leave of the mourners sitting in chairs pushed back against the walls. But Stella, when they came to her, refused to take their outstretched hands and looked away. They murmured their goodbyes anyway and went quietly to the door, picked up their packs, left the property, and started down the gravel road to the railway station.
Suddenly, a half-dozen dogs burst out into the starlight from behind a house and ran barking toward them, but they fled whimpering back into the darkness when Jacob picked up a rock and hurled it in their direction. His seasonal job as a handyman at the McCrum and Son Guest House at the Muskoka village of Port Carling, close to his summer home at the Indian Camp, started the next morning at eight o’clock. He and Oscar needed to catch the midnight train to Muskoka Wharf Station at Gravenhurst at the bottom of Lake Muskoka and paddle throughout the night if he was to report for work on time. James McCrum, the proprietor, wouldn’t care whether or not there was a death in the family or a pack of dogs blocking his way and would probably fire him if he was late.
Thirty minutes later, they smelled the creosote of railway ties and off in the distance heard the shriek of a steam whistle. Quickening their pace, they reached the station just before the locomotive, shaking the rails and pulling two dozen passenger and freight cars, its headlight cutting a path through the night, came thundering around the curve of Lake Couchiching. It had left Toronto four hours earlier and was on time.
With a hiss of air brakes, a cloud of coal smoke, grease, and soot, the train came to a jerking stop. The door at the rear of a coach opened and the conductor, a lantern in his hand, peered out into the gloom in search of passengers. He kicked down the stairs when he saw Jacob and Oscar standing on the platform.
“Tickets, please,” he said, when they came aboard, holding out his hand to take and punch them. “It’s dark in here,” he whispered as he lighted the way with his lantern and led them into an overheated coach filled with sleeping passengers and reeking of sweat, stale food, and cigarette smoke. Coming to two empty places, he said, “These should suit you fellows. Stow your gear on the racks above your heads. You’ll be getting off at the next stop.”
Oscar took the seat closest to the window and sat silently in his separate world as the locomotive, panting with enormous gasps of steam like some primeval dragon preparing for combat, its driving rods pounding and its giant wheels straining as they turned, pulled out of the station. Scraping a peephole in the frost covering the inside of the window, Oscar looked out at the starlit countryside as the train picked up speed and hastened forward at sixty miles an hour. He thought back to the wake, to the single mesmerizing coal-oil lamp casting its soft light over Old Mary’s body and the elders in the room who had seen and done so much in their long lives.
What had the old people been thinking? Were they recalling the days when Old Mary was young and they were young? Remembering the days when the families had returned from their winter hunting and trapping grounds in the spring to spend the summers together at the Narrows where Lake Simcoe emptied into Lake Couchiching? The days when they would talk about births and deaths and finding the perfect person to marry? The days when the ancestors undertook spirit quests, when they gathered sweetgrass for ceremonies, and when they held community feasts? Or, as they looked at Old Mary in her plain pine coffin, were they mourning the loss of their youth and counting the days until his mother appeared at their homes to wash their dead bodies and put them on display in plain pine coffins in their living rooms?
And what meaning did Old Mary’s death have for him, for Oscar Wolf, his head pressed against the window staring out through the opening in the frost as the train raced through railway crossings empty of traffic, its wheels clicking ever more rapidly on the rails, and its whistle wailing? He was sad because Old Mary had been his friend and was now no more. But at the same time, for some unexplainable reason, her death made him feel more alive than ever and astonished at the wonder of existence.
“You owe your birth to blind luck,” Jacob once told him when he was a little boy, “since your parents knew each other for only two weeks before your father went overseas and was killed.”
Oscar at first had accepted his grandfather’s judgement, but as he grew older and started to think for himself, he came to the conclusion that luck had nothing to do with it. Divine Providence was the cause. In contrast to Old Mary, perhaps because he regularly attended church, he believed in the Christian God as well as the Native Creator and felt their presence when he said his prayers before he went to bed and at church during Sunday services. They had put him on Mother Earth for a purpose, he was sure. And although that purpose would only be revealed in the fullness of time, he liked to think he was destined to do great things for his people someday. Maybe he would be a great warrior like Tecumseh, who rallied Indian warriors from across Canada and the United States to save Canada from the Americans in the War of 1812, only to die in the process. Or perhaps like John Brown, the white American who gave his life at the Battle of Harper’s Ferry trying to free the slaves. Maybe, like Tecumseh and Brown, he would sacrifice his life for a great cause someday. Maybe then his mother would treat him with the respect other kids got from their moms.
Oscar wished his father was alive and he could discuss his thoughts with him. But he had been just a baby when his father was killed and he knew him only from his framed black-and-white picture, in which he sat smiling at the photographer and seemed so happy to be wearing the dress uniform of the 48th Highlanders of Canada. The photograph hung in their house back on the reserve, beside one of Jacob wearing a similar uniform. Oscar often looked at that picture, trying to decide what sort of man his father had been. Lots of his father’s friends from the old days had told him stories of going hunting and fishing with him. How he used to run away laughing at the white game wardens when they tried to catch him. He was a throwback to the old Chippewas, they said, someone who could control his canoe in the most dangerous rapids, someone who was a crack shot, someone who never got lost in the bush, and someone who knew and respected the old ways. Everyone said he had a bad temper and once had got so mad at the Indian agent, whom he had caught trying to cheat the people, that he threw him down the stairs of the band office and broke one of his legs. The RCMP had hauled him up before a judge and he spent six months in jail.
Jacob told him his father had died a hero when the Canadian Corps launched an attack on the Germans entrenched on Hill 70 in northern France in August 1917. When he was old enough, Oscar checked out a history of the Great War from the library and read and reread the account of the battle until he practically had it memorized. Although he was proud of his father’s war record, he hated the Canadian government for sending him to his death and depriving him of a dad as he grew up. For as long as he could remember, he had wondered whether his father knew he was going to be killed when the picture was taken. Did he think of the newborn son he had never seen when he was dying? Did he regret he would never be able to take him fishing and hunting and do all the things fathers usually did with their sons? Was he sorry he would never be able to help his people before he died?
2
The train slowed to a crawl, moved across a bridge spanning the gorge over the Severn River, which flowed northwesterly out of Lake Couchiching into Georgian Bay, and climbed laboriously up a steep grade to enter the District of Muskoka. Twenty minutes later, Oscar and his grandfather were standing on the deserted platform at Muskoka Wharf Station as the sound of the train, with its load of passengers bound for Bracebridge and Huntsville and places farther north such as Timmins and the twin cities of Fort William and Port Arthur, faded away. Nearby, they could hear the groans of the steamers of the Muskoka Navigation Company rubbing their bumpers against government docks as they waited for the beginning of the tourist season and the arrival of day trippers from Toronto.
A minor official of the navigation company, a returned soldier who had served under Jacob in the war after he had been promoted on the battlefield to the rank of sergeant, had given his old army buddy permission to leave his canoe on the covered wharf over the winter. After confirming it had suffered no damage, Jacob and Oscar picked it up and slid it into the black water. They then took their positions, grandson in the bow and grandfather in the stern with their packsacks between them on the floor, and began their journey to the Indian Camp. There was no wind, but the ice had been off the lake for only a week; the night-time April temperature was well below freezing and each breath of air chilled their lungs. If all went well, they would be at their