Journal of a Travelling Girl

by Nadine Neema

  “Seeing everyone work hard tonight, helping each other set up the camp, reminded me of Jimmy Bruneau’s wife,” he said.

  “Who’s Chief Bruneau?” I asked.

  “Jimmy Bruneau became Chief after Chief Monfwi passed away. His vision was that our children would be educated without losing our language and culture, that they would be taught both ways, our way and the white man’s way.”

  After dinner, I helped Auntie wash the dishes with the lake water. Then I went to find my friends. Like on the first night, this campsite is tiny, so all the tents are very close together. I found the girls and Kyle right away.

  “Look at the moon!” Kyle said excitedly. “I want to touch it. I think it’s moving. Do you think it might come down to us?”

  “No,” I told him. “The moon always stays in the sky.”

  “I think it’s trying to come to us,” he answered. “I think it wants to be our friend and play with us.”

  We walked around for a while. “How are you feeling?” Layla asked me, intertwining her arm in mine. Then her voice dropped to a whisper. “Is the branch helping?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” I wanted to say more, but I didn’t know what to say. I’d completely forgotten I had the branch, but I didn’t want her to know that.

  “I’m sure it will help you,” Alice said. “It’s helped ever lots of people.”

  We were too tired to play for long, so we came back to my camp and sat next to Grandpa by the fire. People were gathered around listening to him talk about Chief Monfwi.

  “A long time ago, Chief Monfwi signed a treaty for the Tłı˛cho˛,” Grandpa said. “It was called Treaty 11. Back then, we used to travel on the land, following the caribou during the winter months. We fed our families, made dry meat, and tanned the hides. In the summer, we would return to Behchokò˛ to trade furs and fish.

  “When the white man began to govern the North, our land and way of life became threatened. Chief Monfwi signed the treaty and said, ‘As long as the sun rises, the river flows, and the land does not move, we will not be restricted from our way of life.’”

  “What exactly is a treaty?” Alice asked Grandma.

  “It’s an agreement between us and the government of Canada. Treaty 11 was meant to protect our language, culture, and way of life,” she answered.

  “So the treaty was a good thing for us?” Alice asked.

  “Well, it was supposed to be. It opened the door for us and the government to talk, but it took a long time for us to understand each other. And over time, issues arose.”

  “What kind of issues?” Alice probed.

  “We and the government understood the treaty to mean different things,” Grandma explained patiently, “especially the parts about our rights and the use of our traditional land.”

  I didn’t really understand, but I figured it was one of those times when I should just keep quiet and listen. Mom always tells me to listen well when the Elders are talking, that I will learn more from them than from any book, even more than I would learn from her. Besides, Alice and Layla were very absorbed, so I nodded my head too. I have a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more about this on the trip.

  I’m curled up in my sleeping bag, holding the branch to my nose so I can take in its delicious fragrance. I put it down next to my face and slowly fall asleep.

  Day 4 :

  Hand Games

  I’m afraid to go to sleep. I’m terrified the Big Animal will come into my tent tonight. We never say his name because that can call him to us. His claws are huge and so are his teeth.

  The day started out fine. We packed our bags, said our prayers, and paddled away. We had another really long portage, but I didn’t get as exhausted this time. Then the wind became very strong, and the water was rough and choppy. Everyone paddled very hard. I was scared the water would come in the boat again, but I stayed low and didn’t say anything.

  We stopped for lunch on the shores of a big island. After we ate, people asked if they could throw their leftover bones in the fire. The Chief said yes because we wouldn’t be sleeping here. We never put bones in the fire in a place where we’ll be setting up camp because the smell could attract the Big Animal. But in the end, the water was too rough to paddle through safely, and the Chief decided we would be sleeping here after all.

  I’ll try to write more about all the good things that happened today so that I can forget that I’m scared. Like Grandpa says, there’s no use in worrying.

  After lunch, we had a great time exploring the island. The entire place is covered in a grey, mossy carpet. It’s so soft on my feet. A bunch of us went swimming. We played in the water and washed our hair. We jumped off rocks into the lake and compared who could make the biggest splash.

  Then we ran around the island on the soft cushion of moss. Little Kyle noticed that the moon was already in the sky. “Look at the moon!” he said. “Why are the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time?”

  Auntie Rosaline answered, “The moon and the sun are secretly in love. They are very shy, and in order not to show their love, one appears during the day and the other during the night. But sometimes they cannot resist, and they need to look at each other’s faces, so they both come out together.”

  “Oh!” said Kyle. “I love them too.”

  After supper, the men played hand games. I love watching them. Two teams sit in a line, facing each other. The men on one team do a kind of dance with their hands, each man showing a little object he’s holding. Others play drums and sing behind them. Then the men put their hands under their coats so they can hide the object in one of their two hands without the other team seeing which one. They pull their dancing arms out, and someone from the other team tries to guess which hand the object is in while doing his own cool hand gestures. If they guess the correct hand, that person is out, and he joins the drummers. I’m not sure exactly how it ends, but there’s a lot of cheering and exchanging of sticks when a team wins.

  “My dad told me that our ancestors used to play hand games as a way of gambling for things they needed,” Layla said.

  “What kind of things?” I asked.

  “Furs, matches, toboggans, dogs. Whatever they needed,” Alice answered.

  The men taught Kyle the rules of hand games, and he played a little with them. He was really excited to be part of it. It was ever cute. As the men sang, I felt like I could hear the ancestors singing too.

  Afterwards, I went back to my camp to sit around the fire. Grandpa was talking about the Treaty again and how it wasn’t properly respecting their rights and traditional use of the land.

  “Our way of life was being threatened,” he said. “So we formed a Dogrib Council to represent the four communities and negotiate a proper agreement for our people. This agreement is called the Tłı˛cho˛ Agreement. It recognizes our rights and brings alive the words of Chief Monfwi.”

  I asked Grandma why sometimes they were called Dogrib and sometimes Tłı˛cho˛. She answered, “Dogrib is the English word for Tłı˛cho˛. We began using it when we started speaking English with the white man. In our language we are called Tłı˛cho˛, and we are a tribe of the Dene People.”

  I really like hearing stories of how things used to be. I’m starting to look forward to ending the day that way. Even though it isn’t my culture, Grandma, Grandpa, and the others have always made me feel like family. I’m going to miss these nightly stories when the trip is over.

  Okay. I tried writing about the day to feel better. But I’m still scared. I’m still thinking about the bear.

  Oh no! I just said his name!

  I remember the branch. I grab it from my pocket and start rubbing it in my hand. My heart is racing. I feel sick to my stomach with fear. I want to run back to the fire, but I’m too scared to move.

  I begin t
o pray. I’ve never prayed on my own before. I’m not sure how to start. “Dear branch,” I say. That sounds weird. “Dear Uncle Joe.” That’s better, but I should include the Creator.

  “Dear Creator, Uncle Joe, branch, and all the ancestors watching over us. Please don’t let the Big Animal come into our camp tonight. Please keep us safe. I miss you, Uncle Joe. Goodnight.”

  I feel a little better, but I still can’t sleep. My breathing is heavy. I think about the songs of the ancestors. I rub the branch on my chest. That’s where it hurts. I want to sing one of those songs to help protect me, but I don’t know how it goes.

  Day 5:

  The Abandoned Cabin

  I’m so tired, almost too tired to write. Today was the hardest day of the trip so far.

  During one of the portages, I fell through the deep wet moss. I wasn’t paying attention, and my foot went right through to a yucky bed of muddy water. I was all wet and gross. Water went up my leg and in my boots.

  And the mosquitoes were killing me. They’ve been bad all week, but this was the worst. I thought I’d get eaten alive. I could feel them taking chunks out of my skin. I was itchy everywhere. I could hardly breathe without one going in my mouth or up my nose. The loud buzzing was driving me crazy.

  We did three or four portages. Two of them took at least three hours each. During one portage I asked what time it was, and Uncle Jimmy told me two o’clock. When I asked again at the end of that portage, it was already five.

  We didn’t even stop for lunch. We had snacks in the canoe and then portaged the rest of the time. I carried our tent, life jackets, and paddles. It was long, it was hard, and it was heavy. And there were bugs everywhere. We portaged up and down the mountains. Sometimes the land was soft and spongy, and other times it was all rock.

  Between the two longest portages, there was no clean water to drink. The lake that separated them was small and swampy, and we couldn’t drink from it. We had to fill up our water bottles before the first portage and make them last until the end of the second one. I ran out of water partway through. When we reached that next lake, I was so happy to finally drink again. I drank and drank. And then I had the hiccups so I had to drink some more.

  During one of the portages, the ground was too wet and too swampy to walk across. Uncle Gordie and other men cut down some trees to make us a bridge. I thought I’d be really scared to walk on the bridge, but I wasn’t. I thought of the branch in my pocket, and I walked across easily. I even went back to get more things. Kyle sat at the end of the trail, leaning against one of the canvas bags and smiling to himself, too tired to even play.

  Suddenly a gunshot rang out! It was so loud I thought I’d popped an eardrum. Grandma told us to stay put until we knew it was safe to go on. For a few minutes, we didn’t know what was going on, but then Uncle Jimmy appeared in front us, from the direction of the shot.

  “We spotted the Big Animal up ahead,” he said.

  My heart skipped a beat and I squealed, “What?”

  He looked at me and smiled with his missing tooth. “Don’t worry, Jules. Gordie fired a shot into the sky, and the bear left. The coast is clear now. Just make sure to stick together!”

  I was a little shaken up when we started walking again, but when the sun came out I almost forgot about the hulking beast—especially when we arrived at our campsite this evening and saw an old abandoned cabin. It was unlike anything I’ve seen on this trip and looked totally out of place.

  “Who built this?” I wondered out loud.

  “That was a prospector’s cabin,” Grandma told me.

  “What’s a prospector?” I asked.

  “A prospector is a type of explorer who looks for minerals,” she said.

  “They were probably looking for gold,” Alice added.

  Layla, Alice, and I went inside the cabin together. Kyle followed.

  “Ever cool!” Alice looked around curiously.

  The cabin was an abandoned mess. There was a rusty old bathtub and tattered curtain, a rickety-looking bed with a lumpy mattress that probably had stuff living in it, and a broken plastic chair. There was a wooden table that looked pretty clean except for the moulding papers and a large book sitting on top.

  “Why does it look like whoever was here left in a hurry?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, but I’d say that’s how things were done,” Alice answered. “The Elders have often talked about the mess that old miners left behind, how they never cleaned up after themselves.” She picked up the big book and began flipping through it carefully. “I wonder what this book is about.”

  “It probably holds the secrets of this place,” Layla said. Her eyes widened and her eyebrows rose.

  “What kind of secrets?” Kyle asked excitedly.

  “Never mind,” she said and smiled. “You’re too young to understand.” I didn’t know what she meant either, but I didn’t say anything.

  “It looks like some kind of field guide the prospector was using,” Alice explained, examining its pages.

  There was also a shelf with Magic Baking Powder, salt, pepper, sugar, and other spices, a kettle, and a frying pan. And a battered old outdoor toilet too. We ran around exploring. After we were done, we played tug of war on the giant sandy beach. A bunch of us fell into the water when the other side let go of the rope.

  I went back to my camp to change into dry clothes, and when I came out of the tent I saw Grandpa and Uncle Jimmy fishing. Watching them reminded me of Uncle Joe. I learned everything I know about fishing from him. I went to join them.

  I caught an ever-big trout that Grandpa helped me reel in. He and Uncle Jimmy caught some too, and Auntie Rosaline and Grandma prepared them. They scaled the fish and took out all the bones and made filets. We shared the fish with other camps. Grandma also showed me how to make bannock. What a delicious supper!

  I didn’t go sit by the fire tonight. I barely have the energy to write. I’m too tired. I have to go to sleep.

  I stretch out on my mattress. It feels good to lie down. I hold the little branch against my heavy head. I rub it back and forth gently and fall asleep like that. I wake up with it still pressed against my cheek.

  Day 6:

  The Old Grave

  It was another huge day of portages with ever lots of rapids. During one of them, two people stayed in each canoe and paddled through the rapids while the rest of us walked. I love those kinds of portages. We don’t have to carry anything. We walk across while our things stay in the canoe.

  We watched the boats arrive safely at the other end. It looked like so much fun. I told Grandma they should always take the rapids during every portage. She said it takes a lot of skill to paddle through the rapids, and it can be very dangerous.

  On one of the portages I got into a lot of trouble. It was an ever-long trail, and partway through there was a gigantic waterfall. A bunch of us went to look at it.

  “Ever nice!” Alice squealed with excitement.

  “It’s amazing!” I agreed, mesmerized. “I’ve never seen such a huge waterfall before.” The gushing water was so powerful.

  We stood and stared for a while. I wanted to stay all day. Then Auntie Rosaline said it was time to go. We headed back to the trail. After a while, I realized I’d forgotten my bag. I didn’t want to say anything and be told I was careless, so I just went back quickly without telling anyone. I thought, If I run, I’ll be back before they know it.

  I ran to the falls to find the bag. It was on the ground exactly where I thought it would be. I picked it up and almost rushed off. But the water was pouring down, crashing into the river with so much force. The roaring sound calmed me. I closed my eyes for a moment. I loved how the moisture in the air felt on my face. And I loved watching the water rushing around the rocks.

  I finally left and started running down the t
rail. The shrubs kept getting bigger and bigger, until I realized I wasn’t on the trail anymore. I turned back but couldn’t find the path. I was lost. I searched for a while. I was alone for a long time. I was scared.

  I reached into my pocket and held the little branch tightly. “Dear Creator, dear Uncle Joe, dear Tree, dear all the ancestors on this trail. Please help me find my way back. I promise I’ll be more careful. I’ll always listen, and I won’t wander off alone anymore. If you could help me just this once, please, I’ll pay attention from now on.”

  Just then, I heard Auntie Rosaline and Uncle Jimmy calling my name. I took a deep breath. “I’m here!” I yelled. I squeezed the branch, looked up, and said, “Thank you!”

  Auntie hugged me tightly. “Don’t you ever do that again!” she exclaimed. She sounded so happy to see me but also very angry. I tried to explain that I had forgotten my bag, but I knew it didn’t matter.

  When we got to the boats, Grandpa was furious. “You have no idea the danger you put yourself in. Never walk these trails alone. Always walk in groups. And never go anywhere without letting an adult know.”

  I knew he was right. “I’m sorry,” I said with my head down. “I won’t do it again.” And I meant it.

  The campsite tonight is enormous. From one end of “town,” where the first crew put their tents, to the other end seems like a mile. There’s so much space between tents and camps. I love how our village keeps changing each night.

  There’s an old grave by the water. It has a similar picket fence to the ones at the Wekweètì cemetery, but the wood is a lot older. And the pickets are round like the ones at the Prophet’s Grave. We all gathered around, and Grandpa prayed to the Creator to be with the man buried there and to protect us on our journey.