Indian Horse

‘A great change will come. It will come with the speed of lightning and it will scorch all our lives. This is what Horse said to me under the great bowl of sky. “The People will see many things they have never seen before, and I am but one of them.” 

This is the teaching that Saul’s great-grandfather, Shabogeesick, receives from the horse that he brings to their people. It foreshadows Saul and his entire generation’s separation from the old ways.

“She was lost to me then. I could see that. She was gaunt and drained from days of weeping, a tent of skin over her bones. When Benjamin disappeared he carried a part of her away with him, and there was nothing anyone could do to fill it.” 

Saul’s mother is unable to recover after Benjamin’s capture. After losing her second child, she succumbs to drink, foreshadowing Saul’s own descent into alcoholism.

“It was odd to see the expressions of a grown man on a boy’s face.” 

When Benjamin escapes the school and returns to the family, he is broken. He does not discuss what happened at the school, but he is thin and wary. This, too, presages Saul’s own experience at St. Jerome’s.