When he came home from the war, therefore, and learned of his daughter’s erratic behaviour, Jacob concluded that she had probably inherited the mental illness that had cut short the life of her mother. He thus made allowances and tried to shield her from herself by chasing away predatory white men whenever he could. His protective instinct extended to her little boy, and he intervened when he found Stella beating him. She once threw Oscar outside naked into the snow, paying no attention to his screams, and it was just good luck that he happened to arrive home at that moment to bring his grandson inside.
When he told his daughter she had to change her ways, she just laughed at him. “I didn’t want that kid when he was born and I don’t want him now. If you love him so much, why don’t you just take him off my hands and raise him yourself.”
Jacob had sought to do just that, but it was not easy. He had no wife to help him, had no special parenting skills, and found it no easier to establish intimate ties with his grandson than he had with his own daughter. Perhaps that was the reason he made Oscar call him Jacob rather than grandpa or even grandfather. To make it worse, Stella was living in his house and it was heartbreaking to see her constantly shoving her little boy away when he was just trying to show her his love. He did what he could, making sure Oscar ate regularly and buying him decent clothes. When he was old enough, he sent him to the day school on the reserve where the white teachers, although hard on the kids, were at least teaching them some reading, writing, arithmetic, and other skills needed to survive in the white man’s world.
To shield him as much as he could from the influence of his mother, Jacob took Oscar out of the school on the reserve each spring when he started work at the guest house and let him attend classes at the school for white kids at Port Carling.
Oscar was now set to graduate from elementary school at the end of June, and since there was no high school on the reserve, he would have to leave at the end of the summer and attend a residential school until he was sixteen. And although his daughter had nothing good to say about the residential school she had gone to, maybe that was just because girls were more apt to become homesick than boys. Oscar would do okay.
4
A fierce wind from the northwest plains that had crossed Lake Huron and Georgian Bay and swept up and over the leafless highlands now came howling down onto the lake, whipping the water into rows upon rows of white-capped breakers that pushed the canoe off course. Oscar stopped singing as he and Jacob fought their way to a protected passageway between a large island and the shore.
For the next hour they paddled through a wide channel lined with oversized boathouses. Great steamer docks proudly adorned with sixty-foot-high flagpoles, their ropes rattling in the wind, protruded aggressively a hundred feet out into the water. Behind the docks, scarcely visible in the starlight, were wide walkways leading up past tennis courts and wide lawns to huge summer houses with upper-floor balconies and wraparound verandas. This was Millionaires’ Row, the preserve of the American and Canadian super-rich whose parents and grandparents had visited the district to hunt and fish in the late nineteenth century. It was still a land of poor bush farmers then and they were able to buy up the shorefront they needed at a cheap price to recreate the country-club life they enjoyed at home.
The waves were as high as ever when they left the shelter of the channel, but the wind was now at their backs and they began to make up for lost time. The cold, however, cut through Oscar’s clothes and his teeth began to chatter.
“Lie down on the floor and cover yourself with blanket,” Jacob told him. “I’ll wake you up when we reach the manido.”
Sometime later, a splash of cold water coming over the gunnels struck Oscar in the face. He woke up to see, in the grainy light of the predawn, the head of a blind chief emerging from the rock on the north-facing outcrop of a deserted island alongside that of a smaller inert guardian companion. As ancient as Turtle Island itself, its face was covered in lichen, its cheekbones were fractured and its nose broken. Inscrutable, it exuded profound sadness and complete indifference to the waves crashing against its base and to travellers who came to pay it homage. The old people said it was, in fact, the Creator himself in another form.
Taking hold of his paddle, Oscar held the canoe as steady as he could in the seething waters, freeing Jacob to light his pipe, and with his arms and hands outstretched, raise it into the air and offer a prayer to the unsmiling deity.
“Oh Great Manido, I beg you to protect two humble Chippewa canoeists from the wrath of the seven-headed water snake that dwells in the depths of this lake. I beseech you to allow us to travel in peace and safety to the Indian Camp. And bring us good luck, Oh Great Manido, as we try to catch a fish for our breakfast on this last leg of our journey.”
He then blew an offering of smoke to the statue and told his grandson to fish while he paddled. Oscar pulled the gear from a pack — an eight-inch silver spoon armed with triple gang hooks at the end of three hundred feet of thirty-pound test copper trolling wire — and fed it slowly into the water until it was only a few feet from the bottom. He gave the line a jerk, making the spoon leap forward, and a fish immediately took the bait. Oscar hauled in the line, hand over hand, keeping tension on the wire to keep it from breaking free. Jacob turned the bow of the canoe into the wind and held the boat steady until his grandson pulled the fish, a two-pound lake trout, over the side.
Jacob murmured a prayer of thanks to the Manido for answering his appeal and, clenching his pipe in his teeth, steered toward the mouth of the Indian River, a mile away. The final and most emotionally wrenching part of his journey was about to begin, for he was coming home to a place that no longer existed. He was coming home to Obagawanung, known as Indian Gardens by the first settlers. He had been born there in 1863, son of the chief and grandson of a veteran of the War of 1812 who had left the Rama Indian Reserve in the 1840s to look for a place where his family could live in peace away from the white man’s whiskey and religion. The veteran had found such a spot in the middle of the traditional hunting grounds of his people in a place so rocky and unfit for farming and with weather so harsh that he thought white men would never want to settle there. A dozen other war veterans and their families joined him and they built their village just below the rapids at the headwaters of the Indian River, six miles upstream from where it fed into Lake Muskoka.
5
Jacob had treasured Obagawanung when he was a child. It was a holy place where Mother Earth was most alive, where the people were part of the world around them, where the manidos were everywhere in the surrounding lakes and rivers and in the trees, the rocks, the animals, the fish, the clouds, the lightning, and the passing seasons. In the winters, he used go outside at night to listen to them whisper to each another in the mist that rose up from the current. In the spring, he would wait eagerly for the annual visit of the half-breed traders who came from their posts on Georgian Bay in birchbark canoes laden with guns, ammunition, and other supplies to exchange for beaver, muskrat, and wolf pelts. In the summers, he camped on an island in Lake Muskoka picking blueberries with his family, and in the autumns he went hunting with the men for deer and bear. He thought he would spend the rest of his life at Obagawanung, but one day when he was five or six, white men came and surveyed the lands, and the settlers arrived soon after.
Now, only half a dozen rotting log cabin homes, used as pigpens by the farmer son of one of the first settlers, remained of that world. With one exception, the graves of the inhabitants had been picked over by archaeologists seeking specimens of so-called primitive man to put on display in museums or ploughed into the ground by settlers years ago, leaving the shadows of the dead to wander without a home. The grave that was spared was that of Jacob’s grandfather, who had died of grief when told by the Indian agent that his people would have to abandon their homes to make way for the immigrants in search of land coming from across the Great Waters.
In bitter memories that he had shared only with his grandson, Jacob remembered, as if it were just yesterday, helping his father and the other men of the condemned community take his grandfather’s body one moonless night, when