Keeper'n Me Read Free

about things than I woulda if we had electricity and TV. You get to know each other pretty good when all you got is each other for entertainment. Guess that’s the strongest point about this reserve and the people here. Even though we’re poor we still got spirit and heart and we look out for each other. Lotsa other places can’t say that.
    My name’s Garnet Raven. The Raven family’s been a fixture on the White Dog Reserve ever since they signed Treaty Three across the northern part of Ontario in the 1870s. Raven’s also the name of one of our people’s messengers in the animal world, so I guess old Keeper telling me I was supposed to be some kind of a storyteller’s gotta make some sense. I don’t know. But ever since I’vebeen here I’ve been listening to what that old guy’s been telling me and pretty much trying to do what he says and it’s all worked out fine. So who am I to argue?
    I live here with my ma. We’ve got a small cabin on the west end of the townsite. This reserve’s built on the shore of White Dog Lake and it’s the kind of rocky, bushy territory you’d expect. So the houses are all spread apart and built on top of rocky little hills. They’re not houses like city folk are used to. They’re just small one-story jobbies with maybe four rooms that all empty into the main room where the stove is. Not much insulation, and some of the poorer people here still use clear plastic instead of glass on their windows. The townsite’s called that on accounta the band office, school, medical building, store and garage are all clustered around the only clear, flat place around. There’s about half a dozen houses down there where the only electricity and telephones are. That’s where the chief and a few band councillors live along with the white teachers from the school and Doc Tacknyk and Mrs. Tacknyk, our Ukrainian medical team. There’s a ball diamond that doubles as the pow-wow grounds four days every summer, a boarded hockey rink with a couple of rickety light poles, and a small aluminum trailer where the Ontario Provincial Police sit drinking coffee the few times they get out this way. Ma’s cabin sits above the end of the dirt track that serves as the main drag out here. Beyond us is just bush trails leading to other houses deeper in the woods near Shotgun Bay.
    We like to sit out back where the trail leads down to the dock where I keep my boat. My uncle Archie got me that boat with money he won at the big blackout bingo in Winnipeg two summers ago. It’s a fourteen-foot aluminum with a thirty-five-horsepower motor, nice waterproof cushions and a built-in cooler for the fish. Ma and I take lotsa rides in that boat in the evenings and she’s always pointing out places on the shore where big things happened either to our family or our people. When I think about my life these days the thing I think about most is my ma’s wrinkled brown face in the front of that boat, all squinty-eyed into the wind, smiling, pointing and gabbing away, her voice rising and falling through the sound of loons and ducks and wind. But we also sit out back late into the evening watching the land. If you sit there long enough while the sun’s going down behind the hills you’d swear you can see those hills move. Like they’re breathing. It’s a trick of the light really. Something caused by distance and time and a quiet yearning of magic we all carry around inside us. That’s what Ma says. Says that magic’s born of the land and the ones who go places in life are the ones who take the time to let that magic seep inside them. Sitting there, all quiet and watching, listening, learning. That’s how the magic seeps in. Anishanabe are pretty big on magic, she says. Not so much the pullin’ rabbits outta hats kinda of magic but more the pullin’ learning outta everything around ’em. A common magic that