Bone Coulee by Larry Warwaruk Page B

along?”
    “I don’t see why not. You might even be able to help me out if I get into a squabble with the municipal council. It’s not just my heritage they’re messing around with…without my permission. They’re messing around with yours too. You likely have more clout than I do when dealing with the upper levels of government.”
    When the cage is done, Mac asks Abner if he’d like a lift home, but Abner says he needs the exercise. He also can’t join them on the look around at Bone Coulee, because he’s going door-knocking with John Popoff.
    “You could have lunch with us,” Angela tells Mac, but he’s got some leftover Kraft Dinner that he should finish up before it goes bad. He tells Angela that he will pick her up after lunch.
    As the truck drives out, and as Abner struts in his shaking fashion out the backyard, Roseanna comes out of the house with her cane. She studies the owl cage and then shakes her head.
    “No good to keep an owl,” she tells Angela.
    The owl blinks its eyes, then fixes a stare right at Roseanna.
    “It is scheming,” Roseanna says. She blinks several times back at the bird. “If we have to have it here, and we have to feed it, maybe it can help us with my brother’s death.”

• Chapter 10 •
    M ac takes time for a short nap to settle his Kraft Dinner. After building the owl cage, he needs a bit of a rest, especially if they are going to walk any distance in the coulee.
    He pulls on the lever of his La-Z-Boy. Soon he’s fast asleep, but then the dreams come: images of testimony, police and courtrooms.

    The policeman said:

    I saw some blood on his nose
    and in his mouth and it was
    bubbling from breathing….

    The lawyer said:

    Oh, he was breathing…?

    The policeman said:

    Yes he was, and I could also
    see a pulse beat in his throat….

    Mac wakes, the same instant clutching the footrest handle on the chair, bolting himself upright. He goes to the bathroom and runs cold water, splashing it on his face and the back of his neck. He puts his hand on his chest to feel his heart racing as if out of control, and he’s breathing just as fast. He’s got to get out of the house for some fresh air, out of the house to clear his head of its demons.
    With his hands gripped to the steering wheel, he’s tense, but at least he feels some control. He feels more at home in the cab of his truck than he does in his own living room. Shevchenko’s poems have relaxed him before; the book is somewhere in the truck. Then he spots Angela waiting for him on the sidewalk in front of her house.
    “I’ve brought my sketchbook along,” Angela says. “Mother says that Bone Coulee might inspire me.”
    “She’s not coming with us?”
    “I didn’t ask her. Mother’s just as happy to stay home and watch Coronation Street .”
    If it hadn’t have been for the university professor last summer explaining to Mac the significance of Bone Coulee, he’d feel damned uncomfortable. He’s nerved-up as it is with his dreams, and a man with any blood at all in his veins, no matter how old, can’t help but squirm when he sneaks a side glance at the blue jeans on the seat beside him. She being Aboriginal, at least they have a legitimate reason to drive out to Bone Coulee. They have artistic reasons; she has her sketchbook, and if he really wants to get down to it, Mac has his book of Shevchenko poems, if that is legitimate.
    “Mother says the coulee is filled with spirits.” Angela stares out the side window. “Even these stubble fields that are no longer prairie, that no longer nurture buffalo….”
    “And the empty farmyards,” Mac says. I remember when they contained families.” Mac feels the spirit of the pioneers; cream separators, pitchforks, a dance at Buffalo Hollow.
    The school is gone, but the yard is still there, and it’s put to use. Provincial regulation requires the containment of empty herbicide and pesticide containers, so the municipality has constructed a chain-link fence