Owls skated out. Travis bolted past the goalies and made a wide circle at centre ice, pretending not even to notice the other team. He would have preferred to be out first, to be first on the fresh ice, but it was still clean and he could feel–and, even better, hear–his skates dig in with a perfect sharp. Dmitri and Derek had caught up to him and the three of them, in perfect unison, swept behind the net and came out in a perfect V as they headed fast down the ice, their strides smooth and evenly matched, their speed constant.

  Just like the geese, Travis thought. He wondered if anyone else was thinking the same thing. Certainly not Nish, who was stretching by the boards. Nish had a look that said he was thinking only about hockey. Muck had plainly got to him.

  They lined up for the face-off, and, for the first time, Travis took his measure of the opposition. The Great Whale team had beautiful sweaters, with an Inuit drawing of a big, white beluga whale on the front. And they were laughing, something Travis had never seen a team do before the puck dropped. They were speaking in Cree and pointing at Nish.