It struck me that I could not focus on both. And so I chose him. I was young and the emotions of the young are as strong a pull as the Arctic tides that suck fishermen’s canoes out into the bay to be lost forever. I walked out of my shaking tent with no answers to what was coming, and the not-knowing was a strange relief. Not having to be the one divining answers was a weight lifted from me. I could just be normal, suffer the sweet pains that came with my young age. The bad feelings of danger still nudged at me, but I pushed them away with thoughts of him.
Winter came upon us again, and I kept my own dwelling now, having made sure that my mother was safe and living with other awawatuk. The Frenchman came to me often, and we kept each other warm through even the coldest nights, but as spring approached once more, a mood came over him. He did not smile as often and visited me less. When he did come to me, he did not love me as frequently as he had. I thought I smelled another on him, but the scent was never the same, and so I pushed those thoughts aside.
At the time when the snow begins to melt during the day and then forms a hard crust at night, an awawatuk from the marten clan came to me with a request. I knew when I heard the man approach on his snowshoes that he came to ask me a favour, that it would begin a chain of events that I was powerless to stop.
The Frenchman was with me. We brewed tea inside my shelter. We both went quiet at the sound of snowshoes approaching. A visitor in winter is rare and not always welcome. A winter visit often means that bad fortune has descended. I motioned for my man to sit and wait while I went outside to see who’d come. Outside I recognized his face. He was an old hunter who was known to be one of the last of the great trappers. His look confirmed what I sensed, and I knew then that what I’d been trying to push away had arrived now as surely as a blizzard.
After a formal greeting he told me how he knew and respected my father, how he also knew that I was my father’s daughter and had inherited his gift. He explained that his clan was hungry and had bad luck finding meat. He wanted me to divine for him, had brought a moose’s shoulder blade along with him from his part of the country.
I had no choice. Turning around, I walked into my lodge and told the Frenchman he had to leave. He didn’t put up a fight, but packed his things. Although he could not understand what the old man requested of me, he suddenly understood that I was not simply a young woman living in the bush alone. I lived alone for a reason. I had a gift that others wanted and needed. I was frightened by how sullen this made him, how he stopped speaking to me.
Before he left I whispered to him that it wasn’t his fault but that I had to be alone to do what was needed. I asked him to come back soon, but he didn’t answer. He left the lodge, leaving only the sting of his anger.
I walked out behind him, saw the surprise on the old trapper’s face at the sight of a wemistikoshiw, a look that he quickly covered, pretending indifference. When the Frenchman disappeared into the bush, I opened my door to the old awawatuk and built up my fire.
With the return of spring and of the blackflies, life grew a little easier again. But my Frenchman did not come to visit me. By early summer I wondered what had happened and spent long nights inventing stories. He’d hurt himself and lay prone in a bed in that town pining for me. Or he was all right but waited stubbornly and patiently for me to come to him and tell him I was sorry for so briskly dealing with him that late winter morning. In my darker moods I imagined him with other women.
I visited my mother and we spent long hours fishing and not saying very much. The silence was comfortable. I knew that she knew I had been visited by an awawatuk in a time of crisis and had done what I had to. She could also sense that I was alone again, that I ached for the Frenchman and the ache was not going away. My mother finally broke the silence.
“I would never have married your father if I had not pursued him,” she said. “I hunted him like you hunt a bear. I found out where he lived and I paid him a visit.”
I smiled at this story, my first smile in months, it seemed. For the first time in a very long time I felt sure now of my next move.
Late that summer I packed a few clothes and a few days’ rations and left my spot by the river. I began to paddle my canoe back to that place I had promised myself I would never return to. For the couple of nights I was alone on the water I built small fires onshore and stared up into a sky that took many hours to turn dark.
Some part inside nagged at me about what I was doing. I counted shooting stars like I was a child again. Every time I predicted the swath of light that cut through the sky just before it happened, I’d dare myself to turn back home before it was too late. But I didn’t. When I smelled the rotting garbage smell of that town again, I was immediately brought back to the day years ago when I had come here with my mother and young sister.
I beached my canoe close to town around midday. The sun was setting by the time I built up the courage to walk through that place and look for him. I went through the Indian part of Moose Factory first, looking for faces that I knew. There were many that I recognized from my childhood and from my brief time at the residential school, and immediately it was obvious that an invisible wall, one impossible to breach, lay between me and the homeguard Indians of this white town. My clothing was in the old style, a style that only a few of the elders still knew how to make, most of it from the hides of animals.
But that was just the most obvious difference. The Indians here seemed full, full of food, full of drink, full like I saw the white men look full. I became almost envious walking around, feeling the stares burrowing into my back. For so many years it was as if I’d gone hungry. My body was smaller than the others’, having rarely been able to feed itself to full. But I was struck as I listened to families talking and friends laughing and children running and shouting that what I had starved for was the company of others, others like me. When I realized that day that there were no longer others like me, my legs shook so hard in the middle of the dirt street with people all around that I thought I would fall down.
Parents called their children to them when I came close. The old converted Indians blessed themselves and closed their doors when I walked by. Young men pointed to me and stared when they thought I was not looking. The other talent the Cree have to rival their hunting ability is their ability to gossip.
When the sheer weight of the attention became too much for me, I looked for the fastest route out of this part of town. As I reached the edge of it, an old woman, her face as wrinkled and round as a dried apple, beckoned me to her with a long bony finger.
“Ashtum,” she whispered. “Come here.”
I walked to her and she opened her door to me.
“You are the one,” she said, smiling toothless at me when I was safe inside. Her little cabin smelled of tanned hide and good food. She sat me down at her table and brought me a bowl of stew. “Eat, then we’ll talk.”
I ate and she watched me carefully, none of the formal politeness of averted eyes in her at all. “You must watch yourself around here,” she said. “Or the same thing that happened to your father will happen to you.” I looked up to her, at her bold words. “The Indians around here know. You can’t stop talk from travelling. Some of them are happy that the old ways are still alive out in the bush. But there are lots of them Christian Indians now who are not.”
I nodded my thanks for her warning. “Do any wemistikoshiw know? Should I leave this place?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “Probably they don’t. You’ll know as soon as you see them what they know. They are not very good at concealing their thoughts from their faces.” She laughed at this and I did, too. It felt good.
“Tell me more, Kokum,” I said after a while. She brought me tea and I sipped on it and waited.
“There is talk that a certain wemistikoshiw trapper was fucking you,” she said, smiling at me. “But that rumour I am not sure of, since it comes from their side.”
My smile dropped. “So that is the rumour?” I said.
/> She looked at me. “So it is true!” she said. I didn’t respond, didn’t need to. “Be careful of that one. They say he has a taste for red meat that he can’t satisfy. There are little half-French, half-Indian children running around this place that he refuses to claim.” I nodded thanks for the warning. “This is not the place for you, Little One. You are a hookimaw, from a strong family. Happiness is not yours to have. You are a windigo killer.” She said this as if it were a sentence being passed down.
She got up and went to a trunk near her bed, rummaged through it for a while, then came back to me with a handful of clothes. She held them up one by one so that I could see them. They were the clothes of wemistikoshiw women, a long cotton skirt, a white cotton shirt, a brightly coloured bandanna to tie about my head.
“Wear these,” she said. I shook my head. “You must wear them so that you fit in with the others. Those clothes you wear make you a target. You look like a bush animal come too close to this human place.”
I took the clothes from her, thanked her as I made my way to the door.
I could feel her eyes on me as I walked back to my canoe.
I camped that night a little way from that place, my head buzzing with the knowledge that my world was not nearly as secret as I thought it was or wanted it to be. So they knew everything! I grew angrier with each passing hour, so that by dawn a plan had formed in my head. I bathed for a long time in the river, scrubbing my hair until it shone, rubbing my body to pinkness with the soft bottom sand. I changed into the clothes the grandmother had given me and carefully and tightly braided my hair on each side of my head. At high noon, I walked back into the town, a smile on my face so that I appeared a different woman, a shy, young homeguard Indian.
I walked toward the spire of the church, to the place where the residential school sat blank and white as a dumb child’s face. I had not meant to go here, but suddenly the idea of seeing Rabbit—your mother, Xavier—swept over me. Staying a distance away, I waited until the nuns released the children for afternoon play. I looked carefully through the group of older girls, for my sister would be fifteen winters now, but I did not see her. I stayed and looked until the nuns herded the children back inside.
Nobody stared as I walked through the wemistikoshiw part of Moose Factory. The grandmother had been wise about my clothing. All of these people seemed too busy themselves with talk or movement. Most of them seemed late for something, rushing about with heads down. No one paid me any attention, and this made me more confident. I walked down the dirt road of the big street, staring into the trading post, the livery, the butcher shop, the pub.
It was in this last place that I spied him, eating his dinner with another man at a table near the window. A long day had passed, and I realized how hungry I was suddenly. I stood a ways from the window and waited, willing the other man to leave. Seeing my trapper again brought back the feeling in my stomach, made that place low in my belly ache. To my delight, the man sitting with him picked up his hat, stood and left. I waited as long as I could, then walked in.
At first he looked at me like he did not recognize me. He thought I was another young Cree woman, and in that second I saw that everything the old woman had said about him was true. But when he smiled at me with his white teeth, his whiskers pointed like a wolf’s, I didn’t care. I would take him back to the bush and keep him there, change him so that he no longer desired this place of humans.
“Niska,” he whispered, smiling at me. He stood, walked to me, hugged me.
I felt all of the eyes of this place on me and I pushed myself from him. A flash of anger sparked in his eyes for only a second, then something else that I could not read.
He made a motion for me to sit with him, called to a man who worked there and spoke to him in French that I did not understand. Then he looked at me, his hands on the table, one crossed over the other. He began to speak slowly in his tongue, staring into my eyes. “I missed you,” he said, putting one hand closer to mine. I just stared back. “I miss you here,” he said, “and here.” He moved his hand to his heart, then to his crotch just below the table’s lip. He smiled at this, and I did everything in my power not to smile back. The man he’d spoken to returned and placed two glasses filled with yellow liquid before us, then left.
He held his glass up to me and smiled again, waiting for me to raise my glass too. I knew what it was he offered, but I didn’t care. I could no longer bear the weight of the last days, and in that first sip realized that this might be a way to let them sit someplace else for a little while. The drink tasted bitter, like bannock gone bad, and the taste did not leave my mouth quickly enough. I watched him raise his glass to his lips and drink deeply so that the bump in his throat bobbed. He put his mostly empty glass down and ran the back of his hand across his mouth, staring at me. I took it as a challenge and picked my glass up, choked it down fast as I could. I almost gagged, then smiled back at him. He made a motion with his arm to the man who’d bring more.
Outside the window of this place the night came. At first I watched the sky’s colours change with a child’s awe, but as we drank more, a sadness came to me just as the last of the bright light left and the serving man brought candles to all the tables.
“No more,” I said to him, standing up and walking out suddenly, so suddenly that I surprised even myself. My legs felt like a new calf’s, loose and long under me so that I had to grab the door frame as I passed through it. I walked down the dirt road, trying to figure out if I was going in the right direction or not, the night sky beginning to spin above me. I did not know or care if he followed me at this point. The cool air on my face felt good.
I was not sure if it was me or some other force that carried me back to that school and the tall peak of the church, but I found myself standing in the same place I’d been in the morning, looking for Rabbit. I called out her name, softly at first, but when nothing came back but the sounds of the crickets, I cried out louder. Over and over I called out her name, willing her to find me, to comfort me, to bring me back to our mother, to our father. I felt hands on my shoulders and spun around, but it was him instead. He hushed me with a finger to his lips, whispering warnings as he looked around him with wild eyes.
“Ashtum,” he said to me in my language. “Come with me.”
He took my hand and led me toward the church. When I realized he wanted to take me inside, I struggled against him.“Mo-na,” I said. “Don’t take me in there.”
“It is safe here,” he said. “It is a holy place. A place to talk to the Father.”
I followed him as he pushed open the big door, then shut it behind him. The smell was everywhere in here, like cedar, but too strong. He walked straight down the aisle, and I could do nothing but follow, running a hand down one row of benches as I went, letting them steady me. He stopped by the table in front of all the benches. It stood on a small rise of wood.
“This is where a man takes a woman to be his forever,” he said to me, pulling me to him and kissing me.
I began to wonder how well I felt as he kissed me, but pushed the thought aside and let my tongue touch his.
“This is a good place, a holy place,” he whispered, biting at my ear. “You are a holy Indian, no?” he whispered. “The other Indians say you are very holy, very strong.”
His lean body pushed against me. I could feel his hardness. I did not answer him but kissed him back instead. “You want me for you?” I asked as best I could in his tongue. He smiled and nodded. “Here is the place?” I asked, looking at him. He smiled and nodded again. I kissed him. “Us?” I asked.
He smiled and picked me up, sat me on the table. He pulled my cotton dress up so that I was exposed to him, then lowered his head and kissed me there with his tongue. I held his hair in my hands, and when I could not take it any longer I pulled his mouth up to mine and kissed him deep. His hands struggled with his belt, and then I felt him thrust in me until I called out. He panted and we rocked and then I felt him tense inside of me too fa
st, too soon. I wrapped my legs around him so that he would stay inside a little longer. Finally he pulled out of me, and I stretched out on the table, looking up at him, my head spinning.
He laughed. “I fucked you in a church,” he said, and smiled. I smiled back at him. “I fucked the heathen Indian out of you in this church,” he said, but this time the smile was not happy. “I took your ahcahk,” he said to me, the smile gone now. “Do you understand? I fucked your ahcahk, your spirit. Do you understand that?”
He stared down at me, his eyes wide with a look that made my stomach feel ill. I pushed him away with my legs and covered myself up.
“It’s too late,” he said. “You are nothing special, just another squaw whore. I took your power away in this place and sent it to burn in hell where it belongs.”
Suddenly I felt my guts churn and only knew that I needed to be out of this place. The too-strong smell of cedar made my head pound so that I needed to throw up. I jumped up and on shaky legs ran toward the door. It felt like forever, but finally I reached it and flung it open, the contents of my stomach rushing up and spewing onto the steps below me. I fell to my knees, but heard his boots approaching from behind. I reached for my knife on my belt but realized that I did not wear it with these white clothes. Pushing myself to my knees, I ran fast as I could toward the river, expecting any moment to hear his footsteps catching up with me, to feel his hands grabbing at me.
I made it down to the river, my head pounding, my mouth dry and sour, the world around me spinning. I looked back to see if he followed, but all I could make out in the darkness was the blunt block of the school on the ridge overlooking the river and the tall arm of the church stretching up into the night sky. I crouched and sobbed, afraid that his magic had killed my family’s fire inside of me, and it was only then that I realized he was a spell-caster of some kind and he’d stolen my strength.