Page 74 of God’s Country

“In Toronto. At night, the city lights drown out the sky.” He stared upward, and in the firelight, his face seemed like that of a delighted child.

“You know where those lights come from?” I asked him.

“Something to do with magnetic fields around the earth.”

“That’s the white man’s thinking. The Anishinaabeg have a different explanation. They call the display waawaate. But I have also heard it called waasenoode, which roughly translates to ‘heart light,’ meaning the light from the heart of Mother Earth. The lights are the dancing spirits of those who’ve taken to the Path of Souls, our ancestors. It’s a beautiful way for them to show that they are still with us.”

“That sounds so much better than magnetic fields,” Stan said with a smile.

He turned his face to the sky, and for the next hour, in complete silence, we enjoyed the show.

CHAPTER 40

I decided I’d been given a couple of hopeful signs that night.

After Stan crawled into his tent—because of the gray wolf, he opted to pass up my offer of the hammock—I sat against the tree, contemplating the plan of Kitchimanidoo, the Great Mystery.

At birth, I was set on two different spiritual paths. Largely because of my Irish heritage, I was baptized and raised Catholic. Because of the Ojibwe blood that also flows through my veins, I was schooled from an early age in the spirituality handed down from my Native ancestors. Sometimes the two paths converged, but more often they pulled me in different directions. I have always felt like a man trying to find the way that’s true for me.

I’ve worked to give my grandson, Waaboo, a firm understanding of the spiritual beliefs that are a part of his Ojibwe heritage. Rainy, who is full-blood Anishinaabe, helps make certain of that. But I’m comfortable when he accompanies us to church, sees us taking the Eucharist. It’s been important to me that I give my children, and now my grandchild, a firm grounding in Christianity as well.

That said, I admit that I have a lot of problems with the dogma of the Church. For example, I think all of Catholicism would have been better off if priests and nuns had been allowed to marry. It seems to me that so many of the issues plaguing the Church today could have been avoided by simply acknowledging the natural urges of men and women. I grew up in a small, close-knit congregation and have no horror stories to tell. But many of my friends and acquaintances who went to Catholic schools and have since abandoned the Church have offered plenty of firsthand accounts of immeasurable cruelty. Then there are the stories so many of our elders on the rez share of their torment in the boarding schools run by Catholic clergy. And because I had a daughter who was gay, don’t get me started on the official Catholic view of homosexuality.

The way in which the Anishinaabeg and so many First Nations people view our spiritual relationship to the world and to one another feels so much more instinctual to me. All things on this earth and all things in the heavens have come out of the heart of the Creator. Everything in the natural world is connected in body and in spirit and all of it is blessed. We are kin to animals and to plants, to the spirits of water and air and fire. To the bears that ravage our food supplies and the wolves that honor us with their presence. And yes, even to the mosquitoes and blackflies that harass us. Everything is linked to everything else. Nothing exists in solitude or isolation.

So how to explain evil, whatever disrupts or breaks that divine connection? Wiser humans than me have been pondering that question forever. Not even Henry Meloux has been able to give me an adequate explanation. Maybe there’s a darkness inside us all, a wolf of hate, that most of us do our best to fight against and many are even afraid to acknowledge. Unfortunately, there will always be those who, for whatever reason, give themselves over to that dark wolf, and the carnage they become capable of wreaking is truly monstrous.

But most of us hold to a moral compass and every day do our best to follow it. That doesn’t mean we shoot for sainthood. We’re simply trying to be the best people we’re capable of being. Still, even for us, true north on that moral compass is sometimes hard to find. And that’s when the dark wolf inside prepares to feed.

So, as I sat tied to that tree, thinking about all these things, I finally heard Stan snoring along with his brother, though much more softly, and I decided it was time to do what I’d been planning for quite a while.

When I was a kid, Houdini fascinated me. I’d read about a couple of his secrets of escaping when he was tied with rope. First, he used braided nylon rope, which is easier to untie. Second, he would inhale deeply as he was being bound and extend his chest so that when he relaxed, the rope was not as tight, giving him a small measure of freedom of movement.

The rope that bound my hands and bound me to the tree was the same rope I’d used to lower Leticia, braided nylon. When Stan tied me to that tree trunk, I’d breathed in as deeply as I could and held it until he’d finished. This gave me a tiny bit of wiggle room, enough that my hands, which he’d allowed me to keep in front, could, with a good deal of effort, reach my front pants pocket and the multitool that I’d slipped in there earlier that day.

It took some work to get the tool out and open the blade. Then it took quite a while and a good deal of sweat to cut my way through a strand of the rope across my stomach and free myself from the tree. Stan hadn’t killed the fire and a few flames still quivered inside the fire pit. I crept to where he’d left the hatchet he’d used to break up the wood I had gathered. I picked it up with my bound hands, wedged it between my boots, bent low, and used the blade to cut through the rope around my wrists. Standing tall at last, breathing deeply, with that sharp-bladed hatchet in my hand, I felt the howl of a wolf rising inside me. I looked long at the tent where the two brothers lay ignorant of my freedom. They were sleeping soundly. I could easily slip into their tent and kill them now. First, Ollie, the hatchet slicing through his skull into his brain. It wouldn’t make much noise at all. And even if Stan woke, he was no match for an angry, determined man with a hatchet. The thought appealed to me, the dark wolf almost overtaking my heart. But I wasn’t ready to yield to that impulse. I couldn’t bring myself to commit an act of such brutality. Not yet anyway.

I took the hatchet, the food canister, the water bag, put them in the canoe, and as quietly as I could, slid onto the lake and paddled away.

CHAPTER 41

Wassenoode, the heart light of Mother Earth, was still playing in the heavens as I crossed the channel between the Lost Man Lake shoreline and the island where the two women had camped. In the sky and on the surface of the still water, the colors shifted and shimmered, violet bleeding into red, red into green, green into yellow, with bolts of white streaking through it all. As I paddled away from the brutality of the Kennedy brothers, the Anishinaabe idea of our dancing ancestors was a beautiful thought.

The moon, nearly full, was on the rise. Its golden glow washed out some of the display of lights but didn’t diminish at all the magnificence of the whole spectacle. The Boundary Waters, maybe any vast wilderness, offers the possibility of miracles, and what I was seeing felt like one. It was as if the lake beneath me had become more than just water, as if the spirits of the woods had turned the path before me into gold.

As I rounded the island, I could see the fire the women had kindled that evening was still burning, not brightly, but enough to guide me to the campsite. I stepped into the water and drew the bow of the canoe up onto a small grassy landing. A single tent was pitched on the far side of the fire pit, nestled beneath the overhang of pine boughs. I thought it was careless that they’d bedded down for the night without making sure their fire was dead. Although the Boundary Waters wasn’t under a fire ban, you always make sure every ember is out before you go to sleep or before you leave the site. The danger of forest fire is real, and that great wilderness has been ravaged many times because of thoughtless campers.

I walked to the tent. I didn’t want to scare them, so I called out gently, “Hello!” There was no reply. “Hello,” I tried again.

The beam of a powerful flashlight behind me cast my shadow black against the khaki-colored tent. I turned and was blinded by the light.

“I have a gun and I know how to use it,” the voice behind the flashlight declared.

“I’m not here to harm you. I’m here to warn you,” I said, lifting my hands above my head to show that I was unarmed. “My name is Cork O’Connor.”

A moment’s pause, then, “How do we know that’s true?”

It was clear that my name meant something to them. Maybe they’d heard about what was going on with the Kennedy brothers. Probably it was all over the news by now.