It was a lazy afternoon at the end of August; the fields around my house were a rich gold and green from the corn which had begun to lose the grain-like tips to its stalks. The leaves were turning already and their colours reflected off the sky in kaleidoscopic splendour. I remember that day as clear as if it was yesterday, and the smells and colours are still fresh in my mind. It was Sunday; and my dad asked me if I wanted to go for a drive along the reservation line to look at the early autumn scenery. I was seven years old that year, and it was the first time I had ever seen a wild Squifalous.
The small town where I grew up lay on the edge of the Six Nations reserve which covered a great deal of the northwest portion of Norfolk county. We lived on the western edge of our little town, just inside the boundary of the reservation itself. Our geographical position gave rise to an interesting double perspective of our surroundings. We weren't inside the town line, so the Utilities Commission didn't give us water, and we weren't natives, so we couldn't really be helped by their people either. It wasn't much of a problem, and we managed just fine. The main effect of our location was that the kids I played with were natives. They were the children and grandchildren of the elders of the tribe; and their ancestors had been there before mine. I knew much about the ways our aboriginal peoples; most of it I have forgotten. But I have never forgotten the reverence the Indian holds for the Great Squifalous, nor will I ever forget.
On that Sunday I raced out to the car ahead of my dad, and jumped in the passenger side. sometimes he put me on his lap and let me steer; would he do that today? He came out and got in, starting the old Ford with some difficulty and pulling out of the driveway. We drove westward along the main highway for a couple of miles. The sun was now sinking over into a lower portion of the sky and beginning to fade into a warm orange colour, the kind where it doesn't hurt to look directly at it. It made everything around us seem to stand out more clearly. Soon, we pulled off the main highway onto an old gravel road that led north into the heart of the reservation. The place was familiar to me because I had often gone on afternoon bike rides to explore with my friends. We were traders sometimes, or detectives in search of escaped convicts, or cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians (I was always the Indian); but our favourite was storming the beaches in World War II, just like on "The War Years". Soon we came to the bridge that we had blown up so often, and my dad parked the car on the shoulder of the road. The bridge was old and weather-beaten, and Dad and I leaned against the railing looking over the pasture growing nothing but grass right up to the edge of the woods. Then Dad began to tell me about what we could see.
He was always telling stories and teaching me what he knew about the trees and the rocks and the birds. "The tree with the rounded leaves there, no not that one, that one over there; it's an Oak. That's where acorns come from. And the one with the silver bark is a Birch, the Indians made canoes out of them. In fact, I once helped . . .". And he would go on for hours if I let him; but he didn't today. Today he stopped short in midsentence, because he just noticed the squifalous.
The squifalous had stopped in the middle of chewing on a cowslip, and when I followed my dad's line of sight I reacted in much the same way as he did: my mouth fell open and my eyes bugged out like those fish you see in National Geographic. No-one had seen these things around these parts in years. It sniffed the air and, with almost a human-like shrug, scurried into a hole in a small hill and disappeared. We didn't speak on the ride home that day; and Dad didn't let me drive, but I didn't care. It wasn't something we talked about until many years later, seeing the squiffle in the wild. The chance of such a thing happening was so rare that it made it very special, creating a lasting impression in my mind. Sometimes I still go for a drive in late August, although I no longer live near the reservation; and my eyes are constantly scanning the sky for another glimpse of the rarity I had beheld.