Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother,
Fritzie Taylor, who always had time for my stories
.

PROLOGUE

Hey, wanna hear a good story? Supposedly it’s a true one. It’s a long story but it goes something like this…

Somewhere out there, on a Reserve that is closer than you think but still a bit too far to walk to, lived a young Ojibway boy. Though this is not his story, he is part of it.

As all good tales do, this one begins far in the past, but not so far back that you would have forgotten about it.

There was much too much splashing on the lake. It was inconsiderate and downright unfriendly. The minnows were not happy. Same with the perch, the rockfish, and especially the lone sunfish that called the water near the two sunken cedar trees his home. The other fish were just passing through, but for the sunfish this was a serious intrusion of privacy. Those creatures from above the waterline had been there all afternoon creating havoc. And the sunfish hated havoc. It was counter-productive to a sunfish’s life.

For unfathomable reasons, these large, rude, scaleless air-breathing things had jumped off
his
half-buried trees, creating a lingering cloud of silt. The other fish had left, looking for quieter spots to contemplate the age-old aquatic question, whether the lake was half full, or half empty. But this was the sunfish’s home, and he
watched from a distance as the creatures splashed and dove as if they owned the place. There was nothing he could do. He was just a sunfish and they were people. And occasionally, people ate sunfish. It’s hard to lodge a complaint given that balance of power.

Besides, there was something familiar about the man. The sunfish was sure he had come across him, but where, the sunfish couldn’t say.

The woman, barely into the second half of her teens, swam naked through the water. As the man, a tad older but also naked, watched her, he thought about who had made this creature. Certain cultures believed the Creator made man in His own image—but the Anishnawbe language was not hung up on gender. If the Creator had made this woman in Her own image She was an astonishingly beautiful five-foot-six, lean, Anishnawbe woman. The dappled sunlight, the smell of pine and cedar, the tingling feel of the cool clear lake. It doesn’t get much better than this, he thought. And he’d been around. Wherever around was, he’d been there. Twice. And had long ago lost the T-shirt.

The two had been there all afternoon, and if either could have had their way, they would have been there forever. But that was not to be.

“What are you thinking?” came the female voice across the water, speaking in an ancient language.

He just smiled.

“No. Tell me. What are you thinking?”

The man pondered for a moment, but, just as he was about to speak, he dove into the water quick as a dragonfly. Treading water, hair spread, she scanned the surface of the lake in all directions. Becoming anxious, she called out to him. “Stop that. Come back.” But the only response was a nearby loon’s call. She began to panic.
No one could hold their breath that long. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a hawk make its way across the sky. The loon, mirroring her concern, called again.

“Hey!” she yelled, and then, “Hey, where…?” Suddenly she was gone. Silence returned, and the hawk eyed the bubbles rising to the surface.

Two human bodies came crashing through the surface, gasping for air, and then exploding with laughter.

“I scared you, didn’t I?” the man asked roguishly. The light cutting through the forest canopy dappled on the man’s face and danced in his brown eyes.

The girl, wiping the hair back from her face, muttered, “I hate it when you do things like that. What are you, half fish?”

“On occasion.”

The girl back-paddled a metre or so away from the man. “Say you’re sorry.”

“What?”

“Say you’re sorry. Now.”

The man was perplexed. “Or what?”

“Oh, nothing. I just want you to say you’re sorry.”

“All right, if it will make you happy. I am sorry. I am so sorry.” The man was now yelling. “I AM SO INCREDIBLY SORRY! How’s that?” His voice echoed across the water and back again, gradually growing more distant. “Hear that? That makes me three times as sorry.”

The girl smiled. “Thank you. It’s not often you find a man who takes orders so easily.”

Swimming closer, the man rolled over onto his back. “You’ll find I’m a little different from most men… You know, this is how sea otters eat. They put clams and crabs and things like that on
their stomach, and crack them open with a rock, using their bellies like a big wooden kitchen table.”

“What are sea otters?”

“Oh, they live way out west, in the ocean. You know what an ocean is?” The girl nodded. “They are kind of like the otters around here, only different. And have funny moustaches.”

“Otters have moustaches? Like White people?” The girl watched the man float lazily around her. “You’re lying. You have to be. The things you’ve told me. But I love your story about squirrels that can fly. You’ve travelled a lot, haven’t you?”

“A bit. Here and there, and they don’t fly, silly, they glide.”

“This is going to be my first trip anywhere. I’ve never been more than a few hours’ walk from home,” she said.

The man started treading. His eyes forced their way into hers. “Then don’t go.”

The girl looked away. “I don’t have a choice.”

“Everybody has a choice.”

The secluded bay grew a little chillier and the girl trembled in the water. “You don’t know White people. They don’t take no for an answer. My parents tried but…”