Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese

like them just followed the work and tried to make out the best they could. We camped in tents or squatted on scrubland no one wanted or in deserted cabins and sheds and such. Never no proper home.
    “When we got to the Peace it was all we could do to survive. Some of the men remembered how to do all the stuff you been doin’ but there weren’t no horses and there weren’t no time to take the chance on bringin’ down a moose or an elk. So they learned how to forget about it. Just hung around the mills waiting for work. Most times it never come.”
    The kid stood up and laid some more logs on the fire and stirred the embers around to stoke it higher. It was full dark. The horse stomped her hoofs in the bush behind the lean-to and there was the rustle of a varmint in the underbrush somewhere back of them. The creek was a glimmering silver ribbon and the kid walked over and set four hooks on a long line and baited them and anchored the line to a stone and cast it out into the current. Then he walked out of the fire’s glow and stood on a boulder looking out over the creek and the bush behind it and on up to the ragged break of the mountain against the sky.
    “So how come no one thought about just going out onto the land?” he asked without looking at his father.
    His father lay on one side, leaning on his forearm and staring at the ground. “You get beat up good enough you don’t breathe right,” he said.
    “Meaning what?”
    “I don’t know. All’s I do know is that I was ten before we made it into a town and then it was learnin’ all about how to make my way through that.”
    The kid stepped off the boulder and walked back to squat by the fire. “You paint a sad picture,” he said. “Figure you’re the only one who ever got dealt a lame hand in life?”
    “No. That’s not what I’m saying.”
    “Sounds like it to me. I got dealt from the bottom of the deck myself, you know.”
    “Shit. All’s I’m tryin’ to say is that we never had the time for learnin’ about how to get by out here. None of us did. White man things was what we needed to learn if we was gonna eat regular. Indian stuff just kinda got left behind on accounta we were busy gettin’ by in that world.”
    “So I don’t get what we’re doin’ out here then.”
    His father raised the bottle and drank slowly. He set it down and scrunched around trying to get comfortable and then lit a smoke and sat staring at the fire for a while. He closed his eyes. The kid could feel him gathering himself, pulling whatever energy he had left from the day up from the depths of him and when he spoke again it was quiet so the kid had to lean forward to hear him.
    “I owe,” he said.
    “Yeah, I heard that before.”
    “I’m tired, Frank.”
    “Jesus.”
    “What?”
    “That’s the first time you ever called me by my name.”
    His father arranged his legs under him clumsily and when he found balance he leaned back and caught himself on one arm and looked at the kid and reached out with his other hand and squeezed his arm. Then he eased back on to the spruce boughs and wrapped his coat around him and closed his eyes. He was asleep in minutes. The kid watched him, studying his face and trying to see beyond what he thought he knew of the man, the history that was etched there, the stories, the travels, and after a while all he could see were gaunt lines and hollows and the sag and fall of skin and muscle and the bone beneath it all. When his father’s breathing deepened the kid draped his mackinaw over him and walked out to check the horse and gather some bigger wood for the fire. In the forest the night sky was aglitter with the icy blue of stars and he stood in the middle of a copse of trees and arched his neck and watched them. Then he stooped and prowled around for wood he wouldn’t need to chop and thought about his father scavenging breakable wood and trundling it about for the few cents it would bring, the potatoes, carrots, or onions it