Indian Horse

Fred gets Saul a job on a forestry crew. He works hard and is shipped to a logging camp on Nagagami Lake. He feels at home among the bush, but not among the white crew. They call him names but he stays separate, reading and working, which they take for high-mindedness. He is then subjected to the least desirable jobs, like cleaning outhouses but “the more they tried to exhaust [him], the harder [he] worked…all without saying a word” (174). One night, a man named Jorgenson levels a cruel gesture at him and swings a fist at his face. Saul snaps, grabbing him by the throat and choking him until his eyes bug out and he drops to the floor. He finishes by punching him. No one bothers him again.

Saul brings this same violent intensity back to the Moose. “There was no lively banter on the bench…no joy in the game now, no vision…I poured out a blackness that constantly refueled itself” (176). His teammates stop talking to him, and he knows that he is beyond them, the teams, and the game.

The year he turns eighteen, he leaves Manitouwadge. He has no plan, but knows he needs to leave. As he says, “the bush had ceased to be a haven. A vacant feeling sat where the beginnings of my history had once been. That part of myself was a tale long dead, one that held nothing for me.” Virgil says he’s running away. “‘I’m not disappearing,’” says Saul. Virgil retorts, “‘Seems to me you already did’” (178).

Saul drives from town to town, finding short-term manual labor jobs. He’s still consumed by rage, but now refuses to react, instead losing himself to the grunt work. He doesn’t make friends with the fellow workers, but comes to miss the banter, and starts eating meals in taverns. At first, he just listens, but eventually starts drinking, saying “when I did the roaring in my belly calmed. In alcohol I found an antidote to exile. I moved out of the background to become a joker, a raconteur” (181). He tells made-up stories adapted from all the books he was lost in as a kid. In playing these characters, he loses himself. Soon enough, however, he gets lost to the drink and becomes sullen again, and truly in the grip of alcohol. He turns to drinking all the time, measuring out booze to make it through his days. “It was a dim world. Things glimmered, never shone” (181).

Saul ends up back in northern Ontario, near Redditt, the place where his brother had found his family so long ago. At first he breaks rocks at a quarry, but work runs out. He runs out of money and gets deep into drink. One day at a bar, a man comes up to him and asks to drink with him. His name is Ervin Sift, and he takes Saul in, immediately nursing him through a three-day hangover. He doesn’t ask any questions, but simply takes Saul in as a worker. Saul cuts and delivers firewood and stays in a spare room. Ervin, a widower without children, is good to Saul.

Saul and Ervin become friends, though “there were more silence between [them] than words” (185). Saul refers to him as an “angel,” but this simple life is not enough to get rid of the “bleakness” (186) inside. He begins drinking again, and though part of him wants to open up to Erv, a bigger part “simmered with a rage [he’d] never lost” (187). He “couldn’t run the risk of someone knowing [him], because [he] couldn’t take the risk of knowing [himself]” (187). So he packs up and leaves again.

Saul ends up in the hospital due to his drinking. He suffers seizures and collapses. They have to strap him down due to the withdrawal terrors. It takes him days to recover. A social worker tells him about the New Dawn Centre and he uncharacteristically listens. He’s told another bout of drinking like that would kill him so he goes to the rehab facility. 

Though he stops drinking, he doesn’t feel any great healing power. He takes to walking in the bush again to try and find solace. One night, he wanders off and watches a family of beavers and falls asleep in the woods. He is awoken by a moaning sound, which turns into an Ojibway song. He sees a human figure floating toward him, followed by a horse. When it comes into focus he sees that it is his great-grandfather, the original Indian Horse. He then sees the rest of his family: his father, mother, brother, aunt, uncle, and grandmother. They retreat, singing an Ojibway song. He knows that he needs to leave again, but this time knows where he needs to go.