Read Online Grandpère by Janet Romain - Free Book Online Page A

even leave any to make new animals for the next season. They would even steal from our traps, and did not respect our territories. We didn’t feel safe in our lands. Alex and Francine had been hungry in the winter before they came in to town, and they didn’t have many furs to trade.
    “We made them welcome, and we all helped them build a home. Louisa and Francine’s father was happy. We were all working. Sometimes we traded for goods in the store, and sometimes we were paid in coin. Always the store tried to trade rum or brandy to us, but we knew better. Some of our people traded everything for booze and did not have anything left for food when they sobered up. It was very bad. When the people drink rum, they lose all their sense. They work all the time to get furs to trade and then have nothing to show for it but a two-week drunk, and then they go hungry. Gradually our people moved in, family by family. Pretty soon no one traded.
    “Some moved into town so their children could go to the school. If you didn’t put the children in school, government men came and took them away, and you only got to see them in summer. My Uncle Tree had eleven children, all younger than me. He said the government was not going to get his children and moved far into the bush. But they found him anyway and took his children far away where he could not even find them. The four oldest died in the schools. They only left the babies, and when they got older, they took them too. It was very hard on Uncle Tree’s woman, and when the last child was taken, she went out in the bush and hanged herself from a tree. She died, I think, of a broken heart.
    “The children, who were very happy in the bush, did not do very well in school except for my one cousin who they called Joan. I don’t remember what her real name was. She forgot our language and did not want to go to the bush even in the summer. She stayed with our family the first few years when the rest went home. When she was grown, she helped at the Catholic school. She married a white man who was very mean, then she caught TB and died before she had any children. TB was a bad disease in those days — we called it consumption — and people would get thin and weak and cough up blood till they died.
    “Uncle Tree moved in to the town and took up with a woman who drank all the time, and so did Uncle Tree. When the children came home there was not enough food or space. They would not build a house, because every year when he got the children back, he said they were going back to the bush. We did what we could to make it better for them. Louisa, Francine and Clementine had made the garden very big, and we always had more than we could eat. Many a time our little house had so many children in it that we were glad when the school started again. Our own children went to the tiny school in town, and they all went up to grade eight. They grew up in town, but the boys wanted to hunt and trap, and we always spent the early winters on the traplines. It was true that there were not very many animals left in the woods, and I would not have liked to try to live the way we always had, because we would have starved.
    “The white people called us all Indians and half-breeds and did not pay us as much as they paid white men, but we always had enough. The English people called us savages, but the English were far more savage than any of our people, especially when they were drinking.
    “I spent a lot of time logging with my horses in the winter. I had traded for two big mares that were quiet and gentle. I worked with a white man named George who had a wild team. We had a contract to bring in firewood for the winter, and we always had orders for square timbers for building. It was easy to do the firewood, which other men sawed to length in the town, but it was a lot of work to square off the building trees. We did it all with axes, and we could sometimes do four in one day. The boys could help us when they were