As Long as the Rivers Flow Read online

  “The Wendigo,” he continued, “is a half-human, half-devil monster at least ten times the size of a man, with breath that reeks of rotten human flesh.

  “You kids have all smelled animals who have been dead a long time in the bush or in the lake. Well, the Wendigo smells even worse. It stinks and it isn’t even dead! Its favourite food is fresh, living, human meat. During the spring thaw, human-hunting is really good. The snow is deep and wet and it’s hard for people to get around. The moose and deer can wait for the snow to melt, holed up in the swamps eating cedar branches. But the food supplies put away in the fall by the trappers are low by then and sometimes their families have nothing left to eat.”

  The old man suddenly leaped to his feet and lunged at the children as if he were the Wendigo, gnashing his teeth, snarling and beating his chest. And as the children screamed in terror and ran off crying and stumbling over the rough terrain beyond the light of the campfire, he cried out, “Watch out for the toad! Watch out for the toad!”

  Barely able to contain their laughter, the parents went to bring them back, telling them the old man was just pretending.

  “Oh no I’m not,” he said, frowning and picking up a hemlock bough that he hurled into the fire, releasing a shower of sparks that flew upwards like fireflies in the night sky and a cloud of smoke that left the people downwind choking and coughing.

  “Just imagine the scene, kids,” he continued, addressing himself directly to the children whose frightened eyes reflected the flames. “Just imagine the scene,” he repeated, leaning forward again, his voice barely audible.

  “The poor trapper is struggling through the snow. Each step is pure agony since the wet snow sticks to his snowshoes, and they become harder and harder to lift. His rifle and pack get heavier and heavier, and he becomes weaker and weaker, and soon he can barely move.

  “All of a sudden, he smells something so horrible it can’t be described! He hears whistling and bellowing that shatter the winter silence and freeze his blood. The earth begins to shake under his feet.

  “What’s this? It’s the Wendigo itself rushing at him, crashing through the bush, thumping the snow with its giant feet and hurling trees high up in the air.

  “The trapper raises his rifle and fires off a clip of .303 steel-jacket bullets. They hit the Wendigo.

  “Splat, splat, splat! They go right through its body, leaving great wounds and covering the snow with chunks of torn flesh and blood! But they heal right away and the monster keeps on coming.

  “The trapper can now see its huge, ugly fangs and the dirty slobber that hangs from its mouth. The stench is unbearable.

  “He doesn’t have time to reload. He throws his gun away, grabs his axe and hurls it with all his might at the Wendigo, burying its razor-sharp blade deep in its hairy chest. The fiend stops, but only for a moment, then pulls the axe from its body and tosses it far off into the distance.

  “Grabbing hold of the luckless trapper, it rips off his arms and legs. Just like you kids tear off the arms and legs of deerflies! And as the victim lies watching, helpless and in unbearable pain, the Wendigo gobbles them down on the spot, without even putting salt and pepper on them!

  “Usually the trapper dies and there is no more to be said. But if, despite his horrible wounds, he manages to escape and makes it back to his cabin, the story gets even worse.

  “For never forget, kids, if someone is bitten by a Wendigo, that person turns into a Wendigo with a great hunger for fresh human flesh. If the family does not get away in time, the new Wendigo will eat them for dinner and not even cook them first!”

  After a pause to let the children relish the horror of the old man’s tale, the other adults joined in to exchange stories handed down over the years about times of great hunger and starvation in the bush, and about people known to their parents and grandparents who were supposed to have been Wendigos. However, before going too far, the parents told their children that it was time to go to bed, warning them that if they did not obey, the Wendigo would get them!

  Martha and the others had heard enough in any case, and satisfactorily thrilled, returned to their homes to have nightmares about human-eating monsters until dawn.

  2

  Indian Residential School

  ONE EVENING TOWARD THE END OF AUGUST, Mary took her daughter on her knees, and in the softly cadenced tones of Anishinaabemowin, asked her to pay close attention to what she was about to tell her: Ndi kwesencisim gda dwenmin chi bsindman wha wiindmo naan wewenah.

  “You’re now a big girl of six,” she said. “It’s time for you to go away. Tomorrow, a float plane is coming to take you to a place far from here run by white people who will teach you to read and write. The older kids have already left and you will be the only one going.

  “I can’t tell you too much about what it’ll be like since I never went to school. My family lived so far back in the bush when I was your age, the Mounties couldn’t find us. But you’ll have friends and relatives there, and so you shouldn’t be lonely. You’ve been a good girl and I want you to do your best to get along with the others. Your father and I will see you next summer when we get back from the trapline.”

  The trembling mother hugged Martha and burst into tears.

  Martha was only a little girl with big, bright, black-wet eyes, blue-black hair, dark brown chubby cheeks and pudgy hands. In height, she did not even reach the waist of her mother.

  What was school anyway? Apparently she had to go there but she had only a vague understanding from overhearing the conversations of the older kids about what that meant. None of them liked it. Did that mean it was a place where kids were sent to be punished? If so, why her? She had been a good girl. Her mother had just told her so herself.

  Trusting, affectionate and with a ready smile, Martha looked up at her mother with inquisitive eyes and remained silent. Surely the person who loved her more than anyone else in the whole wide world did not mean it when she said she would be going away and not be home again for such a long time?

  But the next morning, Mary prepared her daughter to depart, dressing her in a new calico dress, putting up her hair in braids, helping her pull up the long stockings she wore each day to protect her legs from mosquito and black fly bites, and slipping onto her feet a pair of moccasins she had made for the occasion and decorated with red and blue beads in the shape of flowers. After Isaac gave Martha a long and silent hug, Mary led her to the beach.

  Soon a float plane appeared in the sky, circled the lake, came in for a landing and taxied to the shore in front of the reserve. The pilot switched off the motor, stepped out onto a pontoon and tossed a rope to the trader, who had pushed his way to the front of the crowd of curious onlookers.

  The trader snubbed the aircraft to a tree, and went over to where Mary and Martha were standing. “It’s always tough when the kids leave home for residential school,” he told Mary. “Especially when it’s for the first time. The sooner we get this over with, the better it’ll be for everyone.”

  The little girl did not want to go, and hid behind her mother. But to her surprise, her mother allowed the trader to take her hand and lead her to the pilot.

  Like the Indian agent, the pilot had served in the armed forces during the war. But he had joined the air force and not the army and had been sent overseas immediately after flight training to fly Spitfires in the RCAF. When the fighting ended, he had come north in search of a job, arriving just as the region was being opened up by bush pilots flying single-engine de Havilland Beaver airplanes on the lakes and rivers that blanketed the Precambrian Shield, using pontoons in summer and skis in winter. In time, he bought a second-hand Beaver for himself and started his own small business, happily flying prospectors working for mining companies into remote lakes in search of gold, silver and nickel deposits, doctors and nurses visiting the sick in Native settlements, Mounties investigating crimes committed in the bush, and fishermen from the big cities in the south looking for trophy catches.

  H
e was less enthusiastic about the work he obtained from the Canadian government ferrying Native kids to and from residential schools, even if it paid well. He had married a Métis woman soon after he arrived in the north and they had six children who attended a local school in a white community, and he couldn’t imagine what it would be like if he wasn’t surrounded at all times by his large and loving family. There was something fundamentally wrong with separating kids from their parents, but he had a living to make, a contract to do the work, and if he didn’t do it, someone else would snap up the business. Thankfully, his dark aviator sunglasses would hide his uneasy eyes from those of the little girl.

  The pilot carried Martha into the aircraft cabin and buckled her into a back seat.

  “It’s okay, little girl,” he told the uncomprehending child, “Nobody’s gonna bite you. We’re just going on a nice airplane ride. Once we’re in the air, we’ll fly higher than the birds and it’s so clear you’ll be able to see everything.”

  He locked the door and took his place behind the controls as the trader untied the mooring rope and shoved the aircraft away from the shore. After putting on his headphones, he waved goodbye to the people, gave Martha a smile of encouragement and turned the key in the ignition to fire up the motor.

  The roar of the engine and the sight of the propeller slashing the air panicked the little girl and she began screaming for her mother. But her mother stood unknowing on the shore, squinting into the sun, with her calico dress billowing out behind her from the back draft of the rotating blades and with her hands on her head to keep her kerchief from flying away.

  The pilot was all business, needing to attend to the flight of the aircraft, and he paid no attention to Martha as he taxied across the river, swung the aircraft around to face the wind and gunned the motor. The pontoons slapped the oncoming waves, and the aircraft, shuddering, climbed laboriously into the sky. With one hand, he adjusted the controls, and with the other, he pulled back the stick to bank the aircraft away from the rock face with the pictograph of the ancestors on the other side of the lake. After making a run over the reserve, he set his course for the Indian residential school at the mouth of the Albany River, six hundred miles to the northeast on the shores of James Bay.

  Earlier in the week, Martha had seen this same aircraft come and go, taking glum kids off to school. Each time, she wondered what it would be like to ride in the sky, but as soon as it was out of sight, she gave the matter no further thought. But now she was up among the clouds and did not like it. One minute she was standing with her mother on the shore, all dressed up and secure in her familiar surroundings, and the next, she was being carried away against her will to a place where none of the other kids wanted to go.

  The aircraft droned on and she grew drowsy and fell into a troubled sleep, dreaming that the man with the hidden eyes carrying her away was a Wendigo. She then dreamed that she was just having a nightmare. Yes, that was it. This was just a nightmare like the ones she had been having since the old man told the scary stories around the campfire earlier in the summer.

  She was really in bed back at the family cabin and would soon wake up and run to her mother and tell her about her frightening dream, and her mother would hug her and say not to worry. Her mother would promise to make her a dream catcher and put it on the wall over her bed to catch such awful dreams before they frightened her.

  The aircraft began to pitch and buck as it ran into thermal air currents rising off lakes and rivers on the hot August morning. Martha was jolted awake but believed that she was still trapped in her nightmare. Convinced the Wendigo had decided to take her back to its cave and eat her there, she cried out, begging it to return her to her mother. But the pilot paid her no heed and the aircraft ploughed ahead remorselessly through the deceptively clear morning air, plunging, jerking and heaving, but in no danger of falling from the sky.

  After what seemed like an eternity to the frightened girl, the aircraft began its descent. The pontoons touched down, the aircraft bounced upwards, returned to the water and settled down into the wake. The pilot taxied to a dock where a figure dressed in black awaited. After securing the aircraft, he turned to his now-sobbing passenger.

  “There, there, little girl. There’s nothing to be afraid of. We’ve arrived.”

  Martha did not understood the meaning of his words, but knew from the tone of his voice that he, at least, was not a Wendigo.

  The pilot unbuckled the little girl, lifted her from the aircraft and stood her on the dock.

  “Here’s a welcoming committee of one,” he said, as an unsmiling creature with unfriendly eyes, her head framed in something black and white and dressed in a black dress that came down to the ground, approached.

  Martha screamed and tried to hide behind the pilot as the apparition, which seemed to be floating rather than walking, advanced toward her. It had a large cross dangling from a rope belt around its waist, and a string of wooden beads and a smaller cross hanging down from its neck. This, Martha thought, if not a Wendigo must be a bearwalker. For bearwalkers were mean-looking and dressed in black, were they not?

  The pilot tousled her hair, told her not to worry and shooed her toward the nun.

  “Another wild one straight from the bush, I see,” the nun said. “We’ll soon tame her.”

  She seized Martha by the shoulders and shook her.

  “Now you behave yourself or I’ll give you something to really cry about.”

  Hysterical and convinced she was now in the hands of a bearwalker, Martha howled all the louder. The nun shrugged her shoulders, took her by the hand and dragged her up the road to the residential school, a three-story clapboard structure, inconceivably gigantic and foreboding. After pulling the little girl up the steps, she jerked her through the front door and hauled her down to the basement. Martha fought all the way. The nun tried to reason with her, shook her and yelled at her but Martha continued to shriek, her attempts to escape ever more frantic as the nun tried to remove her clothing and make her take a shower.

  Another nun, Sister Angelica, tall, with broad shoulders and wide hips and opaque black eyes, who was herself Native, stepped in to help. Like Martha, she had spent her winters as a child on the family trapline and her summers at her home community. Like Martha, she had come bewildered and fearful to this same residential school when she was six, but unlike Martha, she had not put up a fuss on arrival.

  In fact, it would not have occurred to her to disobey the nuns. Before being taken away to the school, her parents had taught her obedience by starving and beating her for the most minor offences. Sometimes, when they came home drunk, they hit her with their fists and threw her across the room of their shack for no reason other than for just daring to exist. When she arrived at the school and the nuns saw her naked little body, they were shocked by her badly healed broken bones, burn marks and masses of bruises.

  “Quelle bande de sauvages! “they said. “Only the most primitive people would do such things to their own children.”

  When her parents, returning home from the bootlegger’s one early winter night, took a shortcut across a lake where the ice was thin and fell through and drowned, the nuns told her that God had punished them for mistreating their daughter. And in time, since the little girl was quiet, obedient, and gave every appearance of being devout, the nuns groomed her to follow in their footsteps.

  “In the history of the Church,” they told her when she was old enough to understand, “many Indian women have accepted the call to become nuns.” They related to her the story of Kateri Tekakwitha, an Algonquin woman in the early years of New France who, despite persecution from her own family and community, had lived a life of such exemplary piety and service to others that she had become an object of veneration for members of the faith. It was the little girl’s duty, they said, to become a nun and to devote her life to the education of Native children.

  She accepted their guidance. When she was eighteen, she was received as a novitiate at a convent in Qu
ebec City and emerged five years later as Sister Angelica. When in due course she was sent back to teach the younger students at her former school, she made it one of her goals in life to find other potential nuns from among the Native students.

  Sister Angelica slapped Martha across the face to get her attention, looked into her eyes and whispered urgently to her in Anishinaabemowin.

  “God has sent you here for a purpose,” she said. “Now just do as you’re told and you’ll be happy.”

  It would be the last time Sister Angelica would speak to her in their language. Martha, however, even if she recognized the words, in her confusion did not understand what the nun meant. Sister Angelica, who was trying to prove to the other nuns that she was now a fully assimilated and civilized person by beating the children in her care, slapped the little girl again.

  The two nuns took her in hand, yanking off her clothes, throwing her calico dress, stockings and moccasins into a garbage bin, pushing her into the shower and releasing a wall of water on her as she lay on the floor. They dragged her out, towelled her off and sat her down on a chair. While her colleague held her down, Sister Angelica took a pair of shears and cropped off her braids and molded her remaining hair into a Robin Hood cut. After pouring coal oil, stinging and foul smelling, on Martha’s scalp “to kill the lice,” the nuns led the sobbing child to the girls’ dormitory where they outfitted her in government-issue undergarments—white blouse, grey skirt, black stockings and black shoes—to make her look like every other girl in the school.

  After they left, other girls, friends and relatives from home, gathered around, anxiously trying to comfort her and telling her the nuns were neither bearwalkers nor Wendigos, but in her state of agitation and rebellion, she did not want to believe them.