It took hours to get to Minaki. Then I turned south and west into a broad bay and began searching its far shore for the inlet my sister described. I found it just as evening was beginning to fall. There was just enough time to set up camp and light a fire before the thick, dark blanket of night fell over everything. I sat up late. When the moon rose I walked to the shore and looked up at millions of stars. I stood in the presence of a deep and profound silence and did not feel the least bit lonely.
In the morning I found an old pit. I dragged a log over and sat on it. I had no idea if it marked the site I was looking for, had no idea if it was my father’s hands that had built it. But in the dappled light of that small clearing I chose to believe he had. I chose to believe that he’d held me in that clearing, clasped me to his chest, and cried tears of welcome then raised me up to the universe and spoke my name to it, introduced me to both it and the land around me in the language of my people, gave me both blessing and purpose right there in that small clearing so many years before. I sat there for a long time until the shifting light told me it was time to go.
I found my father on that journey. Found him in the shards of rock around an old fire. Found him in the scent of a river, in the ragged spire of granite cliffs, in the depths of the bush, and in the image of a ragged white pine perched alone at the top of a cliff lurched leeward by persistent winds, standing alone against time and circumstance, proudly like a prodigal returned to the land that spawned him.
I still have the dream, only now we run together into the light.
About the Author
Richard Wagamese, an Ojibway from the Wabaseemoong First Nation in northwestern Ontario, was one of Canada’s foremost writers. His acclaimed, bestselling novels included Keeper’n Me; Indian Horse, which was a Canada Reads finalist, winner of the inaugural Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature, and made into a feature film; and Medicine Walk. He was also the author of acclaimed memoirs, including For Joshua; One Native Life; and One Story, One Song, which won the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature; as well as a collection of personal reflections, Embers, which received the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award. He won numerous awards and recognition for his writing, including the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for Media and Communications, the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize, the Canada Reads People’s Choice Award, and the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Matt Cohen Award. Wagamese died on March 10, 2017, in Kamloops, B.C.
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