Take Us to Your Chief (15 page)

“You're talking about the buzzing, aren't you?”
I asked.

He smiled, glad I knew what he was talking about. “Not buzzing. It's not totally something you hear. And it's not vibrating, something you can just feel. It's a combination of both. Or neither. Or something else completely. It's so slight and elusive… I wasn't sure it was even there. But you know what I'm talking about. I'm no
t crazy.”

That's what he said to me that day. Once more I listened to the rock with my hand, but what I had experienced in my younger years was no longe
r there.

Instead, I told my grandson of my own experiences with those petroglyphs. But I had had children coming and a life to live. I had obligations. Several members of my family had pointed out to me that I had spent way too much time on this stupid island with nothing to show for it. My grandson was glad to find out he wasn't crazy. I was pretty happy to find out I wasn'
t either.

“Wonder what it is,” h
e said.

“Maybe it's an underground river or something,” I suggested, not ver
y convincingly.

As we ate our lunch, his attention kept returning to the wall of images. After some prodding, Duane shared with me more of his thoughts regarding those petroglyphs. It seemed my wayward and unfocused grandson had been studying them pretty deeply. He'd noticed that they were arranged in some sort of pattern. He wasn't sure what the pattern was or meant, but he said if you sat there long enough and let the glyphs tell you their own story their own way, you could almost make it out, like a whisper in the wind. Those were his words. He said you couldn't help but notice after a while that there was a sort of order to all the things carved into that wall. Like it was the Earth telling us a story, he said. Or more accurately, he added, like it was a song waiting to b
e sung.

“What if,” he said, his voice cracking with growing excitement, “the petroglyphs are like that set of lines musicians write, and each of the images is
a note?”

Duane pulled out his guitar and played me a couple bars of music. And then he played them again, with the odd wrong note inserted where a right note had been. The song didn't work. The magic was lost. That's what the wall reminded him of—a pattern of pictures. Some of the carvings had been added over the years, but the wrong image in the wrong place. But a lot of them were in the right place. He thought that's what was causing the buzzing or humming or whatever i
t was.

By this time, I was thinking that maybe we had been wrong to put Duane on this island alone for the last two weeks. It was true I hadn't seen him so flushed with excitement or focused on something positive in a long time. I mean, it was good that he had developed a connection with what his ancestors had done a long time ago, but I was beginning to get a little worried. I remember saying to my grandson that maybe it was time he came back to the mainland, that he'd spent enough time on Thunderbird Island. He looked at me like I had asked him to fly to th
e moon.

“No thanks, Poppa. I'm not don
e yet.”

I wasn't sure if he was talking about his court-mandated sentence or something else. Anyway, I had inadvertently closed the door on the topic and we'd reached the end of our conversation. Duane didn't want to talk anymore, about the petroglyphs or anything else. The wall he had spent years building, emotional brick by emotional brick, had once again risen into place. So, still a little worried, I packed up my boat and returned across the lake to the mainland, concerned about what my next trip to the island might bring. Behind me I could see him on the shore, watching my motorboat plow through the water. Then I saw him turn and walk toward th
e petroglyphs.

That next week was the longest of my life. I kept telling myself there was nothing to worry about. The Creator had indeed made a complex and mysterious world, but most of it was explainable. I left at dawn the following Sunday, needing to make sure my grandson was okay, a little afraid of what I migh
t find.

After two hours in my motorboat navigating the submerged tree stumps and rocky outcroppings common in the Canadian Shield lakes, I saw him waiting for me on the landing spit. I felt better. All his camping equipment was packed, and he looked calm and ready to return to the world of the reserve. In fact, he looked more than ready. There was a sense of excitement about him and an eagerness to move forward, but he was unwilling to talk about it much. He just said everything was okay, he just needed to check some thing
s out.

“Like what?”
I asked.

“I'll let you know when I know” was all h
e said.

As he settled into the front of the boat, I saw something sticking out of his backpack. It ha
d feathers.

“What's that?”
I asked.

He looked at it for a moment before pulling it out and handing it to me. It looked like a tomahawk. Not one you'd find at the local craft store, made for three bucks but costing the tourists fifteen. It looked real. We hadn't made real tomahawks on the Otter Lake First Nation in almost two hundred years. Still, the binding was leather and sinew, holding the oval stone in place, making it a truly dangerous weapon. Dyed porcupine quills gave colour and texture to the foot-and-a-half-long handle. To these old eyes, it was an impressive piece o
f work.

“Where'd you ge
t this?”

Shrugging, he looked back at the island. “I foun
d it.”

That was kind of hard to believe. It didn't appear to have been weathered by several hundred years of exposure to the elements, and if I hadn't known better, the front of the stone looked stained with what looked like blood. Things weren't adding up,
I thought.

“Where'd you fin
d it?”

He pointed back at the island. “Ove
r there.”

“On th
e island?”

“Yep.”

“Where on th
e island?”

It was a moment before he answered my question. “I don't kno
w yet.”

That was the last thing Duane said on our trip. He tucked the tomahawk back into his bag. The attitude that had originally gotten him into trouble and sent to the island had been transformed. The look of anger or rebellion was replaced with contemplation and interest. His mind seemed wrapped around a thought. The moment my boat hit the dock, he thanked me quickly and trotted off down the road. Something had happened to my grandson, and I didn't kno
w what.

A few days passed and something about the way Duane had acted kept eating away at me. All this talk about the petroglyphs, the tomahawk and the changed attitude made me think the path we had chosen for this young man was changing direction. Duane had been living with his father's sister since his return from the island, and she told me over the phone that he seemed to be staying out of trouble, spending a lot of time on the internet, looking at all sorts of strange stuff. Other than video games and porn, he'd never had much time for doing anything on that computerized thing. But now he was on it late into the night, focused and eager, like a young buck on his first moos
e hunt.

So I decided to pay my grandson a visit. When I arrived he was on the computer, tucked away in the corner of the living room. On top of the monitor was that tomahawk. As I approached, I could see the screen. He was looking at rocks. Much bigger than the ones on the island. Tall ones standing in a circle. Maybe he was interested in a career in geology, I tried to tell myself. Duane didn't look up when I approached. It was like there was a tunnel connecting his eyes to the screen. I'd seen a similar look in strip clubs, back in m
y youth.

“Hey, Grandson, find anything interesting on tha
t thing?”

Duane looked over his shoulder at the sound of my voice, gave me a quick smile and nod, then just as quickly went back to looking at the screen. I tried to coax him out a bit, talk to him as I had when he was young, but he had no time for me. He wasn't rude about it, just severely preoccupied. I decided to play hi
s game.

“So, what's so damn interesting about those big rocks? More interesting than your ow
n grandfather?”

I could see the question registering, and luckily for me, it opened hi
m up.

“It's a place called Stonehenge, Poppa. In England. It's thousands and thousands of years old. They're not exactly sure what it was used for, but they think it might be a calendar of som
e kind.”

It looked awfully big and awkward to be a calendar—I kept a much smaller one in my wallet—but I kept my mouth shut. About that, anyway.

“Okay, so it's a big stone calendar. That's interesting to you? Those English people are weird anyway. Do you know they drink their bee
r warm?”

No response to my joke. His fingers started hunting and pecking across the keyboard, making a clicking sound. Other images popped up prett
y quick.

“These are the Nazca Lines, somewhere down in Peru. Kilometres and kilometres of pictures scratched into the ground by Native people a long tim
e ago.”

The images my grandson showed me looked kind of pretty, I thought, pictures of spiders and hummingbirds etched in the dirt. Why somebody would want to do that I couldn't figure out, but it certainly looke
d nice.

“Again, scientists have all sorts of ideas about what they could be, but nothing definite. And look at this…” Once again, his fingers clicked and clacked on those plastic buttons. More images came up. “These are rock carvings in Scotland. Five thousand years old.” I heard the computer go click again. “And these etchings in a boulder were found in Egypt. They're from long before they built those pyramids and stuff. Like 4000
BC
or something.” Click. “This is Machu Picchu, a mysterious Incan city made almost entirely out of rock.” Another click and a wall of different yet familiar images appeared. “This is called Judaculla Rock, in North Carolina. Doesn't it look a lot like the petroglyphs on Thunderbir
d Island?”

It did indeed. I was beginning to notice
a theme.

“A lot of people in this world do interesting things with rocks,
I suppose.”

He nodded, almost too eagerly. “Yeah, but I've been reading up on these things. There are articles and pictures all over the internet about this kind of grid configuration. If you mark all the places that have petroglyphs, or places where rocks are used in sacred ways, on a map of the Earth, they look like a network, or graph maybe. Definitely there's a pattern of some sort t
o them.”

Now, even I knew that the internet was a place you could find theories about everything—that Elvis was still alive, that one race of people actually ruled the world (which would be a huge surprise to our chief and band council), that aliens were responsible for the success of McDonald's. The internet breeds conspiracy theories like the swamp behind my house breeds mosquitos. I tried to tell him that, but he wasn'
t listening.

“Why are you so fixated on this?” I asked m
y grandson.

For a moment, I saw him pause. Then his eyes darted back to the computer screen, and I could see he was trying to make
a decision.

“It's kinda hard t
o explain.”

“Have yo
u tried?”

I could tell something was fighting in hi
s head.

“I'll tell you tomorrow,” he offered. “Why don't you come for dinner? Aunt Maggie will be at work, but she usually leaves me a casserole o
r something.”

I agreed.

We made some small talk, but the conversation had ended. As I left the house, I wondered what he was up to. All this mystery. Was he back to doing bad things again? I didn't think so. Bad things and research about rocks and petroglyphs seldom went together. I decided to do a bit of research of my own. Not on a computer, but in the rea
l world.

The next morning, I was on my way to Thunderbird Island. A man of my age doesn't do overnight trips to rocky islands much, so I opted to spend as much of the day there as possible. The sun was barely up as I pulled away from the dock. A few hours later, as I approached the island, I saw another boat pulled up on the shore. It took me a few minutes before I recognized it as Maggie's boat. Duane must have borrowed it to come back over. But I could tell the campsite, petroglyphs and, I got the feeling, the whole island were deserted. Duane knew better than to abandon his aunt's boat. And since it was an island, where would he go without that boat? More mystery, and a man my age doesn't take well to mysteries. It's way too much effort to figure the
m out.

As mysteries go, the first clue was easy to find. It was located on the petroglyph wall. Two new carvings. The limestone chips and dust were lying fresh on the moss at the base. About three feet up, maybe seven inches long, was a stick figure wearing what looked like a baseball cap. Duane. Maybe six feet farther up was a spiral, similar to one Duane had shown me the day before on his computer, in one of those far-off places. He had defaced this sacred site. I was angry. I was really angry. Not only was this illegal by white men's laws, it was deeply disrespectful by our own beliefs. I planned to have a very serious and possibly loud word or two with that boy. Elders aren't supposed to yell, but I felt this time it wa
s due.

Not knowing what else to do—contrary to what you may have heard, elders aren't all-knowing—I decided to go home and maybe cool down. I was half tempted to tow Maggie's boat back and leave the boy stranded, but then I thought, Screw it. He took it out here and abandoned it, let him deal with her wrath. I was done doing favours for that boy. He was on hi
s own.