Medicine Walk (4 page)

He learned his name was Starlight when he was seven. Even then the connection between them remained loose and untied and the kid remembered saying their names over and over to the darkness in the attic room where he slept. Eldon Starlight. Franklin Starlight. Four blunt syllables conjuring nothing. When he appeared the kid would watch him and whisper his name under his breath, waiting for a hook to emerge, a nail he could hang context on, but he remained a stranger on the fringes of his life. The old man was gruff about it, sometimes even seeming bitter to the kid, and he never spoke at length of it. He was content to provide as well as he could and he had.
It was the old man who had taught him to set snares, lay a nightline for fish, and read game sign. The old man had given him the land from the time he could remember and showed him how to approach it, honour it, he said, and the kid had sensed the import of those teachings and learned to listen and mimic well. When he was nine he’d gone out alone for the first time. Four days. He’d come back with smoked fish and a small deer and the old man had clapped him on the back and showed him how to dress venison and tan the hide. When he thought of the word
father
he could only ever imagine the old man.

He sat on the fence rail and rolled another smoke, looking at the spot where the coyotes had disappeared. The spirit of them still clung to the gap in the trees. But the kid could feel them in the splayed moonlight and for a time he wondered about journeys, about endings, about things left behind, questions that lurk forever in the dark of attic rooms, unspoken, unanswered, and when the smoke was done he crushed it out on the rail and cupped it in his palm while he walked back to the barn in the first pale, weak light of dawn.

THE FIRST THING HE REMEMBERED
was the gun. He must have been three or four. It hung above the mantel of the stone fireplace and to him then, it seemed like it owned a silent form of magic. It seemed to hang suspended above everything, silent, calm, drawing all the light to it. It felt as though it rang
with stories and adventures. He could sit for hours and just stare at it, waiting for the tales to fall.

Now and then the old man took it down and set it in the middle of the hard plank table and he and the kid would just look at it together.

“Can I?” he’d ask.

“Go on then,” the old man would say, and the kid would reach both hands out and slide it slowly across the table so it lay lengthwise in front of him. He’d run his hands along the length of it. He’d come to love the feel of it on his palms. The slick, oiled blue-black of the barrel. The polished girth of the mount and the stock. The checkered and deliberate feel of the pistol grip. He’d poke the trigger guard with one finger, letting it swirl slowly around the bend and back before slipping it in and feeling the glassine curl of the trigger itself against the inside bend of his first knuckle.

He’d always look at the old man then, thrilled at all the magic he could feel alive in that curl of metal.

“What is she?” the old man would ask.

“She’s a Lee-Enfield carbine,” the kid would say.

“And what does she shoot?”

“She shoots 18-grain 30.30 bullets in a brass casing.”

“Shoot at what?” the old man would press though he was always grinning.

“Bear, moose, elk, wolves. Anything bigger than a bobcat.” It was the kid’s stock answer.

“Why?” The old man would always lean his elbows on the table and cock one eyebrow at him.

The kid would purse his lips together, feigning deep concentration even though the both of them knew the old routine by heart.

“Because you can’t tan a hide in pieces,” he would say, and the old man would cackle like he always did when he laughed and slap a hand on the table. Then he let the kid hold the gun.

He knew the names of all the parts by the time he was four. He could break it down and reassemble it by the time he turned five and he became the gun cleaner and caretaker from that moment on. He knew how to oil the rifling in the barrel and how to bring the outside metal to a dull blue sheen. He took care to ensure that the trigger held just enough slickness to make it cool and reassuring to the touch. He rubbed the stock and grip with wood oil and used a light file on the checkering of the grip. He could handle it with his eyes closed.

“Man shoots he’s gotta know what he’s shootin’ with,” the old man said. “No good to hunt with a stranger. Ever.”

“She’s a tool,” the kid said.

“Damn straight,” the old man would say and tousle his hair. “And what do you know about tools, Frank?”

“They’re only as good as the care you give them,” he’d say proudly.

“Won’t ever learn no better truth than that, Frank. See ya keep it.”

He did. The old man got to trust the condition of the gun every time he took it down. But he always made sure the kid watched him check it out. When he was satisfied he would load the clip and shove it in the pocket of his orange hunting jacket and give it a firm pat. He never said a word. He didn’t need to. The kid’s eyes drank in every move.

When he was seven the old man taught him to shoot. At first he plinked away at cans with an old .22. He got so he could hit them from a kneeling position, flat on his belly, and standing with the gun braced against his hip.

“Sometimes you got no proper time to raise it,” the old man said. “Gotta know how to fire on the rise. Save your life someday. You watch.”

The kid shot targets for a year. The old man gradually increased the distance until he could hit a bleach bottle hung from a branch from two hundred yards out every time. He learned to shoot with the wind, how to calculate drift, to know how much a bullet would drop over a long stretch of ground and how the impact decreased at the same time.

“Gotta hit what you shoot at and you gotta drop it.” The old man made him repeat that to himself over and over until it lived in his head like a nursery rhyme. “Ain’t right to let nothing suffer.”

“Gotta drop it.” It became the mantra he spoke to himself at his school desk.

He never did take to school. In the beginning it terrified him. The beat-up old bus would pick him up and he’d be surrounded by yelling, screaming, frantic kids whose noise hurt his ears. Then they’d be made to sit in silent rows with their feet tucked together under the desk and their hands loosely folded on the top. The teachers talked too fast and they never repeated things like the old man did until he could cotton on to them, and he got lost easily.

He knew his numbers and his letters. The old man had taught him that. He knew bushels, pecks, pounds, and ounces from harvesting, sacking grain, and feeding stock. He knew to write lists of food and chores that needed doing and letters the old man made him write to the man who came around every now and then to drink in the kitchen and eye him whenever he walked through the room. He could count and figure and write better than the others, but the lessons
made no sense to him. Nothing seemed built to help him plow five acres with a mule, help deliver a breeched calf, or harvest late fall spy apples, so he mostly let the words fall around him.

The school kids left him alone. He was the only Indian kid and they didn’t trust him. He didn’t hold out much trust for them either. They were mostly town kids who’d never gutted a deer or cut a dying heifer out of a tangle of barbed wire. They lived for games and play and talk, and the kid was used to being talked to and treated like a man. The edges of the schoolyard where he could get an eyeful of the trees poked up along the northeast ridge where he snared rabbits and shot squirrels became where he spent his time.

The teachers called him aloof and cold. They called him difficult. They sent letters home that the old man would read and then toss into the fire.

“No one’s meaning you over there, are they?” he’d ask.

“No. They mostly let me be.”

“Good. You’d tell me if they were?”

“I’d say.”

“Good. Do your best at what you can, Frank. There’s better and more important learning to be had out here on the land. That’s one thing for sure. But some things you just gotta learn to stand.”

“What I figure,” the kid would say, “there ain’t one of those little towheads would know how to square a half-hitch or get a hackamore on a green broke colt. But they make fun of me cuz I won’t do the math or read out loud.”

“How come you won’t do none of that?”

“I don’t know. I can get the numbers sorted around in my head without scratching around on paper, and I guess if a
guy’s to read he oughta be able to do it alone and quiet. Works best for me, least ways.”

“Sounds right sensible to me,” the old man said. “But the law says you gotta go until you’re sixteen. Least ways, you got this place and we get out to where it’s real as much as can, don’t we?”

“Yeah,” the kid said. “That’s what saves my bacon.”

When he could shoot as dependably with the carbine as with the .22 the old man let him start to hunt. They’d take horses and cross the field and plod up the ridge and by the time they were down the other side the land became what the old man called “real.” To the kid, real meant quiet, open, and free before he learned to call it predictable and knowable. To him, it meant losing schools and rules and distractions and being able to focus and learn and see. To say he loved it was a word beyond him then but he came to know the feeling. It was opening your eyes on a misty early summer morning to see the sun as a smudge of pale orange above the teeth of the trees with the taste of coming rain in his mouth and the smell of camp coffee, rope, gun powder, and horses. It was the feel of the land at his back when he slept and the hearty, moist promise of it rising from everything. It was the feeling of the hackles rising slowly on the back of your neck when there was a bear yards away in the bush and the catch in the throat at the sudden explosion of an eagle from a tree. It was also the feel of water from a mountain spring. Ice like light splashed over your face. The old man brought him to all of that.

He taught him to track before he let him do anything else. “Any idiot can shoot a gun,” he’d tell him. “But you track an animal long enough you get to know their thinkin’, what they like, when they like it, and such. You don’t hunt the animal. You hunt their sign.”

He had to learn to walk all over again. The old man showed him how to move in a half-crouch that played pure hell on the top of his thighs. They burned after half a mile and the agony was fierce but he could feel stealth building in his stride. He learned how to curl his foot from the outside in when he planted it to avoid snapping twigs or crunching gravel. It meant that he walked pigeon-toed. The motion was difficult to master and he worked deliberately at it. He’d go out alone to the ridge and practise through the evenings until he could navigate the length of it and back soundlessly. He learned upwind from downwind and came to know how sound was amplified in the still, half-lit world of the forest. He learned caution. He learned patience. He learned guile. Together, he and the old man would creep along behind deer, keeping a parallel tack, and follow them in that half-crouch for miles.

Furtive
was a word he learned then. The old man showed him how to slip between trees like a shadow. He taught him to move with exquisite slowness, almost not like moving at all, so that every inch of forward motion seemed to take a year. He learned to wrap himself in shadow, how to stoop and crawl between rocks and logs, how to hide himself in plain sight. He learned to stand or sit or lay in one position for hours. He could slow his breathing so that even in the chill air of winter the exhalations could be barely seen. He learned how to go inward, how to become whole in his stillness and forget the very nature of time.

Then he learned to read sign. Tracks were a story. That was the old man’s thinking. Every movement left the story of a creature’s passing when you learned to see it. The kid spent hours on his hands and knees touching the edges of paw prints with his finger to test the dryness of the earth. He learned their smell. He could determine how the spread of the print told exactly how the animal was moving. He knew a trot, a lope, a walk, the creeping, inching of a predator on the hunt, and the hunched and gathered fold of prey in shadow.

“See this trail,” the old man said one day.

There was a dim line through the bracken.

“Yeah.”

“See sign?”

“No.”

“Are ya sure? Look closer.”

He walked to a stump and sat and watched the kid study the ground. There was nothing discernible. When he closed his eyes and breathed the kid got a sense of something. He knelt. He pressed his face close to the earth and reached out with one finger and laid the nub of it on the moist surface of leaves turning to rot. Then he turned them over slowly. In the mud was a coyote print, barely visible but there nonetheless. He looked up at the old man.

“Coyote,” he said.

“How old’s the sign?”

“A day. But it rained last night. Could be two.”

“Male or female?”

The kid squinted at the track. “Female,” he said. “Not so heavy as a male. And the dirt’s pushed forward some at the front. She was trotting. Likely on the hunt or coming back with something for the kits. The den’ll be close.”

“What colour you figure her to be?”

The kid looked shocked and the old man cackled and slapped at his thigh. They followed the dim sign to a hillock and spent a few hours watching the coyote kits play outside their den.

He shot his first deer when he was nine. He tracked the buck out of a marsh and upward through the talus onto a high ridge. There were times when the rock made it impossible to follow sign.

“You know him well enough,” the old man said. “Go where you figure he’d go.”

He found a slip of hoof in lichen at the edge of a table of rock leading into thin juniper. They wound through strewn boulders. He crept slowly with the rifle cradled across his chest. Finally, he turned his back to a rock and sat hunkered down on his haunches. He bolted a shell into the breech of the gun. Slowly. Silently. He looked across at the old man and nodded. Then he rose to a crouch and made his way around the boulder. They were at the edge of an alpine meadow. Nothing moved. The kid sat with a stump at his back, staring out across the wide expanse. Nothing stirred. Finally, a shadow eked out of the cover of a small copse of stunted pine. The buck was a juvenile but large. The kid didn’t move. He barely breathed. When the buck turned into the wind and showed his flank he raised the rifle off his knees and pressed the butt into his shoulder. The shot clapped and echoed off the surrounding ridges and slopes. The buck dropped where he’d stood and the kid and the old man walked slowly across the meadow without speaking. For years he would recall the crackle of their
footsteps through the dry underbrush and moss and the feel of the old man’s hand between his shoulder blades.