Bone Coulee by Larry Warwaruk Read Free Book Online Page B

Sask Party, and Abner could flap and hiss and spit, and you’d swear he was a goose. He sits up straighter yet when they come by his farm.
    “Look at that!” A cow moose and its calf nibble on the overgrown lilac bushes that line the driveway leading into the old Holt farmyard. Mac turns in and shuts off the motor. The cow moose glances their way, nips off another lilac branch, then ambles further up the lane with her calf.
    “I should have my twenty-two,” Mac says.
    “You wouldn’t shoot them, would you?”
    “Not with a twenty-two, and not without a licence. But there are gophers out at the old place. More than ever, now that you can’t use strychnine. Remember back in school when we used to get two cents a tail?”
    “Did you register the rifle?”
    “The twenty-two? Just one more money grab.”
    “Don’t know if anyone’s ever been charged anyway,” Abner says.
    Another mile and they are parked at the top of the buffalo jump. They can see across the coulee to the remains of the Chorniak homestead…poplar trees growing out of the cellar hole, pieces of the barn foundation, the chicken coop with its caved-in roof. They can see the outline of the trail leading from the floor of the coulee, up past the homestead and up the rest of the way out of the coulee.
    “The cairn should be over on that side,” Mac says. “Up from the old place.”
    “Trail goes south, too,” Abner says. “Down around by the stink lake.”
    “But I think my grandfather used the west trail to haul out the bones. Our way out of the coulee was to use the west trail. Isn’t this some view from up here? Just look, Abner!”
    From the top of the buffalo jump they can see to Duncan and beyond. The land slopes in a broad and gentle plain where thousands of buffalo would have grazed, before millions of bushels of wheat were grown, with many more millions yet to come. Duncan’s most lucrative business enterprise is a chemical and fertilizer depot designed for just that purpose. Only one grain elevator remains at the siding where once there were six. But more grain than ever is produced, and it’s hauled out by truck.
    Mac and Abner gaze back down into the coulee. Its soil is untouched. At Mohyla, where he stayed as a university student, Mac partook in Bible study on Wednesday nights. The one story he remembers most is that of Cain and Abel. It seemed to tie in so well to his studies in agriculture and the use of the land. Graze animals, or grow grain. Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
    “Look that way, Abner. To the south. Along the coulee hillsides. Look real hard, and you can make out a woman’s body. She’s reclining on her back.”
    “Getting to be a poet, are you, Mac?”
    “Had he seen this, Taras Shevchenko would have written a poem.”
    “Countryman of yours, this Taras?” Abner is the only male friend that Mac would ever engage in this type of conversation. They tolerate each other’s foolishness.
    “A great poet, and a son of the soil. See the salt lifting off the alkali ground? Where the coulee empties into the stink lake?”
    “It is a rugged beauty,” Abner says, stretching his neck out as if he’s trying to find that woman lying on her back. “Indian place.”
    “What did you say?”
    “What Tung Yee said this morning: Indian place. I used to hire the Indians to pick rocks.”
    “My father did too.”
    “You didn’t.”
    For a moment they look at each other and say nothing. Abner’s head twitches, and finally Mac turns away.
    “No,” he says. “They’d come work for Dad, but when he’d pay them, they wouldn’t show up the next day.”
    Abner shoots his goose look straight down the incline of the buffalo jump. Sunlight flashes on metal.
    “Something down there,” he says. “In the trees. I think there are some people down there, but I can’t make them out for the trees.”
    “I’ll get my binoculars from the truck,” Mac says.
    He adjusts the focus, then aims