Medicine Walk. Richard Wagamese

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СКАЧАТЬ remember and showed him how to approach it, honour it, he said, and the kid had sensed the import of those teachings and learned to listen and mimic well. When he was nine he’d gone out alone for the first time. Four days. He’d come back with smoked fish and a small deer and the old man had clapped him on the back and showed him how to dress venison and tan the hide. When he thought of the word father he could only ever imagine the old man.

      He sat on the fence rail and rolled another smoke, looking at the spot where the coyotes had disappeared. The spirit of them still clung to the gap in the trees. But the kid could feel them in the splayed moonlight and for a time he wondered about journeys, about endings, about things left behind, questions that lurk forever in the dark of attic rooms, un spoken, unanswered, and when the smoke was done he crushed it out on the rail and cupped it in his palm while he walked back to the barn in the first pale, weak light of dawn.

6

      THE FIRST THING HE REMEMBERED was the gun. He must have been three or four. It hung above the mantel of the stone fireplace and to him then, it seemed like it owned a silent form of magic. It seemed to hang suspended above everything, silent, calm, drawing all the light to it. It felt as though it rang with stories and adventures. He could sit for hours and just stare at it, waiting for the tales to fall.

      Now and then the old man took it down and set it in the middle of the hard plank table and he and the kid would just look at it together.

      “Can I?” he’d ask.

      “Go on then,” the old man would say, and the kid would reach both hands out and slide it slowly across the table so it lay lengthwise in front of him. He’d run his hands along the length of it. He’d come to love the feel of it on his palms. The slick, oiled blue-black of the barrel. The polished girth of the mount and the stock. The checkered and deliberate feel of the pistol grip. He’d poke the trigger guard with one finger, letting it swirl slowly around the bend and back before slipping it in and feeling the glassine curl of the trigger itself against the inside bend of his first knuckle.

      He’d always look at the old man then, thrilled at all the magic he could feel alive in that curl of metal.

      “What is she?” the old man would ask.

      “She’s a Lee-Enfield carbine,” the kid would say.

      “And what does she shoot?”

      “She shoots 18-grain 30.30 bullets in a brass casing.”

      “Shoot at what?” the old man would press though he was always grinning.

      “Bear, moose, elk, wolves. Anything bigger than a bobcat.” It was the kid’s stock answer.

      “Why?” The old man would always lean his elbows on the table and cock one eyebrow at him.

      The kid would purse his lips together, feigning deep concentration even though the both of them knew the old routine by heart.

      “Because you can’t tan a hide in pieces,” he would say, and the old man would cackle like he always did when he laughed and slap a hand on the table. Then he let the kid hold the gun.

      He knew the names of all the parts by the time he was four. He could break it down and reassemble it by the time he turned five and he became the gun cleaner and caretaker from that moment on. He knew how to oil the rifling in the barrel and how to bring the outside metal to a dull blue sheen. He took care to ensure that the trigger held just enough slickness to make it cool and reassuring to the touch. He rubbed the stock and grip with wood oil and used a light file on the checkering of the grip. He could handle it with his eyes closed.

      “Man shoots he’s gotta know what he’s shootin’ with,” the old man said. “No good to hunt with a stranger. Ever.”

      “She’s a tool,” the kid said.

      “Damn straight,” the old man would say and tousle his hair. “And what do you know about tools, Frank?”

      “They’re only as good as the care you give them,” he’d say proudly.

      “Won’t ever learn no better truth than that, Frank. See ya keep it.”

      He did. The old man got to trust the condition of the gun every time he took it down. But he always made sure the kid watched him check it out. When he was satisfied he would load the clip and shove it in the pocket of his orange hunting jacket and give it a firm pat. He never said a word. He didn’t need to. The kid’s eyes drank in every move.

      When he was seven the old man taught him to shoot. At first he plinked away at cans with an old .22. He got so he could hit them from a kneeling position, flat on his belly, and standing with the gun braced against his hip.

      “Sometimes you got no proper time to raise it,” the old man said. “Gotta know how to fire on the rise. Save your life someday. You watch.”

      The kid shot targets for a year. The old man gradually increased the distance until he could hit a bleach bottle hung from a branch from two hundred yards out every time. He learned to shoot with the wind, how to calculate drift, to know how much a bullet would drop over a long stretch of ground and how the impact decreased at the same time.

      “Gotta hit what you shoot at and you gotta drop it.” The old man made him repeat that to himself over and over until it lived in his head like a nursery rhyme. “Ain’t right to let nothing suffer.”

      “Gotta drop it.” It became the mantra he spoke to himself at his school desk.

      He never did take to school. In the beginning it terrified him. The beat-up old bus would pick him up and he’d be surrounded by yelling, screaming, frantic kids whose noise hurt his ears. Then they’d be made to sit in silent rows with their feet tucked together under the desk and their hands loosely folded on the top. The teachers talked too fast and they never repeated things like the old man did until he could cotton on to them, and he got lost easily.

      He knew his numbers and his letters. The old man had taught him that. He knew bushels, pecks, pounds, and ounces from harvesting, sacking grain, and feeding stock. He knew to write lists of food and chores that needed doing and letters the old man made him write to the man who came around every now and then to drink in the kitchen and eye him whenever he walked through the room. He could count and figure and write better than the others, but the lessons made no sense to him. Nothing seemed built to help him plow five acres with a mule, help deliver a breeched calf, or harvest late fall spy apples, so he mostly let the words fall around him.

      The school kids left him alone. He was the only Indian kid and they didn’t trust him. He didn’t hold out much trust for them either. They were mostly town kids who’d never gutted a deer or cut a dying heifer out of a tangle of barbed wire. They lived for games and play and talk, and the kid was used to being talked to and treated like a man. The edges of the schoolyard where he could get an eyeful of the trees poked up along the northeast ridge where he snared rabbits and shot squirrels became where he spent his time.

      The teachers called him aloof and cold. They called him difficult. They sent letters home that the old man would read and then toss into the fire.

      “No one’s meaning you over there, are they?” he’d ask.

      “No. They mostly let me be.”

      “Good. СКАЧАТЬ