Hawk. Jennifer Dance
stares down at me from the wall, his bones and muscles showing as if he’s been opened up. Clean clothes spill out of the closet and dirty ones are all over the floor. When I was little, Angela tidied my room, but now I don’t let her set foot inside. She obeys the do not enter sign on the door. When the mess piles up too high, or when the mood strikes me, I grab up all the trampled clothes and dump them in the laundry room. They reappear clean and neatly folded.
There’s a smell I can’t place. I open my eyes. I’m in the hospital! My stomach lurches. I close my eyes again, hoping not to face it all, but I can’t go back to sleep. I can’t stop thinking about how much has changed in so little time. Just a month or two back I was fine. Or I thought I was. I thought I just had growing pains!
I remember the last Saturday in April, the day that the ice broke on the Athabasca River. This is always a big deal for everyone who lives in Fort McMurray. It happens each spring, but it’s still a shock, jolting us all back to what we were doing when the river broke the previous year, or the year before that, or in my parents’ case, fourteen years before. We’re in the truck, all of us: Frank, Angela, my grandfather, and me. We don’t do family outings, so this is unusual. We’re going to Energyse, where Frank works, because today is tree-planting day, and employees and their families have been invited to help in the final stage of a reclamation project. My grandfather says that this is a really important part of the mining process and that since the public is not normally allowed in, we should go check out what’s going on. I can think of a million better ways to spend my Saturday, sleeping being Number One on the list, but I allow my grandfather to convince me we’ll have a good time.
We head down Thickwood Boulevard to join Highway 63, Frank at the wheel of the new pickup truck, Angela next to him, and me in the back seat with my grandfather. Everyone’s in an okay mood, at least so far, but we’ve only been on the road for three minutes.
We swing around the bend, and the river comes into view. Yesterday it was flat enough to drive a snowmobile on. Today it’s something else, filled to overflowing with ice blocks the size of minivans. It looks like someone tipped way too many ice cubes into a container that’s too small to hold them — except it’s on a giant scale.
My parents, who rarely see eye-to-eye, both say, “It’s early this year — it must be global warming.” Then Angela gives me her annual warning about not running alongside the river, because ice blocks can explode onto the trail without warning — killing people! One day the river is frozen flat, and then the next morning it has buckled and cracked and is hurling up car-sized blocks of ice at unsuspecting runners. I don’t get it.
We leave the broken river in the valley and take the highway that curves up through the forest. On the sides of the road, under the lodgepole pines and poplars, there are still a few patches of old crusted snow, almost black from the traffic and melting fast.
The sun streams through the truck window, and I close my eyes, enjoying the warmth and the bright orange glow that shines behind my eyelids. The cold, dark winter is finally done. Summer stretches ahead. Despite the exhaustion of my growth spurts and my apathy for life in general, I’m happy to be soaking up the sun.
I’ve lived in McMurray for so long, but this is the first time I’ve ever travelled north of town to where Frank works. It feels good, like it’s the way I’m supposed to go. But that makes no sense, because there’s no way I want to return to the nothingness of the North. I can’t imagine life without the Sports Centre, without the climbing wall, the running tracks, the movies and the mall — without New York Fries and Boston Pizza.
“Is the traffic always this bad?” my grandfather asks, flinching away from the window as yet another transport truck thunders toward us. He still freaks out at things here — he’s a newbie. In Chip you’re more likely to see an ATV on the road than a car, and from what I remember, the word “crowd” means … let’s say five people.
“This is the busiest highway in Alberta,” Frank explains. “All the mines use it. It’s the only way in and the only way out.”
A transport truck roars up behind us and sits on our bumper, giving a blast on its horn that makes even Angela almost jump out of her skin. My grandfather looks horrified. Frank puts his foot down and we surge ahead.
The needle on the speedometer hits 130, and we leave the big transport truck behind. I see Frank’s smile in the rear-view mirror.
Angela hangs on to Frank’s arm as if her life depends on it, begging him to slow down. He gives in, and when the needle swings back to a hundred, he hits cruise control. The transport truck catches up, gives another blast on the horn, and passes on the inside lane.
Angela shakes her fist and glares at the driver as he passes. He looks down at her and gives her the finger. Frank loses it. He swears at the disappearing truck and jabs his foot on the accelerator. Nobody utters a peep. We know better than to escalate the situation, especially when Frank is behind the wheel. After a few seconds he eases off the gas and returns to his normal self — whatever that is.
We pass a string of buses labouring up the hill. They’re packed with shift workers going to their barracks and their jobs in the oil sands. Then we pass the same transport truck, which is also struggling up the hill. We pull alongside; my stomach is churning.
“Don’t, Frank,” Angela warns. “He’s a lot bigger than us.”
Frank waves at the driver, his middle finger raised slightly above the others. Despite the grin on his face, we all know what he means. Thank god Frank doesn’t see the driver’s full-on eff-you gesture as we surge past. Crap! What’s gonna happen when the road levels off?
We level off.
All thoughts of the truck driver fly out the window.
The landscape looks about as welcoming as the surface of the moon.
My grandfather mumbles something about the treaty. He told me the treaty story many times when I was a kid. He must have told it really well, because the treaty was signed over a hundred years ago — even before he was born, yet in my memory I was there. Apart from this one major flaw, I’m sure that everything else he said was true. My grandfather’s grandfather was one of the men who had talked with the British, although talked isn’t the right word, because he didn’t speak their language, and they didn’t speak his. And he couldn’t read the letter from Queen Victoria either. Nor could any of the other Chipewyan, Cree, or Métis. But the queen had sent an interpreter, and he explained that she wanted them to live in peace with her British subjects. My ancestors had thought the newcomers were asking for a friendship treaty, like the ones they’d made with other bands and tribes and nations.
A Catholic priest was already working in Fort Chipewyan. “For some crazy reason,” my grandfather always said, “the people trusted that black robe. They believed him when he said that our lives would remain more or less unchanged and that we’d still be able to hunt, and trap, and fish, just as we always had. There was a lot of land, and there were very few people, so we agreed to share. We made a spoken promise … one that was for as long as the sun shines, as long as the grass grows, as long as the river runs. We also made our mark on the queen’s paper. We didn’t know that the scratchy lines said that we agreed to cede the land to the queen. We didn’t know that cede meant give up; relinquish; hand over!”
The way my grandfather’s story goes, Queen Victoria’s representatives gave the people gifts as a sign of her friendship. Chiefs got thirty-two dollars plus a silver medal. My grandfather’s grandfather got twenty-two dollars, because he was what they called a head man. Everyone else, Indians as they called us, got twelve dollars. Whenever my grandfather told the story, it never crossed my mind to ask why they called us Indians. I didn’t know back then that Indians come from India. For hundreds of years we’ve been called Indians because Christopher Columbus was going the wrong way around the world and thought he’d landed in India when he “discovered” America!
Apart from the cash, the queen gave the Indians ammunition for hunting and twine for fishing, as well as hoes, rakes, and shovels. The whole band got a plow and a pair of horses to share. Then she gave the people land. One square