The Spawning Grounds Read online

  Brandon didn’t bother to answer. Instead he grabbed his cell from the jean jacket he’d dumped on shore and texted Alex about what he had just seen. He turned to look upriver at the bridge over the narrows where Alex sat with other young men from the reserve, and as he did so, he saw the naked boy rise from the river to once again stand on water. The boy watched him as intently as Brandon watched him.

  “What is it?” Hannah asked her brother.

  But as soon as she spoke the boy was gone again. He didn’t sink into the water this time. He simply vanished.

  “Bran, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Brandon said. He watched the river for a time, searching for ripples in the water, for the boy to resurface. Above them, the eagle pair circled and cried eye-EYE, as Alex’s ancestors had, to urge a storyteller on. Eye-EYE!

  — 2 —

  Unmooring

  STEW’S BORDER COLLIE, Abby, stood on alert, staring at something in the water. His mare watched the river with the dog, her ears cocked forward, and it was then, as Stew looked to see what had caught his animals’ attention, that he saw the boy standing on the water. A naked Indian kid in his teens. In recent years, as this world loosened its grip on Stew, he often saw this boy watching him from the river. He glanced at the bridge to see if any of the protestors had noticed the boy. When he looked back at the river, the boy was gone.

  Stew sat on Spice, a strawberry roan who stood up to her chest in rushing water. This horse’s legs were his now. His hips and knees were so far gone that he was lame without her, and couldn’t stand upright in the river to fish. Here, at the deep pool below the rapids, the water boiled as it did nowhere else on this river, and could pull a man under. The water appeared thick, the consistency of glycerine, and was jade green, reflecting the algae clinging to the rocks beneath the surface; tiny bubbles rose up from below as if from a submerged creature. As he cast, he kept a firm grip on his glass rod, his old friend. The line arched over water and caught light, like spiders’ silk floating on the breeze. The protestors on the bridge upriver booed at him. Stew cast and cast again, just to taunt them.

  In the past, before those logs had dammed the flow above the bridge, sockeye had grouped here like pilgrims paying reverence at a holy place. They had waited for some signal, some change in light, some clue in the smell of the water that only they could discern, before leaping the rapids to spawn in the clean gravel of the upper river. Rainbow trout had often waited with them to eat the orange-red eggs. The trout, following the salmon up this river, were the fish Stew cast for, but now there were only a handful in the water beneath him and they weren’t biting.

  Abby barked from shore and Stew turned to see a woman walking up the river path. As the dog bounded towards her, Stew squinted at her in the way a lost hiker searches the forest for human trails. A wave of relief passed over him as he recognized her as his own granddaughter. “Hannah,” he said.

  “What are you doing, Grandpa?” she called.

  “What does it look like? I’m fishing.”

  She pointed at the rifle in his scabbard as she reached him. “With a gun?”

  “Gun’s for trespassers. Those protestors left my gates open. Cows got onto the road, into Gina’s yard.” He nodded at their neighbour’s small acreage across from his own front gate. “I had a bugger of a time getting them back in.”

  As Hannah attempted to get as close to her grandfather as she could, she stepped onto a rock outcropping over the river that had been rounded into a bowl of stone by swirling eddies. River breezes carried the smell of the horse to her, along with the smell of rum from her grandfather. The red feather in the brim of his cowboy hat fluttered in the breeze. Over the summer his face had taken on the gaunt look of the terminally ill.

  “Grandpa, you know you’re not allowed to fish here anymore.”

  “And that asshole’s not allowed on my property.”

  Hannah turned to follow her grandfather’s gaze to Alex, who was heading towards them from the bridge, following the river path that ran the length of her grandfather’s land. He looked so different from the boy she’d known in her childhood. He had grown muscular and was almost too well groomed, like an actor on a movie set, purposefully setting himself apart from both the rez community where he lived and the valley at large with his expensive jeans and leather jacket, this urban identity he had assumed. Hannah felt intimidated by him now in a way she never had before he went to university, when he was still that gangly teen.

  Stew tucked his fishing rod between his thigh and saddle, pulled his rifle from the scabbard, and tipped back his cowboy hat as he aimed the gun at Alex. Alex stopped in mid-step and gave Hannah a look that said, Here we go again.

  “Grandpa, put the gun down.”

  Stew ignored her, peering at Alex through the scope on his gun. “What the hell do you want?” Stew yelled. “What are you doing on my land?”

  Alex held out both hands as if to offer himself up. “If you’re looking for something to fill your freezer, I’ll take you moose hunting on my uncle’s hunting ground,” he called to Stew. “Nothing but tough meat on these bones.”

  “So you are off the reserve, then? You look Indian, though it’s hard to tell these days. All these red-haired, blue-eyed Indians. My granddaughter here says she’s going to college with a blonde who claims she’s Cree. Says she’s got status and everything.”

  Hannah felt the heat rise to her face. She realized her grandfather didn’t recognize Alex, even though he had been to the farmhouse many times over the years. To him, Alex was just another trespasser, another protestor, another Indian.

  “Grandpa, this is Alex. You remember, Coyote.”

  Alex made a face at hearing the nickname. His aunt Sara had given it to him, not because she thought Alex was the archetypal trickster of many of the stories he told, but because his aunt felt he—like Coyote—spent too much of his energy on getting laid. Or at least that used to be the case, before he went to university, when he seemed to have a new girlfriend every week. Hannah should have been too young at the time to be jealous, but she had been.

  “Alex is Dennis Moses’s grandson, his great-grandson,” Hannah told her grandfather. “He comes over to our place, remember?”

  Recognition crossed Stew’s face, and he lowered his gun. Alex took that as his cue to continue walking towards them. He joined Hannah on the outcropping over the river.

  “Grandpa’s pissed because the protestors left the far gate open,” Hannah told him. “The cows got out.”

  “What the hell are you protesting anyway?” Stew asked Alex. “You people are always getting worked up about your bones. What does it matter? The kid is dead, isn’t he?”

  “How would you feel if I dug up old Eugene’s bones?”

  “You don’t even know who that kid is.”

  Alex licked his thumb and rubbed a smudge from Hannah’s cheek before responding. She wiped her face with her sleeve, embarrassed both by his touch and her grubby appearance.

  “He’s family,” Alex said to Stew. “I’ll tell the others to shut the gates if they go through the pastures. Most of them will be gone in a couple of hours anyway. But you’ve got to stop fishing. Zach is threatening to call Fish and Wildlife.” He waved and his cousin Zach waved back from the bridge. Zach was in his early thirties, several years older than Alex. He was more political than Alex, and bitter. Hannah did her best to avoid him.

  “Nobody’s going to tell me I can’t fish in this river,” Stew said. “I’ve been taking fish out of these waters all my life, just like my father and his father before him.” Stew lifted his chin towards Eugene’s Rock. “Every generation of my family—going all the way back to Eugene Robertson—fished here. And goddammit, my grandson is going to fish here too.” Bran biked towards them now down a path so slender it was hard to believe Stew’s cattle had created it. One cow had followed the steps of the next, their hooves slipping neatly into the hoof prints of the one before them, much like his own family h
ad.

  “Oh, I know all about it,” said Alex. “My family fished here for thousands of years before you guys turned up and trashed the place. Keep it up and there won’t be any fish here to catch.”

  “When are you Indians going to get over the fact that this land belongs to us now,” Stew said.

  “You remember what my grandpa Dennis told you every time you asked him that?”

  Stew looked away. He did remember. Dennis Moses had said white men were like infants in their baths who tried to grab the water their mothers poured over them, thinking the water was a thing they could possess. But, Dennis said, they would never own this river or this land. The waters, the soil, would run through the cracks between their fingers, the way bathwater runs through a child’s fist.

  Nevertheless, Stew tapped his chest and repeated himself, defiant. “It’s ours now.”

  Alex shook his head but didn’t respond. Brandon skidded his bike to a stop next to him, as Abby leapt and barked around him. He petted the dog to calm her as he looked at the gun in Stew’s hands.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Stew asked him.

  “Had to change my clothes,” he said. “I fell in the river.”

  “I told you, never swim in that water. You know how many have died here? Christ, your own mother.”

  “You don’t need to remind him,” Hannah said.

  “I said I fell in,” Brandon told his grandfather. “And I was just in the shallows.”

  “So you saw your first water mystery, did you?” Alex asked Brandon, grinning.

  “What was that?” At last Stew tucked his rifle back in his scabbard.

  “I saw something in the water when I fell in,” Brandon said.

  “Something like what?” Stew asked.

  “I don’t know. It was see-through. But it was there, you know?”

  “Like a ghost swimming through water,” Alex said.

  Brandon turned to look at him. “You’ve seen it?”

  Alex paused, glancing at Stew. “Many people have seen it.”

  “I thought I saw a boy, too, standing on the river,” Brandon said. “I mean he was standing right on the water, like he was Jesus or something. Then he sank and I saw that ghost thing swimming towards me.”

  Alex nodded. “That’s the water mystery. The boy and the river ghost are one and the same.”

  Stew asked, “Your head wasn’t underwater, was it? You didn’t drink that thing in?” His grandfather’s expression was so grim, Brandon laughed a little in confusion.

  “No. Hannah pulled me up.”

  “Seriously,” said Alex. “That ghost in the water didn’t get inside you, did it?”

  Brandon shook his head. “No, I saw it on the river after.”

  “What’s this all about?” Hannah asked.

  “Nothing,” Stew said, cutting off Alex’s answer. Then he eyed Brandon. “Your imagination,” he said. He settled himself on his horse to face the river. Hannah raised an eyebrow at Alex, but he held up a hand as if to say, Later.

  As Stew cast his line, Hannah said, “For god’s sake, Grandpa, put the rod down. You don’t want to get yourself in trouble.”

  Stew reeled in his line and cast again. The fly hovered in the air until a swallow swooped down and nabbed it, flitting off with the fly in its mouth as it would a mosquito. Stew swore, cranked his line and the swallow fluttered towards him. “My own granddaughter thinks she can tell me what to do. Says I got to fence the river so my cattle can’t get themselves a drink when they want it. Then all of them environmentalist assholes at that meeting last week told me I can’t sell my own land.”

  “They don’t care if you sell,” Alex told him. “They just don’t want you to sell to this developer.”

  Stew grabbed the swallow and, tucking the glass rod under his arm, plucked the hook from the bird’s mouth. “The lot of you can go to hell,” he said as he opened his fist to let the bird go. The swallow flapped, confused, then darted away to skim the surface of the water.

  “You know, you’re the only local who supports that housing development,” Alex told Stew.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about that hellhole,” Stew said. “I can barely walk even with my canes. Won’t be long before I can’t get on the tractor. What am I going to do? Feed the cattle from a wheelchair? What kind of life is that? I want a few years of comfort before I’m gone. Is that asking too much?”

  “You’re always going on about how this farm has been passed on one generation to the next,” Brandon told him.

  Stew turned in his saddle to face his grandson. “Are you going to take it over? You up to running a cow-calf operation?”

  Brandon had nothing to say to that.

  “Your father sure as hell isn’t.”

  “You didn’t ask me if I wanted the farm,” Hannah said. “I suppose because I’m a woman.”

  “You’re a woman now, are you?” Alex asked her, and grinned. And Hannah realized that Alex still saw her as that girl he had left behind. Hannah had only been fourteen when he went to university.

  “I won’t hand you the farm because you’re a goddamned environmentalist,” Stew told her. “You’d sell off the cows and let these fields go to bush.”

  “And what’s that developer going to do?” She waited for him to respond, but he only cast again. “You’re right,” she said. “I would let the land along the river recover. The spawning grounds are on our land and they need protection. We’re losing the salmon.”

  “No way I’m backing out of the deal now. That developer’s got his offer on the table, as long as the zoning change goes through. All that’s in the way now are those assholes.” Stew pointed his fishing rod at the protestors. “You tell your friends over there to get their cars the hell out of my field. They’re frickin’ trespassers. That goes for you too,” he told Alex. “Go on, get out of here.”

  Stew leaned to poke Alex with his fishing rod and when Alex stepped back the old glass rod slipped from his grasp and fell into the water. As it circled on an eddy, Stew bent to save it but the rod disappeared as if something had yanked it down. Stew made one last attempt to retrieve it, lost his balance and slid from his saddle into the river.

  “Shit,” Hannah cried. She jumped in after her grandfather, weighed down by her waders, and Brandon leapt in after her. Cold river water filled Hannah’s boots, grabbed her legs, lit up her scalp, and tried to pull her below.

  Brandon strained to keep his head above water as he reached for his grandfather, but they were all drawn under the surface by the boiling eddies. For a split second before he was submerged, Brandon glimpsed the naked boy standing in the middle of the river, as if on solid ground. Underwater, Brandon kicked and kicked and kicked, and then, his energy spent, he sank, drifting like a dying salmon. He was aware of the water that enveloped him, but he no longer attempted to remove himself from it. He opened his eyes as something brushed past his arm and saw a sockeye dart away. Then he saw the thing snaking through water towards him, this energy in the water, this ghost; it pushed into him, filling his mouth, travelling down his throat and through the streams of his body. He felt the thrashing in his mind, a disturbance of black waters. He exhaled the last of his breath and bubbles leapt from his mouth, and with them his soul expanded: he was rushing water; he was blinding reflection; he was air, and robin’s egg sky.

  — 3 —

  Surfacing

  AN EXPLOSION OF bubbles burst in front of Hannah as Alex jumped in: his legs in jeans, the rippled muscles of his stomach, his billowing T-shirt, his face made strange by water, his black hair adrift above him. She felt the warmth of his arms around her as he kicked towards the surface and then swam with her to shore.

  Abby greeted them, barking and shaking with anxiety. Alex helped Hannah lie back into the roots of the lone, ancient cottonwood that Eugene Robertson had left standing on this shore. “You okay?” he asked her, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

  She coughed as she spoke. “Go! Help Bran and Gran
dpa.”

  Brandon had already crawled onto shore, pulling himself on his elbows like a lungfish making its clumsy journey onto land. He rolled onto his back, wheezing as his chest rose and fell unevenly, as if breath itself was something foreign to him. Alex sprinted to Dead Man’s Bend, where he found Stew face down, his jacket snagged on the barbed-wire fence hanging low over the river. Alex charged into the muddy water and flipped the old man over, untangled him from the fence, then hauled him back to shore. There he started CPR, pinching his nose as he forced breath into his mouth, and pressing, pressing, pressing his chest.

  Hannah stumbled over river rock to her brother and took his hand to haul him up so they could go to their grandfather, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, get up. She knelt beside him. “Bran, look at me,” she said, and when he didn’t respond she turned his face towards her. He seemed only half-aware of her presence. He was shivering; Hannah was too. “Brandon! Are you all right?” His pupils were unnaturally large in this bright daylight. “Jesus, did you hit your head?” Hannah ran her fingers over Brandon’s scalp, searching through his ginger hair for bumps or gashes. She didn’t find any, yet Brandon was clearly disoriented. When Abby nosed him, looking for reassurance, Brandon shifted away, seeming to be afraid of the dog.

  Hannah felt in her pocket for her cell, to call an ambulance, but it was gone. Panicked, she looked around for help. People spread down from the bridge, on the way towards them, but their neighbour Gina, one of her father’s old flames, was first to arrive. She took Spice’s reins and walked the mare out of the water as if she were family, which even in crisis annoyed Hannah. “Phone 911,” she called to her.

  “An ambulance is already on the way,” Gina told her. She held up her cell as she led the horse towards them.

  “Grandpa,” Hannah cried.

  “Alex knows what to do,” said Gina, her voice steady, with only an echo of the Shuswap inflection. She tied the mare to the cottonwood, wrapping the reins around a sprout growing up from the base of the dying tree, and then came to squat beside Brandon. “Is he hurt?”