![]() The game lifts Saul out of his life at a Canadian residential school in the mid-twentieth century. They become one with the game and it lifts them up and out of their lives too." The scout then asks, "That's what happens to you, isn't it?" (150). A scout for the pros tells Saul that the great players "can harness that lightning. Saul sees through the chaos on the ice, sees the energy of the bodies in motion in ways that allow him to anticipate where the puck or a teammate will be and how to best get the puck in the net. It is ceremonially restarted with the face-off when the creative power of chaos is once again unloosed. Like all things in the universe, time does not really stop, though. It is the creative energy of controlled chaos bodies speeding over the ice are meteorites burning through the sky the puck squirting out from a scrum of players spins "like a small planet in a universe of white" (69) body pounding into body are stars exploding in space and time only stops "when the puck is in the net" (149). Hockey, as Saul lives it in the first half of the book, is not a sport instead, it is an embodiment of the same sort of life force that moves through the universe. Saul is a seer, a gift he inherited from his great-grandfather, a skill that his beloved Ojibway grandma recognizes in the boy. ![]() We need to understand hockey the way our protagonist, Saul Indian Horse, understands it, though. ![]() ![]() ![]() RICHARD WAGAMESE'S Indian Horse is a brilliantly layered and moving novel that tells a story about the healing power of hockey. ![]()
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