Two Smoked Fish
A Reminiscence by Abraham Masakeyash

Dad passed away when I was eight years old, so I don’t really remember about him and his life before that. My mother and my uncle took care of us as we were growing up. My uncle was older than my dad so he looked after us. We almost starved when my dad passed away. Sometimes we would only kill one rabbit in a day. Sometimes my mom would catch one little jackfish. The next day she would feed us fish again. We never had flour or anything like that. We had a pretty hard time. If mother didn’t catch anything, we would starve. I would make myself a fishing rod so I could fish down the lake. Sometimes I would bring back four pickerel or jackfish after a whole day. We lived alone.

Sometimes she would be gone all day trying to get food for us. Sometimes somebody would show up with a pack of moose meat or whatever they had, so we wouldn’t starve. Not until I was 16 did I go trapping on my own to help out mom. We only had traps to use – nothing else to hunt with. I was only bothered by Mensokaneck once, but they didn’t really bother us – just yelled at us from across the lake. We would see tracks but they didn’t really bother us. So we left the old settlement, went downriver to get away from Mensokaneck who were yelling at us from across the River. So we went up river by the power lines up there. Me and my mom. Somebody was taking our muskrats off our traps or turning our traps upside down so we couldn’t catch anything. We almost stayed up there because we couldn’t catch anything.

We had only two smoked fish when we decided to come back to the settlement. We finally decided to set the net for the night. I was small at the time. I saw two figures – I was looking around like a normal kid – and asked my mom, “What are those?” I thought they were human. She said they were two moose far from us. We only had a 22. She was paddling. We only had two long range bullets. We didn’t even go half ways when they noticed us. Mom took a shot at one. The moose turned around and ran away in the bush. My mom said she thought she hit it. When we got to shore we saw the bush moving close to shore. She had hit the moose right in the throat area, where the V is. We killed a really big one. We were so happy we killed it. We went to cut up the moose. We stayed up there about four days while we were smoking it. We took off towards Lake St. Joe. We met up with a family. That is the first time I ever ate bannock. They fed us when we got there. We gave them some of our meat. I remember going towards where they had supplies Mom had a few muskrat pelts to sell.