Travis had heard about getting your sea legs–when you could finally stand on the deck of a ship and roll with the waves instead of hanging weak-kneed and sick over the railing–but after the plane ride he had to wonder if Nish was having trouble getting back his land legs.
They had been on the ground for more than three hours, but Nish was still wobbly. That was fine when they had just been getting set up with their billets–Travis and Nish were placed with the Wolverines’ captain, Jimmy Whiskeyjack, and his family–but it was quite another matter now that they were all out on the ice, about to play their first game of the First Nations Pee Wee Hockey Tournament.
The Screech Owls had drawn the Moose Factory Mighty Geese as their first opponents. The Owls would have an easy time of it, Jimmy had predicted as he helped Travis carry his equipment over to the rink. The Mighty Geese didn’t have much of a team; they didn’t even have a proper rink to practice or play in. Instead they played outside, and the last time the Wolverines had gone to Moose Factory, they had been forced to cancel the third period on account of the wind. It was knocking players over.
None of the teams over on the Ontario side of James Bay were all that good, Jimmy continued. They were all Cree, but the Ontario Cree were very poor and didn’t have much to spend on hockey. The Quebec Cree were better off. It was on the Quebec side, through land owned by the Quebec Cree and Inuit, that the big rivers flowed into James Bay and where the huge hydro-electric dams had been built. They had opposed the projects, he explained, but when they realized they couldn’t stop them, they made a deal with the governments that had given them things like airstrips and new houses and a school and a brand-new hockey rink. They had two Zambonis, just like Maple Leaf Gardens!
“If one breaks down,” Jimmy had explained, “you can’t just drive a new one in through the bush.”
The ice was terrific. As usual, Travis let the Owls’ two goaltenders–Jenny Staples and Jeremy Weathers–lead the team out onto the ice, but he made sure he was next. And while Jenny and Jeremy both skated straight to the near net to place their water bottles, Travis burst for centre ice, his head down so he could see the marks his skates left as they dug in deep. Good old Mr. Dillinger: another perfect sharpening job, with the blades sharp enough that when he cornered on new ice they made a sound like bacon frying.
The other Screech Owls came out behind him. Dmitri Yakushev, the Owls’best skater, dug down deep and flew around the new ice. Derek, Gordie, Data, big Andy Higgins, Liz, who was fast becoming one of the team’s smoothest skaters, Lars–all leaned deep into their turns to produce that sweet clean cut and spray that is possible only on fresh-flooded ice.
After looking around at the others, Travis found Nish, flat on his back in the Owls’ far corner. He dug in and raced around, stopping in a one-skate spray.
Nish just lay there, staring straight up.
“What the heck are you doing?” Travis asked.
Nish blinked once. “Stretching,” he said.
Out by the red line at centre ice, Travis began his own stretches, alone and quiet, the way he liked it. While he stretched, he studied the Moose Factory team. Their sweaters were all right, with a laughing goose on the front that looked a bit like Daffy Duck. But no matching socks. And the equipment! Travis had never seen a team so poorly outfitted. The Mighty Geese were lined up at the blueline to take shots, and two of the players were sharing a stick, one of them waiting until the other had shot and then throwing the stick to him when he raced back.
The referee called for the two captains, and Travis skated over. When the captain of the Mighty Geese joined him, Travis saw he was one of the players who had been sharing the stick.
“Shake hands, boys,” the referee said. “Let’s have a good, clean game, okay?”
The Mighty Geese captain stared as Travis slapped his stick, not his hand, into his opponent’s outstretched palm.
Travis had done it without even thinking. He had brought three sticks with him, all brand new, but he didn’t need all three.
“You’re short a stick,” Travis said. “Take this. I brought extras.”
The other captain stared at it, tried it once (he shot left, the same as Travis), then nodded. He took Travis’s hand and shook hard.
“Thanks a lot.”
“Just don’t score too many goals,” Travis said, and grinned.
The captain smiled back. He had two broken front teeth. Travis wanted to ask what had happened. Was it a puck? A stick? Not likely–everyone here wore a full face-mask. It had to be from something other than hockey. A fall?…A fist?
Muck seemed concerned. Before the actual face-off, he called the Owls over for a quick huddle by the bench. He usually did this only when they had a big game, a championship, to decide, but this time he seemed every bit as serious.
“No fancy stuff, now,” he said. “I want to see a team out there, not fifteen individual superstars.”
By the end of his first shift, Travis knew exactly what Muck meant. The Screech Owls were badly outclassing the Mighty Geese. The Owls were better skaters, better positional players, better passers and shooters, and they had three good lines, whereas the Geese only had the one, centred by the captain with Travis’s stick.
Nish couldn’t resist. You put Nish on the ice against a weak lineup, and it was as if he’d had too much sugar on his cereal. Wobbly-legged or not, he couldn’t help himself. He picked up the puck at the blueline and skated, backwards, into his own end and around the net past Jennie, who’d been given the first start. He then slipped it through the other captain’s skates, and came hard down the ice, with Dmitri on one side charging fast.
Nish turned backwards as he reached the last Mighty Geese defenceman and attempted the “spinnerama,” a move Nish claimed had come to him in a daydream during music class but which Willie Granger said had been used in the NHL by everyone from Bobby Orr to Denis Savard before Nish was even born.
It didn’t matter to Nish. He believed he had invented it, and he had certainly invented this version of it. He spun directly in front of the defender, lost his footing, and crashed, butt first, into the backing-up defenceman. Both went down. Travis heard the scream of the poor defenceman as Nish’s full weight landed on his chest and they slid in a pile past the puck, left sitting there for Travis as if it were glued to the ice.
Dmitri gave one quick rap on the ice with the heel of his stick and Travis cuffed the puck quickly across. Dmitri one-timed his shot into the open side of the Mighty Geese’s net to the shriek of the referee’s whistle.
First shift, 1–0 Screech Owls!
Travis threw his arms around Dmitri as Dmitri spun around behind the net, his arms raised in triumph. They smashed into the boards together and felt the crush of their teammates hitting them. Travis could hear, and feel, Nish, and there was no mistaking the whine in his voice.
“They better give me an assist on that one–I set it up!”
Travis could see the referee out of the corner of his eye, and he didn’t like what he saw. The ref’s arms were crossing back and forth down low, the sign of a goal being waved off. And now he was raising one hand and pointing with the other at the crush of Owls in the corner. The whistle blew again.
“No goal?” Travis called out. The scrum of players broke, all turning to look at the referee.
“You’re outta here, Number 4!” the referee shouted as he closed in on the celebrating Screech Owls. “Two minutes for interference!”
“What the h–?”
The curse was barely out of Nish’s mouth when up went the arm again, and again the whistle blew.
“And two more for unsportsmanlike conduct!”
Travis looked at Nish. His face was scrunched up like a game’s worth of used shinpad tape, but at least his big mouth was shut.
Nish got into the penalty box, and the Mighty Geese went ahead when a shot from the point took a funny bounce off their captain’s stick–the stick Travis had given to him–the puck dribbling in behind a flopping, scrambling Jennie.
Nish got out on the goal. He skated over as if he were dragging the Zamboni behind him, and never even lifted his head to see what Muck was thinking. He knew. He was in the doghouse. Without being told he moved down the bench and took a place on the very end.
Travis got a tap on the back of his shoulder and leapt over the boards onto the ice with Dmitri and Derek. They knew what to do. Travis won the face-off back to Data, Data clipped it off the boards to a breaking Dmitri–and Dmitri swept around the Mighty Geese defenceman so fast the defenceman fell straight backwards as his feet tangled. Dmitri went in and deked twice, sending the goaltender down and entirely out of the net, and then he roofed the puck so high he broke the goalie’s water battle open. It was like a fountain bursting behind the empty net.
Wolverines 1, Screech Owls 1.
Next shift out for Travis, Dmitri’s speed caught the Mighty Geese on a bad line change, and the Screech Owls went ahead to stay. They went on to win 5–2, and when the two teams shook hands at the end, the captain slammed his stick into Travis’s shin pads, a salute of thanks for the stick. Travis couldn’t help but note again that several Mighty Geese had no gloves on. They had to be sharing gloves. No wonder the Owls had caught them short on line changes.
Travis could hear the crowd applauding them as they skated off. He looked up and saw the Wolverines’ assistant standing on a bench, clapping. Rachel. He yanked his helmet off, then began pushing his hair down. It was wet, and he worried that it was sticking up where it shouldn’t be.