Medicine Walk. Richard Wagamese
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was strong from the farm work and used to the terrain so he walked them along at a brisk pace. By late afternoon when the sun slanted down behind the western peaks and the shadows deepened in the ravine where they walked, they’d covered five or six miles by the kid’s reckoning. They’d been following a stream for the last few hours and the trail was good. It was the top of the free-range land and the summer trek of cattle along the stream had beaten down the brush and tangle and only the scuttle of rocks made the going rough but they were smallish and the horse never complained. They’d stopped twice to water. Both times his father had asked for the bottle and taken a few swallows. He rode slumped in the saddle for the most part and a few times the kid had checked to see if he was still there, slapping at his shin until he’d grunted and shifted his shoulders about. When they came to a place where the stream eddied out into a wide pool with a shelf of flat at its edge the kid pulled the horse up and helped his father down. He sat him on a rock and tended to the horse. Then, while his father smoked, he made a fire ring from shore rocks and gathered twigs from the fall of nearby trees and fashioned a twig bundle and set it in the ring of stones and put a match to it. The bundle flared and burned hot and bright and he added limbs and branches and had a blazing fire in minutes.
“Pretty good trick,” his father said.
He took the fishing line from the pack and tied it to a sapling he propped in the rocks at the shore and he turned stones until he found a grub then baited a hook with it and set the line adrift on the rippling current at the head of the pool. While he was gathering wood for the fire the sapling twitched. The trout was fat and he cleaned it in three quick slices of the hunting knife at his belt and flayed it and pierced it through on a forked stick and stuck it over the fire before rerigging the line and setting it out again. He had another fish in minutes. They ate them right off the sticks, pulling the meat from the skin and flicking the bones into the fire. His father asked for the bottle once he’d eaten, and the kid handed it to him without a word and marched off back into the woods again.
When he returned he had five stout saplings and an armful of spruce boughs. He shaved the saplings and used the strips of bark to bind them into a lean-to frame and piled the spruce boughs on before laying an armful more on the floor of it. Then he piled logs behind the fire so the heat would radiate toward the lean-to and stoked it so it was hot and helped his father into it and sat him down on the spruce boughs. He was weak and his upper arm was thin in the kid’s grip. He groaned and shifted about, trying to get comfortable, and once he’d settled he asked for the bottle again and the kid retrieved it and sat beside him and rolled a smoke.
“Where’d ya learn all this?” his father asked.
“What the old man didn’t teach me I taught myself.”
“Spent a lot of time out here, I guess.”
“Enough.”
“Me, I never did.” He stared at the fire and took a small sip from the bottle then nestled it in the boughs at his feet. “We lived in a tent for the most part when I was a kid. Out here. Places like it. But there weren’t ever time to fish. We worked as soon as we could walk. I toted firewood around on a wagon. Had to scavenge it. Didn’t have no axe. Busted it all up by hand and sold it to the people around us.”
“Oh yeah?” the kid said and prodded at the fire with a stick.
“Indians. Half-breeds. Some whites were with us every now and then. Mostly breeds and Indians though. In the Peace Country. Way up north of here. Our people just followed the work but most places wouldn’t hire a skin or a breed. Not regular, least ways. Get a day here, a day there sometimes, but there was never nothing fixed. So I scavenged wood. It’s all I learned to hunt when I was kid.”
His father shook a smoke out of the pack and lit up and smoked a moment. “Your grandparents were both half-breeds. We weren’t Métis like the French Indians are called. We were just half-breeds. Ojibway. Mixed with Scot. McJibs. That’s what they called us. No one wanted us around. Not the whites. Not the Indians. So your grandparents and them like them just followed the work and tried to make out the best they could. We camped in tents or squatted on scrubland no one wanted or in deserted cabins and sheds and such. Never no proper home.
“When we got to the Peace it was all we could do to survive. Some of the men remembered how to do all the stuff you been doin’ but there weren’t no horses and there weren’t no time to take the chance on bringin’ down a moose or an elk. So they learned how to forget about it. Just hung around the mills waiting for work. Most times it never come.”
The kid stood up and laid some more logs on the fire and stirred the embers around to stoke it higher. It was full dark. The horse stomped her hoofs in the bush behind the lean-to and there was the rustle of a varmint in the underbrush somewhere back of them. The creek was a glimmering silver ribbon and the kid walked over and set four hooks on a long line and baited them and anchored the line to a stone and cast it out into the current. Then he walked out of the fire’s glow and stood on a boulder looking out over the creek and the bush behind it and on up to the ragged break of the mountain against the sky.
“So how come no one thought about just going out onto the land?” he asked without looking at his father.
His father lay on one side, leaning on his forearm and staring at the ground. “You get beat up good enough you don’t breathe right,” he said.
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t know. All’s I do know is that I was ten before we made it into a town and then it was learnin’ all about how to make my way through that.”
The kid stepped off the boulder and walked back to squat by the fire. “You paint a sad picture,” he said. “Figure you’re the only one who ever got dealt a lame hand in life?”
“No. That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Sounds like it to me. I got dealt from the bottom of the deck myself, you know.”
“Shit. All’s I’m tryin’ to say is that we never had the time for learnin’ about how to get by out here. None of us did. White man things was what we needed to learn if we was gonna eat regular. Indian stuff just kinda got left behind on accounta we were busy gettin’ by in that world.”
“So I don’t get what we’re doin’ out here then.”
His father raised the bottle and drank slowly. He set it down and scrunched around trying to get comfortable and then lit a smoke and sat staring at the fire for a while. He closed his eyes. The kid could feel him gathering himself, pulling whatever energy he had left from the day up from the depths of him and when he spoke again it was quiet so the kid had to lean forward to hear him.
“I owe,” he said.
“Yeah, I heard that before.”
“I’m tired, Frank.”
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“That’s the first time you ever called me by my name.”
His father arranged his legs under him clumsily and when he found balance he leaned back and caught himself on one arm and looked at the kid and reached out with his other hand and squeezed his arm. Then he eased back on to the spruce boughs and wrapped his coat around him and closed his eyes. He was asleep in minutes. The kid watched him, studying his face and trying to see beyond what he thought he knew of the man, the history that was etched there, the stories, the travels, and after a while all he could see were gaunt lines and hollows and the sag and fall of skin and muscle and the bone beneath it all. When his father’s breathing deepened the kid draped his mackinaw over him and walked out to check the horse and gather some bigger wood for the fire. In the forest the night sky was aglitter with the icy blue of stars and he stood in the middle of a copse of trees and arched his neck and watched them. Then he stooped and prowled around for wood he wouldn’t need to chop and thought about his father scavenging breakable wood and trundling it about for the few cents it would bring, the potatoes, carrots, or onions it would add to the pot, maybe even a rabbit if he were lucky, and he had an idea of him as a small