Bill Walton - Daisy Wheel Press

"Sure," I said, " that's a good place, under that big tree where the osprey nests. But if I go first, then you have to put me on that little hill near the rapids on the river."

Johnny Dougall had always fancied that he was somehow related to a bird in his past life, and if being buried near those ospreys would make him happy, I was going to oblige him. Me, I just liked the sound of running water.

"You are too young a man to think about death," Johnny had told me then.

I was born in the little settlement just below the first set of rapids on the Ombabika River. there are no written records of my birth because the little Catholic church where the records were kept burned in 1920, but I had an affidavit sworn that I was born in 1898. I know this because I was twenty years old when the Great War ended.

. . .

I left my village many years ago, after the railroad came through our land. All the people moved their homes from the lake to the railroad village just so they could be near the white man's noise and clatter. Some of the men did get work from the railroad when they were building it, some even followed the steel rails, taking the white man's money in pay for their labours. A few of the women went to live with the white men and bore their children. As Shaman - I was only thirty at the time - I spoke out against these things but they would not listen to a young man whose ideas had lost favour in the eyes of the young and restless, the old and the tired, people of Ombabika.