The Last Woman (23 page)

Billy shifted uncomfortably in his chair, but Charles persisted. “How old were you when you killed your first moose? Twelve? Eleven?”

“Something around there.”

“I was eighteen myself, an old man by your standards. But look, Rick,” Charles said, turning with a glint in his eye. “We’re going to go out one day. Induct you into the brotherhood. I predict you’ll like it.” And he went on to tell the story of how, hunting the previous fall – “black powder, one shot’s all you get” – he had waited at the edge of a field where a wild apple tree had dropped its fruit. “The buck just appeared. You know how they are, so quiet. I couldn’t have missed, but you know, I thought I had. I look up from the gun, the shot’s still ringing in my head, and he just walks off.

“I followed him – found his body in the next field. I discovered later that I’d severed a big vein. Right beside the heart.”

Ann stood up abruptly and began to clear plates. “I don’t understand killing.”

“But you do love your lamb chops,” Charles said, sending a wink to Billy.

Somehow, the talk of hunting excited Richard. He thought he might like to try it some day, though it was Billy he wanted to go out with, not Charles.

That night, alone with Ann in their room, he struggled to express his feelings about Billy Johnson. “There’s something about him. He feels so self-contained, so – I don’t know –
trustworthy
. I’d put my life in his hands, I mean, if it ever came to that.”

“Maybe the two of you should get together some time,” Ann said. She was sitting propped against some pillows and had not looked up from her book.

“I wonder if he’d like to. Would you mind?” She didn’t respond. “Ann, would you mind?”

“No, not at all,” she said in her small voice – the one that sometimes emerged as if from some obscure corner of her childhood.

Three weeks later, Richard drove to Pine Island. He had never been on the reserve and he walked up the dusty, narrow lanes with some trepidation, aware of himself as an outsider. The place seemed deserted, though at the same time he had a feeling that somehow behind its screens and in the stillness of its shadows, it was conscious of him.

An old woman, her head wrapped in a checkered cloth, directed him up a lane to a small blue house. When he got there, he found a man working on a large, flat-sterned canoe overturned on trestles. He had bent over to sight along the hull, and when Richard spoke, he seemed not to hear but started to feel along the planks with a careful, listening alertness. Richard wondered if this was Matt, Billy’s uncle, and was about to introduce himself when the man looked up. There was something sharp, almost hostile in his glance. Taken aback, Richard explained he was looking for Billy Johnson.

“Down along the shore there,” the man told him in a flat, muffled voice before going back to work.

He found Billy sitting on the smooth rock of the shore with his legs out, intently examining a fishing reel. Loath to interrupt, Richard stopped a few feet off.

Billy looked up just then, but if he took in the fact of Richard’s presence, he gave no sign of it and peered again at his reel.

“Hope this isn’t a bad time.” No response. In an inlet fifty yards or so away, some kids were swimming around a large inner tube. “Was wondering if you’d like to go fishing. If you’ve got the time. I’m no expert, but –”

Drawing up his knees, Billy gazed over the water.

They went in Billy’s boat. Time and again Richard, sitting amidships, thought they were headed into a dead end, but the rock always parted and let them through. There were no cottages in this part of Nigushi, though occasionally a small cabin went by, or a mysterious clearing in the
trees where a few boards nailed up between trunks were the only sign of human presence. Passing under a leaning pine, they swept into another gut on whose walls, close enough to touch, lichens bloomed like rust-coloured suns.

They emerged into a basin between islands: a wide, natural pool overhung by a cliff of shattered rock. Here, in the shade, in the hush of a small stream filtering among boulders, they dropped their anchor and began to fish. A flick of their wrists, and their lures snaked out, fell with a
plop
into the water, then moments later, to the clicking of their lures, came swimming back – spindling up through the tea-coloured water like tiny silver fish. Tugging gently on its line, the boat swung slowly, this way and that, caught in the subtle play of currents. Richard scarcely cared whether he caught anything. It was enough to be here, held, as he felt, by Billy’s knowledge, a guest in a world that few outsiders knew about. As they continued to fish, they began to talk a little and their silences grew more companionable.

They had fished for about an hour when the sound of an engine – low, stertorous, dark – intruded on their reverie. Seconds later, a prow of startling whiteness appeared at the edge of the pool. It grew steadily – a two-tiered cruiser, steered by a man in a captain’s hat standing under a canopy of royal blue. Behind him, on the low afterdeck, two other men, both shirtless, were fishing: one peered into the screen of a fish finder, the other leaned over the side, following the motions of his line in the water.

“There, fuck, I saw one! Stop there!”

“Pete, fuck, stop!”

“The damn thing isn’t a car. Hang on.”

With a clunking of gears the big boat reversed its course, churned back to a spot where, with much shouting and waving, the engines were turned off. As his two passengers fished, the captain drank beer and gazed around the pool. Discovering Billy’s boat in the shadow of the cliff, he raised his bottle in salute.

Richard waved back but Billy did not respond, continuing to watch the other boat intently. The shift into action was astonishing. One moment, Billy seemed carved from stone; and the next, he was on his feet, hauling up the anchor, ripping the motor into life with a single tug. They roared off, across the pool. Richard assumed they were leaving, but Billy turned them in a wide arc and, still accelerating, drove them directly at the big boat.

Later, telling the story to Ann, he would laugh about it. “I mean, I really thought he was going to ram them.” For the white wall of the cruiser had come up awfully fast. At the last moment Billy cut power and swung them alongside. “Hold us,” he told Richard, and, climbing over the side of the larger boat, he dropped to its deck.

Richard stood up and seized a cleat. He had no idea what was happening, but whatever it was – and it seemed clear this was no friendly visit – he was part of it.

Ignoring the men, Billy strode over to a large Styrofoam cooler and threw off the top. Evidently finding nothing
of interest, he ducked into the doorway of the cabin and disappeared.

“What the fuck is he doing?” the captain yelled from above.

“I think it might be an Indian thing, Pete,” one of the other men said. They were all watching the cabin door; after half a minute Billy re-emerged.

“Okay,” he said, addressing the men together. “You’re trespassing here. You can’t fish here. You can’t be here. This place belongs to the people of Pine Island.”

“You listen here,” the captain said. “There’s nothing about that on the charts.” When Billy looked up at him, the man gestured in violent dismissal and turned away.

One of the others spoke now, with his hands out, placatory. “We didn’t know, okay? It didn’t say so on the map. Indian territory, right? We’re cool with that, okay? No offence.”

Billy climbed back into the boat and drove off a little ways, turning so their bow was pointed at the cruiser; and there they idled until the cruiser – a loose rope trailing behind it – trundled out of sight.

Billy had acted with more directness and physical daring than Richard had personally ever witnessed outside of a sports field. Richard was impressed. In fact, he was shaken. The blood continued to pound in his head for minutes afterwards. As they sat on shore eating the lunch
Richard had brought, he asked, “I was wondering – what you told them about these islands belonging to Pine Island – is that written in law, or –”

“It’s not written anywhere,” Billy said sharply. The menace in him had not entirely abated. He seemed ready to turn on Richard too, if necessary.

“So these lands –”

“Always been ours. These lands and waters, hundred miles north, hundred miles east and west, all around Nigushi. We’ve been here thousands of years. From the beginning.”

Richard saw the seriousness of this issue for Billy. This was not casual opinion; he had run into the hard rock of belief.

“We never signed the treaty,” Billy said. Prodding at the ground with a stick, he told Richard that in the last century, when the government called the bands of the region to sign a treaty at Sault Ste. Marie, Pine Island had not sent a delegation. They had not wanted to participate because a widely travelled elder had come back to the Island and told the people that a treaty was meaningless. “The government tells you it’s just a friendship treaty. Next thing you know, your new friends are digging a mine under your house.”

“But they took your land anyway.”

“A hundred and twenty years ago,” Billy said, throwing the stick away. “Yesterday.”

That summer Richard began to read the great chroniclers of Ojibway life. Densmore. Schoolcraft. Warren. A new vocabulary entered his lexicon. Anishnabe. Nanabush. Totem. Babiche. He read of pictographs and pipe stems and tree burials, of the construction of birchbark canoes, of treaties and snakeroot and cradleboards. He learned, to his delight, that the name of the lake, Nigushi, meant “my mother.” At first, he gleaned this information in secret, with a kind of guilty pleasure, as if he were walking around Billy’s house, taking note of things behind his back. For the history of the Ojibway was Billy’s history. After reading how the Ojibway had defeated the Iroquois in a great battle on Lake Superior, Richard seemed to see a trace of this long-ago event still living in Billy’s eyes.

They were becoming friends. They went out fishing again, several times, and often talked over coffee in the Harbour. Billy had opened up, at least to a degree. There was still an air of reserve around him, a sense that he did not always speak what he was thinking, which Richard attributed to shyness. He noticed that Billy never mentioned Ann, and when Richard mentioned her himself, Billy seemed uninterested in following the subject very far. Yet he accepted their invitations to Inverness. By the end of the summer it seemed natural to find him on the big porch, regaling them with stories of his time out west or answering Richard’s questions about the families of Pine Island. The place fascinated Richard. He and Ann went there often, to visit Billy or to buy crafts at the co-op, and he never tired of hearing about the family rivalries, the love
affairs, the tales of living on the land.
That winter
, Billy would say, or
That time we walked up the Vermillion
, and there was a tone in his voice, a particular gleam in his look, at once amused and far-seeing, that told Richard, as he settled comfortably in his chair, that he was about to hear another story. “They flew this big floatplane, eh? Catalina – used them in the war to bomb submarines. They’d fly in at night across the border, sneak into a lake, toss in a few sticks of dynamite, kill every fish in the lake, throw what they wanted into the bomb bays, off they go. We saw it take off once, me and Matt. The thing was so loaded it barely made it over the trees.”