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Manish yells out, I got no brakes, and I shout back, Excellent! as she takes off full throttle on the snowmobile like a bullet through the white-out between eight-foot snowbanks. Stop sign tips barely peek through the snow. For a second, I might know what it's like to be an Olympic athlete on a skeleton sled.

You just want to dump me in a snowbank, I said to her when she offered me a ride. Her giggle is still high-pitched, her anger handy. Her nylon down jacket is hard to grab on to. Covered in engine oil, she could be a garage mechanic. Her fleecy hat sits lopsided.

She hauls me into her house for tea. I ask her about the time when she was Chief and she threw the judge out of the community, a gaggle of women on her tail. I was polite. I did it the official way, she smirks. I handed him a letter, signed, and he obeyed, just like that. Her eyes still look surprised. I had enough of his court. Later after her arrest, she told another judge she was sick of signing papers. We don't sign papers in my culture. Imagine. Telling a judge to skedaddle. I catch a whiff of freedom.

Freckles still sprinkle her nose next to brown mottling across her cheeks from too much snow sun. Freckles are the one thing we have in common. We laugh about the time the women went hunting and she ordered me to lead them to porcupine. The other women acquiesced and all tagged behind me, cackling and babbling in Innu-aimun. Every so often, they would pile up and trip on the heels of my clumsy bear paw snowshoe tracks. Occasionally they translated a joke, mostly dirty ones. They also translated for Mitshekapeu, the Fart man, to gales of laughter. I ate roasted cashews and raisins for snack. They chowed down beef jerky and canned wieners that made my mouth water.

I led them to partridge, six exactly. I'm not partial to porcupine. But on our way back to camp along the craggy riverbank, I spotted the porcupine high on a gaunt spruce trunk. It offered itself without a protest. Manish tied a rope to a front and back leg of her kill and carried it across her back like a bag. Blood dripped onto her coat. Back at the camp, she was still ordering me around, this time to pluck, clean, and cut up the one partridge we didn't give away. I surprised her by knowing what to do. She stewed it on the crackling sheet metal stove, and gave me a breast, the best piece. I wolfed it down and with warm Innu pakueshiken lapped up every last bit of the gravy thickened with oat flakes.

Now she cradles her grandson, the one she drags from doctor to doctor in southern cities, the one with the heart defect and cerebral palsy, the one she says keeps her out of politics. In the corner of the cluttered kitchen sits a half-filled snowshoe with a ball of sinew hanging from it. Her boys scowl at me from doorways, just like their father. We drink boiled tea from the kettle with Carnation milk and sugar and Purity cookies. We agree that Penote looks like a gigolo with his new mustache and that he should quit bootlegging.

I'll talk to him.

Me too.

I leave with two arctic char retrieved from her net that morning. The wind scurries at my feet, winding down for the night. The sunset reflects a coral glow on snowy eastern hills, the same colour as the char's flesh.