Keeper'n Me by Richard Wagamese

somewhere in a place far away, singing soft and low, over and over and over … bih’kee-yan, bih’kee-yan, bih’kee-yan.

BOOK TWO
BEEDAHBUN
    First of all, you’ve got to realize that the lake is like a reflector, okay? What I mean is that on those long, calm nights we get around here, a voice can carry for miles. We used to eavesdrop on conversations whenever we’d see Myron Fisher and Mabel Copenace heading out on the bay in her auntie’s canoe. They’d be talking all lovey-dovey across the bay and we’d catch every line. Old Myron would be mad as hell and chase us all around the townsite whenever we’d repeat what we figured were the sweetest lines of the evening. Myron and Mabel have been married for about three years now, got themselves a boy named Theodore and are living in a house at the east end of the townsite. Maybe all the teasing helped, Idon’t know. Anyway, the lake is like a reflector that can take a whisper clean across.
    Now according to Mabel’s auntie—not the one with the canoe, the other that’s older and has a face like a fresh-scraped deer hide once the wet’s all squeezed out—there was a time on this reserve when the lake was the only way to get a hold of someone on the other side. People would just wander on down to the dock and yell across.
    Actually, White Dog’s not the only reserve up here’s got their own open-lake telephone. This northern part of Ontario’s full of lakes and we Ojibways always seem to be finding ourselves settling down on the shores of one. Once you’ve seen one of our long summer sunsets from across a northern lake, well, you start to get a better idea of why the old people would settle down there.
    Anyway, I’d been back here about four months. My ma had cut my Afro off about three days after I was home and around about that time I was one scruffy-looking Indian. Funny how fate turns things around, eh? I told Ma about the old Pancho Santilla gaffe I used to run on people before I became a black man and she just looked at me and laughed.
    â€œGood thing you don’ try that now, my boy,” she said. “People see you like this with no hair now they be callin’ you one a them Mexican hairlesses!”
    Funny lady, that Ma.
    Making White Dog my home wasn’t as easy as maybe I make it sound. For days on end I still wanted tohightail it back to familiar streets. I felt like a very big fish out of water for the longest time and to tell the truth, it was scary. But the White Dog folks and the feeling that was seeping into me from this land all started getting me to feeling more and more comfortable the longer I hung around. In fact, I don’t remember ever making the decision to stay. It was more like one day I was walking around and it was already made. Nobody was coaxing the answer out of me all that time either. I took to feeling like I’d just been a part of the place forever and like Stanley had told me those first few days, everyone just seemed to want to treat me like a little kid. The little kid they’d never got a chance to know. Pretty hard to think of leaving a place when everyone’s feeding you, giving you things and making you feel all special all the time. Anyway, I fell into the idea of being home long before I even knew that’s where I was. Took some getting used to though.
    See, there wasn’t much to do except hang out with my brothers and their friends and try to fit in and not stick out all at the same time. Which is kinda hard when you don’t speak the language, never done any of the things people like to do around here like hunt and fish and all and you’re running around with a heada hair looks like a bad scalping job by a near-sighted Cree. But I was slowly getting comfortable. Most folks knew who I was, where I’d been, some of the things I’d done out there, and were pretty hip to the fact that I hadn’t been