The Spawning Grounds (13 page)

“She's filled with the mystery, all right,” he told Alex, in English so Stew would hear. Then, in
Secwepemctsín
, he said to Elaine, “I see you've begun your work.”

Elaine turned her head slowly to look at him, then set her gaze back on the pictograph.

“She doesn't speak any Shuswap,” Stew said. “You know that.” He paused. “What did you tell her?”

“This isn't Elaine,” Dennis said. “Elaine's out walking. I've seen her soul on the river. She's getting ready to take the spirit trail.”

“Dennis Moses, what in god's name are you going on about?”

Dennis tucked his chin to his chest as he thought how to explain. “People and animals are separate now,” he told Stew,
holding up two fingers. “But once, in the time of the old stories, when animal and man were still family, a man's soul could flit away as an owl, or the spirit of a bear could slip under a man's skin. In that time a
Secwepemc
boy could ride the ice floe downstream, downriver, down to the ocean to the land of souls, as the salmon do, and then swim back upstream to his grieving grandfather, reborn within the skin of a sockeye. That time has passed, but sometimes, even now, an animal spirit finds his way back to us, into us, as it has with Elaine.”

Stew laughed and Dennis stood slowly, painfully, to put a hand on Stew's shoulder to make it clear that he was serious. “If we don't get this mystery out of her, Elaine will die. Sooner or later, it will take her back to the water. And when that happens, well, it may already be too late for the rest of us as well.”

“What do you mean, ‘mystery'?”

Dennis turned to his grandson. “Tell me, Alex. What do you remember me telling you about the narrows?”

Alex shrugged. “Only that it's a gateway.”

“Gateway?” Stew asked.

“There are gateways all over,” Dennis said. “There's a door to bear country in Green Timber. And the entrances to the buffalo and elk lands are out there in Cree territory. You'll find the gateway to the salmon world here, under the rapids at the narrows. The fish wait all winter in their world beneath the river gravel to be reborn, in the way our people once waited for spring within our winter houses. The salmon dance through winter; they sing their songs and tell stories beneath the gravel. In spring they return
as their own offspring, to swim downriver to the lake and then, when they've grown, downriver to the sea, following the same path our souls travel after we die. When my time comes I'll swim downriver with the salmon, to the land of souls.”

“Dennis, for god's sake. Just tell me what this ‘mystery' is.”

“There it is again,” Dennis said to Alex. “That white man's impatience.” Dennis patted the air in front of Stew with a hand knobbed by arthritis. “All in good time.” He sat back in the chair next to Elaine. “Now where was I?”

“You were telling us about the gateway, about the salmon,” Alex said.

“Yes, the salmon.” Dennis laid a hand on Elaine's arm as if to include her, but he spoke to Stew. “Coyote gave us a great gift,” he said. “He gave us salmon. He created these spawning grounds. But then, many generations ago, when our people were still as young and uneducated as you folks are now, we waged war on the salmon. There were so many fish our people didn't think they would ever run out, so we went on killing them. We killed even the last salmon buck and took his pregnant wife as a slave.

“When her son was born the people kept him as a slave too. So it was that the last salmon boy grew up with the people. And we mistreated him as people will mistreat a slave, one who is not their own. When he came of age and it was time to find his power, his mother told him the story of his father, and of his lost people.” Dennis waved a hand for Stew to take a seat. “Just like I'm telling you now,” he said.

The boy, the salmon boy, was angry when his mother told him about the people's senseless destruction of the salmon, of his father's death. He felt a rage that had built during all his years living under these people who would not accept him as one of their own, who had beat him, shunned him, laughed at him and denied him entrance to their gatherings, so that he sat with his mother outside the women's entrance of the
kekuli
as the feasting and dancing went on without them.

Go find your guardian, your power, his mother told him. Go to the mountain. Go. Go!

He hesitated, not wanting to leave her. She had been his only companion through life.

You're here for a reason, she said. You must avenge your father's death, cleanse this place of its sickness and bring your people home.

They'll beat you when they find me gone, he said.

I'll hide until you return. They'll think I've left too.

And when I find my power?

Go, she said.

But he couldn't leave her, not completely. He hung about the edges of the village, hidden within the undergrowth, fearful of entering the mountain forest alone, but also watching over his mother. She did hide as she said she would, within the
kekuli
while the people made their summer camp. But the people soon found her, dragged her from the women's entrance and down to the river. When she wouldn't tell them
where her son had gone, they killed her and prepared her body as they would any salmon's, laying her flesh on a drying rack. Afraid for his own life, he watched and did nothing as a storm gathered within him. Then he ran up to the benchland below the cliff, lifted his arms to the sky and, for the first time in his life, howled his rage. The sky responded. Black clouds boiled over his head. Lightning broke the air in two and thunder boomed. He was frightened at first and fell to his knees, his hands over his head, as lightning struck to his left, to his right, as hail pounded his back, as trees cracked and crashed to the ground around him.

He saw the people running to save themselves in the village below. These people who he had feared his whole life were now frightened of the storm he carried inside him. They were as ants, tiny and scuttling. He stood then and unleashed the full fury of the storm on them. Lightning struck again and again, thundering down from the sky, bursting the tents into flames, the grass into flames. The fire licked up the mountains and the trees all around burst into flames. The people ran screaming to the river to escape the fire. Many died before they reached the water, suffocated by smoke or burned to death. Others made it to the river and hid beneath the surface from the fires. So he brought down the rains. Thunderous sheets of water fell, putting out the fires, swelling the river, unleashing a flash flood that drowned the people, washing their last footprints from this earth.

“Then the salmon boy went back to the country of the salmon,” Dennis told Stew. “He leapt over the bodies of his people, as a sockeye leaps the rapids to reach home, and in this way brought the salmon back to life. The bones of his mother and father gathered their flesh back onto themselves and their hearts began to beat. This is why we cast the bones of the salmon back into the river, so the salmon will live again, and so we will remember that if the salmon disappear, the river dies, the lake dies, the land dies and we die.”

Stew scratched the stubble on his chin. “So you're telling me this salmon boy is the ‘mystery.' ”

“Yes.”

“And it took possession of Elaine.” Stew managed a laugh. “Are you
really
trying to make me believe that story is true?”

“Many of our elders believe the old stories really happened,” Alex told Stew. “In the same way someone of your generation might read the Bible stories as fact.” He glanced towards Dennis, but didn't look him in the eye, out of respect. Dennis believed the Bible stories as literal fact himself, with the same conviction as he believed the stories his grandmother had told him. He saw no contradiction in this. His two faiths sat peacefully side by side, like two family pit houses in the same village. “The story of the last salmon is true in the sense that it's told to help people remember that they shouldn't take too many fish,” Alex continued, “so enough can spawn, so the salmon will survive, so we can eat them and live.”

“That's your white schoolteachers talking,” said Dennis to the boy. His voice held enough anger that Alex sat back,
chastised. “Don't presume to speak of things you haven't seen or experienced.”

Alex nodded, keeping his eyes on the floor.