"How many moons do you have to give?" I asked to call his bluff and make him stop talking crazy.
      "Five," he answered, fully expecting the question. "Five full ones, Birchwalker."
      "What are you talking about?" I said. Every so often, he just loved to cough up a mouthful of his life's venom for us to wallow in. It was no use probing him. He would only say that dying was the spirit wresting itself free from the bear trap of being alive. Like his eulogy of Louis. Then he toasted me through tree frogs and cicadas, "And another thing, Birchwalker, I'd much rather have a friend than a name."
      "So, I take it there are diff erent models of the Native stick, besides the Iroquois?"
      Neil pulled three red scarves out of the sleeve of his buckskin and handed one to Archie and me. We followed his lead and tied them around our hair like dew rags, making like old time stickmakers. He turned the blank stick in the steam hole. "I will make you a stick to take to your president, one of Iroquois design. So, please notice that once the blank is done you already have the suggestion of a finished stick. But a suggestion is no son. It must cure for ten months before it can be carved and sanded and laced. Only then does it take on life.

Only then are you in possession of a full creation, a living being."
      "Like a good whisky, I suppose. Just how long have your people been doing this?" asked Archie.
      "From beyond the sunrise," said Neil.
      "No, but I mean, is it a hundred years, a thousand?"
      Neil produced two sticks and held them out in front of Archie's eyes, banging them together like the jaws of an alligator. "Since there was fire. Since Wakayabide and Madjikiwis. Since Makoons and Bad Sky." Neil was drunk, venting, confusing Archie. I told Archie it might be four or five hundred years, nobody knows.
      "All blanks are steamed in the fireplace to make the wood soft and supple. First, the Southeastern stick, the design of the Choctaw. The Choctaw still play the Creator's Game in their native lands in Mississippi and Alabama. They chose the shape of a teardrop for their racket head and a simple rawhide lacework, and each player holds two of these sticks during play, one in each hand. Long ago they brought their own refinement to the skill of the cradling run downfield - the bottom stick where the ball nests and the top one as a lid."
      "So if baggattaway had been a religion, it would

have had three branches, right? Iroquois, Choctaw and Great Lakes? That right?" Neil laid the Choctaw sticks against the smoking fireplace and hoisted a Great Lakes stick high in the air so that its outline was cast in moonlight. His breath was heavy from ten feet away. "Well spoken, Archie Mellon. The Great Lakes stick is a thing of beauty in its own right. But, alas, the game is no longer played in Anishinaabewaki. Did you know this? No longer played! Our sons go east to the Finger Lakes to learn the game, to the Iroquois, but still the Anishinaabek are counted among Birchwalker's best players - Obie Crick and the goalie Jerome French; the twin attackmen Robbie and Trevor Fenton, Danny Brown."
      "The Great Lakes branch has died off ."
      "But still capable of rebirth," Neil fired back. "And that's where you come in. If you allow the games to be played once more on our sacred lands we can bring baggattaway back to life here." Neil cleared his throat, shoved the stick under Archie's nose. "The Great Lakes design requires a level of skill in cradling and scooping and passing and catching that not every player reaches. Maybe that's why the branch lies broken. Yet, it is the stick played by the warrior-athletes of those Chippewa

and Saulk tribes that retook Fort Michilimackinac. The very stick with which Makoons and Bad Sky performed their catapult shot."
      "That's right. I remember now. Your story at the meeting, Birch. You're going to show me the fort, right?"
      "You have to see the fort. It's the venue for the final round."
      Neil dropped the Great Lakes stick in Archie's lap and then threw him a Southeastern stick as well, watching as Archie examined them in the dark, taking their weight and balance and lacing into his eye. "You might want to compare them to this one," he added, tossing him a white man's lax stick. "Lightweight metal and plastic, lots of whip, sexy, as they say. Of course, Indigene stickmakers have made concessions to the technology of the white man. We use their electric drills and sandpaper, their synthetic leathers instead of deerskin. But the traditional stick does not go away," he smiled, an index finger jabbing at his temple.
      "Like boomerangs, I suppose. That sound crazy? I don't really know shit about it, just that the Aborigines bend and carve wood for sport. I think they use birch," he said, looking at me.

      "All men are Aborigines," said Neil, meeting Archie's eyes in the dark. "It's just that some remember better than others."
      "Show him how you bend the blanks before it gets too dark," I said.
      Neil led us into the deep shadow of his white ash where he levered his wood into sons.
      "We want you to approve the Iroquois stick for the tournament. We will unify the tribes around it."
      "The aborigines have to stick together?" joked Archie.
      "Damn straight they do. You are catching on, Archie Mellon. Look. Hickory is the wood of choice for the Iroquois stickmakers. The trees must be harvested after the sap run and after all the leaves are down. It must be dry and free of knots, and when you can tie a splinter of it into a knot, you know it is supple enough."
      Neil walked right up to Archie, cradling a blank length of hickory like a middie on the run. The tree frogs and cicadas went still. Neil's eyes caught light from somewhere. "Nature provides us with what we need. You speak of the boomerang in your homeland. I can see this. I can see how your Aborigine, just like us American wood benders, puts his own blood in the art, breathes his own

mind into it, places his own heart in it. This is why the boomerang can return to its maker, its thrower. It is bound to return. The human spirit of Native return is embedded in it, and this is the beauty of stickmaking, drunk or sober, I can assure you."
      Archie breathed in a gulp of air and sat on it a moment, finally pushed it out. "Hey, what if I say I'm sold?" he asked with a big shrug of his shoulders. "Any fool can see that this is a labor of love and of spirit, a tradition from before the sunrise, that says it all to me. I'm just not so sure your WLC colleagues are of the same mind, Birch."
      Neil ambled over to the fireplace and yelled back to Archie as he pulled a hickory shaft from the steam hole in the chimney. He was fully engaged in the tapered end of the shaft as he returned to the bending plate. "You see, Mr. Archie Mellon, like a mustang lassoed for the first time, the first bend is wildly resisted by even the supplest of wood and must be held in place by a metal wire."
      Neil inserted the tapered end of the blank into the space between the lower knob and the flange, traveled gracefully down the handle and pulled it down into himself over the top knob with a sharp grunt. "This forms the crook. See how the bark is left in place around the outside of the crook?" He

slipped a wire around the freshly-bent shaft. "The second and third bends are a piece of cake." He guided the crook into the stack, then pushed the handle up to convert the crook into a triangle. Then he reinserted the crook between the knobs up to a point about fifteen inches from the top of the triangle head and pushed the handle straight up, imparting the final bend at the throat of the stick.
      Archie nodded. "So, I just bend the rest of them to my will, Neil, that what you're saying? Exert the full force of my office upon their small-thinking heads?"
      "There you have it, Archie," he said proudly. "A son of baggattaway, a son of Anishinaabewaki. All that remains is to give him a heart, a mind, a soul. Let's go back inside where there's light and the bugs don't bite." He stooped over stiffly to pick up the whisky bottle.
      But exhaustion had overtaken me, and the new ache of missing my father. Even Neil's ratty couch looked downright inviting, and I plopped down just to take a load off for a few minutes. Neil turned on the kitchen light. He and Archie were hunched over the bent hickory that he would now give a heart and mind and soul to, like a couple of lubed-up GYNs. I heard the clinking of glass and

bottle and ice cubes and smelled whisky on the cooler night air that seeped into the doublewide. They were talking - or rather Neil was holding forth - in a kind of low, monotone, his teaching voice, instructing his Aussie student in the black arts of drawknife carving, sanding and lacing. I could no longer make out the tree frogs and cicadas over the whirr of an electric drill Neil was aiming at the throat of the racket. I did not know how I was still awake. There were strands of rawhide, catgut and clockcord draped over the edge of his table, on the floor. Fading into an overdue slumber, my last thought, Archie was fine, in good hands.

"STAND AND BREATHE, MY SON, ARISE NOW!"