Medicine Walk Read online

  Furtive was a word he learned then. The old man showed him how to slip between trees like a shadow. He taught him to move with exquisite slowness, almost not like moving at all, so that every inch of forward motion seemed to take a year. He learned to wrap himself in shadow, how to stoop and crawl between rocks and logs, how to hide himself in plain sight. He learned to stand or sit or lay in one position for hours. He could slow his breathing so that even in the chill air of winter the exhalations could be barely seen. He learned how to go inward, how to become whole in his stillness and forget the very nature of time.

  Then he learned to read sign. Tracks were a story. That was the old man’s thinking. Every movement left the story of a creature’s passing when you learned to see it. The kid spent hours on his hands and knees touching the edges of paw prints with his finger to test the dryness of the earth. He learned their smell. He could determine how the spread of the print told exactly how the animal was moving. He knew a trot, a lope, a walk, the creeping, inching of a predator on the hunt, and the hunched and gathered fold of prey in shadow.

  “See this trail,” the old man said one day.

  There was a dim line through the bracken.

  “Yeah.”

  “See sign?”

  “No.”

  “Are ya sure? Look closer.”

  He walked to a stump and sat and watched the kid study the ground. There was nothing discernible. When he closed his eyes and breathed the kid got a sense of something. He knelt. He pressed his face close to the earth and reached out with one finger and laid the nub of it on the moist surface of leaves turning to rot. Then he turned them over slowly. In the mud was a coyote print, barely visible but there nonetheless. He looked up at the old man.

  “Coyote,” he said.

  “How old’s the sign?”

  “A day. But it rained last night. Could be two.”

  “Male or female?”

  The kid squinted at the track. “Female,” he said. “Not so heavy as a male. And the dirt’s pushed forward some at the front. She was trotting. Likely on the hunt or coming back with something for the kits. The den’ll be close.”

  “What colour you figure her to be?”

  The kid looked shocked and the old man cackled and slapped at his thigh. They followed the dim sign to a hillock and spent a few hours watching the coyote kits play outside their den.

  He shot his first deer when he was nine. He tracked the buck out of a marsh and upward through the talus onto a high ridge. There were times when the rock made it impossible to follow sign.

  “You know him well enough,” the old man said. “Go where you figure he’d go.”

  He found a slip of hoof in lichen at the edge of a table of rock leading into thin juniper. They wound through strewn boulders. He crept slowly with the rifle cradled across his chest. Finally, he turned his back to a rock and sat hunkered down on his haunches. He bolted a shell into the breech of the gun. Slowly. Silently. He looked across at the old man and nodded. Then he rose to a crouch and made his way around the boulder. They were at the edge of an alpine meadow. Nothing moved. The kid sat with a stump at his back, staring out across the wide expanse. Nothing stirred. Finally, a shadow eked out of the cover of a small copse of stunted pine. The buck was a juvenile but large. The kid didn’t move. He barely breathed. When the buck turned into the wind and showed his flank he raised the rifle off his knees and pressed the butt into his shoulder. The shot clapped and echoed off the surrounding ridges and slopes. The buck dropped where he’d stood and the kid and the old man walked slowly across the meadow without speaking. For years he would recall the crackle of their footsteps through the dry underbrush and moss and the feel of the old man’s hand between his shoulder blades.

  It was a clean heart shot. The buck died instantly. The kid stood looking down at it and there were tears suddenly. He wept quietly and the old man stood by and waited. When he wiped at his nose with his sleeve the old man handed him a knife.

  “Cut the throat, Frank,” he said.

  When the slash was made the old man drew a smear of blood with two fingers and turned the kid’s face to him with the other hand. He made a pair of lines with the blood on each of his cheeks and another on his chin and a wavy line across his forehead. His face was calm and serious. “Them’s your marks,” he said.

  The kid nodded solemnly. “Because I’m Indian,” he said.

  “Cuz I’m not,” the old man said. “I can’t teach you nothing about bein’ who you are, Frank. All’s I can do is show you to be a good person. A good man. You learn to be a good man, you’ll be a good Injun too. Least ways, that’s how I figure it works. Now you gotta give thanks.”

  “Thanks?”

  “To the buck. He’s gonna feed us for a good while, gonna give us a good hide to tan. So you pray and say thank you for his life on accounta he’s takin’ care of your life now. Our life. It’s a big thing.”

  “How do I do that?”

  The old man looked up at the sky. “I was never much for prayer. Least, not in the church way. But me, I figure everything’s holy. So when I say somethin’ I always just try’n feel what I feel and say whatever comes outta that. Always been good enough for me.”

  “I feel sad,” the kid said.

  “Yeah. I know. Speak outta that, Frank. What you say’ll be true then.”

  The old man walked off and sat on a fallen log. The kid stood over the body of the buck and looked down at it. Then he knelt and put a hand on its shoulder. It was warm, the fur felt alive under his palm. He closed his eyes and let the sadness fall over him again. When the tears came he spoke.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry about this. Whenever I come here, I’ll think of you. I promise.”

  It was all he could think to say. After a time he stood and wiped snot off on his sleeve. He looked up into a mackerel sky easing toward sunset. The act of praying made him feel hollow and serene all at the same time. It was an odd feeling but he felt better for having done it. A wind rose out of the west. It would rain soon. They’d have to work fast to field dress the buck and haul it down the ridge to where they’d left the horses. He looked at the old man sitting on the downed log staring up into the same sculpted sky. He followed the angle of his gaze and watched the sky again. Blue. He thought he understood what that meant now.

  The gun became his when he turned eleven. By then he’d dropped moose and elk and black bear. He could track all of them through any kind of terrain and territory and the shots he took were always planned, sure, and deliberate. He learned the value of ammunition. He never wasted a shot. He tracked and waited and bided his time until the animal offered the best possible target. He never rushed. The old man taught him that a hunt was a process. There was a scale and a tempo to it that the land and the animal determined. A man, or a kid, could set themselves into that rhythm and follow it. When he did the kid found that time didn’t matter. What mattered was the process. He learned to pray before he went out and he learned to pray when he returned with game. Framed like that, a hunt became a ceremony. That was the old man’s word.

  “Got to come to know that things get taken care of, Frank,” he said. “Me, I don’t know if I ever got cozy with the word ‘God,’ but I know something’s makin’ sense out of all of this. Man’s gotta trust that somehow. So I figure, what the heck? Even if I’m wrong, there’s worse ways to live than stopping to thank the mystery for the mystery.”

  He liked that. When he stood out on the land he could feel it. It lay in the sense of being hollow and serene like he had felt after he shot the buck. It was in the sure heft of the gun in the crook of his arm and the knowledge that he could take what he needed and use it. Most of all, it was in the process of tracking game, letting himself slip out of the bounds of what he knew of earth, and outward into something larger, more complex and simple all at once. He had no word for that. Asked to explain it, he wouldn’t have been able to, but he understood how it felt against his ribs when he breathed night a
ir filled with the tang of spruce gum and rich, wet spoil of bog. That particular magic that existed beyond words, beyond time, schools, plans, lofty thinking, and someone else’s idea of what mattered. The kid went to the land. It was all he needed. The gun anchored him there. It was how he came to understand the value of living things, by his ability to remove them. Taking life was a solemn thing. Life was the centre of the mystery. The gun was his measure. His hand on the velvet flank of the deer. A cry born of a loss he slowly came to understand was part of him forever.

  7

  “OKAY,” HE SAID. “But I gotta know what the deal is.”

  His father sat on the edge of the bed, half dressed and the bony feet of him stuck out between cast-off clothing and junk, stark and pale as dead fish. He was smoking and he held it between the tips of fingers that were yellow brown and quivering. Deirdre sat beside him.

  “What deal?” his father asked.

  “How do you know you’re getting ready to die?”

  “The liver,” he said. “She’s shot. All kinds of crap making its way into my body now.”

  “From drinking, I suppose.”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked at his father sombrely and felt his anger rise. “But you don’t know it’s the end.”

  “I feel it coming on now. Some days I’m good for nothing. Today’s one of the good ones. I shake a lot. Sweat then cold. Sometimes both at the same time.”

  His father reached under the bed and pulled out a bottle and twisted the cap off and drank. He closed his eyes and breathed out heavy and lay back on the mattress with his head against Deirdre’s thigh. The woman looked at the kid and licked her lips and he could see the struggle for expression in the glassy booziness of her eyes.

  “And you think I’m the one knows how to take care of you at the end.” He looked over at the woman. “You know what he’s askin’?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “You all right with it?”

  “He’s an Indian.”

  “That says it all for you, I suppose.”

  “We all got a right to go out the way we want,” she said and smoothed the hair off his father’s brow and traced the lines of his face with one finger. The blue nail polish was chipped and broken and when she raised the hand back up to her own face it trembled and she reached for the bottle in his father’s fist. She drank and regarded the kid.

  There were no words in him and he stood and looked at them and pinched his lips together grimly. He raised a hand as if to let it lead him to words but all he could do was curl it into a fist and shake it in the air. Then he turned and walked out the door and slammed it behind him. He strode down the hallway and stopped at the head of the stairs. He wanted fresh air. He wanted the street and the feeling of escape that would come from walking away. He paused and looked around him at the dilapidated ruin of the house. The handrail wobbled in his grip. He closed his eyes and wished for the old man’s counsel and the familiar air of the farm. But all he could hear was the sound of his heart hammering in his chest so that he sat on the stairs and put his head in his hands and rocked slowly back and forth until he felt it pass. Then he stood and turned and put one foot on the stair above. “Damn,” he muttered and walked back to the room.

  They were laying on the bed now, his father with a ragged shirt draped over him unbuttoned and hanging off his frame.

  “I ain’t packed for this. I’m gonna need some things,” he said. “Rope, snare wire, fishing line, hooks, matches, a hatchet, and one of them folding pick axes and shovel, a pack. The forty I give out was most of what I had.”

  “Deirdre,” his father said.

  She rolled over on to her side and reached down beside the bed and came up with a cracked old leather bag. She rummaged around in it and brought out a clump of bills. She held it out toward the kid.

  “There’s enough there,” she said.

  “Jesus,” he shook his head and looked toward his father.

  “Bring me back a bottle for now and a few for the trip,” his father said. “It don’t matter much now.”

  He looked at the kid and waved him off. The kid buttoned his mackinaw and when he looked up they were both watching him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “She said you favour me.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Around the eyes and how your mouth sits,” she said and gave a small grin.

  The kid let his gaze sweep around the room; the gathering of tools, worn and broken and unused for years. “You sure you’re ready for this? We still ain’t made a move yet.”

  “I’m sure.”

  He stared at his feet a moment then nodded without looking up. “I’ll bring the horse,” he said.

  He strode to the door and swung it open and turned and looked back at them. His father lay with his eyes closed with his cheek against the woman. She was propped up against the wall on three thin pillows, swathed in cheap sheets and a pilled wool blanket. Her hands were reaching down, cradling his face in her palms, and her expression reminded the kid of the Madonna and he stood and watched a moment as a solitary tear slid from one eye and travelled slowly down her face, hung on the cliff of her chin, and then dropped onto his father’s brow. She smoothed it into his skin with one finger and when she looked up at the kid she raised the finger to her mouth and licked it and he nodded solemnly to her and stepped out into the hallway and eased the door closed behind him.

  He led the horse up out of the dinginess of the river edge and on through the merchant strip. His father rode sloppily, fighting to find the rhythm of the horse with both hands clutched around the saddle horn. The horse neighed and shook her head around at the rough weight and the kid had to keep a tight hand on the halter. It was mid-morning and the shops were busy with the regular flow of housewives, delivery people, and rural folk in town for supplies. People stopped and stared openly. His father kept his head down, more out of a desire to sit the horse, the kid thought, than any discomfort at the gaze of the townsfolk. The pack was cumbersome and he’d have to reload it once they were out of town and he shrugged and tried to settle it better and each time he did the horse kicked up some. The scrape and rattle of hoofs on the pavement drew more looks and the kid did his best to stay focused on the road. He didn’t like attention. He’d always done his business here quickly, never straying or altering from the list in his mind, never speaking more than what was due and moving as quietly and as efficiently as he did on the trail. Now he kept his eyes straight ahead and pulled firmly on the halter. He felt ashamed, as though everyone knew the nature of his journey, could discern from the look of him that his father would not return, and he kept his eyes on the road and walked.

  Once they were beyond the main street the walking was easier and they made better time. Still, the motor traffic unsettled the horse and when she shimmied his father grumbled and cussed and leaned back in the saddle and swayed.

  “Just sit the damn horse,” he said.

  “Tryin’,” his father said.

  “Not hardly.” He found the dim trail that led down from the mountain and once he walked the horse on to it he could feel her relax. There was the crunch and shuttle of gravel under her hoofs and even with the taint of the mill the air was cleaner and the kid inhaled deeply and set his shoulders into the walk up out of the river valley. When the grade sharpened his father leaned forward in the saddle and the kid could smell the fetid breath of him again, all booze and tobacco and a rotted high smell like a dead thing. He turned up his nose at it and pulled the horse harder up the grade. His father grunted at the effort of holding on to the saddle horn. When they crested the ridge and eased out onto the flat the kid was sweating and he stopped the horse and wiped at his brow with the sleeve of his coat. Then he wrestled the pack from his back and reached for the canteen draped off the saddle. While he drank, his father sat upright in the saddle, looking down at the town and the roiling of the mill stacks against the green wall of mountain and the perpendicular push of the sky.<
br />
  “Lived here a long time,” he said.

  “Yeah?” the kid said, sloshing a handful of water across his face.

  “I’ll miss it.”

  “What’s there to miss?”

  “You get known somewhere, it hangs on you.”

  The kid leaned the pack against a log and began to sort it out for balance. His father had only brought an extra set of clothes and he’d bought himself a sweater and a pair of dungarees and socks with the money the woman had given him. He settled the clothes in the main compartment and arranged the bush things and the booze in the side pockets. Then he used some of the rope to lash the breakdown pick and shovel and hatchet to the sides. When he was satisfied he lifted the pack with one hand and tried it for heft and balance. It sat right in his hand and he clipped the hasps closed and set it back against the log.

  “We got no food,” his father said.

  “Don’t need food.”

  “Plan on starvin’?”

  “Plan on gettin’ us what we need.”

  “Don’t got a gun.”

  “Don’t need no gun either.”

  “You’re the boss, I guess.”

  “That’s right.” The kid kicked at the dirt and then took another swig from the canteen. His father hauled a bottle out from inside his coat and tilted it up and drank a few hard swallows then cupped a hand over his mouth and his chest heaved some.

  “You wanna be takin’ it easy on that,” the kid said.

  “It’s just for the sick. Calms me down.”

  “If you can’t sit the damn horse, we ain’t going nowhere.”

  He handed the bottle down and the kid stuck it in the pack. When he swung it up onto his back his father nudged the horse with his heels and she stepped forward farther onto the shale and gravel of the flat overlooking the river valley. He leaned forward so his forearms rested on the horn and swept his gaze along the serpentine wind of the river and over the jut of the town before settling on the stained edge of the sullen and downtrodden neighbourhood they’d left that morning. He nodded and raised a hand to it, purse-lipped and solemn.