Keeper'n Me by Richard Wagamese Page A

around my own people for a long, longtime. They’d kid me about it but generally they tried to help me get feeling I was home again. It happened over the course of that first summer, but slowly. Living with Ma helped the most.
    Anyway, there was a big bunch of us sitting around on the other side of the bay one evening. We had a fire going and were listening to Wally Red Sky singing all his favorite country-and-western songs. Wally’s okay, I suppose, but I always figured someone should have told him back then that there was a few good tunes written after 1952. See, Wally’s always been the big dreamer around here. His family goes back a long way in the local history. What with his great-grandfather being one a the main signers of Treaty Three back in the 1870s and every Red Sky after that somehow getting into the politics, making big plans has been a Red Sky mainstay for as long as most can remember according to Ma. He’d got hold of his daddy’s guitar when he was eight and ever since then has dreamed of being the biggest Indian country singer ever. Trouble is, his high notes sound like what you hear in the bush during rutting season and his low notes sound like a moose four hours after a feeding frenzy on skunk cabbage. But a nicer guy can’t be found. He was right in the middle of some sappy ballad about some long-haired gal named Sal who lived in the middle of the wide open spaces when we heard it.
    See, the open-lake telephone system can be kind of spooky when you’re not ready for it. Voices have a habit of floating up at you outta nowhere. My cousin ConnieOtter just about jumped right outta her skin when we heard this voice go, “Hoo!” That’s all, just “Hoo!”
    Whenever Ma’n me head out blueberry picking she’s always hooing away when I pick my way outta her sight. One good hoo can carry a long way by itself even without the benefit of a reflecting lake. Ma says it’s the way the old people used to locate each other in the bush.
    So we hear this hoo and all the rest got lost in the roar of laughing that erupted when Connie Otter hightailed it into the bush so fast she ran clear out of her gumboots. We could hear her crashing through the timber and someone finally had the sense to yell back over, “Hoo!”
    Now it generally takes a while for a good hoo to travel across so it was a moment or two before we got a reply.
    â€œGAR … NET … RA … VEN … THERE?”
    â€œYEAH … I’M … HERE!”
    â€œÂ â€™KAY THEN … KEE … PER … WANTS … YOU!”
    â€œWHAT? … KEE … PER … WANTS … ME?”
    â€œYEAH … KEE … PER!”
    â€œÂ â€™KAY THEN … BE … O … VER … SOOOOON!”
    â€œÂ â€™KAY THEN.”
    Wally Red Sky bumped against me in the darkness. I could tell it was Wally because no one else on this reserve still uses Brylcreem. Or at least they don’t use as much of it as Wally Red Sky.
    â€œKeeper? Wonder what that old fart wants with you?”
    â€œDon’t know, Wally, maybe he needs help finding one a his bottles.”
    This got quite a laugh because Keeper’d been the local drunk around here for a long time. Well, there used to be a lot of local drunks but old Keeper’d been the one most people talked about most of the time. One of the things you could count on from Keeper was to find him stumbling around in the mornings turning over rocks’n logs and stuff trying to remember where he’d hid his bottle. I remember wondering how anybody could be called Keeper when they couldn’t seem to keep anything.
    Anyway, he surprised everyone when he went away. Guess he just one day up and walked in and asked chief and council to send him off to the Smith Clinic in Thunder Bay to dry out.