Indian Horse

by Richard Wagamese

  Our lives became the plod from one tent village to another. Sometimes there’d be an abandoned tarpaper shack that we could call home, but for the most part we lived with others as displaced as we were, in canvas tents strung in a circle around a central fire. We’d share the warmth and whatever food we had. I learned to snare rabbits and steal chickens. I grew to hate the stink of sulfur at the same time I learned to endure the stench of roasted dog, the bite of the pine gum tea washing down the lard sandwiches that were our staple. Naomi told me stories, kept me away from the adults when they were in the grips of the drink. She showed me how to skin the squirrels and woodchucks we could sometimes catch in those thin woods.

  We settled in at Redditt in the winter of 1960. There was a lot of work for the men there. We managed to buy a wood stove for our tent and passed the deep snow moons in a comfort we’d forgotten could exist. With this infusion of hope, my father drank less. There was more money for food, and I stopped snapping off the ends of the branches that stuck up out of the snow to haul about in my wagon. By spring I’d grown taller, elastic and wiry.

  That spring we gathered mushrooms and greens and wild onions. A stream led from a bog lake to the main river, and my grandmother showed me how to lay out a burlap bag and haul in the suckers that ran up the creek to spawn. I learned to clean them with swift swipes of a knife and use the guts for bait on night lines I set out to drift in the current of the big river. We smoked those fish. Sometimes we’d slap thick coats of clay around them and bake them in the fire. My grandmother used the ribs of them for needles to sew buttons on my battered shirts. It began to feel as though we might forge a life for ourselves there on the edges of that rough-hewn town. Summer came. My mother sat with us at the fire most nights, even though she still carried such a deep sadness.

  5

  Then Benjamin walked out of the bush. He’d run away from the school in Kenora. People he met told him where we’d gotten to, and he’d followed the rail line north, and then the road. It was sixty miles to Redditt and he’d walked all that way. He was bug-bit and thin, taller than when we’d last seen him. His hair was cropped close to his skin and his ill-fitting clothes were made even looser by the weight he’d lost on his journey. For a moment no one knew who he was.

  “Mother,” he said.

  My mother burst out of her despair in a gale of tears and laughter.

  There was great celebration. My brother sat by the fire and was fed our thin stew and my grandmother mixed up bannock that she baked on a stick over the fire. I stood by his side while he chewed. He was different. Not only in size. There was a wariness in his eyes and a hardness to the set of his chin. His hands shook some when he tore off bits of the bannock. “Saul,” he’d greeted me, nodding firmly. It was odd to see the expressions of a grown man on a boy’s face. Then he coughed.

  The cough racked him, and he bent forward. The hump of his back rose and fell with the effort. The grown-ups shrank back a step, fear on their faces. Only my grandmother stepped up to attend to him. She leaned him back against her bosom and cradled his head. His coughs subsided gradually. When they left him finally, his face was red and there were tears in his eyes. I could see how much smaller the spell had made him. He huddled close to my grandmother and put a hand to his mouth and worked at breathing regularly. “The coughing sick,” she said to us. “He got it from the school.”

  Over the next few days my brother rested. It would be years before I knew the full name of what he had but the TB my brother carried in his lungs spread anxiety throughout my family. My mother retreated into her woe again. My father drank hard. One evening my grandmother coaxed everyone to the fire and spoke to us.

  “There is not much time,” she said. “The coughing sick is in Benjamin hard, and I think that soon the Zhaunagush will come to find him. When they do, they will find Saul and we will lose them both.”

  We needed to go where the government men could not find us, my grandmother said. We needed to get back to living in a proper way. We needed to take Benjamin to a place where the air and the land could ease his spirit.

  “He is twelve,” she said. “Saul is seven. They are old enough now to dance the manoomin, the rice, in the old way. Their grandfather would have wanted this for them. We will go to Gods Lake.”

  No one argued. In the firm words of the old woman there was no room for discussion. We began to prepare for the trip. My father used his last paycheque to buy three old freighter canoes that he and my uncle and grandmother patched with spruce gum heated over the fire. The old lady quietly traded my father’s whiskey for a rifle and shells and a pair of heavy metal washtubs. We packed our tents and what food we could and set off to paddle our way to where Gods Lake sat in the thickest part of the bush country. Grandmother knew the country and she guided us through the portages to the Winnipeg River, then north past Minaki, then east again beyond One Man Lake. The journey took us ten days. Benjamin and I sat in the middle of one of the large canoes with our grandmother in the stern, directing us past shoals and through rapids and into magnificent stretches of water. One day the clouds hung low and light rain freckled the slate-grey water that peeled across our bow. The pellets of rain were warm and Benjamin and I caught them on our tongues as our grandmother laughed behind us. Our canoes skimmed along and as I watched the shoreline it seemed the land itself was in motion. The rocks lay lodged like hymns in the breast of it, and the trees bent upward in praise like crooked fingers. It was glorious. Ben felt it too. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and I held his look a long time, drinking in the face of my brother. When he coughed I put a hand to his back.

  “In the Long Ago Time before the Zhaunagush, a group of hunters set out to find moose late one fall.” My grandmother’s voice carried over the water, and the other two canoes pulled even with us so the adults could hear. “They went the way we go now, and they’d never seen such strength in the country. The rocks seemed to sing to them.

  “In those times our people relied on intuition—the great spirit strength of thought—and the hunters found a portage at a flat place not far from where we are now. It led back into country marked with ridges. It was very hard to walk, but they followed a small creek through a cut in the land until they felt the land close off behind them like the flap of a wigwam. They could feel the stillness in their bones, and some of them were afraid. But the need for meat for the coming winter was so strong they pushed on.

  “Finally the creek led them to a hidden lake. The shoreline was narrow and the curve of the lake’s bowl was steep, except for one section that sloped upward gradually out of a tamarack bog. The hunters knew there would be moose there and they were heartened. They began exploring to find the place where it would be easiest to dress their game. The water of that lake was black and still, though, and the silence that hung over it made them nervous. The hunters had the feeling of being watched from the trees.

  “Finally the men came to a spot where a cliff spilled gravel downward to form a wide beach. There were shallows for landing their canoes near a good stand of trees and thickets of willow. It seemed a perfect place to make their camp. They beached the canoes and stood on that gravel shore and looked around them. The air did not move. It felt hard to draw a breath, and their feeling of being watched was stronger.

  “As they started to unload, the hunters heard laughter from the trees and the low roll of voices speaking in the Old Talk, the original language, unspoken but for ceremony. But no one was there. As they splashed through the shallows in a panic trying to get their canoes back into the water, laughter rolled openly from the trees. The hairs on the back of those hunters’ necks stood straight up, and they trembled as they paddled back to the head of the portage. By the time they made it back to their home, every hair on their heads was white.

  “The people called the place Manitou Gameeng, and it became Gods Lake when the Zhaunagush missionaries heard the tale. No one could stay th
ere; whenever anybody tried, a powerful presence would overwhelm them and they would run away. But Solomon had a dream. In that dream our family were harvesting rice at Gods Lake and we were content and settled and the sky was a deep and cloudless blue. So we went there one spring. We made a ceremony on the rocks at the base of that cliff and we sang old songs and said prayers in the Old Talk and prepared a feast and carried Spirit Plates into the trees and left them there. We made a sacred fire and we burned the last of the food and your grandfather climbed high up the face of that cliff and laid a tobacco offering there.

  “The air thinned and the breeze began to blow and there was peace. But no one else has been able to go there since. They are still chased away. Only the Indian Horse family can go to Gods Lake. It is our territory. The rice that grows at the southern end is ours to harvest, and we will gather it in the traditional way as another offering to the Old Ones.”

  The story spooked us. Even the adults, who had heard it many times before, grew silent. I wondered what would become of us there. I wondered if the spirit, the manitous, of Gods Lake would look upon us with pity and compassion, if we would flourish on this land that was ours alone.

  6

  We made Gods Lake in the early afternoon of a day in late summer. It was a great bowl of inkpot black sunk into the granite and edged with spruce, pine and fir. At its shoreline, as my grandmother had told us, were tall cedars, a tamarack bog and a wide shallow bay at the southern end, where manoomin grew in abundance. The air was still at first. But as we paddled toward the northern end, where the grey-white cliffs spilled their gravel down to form the beach, a breeze came up and we could hear bird sounds from the reeds and shallows. A pair of eagles watched us from the top of a ragged old pine. A mother bear and two cubs broke apart at our approach and galloped up through the bracken and the meadow to disappear into the trees at its edge. It was warm and the sky above us was festooned with small clouds.

  We pitched our tents in a glade in the trees. Every morning I could flip back the flap of the tent my brother and I shared and see the water and the opposite shore, the mist off it dreamlike. There were game and fish and berries and we ate like we never had before. Everyone seemed to take to the promise of this place. Ben rallied enough to help me with gathering firewood, setting the night lines and tramping up to the top of the ridge where we would sit and just look out over the land. The gods of Gods Lake seemed pleased that we were there, and as the weeks dwindled off to the far edge of summer, our camp was light-hearted and peaceful.

  I tramped up the ridge alone as my brother slept in the tent late one afternoon. From there it seemed as though the entire world was a carpet of green pocked with bald grey places where spires and shoulders of rock rose through the trees. The sky was a clear and endless blue. A faint breeze eased over the lake. I’d come to favour a small jut of pink granite that looked like the bottom of an overturned canoe. From it I could see in every direction, and I loved being surrounded by all of that amazing space. As I sat there with the warmth of the sun spilled over me, I closed my eyes. I could hear the breeze in the trees. There was a tempo to it. Slow. Measured. My breathing slowed to match it. That’s when I heard my name. It was whispered so softly, I thought at first that I’d imagined it. Then I heard it again. My eyes flew open and I looked around. No one was there, only the branches of the trees bouncing easily in the breeze. Frail clouds had fanned out across the great canopy of blue sky. I stood and walked to the edge of the ridge and looked down. The drop was steep.

  “Saul.” It came to me long and stretched out so that it didn’t really sound like a word at all. But I heard it nonetheless. “Saul.”

  When I looked down at the lake again, I saw people. They were busy in canoes setting nets. A group of women waded in the shallows gathering cattail roots, and laughing children splashed at minnows. A few young men walked out of the trees carrying deer carcasses on poles, and now I could see a camp of a dozen wigwams at the foot of the great cliff. Women were scraping hides stretched out on poplar frames while children ran around them. A pair of elders sat beside a fire, and as I watched, one of the men looked up at me and nodded. He raised his black bowl pipe in my direction.

  Then, suddenly, it was night. The fire at the centre of the camp burned high and in the flickering light I could see people dancing. Someone played a hand drum and the song they sang pierced the darkness where I stood with high, jubilant syllables of praise. The fire sent the fragrances of cedar and sage and roasting meat up to me and I felt a great hunger. The moon was full in the sky. As the rhythm of the drum and the song slowed, it became a social dance and I heard laughter clear as the call of night birds.

  Then it was the deep of night and in the dim blue light of that full moon the camp slept. The fire had dwindled to lazy smoke curling up and over everything. A pair of dogs slept close to it. At the foot of the rock beach, canoes bumped and jostled in the light push of wavelets breaking on the stone. The man I had seen earlier by the fire was standing on the beach and he was singing. He held a long stick with a glowing end, and I could smell sweetgrass, tobacco, cedar and sage as he set the stick down on a flat rock and fanned the smoke up and over himself with a long feather fan. In the song that rose up to me I heard fragments of the Old Talk. The man raised his arms up high with his fingers splayed. When he’d finished singing, he bowed his head. Silence lay heavy over everything. I shivered. A long time passed, and then out of the west came the wail of a wolf song. The wolf song rose higher and higher and as it reached its crescendo I saw the face of the old man in the face of the moon. He stared back at me and the light in his eyes comforted me. Then he closed his eyes slowly and everything changed again.

  Now it was morning. The fog rising up off the lake moved across the rock beach to envelop the camp. A rumble shook the ground at my feet and I heard the sound of rock cascading.

  I fell to the ground as the rumbling grew louder. A cloud of dust rolled over me. When the rumble had subsided, the silence was so deep it scared me. I crept to the edge of the ridge and looked over. The face of the cliff had collapsed, and the camp was gone. Vanished. Even the trees had been scraped away and the beach was strewn with boulders. The chalky smell of rock dust brought tears to my eyes and I stood there weeping, my shoulders shaking at the thought of those people buried under all that stone.

  “Saul,” I heard behind me.

  I turned and my grandmother was standing there with her arms spread open. I fell into them and cried into her bosom.

  7

  My grandmother never explained it, but there really was no need. I knew now why Gods Lake belonged to our family: because part of our family had died there, and their spirits still spoke from the trees. Somehow, knowing that was a comfort to me.

  Ben and I learned from the women how to fashion elaborate braids out of red willow bark. There was a design to the weave, and grandmother watched us to make sure we made them correctly.

  “Before the changes the Zhaunagush brought, the people would make mamaawash-kawipidoon, rice ties just like these. Each family had their own braid tied their special way so that they could be recognized in the rice beds. Each head of rice is tied with these.” She talked as she worked. It was as though her hands could think on their own. “We make a ceremony out of the gathering. It teaches us to remember that rice is a gift of Creator.”

  “It is a gift from God,” my aunt said quietly.

  The old woman replied slowly. “No matter how you make the address, the sender remains the same.”

  “We should pray with the rosary and give thanks the proper way,” my aunt said. “This way is wrong.”

  “Blasphemy,” my mother agreed.

  “That school gave you words that do not apply to us,” my grandmother said. “Out here there is no need to keep the spirit bound to fear.”

  “We were taught to be God-fearing,” my mother said.

  “One who love
s does not brandish fear or require it.” The old woman stopped her braiding to look at my mother and aunt, but they kept their heads down and continued with the ties. “Here in this old way you may rediscover that and reclaim it as your own.”

  I didn’t understand the words they spoke that day. I only knew that it felt right and good to do the chore we did, the simple ceremony of making rice ties. When we were finished, my grandmother and Ben and I paddled out in a canoe and she showed us how to tie the heads of the rice so it could be harvested more efficiently. She used a long, forked pole to push us around the rice beds. In the slow, steady motion of the canoe, my brother and I followed our grandmother’s directions. I didn’t realize until later, when the tent flaps were down and I could hear the voices of the adults over the snap of the fire, that my brother had not coughed the entire time. He slept quietly that whole night.