Chapter 40
I decided I’d been given a couple of hopeful signs that night.
After Stan crawled into his tent—because of the gray wolf, he opted to pass up my offer of the hammock—I sat against the tree, contemplating the plan of Kitchimanidoo, the Great Mystery.
At birth, I was set on two different spiritual paths.
Largely because of my Irish heritage, I was baptized and raised Catholic.
Because of the Ojibwe blood that also flows through my veins, I was schooled from an early age in the spirituality handed down from my Native ancestors.
Sometimes the two paths converged, but more often they pulled me in different directions.
I have always felt like a man trying to find the way that’s true for me.
I’ve worked to give my grandson, Waaboo, a firm understanding of the spiritual beliefs that are a part of his Ojibwe heritage.
Rainy, who is full-blood Anishinaabe, helps make certain of that.
But I’m comfortable when he accompanies us to church, sees us taking the Eucharist. It’s been important to me that I give my children, and now my grandchild, a firm grounding in Christianity as well.
That said, I admit that I have a lot of problems with the dogma of the Church.
For example, I think all of Catholicism would have been better off if priests and nuns had been allowed to marry.
It seems to me that so many of the issues plaguing the Church today could have been avoided by simply acknowledging the natural urges of men and women.
I grew up in a small, close-knit congregation and have no horror stories to tell.
But many of my friends and acquaintances who went to Catholic schools and have since abandoned the Church have offered plenty of firsthand accounts of immeasurable cruelty.
Then there are the stories so many of our elders on the rez share of their torment in the boarding schools run by Catholic clergy.
And because I had a daughter who was gay, don’t get me started on the official Catholic view of homosexuality.
The way in which the Anishinaabeg and so many First Nations people view our spiritual relationship to the world and to one another feels so much more instinctual to me.
All things on this earth and all things in the heavens have come out of the heart of the Creator.
Everything in the natural world is connected in body and in spirit and all of it is blessed.
We are kin to animals and to plants, to the spirits of water and air and fire.
To the bears that ravage our food supplies and the wolves that honor us with their presence.
And yes, even to the mosquitoes and blackflies that harass us.
Everything is linked to everything else.
Nothing exists in solitude or isolation.
So how to explain evil, whatever disrupts or breaks that divine connection?
Wiser humans than me have been pondering that question forever.
Not even Henry Meloux has been able to give me an adequate explanation.
Maybe there’s a darkness inside us all, a wolf of hate, that most of us do our best to fight against and many are even afraid to acknowledge.
Unfortunately, there will always be those who, for whatever reason, give themselves over to that dark wolf, and the carnage they become capable of wreaking is truly monstrous.
But most of us hold to a moral compass and every day do our best to follow it.
That doesn’t mean we shoot for sainthood.
We’re simply trying to be the best people we’re capable of being.
Still, even for us, true north on that moral compass is sometimes hard to find.
And that’s when the dark wolf inside prepares to feed.
So, as I sat tied to that tree, thinking about all these things, I finally heard Stan snoring along with his brother, though much more softly, and I decided it was time to do what I’d been planning for quite a while.
When I was a kid, Houdini fascinated me.
I’d read about a couple of his secrets of escaping when he was tied with rope.
First, he used braided nylon rope, which is easier to untie.
Second, he would inhale deeply as he was being bound and extend his chest so that when he relaxed, the rope was not as tight, giving him a small measure of freedom of movement.
The rope that bound my hands and bound me to the tree was the same rope I’d used to lower Leticia, braided nylon.
When Stan tied me to that tree trunk, I’d breathed in as deeply as I could and held it until he’d finished.
This gave me a tiny bit of wiggle room, enough that my hands, which he’d allowed me to keep in front, could, with a good deal of effort, reach my front pants pocket and the multitool that I’d slipped in there earlier that day.
It took some work to get the tool out and open the blade.
Then it took quite a while and a good deal of sweat to cut my way through a strand of the rope across my stomach and free myself from the tree.
Stan hadn’t killed the fire and a few flames still quivered inside the fire pit.
I crept to where he’d left the hatchet he’d used to break up the wood I had gathered.
I picked it up with my bound hands, wedged it between my boots, bent low, and used the blade to cut through the rope around my wrists.
Standing tall at last, breathing deeply, with that sharp-bladed hatchet in my hand, I felt the howl of a wolf rising inside me.
I looked long at the tent where the two brothers lay ignorant of my freedom.
They were sleeping soundly. I could easily slip into their tent and kill them now.
First, Ollie, the hatchet slicing through his skull into his brain.
It wouldn’t make much noise at all. And even if Stan woke, he was no match for an angry, determined man with a hatchet.
The thought appealed to me, the dark wolf almost overtaking my heart.
But I wasn’t ready to yield to that impulse.
I couldn’t bring myself to commit an act of such brutality. Not yet anyway.
I took the hatchet, the food canister, the water bag, put them in the canoe, and as quietly as I could, slid onto the lake and paddled away.