The thermometer dips to minus thirty, and we decide to stay home. We’ve been invited to Rose’s for dinner, but I phone to cancel, and she understands. We promise to get together soon. Grandpère says his New Year’s resolution is to tell me more about his life so I can write it down for him, if I’m still willing. “I better get to it before I’m too old to remember it or too dead to tell it.” He grins to show me neither death nor age is weighing on him very heavily. “There was always work to do at the Fort. I worked most of the time in the bush, but many of the people moved in from the bush. Louisa’s sister, Francine, and her husband, my cousin Tsa’a’lax — that means Angry Eyes — moved in and built a place beside us. In town they called him Alex. Francine did not like to live in the bush, and Alex said it was getting harder and harder to find the animals that we always lived with in the woods. “Many trappers who were not our people were taking all of them, he said.
