Bob Adams' father was a full-blooded Cree and his mother was a blonde-haired Nova Scotian named McNally. Some people said he wasn't a real Indian. Some said he wasn't even a Metis. There you had it. The only real Indian we knew lived in a high bottomed house out near the slough right in the middle of the land fill where they dumped concrete and asphalt. All we knew was their name was Shot-Both-Legs. We looked in their windows once, but you couldn't see anything because the windows had sheets over them.

Bob Adams wanted to be a white man. Even before the ceremony that day in the old car. Whiter even than the rest of us. Long before we stopped lugging our lunches, tools, six inch spikes and rope borrowed from the shack out behind the church to build our forts in the secret groves along the river.

We all wanted to be Indians. And for a while we thought we were all blood brothers, even Adrian's sister Suzy. Not the Lone Ranger and Tonto kind of stuff. That was dumb we all agreed. The Lone Ranger was candy-ass.

It was Kenny's idea actually, when we were all thirteen. Suzy was twelve but taller than any of us. We had this old Ford sedan, 1948 or '49, we found at the bottom of the cliff on the river road. Windowless, and doorless, bare as a skull, with its roof caved in, stripped of everything but its trunk lid. Once there was an Indian battle on the prairies above that same cliff and before that the Indians had driven buffalo over it.

And it was said that when the river was low, after the spring flood had shorn away the clay bank, you could find the grey teeth of buffalo in the water like pearls among the stones, and that once someone found the ribcage of a buffalo buried in wet spring clay. When he was our age, Al Connacher, the church janitor even found a lever action Winchester just like Chuck Conners used in The Rifleman. Its butt was studded with designs made of tacks. He said it was an Indian war rifle. Peter Olenyck's father found a human skull with a bullet hole in it. The man at the Glenbow Museum where they took it said it was from the battle. It was of an Indian boy only sixteen years old who died nearly a hundred years before. Now it sits in a display case in the junior high foyer.

We never found anything. Except survey stakes for the next lap of houses ringing west towards our precious cliff and the river below it. Even as we tore out the stakes with their coloured ribbons by night, we knew we were and always would be ten or twenty years too late. All of this was lost land. It had been Indian land and now like them, we were losing it too. How many rifles, we wondered, lay buried and then buckled by construction company bulldozers. We wanted a rifle or a skull of our own. It was that strong. We would have given anything to be someone or something else. Like an Indian.

©Bruce Hunter, 1996 unauthorized duplication prohibited