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this time to the horizon, his eyes gazing to the far north where he had once roamed the forest, and had swum in the lakes. Something was calling to him.
    Once more he managed to achieve a standing position. Like a compass, his attention never wavered from the north. A dozen or more seconds passed as he debated his options. Glancing back over his shoulder he saw again his reflection in the mirror. This time he wasn’t surprised. This time he felt the beginnings of a new confidence. Having a purpose could do that to a man. Turning to face the mirror, looking deep into his bloodshot eyes, he shook his head.
    “That… will not do,” he said to the reflection, knowing he now had an appointment to keep.
    But first, he vomited.

THREE
    Virgil was concerned, but didn’t want to be. Everybody was rushing about, talking in hushed tones, looking downward in a respectful manner. It was true that his grandmother was dying, though nobody would admit it in exactly those words. His entire family had spent the past two weeks hovering about her house, bringing in food, taking out dishes of half-eaten casseroles, all frustrated by their inability to do anything to help Lillian Benojee.
    Virgil loved his grandmother. But he was one of eighteen grandchildren and never quite knew were he stood on the totem pole of her affection. One grandchild, about ten years older than him, was well on his way to becoming a successful lawyer. Two others had started up a popular restaurant in a nearby town, providing Nouveau Native cuisine to all the American tourists. Kelly, another cousin who was only five days younger than him, had won some speech contest or something, and had just gotten back from Ottawa where she’d met the prime minister. And then there was Virgil. And there was nothing particularly bad about the boy, but neither was there anything notable about him. He wasn’t as good as some, nor was he as bad as Chucky or Duanne, whose names were frequently found on the police flyer. Virgil was just a grade-seven student whoacknowledged that vanilla ice cream, ginger ale and bad sitcoms were the highlights of his existence. The bell curve was invented for boys like him.
    Oh yes, except that most bell-curve graphs don’t include a mother named Maggie Second who happened to be the chief of the First Nations community known as Otter Lake. Virgil’s father, dead from a boating accident three years ago, had been chief before her. Seeing how hard his mother worked, and how miserable the work made her, he was grateful that chiefdom, as applied under the Indian Act, was not dynasty-oriented.
    Sitting on his grandmother’s deck overlooking Otter Lake and oblivious to the warm spring air, he watched the comings and goings of his grandmother’s house through the big see-through sliding doors. Food being put out, people eating, occasionally somebody going into his grandmother’s bedroom. It had pretty well been the same since she collapsed. At the moment, there were about a dozen people in the living room, getting in one another’s way.
    Then he saw Dakota, yet another of Lillian’s descendants, who was exactly two months older than him. She opened the door and let herself out onto the deck, and she was carrying something. Dakota had two brothers and a sister, named Cheyenne, Sioux and Cree. Dakota always believed the naming of her and her siblings said more about her embarrassing parents than it did about any of them. Especially since
their
names were Fred and Betty.
    “Didn’t see you at school yesterday.”
    “Wasn’t there.”
    “I kind of put two and two together. Here—you don’t come inside any more,” she said, sitting in the chair beside Virgiland placing two bowls on the deck table between them. “So I thought you might be hungry.” She slid one bowl across the table toward Virgil.
    There was a reason she was his favourite cousin. Virgil sniffed the bowl. “More corn soup?”
    “My English teacher calls it ‘the Native chicken