noise and the wind throw me off my stride, but it doesn’t matter because I’m not trying to prove anything.
“Soldier!”
Lum is flying across the yard at a dead run. He takes the angle and catches the engine at the swing of the curve, runs alongside it until the embankment rises to meet the trestle and the gravel shoulder begins to narrow and falls away. Soldier goes as far as the gravel shoulder before he calls it quits, but he’s not happy about being left behind. He stands by the side of the tracks and barks as Lum runs alongside the engine.
You can see that Lum’s going to run out of room, that he’ll be forced to give it up, to peel off and come back down the embankment. But instead of slowing down, Lum drops his head and kicks hard, and as the slope disappears, he sidesteps onto the tracks just ahead of the engine and leads the train across the bridge.
I can’t imagine that the train people are too happy about Lum’s being on the tracks in front of them. But they don’t blow their whistle and they don’t slow down, so maybe they’re busy with something else and haven’t noticed him. Or maybe they don’t care.
One thing is for sure. If he slips on the gravel or stumbles on a tie, he’s dead.
But he doesn’t. He stays just out of reach of the train, and all the way across the bridge he holds it off, until the tracks begin the climb out of Truth, and the train loses speed and begins to fade.
The idea that the skull is prehistoric or has come from an old burial ground is fine until you get to the dirt. Once, when Lum and I were out on the coulees, we found a ground squirrel skeleton just below the prairie grass. The skull was a tiny thing, but when I dug it out, it was heavier than I would have guessed.
“Look at this.” I tossed the skull to Lum, and he held it up to the light and shook it.
“Ground squirrels,” said Lum, and he stuck a stick into an eye hole. “They got dirt for brains.”
The skull was filled with dirt, as if it had been poured in hot and left to set and cool. Both of us worked on it with sticks, but the dirt was like the bone itself, and after a while we gave up. Lum put the skull on a rock and crushed it with his foot. Even then, after you peeled the pieces of bone away, the dirt remained intact, hard as stone.
But the skull we found on the Horns was clean. Inside and out, it was clean. Almost spotless. As if someone had taken the time to wash and polish it before setting it in the grass for us to find.
Soldier and I wait in the shade of the boxcars to see if Lum is going to stop and circle back to check the time, but he has already made the top of the grade and is moving fast out across the long flat that follows the river to Prairie View.
Against the arch of a cloudless sky, he looks like a dark bird gliding low across the land.
Chapter Ten
O ne year, when we were still all living together in Bright Water, my mother decided we should take a vacation. I voted for the West Edmonton Mall. I had seen brochures of the place, and Lucy Rabbit had even been there and said it was neat. But my mother wanted to go camping, to get into nature and see stuff like animals and scenery. I told her we saw that all the time, but she said the mountains were different. She wanted to go to Waterton Lake, hike around a little, and maybe rent a cabin on the water for a week or so.
My father didn’t want to go anywhere. He had too much work to do, he said, and needed to get it done.
“Doesn’t stop you from going to Prairie View when you want to go.”
“That’s business.”
“So is this,” my mother told him. “Family business.”
In the end, my mother got her way, and we borrowed a tent and some sleeping bags from Lucy Rabbit’s brother Gorman and a cook-stove from Franklin, and we packed the truck up and headed for the Rockies.
“What am I going to do?” I asked my mother.
“You can fish.”
“That’s the second-to-last thing I want to do.”
Waterton Lake looked
“Soldier!”
Lum is flying across the yard at a dead run. He takes the angle and catches the engine at the swing of the curve, runs alongside it until the embankment rises to meet the trestle and the gravel shoulder begins to narrow and falls away. Soldier goes as far as the gravel shoulder before he calls it quits, but he’s not happy about being left behind. He stands by the side of the tracks and barks as Lum runs alongside the engine.
You can see that Lum’s going to run out of room, that he’ll be forced to give it up, to peel off and come back down the embankment. But instead of slowing down, Lum drops his head and kicks hard, and as the slope disappears, he sidesteps onto the tracks just ahead of the engine and leads the train across the bridge.
I can’t imagine that the train people are too happy about Lum’s being on the tracks in front of them. But they don’t blow their whistle and they don’t slow down, so maybe they’re busy with something else and haven’t noticed him. Or maybe they don’t care.
One thing is for sure. If he slips on the gravel or stumbles on a tie, he’s dead.
But he doesn’t. He stays just out of reach of the train, and all the way across the bridge he holds it off, until the tracks begin the climb out of Truth, and the train loses speed and begins to fade.
The idea that the skull is prehistoric or has come from an old burial ground is fine until you get to the dirt. Once, when Lum and I were out on the coulees, we found a ground squirrel skeleton just below the prairie grass. The skull was a tiny thing, but when I dug it out, it was heavier than I would have guessed.
“Look at this.” I tossed the skull to Lum, and he held it up to the light and shook it.
“Ground squirrels,” said Lum, and he stuck a stick into an eye hole. “They got dirt for brains.”
The skull was filled with dirt, as if it had been poured in hot and left to set and cool. Both of us worked on it with sticks, but the dirt was like the bone itself, and after a while we gave up. Lum put the skull on a rock and crushed it with his foot. Even then, after you peeled the pieces of bone away, the dirt remained intact, hard as stone.
But the skull we found on the Horns was clean. Inside and out, it was clean. Almost spotless. As if someone had taken the time to wash and polish it before setting it in the grass for us to find.
Soldier and I wait in the shade of the boxcars to see if Lum is going to stop and circle back to check the time, but he has already made the top of the grade and is moving fast out across the long flat that follows the river to Prairie View.
Against the arch of a cloudless sky, he looks like a dark bird gliding low across the land.
Chapter Ten
O ne year, when we were still all living together in Bright Water, my mother decided we should take a vacation. I voted for the West Edmonton Mall. I had seen brochures of the place, and Lucy Rabbit had even been there and said it was neat. But my mother wanted to go camping, to get into nature and see stuff like animals and scenery. I told her we saw that all the time, but she said the mountains were different. She wanted to go to Waterton Lake, hike around a little, and maybe rent a cabin on the water for a week or so.
My father didn’t want to go anywhere. He had too much work to do, he said, and needed to get it done.
“Doesn’t stop you from going to Prairie View when you want to go.”
“That’s business.”
“So is this,” my mother told him. “Family business.”
In the end, my mother got her way, and we borrowed a tent and some sleeping bags from Lucy Rabbit’s brother Gorman and a cook-stove from Franklin, and we packed the truck up and headed for the Rockies.
“What am I going to do?” I asked my mother.
“You can fish.”
“That’s the second-to-last thing I want to do.”
Waterton Lake looked
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