Kikwaakew (2 page)

Back out on his second creek, with the sun bright and the walking easier, he feels a little better. He cuts up the bank and into the bush and checks his snares into the early afternoon. Nothing. Only a few fox and rabbit tracks. He almost doesn’t check his last few cubby sets as the afternoon gets late. He’s cold and needs to warm up. But the thought of the fisher, the slim chance that he might have gotten it, forces him up the bank and into the woods.

On a trail he’s had good luck with earlier in the winter, he spots the tracks. They make him stop, kneel down, and take off his mitts so he can trace a print. Without wanting to, he looks over his shoulder. It’s come back. After all these years. He stands and follows the steps to one of his traps, the spruce cubby torn apart, bits of wood and bark scattered about, the leghold sprung, its jaws clenched and empty. The fish guts he’d hoped would lure in a marten are gone.

He kneels again to verify what he already knows:
Kikwaakew
. A wolverine, a very big one by the size and depth of its prints, has come to take away what he has tried so hard to harvest. He travels farther down his line, and the next three traps are destroyed as well, the bait devoured.
Kikwaakew
has come to ruin his winter.

XAVIER’S ALMOST BACK
to his camp before he sees that a fire’s been lit, the deep-freeze of the late afternoon turning the chimney smoke above his
askihkan
into a thick white line that hangs heavy above it. His sled dogs have returned and picked up his scent, baying out their greeting, pulling at their tethers to try and jump on him as he walks up to his door, grinning. His two boys have returned. They are safe, and they are here.

The three of them stay up late into the night talking, his twins full of stories. Three weeks ago, he had agreed to let them use his sled team so the boys could serve as runners between the Hudson’s Bay Company men and the trappers scattered over a few hundred miles.

“North of Albany, we came across a half-eaten moose,” Antoine tells Xavier.

“The kill was fresh,” Abraham adds. “Grey wolves.” Xavier watches as Abraham looks to him for approval. Abraham’s always been this way, needy of the constant nod to prove he is worthwhile. He came into the world a little bit simple. Despite the boys’ being identical, Antoine is the opposite in spirit to his brother, assured and self-contained, needing nothing from anyone. This is how he can tell one from the other when he is in doubt.

“We knew the wolves were close, because the carcass was still steaming,” Antoine continues. He pauses before telling the next bit. “I grabbed my axe and walked quick as I could, following their trail.”

“Father!” Abraham says, excited, jumping in. “Antoine chased down a wolf that was so full from the kill it couldn’t run from him. He brained it with his axe!”

Xavier raises his eyebrows at the story. Antoine looks angry that his brother has told the best part. Xavier watches as Antoine looks into the fire, biting his tongue.

“Perhaps, then,” Xavier speaks to Antoine, “you can help me brain something else.” He looks to Abraham as well. “I need the help of both of you.”

IN THE AFTERNOON,
the boys come back to report what they’ve found. It’s worse than Xavier thought.
Kikwaakew
has spent the past days working its way through a portion of his lines, stealing the bait as it destroys the cubbies and escapes the snares.

“It drags one of its back paws,” Antoine tells him as they work removing a gillnet from the frozen lake, Abraham chopping out the hole forty yards across from them as they do the same here.

“Maybe it escaped one of my snares,” Xavier says.

Antoine’s lack of answer to this reminds Xavier of himself. He senses Antoine looking at him. Antoine wants to tell him something. Instead, the boy turns back to working the net from the hole.

With the suckers and mooneyes they catch, the sled team will eat well tonight. Xavier watches as his two sons compete with each other to see who can go longest freeing the fish from the net without having to stop and warm his hands in his mitts. His brother as a young man was his best friend, Elijah. Xavier sits in the snow gutting fish, thinking about this, something he rarely allows himself to do. His brother, his best friend, is long dead. In honour of that, Xavier almost named one of the twins after him. For reasons he still can’t speak out loud, he decided not to.

At evening supper, the boys ask for beaver tail. Apparently, they’ve been living on too much bannock and tea. They’re starved for the meat and fat, Xavier sees. While the land animals have been furtive these past weeks, the beaver have been active, and he has captured many of them in the underwater snares he has placed by the openings to their lodges. The young ones are always the first to be most daring in leaving the lodge to swim under the ice, and he has chopped through the ice and pulled up a dozen in the past week.

Each of them sears a full tail over the fire, bubbling the skin, turning the tails constantly. It doesn’t take long. Xavier’s careful not to let the fat that begins to spittle up and split the blackening outer layer go to waste and drip into the flames. He pulls his from the fire first, acknowledging the pain in his fingers as he removes the burnt covering from the meat. For just a moment, the memory spurts from somewhere, pusses out like a festering wound. He reaches down into the mud to pick up a wounded man, but the man’s skin, seared by the heat of an exploding shell, tears off in his hands.

You’re fine. The pain of that world is gone.

When the skin’s all removed, he drops the naked tail into the boiling pot, his sons following suit.

Xavier surprises himself after the meal by speaking. He’s unaccustomed to his own voice. “I’ve been tracking a fisher, me,” he says. He immediately feels self-conscious for having spoken of this. He fears it sounds silly. Both boys look at him. “I’m worried that
kikwaakew
will get it first and ruin my winter.”

He watches as the boys contemplate this. Finally, Antoine speaks. “How much does a wolverine pelt bring these days?”

Xavier shrugs. “A good bit.” He thinks. “A lot.”

“Then we’ll be rich when we bring both a wolverine and a fisher to the Hudson’s Bay men.”

The three of them laugh and stretch out, Xavier rolling and lighting a cigarette. In the fire’s low glow, he sees that both of his sons reach into their pockets and do the same. He wants to say something, that they are only sixteen and too young for this, but he remembers what he was doing at their age. Was forced to do. He was good at that, the killing.

Sleep now, you. You are acting like a crazy old man.

FOR THREE DAYS,
they track the wolverine, setting leg traps baited with goose wings or beaver guts. They follow its tracks, set snares in the bush where the wolverine likes to slip into cover. Antoine is right. It has a damaged hind leg. But this isn’t keeping it from destroying Xavier’s cubby sets and frightening away any marten or fox or even lynx that he might have had a chance with. Its hunger is insatiable.

At breakfast on the fourth day, Xavier tells Abraham that he must go out with the dog team to check the most distant traplines. He says to Abraham that he needs some good news, some pelts brought in to sell. What he doesn’t say out loud is that he wants Antoine to stay with him because he is the more natural, the better hunter. To his relief, Abraham is excited for the adventure. He leaves with the dawn.

Antoine and Xavier head out after their tea
balosse
to continue tracking
kikwaakew
. They’ll stay together for the first few hours, and then Antoine will work his way farther down the lines, because he can move so much quicker. Both of them carry their rifles today. They bring fish and beaver guts to bait the cubbies and to place around the snares.

Xavier’s head isn’t clear this morning as they make their way from set to set. Antoine seems anxious about something. Xavier keeps expecting his favourite son to turn to him and demand that he move faster. Antoine can be short tempered, and has no patience with people who don’t live up to his standards. Xavier finds himself shuffling quicker than he’s used to on his snowshoes to please the boy.

He slept poorly last night, tossing in his rabbit blanket. The fire was either so hot that he sweated, or burned down so low that he lay there shivering, listening to the light snores of his boys. To be that age again, to sleep through the coldest night or the fullest bladder. Xavier’s not old, him, into his forties a little ways now, an age that twenty years ago he couldn’t have dreamt of being. Theresa and him, they used to talk about what they imagined the other would be like when they were old and in their forties.

Antoine came out first. Theresa died when Abraham came out a few minutes later, the umbilical cord tight around his neck.

The wind’s changed by noon, a bitch wind from the east. The cold snap is broken. By the white horizon, it’s easy to see that a big snow’s coming in fast.

Antoine speaks of it first. “Abraham will see it,” he says. “He’ll burrow down. We won’t see him tonight.”

Xavier knows that Antoine waits for him to decide what they will do. Xavier keeps pushing forward for now, angry that this weather will stop them from killing
kikwaakew
today, might keep them from ever killing it if it decides to move on. He’s become infected by the damned thing. As they push up along a trail that runs parallel to the creek, he finally admits to himself that his poor sleep last night wasn’t because of the temperature or because he had to piss. Niska is trying to tell him something from far away, something important. She’s done this before, working her shake tent, filling his head deep at night with images he can’t quite make out through the mist. She warned him about
kikwaakew
. He can see this so obviously now, dreaming its thick neck and black eyes and white teeth hours before finding its tracks. He had thought this was all. But something more comes. He knows. He knows his old auntie. She’s trying hard to warn him. It’s not good, she’s telling him.

Why can’t you see what it is?

The first snowflakes touching his face bring him back. They won’t get the wolverine in a snowstorm. “We’ll go home now,” he says to Antoine. “We’ll be able to follow his tracks easier in a few days.”

Antoine wants to say something to Xavier. He can see his boy opening his mouth and then closing it. Finally Antoine speaks, but it’s obviously not what he wanted to say. “It’s going to be a big storm” is all that he mumbles.

As they march back toward home, the wind blowing in earnest now, the snow falling thick enough to prevent them seeing more than a few feet ahead, Xavier wants to shout to Antoine that he is the beloved son. He opens his mouth to speak it, but the wind will swallow his words. And what would telling him accomplish?