Trickster's Point

CHAPTER 8

Cork said good-bye to Rainy and Meloux and walked back to his Land Rover. It was Sunday morning. He glanced at his watch. A few minutes before ten. The bell would be ringing at St. Agnes, calling the faithful to Mass. He wondered if Jenny and Waaboo and Stephen were going that morning. Usually they all went together, which Cork enjoyed very much. He didn’t think of himself as particularly devout, but church was something that they did as a family, and in Cork’s life, family, even more than God, took center stage. God was generally a distant ideal, but a hug from one of his children or the sound of Waaboo’s giggling were things wonderfully real to him and blessedly comforting and, in their way, sacred.

The wind had died. The temperature had risen a few degrees, and the snow had turned to a light drizzle that, every so often, dripped off the bill of his cap. The woods, as he walked the trail, were still and quiet. Although the air was filled with the scent of evergreen, it was the smell of wet earth that he noticed, of all the summer growth that was dead now, of leaves gone gold or red or brown and fallen and lay wet and rotting, becoming again the earth from which they sprang. Usually, when he walked this familiar trail, his heart was light, but now all he could think about was death. Cork felt overwhelmed by the weight of all those in his history whom he’d loved and who’d died violently. His father, his good friend Sam Winter Moon, his wife, and now Jubal Little.

He stopped and wondered: Had he really loved Jubal?

In the first spring after Cork’s father died, Sam Winter Moon had given Cork a gift, a recurve bow that Sam had made himself. Cork had rifle-hunted with his father, but that was something so many in the North Country did. There were bow hunters as well, but not many men hunted as Sam Winter Moon did, stalking in the old way, and Cork had heard of no one who equaled Sam’s prowess with a bow. He longed to learn, but his father had once told him that Sam had to make the offer. It was not a skill he shared lightly. And it was one he shared only with those in whom the blood of The People ran. When Sam gave Cork that beautiful, handmade recurve bow, Cork understood it was the invitation he’d been waiting for.

All that spring and through the summer, Sam Winter Moon taught him the way of the bow. Sam had a cabin on the Iron Lake Reservation, and whenever he could get away from his burger joint, he and Cork would head out to the cabin, where Sam had a workbench and tools-nocking pliers, a broadhead wrench, a fletching stripper and fletching jig, taper tools, an arrow saw. Sam taught Cork the proper way to make and true an arrow, splice feathers for fletching, and although he used manufactured broadhead tips for his hunting, how to make an arrowhead from a chunk of flint. First he taught Cork to shoot at stationary targets, usually a hay bale on which Sam painted circles and a bull’s-eye. Once Cork was able to group the arrows tightly, Sam set up a moving target, a stuffed rabbit he’d affixed to the center of a short two-by-four board mounted on tricycle wheels, which he pulled in rapid jerks across the yard while Cork attempted to send an arrow into its heart. He tossed small burlap pillows stuffed with dried grass into the air to simulate the sudden flight of a game bird. He taught Cork how to move carefully, soundlessly through the forest, and the signs to watch for as he stalked. Finally, in the fall, they began to hunt small game. Cork was clumsy at first, but Sam was patient, and eventually Cork’s arrows began to find their marks. In that first year, they didn’t hunt large game, but Cork continued to bring down anything edible, and to offer to the elders of the Iron Lake Ojibwe more rabbit, grouse, wild turkey, and duck than they’d probably had since before the white man came.

The next fall, he and Sam hunted white-tail deer. It was challenging in a way that rifle hunting with his father had never been. To kill a deer required that he be almost close enough to hear it breathing. It was a shockingly intimate experience, and after he’d brought down his first buck, he understood why it was necessary for his own spirit that he sing to the spirit of the animal he’d killed, that he explain the violence and promise the beautiful creature that his body would feed The People, and they would be grateful.

In the spring of his freshman year, Cork ran track for Aurora High School. He was tall and had long legs, and his specialty was hurdles. Jubal was on the track team, too, and whatever Jubal did-and he could do just about anything-he did well. The one thing he refused to do was run hurdles. Cork understood that it was, in a way, a gift Jubal was offering him.

Cork wanted to offer something in return, something important, and he asked Sam Winter Moon if he’d be willing to teach Jubal how to hunt in the old way. He knew that it was a skill Jubal wanted desperately to learn, but Cork had so far refused to ask Sam to teach him. He’d refused for two reasons, both purely selfish. First, if Sam agreed to teach Jubal Little, Jubal would undoubtedly become better at it than Cork. And second-and more important-it meant that Cork would have to share with Jubal the man who now, in many ways, filled the gap left when Cork’s father died. In his own mind, however, Cork had begun to think of Jubal as a brother, and so he finally decided to offer this gift. But Sam said no.

“It’s something I share with Shinnobs,” he told Cork.

“What if Jubal was Indian but not Shinnob?” Cork asked.

Sam shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. That boy’s white.” Then Cork saw a little glint in Sam’s dark eyes. “But if he was Indian, I suppose I might.”

Cork talked to Jubal, who was reluctant to share the secret of his blood, even with Sam Winter Moon. Cork told him that he suspected Sam already knew, and Jubal seemed taken aback.

“You said something to him,” Jubal accused.

“No, honest I didn’t. But if you told him, he’d keep your secret, I know he would. And he’d teach you to hunt like he does, I swear.”

In the end, Jubal agreed, and when he’d told Sam the truth of his past, Winter Moon said, “The white man took almost everything from us and gave us in return mostly disease and alcohol. But there’s one thing he can’t take from us unless we let him, and that’s our dignity, Jubal. There’s a great heritage in being Indian. I’ll teach you to hunt in the old way, but in return, I want you to begin to think of yourself in a different way. Accept that the blood of your Blackfeet father flows in you, and be proud of that, even if you don’t say a word about it to anyone. Deal?”

Jubal thought it over and nodded seriously. And that, as it turned out, led to the first time Cork had seen murder in Jubal Little’s eyes.

In the fall a few weeks before Cork turned sixteen, he went hunting in the old way with Jubal Little and Sam Winter Moon. They drove in Sam’s old pickup to an area on the eastern edge of the rez, where the backsides of the Sawtooth Mountains were visible in the distance. It was an area well known to the Ojibwe, an area in which big bucks were often taken.

The day was overcast and wet and cool. They followed a rutted dirt road over bogland where the tamaracks were gold and stood out like lit torches. They wove through birch stands barren of leaves, with bone white trunks and branches. Sam Winter Moon suddenly braked to a complete stop, then backed up. He swung his pickup onto the grass at the side of the road and, without a word, got out. Cork and Jubal got out, too, and followed. Sam walked down a little spur of road, almost invisible beneath the tall overgrowth of weeds. Cork saw what his own eyes had missed initially but Sam’s had not, an outline where the passage of tires had crushed down the weeds. They came to a black pickup, a newer model, parked behind a thicket of wild blackberry that made it invisible from the road.

Sam said quietly, “Know any skins on the rez who can afford a new pickup?” He walked carefully around the vehicle, studying the ground. “This way,” he said and began to follow the trail left by those who’d come in the truck.

Cork realized that Jubal was carrying his bow and quiver of arrows, which he must have pulled from the bed of Sam’s pickup when they got out. Since it wasn’t deer they were hunting at the moment, Cork wasn’t sure why Jubal had done this, but he quickly forgot about it as he became intent on reading the signs of the trail. Wherever the ground was soft and bare of cover, three distinct sets of tracks were visible. Two sets were large-men. One was much smaller-a child. They followed nearly a mile, up a ridge, and as they approached the crest, they heard voices ahead. Cork and Jubal looked toward Sam, who nodded for them to keep moving toward the noise. In a couple of minutes, they came to a meadow full of wild grass and sumac, with three figures at the center, dressed in camouflage and standing over a killed white-tail buck. Cork recognized them immediately: Donner Bigby; his little brother, Lester; and their father, an enormous and brutal-looking man whose name was Clarence but whom everyone called Buzz because of his logging work with chain saws. Bigs and his father held compound bows. Lester, who was maybe eight or nine at the time, held a hunting knife. The blade looked huge in his small hand. He was crying.

“I don’t want to cut him, Daddy,” Lester said.

“Your brother and me did all the work of bringing him down,” his father said. “The least you can do is help us dress him.”

“Make a man out of you,” Bigs said with a laugh.

“I don’t want to,” Lester cried. He looked down at the deer.

“I don’t want him to be dead.”

“He’s not Bambi, for Christ’s sake,” Bigs said.

“Cut him open like I told you,” their father said.

But Lester just stood there, crying. Buzz Bigby grabbed the knife from his son’s hand and slapped the boy across the face. Lester tumbled to the ground.

“Hey, Pop, leave him alone,” Donner said.

“You want some of this?” Bigby held up the open palm with which he’d sent Lester sprawling.

Donner lowered his eyes and didn’t reply.

Bigby looked down at his younger son and spit. “Shut up and be a man, or the next thing I give you will be the toe of my boot.”

Lester retreated in a crawl but finally brought himself under control, and the sobs subsided.

“Stand up.”

He did as he was told. His father handed him the knife. The boy took it and knelt beside the deer.

Cork and Jubal and Sam had hidden themselves among the birch at the edge of the meadow. Sam whispered, “Stay here.”

He left the tree cover and walked toward the Bigbys. “Anin,” he cried out in Ojibwe greeting.

Buzz Bigby swung around to face him, and Cork saw that he brought his bow to the ready. Bigs, seeing his father’s response, did the same, and went a step further. He drew an arrow from his quiver and nocked it on his bowstring.

“What do you want?” the elder Bigby said.

“Thing is this. You’re on Indian land, but you don’t look very Indian to me.” Sam had halted a dozen steps away from the Bigbys. “It’s against the law for you to hunt on our land.”

“Hell, you got more deer’n you’ll ever need to feed yourselves,” Bigby said.

“That’s not the point.”

“Well, here’s my point,” Bigby said. “Me and my boys are gonna take this buck back to my truck, and we’re gonna haul it home, and we’re gonna mount them antlers on my wall, and there ain’t a thing in the world you’re gonna be able to do to stop us. What do you say to that?”

Jubal drew an arrow from his quiver and laid the shaft over the arrow rest and fit the nock into the bowstring. Cork wanted to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. Would he really shoot Bigs or Mr. Bigby or Lester?

Sam said, “If you do that, I’ll report you to the sheriff.”

“He’s white. Think he’ll care about what goes on out here?”

“I haven’t finished. I’ll also report you to Rusty Benay. He’s the game warden in these parts, and he’s half Indian. He’ll see to it that you never get another deer license, or any kind of license for that matter.”

“He can’t do that,” Bigby said, but not with certainty.

“Is this deer worth that chance?” Sam replied.

Bigby weighed his response, and while he did, Donner slowly edged away from the others, as if to clear himself a space in order to send an arrow into Sam Winter Moon if necessary. In that same time, Jubal raised his own bow, drew back the string, and sighted.

“Jesus, Jubal,” Cork whispered. “Put it down.”

If he heard, Jubal gave no indication. He held the bow steady, as if it were only an inanimate target he was aiming at, not Donner Bigby’s heart.

Cork became abnormally aware of everything around him. The smell of wet tree bark, the kiss of the autumn air against his face, the look of the clouds running like gray wolves across the sky, the feel of the very ground through the soles of his boots, the easy breathing of Jubal Little, the metal taste in his own mouth. He would experience this hypersensitivity several times over the years to come, usually in a situation when a human life was at stake.

He thought of tackling Jubal but was afraid that a move like that might cause the arrow to be fired accidentally.

In the blink of an eye, Cork made his decision. He stepped from the trees and called out, “Hey, Sam, we were wondering where you went. Me and the guys.” He walked to the center of the clearing, where all the eyes had turned his way. “Hey, Bigs,” he said easily. “Hello, Mr. Bigby. Hey, Lester.” He looked down at the deer, as if only just becoming aware of it. “You know, you can’t keep that buck. We’re on reservation land here. But the elders, they’ll be grateful for all the jerky and deer sausage we’ll be able to make from it. Thanks a lot. Or as the Ojibwe say, migwech. I’ll go get the other guys, and we can take it from here.”

He spoke fast and friendly, as if he and the Bigbys were pals. And he smiled easily, though his heart was kicking like a mule.

Buzz Bigby took his measure and finally nodded. He looked at Sam. “The buck’s yours. Come on, boys, let’s pack it in.”

The Bigbys left, returning the way they’d come. Cork wondered if Jubal would make his presence known to them, but when he looked where Jubal had been, he could see nothing. Jubal appeared again once the Bigbys were well and truly gone. He’d returned the arrow to his quiver. He walked to the center of the clearing and stood with Cork and Sam, looking at the great buck that Bigs and his father had brought down. There were two arrows in the animal. Cork could tell from the line of blood across the wild grass that the buck had run here after being hit, had fallen, and died. But it probably hadn’t run far, because both arrows had been well-placed heart shots.

“Let’s dress him,” Sam said.

Jubal said with satisfaction, “Bigs and his old man are going home empty-handed today.”

“No,” Sam said. “They’ll take the memory of this day home, and they’ll feed on it a lot longer than they would’ve fed on the meat of this deer, and it’ll always taste bitter to them. My advice? Around the Bigbys, you guys watch yourselves.”