Wenjack Read online

  ALSO BY JOSEPH BOYDEN

  The Orenda

  Through Black Spruce

  Three Day Road

  Born With A Tooth (stories)

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of Penguin Canada,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2016

  Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Boyden

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.​penguin​randomhouse.​ca

  This book is a work of fiction. While incidents in the novel are based on real people, events, and locations, they have been recreated fictitiously. All other characters, dialogue, and events are the work of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Boyden, Joseph, 1966–, author

  Wenjack / Joseph Boyden.

  ISBN 978-0-7352-3338-6 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-7352-3339-3 (electronic)

  1. Indians of North America—Ontario—Residential schools—

  Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8553.O9358W46 2016 C813’.6 C2016-904595-1

  ILLUSTRATIONS BY KENT MONKMAN

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by CS Richardson

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Titles

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Sucker Fish

  Crow

  Hummingbird

  Owl

  Mouse Skull

  Pike

  Spider

  Wood Tick

  Beaver

  Snow Goose

  Rabbit

  Lynx

  Author’s Note

  SUCKER FISH

  Gimik-wenden-ina? Do you remember? I remember, me.

  My friends, the two brothers, call the pale teacher Fish Belly or sometimes Sucker Belly. They don’t say it to his face because he’s strong and he smells like what the colour yellow or maybe brown smells like, and he has a room in the basement that scares the life from us. He calls me the slow one. Even though they took me away from my home two years ago when I was nine I am still in the first class but Fish Belly says I get to go to a new class soon. I’m learning my English, me. But I won’t lose my tongue.

  I pretend to be the slow one so I don’t forget my words. When the Fish Bellies with shining shoes and guns tied to their waists came to take me, Nindede said not to speak my words out loud but only to whisper them when they couldn’t hear. Daddy. Nindede. Mama. Nimaamaa. My sisters. Nimiseyag. My dogs. Animoshag. I will see you again, yes? Indian. Anishnaabe. If the Fish Bellies hear me speak my words they beat me with a stick and make me eat soap.

  Tonight is the night they line us up and then we climb in the water tub, two, or three of us if we’re real skinny, and we have to wash the back of the one in front. Then we get out and Fish Belly rubs each of us with a wet towel. This means tomorrow is prayer day. I can tell which niijii, which friend, ran away from the school this week by the long red marks on his back. Ever a lot of red marks. Ever a lot of friends who ran away this week. But Fish Belly teacher has Fish Belly friends who go out and catch them. We have a secret path, but maybe it’s not so secret anymore. The Fish Bellies are good at catching Indian children. One day I will run. One day they won’t hurt me anymore.

  CROW

  The three boys didn’t plan to run away from the school on that October afternoon. But the sun was warm enough that they took off their windbreakers and tied them around their waists, and it was the older of the two brothers who said to his younger sibling and to Charlie that they should go visit an uncle who would take them out on the traplines so that the school people they called Fish Bellies would never find them again. A dozen children had run away from the school that week but all had been captured and returned and beaten.

  The three boys made that impulsive decision on that Indian summer afternoon as boys are wont to do. They climbed the fence when they knew no teacher would be looking and disappeared like thin ghosts into the thick forest of spruce and poplar and willow. The two brothers covered ground quickly, walking fast then slipping into a run, pushing each other the way brothers who have nothing else but each other do. They didn’t get upset when they had to stop and wait for pigeon-toed Charlie, placing thin red willow shoots into their mouths and chewing on them, squatting on their haunches and staring wordless at the forest ahead, their eyes carving the path they would soon take.

  Near the secret path that the children used to sneak away from town without being seen, Charlie found a discarded railroad schedule with a route map in it. He hoped this might serve as a guide to his home and carefully folded it and put it in his thin jacket’s pocket. Charlie had a lung infection. Tuberculosis and similar diseases had taken thousands of Indian children’s lives the last years in these strange schools, always built with a cemetery beside them to bury those the attendants knew would not make it to the final grade. Charlie had once shown the two brothers the long red scar that began at his collarbone then arced down and split his chest before curving off to his back. He’d been opened up by a white doctor’s scalpel as a child but when the brothers asked him why, he claimed not to know or even to exactly remember how old he was when the scar was made. On this bright October afternoon, the sun beginning to fall and the cold beginning its wind through the black spruce, Charlie coughed and spat phlegm, his breathing a whine. When he caught up to the two brothers, no words were exchanged nor any judgment or anger as the two boys rose from their haunches and bounded off into the growing darkness, Charlie following as best he could.

  How do we know this, you ask? We watched them. We, those who chose to, took the form of crows and followed them silently and swiftly, swooping by them then hovering above before diving down to land in the branches of dying trees to stare upon them, our cobalt eyes sparkling to absorb the last of day’s light.

  HUMMINGBIRD

  Ever glad my friends wait for me. They go fast and disappear in the bush and I have to look careful as I follow for ghosts of footsteps or broken twigs they leave for me or the thin paths through trees that I know in me are the ones they take. I need to stop and sit and when I do, nenookaasi, a hummingbird, comes near my head and stares at me, so close I hear her tiny wings hum before she flies away. That is a good sign. I know it.

  Getting dark and I can hear something following. Is it the Fish Belly men? My body won’t give me enough breath to run like my friends but I try anyways, and every time I catch up they stand from squatting and spit the twigs from their mouths and disappear again.

  But now dark is almost here and I hear the Fish Belly teacher word. Don’t. I catch my friends finally and my inside chest burns and I spit some red-and-white spit on the ground but this time they don’t stand and disappear again. I kneel beside my friends and we huddle for heat and don’t say anything but glance into each other’s eyes then look just as quick away. We all say the same thing without saying it out loud. Go back now and get switched but don’t get real cold tonight. Or get real cold tonight and wait for light but don’t stop running to where we run. None of us wants to go back even though we now understand how cold the night is going to be. We are going to stay anyways and my insid
e chest begins to stop hurting as bad. Don’t hurt, chest.

  The older brother reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out some toilet paper and the other brother reaches his hand into his own pocket and pulls out some dry grass. I reach into my pockets and feel the map. I will need this. I feel bad when my hands come out empty to say I have nothing. The older brother reaches into his other pocket and pulls out what looks like a little stick and holds it in front of him, showing it to us in the shadows like it is something we need to pray to. I lean closer. It’s a match, but even in this little bit of light I see that the blue head of it misses its red tip.

  The two brothers gather dried twigs and then I watch as they kneel to the ground, their heads almost touching as they work with their hands. The older one takes the match and they both whisper and then he picks up a small stone and runs the match across the top of it. Nothing. He does it again. Nothing. The third time he does it I hear the match snap and then the ko ko ko of an owl somewhere not far away. The brothers say Gaaaah! and then laugh quiet and sit down on their bums.

  I know what Owl says when he says ko ko ko but I don’t want to tell my friends and scare them. Instead I tell them I saw a hummingbird and it’s a good sign for us, but the younger brother says no, it’s not, because they were all supposed to leave at end of summer and if one is still here it will die of the cold.

  The brothers get up and we walk to a big black spruce and snap its lowest bottom bits off and make a bed for us under it from the green smell of it. That smell makes me want my home and my nindede and my sisters and dogs. The brothers whisper and one hums a bit of a radio song, and then I listen, my eyes open and staring up through branches of gaa waan dag, of spruce, as both begin to breathe like waves coming onto the beach with their breath of sleep. So dark now under the night and clouds that hide stars and moon that I can only hear the mouse chewing on the toilet paper and dry grass and dried twigs from our fire, the fire that couldn’t live. I’m cold. Cold. Nin giik aj. Ningiikaj I whisper as I flutter like a hummingbird to sleep.

  I wake from hard shakes and in the darkness feel like I’m all by myself until the clouds pass, and in the light of Giizis moon I think I see an owl above watching me and when I turn my head slow I see the brothers curled together. Slow as I can I move closer to them and slow I curl as close to them as I am able and soon we are three curved sticks floating on the back of a great and rough and freezing river that carries us and swallows us and carries us again toward the sun morning.

  OWL

  When darkness comes, some of us who follow the three boys descend from bare tree limbs to become mice. Those of us who choose this form sniff then gnaw the twigs and paper the children have left as offering. We sit on our haunches and we hold this detritus in our tiny paws and watch with twinkling black eyes the three brown children buffet along the swollen rivers of sleep, their bodies clutching each other for warmth.

  Those of us in the trees above who choose to stay perched instead shift into owls, twisting our heads and blinking our slow yellow eyes to refract the moon and stars’ light to sight. We twist our heads to one another and call out ko ko ko, whisper to the children below, then swoop on silent wings with talons spread to pierce the mice and carry them squirming above. We perch on limbs and look down at the shivering children as we swallow the mice whole, their tails twitching in our beaks as we watch the one called Charlie awake and look up at us before crawling closer to the two brothers, searching for warmth.

  Charlie. His real name is Chanie. But the ones who forced him to that school can’t pronounce or don’t care to listen and so say it with sharp tongues instead. If we could feel pity for this one, we would. His walk before, his walk to come. Neither is easy. All he wants is home. We follow now, we follow always, not to lead but to capture. Someone, yes, will capture this boy’s life.

  As the coldest part of North October night sets in, we who are owls gag and retch. We’ve absorbed the essence of our captive mice and now cough up their bones and fur. We spit what we can’t keep down to the boys below, not in contempt but in honour. Nothing. Ko. Nothing. Ko ko. Nothing, ko ko ko, should go to waste.

  Just look at what these three boys do. They’ve left the hissing radiator’s warmth, a dormitory bed, night floorboards creaking under the weight of those charged with their protection. These boys, and the dozen children the week before them, have all run away for a reason. But these three, these three will go further than the others. They are driven.

  We stare down upon what they can and must live through. They shake in half sleep despite holding on to a friend or a brother. When they awake, though, they will feel the shame of having touched one another, if even just for warmth. This lesson not taught by their own but by others will by morning dissipate with the early frost. Alas, we get ahead of ourselves. The school these three were dragged to will continue to call to them like distant shouts through the poplar. And these three, Chanie especially, will try to concentrate on the choked breath in his ears as he runs, the whine in his lungs, his inside chest burning.

  We who choose to be owls watch all this, blink our yellow eyes slow and cough down pellets to the three boys below. The fur and bones won’t keep them warm. But the one truth we know is this slow blink of our own yellow eyes. These children we reflect in our retinas will awake at least one more morning. They will wake staring into the black of the centre of our eye and will rub their own and make sunspots, the yellow orb of light growing rounder to pull them from the ground to go.

  MOUSE SKULL

  I wake up, me, to the older brother staring down. The sun rises behind him so that light shoots from his body. My arms are wrapped around his brother with his back to me and we are curled like dogs. I watch as the older brother shakes his head in a big no. He kicks the younger one hard who cries awake. I suddenly feel guilty. The older brother turns and walks to the path and squats on it, looking away. The one beside me jumps up and says Ever stupid, you! Then he kicks me, too.

  I crawl up on my knees and then push my hands on the ground to stand up straight. My knees feel like what an old man walking looks like and my side is hot from the tip of the boy’s shoe. The younger one has joined the older and both squat and chew on sticks and stare down the path they will take. I want to walk to them to be friends again. I don’t know what I did, me. The air between us is cold and heavy and sparkles with sun morning. Giizis.

  I walk in a small circle with my eyes to the ground and let the circle get bigger. This will warm me and let me get closer to them, too. Under last night’s tree our green bed still holds the shape of our bodies. I stop in my circle and look up at the tree losing its leaves that kokoko stared down from. My eyes go to the ground and I see now what he left. I pick it up in my hands and run a finger along the hard and soft of it, this cough-up shaped like an egg, and this thought makes my belly rumble. My fingers pick through it, pull it apart, the fur and little bones of waa waa big on oojii mouse. Waawaabigonoojii. Ever big name for such a small one.

  At the centre of the ball of fur and bones my fingers stop picking. Careful as I can, I remove the bits of fur that still stick, and then my fingers pass to my palm a perfect mouse skull. I hold it up to the sun morning and through the glowing eye hole I see a shining black pebble, tiny and sparkling. I bring the skull closer and smile at my find. A tiny black stone stuck where Mouse’s eye used to be. This is beautiful. I will give it to the brothers to say sorry for what I don’t know I did, but when I turn to walk to them, I see that they are gone.

  I’m hot again when I reach the brothers squatting and chewing sticks, the mouse skull safe in my jacket pocket with the map. This is all I have but this will be enough for now. My inside chest burns and I spit some red on the ground as I lean on my knees and try to breathe good. The brothers don’t look at me as they rise to run, and I don’t feel bad. I can feel they are no longer mad at me for what I don’t know I did. I think they don’t know, too. I will give them this gift when we stop and rest proper. I will give them th
e most perfect thing I’ve ever found because they wait for me and they care.

  The forest begins to open up as the sun looks down from straight above. I can tell, me, we are getting near a big river or maybe a lake, the ground leaning to it now just a little bit. I’ve been good at knowing which way the brothers run. I’m not so scared anymore in the sunlight. Not so scary in the day. Gii zhi gad. Giizhigad.

  I can tell which way they run because they go the way that’s easiest to make. Sometimes there’s more than one choice but if I look close they leave me messages of a broken bit of willow chewed up so the red skin of it shows the white meat underneath. When I find them, I pick them up and put them in my pocket so I have something to prove to my friends I knew they were close. That I am here, too.

  Every little bit when I need to rest, I reach careful in my jacket pocket and take the gift even more careful in my fingers and peek at it for just a second. The light of Giizis touches the black pebble eye and waawaabigonoojii mouse winks at me. Today is okay. Today there will be no school.

  The trees are bigger here. The ground leans harder. I’m closer now to water. I can no longer run, me, but walk fast instead and let the slow hill carry my body. Thirsty. Water soon. The Fish Belly who teaches us doesn’t let us drink any water when we answer words wrong. He doesn’t let us eat, either. I’m used to hungry, me. But I can’t get used to no water.

  I can hear a river now, and soon see its bright back twinkle at me through the azaadi poplar as Giizis sun touches it to say ahnee hello.

  PIKE

  We flick our amber tails and torpedo through the tannin-stained river, gills breathing water as we gather into flashing schools before, in ones or twos, we depart our company to swim alone. One of us takes the form of northern pike, yellow eyes with sparkling retinas searching for sustenance and finding a young pickerel hiding behind a shoal on the riverbed. Short chase before the lunge, needle teeth clamping, this fish small enough to be gulped in two torn swallows.