And Millette? I tell myself that he’ll understand why I left without saying goodbye.

Sam is jammed into the corner of the driver’s seat to leave more room for the rest of us. His eyes are fixed on the horizon, and there’s a slight smile on his face. He’s somewhere far away, maybe paddling a canoe on a big lake or hiding in the tall grass, patiently waiting for an animal.

Suddenly his face darkens as we pass a huge truck rolling toward town, dangerously overloaded with long logs dripping with sap, skinned alive. Sam slows down, and we’re swallowed up by a thick cloud of dust. We drive on blindly and then emerge into blue sky. We pick up speed again.

I don’t like to see these big trucks full of wood. Each truck leaves us a little poorer, keeps us in misery. One day, if we aren’t careful, there will be no more forest and we Indians will disappear from the earth altogether. We will have no more reason to be here.

Manie is sitting beside Sam, watching the road. She is wrapped in a deep silence like a groundhog that sleeps with its eyes half closed.

It’s been almost a year since I last saw her. Her hair is silver at the temples, and her shoulders are rounded like a mountain that has been worn down by the wind and the rain. Her golden cheeks and the corners of her lips are lined with tiny wrinkles, like a pebble that bursts in the frost. I know that deep down she’s been hoping I would come back from the city one day. Maybe she even predicted I would return. She knows me better than anyone.

If she hadn’t come to find me, I would have thrown myself off that bridge. Now, just a few hours later, I have never been so happy to be alive.

Sometimes the line between life and death is so thin, like a sheet of ice in autumn. It seems solid, so you lightly take a step, then two, to check it out. Everything’s okay. Then you step more heavily and all of a sudden the ice gives way with no warning, and you disappear into the dark water.

I shudder just to think about it.

The forest is very green from the spring melt, and it unfolds on either side of us. I notice the damp, glistening undergrowth, the streams full to bursting running into lakes that are still crowned with ice. Here and there the new growth of the birches rises up from their slim white trunks.

It’s all so familiar, the land of my childhood. I, too, have long roots that run deep into the earth and mingle with those of my ancestors. We all drink from the same sap of the earth. We are all one. That’s what Kitchimanitou, the creator of all things, intended when he made the mother earth, animals and humans. We were made to live together in harmony.