Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese Page A

boom.
    Lester Jenks. He was the boom foreman. He was a New Brunswicker, raised in logging camps and lumberjacking full-time by the time he was their age. He liked their bravado, the aplomb they brought to the art of the boom, and he encouraged their play and rambunctiousness.
    “A cautious man’ll die out here,” he told them. “You need to be playful as an otter and sturdy as a bear. That’s what’ll save your skin in this job.”
    Jenks taught them to log roll. He showed them the footwork that would keep a log spinning in the froth and yetallow them to work it, manoeuvre it, herd it into the boom, and rest it lightly against the outside logs. When they fell he laughed. When they cussed and clambered out, water peeling off them like sheets of light, he slapped them hard on the back and showed them one more time. Jenks was fast. He was a tall, athletic, heavy man but light on his feet, agile, and completely fearless. The look on his face when he worked the log was one-half childish delight and one-half jubilation like a demon cajoling souls, and the faster he spun a log beneath his feet the more crazed and flushed his face became. They learned to mimic him.
    Together he and Jimmy would spin a timber in the flow. They’d stand a few yards from each end and run. The log would slip in the water and twirl slowly at first until they picked up speed and then it would spew froth out behind it as they ran. Then they’d exchange a look and reverse it. They’d catch the log lightly with the hobs of their boots, slow it, coax it to a roll, and then run again and spin it the other way while Jenks watched and applauded their skill. It became a dance they did, another entrance into manhood burgeoning at the edges of the boom. The two of them set out against the river. The logs at their feet. The bob of them. The airy feel of suspension. Weightless. Then the impossible release of gravity as they ran and spun the log, churning the water and moving it forward and backward, locked in rhythm, eyeing each other, daring each other, the current, the flow, the muscle of the river forgotten until all that existed was the speed and the pitch and bob of logs in the water and the feel of them free, unencumbered and uncontained.
    “Where’d you get the moxie?” Jenks asked one day over lunch.
    “My dad rodeo-ed,” Jimmy said. “Bulls. Didn’t pay none so he quit.”
    “You?” Jenks asked him.
    “Don’t know,” he said. “It’s the action. The thrill to it.”
    “Like the feel of danger, do ya?”
    “Don’t feel dangerous.”
    “What’s it feel then?”
    He thought for a moment. “Free, I guess. Like I’m doin’ what I gotta do and there ain’t nothin’ much to stop me.”
    “Said like a true daredevil. I can trust a man like that,” Jenks said.
    They spent a long time talking. Jenks knew the ins and outs of logging and he shared adventures from camps from Nova Scotia to northern Quebec. He’d wandered west on a whim one year and came to love the rugged interior mountains. There was work from Vancouver Island to the northern border to Alaska but he favoured the Nechako. He’d never been much to settle but found a cabin to his liking and a truck he’d come to love.
    “And a passable dog,” he said with a laugh. “Fellas been known to make a home with less, I figure.”
    So he told Jenks about the caravan, about the winding road that led to jobs, the things he’d done for money, and then he told him about his father, the war, and about his mother.
    “She’s where I got so strong,” he said. “When my dad died she just got even more gumption. I use that. The sight of her. It keeps me going.”
    He told him about the feeling of words spun out of the darkness and how the sound of her voice reading to them became someone painting images in the light of candles onthe walls or firelight on the branches of trees. He told him how her voice held his world together.
    “I could use me some of that,” Jenks said.
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