Barefoot at the Lake Page 5

  ‘What happened to them?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Well, Al moved up north to Haliburton and named a park after himself, the braves all moved up to Mud Lake, where the Reserve now is, and Minnemoosah and Mikkimoosah moved to California where they went into the movies.’

  Grace’s eyes danced and she clapped her hands until they hurt.

  ‘Tell me another!’ she implored my uncle.

  ‘Would you like to hear a true story told to me by Edgar Ten Fingers?’

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ Grace answered. Glory also gave an affirming nod and our mothers smiled.

  Perry and I were more interested in doing rather than listening. We decided to see what was happening at frog bog.

  THE GANG’S

  HIDEOUT

  Nothing much happened at frog bog. There were no snakes or snapping turtles to try to catch. Perry and I parted, each going to our own cottage, but we decided to go to our fort in the woods the following morning. After breakfast the next day, as I left the cottage, I saw my uncle sitting in his chair with tears in his eyes. I didn’t like seeing grown-ups cry. I didn’t think they should. I thought he should go someplace else if he wasn’t happy but I didn’t say that. Instead I asked him if he wanted to come to the fort with me.

  My uncle and I had sometimes continued to walk together and when we did we both felt comfortable in each other’s company. We might walk in silence but I knew there was always something in my uncle’s mind, something just beyond the reach of his telling, but whatever it was I never knew. I shared his silence with a relaxed ease. I shared my father’s silence too when I went somewhere with him, but when he was silent I knew he had nothing to say. I thought he didn’t think much. My uncle’s mind was always working. Earlier in the summer I’d wanted to know what was weighing on it, but now I felt comfortable in my uncle’s privacy.

  As we walked up to the paved road we smelled skunk and saw one dead by the side of the road. Others pinched their noses when they smelled skunk but my uncle and I went to look. Uncle Reub prodded it with a stick.

  ‘It must have just been killed. It’s still soft and it hasn’t bloated up yet.’

  Using his foot to hold its tail in place, he cut it off with his knife and kicked the tail into the chicory growing on the side of the road.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked.

  ‘To a hungry animal a skunk looks innocent, waddling around, looking after its own business,’ Uncle said. ‘It doesn’t need powerful muscles. Instead it surprises its enemy with its stench. I’ll collect that tail when we return. It’s beautiful. It might come in handy.’

  ‘Mum won’t let you,’ I commented.

  ‘I won’t take it to the cottage. I’ll borrow some of your mother’s gin and store it in it. The smell will be gone in a week.’

  We crossed the paved road then continued down a short dirt road and into the forest. Last summer, in that forest, not far from an abandoned railroad line that once went from Peterborough to Lake Chemong, I had discovered a pile of pine logs, each one around four inches thick and ten feet long. They had been there for years, I thought. I told Dad and on a spring visit this year, when the clearing in the woods was blanketed by trilliums, the two of us collected them. Dad and I carried two at a time back to his station wagon until we collected enough for Dad to build a magnificent tree house with a floor and ceiling and two walls in the giant willow tree on their front lawn. Uncle Reub now enjoyed that tree house. Once, I heard him calling me but he wasn’t in his usual lawn chair overlooking the lake. I looked up and my uncle was in the tree house, leaning over the railing, in his white undershirt and black city trousers but with thin branches of willow leaves, like a hula skirt, tucked all around his belt.

  We walked silently deeper into the woods through a grove of cedars with thick brown trunks like massive Havana cigars. That part of the forest had an aromatic smell, a bit like tobacco. Then we reached a grove of birch trees where it was lighter and cheerier. Perry, Rob, Steve and I had stripped off bark from most of the trees, to write messages to each other. We had carved our names in some of the birch trees and each year our names got larger.

  We reached the sugar bush and amongst the stand of maples were three lonesome wind-buffeted white pine trees, the tallest of all the trees, and all of them leaned east, away from the lake. Beyond the sugar bush was a clearing, covered in poison ivy. I was always careful but my bare leg rubbed against some of its leaves.

  ‘Brucie, come over here.’

  My uncle crushed and rolled two burdock leaves in his hands then rubbed the juicy plant over my legs.

  ‘This burdock’s an immigrant, like your great grandparents,’ he said, as he rubbed the leaves on my ankle. ‘They arrived from Russia eighty years ago but this plant arrived with the Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower and you know, it’s just about as good as any medicine for stopping the itching from poison ivy.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

  ‘Edgar Ten Fingers told me,’ Uncle answered, ‘although once you’ve got itchy pimples, fish blood is good. You let it dry and it stops the itching.’

  ‘Why is he called Edgar Ten Fingers?’ I asked.

  ‘And why are you called Bruce Fogle?’ my uncle replied. ‘It’s simply his name.’

  The forest got darker again until deep in the woods we reached a place where even in the driest summer, even when it never rained, the black earth never dried. In that private jungle the air was soaked in a delicate damp smell. This was where our fort was.

  My uncle and I crossed a stretch of greasy earth on planks us boys had taken from cedar fences, and arrived at a place where all summer the sun never shone. Here lived snakes and birds and small animals we never saw anywhere else. When Perry and I lay on the ground and were perfectly still we could hear scurrying feet. Once, only once, I saw an owl sitting on a branch right above me. I was interested in it but it wasn’t interested in me. I’d once found deer antlers, whiter than Pepsodent toothpaste, and they were now in my father’s tool shed.

  Our fort in this no man’s land, was, we were sure, beyond anywhere anyone had ever been. That’s what we thought. As soon as we arrived at the lake each summer, Perry and I, Rob and Steve visited our fort, raised ramparts, built defences, stocked up on candles and made ready for attacks. Steve told us what to do and he and Rob did most of the work. He told us we lived in the Dominion of Canada but this was our very own Dominion of Boys. I was good at doing what I was told to do and even when I wasn’t strong enough I kept trying. Perry got tired easily and when that happened he gave up. No one was ever allowed to visit our fort, especially girls, not even Grace. Now I had brought my uncle.

  Deep in those woods there were many skulls scattered in the leaf mould and litter, tiny little skulls that once housed the brains of the snakes we had captured and killed the year before and hung around the fort to prevent other boys, or witches, from coming near. Pinching stag beetles ambled across the brown ground and we caught them and stuck them on our arms, pretending their pincers held together war wounds. When Fronko, from the tarpaper shacks, followed us from the lake to the fort in the woods, he did so silently, without uttering a word. He just as silently let us apply Noxzema skin cleansing cream to his nose and keep him in the fort’s jail until we released him to go home for lunch.

  Perry, Steve and Rob were already at the fort when I arrived with Uncle Reub and they didn’t know what to do or what to say when they saw him.

  ‘Hello, boys. So this is your hideout,’ he said and they nodded.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, and with his right hand he collected a spider’s web from amongst the branches that made up the fort. He divided the web into two portions and, like a sideshow magician at the county fair, he placed a portion of the web in each of his nostrils. Then he sneezed into his hand and opened it up and there was the spider that had woven that web. The other boys decided it would be fun for Uncle Reub to stay.

  UNCLE’S

  STORIES

  ‘Bo
ys, it’s an honour for me to be allowed to visit your fort,’ Uncle Reub said, and Steve, the oldest, replied the way he thought he should. ‘And it’s an honour, Rob’s Uncle, to have the great storyteller visit us.’

  Rob showed our uncle around the fort, Perry’s and my section, Rob and Steve’s section and the jail where we sometimes kept Fronko. Uncle told us he was impressed by its construction and by the number of dead snakes and frogs hanging on Rob and Steve’s section. The frogs had pine needles stuck in their eye sockets and through the webs of their feet.

  ‘Were these frogs alive when you stuck them with pine needles?’ Uncle asked, and Steve told him they were.

  ‘I stick needles into people but always to make them better, never intentionally to hurt them,’ Uncle replied, and he continued, ‘animals can’t speak up for themselves so it’s up to us to do what’s best for them.’

  At the fort, the older boys made all the decisions, what we would use for building material, who would do what work, how we would kill the snakes we caught. Perry and I did what we were told to do, especially me. I never complained. When once I told Uncle Reub that the big boys were bullies, my uncle said that strength doesn’t come from your arms and legs. Strength starts in your head then it spreads slow but sure to the rest of your body.

  ‘Boys, now I don’t mean this as criticism but do you ever think when you’re here that you’re acting like animals?’

  When he said that I felt my uncle was criticising us but before I could speak he continued, ‘You know, the animals in the woods, when they look at you they think you’re very strange. They think that it’s much better, it’s more noble, to be an animal than to be a person.’

  ‘There aren’t many animals in the woods,’ I replied. ‘Besides, it’s our woods.’

  ‘Ah, but there are, and they’re all watching you, right now. Everywhere. You might think this is your woods but it’s really theirs. When the summer is gone and you’re back at school, they will visit your fort and piss on it and make it theirs again. Do you want to know why?’

  ‘I think we’re going to hear one of Uncle’s stories,’ Robert said. We sat on the ground while Uncle sat on the trunk of a fallen tree.

  Then he continued.

  ‘Animals think, “People have no tails so how do they keep their feet and noses warm?”

  ‘They see we have no hair on our bodies and wonder how we can protect ourselves from thorns and poison ivy.

  ‘They see we only have two legs and wonder how fast we can run.

  ‘They see we have small ears and they’re not on top of our heads and they wonder how well we can hear.

  ‘They see we have tiny noses and wonder how well we can smell.

  ‘They see our eyes are close together and wonder how we can see danger coming from beside or behind us.

  ‘They think we’re not designed very well and that all in all it’s better to be an animal.’

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Is that the story? Your stories usually start a long way further from the finish than that.’

  ‘When do you go for lunch?’ Uncle asked, and Robert answered, ‘Not until lunchtime.’

  ‘All right then. Now, boys, this is a true story,’ Uncle began. ‘When I lived in Mandan, as you know one of my patients Edgar Ten Fingers was an Oglala Sioux medicine man and I heard this story from him. Edgar and I were very good friends. We came from different cultures but Edgar and I saw eye to eye. He called me a “right man” and that was a great honour. I told him about the medicines I used and he told me about the medicines he used.’

  ‘Why was he called Edgar Ten Fingers?’ Steve asked.

  ‘Steven, Bruce just asked me that very question and you know I never asked him,’ Uncle Reub replied. ‘Indians can have many names during their lives. That was his name when I knew him ten years ago in Mandan and it’s still his name today, although if I were to choose I’d rename him Edgar White Man Healer.’

  ‘Why?’ Rob asked.

  ‘Because his words can be more powerful than shock therapy. Now let me tell you about the medicines he used. Those pink flowers your mother grows around the cottage, those coneflowers? The Sioux smear their hands in coneflower juice when they use their bare hands to fish out dog heads from stewing dog meat.’

  I wondered if Uncle’s story would be about dogs but it wasn’t.

  ‘This is a story about how bountiful this land is, how it really belongs to all the animals that live on it. We think it’s ours to do with as we wish, but it’s really only ours to share,’ Uncle began. ‘The Sioux have great patience and their stories are very long. In the winter, storytellers go on for days telling a story.’

  ‘What if someone has to go to the bathroom?’ Perry asked.

  ‘I’m sure the storyteller will pause for pee breaks,’ Uncle replied, ‘but as well as being very long, just like life sometimes their stories go off in different directions to where you think they’re going and the story you’re waiting to hear the ending of doesn’t end. It just sort of peters out.’

  I thought I understood what my uncle was saying. Sometimes I’d plan to do something – catch worms – but soon after starting I’d get distracted and do something else.

  ‘Now then, boys, this Ontario forest is rich in life but in North Dakota where I lived the land was different, it was barren and empty. Two brothers, Luke and Jacob – they were really Indian spirits but let’s call them brothers – were passing through North Dakota one day, where nothing much grew and there was no water to drink and in that desolate land they met a starving rabbit that asked them why they were there and where they were going.

  ‘“We’re going to Lake Chemong, in Ontario, where there’s plenty of fresh grass and herbs to eat and water to drink,” Luke told the rabbit. “Do as you please but you’d do well to follow us.”

  ‘Well, that rabbit told the other rabbits and they told their friends, the gophers and groundhogs, prairie dogs and field mice, that Luke had invited them to go where there was lots of grass and bugs and herbs and water. These animals told their friends and they told all the big, gentle animals, the moose and deer, caribou and reindeer, antelopes and elk, mountain goats and bighorn sheep and they all took their families and followed Luke towards the rich and fertile land around Lake Chemong.

  ‘A timber wolf saw them all passing and asked an elderly deer why they were all travelling together and where they were going.

  ‘The old deer said, “There will be a great feast on the shores of Lake Chemong, where there’s every type of food to eat and plenty to drink. A truce has been declared during that feast and no animal will harm any other animal. The feast will last for many moons, for so long that even you and I will live happily together without any worry or care. It would be wise if you joined us.”’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Steve. ‘The deer said a truce has been declared but that’s not what Luke told the rabbit.’

  ‘Excellent, Steven. You will make a good courtroom lawyer. But let’s hear what happened next. Well, that timber wolf told his friends, the coyotes and weasels, pine martens and foxes, raccoons and skunks, wildcats, bobcats and wolverines, what he had been told. And these animals told the beaver and muskrats, otters, mink and polecats, and they all took their families and travelled together with the old deer, following Luke to Lake Chemong.’

  ‘Did Edgar name every single animal that ever existed?’ Perry asked, and Uncle answered, ‘Edgar Ten Fingers says it is a great sadness if a man is not given the opportunity to finish telling his story.’ And he continued.

  ‘A painted turtle saw them as they passed and asked one of the muskrats why they were travelling together and where they were going and, Perry, he told his friends the snapping turtles and salamanders, frogs and toads, snakes and lizards, and each of these told their friends and they took their families and travelled together with the muskrat.’

  ‘This sounds like Noah and the Ark,’ I said.

  ‘Very good,’ Uncle Reub replied. ‘Every religion
has a Noah and the Ark story, not just ours. This story may be as old as the Noah’s Ark story but it’s not from the Torah.’

  He carried on, ‘A bear saw them as they all passed by and asked one of the frogs why they were travelling together and where they were going, and the frog replied as you’d expect the frog to reply. He said, “Luke says there will be a great feast on the beautiful and fruitful shores of Lake Chemong, that the Mighty Spirit has declared a truce amongst all things that breathe, and there will be unlimited food for us to eat and fresh, clear water to drink, forever.”

  ‘The bear is a very wise animal, the wisest, and he asked the frog one more question. “Did Luke tell you this?”

  ‘“No,” answered the frog, “but the painted turtle told me that’s what he said.”

  ‘The bear asked the painted turtle, “Did Luke tell you there will be a truce amongst all those that breathe and a great feast on the shores of Lake Chemong?—”’

  But before Uncle Reub could tell us what the painted turtle said we heard Grace calling, ‘Uncle Reub! Mrs Fogle needs you. Angus has been shot by a porcupine!’

  We all stood up. I felt a shiver go through me. Grace had run the entire way from the cottage and was breathing hard.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked Grace.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘Your mother came and told me to find you and your uncle.’

  ‘What’s happened to Angus?’ I asked again.

  ‘He’s crying and won’t let anyone touch him. The porcupine needles are all over his face.’

  ‘Grace, go back and ask Mrs Nichols where her vet is. Get the vet’s address and telephone number and take it to your mother. Tell her we’ll probably need her to drive us there,’ Uncle instructed and Grace raced back ahead of us.

  ‘Robert and Steven, go ahead of us and see what you can do but don’t touch the dog. I don’t want you to end up at Civic Hospital with dog bites. They’d have to give you rabies serum.’