“I have the materials for a canoe; I was going to start next week. Tomorrow is as good a time as any,” he said, smiling in a way that Shane would come to treasure in the short time he was with the old man. “It’s good to have help.”
They began work the next morning. Patrick noticed very appreciatively that Shane could easily handle the splitting of the cedar and the carving of the ribs with a crooked knife. Shane was good with a crooked knife, and there was no better way to please an Indian craftsman.
They sat in the shade under two tall black spruce trees, their lower branches cut off. “This is where we have the building bed,” Patrick said, “You should keep the hot sun off the bark while the canoe is being made.”
And a while later: “We make all the wood for the canoe first, then we put everything together. If you don’t have a little system, you don’t work well.”
Patrick showed Shane how to split the cedar for the ribs. “This is easier to split than ash for snowshoes,” Shane observed.
Then they split the very thin sheathing that would be used to line the inner hull of the canoe. Shane and Patrick both sat on large blocks of wood as they finished shaping the ribs and sheathing with their crooked knives. When they finished the ribs and sheathing, they split the long battens that would be the gunwales. From a knot-free cedar log fifteen feet long, they split in halves, quarters, and then again twice, until the battens were nearly the proper dimensions. Then they carved a lissome finish on the gunwales with their crooked knives.
Patrick asked Shane to go in the woods to find a medium-sized yellow birch for the five thwarts. He didn’t have to tell the young man from Moose Factory how to split the log and then carve the pieces. For the actual shape of the thwarts, Patrick simply pointed to his own birch-bark canoe lying nearby. “Just make the thwarts the same way,” Patrick said, and he watched Shane with satisfaction while he smoked his pipe.
Talk during the canoe building was almost non-existent. But during breaks when they went in the cabin and made a tea, they spoke of various things. Shane enjoyed talking with Patrick for the same reason he liked speaking to the old people at Moose Factory — they knew so much more than he did. This was especially true about their knowledge of the animals. The old people had more time, and more favourable circumstances, in which to observe the animals and think about them.
Patrick said, “The moose does not die. And the deer and the beaver do not die. They live. Their meat lives in men. Their skins clothe men.”
Shane nodded at this observation, something about which he had never thought.
Trapping had changed, the old man said, among the white trappers and the younger Indians. “The beaver, the lynx, and the muskrat are all good to eat. Today the trappers leave the beaver meat and sell the hide to buy bacon. That is not a good thing.”
Shane enjoyed the breaks as much as the canoe building and hoped that Patrick would speak on.
Patrick described an involved ritual that was to be followed when a beaver was killed. The head, paws, entrails, and tail all had to be placed in a prescribed pattern. This had to be done with care.
“Why do the Indians do that for a beaver?” Shane asked.
“We must respect them,” replied Patrick. “They are so much like Indians. The old people thought that animals were much like Indians, only each possesses attributes the other does not.”
Volunteering information was not the Indian way. But Patrick seemed rather firm in his beliefs, even though they were expressed almost diffidently.
Patrick said once, “They say that the Algonquin came from the east.”
“Where?” Shane asked.
“East,” was the extent of Patrick’s reply.
Shane handed a teacup to Patrick, then lifted his own to his lips and sipped quietly before resuming work with the crooked knife. A whiskey-jack swooped close to see if Shane might not be having a morsel of food with his tea. “I wonder where the language came from?” Shane asked.
“It might be that the language came about because the people long ago at first tried to imitate the animal sounds.”
III
Something that Shane felt rather than verbalized: in the woods with Patrick there was peace. Not the televisions, radios, and four-wheelers that sometimes smothered his mother’s house in Moose Factory. Or the sounds of the city. Even at night in Montreal when nearly everyone was asleep, there was the distant motorized hum of the traffic on the autoroute.
Here, as he drew the crooked knife towards him rhythmically, slowly, and efficiently, leaving the fragrant cedar shavings beneath him, he heard the several voices of the wind, though he almost laughed at how inferior his perception was to that of the old people like Patrick.
But even in his undeveloped stage, Shane could hear what the wind wanted to tell him. As he carved, he could hear in various directions the open, free sound that the wind made as it coursed through a tall white pine; the steady, workaday blowing when it ran through white spruce and black spruce; the sound, close to a tintinnabulation, that it made when it blew through a little stand of poplar to the south — poplar, whose leaves were so lightly attached to their stems that the delicate fluttering they made could only be made by the leaves of this tree; the crackling made by the dead leaves of the maple just behind Patrick’s cabin that had died the year before; the lapping of the waves on the shore near them: the wind was so precise about the waves that it told him exactly how high they were and how a canoe would react to them.
IV
In the canoe building, Patrick’s movements were deliberate and almost seemed slow at times, but Shane was pleased at how quickly they seemed to be making progress. Patrick had already gathered the single large sheet of bark that would he used to make the canoe. Likewise, his son had helped him gather the cedar for the ribs and sheathing and the spruce root for the lashing.
Patrick’s crooked-knife work was methodical and precise. With Shane working alongside, they produced piles of shavings until they almost buried themselves.
Patrick said, “The old people had one name for shavings from a crooked knife. They call them piwipodjigan. But they had a different name for shavings from an ordinary knife or a plane or something like that!
Shane knew no equivalent in Cree, and he never ceased to delight in the complexities of the Indian language.
They prepared hundreds of feet of spruce root together, splitting the root first in half and then boiling the root to help remove the bark. The roots would be the lashing for the gunwales.
The large birch-bark sheet was rolled out on the building bed. Patrick instructed Shane to put the building frame on the bark and then to weight it down with hundreds of pounds of stones. They pried up the sides of the bark sheet with birch pickets, then tied the pickets at the tops across the canoe.
Patrick took innumerable eye measurements, making sure the bows lined up perfectly, ascertaining that the inwale frame was the proper height above the bark sheet, making sure that the outwales were fixed at the exact height of the inwales so that they could be lashed together.
Shane, in his enthusiasm, did most of the lashing of the gunwales. He punched holes in the thick bark sheet under the gunwales with the awl. Then he made ten turns around the gunwales with the spruce root.
Patrick showed Shane how to bend the ribs and place them in the canoe for drying. The ribs had been soaking in bunches for several days. When the day came to bend the ribs, Patrick held a pair of ribs over a kettle and boiling water was ladled over them. Patrick took the two ribs and sat down on a log block, then he carefully bent the ribs over his knee in near-perfect conformation with the hull shape. He then took the ribs to the canoe and fitted them snugly against the bottom to dry.
After the ribs had dried in the sun for an entire day, they were removed from the canoe, and Shane helped Patrick to fit the beautiful pieces of cedar sheathing along the entire interior of the canoe. The ribs’ ends were pried under the gunwales and the ribs pounded tightly in the canoe to hold the sh
eathing in place. When the canoe was finished, Patrick showed Shane how to seal the seams of the canoe with spruce gum. The gum was actually a mixture of spruce sap and bear grease, the latter to keep the gum from cracking too easily.
Patrick and Shane paddled the finished canoe around the little lake when it was finished. Shane was honoured to be paddling in the bow of the canoe of a master Indian canoe maker.
Patrick told Shane how they had lived in the woods as children, how none of the family knew a word of any language other than Algonquin. He told stories of hunting in the fall and trapping in the winter, and how they went to the sugar bush in the spring for maple sugar, and how following the seasons in the forest led them also to the blueberry fields in August.
The old man said that the culture was dying. He didn’t know as much as his mother and father had known about Indian life; his son and daughter-in-law knew less and his grandchildren much less yet about the Indian way of life. They barely knew the language. They didn’t know the woods. They were almost afraid of the woods — like white men were.
“We weren’t afraid of the woods,” Patrick said as he drew on his pipe. He was sitting on the stump he used for a seat while carving ribs, and had laid down his crooked knife. White people say that the bush is wild. I never thought that the lakes and the hills and the deep forest were wild. They were home. When we came out in the spring to sell the furs at the Hudson’s Bay post, it felt as if we were in a different world. But when we turned around and returned into the deep bush far away from the post, it felt almost as if we were in a different world. We didn’t think there were wild animals in the bush; they were the animals we lived with. Animals like us.
“Many things were part of our life long ago that aren’t part of our life today. We thought about things in a different way than we think about them today.”
Listening to Patrick, Shane realized how Indians like himself and Theresa and Delores and Maurice Papati were distant from the kind of life the old people had.
Patrick went on: “When we were in the bush, children were taught to sit still and to enjoy it. They were taught to smell everything, to see what the wind could tell. Their mothers taught them to look when there didn’t seem to be anything to see and to listen closely when everything was quiet. A child who cannot remain still is not fully a child.”
“Have you ever gone to school?” Shane asked.
“Once. Not long. One season only,” Patrick said. “My father was told to send me there by a missionary, although he did not want to. It was not good. It didn’t teach Indian things. The Indian children go to white school today, and they are no more Indian. My father took me out right away because he wanted me to go hunting with him. That was better, and I never went back to school. With him I learned the Indian way.
“I could see what they were doing in school. They learned to think with their heads, not with their hearts. Indians start to believe the same way. But they miss things. They don’t see things. The spirit cannot talk to reason.
“I tried never to become caught up in the white man’s way after that. White men were so busy that they had no time to think and to see. I never worked all the time. When you work, you cannot dream. Wisdom comes in dreams.”
Chapter Nineteen
I
“I’m pregnant,” Theresa said when Shane walked through the door of their apartment. Her smile beamed from her face, and her eyes closed into slits. Shane thought that her beautiful Indian eyes were a true gift of the race.
“That was quick!” he said, and he ran to hug her and lifted her from the floor. For her to have such a moment of deep happiness was a precious thing to him.
She made tea for them and told Shane what the obstetrician had told her: about her likely due date and how to care for herself during her pregnancy. “What if it’s twins?” she asked.
Theresa was unusually voluble and spoke on about the pregnancy as if it were a living child. “We have to take good care of it; we have to feed it well so it will grow. I’ll try to keep it warm and comfortable.” And she smiled broadly, happy with herself, happy with Shane, and quite delighted at the pregnancy.
Theresa was eager to learn about Patrick Matchewan, what kind of man he was, where he and Shane worked, and how Shane had learned about birch-bark canoe building. Over hours of tea drinking, they spoke about Shane’s experiences, the baby, and the move to the bush.
“She’s amazing,” Shane said to Jim in the apartment they shared, “She’s really hard to believe.”
“What do you mean?” Jim asked.
“She’s got incredible resilience.”
“You mean being reasonably cheerful in the face of her illness?”
“Yes. I can’t imagine that. Losing her two children, being brought up in a home away from her brothers and sisters and parents, then diagnosed with a terminal illness — and then being able to smile. And they say I don’t smile enough in the normal course of things.” Shane even then attempted a smile, which made Jim smile at him.
“How do you think she manages that?” Jim asked.
“Well, of necessity maybe. Maybe it’s built into the race. Maybe because she’s Indian.”
II
They made preparations to go north to Lac des Îles. They bought seed for the garden they hoped to have, and Shane bought a bucksaw as he thought it would require less maintenance — and gas — than a chainsaw. He would not have to do a great amount of cutting for a small log cabin and a supply of firewood. He bought a small, old, cast-iron stove. From a demolition site in the city, he bought a window and door frames and some of the other things that he could not easily fashion in the woods.
They accumulated large sacks of flour, salt, sugar, beans, peas, and metal containers of salt pork and lard. Shane and Theresa were so occupied with preparations for the trip that her illness ceased to be their main topic of conversation.
“Will you miss the city?’” Theresa asked.
“No,” Shane said. “We’ve had good times here, though. We met here. We’ve had certain opportunities here. But this is not home for either of us, and it won’t be hard to leave.”
Finally they were ready to leave. One day, Jim brought Shane’s pick-up truck over to Theresa’s apartment in the afternoon. There were so many supplies — which included Shane’s canoe — that they had to make two trips to the baggage office of the Canadian National station in downtown Montreal. The train departed every evening at 8 p.m.
They were ready to leave.
The train pulled slowly through the station and through Place Bonaventure. As the train came out at last into the open, Shane and Theresa looked at the city. It stood in the dark against the backdrop of Mount Royal. The searchlight atop the high, cruciform Place Ville Marie panned the city. It would be the last time they would see the city for a long time.
Shane wondered to himself if he had done the right thing, whether it would not actually be better to stay in the city. Theresa would be more comfortable medically and physically. The better care might secure for her an extra few months. But it was Theresa herself who had chosen a better way of living, rather than a longer way.
“Excited?” she asked, holding on to his arm as they watched the lights of Montreal recede into the distance.
“Yes,” he said, a little awed at what they were undertaking.
They both took out books to read. Their car was barely a third full. Most of the people were going home to Trois-Rivières or Quebec City from Montreal. Shane and Theresa sat in a double seat facing their own, so they were able to put their feet up and later could stretch out to the other seat to sleep.
Sometime during the middle of the night, they were awakened when the train was jostled.
“We must be in La Tuque,” Shane said, “They’re changing the cars for the trip to Senneterre.”
They could see the lights of the town as they looked, bleary-eyed, out of the window.
In a short time, the train started up again, this time on the trip west that would
lead them to Casey.
A conductor came down the aisle to check the tickets. Shane told him where they wanted to get off, at a siding fifteen miles beyond Casey; he showed the man where on the topographical map.
“No problem,” said the conductor. “I know the place. We’ll be there just after sunrise.”
He was a stout man with white hair, just under sixty, Shane guessed.
“What will you be doing there?” he asked.
They told him that they were on their way there to build a cabin and live in the bush.
At this he perked up. They had touched a responsive chord. The conductor was keenly interested in how they planned to do it.
“I have to make the rounds, but do you mind if I come back in a few minutes and talk to you about it?” he asked.
They liked the idea.
He returned a short time later with three large mugs of steaming tea.
“Tell me now,” he said. “Will you be making your cabin out of spruce? There’s a lot of spruce stands in the area, you know. And what will you be using as chinking?”
Shane answered those questions, and the conductor asked more. He envied them for what they were doing. Each time they answered his questions, he shook his head approvingly, as if they were doing exactly the right thing. He became more and more animated as they told of their plans. He told them that he had once come out here as a trapper, but that he had only lasted a year — until he got married. Then he thought he needed a more steady income. But he had fallen in love with the woods during that winter. He talked of it rapturously — the clear water, the moose he saw nearly every day, the snow so deep in the winter that there were a few times when he couldn’t get out of his cabin. He talked on and on, transported by the memory of it all. He brought things to memory that he hadn’t thought about for years. And as he told them, he relived the experiences, and he enjoyed them again just as he had years before. There was regret in his voice, as though he thought he might have truly missed something all these years. He had had to work on the railroad to support his family. But he still — passing frequently the territory he had worked as a trapper that brief winter long ago — missed it. Despite the wife and children in La Tuque, in their modern house with electricity, two bathrooms, and television, he missed the wild — and his free life in the wilderness, which he had known for such a short time.
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