Through Black Spruce

  “Annie Bird. On Soleil’s guest list.”

  He runs his finger down the columns. I glance at the shivering girls and boys waiting in line. It’s long enough to see the blur of them going around the corner. I am Annie Bird, and I am Cree from a place called Moosonee, and I am a model, and I’m going into this club ahead of you, wemestikushu.

  The doorman turns his massive head to me. I hope you all get in. “Don’t see your name on the list, Ms. Bird,” he says.

  “Is there a guest list for DJ Butterfoot?” I ask. “Has Soleil already arrived? You can ask her.” The line stares at me, their mumbles growing in happy notes, knifing the air.

  The doorman scans again through his sheets. He looks up. “Sorry Ms. Bird. Ms. Annie. I don’t see your name here anywhere.”

  My ears begin to burn. The voices in the waiting line grow. I hear hushed laughs. “Are you sure? B-I-R-D. Annie. Is Butterfoot or Soleil here? They’ll vouch for me.”

  The doorman shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Annie. You’re not on my list.”

  “There must be some mistake.”

  “You can always try to get in by lining up.” He nods his head to the crowd. I know they’re laughing. I won’t look at them. I whisper a thank-you and walk back down the stairs, turning away from the line. Me, I won’t walk the gauntlet twice tonight.

  “Ms. Bird?” the bouncer shouts. “Annie?” I turn around. He waves me back. When I am close to him, he looks around quick and motions me closer. “I know you’re a friend of Soleil’s.” He gestures toward the door. “Go ahead. Let’s call it a mistake. Just don’t say I did it.”

  A hug and peck on the cheek and I’m inside, the blast of warmth after the cold of outside making me shiver. Lights flash in the darkness, crowds of bodies pressing into the places where the heartbeat is strongest, like minnows just below the surface, grouping, moving together, knowing the next direction instinctually, no leader but the bass, then darting away when something disturbs them.

  I promised myself I wouldn’t do anything tonight. No drinking, no E, not even a cigarette. The tremor of a fit the other night, a baby seizure, followed by the bad dreaming. It’s a precursor to something far worse if I’m not careful. A good girl. I’ll be a good girl. But goddamn if this doesn’t make me want to do a vision quest with Violet. I can almost feel the initial rush, the waves of it coming in slow and steady.

  I try to become a minnow in the crowd, try to join this rush, the ebb and flow of the bodies crushing around me. I order a bottled water from the bar, then slick my way through them to the DJ booth, seeing the roped-off tables that are certainly Soleil’s.

  A gaggle of people in the lasso sit and lean to one another, shouting in each other’s ears. Others stand around them, slouching. I wish I were high right now. I’d enter their circle with the subtle authority that it gives me.

  Close to the velvet ropes, faces become discernible. Veronique is in the group. The bitch that doesn’t just hate me but hates everyone. I see one of Soleil’s people, one of her bodyguards. He stands back and watches the crowd that comes close.

  I see Butterfoot, standing and smiling broadly, his pretty mouth talking to someone sitting. I can’t see enough from this angle. They’re engaged in something good. I’ve rarely seen his face so animated. So happy. Soleil’s chair, her throne beside him, sits vacant. I push through a few gawkers, stepping on a woman’s toes. She cries out and shoves at my arm. I mouth, Sorry, girl, getting closer to the ropes, hoping Butterfoot sees me, that he smiles wider and ushers me in.

  I’ve got a view now of who he leans down to. I see the long hair, her thin face bent up to his. Violet takes his face gentle in her hands and kisses him. I see the flash of pink tongue, their teeth blue under the light.

  I stand beside them, feet from them, the velvet rope separating us. But they don’t see me, locked in each other’s eyes. They laugh, and he bends down and kisses her again, deep.

  Butterfoot looks up finally, seeing me. The guilty eyes of a little boy. Violet looks to what he does. She sees me. Her face is calm. She smirks.

  Violet wiggles her fingers at me. “Annie!” she shouts over the music. “You made it in!”

  I want three shots of vodka back to back. Instead, I smile. “You did catch him in Montreal!” I shout back, still grinning, teeth bared.

  I look to Butterfoot. “Did she catch you here in New York, too?” He looks at his feet. I want to run away. Run and scream till my lungs ache. But I say something that surprises even me. “What? Is the Indian Princess not even good enough anymore to be asked in?”

  Butterfoot won’t look up.

  “Don’t be so shabby,” I say, “to a fellow Anishnabe.”

  He reaches for the rope, unsnaps it, and ushers me through. Violet’s smirk is gone now, replaced by something as close to anger as I’ve ever seen on it.

  A waiter appears from nowhere beside me. I consider that triple vodka. “I’ve got a water,” I say. “Thanks.”

  Butterfoot looks at his watch. “I’m up at the tables soon,” he says. What a chicken.

  “You spin, Mr. Foot,” I say. “You spin like you’ve never spun before.”

  Violet stands and leans to me. My fists clench. “Nobody owns anybody,” she says into my ear.

  “Where I’m from,” I lie, “we peel the skin from women who’ve done what you’ve done.” I’ll lie boldly. “A woman who steals a man, where I’m from, has her head shaved with clam shells and then the tips of her fingers removed with those same shells.” I’m talking loudly, and I don’t care.

  Violet purses her lips, as if to say something. Her eyes are wide. Scared of the scene I’m making? Scared of me? She’d better be.

  A few people around us lean closer, trying to listen in. They all know what the deal is. All these pretty party people are worse gossips than the old kookums in Moosonee. There’s some joy in anger. I will enjoy its heat and cry later.

  Can I tell you more, my shrinking Violet? “If you don’t believe me,” I say, “just ask what Butterfoot’s people, the Mohawk, like to do.” I remove the velvet rope’s hook myself and let it drop onto the floor behind me as I walk away through the crowd and out into the cold night.

  My face burns. I’ll send her ears home in a basket. I’m hurting like I’ve been hit on the head. I want to throw up.

  A hundred generations that came before me wait, huddling in the cold. They look at me, I think. They look up at me, but they don’t judge or laugh. They just watch me, trying to flag a cab on the slushy curb.

  31

  BITCH WIND

  I woke something up in my coming to this place called Ghost River, something inside me, but something outside of me, too. For many nights after taking that moose on the river, I awoke to its bawling. At first, I told myself it was my mind playing tricks on me, and I am sure that was part of it. But the bawling, it didn’t go away when I lay wide-eyed awake in my askihkan, clutching the rifle beside me. It only moved away from my camp, somewhere toward the old settlement.

  By early November, the first real snowfall came, late this year, but thick and heavy, covering everything. Much of the river stayed open, but the sides iced up closer and closer to the middle every day. This was the snow that promised to stay as the days and the nights turned colder. I ran traplines for fox and for rabbit. I decided to focus on these two for my survival, along with the beaver ponds inland a little way. As I expected, the first beaver, once I broke part of their dam and set snares by it, were easy to take, but they knew I was around, that I tried to trick them. Just a couple of skinny hares in my traps. This place was proving a hard one to harvest, and each week I saw how much lower my supplies became. The moose meat was a blessing, and I tried to tell myself that the cries I heard most nights were the screams of rabbits being taken from my snares by fox and lynx.

  I travelled out into the bush one day, cutting through the old settlement to check a set of traps on the far side. The wind blew cold and sent snow up swirling in that empty place. One
wouldn’t know it was ever much of anything now, just an open field where the trees refused to grow. The place spooked me, a feeling like I was being watched. What happened here? Something must have. I’d ask old Antoine if I saw him again. He knew all of the stories of James Bay.

  The bush on the far side was quieter out of the wind, so quiet that the creak of bare tree limbs in the snowfall sounded like the muffled grinding of teeth. I had to keep on my lines, keep packing a trail as winter settled. I’d brought snowshoes with me but didn’t bother with them that day. It still wasn’t deep enough, and my traps didn’t travel too far yet. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone, something, watched me. Was this what I had to expect the rest of my life for what I’d done? I’d not felt this till I arrived here. Maybe I was going bush crazy. Maybe it was something here in this place. I carried my shotgun and plenty of birdshot in case of grouse or ptarmigan, and I carried a handful of slugs in my right pocket. I told myself it was in case I came across a bear.

  No tracks in the snow today. Not a single one. Had I chosen that poorly? There were clearly rabbit runs here before the snowfall, but now not a print disturbed the new blanketing. I double-checked that the snare wire was not frozen up and moved on. I’d search out new rabbit tracks, new runs, but before I headed back to camp, I checked my fox snares.

  Many prints in the snow along here as I fought my way deeper into the tightly knit spruce, tripping over snow-covered roots and deadfall when I tried to go too fast. Mostly smaller beasts, but I recognized a wolf trot in the white, then two hundred yards on, the belly drag of a stalking lynx. This I’d never seen, the two so close in the same place. I’d take it as a sign that promised plenty of smaller game, and this helped to ease my mind about the night noises I’d been hearing. Wolves take down moose, and the bawling late one night could be explained. And the cries might call in the lynx to investigate. I pushed on through the snow to my other snares, my bum leg aching, the cold drip of melting snow in one boot. But what about all the other nights? The cries came to me most every evening, yanking me from sleep.

  I spotted the first fox snare by the goose wing I left tied in the alder above. A simple trap, but a good one. The fox came to the wing smelling a meal, staring up at it, running around below the alder, figuring out how to get an easy meal. The metal trap I’d covered in the leaves and snow just below the wing waited for the foot to set it.

  Not a print, fox or otherwise, for many yards around the snare. But it had been sprung. I moved on to the second. Again, no prints. But it, too, had been released. When I saw that the third had been set off, I turned for home, for my camp, walking quick as I could.

  The cold weather changed to sleet and frozen rain, and I spent the next two days trying to make my askihkan as resistant to the weather as possible. I’d made my shelter for cold weather, and with the temperature hovering around freezing, the sod and bark weakened and sent rivulets of water down the insides as my fire heated the lodge.

  The four hides I skinned from the moose, the four quarters of it, had been long scraped and stretched. I’d secured the hides on the ceiling around the chimney, letting the smoke of the fire that exited slowly tan them. They helped in their own way to keep the blowing snow and now the frozen rain from coming in much. But goddamn, when I got the fire going in here and they heated up, it smelled a lot like bacon and made me feel like I was starving to death. Maybe I was. I’d been brutal with myself in terms of how much I could afford to eat, and I didn’t need a mirror to know I looked drawn and hungry. I rubbed my hand on what was now a lean chin, could peel my clothes off and see the thin body. Okay, maybe I wasn’t as skinny as those poor buggers in hot climates, but there wasn’t much fat on me.

  While I sat waiting for the weather to go cold again and freeze the snow into something I could walk on top of, the boredom set in. I played a game where I waited to have a smoke until I did something absolutely essential to my survival. Or until I opened one of the last bottles of rye and poured it down my throat in giant gulps. What about just a few sips, one here and there? But I knew where that led.

  Today I slowly, painstakingly stripped birch of their bark, weaving the sections of it onto the outside of my askihkan. Keep the water out, the heat in. I was worried the weight of the water-soaked sod would break the frame. If so, back to living in my prospector’s tent till I could build a new one, but building one this late in the season was big work. I thought of the amounts of wood my little stove would need over the course of a winter just to keep the tent hovering somewhere above freezing. I didn’t have enough gas for the chainsaw for the cords of wood I’d have to cut. My shelter I’d built was how I’d survive, and I became obsessed by how the frame held up, how the covering and insulation managed, hoping for the true cold to set the structure, settle all of this. I waited for this deep cold to come, the same enemy I’d have to fight against every day.

  The weather, rather than freezing, went warmer again. Snow melted in rivulets from everything that held it. The trees. My shelter. My plane on its log platform. The river swelled some and cracked the ice at its edges. Wet, gloomy days that were cloud-filled and drizzly. I knew, though, that with my luck, the days would freeze hard if I travelled too far from the camp. The animals, they had retreated somewhere, so much so that even the whisky jacks didn’t come near. Me, I’d lost track of counting days in this grey world I chose. On this river. Not even a whisky jack to talk to. A few red squirrels came and went, and I tried to make friends, but they hated me.

  It was the nights I continued to fear. The long nights that began at what must have been four or five in the other world, the world of warm houses and people and dirt roads, the nights that didn’t allow day to return for another sixteen hours. And it would only get worse. My days shrank with me.

  And those nights. What to do? Those I never planned for. I was left sitting and working a fire, staring into it, worried about my wood supply, my food. I wished, now, that I had a hobby. This boredom was why my father, I realized, had learned the woman’s art of beading and sewing.

  My meat supply thawed in the day and froze again at night. The crying woke me, and when it did, I couldn’t fall back to dreams. All I wanted was to sleep the long night hours and have daylight when I woke. But I woke to screams, to storms coming in. I clutched my rifle in the middle of the night, terrified at what would come and rip apart my fragile shelter then rip apart me.

  On this morning, when the weak light finally came, another night of being haunted finally over, my head filled with a headache, nightmares of my sister murdered and eaten by hairy beast men, of Dorothy pleasuring hairy beast men in her bed, of you, my nieces, surrounded by them and you screaming like wounded moose calves, I took some of my most valuable stash, my tobacco, and headed outside.

  The earth here was dark now, white snow melting into it as if to calm a fever. The grey of the sky melted into the earth. I was in that half place between two seasons, neither of them wanting to move forward or back. The wind in the trees moaned and made the boughs creak. Then it stopped, and the distant whine came, a wounded animal somewhere not so far away. I had chosen a bad place.

  Taking a pinch of tobacco from my pouch, I spoke those words because they were the first words to come to me. I have chosen a bad place. I sprinkled some tobacco because that was all I was left with, and whispered, I am sorry to be in this place. The wind started again, and I could tell this wind that started was going to be bad. The gusts blew from the north and west, the blizzard that approached in the heavy skies barrelling in.

  I walked around my askihkan and sprinkled more pinches into the air, the wind taking it, displacing it. Allow me to stay here. I have nowhere else to go. The wind gusted freezing rain into my face hard enough to try and drive me back inside. I thought I could hear the screaming below it. The wailing. The wind hit stronger, pulling pieces of bark and mud from my shelter. It wasn’t going to let up. What else to do now but crawl inside? I wouldn’t yet.

  I tried, I tried to appe
ase, but it wasn’t hard enough or good enough, and I leaned to the wind that gained strength and called out, screamed out, “Don’t do this to me! I just want to get by!” Soon as the words left my mouth, I realized the ridiculousness, the stupid, stupid lack of power my words had against this, my sad attempt to appease something that would take far more than some tobacco shreds. Last-minute ideas. Gaaah.

  The north wind blowing, north and from the west, wasn’t going to let up. I leaned into it, covering my face from the stinging ice rain that turned quickly to driving snow, and watched something I’d rarely seen. I watched the river begin to run sideways. At first it was simply waves cresting slanted to the current, but now, with the wind blowing in earnest, the water began to fight itself, away from my shore, deep into the far one. Bad stuff coming. I checked to make sure I’d left nothing outside I couldn’t afford to lose and crawled into my shelter.

  Wind howled, and I heard pieces of my lodge leaving. Wind blasted into the smoke hole and filled my askihkan with choking ash. I wanted to do something, but the howl made me dig under my blankets, wishing for anything more stable to crawl under. My house would blow away soon. It shook then tremored when the wind gained its breath to blow harder. I heard the cracking of the frame, the trees snapping outside. I saw pieces of black sky through the disintegrating roof, the storm using the river as a funnel. I began to beg, to ask everything I knew that was sacred to help me. My father, he was the only one I could think of as the storm shook my lodge until it gave in and collapsed, chunks of it, chunks of everything I wanted and owned and needed, flying away with a roar.

  Part of the frame of my askihkan fell on me, but it protected me from this storm, now a heavy blizzard. I’d be left with nothing, but as the wind shrieked, all I asked for was my life and my warm blanket around me. The bawling of a wounded moose, the screams of the women who were my blood, the shivering of the one I lost, dying beside me. I buried my head deeper into my sleeping bag and wished for some little part that was good in me to be left to help.