Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway Page B

leeward side at what looked like a candle flame.
    It must be Cree fishermen, Jeremiah concluded silently,camped for the night on one of the islands. The brothers looked with wonder at the distant glow.
    From some lonely place beyond the fading flicker, the sweeping arc of a lone wolf’s howl reached out through the miles and came to a perfect landing beside the brothers, touching off a vague shudder that brushed the surface of their hearts, in perfect unison, like the ice-cold hand of someone waking after five hundred years of sleep.
    Mariesis had seen such fires before. She had known this lake like an intimate friend, a relation, an enemy, a lover for nearly fifty years — such occurrences were not new to her. She merely kept her gaze straight ahead, as if nothing had happened.
    Abraham, too, was looking straight ahead, focused on the three miles to Nigoostachin Island, where they could set up camp for the night.
    “That’s the island where Father Thibodeau’s men caught Chachagathoo.” It was their mother’s voice, though as if someone else was giving expression to the words. “Don’t look at it.”
    “Why not?” Gabriel asked, not moving his gaze from the sight. No response. Gabriel decided to be patient.
    Mariesis’s answer finally broke the spell. “Because Chachagathoo was an evil woman. Because she had
machipoowamoowin
. Father Thibodeau, oh, he hated that woman.”
    Like all children of Eemanapiteepitat, they had been told since early childhood that they were never to mention the name of Chachagathoo inside the house. And they didn’t. All that they had heard of Chachagathoo was whispers thattrickled through the village, from time to time, like some unpleasant, unwanted news.
    When Father Thibodeau passed away, at the ripe old age of eighty-seven, he took his reason for hating Chachagathoo to his grave. His had been the first corpse Mariesis Okimasis had seen, when she was six years old, she had told her sons many times over the years: the waxen white mask with its eyes closed, its lips sealed tight, tiny Mariesis Eemoomineet standing in the summer breeze beside the open casket, wanting desperately to pinch the old man’s nose to see if it would honk.
    The boys had also heard the word
“machipoowamoowin,”
but not often. All they knew was that it meant something like “bad blood” or “bad dream power.” Jeremiah and Gabriel had once asked their uncle Kookoos about this ominous, disturbing word, but all they got was, “It means that when you dream you dream about things that go
chikaboom chikaboom
in the darkest corner of your mind, and that generally happens when you don’t have no money to make the good home-brew.” Gabriel thought to ask his mother about it, but a better idea poked him in the ribs.
    His eye still on the receding flame, he decided to show off the English he had learned in his year at Birch Lake School.
    “Do
‘machipoowamoowin’
mean what Father Lafleur do to the boys at school?” Although he wanted to tickle his brother with this light-hearted joke, Gabriel’s question ended with an eerie, spectral chuckle that could have popped out of a bubble in his blood.
    Jeremiah’s words, in English, were as cold as drops from a melting block of ice.
    “Even if we told them, they would side with Father Lafleur.”
    Selecting one of the three Native languages that she knew — English would remain, for life, beyond her reach and that of her husband’s — Mariesis turned to Jeremiah. “What are you saying, my sons?”
    If moments can be counted as minutes can, or hours or days or years, one thousand of them trickled by before Jeremiah was absolutely sure Gabriel’s silence would remain until the day they died. And then he said, his voice flat,
“Maw keegway.”
Nothing.

E LEVEN
    “D ominoes, dominoes, do the Cree Indians of northern Manitoba know how to play dominoes?” The little-boy voice of Gabriel Okimasis drifted through the radiant August afternoon on one extended