Bone Coulee by Larry Warwaruk

down to the grove of trees just off to the right at the bottom of the buffalo jump.
    “Panel truck and two women. Have a look.” Abner takes the binoculars, but his hands shake and he can’t focus.
    “Here. Tell me what you see.” He hands the binoculars back to Mac.
    “One’s got a walker.”
    “Them? Your new neighbours?”
    “I think so. Now one’s helping the other into the truck.”
    The panel truck backs up and turns around, then follows the trail up past the cellar hole and out of the coulee. Mac and Abner can cut them off on the north grid where the panel truck will have to come across the coulee.
    Mac stands out on the road, flagging with his hands. The panel truck stops, and Angela rolls down her window.
    “Were you looking for something down there?” Mac asks.
    “Tell him to go to hell,” Roseanna says, as she fiddles with a plastic tube attached to her nose.
    “We have permission,” Angela says.
    “Who from?” Mac says.
    “Darlene Chorniak. She’s in my class. I teach art at the college in Bad Hills.”
    “My daughter-in-law,” Mac says. He notices the back of the panel filled with willow saplings. “And it’s my property, not hers to do what she wants with.”
    “You are a Chorniak?” Angela looks over to her mother, and then she smiles at Mac. “ The Chorniak?”
    “What are you going to do with all the willow?”
    “They’re going to make baskets,” Abner shouts from the truck. “Jen told me.”
    “Your friend seems to know,” Angela says.
    “Take all you want,” Abner says. “Mac doesn’t mind. You don’t mind, do you, Mac?”
    “The polite thing would have been for you to ask me first,” Mac says. “Next time, please ask.”
    “Tell him to go to hell,” Roseanna says again. But Angela just smiles.
    “Yes, next time. And then we could talk, Mr. Chorniak. I know of some matters we could talk about.”
    Mac isn’t sure, but he thinks she winked at him when she said this. She then puts her truck in gear, sticks out her tongue and drives away.

• Chapter 4 •
    M ac adjusts his binoculars. From his kitchen window he watches the young Indian woman feed her dog. She reminds him of the Indian girl of fifty-seven years ago, but the pretty ones all look the same, just like the fat ones all look the same. She and her mother moved in some time last week, and they are the same ones that he and Abner saw out at the coulee.
    This afternoon Mac is taking Esther out to the coulee, and he can listen to her troubles to get his mind off his own. He’s taking her to the west side of the coulee. She’s on the plaque committee, and he needs her opinion. The Rawlings were neighbours when he and Peggy still lived out there, so Esther knows the area well. She also has a good sense of local history, and no one’s going to dispute her opinion.
    Besides that, she needs an outing to get her mind off her son in Vancouver. It’s not that long ago that her husband passed away, and now Cameron’s close to dying from a disease nobody wants to talk about, other than to point fingers. There’s no dignity in Cameron’s illness – what those people get – and Esther knows that he is going to die.
    Mac eases back in his La-Z-Boy. The October sun radiates through the living-room window, warming him, and soon he’s snoring, deeply drawn into a dream. He’s in a courthouse, awaiting the silent entry of the judge, the only sound the tick tock, tick tock, tick tock of a pendulum clock. A brass chandelier hangs from a domed ceiling, the ceiling surrounded with a frieze of ropes and leaves and sharply petalled roses.
    The judge enters, pausing to study the room before he sits down behind a large oak desk. Above his head hangs a picture of King George and Queen Mary, and another of the wheat sheaves of the Saskatchewan coat of arms. A policeman reads evidence:

    “There were a number of beer bottles…you
    can see them lying under the wagon in
    photograph 15….”

    A lawyer asks a