by Jay Forman
“And they want one about Webequie?” He sounded surprised.
I just nodded. Webequie wasn’t on the suggested list, but I’d never been very good at obeying suggestions and they had said I could throw in some unusual spots if I found any along the way. “What about you? Is this your first time going to Webequie?”
“Second time. I’ve been doing research over in Wunnumin. I’m coming to visit my cousin.”
I had no idea where Wunnumin was. “Your family lives in Webequie?” I highly doubted it. He was too tall, too red-haired, too just plain hairy, and way too white to be of First Nations descent.
“No, my cousin works in the area. She’s a prospector.”
“Is your research mining-related?”
“Not even close! I’m an accredited Sasquatch researcher.”
I had to fight to stop myself from laughing out loud and suggesting that his professional qualifications were on a par with claiming to be an accredited unicorn trainer. How, I wondered, did one get accredited in his field? As far as I knew no one had proven that Sasquatch or Bigfoot existed in North America. Or that his white-haired cousin, Yeti, existed in the Himalayas. The general consensus was that if something that big and hairy was walking around somebody, on either continent, would have found some solid proof. There was a reality show called Finding Bigfoot, but several seasons into the series they hadn’t actually found him, or her – they were still just looking. If Big Red dyed all his hair dark brown and let it grow out another centimetre or two he could just look in a mirror and save himself a lot of work. What could I possibly say in response to his occupation declaration? “Oh”, was the only thing I could think of.
I may have managed to hold my laughter in, but the woman across the aisle from me didn’t. She laughed and shook her head in disbelief. “Amitigoshi,” she scoffed, but not in a language I understood.
The man in the seat behind her understood it, though. He laughed so hard that it made him cough.
“Are there a lot of Sasquatches around here?” Was that the plural of Sasquatch? Sasquatchi?
“There’ve been a couple of reported sightings, but nothing recently. I’m just coming to offer moral support; my cousin’s dealing with some stuff, having a hard time. I left all my scientific equipment back in Wunnumin.”
The plane started to descend and I looked back out the window. The forest had been thinning out more and more with each kilometre we travelled north and ahead in the distance the trees started to look like cocktail toothpicks sticking up from a never-ending tray. Polar Bear Provincial Park was up there, stretching to the shore of Hudson Bay.
We dropped closer to a long, thin flat island in the Winisk River and I spotted a most definitely man-made short strip in the middle of it. South of the airstrip the island still looked nature-pure, but north of it was a collection of low buildings that were neatly lined up in straight rows along the shore on both sides of the island and along the two main roads that ran north-south. As we got closer, the buildings reminded me of the plastic rectangular hotels placed on a Monopoly game board, but the Monopoly hotels were red and most of the houses on the island were dirty white, verging on grey.
The pilot did a wide circle as a big white helicopter lifted off from the island and immediately headed east. I almost banged my nose against the window when I did a double-take and leaned in closer to the window to get a better look at that helicopter. Even at a distance I recognized the stylised blue design on the it – ‘Hughes Diamonds’, with the ‘a’ in ‘Diamonds’ shaped like a big diamond.
What the hell? Had Jack decided to surprise me? He knew I wasn’t a big fan of surprises. I hated them, in fact. How did he know I was going to Webequie? I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t lied to him. I’d just dodged the issue by feigning exhaustion after my Sleeping Giant hike as an excuse to avoid our nightly FaceTime chat. He had an uncanny knack of being able to read my face too well. He thought I was heading to Lake of the Woods to go canoeing and take photographs of the 5000-year-old rock paintings near Sioux Narrows. I’d planned to justify not telling him about my unexpected trip to Webequie by explaining that Blaze had specifically asked me not to tell him. But that wasn’t the whole truth. My trips, my job – they were mine. Just mine. And I wanted to keep them that way, whether I married Jack or not. Just like his job was his business, not mine. Auntie Em must have blabbed to him. My anger at both her and Jack was slightly diluted by my own guilt. I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was the one who was heading dangerously close to crossing the line between our independent lives.
The Hughes helicopter shrunk to a little speck in the sky as we bumped down onto the dirt strip, passed a large collection of metal oil drums stacked near the runway and a parked private jet that was smaller than Jack’s, and jostled over to three small single-storey, metal-sided buildings that were more like overgrown sheds.
Big Red bolted out of his seat and bounded down the steps to the airstrip almost before the pilot had a chance to lower them all the way.
“You go ahead,” I said to the woman across from me. I wasn’t just being polite. I wanted to delay facing Jack for as long as I could.
She took me up on my offer.
The man sitting behind her stayed seated and waved me on to go. “This isn’t my stop. I’m going to Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug.”
Part of me wanted to go with him.
Right then. I couldn’t put it off any longer. I took more time than was really necessary putting on my new, big puffy Canada Goose parka. It was so puffy that I hadn’t been able to jam it into my backpack. I took a deep breath and stomped down the steps of the plane.
I looked around for Jack as I waited for the pilot to haul my backpack out of the back of the plane, but couldn’t see him anywhere. Maybe he was waiting for me outside the gate of the chain link fence that surrounded the airport? The only vehicle sitting on the other side of the open gate was a beat up old pick-up truck. There was someone sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck but when he got out and started walking toward our plane it was clear that he wasn’t Jack. Jack would never have been seen dead in a baseball cap. Not only was the man wearing a baseball cap, he had a long ponytail hanging down out of the opening in the back of it. Definitely not well-groomed Jack.
A baseball cap seemed to be the headgear of choice for just about every man I could see on the airfield. And almost everyone was wearing a hoodie sweatshirt, instead of a coat.
I was the only person wearing a parka, and its shiny new whiteness made me feel very self-conscious. At least I was wearing jeans like almost everyone else, but my parka was so long on me that only the lower halves of my calves were visible.
Even though I knew I was in my home country I felt as if I’d entered a foreign land. I didn’t know the places or understand the people’s language and I didn’t look like them either. I was the antithesis of the heavy-set, dark-skinned, dark-haired Peacekeeper who looked through my backpack to make sure I hadn’t brought any alcohol to the reserve.
I was in a different nation in fact, an Ojibway nation – the Webequie First Nation, Indian Reserve #240. I was on a reserve. A First Nation reserve. That blew my mind.
I had to pass through the Wahta Mohawk First Nation whenever I drove from Toronto up to my home in Port Hamlin and I treasured the two little birch bark boxes that were embroidered with dyed porcupine quills that Da— … Stuart had bought for me from the Wolf Den near the Shawanaga First Nation just north of Parry Sound, but Webequie was different. It wasn’t a ten-minute drive away from the closest Tim Hortons or McDonald’s. It was the real, isolated deal.
Big Red heaved his equally oversized backpack up onto his shoulders and strode like a man on a mission toward the gates at the airport entrance. The elderly woman struggled to pull her wheeled suitcase across the bumpy dirt so I offered to pull it for her and was surprised by how heavy it was.
“Meegwetch,” she said. She’d used one of the Oji-Cree words I’d had Blaze teach me.
“You’re welcome.”
She seemed pleased by my understanding of her thanks. “You’re the one Blaze called?”
“Lee Smith.” I stopped walking beside her, let go of the handle of her suitcase, held my hand out to shake hers and used another word that Blaze had taught me. “Boozhoo.”
The creases on her face deepened to crevasses when she smiled. “Hello to you, too. I’m Elba.”
I let Elba lead the way toward the gates because I had no idea where to go. Presumably Blaze’s teacher friend would be at the school, but I didn’t know where the school was. And I didn’t know how I was going to get there. Not surprisingly, there weren’t any taxis waiting for arriving passengers at the Webequie airport.
The man from the pick-up truck walked straight to Elba and greeted her with a hug.
“Did I miss Marvin?” she asked him.
“Yeah, the Hughes crew just left.”
The Hughes crew … I should have thought of that. Jack probably hired lots of people from the reserve to work at his mine. That made much more sense than the thought of Jack jumping into his jet to spend the night flying across the Atlantic just to surprise me.
Elba and the man switched to speaking in Oji-Cree, using none of the few words that Blaze had taught me. The man’s long hair was jet black and the skin on his face was worn brown leather with very few wrinkles. His faded jeans hugged his muscular thighs so tightly that I could almost see the curves of each one of his quads. I thought he and Elba would switch back to English and introduce me to him, but I thought wrong. All I got from him was a curt nod and a cursory glance.
He lifted Elba’s suitcase up and put it in the bed of the truck with no more effort than it would have taken him to pull a tissue out of the box. “Sara asked me to bring both of you to the school.”
He held his hand out to take my backpack, but I was already trying to make it look like I, too, was capable of lifting it over the truck’s tailgate without effort. It took a lot of effort to make it look easy.
“Where did you think you were going? The Arctic?” His look of disapproval as he stared at my parka made me feel even smaller than my actual size. “Good thing we don’t have any snow yet; nobody would be able to find you if you got lost.”
“The white ones were on sale,” I said as my backpack crashed down into the truck bed. What was this guy’s problem? Whatever it was, it was his problem – not mine. I stopped myself from explaining that the parka wouldn’t fit in my backpack. “I’m Lee.”
“I know.” He was already opening the creaky driver’s door.
He didn’t need words, in any language, to get his message across: I don’t want you here.
At that moment I didn’t want to be there either. I’d never felt so unwelcome so soon after arriving in a new place. What a jerk.
****
Elba sat in the middle of the front bench seat of the truck. I sat beside her and stared at the scenery. They talked to each other in only Oji-Cree. I understood that it was their native language and that they probably felt more comfortable using it instead of English, but it would have been nice if they’d tried to acknowledge my existence in the truck. I almost asked to be let out when we drove past Big Red walking at the side of the road. His sanity was questionable, but I understood him.
We drove in the same direction that Big Red was walking. The muddy dirt road was a mini-replica of the terrain I’d seen from the plane. Instead of lakes, it was pockmarked with water-filled potholes. The truck’s suspension had the same brusque disposition as its driver.
The landscape didn’t improve my mood any. Sure, there were lots of trees on either side of the road, but they were stunted and the few evergreens weren’t nearly as lush as the ones in the forests further south. The leaves had already fallen from the deciduous trees and it took me a minute to realize that some of the bare trees at the side of the road were actually wooden hydro poles. I looked up and saw their wires stretching along as far as I could see down the road. Then we started driving by a collection of two-storey wooden homes. One of them even had a tepee in the front yard.
There were more dogs roaming around than vehicles, which made the stop sign we drove past rather pointless. All of the dogs were of the Husky variety. All of the vehicles were of the pick-up truck or ATV variety. I saw very few people.
After passing a big industrial looking building that had a ‘Northern’ sign on it we came to a fork in the road and I instantly thought of Robert Frost’s poem, but Mr Frost wouldn’t have had much of a choice in Webequie. Both roads had been equally travelled. I looked down the right one as far as I could and saw that there were houses on either side of the road, smaller single-story houses. All of them sat about three feet up off the ground and I wondered if that was because of permafrost. Was Webequie that far north? I knew so little about this part of my country. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could see the boards for an outdoor hockey rink further down that road and hoped we’d be going that way. Only in Canada would there be a hockey rink at the corner of No and Where. It would be a fantastic starting point for the article about Webequie that I’d eventually write. But the jerk on the other side of Elba turned the wheel to the left and took the other road.
We drove past more little houses, all of them single-storey, none of them in great shape. Minutes later we pulled up in front of a modern-looking, well-kept building that had a large wooden brightly coloured tepee at its entrance. It was more of an art installation than a dwelling. The grey, blue, red and yellow horizontal stripes on it reminded me of the colours the Hudson’s Bay Company used for its blankets, coats and scarves. A bright yellow sign on the side of the building told me that we’d arrived at the Simon Jacob Memorial Education Centre.
The school was strangely empty of people, both students and teachers. It looked like just about every other elementary school I’d ever been in, with the exception of the brightly painted First Nations murals on the walls of the circular reception area and the hallway we turned down. I stopped to look at the mural on the wall across from the classroom that my grumpy chauffeur had walked into. The brilliant orange sky behind two loons floating on black water almost gave off heat. The loons’ red eyes looked at me with a burning stare. The clean strokes and vibrant colours reminded me of some of Blaze’s paintings, so I leaned in closer to see if the mural was signed.
“You recognize Blaze’s work?” Elba returned to using a language I could understand.
“He’s amazingly talented.”
“He gets that from his Gogo.”
If Dodo meant grandfather I had a hunch what ‘Gogo’ meant. “His grandmother?”
Elba nodded. “They’re waiting for you.” She turned and walked into the classroom.
They? I thought I was just meeting Blaze’s old teacher? I thought wrong.
A little wisp of a girl, who couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old, was at the chalkboard wiping off whatever had been written on it. Sitting in chairs that had obviously been designed for someone of the girl’s age and size were three adult-sized men. My grumpy chauffeur was at the front of the classroom, talking to the woman who was sitting at the teacher’s desk. She had super-high cheekbones, a slender build and long dark hair and could have easily passed for a First Nations person if her skin hadn’t been so obviously Anglo white.
“Boozhoo,” Elba said as she entered the classroom.
The only person who acknowledged my presence as I followed Elba into the room was the teacher.
“Lee?” She stood up from her desk and walked toward me.
“Sara?” Finally, someone who looked really pleased to see me. Unfortunately, the little girl’s reaction to seeing me when she turned around was very, very different.
“Gee-buy!” Her voice trembled with abject terror.
“Mary!” Sara snapped.
Elba laughed, walked over to the girl, bent down, wrapped her arms around her and spoke to her gently in Oji-Cree.
“Sorry about that,” Sara said.
“The kids don’t see a lot of people with blonde hair and your parka’s really, really white.”
“What’s wrong with white?” Had I offended some First Nations custom?
“Gee-buy means ghost.”
“Seriously? She thinks I’m a ghost?” I immediately started to pull my parka off.
“Seriously.”
“I’m a person, honest.” I said to the little girl.
She just buried her head further into Elba’s thick sweater.
“Do you know Blaze Suganaqueb?”
The little girl nodded, without turning to face me.
“He’s a friend of mine. He asked me to come up here to visit your teacher.”
She turned her head just enough for one eye to be able to see me.
“I’ll take her home now,” Elba said to Sara.
“Any luck in Thunder Bay?” Sara asked.
Elba just shook her head as she shooed the little girl out of the classroom.
The jerk who’d driven us from the airport went with them and I wasn’t sorry to see him go, but once they were out of the classroom I wanted to run after him to get my backpack out of the pick-up truck. But Sara was already introducing me to the men who’d apparently been waiting for me.
“This is Chief Troutlake and Len and Gilbert, two of the band councillors.”
The chief and his councillors didn’t get up from their chairs; they just nodded as Sara said their names.
Even though the Bering Land Bridge Migration theory was questioned by some scientists and archaeologists, Chief Troutlake’s facial features strongly hinted at an Asian lineage. His headdress was a Toronto Blue Jays’ baseball cap. “Who is Jack Hughes to you?” he asked me.
Talk about a loaded question! “He’s my friend. Good friend,” I quickly added. “We went to the same high school that Sara went to, that Blaze is at, and we’ve been friends ever since.” Jack would have been hurt if he’d heard me diminish our relationship to just good friends status, but I got the distinct impression that the band councillors wouldn’t have been pleased to know just how close Jack and I really were.
