26
The Moose travelled to games in a pair of broken-down vans that Virgil worked his mechanical magic on to keep running. Fred’s shifts at work made it almost impossible for him to go with us as our coach so Virgil did that as well as captain the team. Our gear was stacked on the roof. We were crushed together, except for Virgil, who did the driving, and the front-seat passenger. We’d doze off to the smell of feet and sour breath and the sounds of snoring on those long, pitch-black northern drives, some of them three hundred miles or more. We existed on fruit, chocolate bars and sandwiches prepared for us by someone’s mother or girlfriend. It was my job as the rookie to clear out the van at every stop. We’d leave on Friday night, right after the work whistles blew at the mills or the mines. In the fading light of the sun we’d follow the dim, humped white of the snowdrifts at the road’s shoulder into the northern bush.
Because I was the smallest one on the team, I always found myself scrunched between two larger players. They’d cut cards to see who got to sit beside me: I took up less space, so there was more room for those on either side to get comfortable. Often, while the others were sleeping, I’d look out the window and watch the land flow by. Some nights there would be a moon, and the shadows it created were spectacular. Trees became many-armed creatures looming across the road. Lakes were shining phosphorescent platters. Ridges and scarps were fortresses capped with snow. Rivers were serpentine swaths of a deeper black. I loved every inch of it. I’d largely given up mourning the loss of my early life, those days on the land with my family. But the sadness filled me at times as we drove through the night.
Whether our destination was Gull River, Longlac, Red Rock, Whitesand or Ginoogaming, we were welcomed into the community and billeted with families who took good care of us. Sometimes five or six players would hunker in with a family of twelve in a small clapboard reserve house, bodies sprawled around the woodstove or laid out in rows across the main room. They served us rabbit, beaver and moose. When the time came to play, we’d all tramp through the snow to the rinks. Sometimes we played on rivers, or lakes or ponds. More often the rinks had been set up behind the band office or community centre. There would always be a wooden shack that both teams shared to suit up in. Those shacks were incredible. Lit by the brightest of light bulbs and warmed by stoves with a chimney pipe that stuck up through a hole in the roof, they had gouged plywood floors that you could see the ground through. The benches had to be replaced every year, because someone always made off with the benches from the year prior to use for firewood. When we clomped down the plywood ramps onto the ice, our skates sounded like thunder rolling across the vast whiteness. The rinks were much the same wherever we went. Wooden boards braced by two-by-fours. Chicken wire stretched across each end behind the nets. Three or four strings of light bulbs draped across the blue lines and centre ice, with maybe another yard light mounted on a hydro pole. Sometimes there were bleachers, but for the most part the crowds stood shoulder to shoulder around the perimeter, ducking when the puck flew over the boards. But the ice was always smooth and well tended. Each host community took great care to prepare it. People loved the game. It might be thirty below with a wind whipping across the surface of the rink and stinging their eyes, but they would stand there and stamp their feet and lean closer to each other like penguins. They’d stand for the length of the game, then scurry into the community hall or the nearest house to warm before the next game started. They were the hardiest and most devoted fans you could ever wish for. We played our hearts out for them.
Those games were spirited contests and gruelling physical feats. The white people had denied us the privilege of indoor arenas, the comfort of heated dressing rooms, concession stands, glassed rinks, scoreboards and even a players’ bench. We stood behind the boards, stamping our skates in the snow to keep our feet warm. In the coldest weather we took turns heading to the shack for warmth, leaving just six players from each side on the ice. The goalies would take turns too. But we played each game out. No game was ever called because of weather. We skated through blizzards, deep Arctic freezes and sudden thaws that turned the ice to butter. The game brought us together in a way that nothing else could, and players and fans alike huddled against whatever winter threw at us. We celebrated every goal, every hit, every pass. Sometimes there were fights as there are so often in the game, but they were never bitter, never carried on beyond the next faceoff. We came from nations of warriors, and the sudden flinging down of sticks and gloves, the wild punches and wrestling were extensions of that identity. A fight would end and both players would shake hands. The crowd would cheer and clap and stamp their feet, and the game would carry on.
Everywhere we went I was greeted with laughter because I was so young and so small. We played five games at the end of that first winter. At the beginning of each game I hung back as Fred Kelly had asked me to do. But when I had seen enough, I jumped in and the laughter died away. The higher level of play with these bigger and better teams did not stall me. Instead, it pushed me to greater heights. By the end of that first winter, I was an essential part of the Moose.
“Our secret weapon,” Buddy Black Wolf said.
“A bag of antlers,” was how Ervin Ear described me. “But fast.”
27
Every reserve in the North had a team. Indian boys grew up in those communities knowing that when they got old enough and good enough they could wear the sweaters of their home reserve. Whenever I saw younger kids racing around in decrepit skates with broken sticks, chasing a ball or a sawed-off tin can filled with dirt, I remembered horse turds and hockey sticks stuffed in a snowbank and I smiled. The teams were their communities’ pride and joy. We paid about ten dollars each to play those tournaments and the winner team took home a small purse. Mostly you won enough to cover the gas to get you home and people were happy with that. The first game was held late Friday night as soon as the first teams arrived, and games ran all day Saturday. The championship game was early enough on the Sunday morning to allow everyone time to get home and be ready for work the next day. Everybody stayed to watch the final outcome. Everyone wanted to be a part of the celebration at the end. We lived for the crush of bodies and the yelling and the clapping and the tumult that greeted the champions regardless of who won.
The first part of our journey home was raucous. We replayed every shift, every pass, goal and rush. We teased each other over losing the puck or taking a hit. We laughed at lapses in thinking or sudden misadventures. We praised each other for things well done. When we finally fell asleep it was to dreams of hockey. It was the same for every team, I believe. We came together every weekend with the same anticipation, waiting for the release that happened when our skate blades hit the ice. The rink was the place where our dreams came to life.
It couldn’t really be called a league. But there was a network of reserve communities flung across the North and each team captain took it as his responsibility to get the word out before freeze-up about when his community would host its tournament. The news travelled by moccasin telegraph. The spring, summer and fall were the times for players to train, to run, to lift weights and get their bodies ready for the new season to come.
We were hockey gypsies, heading down another gravel road every weekend, plowing into the heart of that magnificent northern landscape. We never gave a thought to being deprived as we travelled, to being shut out of the regular league system. We never gave a thought to being Indian. Different. We only thought of the game and the brotherhood that bound us together off the ice, in the van, on the plank floors of reservation houses, in the truck stop diners where if we’d won we had a little to splurge on a burger and soup before we hit the road again. Small joys. All of them tied together, entwined to form an experience we would not have traded for any other. We were a league of nomads, mad for the game, mad for the road, mad for ice and snow, an Arctic wind on our faces and a frozen puck on the blade of our sticks.
Fred and Martha Kelly were good to me. They didn’t try to be parents. They settled for being friends, and Virgil and I grew close. He was my greatest ally. I’d never done homework before or had teachers pay any attention to me. The idea of school as a process of grades and expectations was new and frightening. Virgil sat up late with me and helped me with my lessons. He taught me how to understand school, how to present myself in class, how to fit in with the other kids, and tips and tricks to help me learn faster. School became a pleasure with his help. At home I was asked to help out with household chores. I’d been trained to work at St. Jerome’s. Anything the Kellys asked me to do, I did smartly and well. The first time they thanked me for my efforts I had no words. Because of their own experience with St. Germ’s, they understood. Home life became an easy thing and I got comfortable quickly.
My second winter in Manitouwadge, I took to rising early just as I did at St. Jerome’s, clearing the ice and then practicing until it was time to leave for school. I was almost fifteen. Virgil would join me on the ice when he had a later shift at the mine. I would practice escaping his clutches and holds and the snare of his stick as he leaned into me, using his size and girth to slow me down. He was fast for a big man. By that second winter I had almost reached my full height and size, five-foot-nine and one hundred and forty pounds. So I was still small. Virgil had showed me how to work with weights the summer before, and I was lean and wiry. Still, he outweighed me by almost seventy pounds.
“Don’t get caught along the boards. Use the ice. Use as much as they give you,” he’d say. “Use your speed to give yourself more.”
During our team practices Fred would sometimes send me out against three of the other players. They would chase me, hit me, grab me. Every time I touched the puck in those sessions, a body was there. Every time I turned, someone was right up against me. It took a lot of work to find my rhythm under this kind of pressure, but I did it. Those three-on-ones taught me to activate my vision as if it had a switch. When the bumping and the holding impeded me, I’d coast, let the game go, watch it flow around me, just breathing until the vision descended like a cloud of light again. I would see the ice, the players, the destination of the puck as clearly as if the action were on a movie screen. But I had to call my vision forward with emotion; with longing for that purity of motion, the freedom that the game gave me.
“You go somewhere when you’re on the ice,” Virgil said to me after one practice. “It’s like watching you walk into a secret place that no one else knows how to get to.”
28
We won ten out of the fifteen tournaments we played that second year. We scored goals by the bucketful. Fred Kelly called us “a war party on skates.” He usually put me out on each of our three lines. That meant I played almost forty minutes of every game, but I never lost focus. None of the other players on the team complained. How could they? They would find themselves with the puck suddenly appearing on their stick out of nowhere. They learned to head for open ice at every opportunity. We became a team of skilled passers. Instead of letting the puck lead us around by the nose, as so many other teams did, the Moose began to go where the puck wasn’t, trusting that a teammate would send it there, and they would pick it up with another golden chance to score.
Father Leboutilier showed up at a game in Pic River that winter. It was late November, and we’d been playing for a month already. I didn’t notice him in the crowd, but when we clumped up the ramp to the shack he called to me from the side. I was surprised to see him. He looked different in his civilian clothes. Not like a priest at all. He smiled as if he knew what I was thinking. After I had changed I met him by the boards, and we walked together to his old battered car. We talked about the game and I settled into the remembered feeling of our friendship.
“You make the other players better, Saul,” he said.
“They make me work harder too.”
“That’s what I hoped when I sent you to the Kellys. That the game would lift you higher.”
“They treat me good.”
“The Kellys?”
“And the Moose. The people around the circuit. It feels great.”
We wound our way along the highway and back toward the community hall. “I hope I was able to help you when you were with us at the school,” he said.
“You did,” I said.
“I’m proud of you, Saul.” We were parked in the hall’s lot by then and he grabbed me and pulled me across the seat to hold me close. I could hear his breathing. When he let me go I could feel his eyes on me. “I don’t know when I will see you again.”
“I know,” I said.
“You’re free now, Saul. Free to let the game take you where it will.”
I got out without another word and stood in the snow and watched his old car disappear around the bend. His leaving was an ache that stayed with me for days. I would never see him again.
29
By February of that year, the Northern winter was at its deepest. The Moose kept winning and news of our success travelled beyond the confines of the reservation circuit. We were playing at a tournament in Longlac when Virgil poked me in the ribs with his stick as we stood by the boards.
“White guys,” he said. They stood behind the chicken wire at the end of the rink, far away from the regular crowd. Six of them. They wore identical team jackets and they were big, but clearly nervous to be on the reserve.
“What are they doing here?” I asked.
“Gonna find out,” Virgil said.
After the game, I left the shack to find Virgil talking to them, his arms crossed over his chest. When he saw me he waved me over.
“These guys wanna play us,” he said. “Exhibition game. In Kapuskasing.”
“You play a hell of a game,” the tallest one said. “Your team’s too good for these other guys here.”
“We do okay,” I said.
“The thing is, we wonder if you can win at another level. Against us. We want to challenge you.”
Virgil hooked a thumb at me and the two of us moved off to the side,
They were from the Kapuskasing Chiefs, a Senior A team comprised of mill and mine workers. They played in the Northern Hockey Association against teams from Schreiber, Terrace, Geraldton, Marathon and Hearst. They were good—more than good—and the town of Kapuskasing was proud of them.
“One game,” Virgil said. “They were league champions last year. I figure, why not?”
“We never played in town before,” I said.
“Rink’s a rink.”
“Maybe,” I said, remembering White River.
“These Kapuskasing guys would give us a good game,” Virgil said
“We already play good games.”
“Yeah. We do. But these other teams aren’t exactly pushing us. Maybe we could be even better. There’s only one way to find out.”
We stared at each other. I could see the hunger in him. He wanted this game.
“We’ll pay your gas. Give you food money,” the tall player called over to us. “It’d be worth it to us.”
“Hear that, Saul? Can’t get a better deal than that.”
“I don’t want to play in town. I did that. It was no good.”
“You weren’t a Moose then.” Virgil looked at me hard. “If the other guys on the team want to do it, we’re going. That’s how it’s gonna be.”
They’d decided before we went on the ice for our next game. The idea of the challenge excited my teammates and nothing I said could curb their enthusiasm. All they could think about was an indoor arena with manufactured ice and a dressing room we wouldn’t need to share and showers and toilets. So the game was booked and we began to practice harder than ever before. Fred Kelly was determined to ice a competitive squad and he drove us to excel. We did the same passing drills over and over again. He worked us on clearing the puc
k from our own end, freeing it in the corner for faceoffs and using the sixty feet between blue lines to gather momentum and arrange ourselves for attack. The players changed. Our practices, usually marked by good-natured yelps and shouts, became solemn, with everyone bearing down. The silence was disturbing.
“We’re not the same team,” I said to Virgil one night.
“What’s the problem with that? We’re better.”
“It doesn’t feel better.”
“You’re just scared.”
“I’m not scared. I just want it back the way it used to be.”
“We’ve never had a chance to be great before.”
“We were great.”
“Against teams that couldn’t push us.”
“Great’s great.”
“Easy enough for you to say, Saul. But none of us have your gift. Think about us guys. Think about how much we’d like a shot at playing at a higher level. Think about that.”
So I did. In the end that was the only reason I decided to skate against Kapuskasing. I didn’t want the Moose to fail. I didn’t want them coming back defeated, bearing the memory of a battle they’d never had a chance to win. If there was anything that I could do to prevent that I would. I’d bring my best game. I would bring my entire focus. I’d bring every ounce of my will. My team needed me to play my best and that’s the only reason I decided to play that game.
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