Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway Page A

atthe Saviour’s face with a filthy dishtowel before she too felt the wrath of Jeremiah, the centurion.
    To save time, Jeremiah had cut Christ’s second fall, his consolation of the women, and his third fall, all without informing Gabriel. The company skipped to the strip.
    Off came Gabriel’s clothes at the hands of Jeremiah and his ragamuffin band and onto the prostrate cross went the Cree Son of God, naked but for his underwear, and shivering.
    At which point Brother Stumbo’s whistle announced supper.
    Jeremiah and his nine-year-old soldiers hurriedly “nailed” Gabriel to the cross, swung it up, and banged its base into a groundhog hole. Veronica, saintly Simon, and drunk Mariesis in tow, they rushed off, leaving their spruce-branch whips and Jesus hanging in the gathering gloom. Call out as he might — “Come pack! Tone leaf it me here!” in his still dysfunctional English — the Saviour’s pleas went unheard.
    Wired haphazardly to the steel-mesh fence behind him and crackling in the dry June breeze, a scrap of cardboard read: “The Okimasis Brothers present ‘The Stations of the Cross,’ with a scene from ‘The Wedding at Cana’ thrown in.”
    Squirm by squirm, wriggle by wriggle, Jesus made the base of his pillory chew the groundhog hole. Next, he yanked until the cross fell, pinning him beneath its weight. Then he worked his wrists free of their binding ropes. Finally, praying to the Father that his supper would be saved, he ran.
    In the dining room, one hundred boys looked up from apple pie half-eaten. The laughter was explosive, the pointingfingers worse than nails — Gabriel had forgotten to take off his spruce-root crown of thorns — but his vow of vengeance on one Champion-Jeremiah Okimasis rendered both laughter and fingers meaningless.

T EN
    “T here it is!” yelled Gabriel over the roar of engines and propellers. He wanted to run in circles and shriek with joy, but instead jabbed Jeremiah’s stomach hard with his elbow. “There it is! There’s Eemanapiteepitat!”
    On the last day of June, the Okimasis brothers were in the red seaplane again, this time approaching Mistik Lake. At last! Mistik Lake with its thousand deep-green islands, its thousand gold sand beaches, its endless water.
    Jeremiah strained to see over his brother’s shoulder and his smile grew radiant. He yearned to reach right through the window, scoop up the toy village in the cup of his hand, kiss it tenderly, and put it in the pocket next to his heart. He could already taste the Cree on his tongue.
    Late that night, hunters, beasts, and queens glimmered twenty trillion miles below the Okimasis brothers andtwenty trillion miles above them. Gabriel and Jeremiah were the very centre of a perfect sphere, a gigantic bubble of night air, and glass-smooth lake, and stars. Gabriel told Jeremiah that the Okimasis family must look like Winken, Blinken, and Nod floating off towards the moon in a wooden shoe.
    The wooden shoe was bearing the brothers, their father, their mother, and their sisters Josephine and Jane across one of the few open stretches of Mistik Lake to Kamamagoos Island, twenty miles south of Eemanapiteepitat, where Abraham had decided they would spend the summer fishing for trout that were the fattest in the world.
    The only intrusion upon the vastness of the silence was the sound of paddles dipping and surfacing, dipping and surfacing, ripples of water gurgling sweetly in reply. Abraham sat in the stern of the canoe, thirteen-year-old Jane in the bow. Eleven-year-old Josephine slept on the floor behind Jane while Gabriel and Jeremiah sat idly in the middle with their mother between them. Infinitely happy that he had returned at last, Kiputz lay curled half-asleep in Gabriel’s lap.
    Suddenly, Gabriel saw a flame flickering faintly in the far distance.
    “Look, a fire!” he exclaimed softly.
    “Where?” asked Jeremiah, turning drowsily to look at Gabriel.
    “There,” replied Gabriel, pointing to the