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didn’t enter the dream world for many more months. After the beating, I remember emerging from my hibernation slow, blinking my eyes to the light of bright sun through a window beside me, the whoosh and hiss of some machine standing guard by my bed. I remember not smelling so good, me. Something like rot. The beep of another machine when I closed my eyes to the light. My head thumped. I dreamed I was a sturgeon on river’s bottom pushing up stones with my nose for crayfish. I remember being prodded by doctors, and I remember slipping back down to the bottom of that warm river.
    When I was a boy, I used to sleep in a long, white room in Moose Factory, the same island that holds the hospital. My school used to be the biggest building on the island before they built the hospital. It was whitewashed and scrubbed clean with wood soap and the greasy sweat of Indian kids. The boys, we slept in one long room upstairs above the dining hall. The girls, they slept in a room beside us above the laundry room and kitchen. Me, I dreamed of slipping into the girls’ dormitory in the middle of the night and learning how to make babies. All the boys did. Some of my friends claimed they managed to learn this way, but me, I don’t buy it. I did learn how to French kiss during recess once, though, with a skinny girl named Dorothy.
    I healed over time. We all do. Your mother, she came to visit me in the hospital after the beating. She would bring a book with her and try to read it to me so that I was forced to pretend sleep. She’s a good woman, your mother, but she’s been weakened by Oprah.
    When I went home, my two remaining friends in the waking world, Chief Joe and Gregor, they came to visit more regular than usual. As spring progressed, we got into some drinking on my porch while looking out over the river for beluga whales. Gregor, he came to Moosonee twenty years ago to teach at the high school for a year and never left. Gregor, he’s not exactly white. He’s as dark as me and came from a country in eastern Europe or something. Eastern something, I can’t remember. All I know is the place has changed its name so often I don’t know it. But he keeps his accent, especially when he’s drunk. He sounds kind of like Dracula, which can be funny. Funny and creepy sometimes. You get used to anything, though, after a few years.
    I remember how Gregor and Joe sat with me on my porch like I was some new celebrity. Spring is the time when the belugas come this far up, the dozen miles or so from the bay, to make babies and gorge on whitefish. Gregor spotted a beluga, ghost white in the dark river about a hundred yards out. I’d been watching it swim, back and forth, for a while. If I was an Inuit, I’d be getting in my boat and going to get dinner. But I’ve tried beluga. Too fatty. Not a good taste at all. Like lantern oil. Give me KFC any day.
    “Look now, boys. Vales!” Gregor said, standing and pointing out, rubbing his thighs. On numerous occasions, Gregor had almost lost his teaching job due to inappropriate behaviour, especially with his female students, like asking to hold their hands so he could check the fingernails for dirt or touching their hair when they answered a question right. He says these are European behaviours. He’s what Lisette calls lecherous. But he’s a funny one, him. “My god,” he said. “Beautiful vales.” He stared sad at the beluga as another spouted and appeared close to it. Joe took another beer from the case by his foot.
    “Look at us,” I said. “Three fat guys on a porch. Does our life need to be this way?” And that’s when I made the mistake of sharing with them that my beating made me realize I needed a big change in my life. I needed to get in shape. I was going to start jogging.
    “You’re reacting to the violence perpetrated against you,” Chief Joe said, just like a real chief, using words he wasn’t too sure of. “You try running, your heart will explode and you will die. I