King - A Short History of Indians in Canada

It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and the winter storm that drifted through the Caledon Hills during the night should have raised Hudson Golds spirits. Winter was, after all, his favourite season, and he was always delighted with the first snow, with the way it lay on the dense firs thick as frosting, with the way the bare branches of the birches and the maples wrapped themselves in ice and flashed like cut crystal in the cold light. Even the dark, dank beaver ponds that Eleanor had imported all the way from Cleveland looked crisp and festive.

And Hudson was especially fond of Christmas, looked forward to the clamour of roasts, mashed yams, and pies, to the sharp taste of bittersweet chocolates from Belgium, to the tart and juicy clementines from Morocco, eagerly sought the hearty and well-met company of friends and neighbours, waited anxiously for the ritual give and take of gift-giving.

Hudson was, in fact, an especially skilled and considerate gift-giver. Year after year, he took great delight in surprising Eleanor with thoughtful presents. A fur stole. A cruise to St. Croix. An eight-piece set of hand-painted antique wine glasses. A designer raincoat.

Well Hudson, Eleanor would say each time she opened a present, youve done it again.

And he liked to receive gifts, could remember what someone had given him years after the fact. When he was four, his parents put a red and yellow train under the Christmas tree. When he was five, they came home with a puppy. He could still remember that.

But, todaythe day before Christmasas Hudson stood by the bay window and looked out at the trees and the ponds, and the tipis in the small valley below the main house, he was harassed by a growing feeling of unease.

Hudson had read about people who became depressed in December, who were so overwhelmed by the expectations of the season and of their families, were so convinced of their own worthlessness, that they either went on a killing spree or strung themselves up by their belt in a closet. Rich, poor, it didnt seem to matter, though Hudson guessed that rich people, in general, coped with Christmas better than poor ones.

But Hudson knew it wasnt the season and it wasnt the weather. It was the Indians.

During the sixties and seventies and for the first half of the eighties, collecting Indians had been the rage with most of the families in the Caledon Hills. And while most everyone had since moved on to newer enthusiasms such as exotic pets, rain-forest acreages, and internet stocks, Hudson stayed the course and had, over the years, put together one of the more impressive collections of Indians east of Saskatoon.

It was Eleanor who bought him his first Indian, a Seminole that she had run across in a small shop in Clinton, Oklahoma. The next year, Franklin Spense, of all people, his neighbour on the other side of the ridge, a gun enthusiast and a stickler for the sanctity of property lines, gave him an Ojibway shaman. The year after that, Vince Muir, whose family at one time had owned all the land in Caledon Hills, brought over a Mohican that he had picked up at a yard sale.

I thought Mohicans were extinct.

That was the rumour, but they found a bunch of them in northern Massachusetts a couple of years back, said Vince. Dont worry, hes authentic.

Hudson hadnt really planned to collect Indians, and he had never really gone out of his way to locate new pieces, at least not the way Jack Cartier and his wife Bridget chased after Hummel figurines. It was true he had travelled all the way to Quebec City to purchase a set of four Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, but that had been more for investment than for mere collecting.

Eleanor, at least in the beginning, had been the real force behind the collection. For his fifty-sixth birthday, she bought him seven tipis and a video on how to set up an authentic Indian camp. And then, last Christmas, she had come back from Alberta with a matched drum teameight singers, a buffalo-skin drum, and a pow-wow song book with a CD, so you could learn the songs and sing along if you felt like it. The singers were an absolutely stunning gift, even better than the Dog Soldiers.