It was nearly noon when he reached the small cabin where he’d been born-and his sisters, too-where he’d spent the first twelve years of his life collecting fine memories that would remain strong even when he was an old man. The cabin stood at the edge of a pond. The water was still and blue and full of reeds along the edges. Wild grass had grown up around the cabin, and honeysuckle vines crept up the log walls. Henry came toward it slowly, with the knowledge that what awaited him there was little different from what the cemetery had offered. But he had nowhere else to go. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
It was one room, mostly bare now, with a plank floor. The table where his family had eaten was overturned. One chair remained. The black stove that had heated the cabin and on which his mother had cooked was there, the stovepipe still thrust through the roof. The frame of the bed his father had made for himself and his wife stood against the far wall beneath a small window that had once been covered by oilcloth. The oilcloth was gone. The bedding and the straw mattress were gone, too. He checked the cupboards. Empty except for a few cans with flour and salt and baking soda and one dented pot. He also found a can of kerosene that had been used to fill the lamps that were no longer in the cabin. Henry knew it was possible that Shinnobs on the rez had stripped the place, come and cleared out what was usable, but it was more likely white people looking for things they could take for themselves or sell as Indian souvenirs.
The floor was covered with dust, the corners hung with cobwebs. This day he did not feel like weeping. He wanted to bring life back to his home. He left the door open to let in the sunlight and the evergreen-scented air. Outside he used his pocketknife and cut pine branches with thick needles and bundled them together to use as a broom. He swept the floor and every surface. He cleared the cobwebs. From the cupboard he took the one remaining pot and filled it with water from the pond. His shirt became a washrag, and he scrubbed the place clean. He cut more pine boughs and laid them on the bed frame as a temporary mattress.
In the late afternoon he gathered wood for the stove and built a fire. He made biscuits with what he’d found in the cans. He ate the biscuits with the last of the blueberries he’d picked. Afterward, he sat outside and watched the night come on and tried to think what he should do. He was fifteen years old. His parents were dead and buried. His sisters were far to the east. In the letters they’d sent him, his sisters told him they liked the school in Wisconsin. The people were decent to them there. Henry didn’t want to go back to the boarding school in Flandreau, ever. He knew the white authorities would be looking for him. Maybe even some Shinnobs who thought it best to do what the white men wanted. If he went to anyone on the rez for help, it might mean trouble for them. The last thing a Shinnob needed was trouble with white men.
In the long dark before the rise of the moon, Henry listened to the woods, which were alive all around him. Tree frogs and crickets. The hoot of an owl. The wind dancing in the tops of the pine trees.
Even if they found him tomorrow and dragged him back to Flandreau, he was glad he’d made the journey. He was glad to be home.
TWENTY-ONE
Wake up.”
Henry felt a shove and opened his eyes. The words had been spoken in the language of his people, the first he’d heard in that tongue in a great while. Henry lay on the blanket he’d spread over the pine boughs on his parents’ bed. He rolled over to see who’d rudely awakened him.
It was not yet dawn. Barely any light came through the cabin windows. The door was open.
“You sleep like a deaf old dog, Nephew.”
Woodrow Meloux, whose Ojibwe name was Miskwanowe, which meant “red cheeks,” was not tall. Several inches less than six feet, he was broad across the chest, and strong. He wore his black hair in a long braid. His eyes were deep brown. He resembled Henry’s father in many ways, but harder. He had never taken a wife, never fathered children.
“Uncle.” Henry sat up on the bed and rubbed his eyes. “How did you know I was here?”
A leather pouch hung from Woodrow’s belt. He undid the pouch, reached inside, and took out a strip of deer jerky, which he handed to Henry. He sat on the bed beside the young man.
“Everyone on the rez knows you’re here. The smoke from the stove.”
Henry chewed on the jerky. He loved the texture and flavor, which he hadn’t tasted in three years.
His uncle said, “The whites were in Allouette yesterday. They warned there will be trouble if we do not send you back.”
“I won’t go back,” Henry said.
Woodrow took a piece of jerky for himself and gave another to Henry. They ate in silence while the sky turned red, filling the cabin with an angry hue.
Woodrow looked around the room and shook his head. “White people came here after your father died. They took what they wanted. They are like fat, greedy squirrels. They pile nuts they will never eat.” He stood up and retied his pouch. “We have a long walk.”
“I’m not leaving the cabin.”
“They will look for you here, and they will take you back to that school.”
“I’m leaving. But I’m not leaving the cabin my father built. I don’t want the whites or anyone else in here again.”
Henry got off the bed. He put on his government shoes and walked to the corner where the can of kerosene sat, useless without the lamps it was meant to fill. He removed the cap and began to spread fuel across the cabin floor.
“You have things?” his uncle asked.
“Only what I’m wearing,” Henry replied.
Henry took the box of matches from near the stove. He stood at the door with his uncle. He struck a flame and threw it into the wet line that lay across the floor. Fire crawled through the cabin like a yellow snake. Henry waited until he was sure the logs were burning well, then he turned away with his uncle and never looked back.
They walked for several hours, keeping to the trails, skirting Allouette and the cabins and shanties that spotted the woods. Henry knew where they were headed. His uncle had a parcel of land in the northwest corner of the reservation, a small, rocky finger that jutted into Iron Lake. It was far from Allouette, far from any other dwelling. Woodrow had named it aandeg, or crow, because the trees were a favorite rookery for the crafty black birds. His uncle had built a wiigiwam, a traditional Ojibwe dwelling, a simple framework of ironwood poles covered by bulrush mats and roofed with rolls of birch bark. There, in the summer of his fifteenth year, Henry Meloux began to live in the old way.
His uncle didn’t work at the jobs the whites offered most Ojibwe- logging, mining, serving the tourists who came north in greater numbers every year. Woodrow trapped and fished and hunted in the vast forest to the north, which the whites called the Quetico-Superior wilderness. Through an outfitter named Aini Luukkonen, who operated on Iron Lake near the town of Aurora, he sometimes agreed to hire on as a guide to take white people into the wilderness and see that they came out safely. Because he knew the northern forest and the lakes better than any other man, he was always in demand.
Through that summer, through the season of the wild-rice harvest that followed, through the long winter when Grandmother Earth slept and the time for storytelling came and passed, through iskigamizigegiizis, the time of collecting maple sap and boiling it into syrup, Henry Meloux watched his uncle and listened and learned. Woodrow could track an animal over stony ground. With his rifle, he could bring down a deer at over a hundred yards with a single chest shot, even in thick cover. From the shoreline, he could read the depth of ice across a frozen lake and see where to cross safely. He could take a canoe through white water and knew portages no white man had ever walked. He knew how to start a fire with tinder, flint, and steel. He knew the old way of making a bear trap. All this knowledge he passed to Henry.