Raising Grandkids by Gary Garrison

Author:Gary Garrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2018-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

eight

On the Reserve

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

—Robert Frost

The trembling aspen forest both sides of Highway 44 north of Westlock, Alberta, glows yellow green on this May morning, more like the colour of golden sunshine than the dark green they’ll be in a week or two. The air is clear and fresh with the exhalation of newborn leaves. The fire season will start before the month is over, but today the cloudless sky is as blue as the Pacific Ocean. It’s the Victoria Day weekend, and I’m driving to visit an Indigenous friend. I’ve lived in Alberta over forty years, but this is only the second time I’ve driven this far north, into what most non-Indigenous people would call the middle of nowhere. I’ve had no reason to go this way before. After all, I’m a city guy, except for when I take a vacation trip to the Rockies or to a friend’s farm in central Alberta.

It’s a three-hour drive from where I live in Edmonton. After the first hour, there’s not much to see except trees, the occasional gravel road, and one truck stop. But for the car I’m in and the newly paved highway, this looks, feels, and smells like wilderness.

When I step inside, my friend’s house looks like the type of suburban home you’d find in any Canadian city. Then I see a frozen fish on the kitchen counter. I look closer. The frosty, dark grey surface isn’t made up of fish scales. And the thing has no fins, nor any knife marks where fins used to be. It’s an oval shape with a flat spot on one edge. That flat spot on the narrow part of the oval is pink, like a steak. “Oh, that’s a beaver tail,” my friend says. “We got that out maybe for supper.”

I’m afraid my American-ness is showing. I was born and raised south of the forty-ninth parallel. Down there, the national animal—the bald eagle—is a protected species. Subconsciously, I assumed Canada’s national animal must be protected too, not because they’re rare but because they symbolize Canada itself. My friend tells me that if people didn’t hunt and trap them, beavers would overrun the place. For Indigenous people, he says, the beaver tail is a good source of meat, and, two hundred and fifty years after the peak of the fur trade, beaver fur is still great for making coats, hats, and mitts. I notice some small pieces of black fur on the living room table; he says that’s bearskin.

In his backyard, he shows me a 12-foot diameter teepee he uses to dry skins and an oil-drum-sized plastic barrel for softening skins. In his garage he shows me muskrat, beaver, skunk, and moose hides in various stages of stretching. The moose hide, he said, when finished, could sell for up to $1,500. In the west-facing window I see several pairs of small testicles hanging from nails. He says those are really scent glands, and they’re great to attract game on hunting trips.

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