Indian Horse

The team arrives at the arena, which is brand new and full of trophies and photographs. Unlike the sheds in their normal tournaments, the team has a large dressing room with cubicles for each player. As usual, the crowd laughs upon seeing Saul, though not for long. The Chiefs score five goals rapidly before Saul has watched enough to be able to see the rival team’s patterns and join the game. Saul’s speed and foresight allow him to score the Moose’s first goal. By the final frame, the game is tied 5-5. As the game winds down, Saul skates like he’s never skated before and, as time slows, takes possession of the puck and, seeing Stu Little Chief alone off to the side of the net, makes a hard pass, sealing the victory. As he is headed to the dressing room post-game, he is stopped and notified that he is “first star” of the game, like in Hockey Night in Canada. He is announced and walks onto the ice to cheers from all sides. “‘Better’n a fricking trophy any time, eh,’” says Virgil (128).

After the victory against the Chiefs, word gets out about the Moose and “everyone wanted to play us” (129). They begin to travel to towns almost every week for games. “The games were always events, mostly because people were curious to see if Indians could really skate, if we could play the game right” (130). Previously a clean game for them, there are now “out-and-out brawls” (131). After a particularly dirty match, “garbage rained down on us. A group of them pissed and shat in our dressing room. The tires were slashed on the vans” (131). One night, after winning a tournament, they stop at a café. A group of men surround their tables and accuse them of being uppity. One man says: “‘You wanna eat here you gotta fight for it’” (134) and says that they will take them outside one by one and brawl. The men take them out one at a time, sparing Saul due to his size and age. They come back bloodied and rank. Hours into their drive back, Virgil admits that the men pissed on them. They vow not to tell, “But there were moments when you’d catch another boy’s eye and know that you were both thinking about it. Everything was contained in that glance. All the hurt. All the shame. All the rage” (136).

After this incident, Saul notices the small marks of racism: how there are empty rows between Indigenous and white spectators, how white players don’t remove their gloves to shake hands, and the separate entrance the Indigenous people must use. The Moose are invited to play against repeat champions the Lumber Kings in Espanola, where only the best teams were invited to play. While the tournament begins with an easy win, the Owen Sound Clippers play rough and continually hit Saul so that he can barely skate. Though he is encouraged to hit back, he refuses. But the efficacy of this rough strategy spreads to other teams, and Saul spends the rest of the tournament getting checked and hit. The crowd’s animosity is so high that they rain spittle on the Moose. Though the pressure is higher than ever, Saul “would not surrender [his] vision of the game. [He] would not let go of [his] dream of it, the freedom, the release it gave [him], the joy the game gave” (143). He refuses to fight, but is driven to reclaim the game.

They end up winning the tournament, training Saul how to handle violent matches and receiving a mound of press. “There was something in the negativity from the crowds and the other teams that drove us,” (145) he states. Soon after the flood of press, a strange white man begins appearing in the stands. People gossip about him being a scout. After a game, he enters the dressing room and speaks to Virgil, who tells Saul that his name is Jack Lanahan and that he is a scout for the Leafs and would like to talk to Saul about playing in the NHL.

Saul meets Lanahan in the stands. He says he can get Saul a try-out with the Toronto Marlboros, a Major Junior A and feeder club for the Maple Leafs. Saul is resistant. ‘White ice, white players’ (149) he says. Lanahan says that great players ‘become one with the game and it lifts them up and out of their lives too’ (150) and that Saul sees the game ‘from a different kind of plane’ (150).

It takes three weeks before Saul is cornered by four of his teammates. They tell him he has to go. As Ernie Jack says, ‘I’m working graveyard in the fucking mine and I been there since I was sixteen. I’ll be there until it kills me or I’m too fucking old. I ain’t got no out…But someone reached down and put lightning bolts in your legs, Saul. Someone put thunder in your wrist shot and eyes in the back of your fucking head. You were made for this game. So you gotta give this a shot for all of us who’re never gonna get out of Manitouwadge’ (153). Virgil says he owes him because he’s the one who let him into the Moose in the first place. 

Saul plays out the season and agrees to go to the Marlboro training camp the next fall. In the meantime, he continues to train with Virgil, adding more muscle to his frame. Virgil says that Saul’s like a brother to him and that ‘hockey is what [Saul was] sent here to do’ (157). Virgil says he can come back any time and Saul leaves on a Greyhound bus to Toronto.