“Will he stay with us?” his wife asked.
“No, I think he’ll stay in his truck on the other side of the lake.”
II
Supper was finished. Angus and his wife were drinking tea. The three children were playing on their bed. They were playing with the Sears catalogue that Angus had found. He had cut out photos of the models in clothes; those were their dolls.
The quiet rain fell gently upon the waveless lake. The warmth of the wood stove took out any chill in the air inside the cabin. The only sounds within were of the children playing and the fire burning in the stove.
Angus’s wife looked up at a sound from the outside. “Wabickiwe ani tagocin,” she told her husband. The white man is arriving. The children stopped playing, and all could hear from the outside the sounds of the fur buyer’s canoe being pulled up on the shore, followed by the clunking of the man’s gear in the canoe as he removed his things.
The man entered with two large packsacks. He was short, stocky, watchful. Angus shook his hand. The man started speaking in the white man’s language. Angus understood only a handful of words in the language, Theresa not even one. The children sat on the bed now. They had become intensely shy at the arrival of the foreigner.
The fur buyer smiled continuously at Angus. Angus asked his wife to pour the tea. The man put out his hand to the cups as a sign for her not to do so. He reached in one of his packs and took out a bottle of whiskey. He poured the whiskey into Angus’s cup and into his own. Soon Angus was more animated than he had been.
After a time, Angus motioned to his wife to follow him outside. They went in back of their cabin to the little shed where he kept the furs. They came back with armloads of furs and set them on the floor of the cabin near the fur buyer.
There were several stacks of stretched beaver pelts, two lynx, a few score marten, and some fisher. The fur buyer counted all of them, examined the quality from time to time, and scratched little figures on a paper with a pencil. Some trappers were sloppy in skinning animals; Angus was the most skilled and meticulous trapper he knew. After he was done counting the pelts, he took from his pack three big bottles of whiskey, set them on the table prominently before Angus, then took some money from his billfold and gave it to him.
Angus asked the man if he wanted to spend the night. No, the man said, he would go back across the lake in the canoe and spend the night in his truck. He had set a bed up there.
III
Angus was throwing things. The children were terrified. The three of them desperately crawled under their little bed after they were hit by thrown objects. They held each other under the bed and cried together. Angus had punched his wife. She was crying, but she was lying on their bed. Theresa called to her mother, “Hurry up and get under your bed, Mommy! Hurry up and get under the bed! You won’t get hurt!” But the woman could not crawl under the bed.
Theresa tried to keep her little brother and sister from being terrified, but she was terrified herself. She loved her father, Angus, very much, but this seemed like a different man. Her father was the one who always smiled at her, who made birch-bark baskets just for her, who made wooden toys for all the children. He helped take care of them when they were sick. He took them in the canoe with him. She could remember how much her father liked it when she would walk up to him and watch him and talk to him when he was making a paddle, or repairing snowshoes, or stretching a hide. She could see that he really liked her to be with him.
What had happened now? What had happened to her father and her family? Why did they have to live through this terror? Would they live through this terror?
Crowded under the low bed, she held her crying, terrified little sister and brother to her until they finally went to sleep.
Chapter Four
I
“Do you think an Indian could live in the woods today like the people did long ago?” Jim Gull asked.
“I don’t know,” Shane Bearskin said, “I think so.”
They were sitting in the kitchen of the apartment they shared in an old section of Montreal. Both were in their mid-twenties and both were Cree; Shane Bearskin was from Moose Factory at the southern end of James Bay, and Jim Gull was from Attawapiskat on the eastern shore of the bay.
“But if Indians had to do without guns and steel knives and snowmobiles?” Jim questioned.
“Indians in Moose Factory have all those things, but they still have all the old skills too. It would just be a matter of their adjusting a little bit.” Shane offered some tea to Jim before he continued. “I don’t want to live in a town. I want to go to the woods. I would not want to feel that I had to go into the woods draped in smoke-tanned moose hide. But I need to be there.”
Shane was making supper — fried bologna and potatoes. Jim loved to eat; he lived to eat, thought Shane. Neither was particularly good at washing dishes.
Jim Gull’s family name was from the Indian word for gull — kiock. The people long ago on James Bay had given this name to Jim’s ancestor. The ancestor was always anxious for food, and even sometimes seemed to call for food like a gull: “Hiyak, hiyah, hiyah!” Jim did the same.
Shane Bearskin was amazed to see that this trait could be handed down. Every time Shane fixed food in the kitchen, Jim hovered around like a gull, picking at a salad or snitching at pork frying in the pan. It reminded Shane of the gulls that flew circles around Indians’ fish nets that were set in the rivers flowing into James Bay.
The apartment was small, with only one bedroom. When he and Jim had moved in, they had flipped a coin to see who would have the small bedroom. Jim had won, so Shane slept on the foldaway couch.
Jim Gull was doing graduate work in biology. Although Shane Bearskin was in his last year of undergraduate work, he was older than Jim, having worked in Moose Factory for some time before he began college.
Jim was tolerant and attentive, the two qualities Shane felt, when he thought about it, were perhaps the most important in a friend. Shane liked him for his ability to fix his attention on whatever was being said in conversation. He always remembered what was said and was able to recall it later. Jim had friends because he was a listener. He was possessed of that rare trait of never deprecating a person behind his back. No sooner did he meet someone than he would be touting that person to a third party. He somehow found something of interest in everyone and spread the information.
Shane had dark good looks. But they were the kind of dark good looks that could have been southern European, to such an extent that the admixture of white blood in his ancestry tempered his Indian physiognomy. His black hair fell to his shoulders. He was sinewy, but muscled, with a narrow waist and broad shoulders.
II
“You look a little down,” Jim said to Shane, who was now at the refrigerator putting the canned milk back in. “Is it Theresa again?”
“Yeah.”
“What is it this time? A fight?”
“I guess you could call it a spat. But it’s the same thing over and over. She’s really in love with me, you know. She’s so happy when we’re together. But she needs so much reinforcement. She’s watching everything I do and say to see if I love her. Something positive and she’s enraptured.”
“I notice you bring her flowers often — more than any other man would,” Jim said.
Shane smiled at the thought of how thankfully Theresa always received such gifts. “You give her something and it’s as if she forgot everything around her and all the past and just focused on that moment. And her whole life for that instant is full of happiness and joy. She honours the giver by her appreciation. “
“So what causes the problems?” Jim asked.
“It’s probably me, when you come right down to it. If she thinks I’m behaving coolly, she gets despondent and that’s when the uncomfortableness starts. I’m powerless to stop it. You know, sometimes I think that if I did something truly horrible, it would create less of a problem. She’d probably be very understanding. But let her sense what she f
eels is a little coolness, and she gets very hard-headed.”
“Does she like to fight?”
“Not really, but she does not back down from one. I think it gets going because she’s sensitive to the least lack of attention. She’s dependent on my affection for her.”
“That makes it hard for you,” Jim said. Impatient for supper, he rose and went over to the frying pan and picked at the bologna.
“Well, I don’t know,” Shane answered. “Sure it’s hard, but on the other hand, it kind of gives me a little security too; makes me feel wanted, and that at least I’m the most important person in the world to someone.”
“She seems to thrive on affection,” Jim said.
“I suppose we would too if we’d gone through what she’s gone through,” Shane responded.
Jim said, “Things weren’t all that easy at Moose Factory.”
“No, they weren’t,” Shane agreed. “My dad ran away on my mother, and she had to raise us. But we had it easy compared to Theresa.” By way of illustration, he asked, “Do the people at Attawapiskat eat lard sandwiches — two pieces of bread with lard and salt?”
Jim said, “The old people still do.”
“Theresa’s natural mother at Ottawa Lake used to make them; they had so little to eat sometimes. Once Theresa and I were out getting yellow birch for snowshoes. She made herself a lard sandwich — I don’t like them — and she said simply, I’d rather be eating a lard sandwich with you here than be eating in a fancy restaurant in Montreal.”
“You told me before that she was taken from her parents, and that she had her own children taken from her.”
“Yeah, she was raised in the woods — at Ottawa Lake,” Shane said, naming the big lake three hundred miles north of Montreal that was the headwaters of the Ottawa River. “Her father drank and beat her mother. One night when Theresa was seven years old, it got too much for the mother to take. It was raining hard and the only thing the mother had was a canoe. She put the three children in the canoe and spread a canvas tarp over them. Then she paddled as fast as she could across the lake to the lumber camp to escape the father, who by this time was paddling as fast as he could after them in their second canoe. He was drunk and unable to catch them. That was too bad; I’ve heard that Angus Wawati was one of the most skilled Algonquin in the woods.”
“What happened then?” Jim asked, now chewing on another piece of bologna.
“At the lumber camp, they gave Theresa’s mother food and a little money in return for helping out in the kitchen and with the laundry. They let her make a little place for herself and the children in a little shed in back of the camp. The children’s aid society finally found out about it and took the three children from her. Each of the three was placed in a separate foster home. Theresa never saw her brother and sister again. That was the last she saw of her mother.”
“Rough life,” Jim opined in sympathy.
“But can you imagine, with all that trouble, she still manages to remember good times at Ottawa Lake. They were really well there, a nice little cabin on the lake, and Angus could get work guiding and he trapped in the fall. Angus brought a Sears catalogue back from Maniwaki once. The children cut the models out and used them for dolls. They used to go sliding down hills on moose hides, and they’d play with the Indian toboggan her father made. She still laughs today when she thinks of all the fun they had with the dolls they cut out of the Sears catalogue.”
“That’s harder than we ever had it at Attawapiskat,” Jim said.
“It got rougher after that,” Shane said, “She was raised by a white family in Montreal.”
“Too bad she couldn’t have grown up with another Indian family,” Jim said.
Shane agreed. “They didn’t do things like that back then. They took the Indian child out of the environment as soon as they could. The problem might have been with one family, but the social worker looked down on the entire environment: the people and the woods. Today Theresa’s caught between the old life in the woods that she remembers and the life in the white world, which for her means being a lawyer so she can help Indians.”
“That’s what was rougher than being taken from her parents — being raised by a white family?” Jim probed.
“No, I didn’t finish. Theresa left the family to work and go to school when she was eighteen. She became pregnant twice and ended up having two children. She loved the children very much. I think they made up the family she never had. Those two children were taken from her and she never saw them again.”
“Why?”
“Well,” Shane said slowly, “she was a young single mother with no well-paying job skill that she could market. According to what the social worker told me, she had a hard time making ends meet with the children, and drinking finally caused the children to be taken away from her. At least that was the explanation the social worker gave me. She’ll never see her children again.”
“I don’t know how she can accept that,” Jim said.
“In her heart, I suppose, she’ll never accept it.”
They were quiet for a while.
Finally Shane said, “Theresa seems to get along well. In fact, I think she can be quite happy with me most of the time.”
Shane rose, walked to the stove to fetch the teapot, and poured some more tea. He brought the frying pan to the table and dished up the fried bologna and potatoes for both of them.
Shane cut the bologna with his fork and ate a piece. He said to Jim, “What do you think of white people?”
Jim ate the bologna and gave himself a few moments to think. “Well,” he said after a time, “I think the race has a lot going for it. But despite that, the men are often arrogant and aggressive.”
“It’s the white women and children I find sad,” Shane inserted. “The women are unattractive as women because they are so demanding, and they talk too much. But the saddest thing is the white children. They don’t smile enough. Instead of being allowed to be a child, a white five-year-old is trained to be glib and competent.”
“Can I brag about Indians?” Jim Gull asked.
Shane Bearskin said, “Nobody will ever hear you but me.”
“Indians have a grace and courtesy whites will never know.”
They ate in silence for a few moments.
“But Indians are always the victims,” Jim proffered.
“You noticed that too,” Shane said.
Chapter Five
I
Shane had called Theresa and told her he was coming over to her apartment. When he reached the door of the apartment, he knocked lightly and then let himself in. As he entered, he smiled a little in anticipation of seeing her. She usually came around the corner of the kitchen door, a bit shy yet — though she knew him so well — and smiling broadly that he came to visit her.
“Theresa?” he called, not seeing her immediately.
No answer.
He walked through the door of the small kitchen and saw her standing by the end of the counter. She was weeping softly.
“Theresa!” he said. “What is wrong?” He walked up to her and held her and took out his handkerchief to wipe the tears running down her cheeks.
In answer, she looked at a newspaper on the small kitchen table.
Shane went over to pick it up. It was open to one of the inside pages. Broad headlines across the top of the page read: “Young Native Women to Fast to Death on Parliament Hill.” Shane read the article quickly.
The federal government was planning to make drastic cuts in native educational funding. Those Indians already in university would have a difficult time continuing. And a preliminary study had shown that up to eighty percent of the young Indians who managed to complete secondary school would not be able to go to university because of the proposed cuts.
In response, three young Ojibway women from the Northwestern Ontario reservations of Muskrat Dam, Kasabonika, and Kingfisher Lake had decided something needed to be done. The three had met each other in Thunder Bay, where o
ne was going to university and the other two were secretaries.
They had taken a bus from Thunder Bay to Ottawa and had set up a tent on the lawn in front of Parliament. Drinking only Labrador tea, they were going to fast to the death. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, so quick to remove other protesters from the grounds of Parliament, knew it was politically impossible to forcibly remove these girls.
Shane put the paper down and returned to Theresa and put his arm around her. “Do you know them?” he asked.
She shook her head to say that she did not.
Shane felt that Theresa was glad that he could be there for her.
II
He said to Theresa, “Do you want to know why I like you?”
“Yes,” she answered, trying to muster enthusiasm.
“Because you’re pretty.”
She smiled.
“And because you laugh a lot.”
She smiled some more.
“And because you look very Indian.”
This time her smile spread across her whole face until her pronounced cheekbones appeared even more pronounced, and her almond eyes themselves seemed to close in a smile.
Theresa thrived on love, so that Shane felt that no attention he showed her ever went unappreciated. When he gave her his attention, she reminded him of the trillium in the woods, how one could almost see their growth when the sun shone after a spring rain.
III
Theresa bought a new blouse.
“What do you think of it?” she asked Shane.
As she showed it to him, she unconsciously rose on her tiptoes. In another woman, that would have been a conscious act. With Theresa, it was a kind of shyness. And it charmed Shane.
“After we’re married, we should go back to Moose Factory or to Barrière Lake,” Shane said.
Shane’s place of upbringing — Moose Factory — was not as urban as Theresa’s foster home, Montreal. Nor was it as bush-like as Ottawa Lake. It was, rather, a kind of village life that offered frequent access to the woods.
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