great warrior like Tecumseh, who rallied Indian warriors from across Canada and the United States to save Canada from the Americans in the War of 1812, only to die in the process. Or perhaps like John Brown, the white American who gave his life at the Battle of Harper’s Ferry trying to free the slaves. Maybe, like Tecumseh and Brown, he would sacrifice his life for a great cause someday. Maybe then his mother would treat him with the respect other kids got from their moms.
Oscar wished his father was alive and he could discuss his thoughts with him. But he had been just a baby when his father was killed and he knew him only from his framed black-and-white picture, in which he sat smiling at the photographer and seemed so happy to be wearing the dress uniform of the 48th Highlanders of Canada. The photograph hung in their house back on the reserve, beside one of Jacob wearing a similar uniform. Oscar often looked at that picture, trying to decide what sort of man his father had been. Lots of his father’s friends from the old days had told him stories of going hunting and fishing with him. How he used to run away laughing at the white game wardens when they tried to catch him. He was a throwback to the old Chippewas, they said, someone who could control his canoe in the most dangerous rapids, someone who was a crack shot, someone who never got lost in the bush, and someone who knew and respected the old ways. Everyone said he had a bad temper and once had got so mad at the Indian agent, whom he had caught trying to cheat the people, that he threw him down the stairs of the band office and broke one of his legs. The RCMP had hauled him up before a judge and he spent six months in jail.
Jacob told him his father had died a hero when the Canadian Corps launched an attack on the Germans entrenched on Hill 70 in northern France in August 1917. When he was old enough, Oscar checked out a history of the Great War from the library and read and reread the account of the battle until he practically had it memorized. Although he was proud of his father’s war record, he hated the Canadian government for sending him to his death and depriving him of a dad as he grew up. For as long as he could remember, he had wondered whether his father knew he was going to be killed when the picture was taken. Did he think of the newborn son he had never seen when he was dying? Did he regret he would never be able to take him fishing and hunting and do all the things fathers usually did with their sons? Was he sorry he would never be able to help his people before he died?
2
The train slowed to a crawl, moved across a bridge spanning the gorge over the Severn River, which flowed northwesterly out of Lake Couchiching into Georgian Bay, and climbed laboriously up a steep grade to enter the District of Muskoka. Twenty minutes later, Oscar and his grandfather were standing on the deserted platform at Muskoka Wharf Station as the sound of the train, with its load of passengers bound for Bracebridge and Huntsville and places farther north such as Timmins and the twin cities of Fort William and Port Arthur, faded away. Nearby, they could hear the groans of the steamers of the Muskoka Navigation Company rubbing their bumpers against government docks as they waited for the beginning of the tourist season and the arrival of day trippers from Toronto.
A minor official of the navigation company, a returned soldier who had served under Jacob in the war after he had been promoted on the battlefield to the rank of sergeant, had given his old army buddy permission to leave his canoe on the covered wharf over the winter. After confirming it had suffered no damage, Jacob and Oscar picked it up and slid it into the black water. They then took their positions, grandson in the bow and grandfather in the stern with their packsacks between them on the floor, and began their journey to the Indian Camp. There was no wind, but the ice had been off the lake for only a week; the night-time April temperature was well below freezing and each breath of air chilled their lungs. If all went well, they would be at their destination in six hours.
As Oscar paddled, the words and melodies of the hymns sung around the coffin earlier that night played over and over in his mind. At first he found them distracting, preventing him from concentrating on the things he wanted to think about on this special night on the water. But he soon gave in and sang aloud the words of his favourite hymn.
Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel-feet have trod,
With its crystal tide for ever,
Flowing by the throne of God.
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river,
Gather with the saints at the river,
That flows by the throne of God.
On the margin of the river,
Washing up its silvery spray,
We will walk and worship ever,
All the happy, golden day.
As Oscar sang, tears of exultation flooded his eyes and he became conscious of the presence of someone, of something otherworldly, and he looked up at the stars and saw the outline of a smiling face. Old Mary, he recalled, had once said that the old people believed that humans were composed of three parts: a body that rots in the dirt after death; a shadow that watches over the grave of the corpse as well as the members of the dead person’s family and closest friends; and a soul that travels westward over the Milky Way to reside in the Land of the Spirits. The Land of the Spirits, she said, was ruled over by Nanibush, the right hand and messenger of the Creator, whose power ran through all things.
It’s Old Mary, he thought. Her shadow followed me here from the wake, and now her soul on its final journey is watching over me as I sing out here on the lake in the middle of the night. And the soul of my father, Oscar remembered, travelled on that same road to the Land of the Spirits after he was killed in France.
Oscar sang louder, shouting out the words of the hymn to the starlit sky.
3
Oscar’s passionate singing irritated Jacob, but he said nothing. If his grandson found some comfort from attending church and singing Christian hymns, good for him. Personally, he found their messages of love and forgiveness, if you were lucky enough to be counted among the chosen, hypocritical. His service in northern France as a soldier had led him to equate Christianity with cities in rubble, the suffering of civilians, and the massacre of soldiers. A lukewarm Christian before he went overseas, he had returned with a renewed attachment to the Indian beliefs he had embraced as a boy and abandoned as a man many years before. Like many other things in his life, he kept his beliefs to himself.
Puffing hard on his pipe, Jacob thought of the disrespect his daughter had shown to him and to Oscar at the wake. He was not angry — becoming upset would do no good — but he was worried about her. When he had come back from the war, neighbours on the reserve had told him that in the years he had been away, Stella did not seem to care for anyone or anything. She drank, she ran around with any low-class white man who took her fancy, often disappearing for weeks at a time, leaving her baby with Old Mary to look after. She would return smelling of alcohol, her hair a mess and her body covered in bruises when she had run out of money and needed to cash her pension cheques. She laughed too loud, they said, and she became involved in brawls whether she was sober or drunk. She was unpredictable; no one knew what would set her off. She was more than willing to take on anyone in a fight, man or woman, old or young, big or small, with fists, feet, and fingernails; a piece of cordwood would do if she was losing. She was, they said, just plain crazy.
Jacob suspected the neighbours might well be right. At the turn of the century, he and three other men from the Rama Reserve were working for two white men from Toronto, surveying the hunting and trapping territories of the Ojibwa people who lived on the headwaters of the Albany River, deep in the northwestern Ontario bush. One morning, a birchbark canoe paddled by a Native glided toward them out of the early morning mist.
“Bojo,
