WITH DAYLIGHT FALLING off by more than ten minutes a day and the cold attacking as we ran between classes, the dark subarctic winter was approaching, and the menace of it seemed to stretch endlessly ahead. It was early October, and homesickness was going around the boarding school like a bad virus. Though they were accustomed to the cold and the darkness, the native kids from all over Canada’s North seemed to have almost no immunity to homesickness. A half dozen had already dropped out and gone home. “Dropping like flies” is how some of the boom kids put it.
I was worried about Raymond. When he looked at things, including me, he didn’t really seem to be seeing them. The sadness in his eyes was unmistakable. This gray school and the gray skies were enough to dampen anyone’s spirits.
I took a walk after school one day and ended up wandering inside the public rink where the school hockey team was practicing. I spotted Raymond up in the stands watching, and I joined him. We didn’t say anything for quite a while, and then I asked him how it was going. He said, “Everything’s too hard here. Back home, I used to be good in math. But this algebra…I don’t get it. I don’t see why they have to put letters in with the numbers.”
“I know what you mean,” I told him. “I had algebra last year. I thought it was going to kill me, but finally I got the hang of it. I can show you if you want.”
“Could you?” he said, and I said, “Sure.” We went back to watching the hockey practice. “Are these guys any good?” I asked him.
“Some of ’em are real good.”
“How come you didn’t go out for the team?”
“I dunno. I just like to play. At Nahanni we always just get some guys together. People come and go from the game. It’s no big deal; everybody gets to play.”
“Can’t you just get a few guys together and come and play here on your own?”
“It’s reserved for clubs and schools and stuff.”
He looked awfully down to me. I said, “I still haven’t even been on skates. You think you could find me a pair of skates and a hockey stick?”
“Sure, I guess. Then what?”
“Tomorrow night, let’s see if we can sort of forget to leave when they close up. Maybe play some one-on-one?”
“You kidding?”
That’s just what we did. As it turned out, there was enough moonlight streaming through the windows that we didn’t even have to turn on the lights. Raymond was beautiful, dancing all around the ice with that puck while I was flapping around the rink like a wounded goose, laughing at myself and just trying to keep on my feet. Every time Raymond would slap the puck into the net, I’d yell, “Score!” That smile never left his face the whole time, no sadness in his eyes. It was perfect. We didn’t even get caught sneaking back into the dorm. “That was way cool,” he said.
“Where’d you learn to talk like that?”
“TV, I guess.”
I gave him a poke. “It’ll rot your mind, you know.”
“You read too much. Your head will get too big.”
“Then what?”
His eyebrows lifted way up and then dropped. “Explode, I guess.”
After that, Raymond and I started spending more time together. I helped him with his algebra, and he was picking up on it fast. We found out there was open hockey on Sunday afternoons. I’d sit in the stands and watch him skate circles around guys. People were telling him he should be on the school team. Back in our room, I called him the Great One. I told him he’d have no trouble making the team.
He thought that was pretty funny. “Sure, Gabe. I’m Wayne Gretzky like you’re a scout for the Edmonton Oilers.”
“Still, you should talk to the coach—maybe it’s not too late to sign up.”
“Maybe next year,” he said. “Tell you what—I’ll go out if you go out.”
“Sure, Raymond. But by the time I’m ready for the school team, you’d be ready to retire after your big career in the NHL.”
Everything seemed better. I thought he was over the hump.
Right before our three-day weekend at the end of October, I got a call from Clint. He said to meet him at the floatplane dock first thing in the morning if I wanted to do some sightseeing. I realized that my father had come through for me, and I was going to get to do some flying.
Clint was saying that he hadn’t heard where he was flying to yet, but he’d been hired by a Dene council to take a kid and a village elder back home. “Wear everything you have that’s warm and then some,” he was saying. “A polar bear would freeze to death inside that airplane!”
With the memory of my van ride with Clint not all that distant, I’d have liked it better if it had been some other pilot, but then, beggars can’t be choosers.
I never had a chance to talk my flying plan over with Raymond. When I drifted off to sleep it was past curfew, and he still hadn’t showed up.
In the morning I was raring to go. No guts, no glory, I told myself. Raymond had slept right through my alarm and was sleeping so soundly I didn’t want to wake him up. In a couple of days, I figured, I’d be back and could tell him about my big adventure. I remembered Clint’s warning and wore all my warm stuff, the thermal underwear and even the wool trousers instead of my jeans. I stuffed my daypack with a couple of changes of underwear, some spare socks, my huge mittens, and my toothbrush.
I left Raymond a note saying I was going flying, pulled on my ski gloves, and hurried through the empty streets making vapor clouds every time I exhaled. It was 7:00 A.M., an hour before first daylight. There was a good buildup of ice along the shores of Yellowknife Bay.
Clint was already there, fueling the floatplane. In a winter flying suit with a fur ruff around the hood, he looked the part of the dashing bush pilot. “Hey, Stump,” he called. “Good to see you dressed warm. Starting to cool off, eh?”
“Hammer’s coming down,” I agreed.
“Getting close—you’ll know it when you see it. Freeze-up on the lakes and rivers is coming any day. Then the hammer. After this trip, we’re switching all the planes from floats to skis.”
Clint’s passengers were supposed to have been ready to go at dawn. He told me about the bush plane as we waited for them. It was a red-and-white Cessna 185, single-prop, two seats in the front, two close behind, a very small cargo area behind that. Somehow I’d expected a bigger airplane. “Great old plane,” Clint said. “It’ll lift about anything you can stuff into it.”
Dawn came and went, other planes were taking off, and Clint was muttering, “We’re burning daylight.” We went back inside the office, where it was warm. Clint glanced at his watch and I looked at mine.
“Hey, that’s some watch you got there,” Clint said. “Looks pretty high-tech.”
“Bombproof, too,” I said proudly. “My dad just got it for me.” I fished my new pocketknife out and showed him that as well. Clint was impressed with the titanium handle. “Never seen one of these before. It’s really light—much lighter than a regular pocketknife.”
Ten o’clock rolled around, and still nobody had showed. Clint was muttering to himself now. We went back out to the airplane. “Too late to get there today,” he said. “Can’t fly in the dark—do they think this is a 747?”
“So where are we going?” I asked.
“Nahanni Butte.”
I had a sinking feeling. “You said you were taking a kid home?”
“And an old man who’s been in the hospital. The kid’s dropping out of school.”
“What school?”
“Yours. It happens all the time.”
Just then I looked up and saw a slender old man with a light duffel bag coming toward the ramp. He was squinting as he took a look at the floatplane. His hair was as white as a polar bear’s fur and just as thick, though not very long. His skin was a light brown. He was dressed in a cloth parka that looked homemade, and he was wearing tall moccasins that were tied with thongs at the ankle and calf.
“Here’s one,” Clint said. “And here comes the other.”
It was Raymond, toting that big duffel bag, his hockey stick, and that red electric guitar.