Bone Coulee Read Online Free Page B

was Métis, and they lived in the winter at Round Prairie between here and Saskatoon…close by the reserve. He would have been fighting at Batoche with the rest of them, had he and Mother not been visiting relatives in Manitoba. But it didn’t matter if the Métis were at Batoche or not. The soldiers burned out the homes at Round Prairie anyway.”
    Every once in a while Roseanna hears someone shouting and laughing from somewhere among the parked cars around the dance hall. Car horns toot, and she can hear the dance music. She wonders how much fun it must be to dance there. She goes to the tent to get her kewpie doll and quickly returns to the fire and the soft drone of Kokum’s voice.
    Father and Mother came back eighteen years later, and there were three of us children by then. This white man’s village was not here yet. No railroad yet, and no grain elevators. Father wanted to go all the way to what might be left of Round Prairie, but Mother had another plan. She said to turn our cart west. We had to make our cart into a raft to float across a river, and once we managed that we soon arrived to look down into a deep coulee. There were many buffalo bones in this coulee, and Father could sell them in Moose Jaw. There were so many bones in the coulee Father thought we could stay there to live, and he and my brothers could make many trips hauling bones.
    “Who would want bones?” Roseanna asks.
    “Americans,” Kokum says.
    “Whatever for?” Stella asks.
    “For gunpowder. And Father said that Americans ground up bones to make fertilizer, and even used the bone meal to add to sugar. He said that when he was a boy he saw the prairie covered with bones. American hunters took only the hides. They shot the buffalo, slit the hide down the belly and around the neck. They spiked the buffalo’s nose to the ground, hitched up a horse and pulled the hide off like you’d skin a muskrat.”
    “Yuk!” Roseanna says.
    “Where are the men?” Stella says. “They should be back by now.”
    “They come when they come,” Kokum says.
    Roseanna hopes that Thomas brings beer. She has drunk beer twice before in her life, and both times it made her dizzy, so dizzy that she could not stop laughing, and Stella wouldn’t let her have any more.
    “We built a cabin in the coulee,” Kokum says. “I helped. I was only eight, but I tramped with my bare feet to make plaster.”
    “The ladle story,” Roseanna says. “What about your soup ladle?”
    “Yes,” Kokum says. “That summer in the coulee, Father took me for a walk along the creek bed. Many willows grew along this stream. He showed me a willow sapling no thicker than my little finger, and he tied it in a knot. He said that the willow would grow, and it would have a big lump on it. He said that if I grew up to be a big girl, and if I was then to be married and I would have to boil soup for my husband, he would make a ladle from the tied-up willow, and that is what he did.”
    “The men should be back by now,” Stella says for the second time.
    Stella’s husband, Harry, and his brother, Charlie Daniels, along with Ben Star and Thomas, each have a twelve-pack of Pilsner. They are standing under the hotel’s fire-escape staircase. Charlie’s beer box is open and two-thirds empty.
    “We should buy a treat for Kokum,” Thomas says. “Who wants to go to the store?”
    “You go,” Charlie says. ”She’s your mother.”
    “Wait for me here, then.” Thomas leaves them at the back of the hotel and walks around to the sidewalk under the street lights. He doesn’t have to hide from anybody. Thomas is proud of himself. He hit the home run, and not just any home run, but the game winner. And now he can treat his friends. He’ll buy Oh Henry! chocolate bars for the girls and Kokum, and a Coca-Cola for himself.
    John Minski stands behind his counter. “All out of vanilla extract,” he says.
    “Not looking for vanilla extract.” Thomas points to the chocolate bars. “I want