Through Black Spruce (22 page)

What if they do know of Marius’s murder? If I am wanted by the police, these people probably have gotten wind. There are no secrets in Mushkegowuk. These old ones are good actors or they truly don’t know anything.

The whisky jack took another bit of bannock from the ground.

And what about when they return to Attawapiskat? Even if they know nothing now, surely they will speak of me on this island. Whether or not their intentions are good, word will be out, and people will know where to find me. Does this mean I have to find another hiding place?

The whisky jack turned its head and blinked. I stood and began pacing. The bird flew away. I would have to as well.

Sitting in the darkness of my
askihkan
, I drank more, used the excuse of my hurting leg, but the more I drank, the more my father’s gun in its blanket moaned, enough to make me think I was going crazy. The fire burned low. The night began coming into my
askihkan
now, but I didn’t stand up for more wood.

“Shut up, you!” I found myself shouting. “You don’t shut up, I will throw you away.” I imagined the rifle whimpering at my words like a punished dog. I looked at the shadows around me, the last light before complete nightfall a deep blue halo in the smoke hole above me. I saw my packs of winter clothing in one corner, my father’s rifle buried below them. Perishable food sat at the far end by the door. My bed lay across the fire from me. The log that I sat on hurt my bony ass. So this is what my life had become. An idea presented itself to me. “You know what?” I said to the rifle. “I’m going to give you away. As a gift.” The gun, this time, it definitely whimpered.

24
SQUEEZED

Five of us sit around Uncle Will’s kitchen table. Eva says she’s going to try and come by. She’s an hour late. Gordon and I lit candles earlier for some ambience, but my mother’s and Joe’s and Gregor’s faces in the eerie light make it seem like more of a séance than a casual dinner. Why, again, did I ask them over? What was I thinking, trying to introduce a little city suave into Moosonee?

“So, ven do ve eat?” Gregor asks. The vampire accent, though not a put-on, still makes me want to laugh once in a while. He picks up his beer bottle and drinks. His eyes catch mine in the flicker of candle flame. He winks. Such a perv. But there’s something funny about him. He’s the neutered old dog that begs for attention.

“How are we going to see what we’re eating,” Joe says. “You weren’t able to get Will’s electricity turned back on?”

My mother, of all people, laughs. She pats Joe’s arm. “You’re such the funny one, Joe Wabano,” she says. She stands. “I’ll help Gordon in the kitchen.”

I didn’t buy any booze, thinking it was a good idea to have a night where no one drank. But both Joe and Gregor showed up at the door with a case of beer each. I’m seriously wanting to head to the fridge and grab one.

“Annie,” Joe says, his own bottle in his big hand, “your mum tells me that Will squeezes your hand when you talk to him.” He smiles. “That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time.”

My god, are there no secrets in this town? I’ve created a lie that has repercussions. But don’t they all? “Yeah,” I answer. “Sometimes his eyes flutter, too.”

We’re finishing up our meal when I hear a snowmobile pulling into the drive. When I open the front door, the icy air washes over me. Junior sits on the ski-doo while Eva struggles to climb off it. He won’t even get his fat ass up to help her. They exchange some words that I can’t hear, and Junior cuts across Will’s front lawn without so much as a nod.

“You made it,” I say as Eva stomps inside, kicking snow off her boots. She smells of the cold.

“Ever freezing out!” She gasps as she sits. I help her pull her boots off. “Junior’s such a dick. Our truck wouldn’t start and he wasn’t going to drive me across on his sled. He won’t pick me up later, so I’m going to stay over if you don’t want to drive me home.”

The idea of Eva staying over makes me feel crazy happy. I guess I’m starved for hanging out with someone who will actually talk back to me.

“Got any wine coolers?” Eva asks. “Me, I got the next three days off, and my mum’s watching Hugh till tomorrow.”

“We just got beer,” I say. I go to the kitchen and grab one for each of us. So much for a sober evening.

Mum sits beside Gordon, holding a mug of tea. The table’s already cleared off.

“You hungry, Eva?” I ask. I can see Joe and Gregor out on the back porch, smoking cigarettes, their mouths emitting great puffs of steam.

“Mona,”
she says. “Me and Junior ate at home.” Despite her size, I’ve never seen Eva eat any more than a normal-sized person. The other kids used to taunt her mercilessly when we were young. Her size is not her fault.

Joe and Gregor bump back into the house, letting in a blast of cold air. I head to the wood stove and throw in a few logs. In the next couple of days, I’ve got to get Gordon out to cut up some extra wood. I’m worried he’s going to hurt himself with the chainsaw, but he hasn’t yet.

“
Wachay, wachay
, Eva,” Joe says, sitting at the table. Gregor joins him. “So you got the night off work, eh?”

“The next three days,” Eva says, taking a swig of beer. “Ever tasty, this.” Joe and Eva are cousins, though I don’t think they talk unless I bring them together. It’s nothing personal between them. Just different generations. Half this town, and Moose Factory too, are cousins, it seems.

“Didja hear that Will’s been responding to Annie’s talking?” Joe asks.

Oh shit. I’m dead. Eva looks over to me quick, but doesn’t say anything. I can feel Gordon’s eyes on me, too.

“I’m sure you must have heard,” Joe says. “What does that Dr. Goat have to say about it?”

“Dr. Lam,” Eva corrects. She glances at me again. “He says activity in the prefrontal cortex is working overtime to click back into gear.”

“Well,” Gregor jumps in, “this night, it is a night of celebrating.” He raises his bottle.
“Nostrovya!”
he shouts, and we raise our beers and clink. “Tomorrow, I will begin talking to my friend Will,” Gregor claims. “I will talk to him for three days until, like Jesus, he climbs out of his bed.”

Everyone else finds this funny. I get up from the table to grab another beer.

Eva and I sit on Uncle’s couch, taking old photos out of a shoebox and looking at them. Gordon sits in a chair across from us, picking up some of the photos lying on the coffee table. The others left an hour ago, and Gregor was kind enough to leave the rest of his case of beer in the fridge.

“Look at you!” Eva says, showing me a picture of a skinny girl with twig legs, casting a fishing rod.

“That’s Suzanne,” I say, looking closer.

“Ever look alike when you were kids,” Eva says. She picks up another photo. “This was Will’s wife, eh?”

I nod.

“Such a shame.”

“I don’t remember her,” I say.

I look at some photos of Uncle Will when he was my age. Handsome devil. Tall and thin, his long hair tied back. He’s smiling in this photo and looks like he owns the world, his first bush plane resting behind him. “Look at this one, Eva.”

She takes it and stares. “Wow! What a hunk. What happened?”

I slap her arm playfully. “He’s still good looking. Even lying in that hospital bed, you can tell.”

Eva puts down the photo. She picks up her beer and drinks. “So, Annie, it’s good to hear he’s responding to you. Too bad no one at the hospital knows about it.”

“What was I supposed to do?” I ask. “You guys were going to send him down south. You know as sure as I do that he’d last about a week there away from his family. Away from home.”

“What,” Eva says. “You a doctor now? You don’t know that.”

“You’re the one who told me to talk to him,” I say.

“I didn’t say you should lie,” she says.

I get up and walk to Gordon. I stand behind him and place my hands on his shoulders. “Be honest with me, Eva. Is he ever going to wake up, or is he basically dead already?”

She looks down at the photos on the table. “Do we have to talk about this now?”

I don’t answer. It’s answer enough.

“Let’s just say that the percentage of patients in Will’s situation who make a full or even partial recovery is extremely low.” Eva looks at me. “And each day that passes without response drops that percentage lower.”

I can feel tears begin to sting my eyes.

Eva says, “That doesn’t mean you give up, Annie.”

I’m squeezing Gordon’s shoulders hard without meaning to.

25
CALLING GEESE

Over the course of the next month, I paid a number of visits to the family. At first it was to try and figure out when it was they were to leave so that I could begin my own packing. But I’d learned to like them and their easy company. I took the daughters out to show them how I trap. I shared a few meals with them, always bringing something so as not to deplete their supplies. Me, my gut told me that they knew nothing of any troubles down in Moosonee. But when they returned, they’d talk of seeing me, and then it was only a matter of time. Maybe I could convince them, before they left, to not speak of me. But that’d only bring them questions, and the old woman, she seemed normal most of the time but showed signs of forgetfulness and sometimes slipped into moments where she looked lost and didn’t know her own husband. And she was direct with her questions. No control over any of this. I’d be placing myself in their hands when they left. If I stayed.

I began pulling out old maps of this part of Ontario, looking for other possible places to go to and set up a winter camp. Hard work to find somewhere new, before the snows came. This island, Akimiski, is huge. More than fifty miles across. More than thirty long. Other good places existed on this island. But if the police or the RCMP got wind that I was here, how would I do something as simple as hide the smoke of my fire on a clear day from a man in a plane? No matter what I tried to figure out, the simple knowledge that I couldn’t stay here any longer returned.

Hiding in some tiny part of the massive landscape that is Mushkegowuk wasn’t the problem. It was finding the right place, a place on a lake or river, a place that offered escape quickly. But most important, I needed to find a place that allowed me to survive by offering me its animals. That’s always the crapshoot. So many of my people over the generations came to the table to gamble only to have the animals not even show up.

With October, the geese began to prepare. The family here told me they’d hunt for a week before they departed. I’d already built my own blinds around my lake and had helped old Koosis construct a number of his own. By a fire at night we burned logs and attached curved boughs to the bodies till we had dozens of decoys.
Kookum
taught her granddaughters how to weave the tamarack into a different type of decoy until there were many.

I listened to the
niska
, to the geese, each evening as they gathered on the lake. Their voices had taken on a different sound. Agitated, your mother Lisette would call it. They gathered as dusk fell, and the excitement in their voices came to its height just before night crept across the lake. They knew their long flight was coming, and the promise of travel made them sound like children. I’d not begun my hunting yet. The geese were still gathering, and if I timed it well, I’d shoot enough geese over a few days to feed me late into winter. But soon as I started my shooting I would announce myself. The geese, they’d send out word over the course of those days that this lake was no longer a good place. And so first I’d help the family do their hunting near the shoreline before I came back to my lake to kill my own.

Dawn still hunched an hour away as I followed the little trail I’d cut from the lake to the creek. Anyone who had bush sense could find me if they found this trail, but it didn’t matter. I already knew I’d be leaving soon. In a month the snow would be flying, and the winter would begin settling, laying herself out over the forest and the muskeg and the water. Then the time of true suffering would begin. Along this thin trail I carried a heavy pack of shells for my shotgun, some extra warm clothes, smoked trout, tobacco, and a new bottle of rye. If today was successful, I would drink. And if the old man wanted some, I’d offer. He and his woman brought none of it with them. Years of the life I had lived taught me to note these things, to smell them out. I wouldn’t drink around the children, though. That time in my life had passed.

The creek opened itself up to me as the first light of morning began to seep through the cloud. Overcast, but not a bad day for geese. Already the bottle in my pack called to me. Maybe I’d sneak sips soon. Some of my finest memories were of being half-drunk, sitting in a stand and waiting. Those old memories can’t be burnt or drowned.

The skeleton of the whale loomed up. I stepped into its cavity and sat for a moment. My fingers rolled a cigarette as I looked around me. That first day I found this place felt like forever ago, summer sun so warm it was like I was in the tropics. But today the whale’s bones sang a different message. I felt the chill of the Arctic waters in them, the desperate hunt for food, the storm that finally caught it and beached it so far from its home. I wanted to imagine the wind through the bones whistling. What must it have been like to die like this? The horribly slow reverse of drowning. Nothing quick in this death. Massive lungs crushed for air and the simple weight of this animal’s body slowly suffocating itself. The trickle of a freshwater creek a taunt to the rest of the body.

Not a good feeling in the whale this morning, and so I walked out of its body and tramped down the creek. The animals on this island must have rejoiced upon its death, though. I pictured the marten, the lynx, the black bear and polar bear, the flies and their maggots, the fox, the wolf, the whisky jack and the crow, all of them meeting here and grinning at their good fortune. I saw the animals in turn coming up to feast and then I saw like I once saw on the Discovery Channel a fast motion camera capturing these same animals coming up and eating, then departing, the whale pulled apart in mouthfuls like you would a house until only the framework remained.

The sun began to peek up, so I walked as quick as my leg allowed. Best to be in the blind already, but the geese, they’d be flying all day today. The first ones, though, those are always the special ones.

Old Koosis waited, squatting by the quiet tent heavy with morning dew. His head of white hair stood out against the still dark morning. I squatted by him and pulled two cigarettes from the pocket of my flannel and handed him one. We sat on our haunches and smoked, looking out to the bay, misty and dark. A good couple of blinds waited to our left in a cove on the mudflat, the flat flecked with grasses and nests in the grasses, protected from wind. The geese had already been stirring and more would be flying in those first short hours of dawn. We’d have to make our way to the blind quietly. Koosis handed me a cup of instant coffee, cooling in the tin mug.

“A good morning,” he said.

“Perfect.”

We stood and picked up our packs, slung our shotguns over our shoulders, made our way back up toward the stunted spruce, trying to walk quiet in the suck of mud, crouching as we cut toward the blind, following the muskeg grass that kept us from sinking too deep.

A good blind we had built. Dry floor of spruce boughs and its height so that we could sit without being seen on rough benches. A big view of this marsh. Only the standing when the time came, shotguns at our shoulders. Good place. All we needed for the day sat at our feet in this tight space.

As the light grew stronger, our morning laziness left, and we loaded and checked our guns. The old man peered out to the horizon. Our decoys lay carefully scattered in front of us on the shore and in the water. Some with heads bent as if feeding, others with necks craned. Hard to tell they weren’t real in this light. The old man would begin calling when the time was right. We needed to tempt the geese close in to us. They’d arrive in waves and then just the matter of aiming well once we called them with our own throats. I smoked one more cigarette while I still had the time. The old man didn’t like my doing it. I could tell he worried about its scent scaring them off. But the wind blew into us, and I decided this was okay.

The day grew more gloomy and smelled of rain. My coat soaked through with the heavy air. Hard in this light to make out anything on the horizon. This day was a very bad day for flying a plane but a good day for the geese.

Old Koosis spotted the first group coming in from the north, black of wings flashing in the grey. He tensed his throat, cupped his hands around his mouth, and began calling. When I spotted them, I joined in. At first my throat felt too tense, and I squeaked rather than called, almost laughed out loud at my foolishness. Children’s voices are so much better at this. You, nieces, were champion callers. But when I found the tension in my vocal cords, I made the
awwuuk, awwuk, awwuk
, just as I once taught you. We watched careful and adjusted the intensity of our calls as the geese responded mid-flight. First almost desperate to get their ear, then plaintive, a happy note to let them know that the decoys below us had found a perfect spot for breakfast and a rest. This first V of geese turned to us, but then, a hundred yards out or so got spooked, the lead flyer turning abruptly and leading them higher and away.

The old man looked at me, grinning. He placed his index and middle fingers together and pretended to take a drag from a cigarette.

“Jushstuk,”
I said.

He laughed. We sat back and waited. I considered lighting another cigarette just to bug him.

The second V of geese swung in, honking out, us calling back. This group was a good one, twenty or thirty, looking to land. I could feel it. I slipped the safety off the top of my gun with my thumb and tensed for the standing and shooting. The geese stopped flapping their wings and glided in closer, webbed feet just beginning to stretch out, at the point where they’d either catch on or it would be too late for them. At the right distance, close enough to see their black eyeballs choosing the marsh they’d land upon, we both stood and began firing. Boom! Pump the old shell out. Boom! Pump. Boom! Pump. The geese still in the air worked their wings, panicked. When they retreated thirty yards, I stopped firing. We’d taken three each, watched the disorganized flock work hard and disappear over the spruce in the distance. I slipped the safety back on and reloaded the shotgun.

When we were sure another flock wasn’t coming soon, we made our way out of the blind and through the mud, picked up the dead birds by the necks, and carried them back to our blind. I lit a cigarette and reached into my pack, pulling out the big bottle of rye. I watched from the corner of my eye for the old man’s reaction. He didn’t give one. I broke the seal with a twist of my hand and took a good sip, then handed the bottle over to him. He didn’t say no, but didn’t take the bottle, either. “Been a long time for me,” he said. I took another swig and put the bottle on the spruce between us. On the dash, old man.

I began to worry these might be the only geese we got today. The sun broke weak through the clouds, and we sat quiet and stared out. I had a good buzz on, me. Rye on an empty stomach. I pulled some smoked trout from my pack, and we ate it slow.

Old Koosis sniffed the air. “More within an hour or two.” I’d noticed a wind shift, was interested to see if he was right. “You have someone fly you in here?” he asked. “Drop you off?”

“I’m camped on an interior lake,” I answered, pretending to mishear him. “Good place. Should be a good lake for geese.”

“Me, I saw polar bear tracks on the shore not far from my camp yesterday.” Koosis looked over to me. “Told my woman to fire her rifle if she needed any help.”

“Why not have them here with us?”

“My granddaughters would scare away everything.” He went quiet for a while, and I knew he wanted to say more. “My woman, she’s got the diabetes bad,” he said. “Bad enough the doctors say it will kill her.”

I nodded.

“What’s worse,” he continued, “she is becoming a child in her head again. Forgets things all the time, sometimes even where she is or who I am. She talks more than she ever has before, her. Doesn’t know when to stop. Tells me stories about when she was a kid.” He stopped, and I worried he’d start crying. “She’s gotten worse this last year.” He straightened up on the bench. Looked from the ground to the horizon. “But this is good for her, away from Attawapiskat for a while. She’s better in the good air away from people.”This the most he’d said to me at one time. Probably more than he’d said to anyone in years.

I offered to go back and check on them, but Koosis shook his head. “My woman, she has the moose rifle strapped on her shoulder.” He looked at me. “She can shoot it better than us. We been around polar bears all our lives. She’s killed more breaking into our camp than me.”

I smiled. “My wife. She used to be a pretty good shot, too. Never killed a polar bear, though.”

Old Koosis nodded.

When the geese returned, they returned full on. Both of the first two flocks winged right in to our decoys, and we fired and reloaded fast as we could. I began to head down to retrieve them when I heard the honking of another V coming in. Crazy. We aimed and fired, aimed and fired until our barrels were too hot to touch. There were as many dead geese on the marsh as decoys.

When finally it was all right to, we made our way out and began collecting them. Most were heavy with summer feeding. Good-looking geese. I tied a thin rope around the neck of each and moved on. When I had a rope of ten, I hauled its weight back to the blind. Much plucking tonight. The old man could carry as many as me on his string. He was old school. Thin and hard, white hair thick as a lynx pelt. Healthy one, him.

When I headed back to collect more, I came across a goose that was still alive. It flapped its good wing in panic as I approached, its big black head looking at me, white feathers like a smile under its beak. The round black eyeball stared up at me. I didn’t like this part. Never did. But to let something suffer unnecessarily is the worst sin of all. I kneeled on the goose’s chest, whispered
“Meegwetch, ntontem,”
and squeezed the air from its lungs. The body tightened in convulsions, but the brain, it wasn’t registering pain anymore. I tied it to the others.

The later afternoon until dusk continued in this way, geese coming in, now to roost, old Koosis and me shooting well until I was concerned with how we’d carry all the geese back before night settled. But the old man was strong, and me, I continued to sip off the bottle. We walked back and forth between the blind and the camp,
Kookum
and her grandchildren set to the plucking, feathers flying in rips from the still warm animals. They looked up to us, the two girls laughing, down in their black hair, a long flight feather tucked in each of their messy braids. The youngest one reached over and tickled her grandma’s arm with a wing.
Kookum
shooed her away. She looked up at me. “I will make you a warm pair of winter mitts before we leave.” She’d already forgotten her offer. I smiled and nodded.