this was the first time I’d encountered it on the Migiskan Reserve, and it came as a shock. It only served to make me angrier at Eric that he hadn’t done anything about it. After all, he’d been instrumental in getting new housing for the reserve. Why hadn’t he given these two unfortunate souls, who clearly needed it, one of the new bungalows?
Muttering what I took to mean “May I?”, the old woman ran her gnarled fingers enquiringly over my face. She tugged at my hair and said something to Ajidàmo, whose response made her chuckle. Smiling, she fingered my hat-crushed locks, then patted me on the head, as if comforting a child.
“What did you say?” I asked Ajidàmo. “I told her your hair was so bright, it would burn her fingers,” he replied with a mischievous glint to his eye.
He stood almost protectively beside his grandmother, a wraith of a child with large brown eyes, who looked younger and more defenseless than his eight years.
On our one and only encounter, he’d been groggy and disoriented from the drug overdose. “Remember me?”
He nodded gravely. His grandmother must have also understood my question, for she clasped her grandson to her ample bosom and repeated “Migwech” several times, which I took to be her way of thanking me for saving him.
I then passed her the pot of freesia. “Goood, goood,” she said as she breathed in their perfume. With the confidence of the sighted, she carried the flowers to a large formica-topped stainless steel table occupying the centre of the room. Meanwhile, Ajidàmo, with the intentness of a kid who knew what was what, placed the tower of Jenga blocks on the floor and began slowly extracting his first wooden block.
After placing the flowers squarely in the middle of the table, Kòkomis turned her blind gaze towards me, as if to say, “It’s your turn. Why are you here?”, a question I was beginning to ask myself.
Now that I was faced with their vulnerability, I hesitated diving in with my questions. I worried that asking the boy to squeal on someone who could very well be a member of his community would place them in a difficult position, even a dangerous one. Given the language constraints, light chit-chat seemed impossible. Besides, what common ground did we have to talk about other than the weather. Sergei solved my dilemma.
The dog’s whining at the door lit up Ajidàmo’s face. With a word from his grandmother, he rushed to the door, and in sprang the dog, sprinkling snow in his wake. The old woman clapped her hands and spoke softly. The dog careened to a stop at her feet. Unbelievable. He sure wouldn’t do that for me.
“Goood, goood,” she mumbled, as she stroked his curly head. I wasn’t sure if she was commenting on his stellar behaviour or expressing pleasure over his presence.
Words tumbled out of the excited boy, who was displaying the squirrel-like energy of his name. “He’s so big and curly. What kind of dog is he? What’s his name? Can he shake hands?”
I answered each in succession. “A standard poodle. Sergei. But I’m not sure about the shaking hands. He’s never done it for me. Why don’t you try?”
“Right on,” he replied, sounding like any kid trying to emulate the latest expression he’d heard on TV .
He clapped his hands the way his grandmother did to get the dog’s attention. Then, while I watched in amazement, he had the dog sit down and extend his paw to his outstretched hand. All of this in Algonquin, a language Sergei had never heard before.
“How did you do that?” I asked. He grinned.
“Easy.” And he got the dog to do it again.
“Kòkomis taught me. This is the way a hunter talks to his prey, so the animal won’t be afraid. He looks the animal in the eye and talks like this.” He dropped his voice to almost a whisper. “Then he tells the animal what to do, and it does it, like this.” He spoke again in the soft but confident undertone accompanied by a slight downward motion with his hand, and Sergei promptly lay down.
“Wow, I’m impressed. I’m afraid I haven’t been too good at training Sergei, so I’d really appreciate it if you could give me a few pointers.”
While Ajidàmo and I had been talking, his grandmother had taken a couple of mugs and a stained teapot from a cupboard. “Tea,” she said more as a statement than a request, and held out the teapot to her grandson, who filled it from the tarnished copper kettle boiling on top of the wood stove.
She ordered me to sit, and I promptly sat down on the closest chair, landing on something sharp, which proved to be a needle inserted into a moccasin. Fortunately, it was the blunt end.
The moccasin had been expertly crafted by hand from soft but sturdy moose hide. Only the beading on top, where the needle was inserted, remained to be completed. A tuft of dense moose hair created a centre from which a design of red and yellow beads radiated. It looked as if it needed only a couple more spokes of beads, and the moccasin would be finished.
“This is beautiful,” I said.
“Kòkomis made it,” Ajidàmo replied to my amazement.
“But how can she?” I asked without thinking and immediately regretted my insensitivity.
But Ajidàmo didn’t seem to mind. “Easy. She’s very smart,” he said, with all the pride of a grandson. “She’s been making moccasins, so long she can do it in her sleep.”
His grandmother must’ve realized what we were discussing, for she held up its completed mate and said, “You want?” And before I could reply, she continued via Ajidàmo, the translator, “Try them on.”
The supple leather hugged my stocking feet as if the moccasins had been made for them. “How much?” I said, reaching for my wallet.
Kòkomis shook her silvered head. “No, no. It’s a gift. You brought this joyful flower and saved my grandson.” The boy dropped his eyes as he translated this last remark and became quiet.
After offering my thanks, I inquired about his health. “No bad effects from the drugs or the frostbite?”
“Nope.”
“That was a close call, wasn’t it?”
He nodded and left the table to play on the floor with the dog. I didn’t bother to voice my next thought. It was clear he didn’t want a lecture on the dangers of drugs.
I sipped my tea and watched the old woman finish the beading on my moccasin. Despite the arthritis in her fingers, she was able to pick up the tiny beads, which had been sorted by colour into different shaped boxes. She then slipped the needle through their imperceptible holes and sewed them correctly into the design. Amazing. I, with my almost twenty/twenty vision, couldn’t even sew on a button properly.
“When I was little, Kòkomis could see,” Ajidàmo said. “The doctor says she got carrot cats.”
“Cataracts?”
“Yeah, that’s it. He says he can get rid of them, but she says no. She’s got a medicine tea she makes from mashkìgwàtig.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a tree. I don’t know its name in English, but it’s like a pine tree, ’cept it loses its needles
