Walking in the Woods by Herb Belcourt

Author:Herb Belcourt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchwood Editions
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Request

A MÉTIS WOMAN CALLED ME FROM Winnipeg. I didn’t know her, I didn’t know her relatives, I didn’t know anything about her. She said her sixteen-year-old daughter had come to Edmonton and started hanging around with a bad crowd. She wanted her to come home.

I went around town and found that girl. I took her down to the Greyhound bus station, and bought her a one-way ticket to Winnipeg and some sandwiches and cold drinks for the trip. I sent her home to Manitoba.

“You’ll never see your bus ticket money again,” a staff member at the Canative Housing office told me. We laughed about it.

A few weeks later, I received a second telephone call from the girl’s mother. Her daughter had left home again for Edmonton.

“Would you go and find her one more time?” she asked.

I went out again, and I found her. I took her down to the Greyhound bus station again, bought a one-way ticket to Winnipeg again, and purchased more sandwiches and cold drinks for her trip to Manitoba. This time I spoke to her in a firm voice: “I don’t ever want to see you in this city again.” I meant every word of it, and she knew it.

A few months later, a middle-aged woman walked into my office. I remember that she was blind, and holding a white cane, and I had no idea who she might be. She walked up to my desk and handed me the cash to pay for two bus tickets from Edmonton to Winnipeg.

It was the girl’s mother. She and her husband, an electrician, were driving across the Prairies with their children for a holiday on the west coast. The girl was travelling with them, happily. They stopped to pay a debt to a stranger, because they knew it was the right thing to do. Deep down I felt good. I hope that girl is still on the right track.

This is a story about how we care about one another.

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