cover yourself with blanket,” Jacob told him. “I’ll wake you up when we reach the manido.”
Sometime later, a splash of cold water coming over the gunnels struck Oscar in the face. He woke up to see, in the grainy light of the predawn, the head of a blind chief emerging from the rock on the north-facing outcrop of a deserted island alongside that of a smaller inert guardian companion. As ancient as Turtle Island itself, its face was covered in lichen, its cheekbones were fractured and its nose broken. Inscrutable, it exuded profound sadness and complete indifference to the waves crashing against its base and to travellers who came to pay it homage. The old people said it was, in fact, the Creator himself in another form.
Taking hold of his paddle, Oscar held the canoe as steady as he could in the seething waters, freeing Jacob to light his pipe, and with his arms and hands outstretched, raise it into the air and offer a prayer to the unsmiling deity.
“Oh Great Manido, I beg you to protect two humble Chippewa canoeists from the wrath of the seven-headed water snake that dwells in the depths of this lake. I beseech you to allow us to travel in peace and safety to the Indian Camp. And bring us good luck, Oh Great Manido, as we try to catch a fish for our breakfast on this last leg of our journey.”
He then blew an offering of smoke to the statue and told his grandson to fish while he paddled. Oscar pulled the gear from a pack — an eight-inch silver spoon armed with triple gang hooks at the end of three hundred feet of thirty-pound test copper trolling wire — and fed it slowly into the water until it was only a few feet from the bottom. He gave the line a jerk, making the spoon leap forward, and a fish immediately took the bait. Oscar hauled in the line, hand over hand, keeping tension on the wire to keep it from breaking free. Jacob turned the bow of the canoe into the wind and held the boat steady until his grandson pulled the fish, a two-pound lake trout, over the side.
Jacob murmured a prayer of thanks to the Manido for answering his appeal and, clenching his pipe in his teeth, steered toward the mouth of the Indian River, a mile away. The final and most emotionally wrenching part of his journey was about to begin, for he was coming home to a place that no longer existed. He was coming home to Obagawanung, known as Indian Gardens by the first settlers. He had been born there in 1863, son of the chief and grandson of a veteran of the War of 1812 who had left the Rama Indian Reserve in the 1840s to look for a place where his family could live in peace away from the white man’s whiskey and religion. The veteran had found such a spot in the middle of the traditional hunting grounds of his people in a place so rocky and unfit for farming and with weather so harsh that he thought white men would never want to settle there. A dozen other war veterans and their families joined him and they built their village just below the rapids at the headwaters of the Indian River, six miles upstream from where it fed into Lake Muskoka.
5
Jacob had treasured Obagawanung when he was a child. It was a holy place where Mother Earth was most alive, where the people were part of the world around them, where the manidos were everywhere in the surrounding lakes and rivers and in the trees, the rocks, the animals, the fish, the clouds, the lightning, and the passing seasons. In the winters, he used go outside at night to listen to them whisper to each another in the mist that rose up from the current. In the spring, he would wait eagerly for the annual visit of the half-breed traders who came from their posts on Georgian Bay in birchbark canoes laden with guns, ammunition, and other supplies to exchange for beaver, muskrat, and wolf pelts. In the summers, he camped on an island in Lake Muskoka picking blueberries with his family, and in the autumns he went hunting with the men for deer and bear. He thought he would spend the rest of his life at Obagawanung, but one day when he was five or six, white men came and surveyed the lands, and the settlers arrived soon after.
Now, only half a dozen rotting log cabin homes, used as pigpens by the farmer son of one of the first settlers, remained of that world. With one exception, the graves of the inhabitants had been picked over by archaeologists seeking specimens of so-called primitive man to put on display in museums or ploughed into the ground by settlers years ago, leaving the shadows of the dead to wander without a home. The grave that was spared was that of Jacob’s grandfather, who had died of grief when told by the Indian agent that his people would have to abandon their homes to make way for the immigrants in search of land coming from across the Great Waters.
In bitter memories that he had shared only with his grandson, Jacob remembered, as if it were just yesterday, helping his father and the other men of the condemned community take his grandfather’s body one moonless night, when no white people were watching, and bury it at the mouth of the river at a secret place on a high point of land overlooking the Manido of the Lake. At that time, there had been no sign of human life anywhere in this part of Lake Muskoka. Now, six decades later, a gazebo had been constructed over the grave and shuttered summer cottages occupied building sites every two or three hundred feet along the indented and rocky shore.
Not long afterward, the police came with rifles and told the people they had to go, and they loaded whatever they could carry in their birchbark canoes and departed. Most would leave for a reserve on a rocky island on Georgian Bay and a life of poverty, but a few, including Jacob and his family, went to the Rama Indian Reserve seventy miles to the south where they had family to help them.
Jacob never forgot the white people standing on the shore cheering their expulsion, nor the huge piles of logs and brush burning on both sides of the river as they paddled away. His father told him the white people were making the point to the Chippewas that they could never return to their homes, that their time was over and that the time of the settlers had come. It was of little comfort to Jacob that the government later created a tiny reserve called the Indian Camp where his people could spend their summer months within the boundaries of the newly incorporated white village of Port Carling. If anything, it made him feel worse, since each time he paddled by the site of his former home he was assailed by thoughts of what his life might have been like if only the white people had shown his people some compassion.
6
An hour later, the sun was up, the wind had died down, and the ground was white with hoar frost. As they rounded a bend in the river, the two paddlers smelled wood smoke in the air and off in the distance they had their first view of Port Carling, a cluster of clapboard houses on both sides of the river, their windows framed with white-lace curtains and their backyards filled with chicken coops, privies, and half-empty woodsheds.
Twenty minutes later, they paddled past the Amick, a steam-powered supply boat owned by Jacob’s employer, James McCrum, moored to the government wharf. When the tourist season began, it would start its rounds delivering groceries, ice, and sundries to its well-off clients on the surrounding lakes. Up the hill, on the road leading off the bridge that spanned the Indian River, was the village business section, a row of one- and two-storey frame buildings with high false fronts to make them appear bigger than they were. On the other side of the bay, visible from the government wharf but cut off from the rest of the village by a ridge, were the two dozen one-room shacks of the Indian Camp where Oscar and his grandfather would spent the next six months.
A few minutes later, they pulled their canoe up onto the shore and Jacob took out a key to unlock the door to the shack he had built after he had married Louisa. The door, however, was ajar. Someone had entered over the winter months, but nothing, it seemed, had been stolen. The beds and mattresses, the linoleum-covered table pushed up against the window facing the lake, the chairs, the old cook stove, the pots and pans hanging from nails on the bare studs, the axe and saw, the woodbox, and the cutlery and crockery in the orange crates scavenged at the village dump and used as cupboards remained as they had been left the preceding fall. The smell of stale ashes, wood smoke, coal oil, and last year’s fried fish meals hung in the air. Sunlight streamed in through the windows devoid of curtains and blinds, but the building was cold and damp.
Oscar followed his grandfather into the shack and quickly checked his precious collection of books, bought with the money
