WHEN THE RICE MOON came, Ben and I were put in charge of digging a pair of shallow firepits and gathering firewood. Then we dug another, larger, slightly deeper pit a few yards away from the fires and lined it with a canvas tarpaulin. On the day of the harvest we started the fires early in the morning. In the dawn chill my grandmother sang in the Old Talk, her voice reverberating off the water and echoing back from the face of the cliff. She sprinkled fresh cedar on that fire. My brother and I hauled the crisp air deep into us and tried to join in the old woman’s song even though we did not know the words. Ben coughed and had to stop. My parents and my aunt and uncle hung back near the trees, the toe of my father’s boot tracing circles in the dirt.
After we’d eaten, the adults paddled off to the rice beds. Ben and I tended the fire and when there was a good bed of embers we propped the metal wash basins my grandmother had brought across stout green logs to heat them. We knew what would go on in the canoes. She’d told us.
“The men will pole the canoes through the stocks. We women will pull the heads of the rice down with a stick. Then we’ll knock that stick with a swing of another one and the rice will fall into the canoe.”
The solid clap of sticks travelled back across the water.
“We keep on knocking that rice until the canoes can’t hold any more. Then the men will guide us back here to the fires.”
We heard a shout after about an hour. In the distance the canoes emerged from the rice beds, so low in the water I thought they would sink. The women were sitting on the bottom. We could see the rice piled up over their legs, which they’d covered with thick pants to ward off the bite of the rice worms. My grandmother and mother and aunt paddled lightly. The men stood at the sterns and used the tip of their paddles to ease the canoes forward. It seemed to take them forever to travel the breadth of the lake. When they got closer I waded into the water to help pull the bows of the canoes as close to the beach as they would go. I helped the women out and the four of us hauled the canoes up onto the stone shore. Once my father and uncle had hauled the canoes out of the water, we began throwing rice into the metal washtubs.
When the tubs were filled the men carried them to the fire and the women took the canoe paddles and sifted the rice. The smoke curled up and around them and they rubbed at their eyes. As they worked, my father and uncle walked into the bush and returned with two long poles that they stripped of bark and propped up in holes they’d dug at the sides of the deeper, canvas-lined pit. When the rice had parched sufficiently over the heat, my grandmother signalled for Ben and me to take up our positions beside the men.
“In the old days, it was important for boys to learn to be men, to be responsible. This dancing of the rice was one of the first ways they did that,” my grandmother said.
“Rice is sacred. When Creator sent the Anishinabeg, the Ojibway, east from the Big Water to find their homeland, we were instructed to stop when we came to the place where food grew on the water. This country of rice was the place we found.
“You boys will crush the hulls of the parched rice from the seed with careful, steady steps. I will use your grandfather’s rattle as I sing the ricing song. The poles beside the pit will help you keep your balance.”
Our grandmother came to smudge our feet with the sacred herbs and mumble a prayer. When she took up the rattle and began to sing, Ben and I stepped into the pit. The rice pods shifted crazily under our feet and we struggled to keep time with the song. The dried seeds in the rattle sounded like hulls of rice. The crunch of the pods beneath our feet took on a beat that we struggled to maintain. When she had determined that the batch was hulled, our grandmother signalled us to stop.
After Ben and I climbed out of the pit, my father and uncle lifted the tarpaulin and poured the rice out on a blanket set on the rocks near the shore. My mother and aunt loaded flat baskets with rice, turned to face the breeze and began flipping the rice into the air. I watched as the breeze caught the rice and blew the crushed hulls away. Then the pit was loaded again and Benjamin and I began to tread the fresh batch. We worked that way all morning, legs burning. Benjamin tried to hide his coughing from the adults. I wanted to call out, but he looked at me with his fist held to his mouth and shook his head.
The sun was high when we stepped into the pit for the last of the load. My brother splashed himself with water and wiped at his face. He leaned harder on the pole, doubling over with coughs that shook him mightily. He managed only a few strides before the coughs hit him again. A spume of blood flew out of his mouth and sprinkled the rice at our feet. Benjamin leaned on the pole and fell onto his side on the edge of the pit. I yelled.
We dragged my brother from the pit and laid him on a blanket in the trees. He couldn’t stop coughing and his lungs made a wet, slushy sound. Finally my grandmother said we should move him.
My brother was limp and hot and he felt thin in my hands. Empty. When we laid him on the spruce boughs in the tent he seemed to sink into them, as though the land were already reaching out and claiming him.
We took turns bringing him water, the old woman and I. The others stayed away. We could hear them talking by the fire, but my grandmother was too busy making teas and potions, using roots she’d found by searching the nearby bush, to pay them any mind. I could feel the chasm between the three of us and the others as if it were a living thing. There seemed no way to cross that distance. It was the first time I recall being afraid of my parents. They stoked the fire and sat in its shadow. The moon rose. When I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, I leaned against my grandmother outside the tent where my brother hacked in the darkness, and fell asleep.
He was dead by morning.
8
My mother’s keening by the river was eerie. My father stood at the fire rubbing his hands together and mumbling to himself. My aunt and uncle sat with their arms around each other while she said the rosary and wept. It was my grandmother who prepared my brother’s body. She took water from the lake, dipped cedar boughs in it and washed him. I could hear her singing in the tent. The tightness in my throat almost made me cough too. No one came to ask me how I was. Instead, when the old woman finished with her ministrations, she came out of the tent and called us all to the fire.
“We will honour him in the old way,” she said. “We will carry him to a high point and lay him in the breast of the earth with his feet pointed east facing the morning sun. That way his spirit can follow the sun as it makes its journey across the sky and begin his Spirit Walk.”
“Heathen,” my mother spat. “He is my son. We will take him to the priest.”
“They will not honour him.”
“You do not honour him,” my mother cried. “You brought him to this forsaken place. You told us by coming here that we would return to how things were. But those ways are gone. Those gods are dead. We need to take my son to the priest so that he can be returned to the bosom of Christ.”
“Your grief has blinded you.” My grandmother held out the bowl that contained the sacred medicines but my mother slapped it away.
“You have no say. He is my son. He will have the rites of the Church. We’ll take this rice that cost him his life and we’ll sell it and buy him a coffin and he will have a proper burial. Not out here. Not stuck in some hole in the earth.”
My mother walked to my father and took his hand and led him away from the fire. My aunt and uncle followed. We could see them all talking by the water. My father came back alone and stood across the fire from the old lady.
“We’ll take him to the priest now,” he said. “There’s a lot of the day left and we can get a good start.”
“You know what your father would have said?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I have not heard his voice in a long time.”
“He would have said that all gods are one.”
“She won’t hear that.”
“Do you?”
My father pinched his lips together and rocked on the balls of his feet. I could sense the struggle in him. “Kaween. No. I guess I don’t,” he said. “She said to tell you that you could either come with us or not.”
“I won’t come.”
“We’ll be gone a spell. Can you look after Saul? Better he waits here with you.”
“He’ll be fine with me. There’s food. We have snares and the net.”
“All right, then.”
“All right.”
The adults packed two canoes with the bags of rice. They left a small sack for us. They gathered their clothes and other food for the journey, and when they were ready to leave they came to the fire. At that moment my parents seemed like strangers to me. Maybe it was the grief over my brother’s death that made them move so deliberately. Sometimes I think that if I had yelled something it would have all been different. But no words were in me. I watched my uncle and my father carry my brother’s body from the tent wrapped in a blanket and lug it to the canoe. They set him in the middle, leaned back against sacks of rice. I cried. I wept harder than I ever had. I wanted to stop this, wanted to bring them all back beside the fire and hear my grandmother’s guiding voice telling us stories and showing us the direction we should go together. As they eased the canoes out into the shallows, my grandmother pulled me close to her and put a hand on my head.
Even now when I think back to that day, I can see the shimmer of the wake they left behind them, the vee of it and the divergent lines that lapped at the shoreline. I can still see the bent back of my father paddling, the slumped form of my mother in the bow waving at the water with her oar. I can see the canoe that held my brother’s body as it passed the rock cairn and slid out of my view forever.
9
The adults didn’t come back. When the autumn began to turn I could tell the old woman was worried. That terrified me. The sky turned to the pale, washed-out blue of late October. Geese were in flight and my grandmother used some of the shells to bring down a few. We plucked them and slow roasted them over a green wood fire along with the fish I’d gill netted. She showed me how to use moss and thin strips of sod from beneath the trees to line the edges of our tent, and then we padded the floor extra thick with spruce boughs against the frost. As the nights became colder, ice appeared at the edge of the water. I set snares in the woods but they came up empty. We woke to snow one morning. The old woman walked off into the trees alone with her pipe and her rattle. I could hear her singing and praying. I sat by the fire and waited, and her keening echoed back from across the water as though others were with her in the trees. She came back and sat beside me and we drank tea.
“We can’t wait for them,” she said.
“What will we do?”
“We have to take the canoe and go down river to Minaki. My brother’s son Minoose lives there. We can stay with him through the winter if we have to.”
“Where did they go?” I asked.
She set her cup on the log and took out her pipe and loaded it and sat and smoked and stared at the fire. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I asked the grandfathers and the grandmothers for vision, but they have moved beyond the reach of the Old Ones now.”
“Will we find them?”
“I don’t know. But here we will die.”
10
Keewatin. That’s the name of the north wind. The Old Ones gave it a name because they believed it was alive, a being like all things. Keewatin rises out over the edge of the barren lands and grips the world in fierce fingers born in the frigid womb of the northern pole. The world slows its rhythm gradually, so that the bears and the other hibernating creatures notice time’s relentless prowl forward. But the cold that year came fast. It descended on us like a slap of a hand: sudden and vindictive.
We loaded the canoe with the last of the geese and the fish. We were freezing. The old woman made me pile on clothing and she cut shawls for us out of the canvas of a tent. She’d made boots for us out of the same cloth and we tied them to our feet with rope around our ankles. It was snowing. The pellets were like comets whirring in from space. I remember thinking I could hear them. It took all we had to cross the lake to the portage. The old woman’s face was strained with the effort of paddling into the teeth of that wind. The whitecaps slapped up at our hands. But we made it, and when we hauled the canoe up and into the shelter of the trees, the absence of wind made it feel like we were stepping into a dwelling.
“We’ll have to walk the supplies out first,” she said. She took our canvas shawls and fashioned them into sacks and we piled everything into them and slung them on our backs. The walk along the creek was hard. Frost covered the rocks and we slipped often. The air froze our hands into claws where we gripped the rope that bound the canvas. We had to breathe through our mouths because the ice crystals froze our nostrils together. When we reached the shore of the river the old woman took my hands and put them up her skirt and held them between her thighs to warm them. I wasn’t embarrassed. I put my face against her belly, and when we had rested we walked back to the canoe. She made a harness out of rope and I walked the front of it while she hoisted the stern with a stick of alder, and together we slumped up the length of that creek and got that long canoe up the portage. It taxed us completely. She turned the boat over and we lay beneath it with the canvas slung over us and the snow hissing through the air outside. When I woke she had a fire going and I could smell goose fat and strong tea. We ate without speaking and my grandmother kept her eyes on the river. The water was black with the cold. We edged the canoe closer to the fire and tilted it and she put spruce boughs on the ground and over the hull to form a lean-to, and that’s where we slept that first night. We could hear wolves and the snapping of branches in the trees and she pulled me closer. The land around us was like a great being hunched in the darkness. In the morning there was an inch or more of snow and we had a breakfast of cold fish and tea. Then we set the canoe to the water and pushed off west to where the river swung south and then east again toward the railroad town of Minaki.
She sang while we paddled. Her songs sounded like prayers. I hoped they were. The cold was intense. Mist came off the water and everything was grey with the frost. The only sound was the peeling of the water across our bow. The humped shapes of boulders on the shore wore cloaks of white. Trees with new snow heavy in their branches looked like tired soldiers heading home from war. The glisten of ice. When my hands became too cold to paddle I put them in my armpits to warm them and the old lady paddled us forward. The snow began again in mid-afternoon.
It was falling straight down and spinning, plummeting, the wind dying off. Snow piled up in the belly of the boat. When the snow became too dense to see, the old lady eased us to shore between a pair of stones the size of wigwams.
The cold was an awesome beast. As I plowed through the knee-deep snow to forage firewood I could feel the beast tracking me, waiting for the exhaustion to fell me so it could feed on my frozen flesh. The fire we built against it was tiny. The wood hissed and I feared the flames would wink out. But the old woman humped off into the bush and came back with arms filled with fir branches, and when she threw them on the fire it blazed high and hot and crackling. Snow fell like pieces of stars through the night.
We ran out of food on the third day. By then the water was too cold to swallow. I could feel my teeth crack when I tried. My grandmother cut a swatch of buckskin from her moccasin and told me to suck on it like a soother. It tasted like moss, but it offered a little moisture. At a bend in the river we came across a deer standing at the shore. The old woman raised her rifle but she was shivering too much to aim. The buck raised its nose and watched us. That night she fed me a soup of spruce gum, berries dug from the snow, moss and stones.
Both of us dozed off in the canoe that fourth day. The river sent us shooting into a gap strewn with boulders and we woke with
a shock when we hit one full on. The belly of the boat split at the nose and water poured in. We scrambled over its side into water thigh deep. My grandmother grabbed my hand and we pushed on toward shore. The water felt like knives of cold steel. When we made shore we turned and watched the canoe spin lazily in the current and then drift away, the bob of the last of our supplies heartbreaking.
The snow was even deeper now. The old lady waded through it, tugging me into a thick copse of cedars. She tore branches from them and piled them on the snow and made me lie down in them. She took off her canvas shawl, laid it over me and covered me with more cedar boughs. When I closed my eyes the dark was luxurious and I turned to it and let the sleep come. I felt slow and lifted on billows of air. Drifting. In my mind I saw the shores of Gods Lake as it was in the late summer. The sky was high and cloudless and easing toward sunset. I was drifting in the canoe a hundred yards from shore, and there were the shadows of my family, my people, dancing around a fire, and there was singing and the sound of a drum and the vague stir of laughter from the trees. I was weightless, boneless and very, very tired. The old woman slapped me awake.
“Gods in the trees,” I said, dreamily. My voice seemed to come from far away.
She slapped me again and I came to in the bracing push of the freeze. She’d cut sod and trundled it back. Together we gathered branches and made a small domed frame above the boughs on the snow, then covered it with the rest of the cedar and the sod patches. It wasn’t very big but there was enough room for us to crawl in and pull the canvas shawls over us. Our body heat kept us warm.
That night I fell asleep to my grandmother’s voice. She told me stories of the Star People who had come to our people in the Long Ago Time and brought teachings, secrets of the cosmos and the basis of our spiritual way. When I woke halfway through the night she was still talking, but her voice was weaker. The old story took me off into sleep again. When morning came she looked tired. Worn away. We were hungry. We stood shivering in the snow. She followed the shore of the river with her eyes.
Indian Horse Page 3