Chickadee (17 page)

Omakayas was worried.

“Come here, my boy,” she said gently. “Sit with me. We are missing your brother, aren't we?”

“Yes,” said Makoons.

“Let us sit here and think about him then,” said Omakayas. Tears came into her eyes.

“I know he is alive,” Makoons said. “I feel his presence. I know he's looking for us.”

“He is strong and he will find us,” said Omakayas. “We have to be patient and wait.”

Makoons looked at her helplessly. Waiting was very hard. It was so difficult to stay in one place waiting for your twin, the other half of you, to show up. Any moment he might appear. Or he might not appear. There was no certainty. That's what was hardest. That's what tired him.

Makoons crept next to his mother, lay against her. Exhaustion crept over him. The chill from the river came back and he shivered, even though the day was warm. His mother made tea from wild rose hips, covered him with a blanket. Omakayas sang to him and stroked his hair until he slept. She was very worried.

“Nokomis,” she said when her grandmother appeared. “We need to make another, better, strengthening tea for Makoons. We have to feed him well. We must keep him from growing ill.”

“I know,” said Nokomis. “I, too, am worried that he could pine away for his twin. I am going out to gather medicines, plant food, and watch the horizon. One day, from that distance, I know our boy will appear.”

Nokomis took her bean seeds from the little pouch she had carried across Minnesota. Even when most of their things had been stolen, she'd saved a few seeds. She loved to make gardens, and had a nose for whom to ask for seeds. She'd added to those few seeds with others that she traded for from the people of Garden Island, in Lake of the Woods. All around that great and complicated lake, there had been women who planted corn, gourds, beans.

Now, bending over the soft earth, Nokomis took a few bean seeds and carefully buried them. She marked each seed with a tall stick. She worked the fish bones, the heads and fins and scales, into the soil between the seeds. Then she carried water in a wooden bucket to each one. It used to be, she reflected, that she could make a new container from birchbark any time she wanted. She just had to find a tree, remove the bark, and fashion her vessel. Nokomis sighed at the memory. On the Plains, there were few birch trees. And even those few had thin and crinkly skin. They made frail baskets, and terrible buckets. This one wooden bucket had to do a lot of work. It was the only one they had.

Angeline and Yellow Kettle straightened their backs. They were planting seed potatoes given to them by Father Belcourt. At that same moment, using a saw borrowed from the priest, and hinges traded for with maple sugar, Mikwam and Fishtail were making a little trapdoor in the wood floor of the cabin. They were digging out a root cellar, anticipating that there would be potatoes to keep there by fall. They were hauling sand to line the bottoms of the bins—they had learned that this trick kept the potatoes and squash at the right temperature all winter.

After the cellar was dug and the door finished off with a rope handle, the two went out to work on the pole fences. They had put to use old poles left behind, setting them in place between shorter logs pounded into the earth. They now had a small fenced yard, and a shanty for Brownie and Brownie to shelter inside when the rain poured. Otherwise the horses were tough and grazed the grasses all around on staked lines. Their bellies grew, though one Brownie's belly was growing bigger than the other's.

Zozie had joined Nokomis in the garden. She pointed at the horses and said, “Nokomis, I think one of the Brownies is going to have a foal.”

“You're right,” said Nokomis, nodding happily. “It won't be long. We are lucky that Two Strike knows what to do.”

Two Strike, who had taken charge of the horses, cared for them religiously. At night, she slept near them in a pile of sweet, dry grass. By day, she worked and trained them. She practiced riding, along with Animikiins. As soon as possible, they planned to take those two horses and hunt buffalo. They were making friends among the other Anishinabeg, and also among the Metis who lived all around the town and up into the low hills. Once the Red River carts returned and the families were again together, they would follow the buffalo off into the Plains and hunt them to fill those carts again.

They would use each part of the buffalo and build up their winter stores of dried meat. They would make pemmican, tan hides, make beautiful fluffy robes, and keep the horns to make powder carriers, knife handles, spoons, even buttons and tobacco boxes. How Two Strike looked forward to that hunt.

But even as Two Strike made plans, Animikiins fell silent. His heart was heavy. He worked as hard as he could. But waiting and wondering about Chickadee weighed so heavy on his heart, sometimes, that he couldn't breathe. There were times when he sat with Omakayas, holding her hand, neither of them saying a word hour after hour. How could they go on? Yet they did go on, waiting for their son.

T
he oxcart train jogged and wobbled, in a sea of noise, down a path that became a wide road. This road broadened and smoothed itself out and at last became a series of streets lined with wooden buildings. Chickadee sat beside Uncle Quill and looked with amazement at the ornamented tops of the buildings. There were many log cabins and many more plank houses, too. For which reason, of course, there was not a tree in sight. The signs that marked the glass windows of the stores were bright and bold. The people walked on wooden paths and stared at the oxcarts and held their hands over their ears.

The muddy path took them along the river, where each cart would unload. As the cart jounced along, Chickadee stared up at the bluff above the river.

Towering high over the slope he saw the biggest houses in the world. They were carved of trees. Each was of a different shape and color. Great windows like staring eyes glared over the river. Doors like mouths swung open as people came out, drawn by the outrageous noise of the oxcarts. The people stood high on the bluff, shading their eyes, pointing down at the carts and the drivers and the children, who shaded their eyes, too, and pointed right back up at them.

It was not polite to point. Nokomis had always stopped Chickadee from pointing at a person.

“You are stabbing at that person's spirit,” she had told Chickadee. “And never point at clouds because there might be a thunderbird up there, or at the water because you must not challenge water, or at the islands because they are also alive.”

Nokomis pointed by puckering her lips and nodding at whatever she wanted to indicate. Most other Anishinabeg did too.

Chickadee had rarely pointed at anything or anybody in his life. But he was so astonished at those houses, which Uncle Quill called mansions, that he pointed right up at them, and nobody stopped him.

Uncle Quill just smiled at his nephew's surprise. He'd been in St. Paul before.

The oxcart train made camp by a lake.

Although he was excited to be in St. Paul, he also wanted to go home. He looked at the ground. One hawk feather, blown by the wind and trampled by passing carts, stuck raggedly out of the mud. Chickadee plucked it out of the road and carefully tucked it into his shirt. There weren't very many birds in St. Paul, but one of his helpers had passed over.

One by one, each cart was unloaded at the trader's warehouse. The bales of fur were weighed, their quality assessed. The horn spoons and bowls, the baskets and quilled shirts were bargained for. Antoinette sold seven pairs of embroidered moccasins and eight calico shirts that she'd made on the way. She was such a quick and clever seamstress that she'd make as many on the way back and sell another batch in Pembina.

Once a cart had been emptied, it would then be reloaded with things that people back home had requested from the St. Paul traders. The people up north, around Pembina, needed metal dishes, bolts of wool and calico, rifles, ammunition, ribbons, beads, door latches, bucket handles, ingots of metal, and reams of paper. Tar paper, writing paper, wrapping paper, oil paper were loaded into the carts. There were lanterns and lantern oil. Coffeepots. Coffee beans. Tea. Sugar. Flour. Nails. Hammers. Delicate windows. Packets of bright candy.

All of these things and more!

As they waited at the end of the line for their cart to be assessed, Chickadee watched everything around him. He saw his uncle squint hard at the line of traders who were bargaining for each load. The traders wore fancy vests, boots with a harsh shine quickly covered with mud and dust, and white shirts. They had loud, excited voices that dropped to a whisper as they decided on prices. Each had a pad of paper on which he wrote out numbers. Still squinting hard, Chickadee saw his uncle pull a pad of paper and a long pointed feather out of a packet at his elbow. He also had a little bottle filled with a black substance. Uncle Quill dipped his sharpened feather into the ink, and began to scratch it across his paper.

The traders Uncle Quill had been looking at approached the wagon and gave out a huge guffaw.

“Looka here, this savage is
writin'
!”

Several of the other traders craned to see what was going on. Uncle Quill continued calmly to dip his pen in the bottle and to make signs on the paper. Two more traders came over to see what was happening and gawked at the sight of Uncle Quill, who occasionally brushed his forehead with the tip of the feather and looked into the clouds, as if for inspiration.

“Whatcha writin'?” asked one of the traders.

Quill glanced at them through his shaggy hair, then handed over the paper. The first trader read out the numbers on the paper, then frowned. Another trader jostled him, took the paper, and wrote another number down beside Quill's number. Still another trader looked at everything in the cart, grabbed the paper, and wrote down yet another number and handed it up to Quill before a fourth trader could elbow his way over. Quill looked at the number and shrugged. He waited for the last trader to make his way to the cart, and handed the paper to him. The last trader kicked one of the other traders in the knee, wrote down a number quickly, tossed the pad of paper up to Quill.

Quill read the number, thought a moment, then nodded. The other traders turned their attention to the other carts. Quill followed this trader to his warehouse, where money was counted out to him. Once Quill had counted and recounted the coins, he allowed his cart to be unloaded.

After the quick unloading came the next part of the exchange. Quill and Chickadee went to the storeroom next to the trader's fur warehouse.