Sugarmilk Falls

Maybe you know the Ojibwa name this bitter heart of winter the Moon of the Windigo, after their most ancient fear, the crazed cannibal giant who swoops down from the north bringing madness and destruction. Each breath of pale frozen air catches in the throat and nostrils. The hard packed snow creaks loudly underfoot. At night you hear the tamarack trees crack like gunfire in the iron cold. Constellations glitter wildly and the northern lights shimmer across the sky. You could say it began like this, with the windigo moon bright on the snow and Grand'mere, snowbound in her cabin on the edge of the muskeg, staring into the flames of her round black stove. She drank from a bottle of moonshine whiskey and the past became the present . . . * Rachelle has taken to hanging around the store with the older girls after school. They sip cherry soda and giggle through their hair at the loggers who also stop by at this time. They want movie magazines, strawberry bubblegum, grape-flavoured lipstick, and the lumber men, enchanted by the schoolgirl laughter, pay. Rachelle does not come home as usual. For three long days and nights she is missing. Even Grand'mere, who knows all the places, can find no trace. Zack discovers her on the fourth day, abandoned in a sugar shack, a bruised, distraught, unspeaking girl, gripping tightly the coat he wraps her in. Little by little Grand'mere pieces together all that has been done to Rachelle. She tells no one. Eventually the ones she concludes are responsible wander into the muskeg and long before Bobby is born they are all lost in the cold, shifting, bottomless mire. Constable Martello questions the Oswekens about the disappearances. He looks long and hard through narrow eyes at Grand'mere. But there is no evidence. Others have vanished this way. No one ever knows for certain, not Zack Guillem, not Father Souris, not even Rachelle. Bobby is born in the Moon of the Windigo; he is a bright and difficult child. Grand'mere cares for him as she has cared for all her large family. But Rachelle will have nothing to do with the boy. She quits school and finds live-in work at a holiday lodge on Medicine Chant Lake. She paints her face and chain-smokes. Zack sometimes calls by but she pretends not to know him. Soon the resort manager tells him to stop coming round. Later he learns she has gone to the city, where the money is better. It is Grand'mere who tells him this. She speaks without emotion, but hopelessness gathers like a freezing mist. "There is Bobby," she says flatly, "with a child it is always springtime." Bobby plays on her soft, shining moosehide rugs. He bangs her cooking pots and beats her drum. Sometimes she holds him up to sit astride her dogs. Bobby watches her prepare the herbs she uses in her medicine. He holds her hand when they go out to pick the tawny leaves, the mosses and lichens, the cherry bark and cedar for making steaming broths to drink or splash on red-hot stones, the forked and hairy one she calls root of a thousand roots. On winter days he takes her collection of mineral samples out of the grey canvas bags and arranges them in rows. He smells spices, the cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, and sneaks the raisins when she bakes. She makes deerskin mittens, decorates them with coloured beads. He echoes her chants and sees inside her medicine pouch, the necklaces of animal claws and teeth, bones and strips of fur. Sometimes, not often, they go to Mass. In the evenings he sits close to her. He holds her long grey braid in his hand and they eat popcorn. Bobby watches the men, Louis and Ovide, prepare the traps and fishing lines. Later he goes into the bush with them, far beyond the maple groves, and learns to take the skins from animals and cut up the meat for food. Once he heVan Mil, Ilona is the author of 'Sugarmilk Falls', published 2005 under ISBN 9780771087325 and ISBN 0771087322.