Speak to Me in Indian Read online

  © Baraka Books 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-77186-053-6 pbk; 978-177186-055-0 epub; 978-177186-056-7 pdf; 978-177186-057-4 mobi/kindle

  Front cover photo by David Gidmark

  Back cover photo by Julia Philpot

  Cover by Folio infographie

  Book design by Folio infographie

  Legal Deposit, 3rd quarter 2015

  Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

  Library and Archives Canada

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  To Ernestine

  Chapter One

  I

  “Why doesn’t he talk to us?”

  “He speaks only Indian.”

  The three Indian guides were readying canvas canoes for a day’s speckled-trout fishing. The sun was mounting the eastern slopes of the hills surrounding Lac du Rocher. Mist was upon the mirror-like surface of the wilderness lake. The lake was one of Earth’s eyes. The three guides and the three white fishermen had spent the night in the small lodge on Lac du Rocher. They had flown in the day before from an outfitter’s camp on Lac Brascoupé.

  One of the tourists, a large man, sat in the bow seat of Basil Carle’s canoe. Basil weighed one hundred pounds, and the white tourist well over two hundred; the trim was terribly off.

  “You can’t go like that,” said Jocko Whiteduck, Basil’s trapping partner and the foreman of the guides at Lac Brascoupé. Basil looked at the bow of his canoe, much too low in the water under the weight of the white fisherman, and he laughed.

  Jocko motioned to one of the other fisherman, a man who weighed around a hundred and sixty pounds, to change places with the man in Basil’s bow. “That’s better,” Jocko said, “It’s still not too good though.” He went to his own canoe, took out the heavy, wooden grub-box with the tumpline attached and placed it just fore of Basil in the canoe.

  The man in Basil’s canoe looked back, hoping that the canoe would soon be sitting level in the water, and that they could depart. “It’s not the best even now,” Jocko said, looking at the awkward trim. Turning to the man in the bow, he said, “Take the change out of your pockets.”

  The man had both hands in his pockets before he realized he was being teased.

  II

  Two white-throated sparrows and one wood duck called to their brethren that there were human visitors on the lake. The three canoes glided south across Lac du Rocher towards the portage. The guides in the stern paddled smoothly; the tourists much less so. In early August, a mist over the lake meant that the night had been cold but the day would be warm.

  Jocko Whiteduck and Basil Carle were Algonquins in their seventies from the Algonquin reservation in Maniwaki. Jocko was a strong, stocky man; age had brought a stoop into his walk. The fact that his family name came from the white duck (wabicib) and that he now had short-cropped white hair could be credited only to coincidence and age.

  Basil Carle was strong but extremely thin; the hair that came to his shoulders was gray, but not entirely so. His walk suggested — quite falsely — the feebleness of an old man. He was hard of hearing, but there was no one among the twenty guides at Lac Brascoupé more renowned for good humour and graciousness.

  The third guide, Angus Wawati, was a very powerful man in his early fifties. He was an Algonquin from Ottawa Lake, far to the northeast. He had dark, tawny skin and long hair, still jet black. His faced was unlined. Where Jocko and Basil showed a small admixture of white blood, Angus showed none.

  Angus looked older than his two Indian friends — not in years, but in epochs. Angus seemed as though he was from the sixteenth century.

  Ted, the man in Jocko’s bow, was tall, thin, quiet, and he paid close attention to everything the guides did. He’d been coming to Lac Brascoupé for decades. The other two fishermen — the big man in Angus’s canoe and the smaller one in Basil’s — were neophytes.

  The tourist in Basil’s bow talked a lot, which was one reason Jocko put the man with Basil.

  “Basil’s hard of hearing?” the man asked.

  Jocko said from his canoe, twenty feet away, “He’s been like that since the 1930s.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was working on the Gatineau River for the lumber company. He was with his two brothers in a boat trying to get a logjam free. They were using dynamite and it blew up. One of the brothers was killed; the other is alright. Basil’s hearing went bad.”

  “I know he speaks English well,” the tourist said. “I don’t have any trouble understanding him when he speaks, but I’ve got to do some ungodly shouting for him to hear me.”

  “Anin gai ikitotc?” Basil asked, wanting to know what the man was saying. Jocko told him that the man was inquiring about his hearing problem. Basil just laughed.

  “I’d swear that Basil hears better when you speak in Indian,” the man said to Jocko. Jocko didn’t say anything.

  Ted was paddling in the bow of Jocko’s canoe, paddling nearly as skilfully as the three guides, and with a minimum of talk. Now he spoke: “Basil has a gentlemanliness, good humour, gentleness, and considerateness that we’ll never match. Maybe it’s in their genes.”

  The talkative tourist: “I don’t understand.”

  Ted: “No, you don’t understand.”

  They paddled in silence for a while. The talkative tourist could not keep quiet for long though. “And Angus doesn’t speak anything but Indian?” he asked.

  Jocko by this time was hoping that they could just keep paddling without the noise. “That’s a real Indian,” Jocko said, in answer to the question, more or less, and referring to Angus. Then to Angus he said, speaking in Indian, “Maybe we should get a radio.”

  Angus didn’t say anything, but only continued his smooth paddling.

  Jocko liked Ted, the white fisherman in the bow of his canoe. Ted had been coming to Brascoupé for more than thirty years, first as a teenager with his parents. He’d been keen about learning; he was acquiring a knowledge of the woods. And the more time he spent at Brascoupé the quieter he became, something that Jocko appreciated.

  The friend in Basil’s canoe was making his first visit to the area. The fact seemed to be reflected in the man’s loquaciousness.

  “Ted, where’d you learn to paddle like that?” the talkative man asked

  “From them,” Ted said, indicating Jocko and Basil.

  “Do Indians know everything about the woods?” Basil’s canoe mate asked.

  Angus did not respond because he couldn’t understand; Basil because he couldn’t hear; Jocko because he did not think the comment worthy of response.

  The tourist rephrased the question. “Indians seem to know a lot about the woods.”

  Jocko, effacing himself and Basil in deference to
Angus, nodded in the direction of Angus Wawati and said, “He does.”

  Basil asked Angus and Jocko, in Indian, if they’d stop paddling a moment. He lit his pipe; then they continued.

  Off to the left of the canoes, a loon wailed. “She’s looking for her baby,” Jocko said.

  The sunlight was beginning to absorb the mist. Several white-throated sparrows in the woods on the shore gave distinctive whistles; they seemed enthusiastic about having visitors.

  A gray owl flew over the canoes. “He’s going to start his day’s hunting,” Jocko said.

  They arrived at the portage. As they brought the canoes up on shore, the fisherman in Basil’s canoe said, “How do we do this?” He made ready to pick up the canoe on one end to help Basil carry the canoe over the portage.

  “It’s best just to stay out of the way,” Basil said politely.

  “But you can’t carry that by yourself,” the fisherman asserted. He shouted the same thing to Basil three times, but Basil couldn’t or wouldn’t hear. He looked at Jocko. “Basil’s in his seventies, and he hardly weighs 100 pounds. How the hell is he going to carry that?”

  Jocko said only, “It’s best to stay out of the way.”

  Basil carefully shouldered the canoe and was off down the portage trail to the next lake. Angus and Jocko shouldered their canoes; Ted carried the heavy, wooden grub box with the tumpline, and the other two carried the fishing poles and the tackle boxes.

  At the end of the short portage, they came into Lac à la Bague. The three guides carrying the canoes and the three fishermen were winded, about equally. But the talkative one said, “Damn, you know, back at Brascoupé I was walking alongside Basil and Jocko from the cookhouse to the dock this morning. I had to slow down so they could catch up, and I said to myself they’re old men in their seventies. But I’d swear they walk faster than we do in the woods.”

  They put their gear in the canoes and started paddling through the marshy margin of the lake.

  “Acagi,” Angus was heard to say.

  “What did he say?” one of the fishermen asked.

  Jocko thought a minute to find the English translation. “That’s a blue heron.”

  “I don’t see any blue heron,” the tourist said, looking around on both sides of the canoe through the marsh. Jocko, Angus, and Basil kept paddling smoothly through the water.

  Then, when the fisherman had given up looking, a harsh croak on the starboard side of the canoes startled him. In contrast to the harsh croaks, the flight of the heron as it lifted from the lake was full of grace. They watched the large bird disappear over the trees at the end of the lake.

  They paddled on through the small lake — this one, like the larger Lac du Rocher, perfectly smooth in the early morning. The elegant canoes cut the aqueous mirror sharply but quietly and left in their wakes exquisitely sculpted little ripples.

  It was Basil’s tourist who betrayed the silence. “Maybe if we fished in this lake, we wouldn’t have to make the long portage to the next one.”

  Basil couldn’t hear; Angus couldn’t understand; and Jocko hoped that if he remained silent, the man’s thought would pass.

  They reached the portage at the end of Lac à la Bague. The canoes and gear were on shore. Ted again picked up the heavy, wooden grub box and was about to put the tumpline around his forehead.

  The fisherman who had been in Angus’s bow came up to him. “Ted,” he said, “let me try that gismo.” He indicated the grub box with the tumpline attached.

  “It’s heavy,” Ted said.

  “No offense, Ted, but I’m bigger than you are.”

  Ted helped him put the grub box on the small of his back while he tried to fix the tumpline comfortably on the man’s forehead. “Oh, God!” the man exclaimed as the full weight of the box drew back on his neck.

  “You want me to take it?” Ted asked.

  “No, I’ll make it,” the stout fisherman said as he started off down the trail, staggering every few steps. The three guides followed with the canoes. Ted and the other fisherman carried the fishing gear.

  The portage was half-a-mile long. Angus, canoe on his shoulders, followed the man with the grub box. The man stumbled and nearly fell. The trail rose. There was no way Angus could pass him on the narrow trail. The man tired. Finally, he stumbled and fell.

  Angus saw his chance. He walked up to the man and carefully put the canoe on the ground. His powerful arms picked up the grub box by the tumpline straps. He carefully fixed the tumpline on his forehead. Then he backed over to the canoe. Balancing the grub box on his back, he bent down to grab the canoe by the gunwales. As he lifted one side of the canoe up, he quickly put an arm around the bottom of the canoe, lifted it to chest height, and onto his shoulders. Then he walked up the trail with both the grub box and the canoe.

  The party had to go through a short, rocky channel at the small lake at the end of the portage. Jocko and Angus and their canoes negotiated the rapids first. Basil followed in his canoe with the talkative tourist.

  As they were passing the last rock, the fisherman shoved at the rock with his paddle. The paddle became wedged between two rocks, and the speed of the canoe caused it to break. Only quick correction by Basil kept the canoe from capsizing. Jocko, watching from below, gave a barely perceptible grimace that indicated impatience. Having only one paddle in a canoe would slow them all down.

  The fisherman, having broken his paddle, seemed to feel that not having to paddle freed up more time for him to talk. “Are we going to catch any speckled trout today?” he asked.

  Jocko, somewhat impatiently, said, “Oh, I think so.”

  “How can we be sure?”

  “Because you’ve got three good Indian guides,” Jocko said.

  “Monz,” Angus said.

  “What did he say?”

  “There’s a moose around,” Jocko said. Then he looked to the far end of the lake, half-a-mile off, squinted a few moments and finally located the moose browsing on the grasses in the lake. He paddled close to the other canoes. “Stop paddling,” he told the three fishermen. “Don’t make any noise.” Then to Angus: “Kit ijamin indi.” And the three Indians paddled the canoes quietly in the direction of the moose.

  One hundred yards from the moose, the three guides switched to a silent paddle stroke that kept the paddles underwater. They approached the moose within thirty feet until someone in one of the canoes moved his foot.

  The moose, still slowly chewing the weeds, looked up in the direction of the canoes. It turned and, in what seemed to be slow motion, ambled off into the woods.

  III

  At the end of the lake, the three fishermen busied themselves baiting their lines. Ted used worms; the other two used spinners. Basil smoked a pipe; Jocko exchanged a few words with Angus.

  The little lake where they fished was hidden from other fishermen. Were it not for that, catching speckled trout in early August would have been difficult.

  The three men soon caught six large, speckled trout, one for each of the party. Basil’s tourist wanted to continue fishing.

  “That’s enough,” Jocko said.

  “I’m going to fix a shore lunch,” Basil said.

  They pulled their canoes onto a low, flat granite rock that appeared to lie upon the surface of the water at the edge of the lake.

  “Can I help you with the lunch, Basil?” Ted asked.

  “Eh?” Basil said.

  When Ted repeated the question in a louder voice, Basil replied, “Why sure!”

  Ted cleaned the fish; the two other fishermen gathered dry wood for the fire. Basil took out two large frying pans and a small one from the grub box. Jocko removed the flour, butter, bacon grease, and camp beans from the box.

  Angus did a strange thing. He walked back in the woods about twenty feet from the camp and looked closely at a birch tree that was eight inches in diameter. He walked around it, assessing it carefully. He checked the sharpness of his medium-sized axe by pulling up his shirt sleeve and shaving
a few hairs on his arm. Then he started to chop the tree at the base. When the tree was down, he chopped a five-foot log, working slowly but well.

  Basil’s tourist had been busy gathering dry wood with the other fisherman. Bringing an armload back to the fire, he looked over at Angus for the first time. He was surprised, then incredulous. Jocko saw the tourist looking at Angus working on the birch log, and Jocko could read the man’s look quite well. The look said: “My God, doesn’t this poor fellow know that you make a fire with dry wood, not green wood?” Jocko did not feel that the incredulous look needed a response.

  Hitting the axe head with a small block of wood, Angus split his birch log into halves and then quarters. Then he put one of the quarters on a stump and began shaping it with his sharp axe. After taking off much of the wood, he sat on the stump and took out his crooked knife, a curved knife that he pulled toward him in quick, smooth, deft strokes.

  Basil laid several even, straight dry-spruce sticks over the fire to form a burning grate. Ted had dipped the trout fillets in flour and was putting some bacon grease in the frying pan. “Put a little butter in the bacon grease too,” Basil told Ted. “Not too much.”

  “I’m getting hungry already,” Jocko said. “Good thing you people know how to catch fish.” Despite his occasional scepticism, Jocko liked being with these white men — and he liked being in the woods.

  Basil had readied the potatoes and onions. Jocko took out the beans that had been baking overnight back at the cookhouse on Lac Brascoupé. He held the bean pot out to one of the tourists. “We call them camp beans,” he said, fanning the flames of his own enthusiasm for the meal even more.

  “Boil the tea,” Basil said to Ted. Ted found a long forked stick that he then propped at an angle over the fire with two large rocks. Then he took a large aluminum can with a wire attached to it, filled it from the lake, and hung it at the end of the stick over the fire. The other two tourists busied themselves taking out the plates and the knives and forks.