The Night Wanderer

Tiffany meets her friends Darla and Kim, who are eating fries at a picnic table and discussing their futures. Darla wants to hitchhike to Vancouver and find a “life,” while Kim wants to become a lawyer, which most people view as ambitious. Each girl thinks the other’s plans are ridiculous. Tiffany, meanwhile, has no concrete ideas for her future. When she arrives, both girls confront her about missing their get-together on the previous night, and although she tries to brush it off; the girls express their anger and observe how absent she has been lately. Eventually, they come to a restless truce.

Darla mentions the commonly held opinion that Tony and Tiffany are an odd couple; this makes Tiffany insecure. Darla then tells Tiffany that Julie Banes, the girl Tony hugged, has a gold bracelet that matches Tiffany’s. Darla also shares that Julie and Tony used to date but broke up because their parents forced them to do so. Suspicious and irritated, Tiffany calls Tony, but he brushes her off and says he is at work. Darla and Kim are gleeful about his behavior, insisting that it is a just reward for Tiffany’s recent behavior toward them. Tiffany leaves, distraught. Kim wonders if they were too mean to her, but Darla just shrugs.

Tiffany takes a long walk back home but takes a shortcut through the backwoods that she will not be late for dinner. She contemplates a conversation from her childhood about God, in which Granny Ruth told her to listen to the world and observe. In the memory, the young Tiffany noticed the sounds, smells, and sensations of the natural world around her, and Granny Ruth told her that God is about those things, saying, “Don’t let anybody tell you God is a man, or a person, or lives somewhere high above. God is a feeling” (110). Tiffany comes back to reality in the dark forest and wonders if Granny Ruth is right. She nears the lake and sees the lights of the off-reserve people across the water. She thinks about Tony and contemplates the rising tensions between the reserve and the people who live around it. Tiffany’s generation is inheriting those tensions, and she fears the prospect of never leaving the reserve.

Suddenly, a voice speaks behind her, and Tiffany jumps; Pierre scares her so badly that she ends up standing in the lake. She is furious with him, but Pierre is unbothered, if apologetic. He tells her that she will dry and that her problems are exceedingly small in the grand scheme of things. Pierre then shows her an old arrowhead he found, which delights her. He tells her that the reserve confuses him somewhat; the lake’s water levels, for example, are too high. She explains that the dams created swamps and affected the lake. He gives her the arrowhead and stands in the wind, seeming at peace; she tells him he is strange, and he thanks her. Pierre offers to walk her home, but she turns him down. Suddenly, Pierre pivots toward the forest, completely focused; he sniffs the air and tells her that a fox has killed a pheasant. Somewhat perturbed, Tiffany runs off. Pierre listens to her run home and ignores his own hunger.

The narrative shifts to two Otter Lake men, Dale Morris and Chucky Gimau. Both are bullies and criminals who live at other people’s expense. They fight for fun and grow marijuana in the woods. Now, they are driving home from the grocery store when they see a man sitting alone on the bleachers. Wanting some fun, they go to confront him. They approach the man—Pierre—confrontationally, but he ignores them, which frustrates them further. Pierre finally says that the bleachers were built on the site of a former sweat lodge. Dale decides that he is “crazy,” but Chucky begins to grow wary, seeing that the man’s eyes are glowing without a source of light to illuminate them. Dale tries to say something to Chucky but realizes that his friend looks terrified; when he turns back, the man has vanished. Chucky tells Dale they need to escape. Their car mysteriously turns on, and they run to the car to confront Pierre, but the car is completely empty. After Dale inspects the car, he stands up and turns and finds that Chucky has vanished as well. Now thoroughly spooked, Dale leaves in a hurry, trying to think of what he should do. He realizes that his rearview mirror is missing, and suddenly a voice says, “You must be Dale” (125).

At the Hunter home, Tiffany and Keith have an intense confrontation about her progress report. Keith grounds her until she gives him better results. Tiffany eats half of her dinner and then retreats to her room. She calls Tony and asks him to come do something with her despite the late hour, and he agrees, even though she is grounded. She slips out the window, hoping to be back before anyone notices her absence. Pierre observes her escape from a tall tree and smiles, succumbing to another memory.

In Pierre’s childhood as Owl, the fur traders fascinated him, and he eventually chose to travel with them to Montreal, wanting to come home with great gifts and knowledge. Eventually, Pierre reached Montreal, where the smell and noise overwhelmed and excited him. He was “given,” in some capacity, to a man going back to France, who surmised that he would survive the journey.

In the present, Pierre stands on the tree and overlooks the land, thinking about how much it has changed. He is starving from lack of blood and grows weaker and less controlled by the day. He observes the details of the world around him, from the activities of squirrels to Keith’s discovery of Tiffany’s absence. Then, he jumps down from the tree.

Tony is strangely quiet during the drive and smells like perfume, but Tiffany brushes off these details. They go to a restaurant that is mostly occupied by truckers and sit at the back, ordering only fries and soda. Tiffany immediately confronts Tony about the gold bracelet, and he grows extremely uncomfortable. When he insists that it didn’t fit his mother, she asks why he gave it to Julie, and he evades the question by complaining about how hard it is to date her because she is an Indigenous person. He says that his father dislikes the fact that Indigenous people do not pay taxes, and he agrees. The hostile tone of conversation escalates, and Tony breaks up with her, condescendingly telling her that she will find someone else. Tiffany becomes overwhelmed with despair at the loss of the one bright spot in her life and the concept of her father saying, “I told you so” (138). She ignores Tony’s pleas for her to calm down and stares at the plate of fries. She then picks up the ketchup and the plate of fries and leaves, ignoring the protests from the waitress and Tony. She puts the entire bottle of ketchup on the fries, walks over to Tony’s car, and throws the plate through the window, destroying the window and the inside of the car. Tiffany orders Tony to pay the waitress and rips the weekah root off his neck, leather thong and all.