Read Online Big Bear by Rudy Wiebe - Free Book Online

Big Bear and a few of his band were at Pitt trading for winter ammunition when they met their first Queen’s police. Inspector Paddy Crozier had bristles sticking out wide under his beaked nose. He explained he had been sent to give presents to the Plains Cree and to tell them not to interfere with workers surveying for telegraph and railroad lines, that commissioners were coming this summer (1876) to talk treaty. Big Bear answered, as Crozier reported to Ottawa, that all the Plains People had already heard this, several times, and that “they wished to take nothing from government until the treaty was made.”
    Crozier peered at him sharply, his whiskers lifting as though he could not quite understand what James Simpson translated. Then he said, The Blackfoot complain to us you Cree are squeezing them off their buffalo lands, back against the mountains and Montana.
    Big Bear laughed. We have made peace with the Blackfoot, everyone just wants to live. The Blackfoot should thank you for making their rivers flow faster, dumping all that whisky into the water.
    Crozier laughed too. They do thank us, and they’re getting fat, eating better.
    Big Bear said, But there are still Americans with long Sharps rifles coming north. When they find buffalo, they sit all day on a hill shooting, then they rip off the hides and leave good meat to rot. Why don’t police stop them?
    There’s no law against shooting buffalo and taking hides.
    What is “law” for?
    To protect everyone.
    Then there should be a law stopping sharp-shooters. How many hides went to Montana last season?
    Crozier pondered. Maybe two hundred thousand. You Cree sent plenty of them.
    Every hide we trade, we eat all the meat.
    But soon, Crozier said carefully, there will never be enough buffalo again. Some chiefs are growing food, out of the ground, and maybe more Cree should do that. There is very good food in the ground.
    Yes, grass for animals to grow and give their meat to People. If Pakan and Mista-wasis want missionary potatoes and wheat, good, but my People, Little Pine’s People, are hunters. We don’t sit in one place waiting for food to poke out of the ground.
    Crozier nodded as Simpson finished, looking over the log walls of Fort Pitt at the high banks across the North Saskatchewan folded into snow. He said, Sweetgrass, this winter, he’s thinking about potatoes too.
    When Big Bear did not respond, Crozier continued, My assignment is to tell all Plains People about treaty.
    I know … but
we
need to talk with commissioners.
    Crozier remained stubborn; he would travel everywhere in such a hard winter. There was in him something beyond McDougall, a rigidity of orders, eyes fixed as if seeing only one spot at a great distance—where he would go.
    Crozier is bull-headed Irish, Simpson told Big Bear over a last cup of tea. A trained soldier, he obeys orders even if they are stupid.
    They say these are police, not soldiers.
    Yes, but about orders they’re the same. They do what they’re told.
    If all police are like Crozier, Big Bear thought, what will happen to them on the blazing winter prairie?
    At sunrise the Cree left Pitt for The Forks. The sun burned blue in the sky, light falling like ice in the fierce cold, and they were forced to shield themselves from blindness by cutting slits in buffalo hide for eye patches. Next day the Neutral Hills emerged in the west, with The Nose a hump on the horizon beyond them, sacred places, Ribstone Creek and Battle River and Iron Creek and the high hill where once the Iron Stone had rested—land everywhere as familiar to Big Bear as the palm of the hand nearest his heart. He rode, continuing his prayer for guidance.
    They crossed Eye Hill Creek and set their night camp beside the ice of Sounding Lake. When the fire burned in their travelling lodge, Horsechild crawled into his father’s lap. The chief folded him in his arms and told him the story of that place, so the little boy would remember it from before he