Chickadee (18 page)

When Chickadee walked into the storeroom, his mouth dropped open. There were bags upon bags of flour, sugar, meal, oats. There were tins of tea and jars of red-and-white-striped sticks. Bales of calico and wool, boxes of dried fruit and salted meats. There were tin buckets and stacks of animal traps. Knives of every size and shape.

“Here, boy,” said the trader. He handed Chickadee a striped stick. It was a nice stick. Chickadee looked at it. He'd never seen a stick like this before. He waved it through the air. He tapped it on his hand.

Uncle Quill laughed.

“Taste it,” he said.

Chickadee put the red-and-white stick in his mouth. His eyes opened wide as the sweetness and deliciousness of the peppermint struck his tongue with a blow of joy.

He took the stick out with a wild smile.

“Uncle,” he cried. “Minopogwad! It tastes
good
!”

Uncle Quill laughed again and then proceeded to bargain with the goods agent until he had what he needed loaded back into the cart.

As Uncle Quill was bargaining, Chickadee slowly enjoyed his first taste of candy. But as he tasted it with every fiber of his being, he thought of Makoons and wished that his brother could be eating a peppermint stick too. When he had licked and nibbled the stick exactly halfway down, Chickadee wrapped it in a stray piece of paper that a trader had dropped on the floor. Then he put the peppermint in the same pouch where he kept his striker. He would keep it for his brother. If only he could give it to Makoons right this minute!

Finally, the last decisions were made and the merchandise was piled near the cart. Chickadee and Uncle Quill secured everything with ropes and covered their precious cargo with the buffalo hides kept to protect the wares on the way back.

That night, as the oxcart train made camp near the outskirts of the city, Chickadee saw the flicker of candlelight and lamplight high on the hill where the great houses stood. He wondered if he would ever see the inside of one of those houses whose great windows blared sheaves of light. They made huge blurred spears that reached out into the balmy spring darkness. He heard voices up there, tinkly music, and the clatter of hoofbeats as carriages and wagons rolled over wooden planks and stone pathways. He thought of Makoons again. Could he ever convey this sight in words? He would have to memorize all that he was seeing so that he could tell his brother of what was there. Only his brother would understand, he thought, the black uneasiness that he also felt.

It seemed to Chickadee that those houses held the powers of the world. The ones who built and lived in those houses were making an outsize world. An existence he'd never dreamed of. Almost a spirit world, but one on earth. Chickadee could see that they used up forests of trees in making the houses. He could see that they had cut down every tree in sight. He could feel that they were pumping up the river and even using up the animals. He thought of the many animals whose dead hides were bound and sold in St. Paul in one day. Everything that the Anishinabeg counted on in life, and loved, was going into this hungry city mouth. This mouth, this city, was wide and insatiable. It would never be satisfied, thought Chickadee dizzily, until everything was gone.

That night, Chickadee tried to sleep. But he was too excited to drop off into slumber. There was a loud uproar around the fire, and Chickadee decided to watch the dancing and listen to the fiddle music. People from St. Paul were so happy to see relatives from the oxcart train that they brought out extra food. There were many fiddle players sitting on stumps, playing together or taking turns. As they played, they kept time with their feet. The firelight gleamed across their bright eyes and they played with joy and effort, squeezing up their mouths and bending up and down as they came to the quickest parts of their songs.

And the dancers! Chickadee now realized that the dancing he'd seen on the way to St. Paul was nothing compared with a real Metis celebration! The men were dressed in their best clothes—stocking caps, fancy berets with round pompoms, brimmed hats, striped hats! Their shirts were dripping with ribbons and fringe, and they wore long red sashes, finger-woven like the carrying straps that Nokomis made.

The women were even brighter. Necklaces of every color of bead glistened and bounced as they jigged. Their full skirts bounced around their ankles, showing fancy underskirts and colored stockings. Their moccasins, like those of the men, were beaded with intricate flowers. Their hair was held up in silver pins or braided tightly with ribbons or swung loose and free as they whirled and tapped. Their feet moved so fast sometimes that they seemed to blur. And all the time they were laughing, the men were smiling, the children were tumbling about, their mouths smeared with food, their eyes brilliant.

Chickadee saw Antoinette in a jigging contest with another woman. Each did her fancy steps to the fiddle, and then held out a hand to let the other jig. The men clapped and urged them on with delighted cries. And the fiddles never stopped. Sometimes they squeaked high and fast. Sometimes they groaned low. Sometimes they brought every-one to their feet. Sometimes, when a fiddler let loose with a wild air, the dancers stopped to clap and encourage the fiddler to greater effort.

All of a sudden, Chickadee saw Uncle Quill leap into the middle of the circle. He did not have on fancy clothes, beadwork, a hat, or red leggings. But his footwork was so fast and dainty and his jigging so precise that Chickadee was amazed. Then he disappeared. Other men took his place. The whirl of music and dancing went on for hours and Chickadee finally could not keep his eyes open for even one more song. He stumbled back to the wagon, crept beneath the cart and fell asleep even as the Metis people danced, laughed, and drank until dawn.

The first carts started moving while the sky was still faintly pink. Chickadee crawled sleepily into the oxcart and snuggled up in the buffalo robe behind his uncle. He checked his pouch to make sure that the half peppermint stick was still there. It was safe. Chickadee dozed off as the cart began its familiar jouncing. He opened his eyes once and smiled, knowing that every turn of the wheel brought him closer now to his twin.

Life had sprung up along the trail. The thin film of green in the trees had become a cloud of new leaves. Robins, bluebirds, vireos, finches, songbirds of all types made the brush along the trail a wall of sharp melody. The broad road went on and on and the traveling was very pleasant. Off to the side of the road there were houses, and every so often there was a town to stop at, a settlement where Quill occasionally made a purchase. At one place he added to the ribbons he'd bought for his wife by buying a hat straight off a woman's head. At another place, he bought a pie. He cut it down the middle and he and Chickadee ate it right there.

Alongside the road, the number of sloughs increased as they left behind farmland and journeyed toward the forest. The road narrowed, then it got bumpy, and filled with stumps that could break an axle. There were rocks, branches, mud holes, twisting roots. In the sloughs, high-pitched spring peepers and deep-throated bullfrogs joined in a chorus so loud it could even be heard above the squeak of wheels. Eagles, hawks, herons, and great flocks of ducks wheeled down and clattered up into the sky as the oxcart train passed.

But of course along with the sparkling sounds of birds and the delicious dinners of duck, spring brought newly hatched mosquitoes. As they left the flat plains and ventured on up into forest and prairie lands, the mosquitoes found them.

First, it was a slap here, a bite there, but a smudge fire in the night would drive them from the sleeping area. Then things got worse. The insects seemed to be everywhere. At last, one afternoon on a rolling piece of prairie dotted with wildflowers, a spot so pretty that even a young boy would admire it, Chickadee saw a dark cloud wavering ahead. There was no wind. All was still. The cloud gave him an uneasy feeling. He asked his uncle what it was, but Quill didn't answer. When Chickadee glanced at him to see if he'd heard, he saw that Quill's face was contorted by an expression he'd never seen there. Quill's eyes were open wide, he panted and a small moan escaped his chest.

“Get my jacket, my facecloth, my mitts!”

Chickadee handed these items to his uncle from the bag in the center of the cart.

“Now you get down! Get underneath the robe. Quick!”

Chickadee did as his uncle ordered, as fast as he could. By the time he pulled the robe over his head, he heard a strange, whining, vibrating, terrifying roar. And then the cloud descended.

The attack was unlike anything Chickadee had ever experienced. He knew what mosquitoes were like, naturally. He knew them all too well. But living near a lake he could escape them by jumping straight in the water. He could cover his body with mud. There were plants his Nokomis smeared on him that the mosquitoes did not like. Out here, there was no place to hide. Everyone was defenseless.

Uncle Quill cried out. The poor oxen bellowed. Millions and millions of mosquitoes landed on the flesh of every living being in the oxcart train. The train became a moving mosquito feast. Children cried, men wept and cursed, and the poor animals, whipped by the drivers and tormented by the insects, groaned as they trudged forward. There was nowhere to go but forward.

There was no wind, no breeze at all, so the mosquitoes could land and attack at will.

Wrapped in the robe, Chickadee got only a few bites at first. But then the biting cloud discovered him too and great bunches of mosquitoes jammed themselves through every opening, stinging ferociously, sucking his blood out of him with thousands of tiny straws.

Chickadee yelled, cried, groaned like the poor oxen, but there was nothing to be done. Every time he smacked away a cluster of mosquitoes, a new ferocious avalanche of them took its place. In a few minutes, he was bitten to pieces. What would happen to him in the hours ahead? He didn't think he could last. Every time he opened his mouth to take a breath, he took a mouthful of mosquitoes in. They filled his nose, his ears. They stung his eyelids, even tried to get his poor eyeballs.

The oxcart train was moving as fast as it could, trying to get through the deadly cloud. The beasts were so thickly covered with insects that there wasn't a scrap of hide visible. They were all gray. That terrible, moving, feeding, sucking gray color of mosquitoes. Crying out with pain, the drivers used their whips again and again. To stop was death. A mosquito cloud like this could literally drain the blood from the oxen and the horses, leaving them too weak to pull the carts. So all that day, in a mindless groaning howl of agony, they plunged along the trail.

By nightfall, there was still no wind, and the mosquitoes were unhindered in their viciousness. The oxcart train stopped, and as quickly as possible smudge fires were lighted. These fires smoked when old leaves and wet branches were added to the flames. The smoke spread over the encampment, and the cloud lifted slightly, hovering just above the smoke, sending down only thousands, not millions, of their number. Uncle Quill covered his ox with a heavy piece of wool. He made the tent underneath the wagon as mosquito tight as he could. He kept a smudge fire going on each side of the cart, getting up every hour to feed it through the night.

It was a tortuous night.

Chickadee thought nothing could get worse than the attack in the cart, but to fall asleep and then be awakened by the mosquitoes was somehow worse.

“Pray for a wind, or rain, or cold!” said Uncle Quill. “That's all that can drive them off.”

Both of them begged for relief before the night was over, but by morning the mosquitoes raged even more harshly as the pack train started out again.

The prairie almost seemed to mock them with its beauty. Every inch of their skin was covered with bites upon bites. Their faces were purple and swollen. The mosquitoes bit through cloth, they bit through hair, they were implacable. Every being suffered. Yet they kept moving.

The sun was high in the sky by the time the mosquitoes began to settle. It was unnoticeable at first, and then slowly—infinitely slowly—the cloud of insects broke up into cruel bands and wavering streams. Eventually, in the heat of the day, a brisk wind rose. The mosquitoes, too light to land in wind, diminished. Then at last there was relief. Sweet relief. Almost too sweet to bear.