Nish by Isabelle Picard

Author:Isabelle Picard [Picard, Isabelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Canada
Published: 2023-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

14   Dad

15   It’s good to hear the Innu language.

16   Here, everybody speaks French all the time.

ELOISE

“How is Dad? Tell me the truth.”

I know my brother will tell me the truth. I don’t know why, but I feel like my mother doesn’t tell us everything to spare us. Sometimes I feel like she thinks we’re still five years old. But now I can take advantage of the fact that my brother is in Quebec City to have a real witness to my father’s health.

“Well, uh …”

“Is he next to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if you had to give him a mark out of ten, what would it be?”

“Six.”

“That much?” I murmur, a little worried.

“Where’s Mom?”

“Out jogging.”

“And school, am I missing anything?”

“That’s right, change the subject. You’ve only been gone two days, you know. School doesn’t stop running without you hockey players. We have a new end-of-year project in geography. We have to present our community to the world — something filmed in teams — as if we’re going to put it on YouTube, you know?”

“Ah, that’s cool! For a school project, I mean.” Leon tries to hide his enthusiasm. “You know what I ate yesterday?” he says, probably to taunt me a little. “An ice cream dipped in chocolate with candies and gummies on it. It was so good!”

“Sure, just rub it in a little more.”

“That’s what I’m doing! Ha, ha! Are you going hunting during the Goose Break?”

“Yes, with Uncle, Ati and the kids. After all, that’s what a Goose Break is for!”

“Yum! And I’ll miss it.”

“Poor you. Wanna change places?”

Leon is silent on the end of the line. I know he wouldn’t swap with me. Neither would I if I were in his place.

“Okay, put Dad on the phone. Wait! Did you win?”

“About time!” my brother replies, obviously waiting for the question.

“With everything going on, I forgot,” I say apologetically. “Well, did you win. Yes or no?”

“Yes and no, I guess. We won one and lost one. I scored one goal each game. Joce got a hat trick in the second game and we crushed them 7–3.”

“Oh yeah? Surprising.”

“What do you mean?”

“No, I’m happy for you. Okay, I’d like to talk to Dad now.”

After my daily update about my father, I hand the handset to my sweaty mother, then I start thinking of a creative way to present our community to the world for the geography project.

What if we present everything we don’t have here, but they do in the South? What if we showed what we replace those things with? It would be easy to edit and we could film in several different locations to show what our land looks like. Yeah!

I pick up my tablet, open Messenger, and click on the group that was originally called “The Three Musketeers,” but that I renamed “The Three Sisters.” I changed the name when my mother explained to me what it meant to the Wendat. I feel it has a little more to do with me and my friends than, say, a French novel.

The Wendat, my mother’s Nation (and half mine), were horticulturalists before the arrival of Europeans.

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