case the branches bent too much and the case slid back into the black leaves and stirred up the guck at the bottom of the pond. Or my uncle and I couldn’t coordinate what we were doing and the glasses case slipped back to its murky home. Uncle tried using both branches himself but with no success, and now the water was so murky it was almost impossible to see where the glasses case was. I wanted to give up and go home. When I was young I found that easiest to do. My uncle knelt on the tree trunk. He was a small man and sometimes reminded me of Humpty Dumpty but now he looked even smaller and I felt sorry for him.
‘Are you sure you can’t get it for me?’ Uncle Reub asked.
I felt embarrassed. I was in my bathing suit. I loved the lake. There was nothing better in the whole summer than floating in hot sunshine buoyed up by the warmth and the strength of a truck or car tyre’s inner tube. But getting into the bog was scary. I didn’t mind the goo on the bottom. In fact I liked the squishy feel. I didn’t mind the frogs or painted turtles either and the water snakes always hid when Grace or Perry got into the bog, but there were snapping turtles in there too and the year before I was bitten when I caught one. It was horrible. I was carrying it back to show Grace and hadn’t noticed that the snapping turtle’s head had slowly emerged and turned upside down over its back. At the instant I saw this the snapper crushed its jaws into my forefinger. It didn’t let go until I put it back in the bog and it swam off.
I never talked about that. I certainly wouldn’t have told other adults but Uncle Reub was different so I said, ‘I’m frightened of the snapping turtles.’
‘They are frightening. You’re very sensible. Now I’ve got these sticks and I’ve got my knife, and Edgar, my friend in Mandan, taught me how to throw it. I can knock the right eye out of a rattlesnake at ten paces with this knife so if you get in there, I promise, nothing will come near you. You’re safe with me.’
The sun was higher. It was almost nine o’clock and I felt its warmth heat my bare back. With my uncle’s assurance I slid off the log until my feet felt the mushy bottom of the bog. The water was colder than I expected and came to the top of my bathing suit. My shoulders lifted and I squeezed my arms against my sides.
‘You don’t even have to look at what you’re doing. We’re a team,’ Uncle said. ‘Now, open your fingers and bend your body over to your right.’
I obeyed. In slow motion I leaned over to my right, reaching down towards the bottom of the bog until my whole arm and shoulder were in the water. I didn’t like what I was doing but I said nothing.
‘Over a bit more. Now forward. Keep your fingers open. Down. There. Can you feel it?’
I could. I grasped the case, together with some leaves as black as coal, and, still not smiling, raised it all out of the water and handed everything to my uncle, who opened the case and emptied it of water. I hoped there’d be a tadpole in it, stabbed to death by a water bug, but there wasn’t. Now, standing up, I felt warmer, and quite satisfied with myself. I actually felt like going for a swim but I climbed out of the pond, onto the log and with my uncle walked back to the shore.
Before we left the woods for home, Uncle cut a handful of sweetgrass with his knife.
‘The next time your father makes a barbecue, let’s put this on the embers,’ he said.
‘Will it make the hamburgers taste better?’ I asked and my uncle replied, ‘Better than that. The incense from this sweetgrass will relieve us all of our weariness. And yes, the meat will taste better too.’
We walked back through the trees and just before the gravel road and cottages on Long Point became visible, Uncle Reub said once more, ‘Hold on for a moment.’
Again he took his knife out of its beaded sheath and deftly cut two bands of bark off one of the surrounding birch trees. ‘When we get back we’ll soak these in water. I’ll show you how to make an unsinkable birchbark canoe.’
By the time we got back to the cottage, my family was already having breakfast. ‘Where’d you go?’ Robert asked me.
‘Nowhere,’ I answered.
‘What were you two doing this morning?’ my mother asked Uncle Reub.
‘Not much,’ replied her brother.
‘You’re not going to tell us anything?’ Mum asked.
‘Brucie and I were discussing the meaning of life,’ Uncle Reub answered.
I smiled inside me. I loved that we had a shared secret. We finished our breakfast all together, white toast, butter tarts and milk.
THE CANOE
The slapping rain was sudden and passed in minutes, leaving a rainbow over the still lake. Grace and I found my uncle inside the cottage talking quietly to my mother who, when we arrived, left and went to her bedroom.
‘I’ve just finished making the canoe,’ Uncle Reub said.
I had been surprised that my uncle had promised to make me a model canoe. I was more used to seeing him just sit in his chair or read a big book. Uncle Reub had found an aluminium bucket in my father’s shed and filled it with water to soak the white bark he had cut from the birch tree near frog bog. I had watched him make some slits at both ends with his knife and bend the bark in half with its woody side out, not its bark side as I’d expected, but before I could ask why I got bored and left to find Grace.
‘Do you hear how shrill that woodpecker’s cry is?’ my uncle had asked. ‘A storm’s coming.’
And in not much longer than it took that storm to come and pass, the miniature boat was finished.
‘Folks, that stitching at the bow and stern, it’s called whipstitching. When I used to patch up people at The Mayo I used something called mattress stitching but this is better for boats. Both of them make the seal watertight. Along the gunwales where I’ve bound in sweetgrass, those are called simple stitches.’
I was impressed, especially by the two thwarts my uncle had whittled with his knife, to keep the canoe firmly spread.
‘Will it float like our canoe or just tip over?’ Grace asked, and my uncle replied that we should take it out on the lake and find out.
Grace and I wanted to go in the big red canoe – we were allowed in it with a grown-up – but Uncle Reub said it was too wobbly for him to get in and out so we all got in the rowboat. Angus was on the dock asking to come but Grace said he had to stay at home.
‘I row,’ said Grace, so she did, with me in the front and Uncle in the back.
As she rowed, my uncle leaned forward and said to Grace, ‘Do you know where all the flowers go when winter comes?’
‘They all die,’ she answered.
‘That could be true,’ Uncle replied. ‘But I have a friend who thinks differently. He says that God would never let such beauty die. He says all the flowers go to heaven and come back next year to make rainbows.’
‘If God decides all the flowers come back, what does he do with the birds?’ I asked.
‘That’s
