For months Gordon Peter* Ballantyne had looked forward to the fish derby. He had dug deep to come up with the $150 entry fee for both him and his wife, Susan. The stakes were high, first prize a brand new half-­ton, second prize ten thousand dollars cash. But at eight-­thirty in the morning, as he was launching the shabby little boat he had borrowed, he noticed the crowd starting to gather. The power-­crafts slithered off their trailers like partying Jackfish. There’d be more chance of cashing in on Jumping Jackpot Bingo than delivering the winning pickerel, Gordon Peter concluded.

He firmly believes that, where there are small fish, there are large fish. Just a while back a friend had won a new Chevy in a similar derby. He had settled in the same spot all day, every now and then pulling out the kind of specimen others laughed at. Then, just before the finish, he snagged the fat grandfather lounging on the bottom and won the competition. This was Gordon Peter’s model. He found a spot where a couple of two- and three-­pounders were landed and he had wanted to park there. But after an hour or two his wife had grown restless. “Not getting anything here,” Susan said. “Let’s try another spot.”

“You have to be patient when you’re fishing,” he kept saying, until Susan finally lost patience. They quarrelled. She had walloped him on the cheek with her fishing rod.

Lots of pickerel were caught (and thrown back — a rule of the derby), but they ­weren’t that big. So right up until the last moment, everybody, including Susan and Gordon Peter, felt they had a chance. Then, ten minutes before the closing, a young woman from Amisk Lake pulled out a seven-­pound-­three-­ounce fish. Goodbye shiny red truck.

So far this has not been the luckiest year for Gordon Peter. For the first time in twenty years he ­hadn’t been called up by the band council to work as a foreman on construction. No money to build houses, they announced. All spring he’d had to scramble. Tired of waiting a year for a bathroom door to be replaced or a broken window fixed, reserve folks, who admired Gordon Peter’s skill and hard work as a carpenter, asked him to renovate their houses, but often they forgot to pay him. “The end of the month,” they’d say, and he knew the pelicans would have come and gone before he’d see his money.

There’d been more disappointment. In the spring Gordon Peter had run for band councillor and had lost. His seventeen-­year-­old son announced that he was quitting school and that his girlfriend had just had a baby. And then a cousin, Leland Ballantyne, had been hit on the head with a baseball bat while he was partying in Saskatoon. During the funeral at St. Gertrude’s Church, Gordon Peter’s heart had gone out to Leland’s wife and four children. He may have felt gloomy about all this, but he certainly ­wasn’t surprised. Life on this reserve is always an unpredictable soap opera. “It’s worse than All My Children,” says Darlene McKay, one of the reserve’s comedians. “Erica Kane would feel right at home.”