Forever Dead

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  I looked at him and said, “Would you please get to the point.”

  “I also heard that an assistant professor is on the chopping block, come spring,” he said, “and I think it’s going to be you.”

  He smiled again and shrugged, holding out his overly muscled arms to me, inviting a hug. I moved away, saying nothing, too afraid my voice might crack, furious at myself for not being able to come up with some witty remark.

  “You know why it won’t be me, other than the fact that I’ve published more papers?” he crowed.

  When I didn’t answer, his face suddenly twitched in annoyance and he abruptly answered his own question. “Because for your last year here they’re saddling you with the perennially unpopular entomology taxonomy course, now that Jefferson’s heart problem has sidelined him.” He sighed. “I’m really sorry, Cordi, but it sure won’t be easy to impress the tenure committee with an insect taxonomy course, not that that’s a prerequisite or anything.”

  He shook his head in commiseration, grinned suggestively, blew me a kiss, and turned to leave, but then couldn’t resist a final jab. Did he know the damage his words were doing, or was he biologically incapable of comprehending?

  “I’ve had two papers accepted, you know, and I drew Jefferson’s animal behaviour course this year — hard to make a course like that bomb out, eh? But who knows? Maybe you can do something with the insect taxonomy course that will blow us all out of the water.” He disappeared down the hall, leaving me shaking with frustration at myself for letting him see my shock and the stinging tears in my eyes. At times like this I felt like a real loser even though I knew the jerk was exaggerating. I was good at what I did. I just had to convince myself of it somehow.

  I tried to shift my focus away from my depressing thoughts and glanced at Ryan, who was securing the canoe. He had a million new freckles on his arms, legs, and face from the endless days of sun, and the rusty red baseball cap that hid his unruly red-blond hair seemed to have done little to prevent the sun from bleaching most of the red out. I smiled and remembered trying to count all those freckles once when we were kids on the farm: it had been like counting the grains of sand on a beach. We were so different, he and I.

  I sighed and got up to tie my line around a large boulder at the base of a cliff that soared above us. The jumble of rocks at its base had once formed part of its face, now battered, craggy, and forlorn from years of losing pieces of itself.

  The entrance to the portage trail was framed by the huge trunks of two large pine trees on a height of land. Ryan turned on his heel and disappeared into the woods to scout the rapids. I followed him down the soft earthen trail and saw him veer off the path in the direction of the rapids. We broke out of the bushes onto some sun-warmed, rust-streaked granite rocks overlooking the full force of the rapids.

  “Would you take a look at that!” yelled Ryan from his position atop a huge boulder.

  The words were whipped away by the wind and the thundering roar of the rapids. I clambered up beside him and looked at the roiling mass of suicidal waves at our feet. I glanced apprehensively at Ryan out of the corner of my eye. He was eyeballing the rapids with the look of someone possessed, and when he caught my glance I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

  “No way, Ryan.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Cor.” He gripped my arm and pointed. All either of us could see was the ominous white cauldron of water, torn here and there by jagged rocks and a fallen tree hanging out over the water. Further down I could just make out the telltale line where the river suddenly dropped from view as it plummeted over a series of unseen cliffs.

  “We could canoe this far side,” said Ryan eagerly. “See? Over here. We take the route between those two boulders, veer sharply left to miss all the mess close to shore there, and then angle back to miss the shelf. We hug the shore and find a backwater just before the tree and the falls. Easy!”

  “That’s what you said about the last one,” I yelled, “and we nearly skewered the canoe on that godawful rock just past the mini ledge!”

  “Whose fault was that? You were in the bow!” shouted Ryan.

  “Don’t remind me,” I said. I hated being in the bow, being the first one down into a boiling cauldron of water, madly trying to take the correct route to get us through. The person in the bow never got the respect they were due. All the stern had to do was follow the bow’s lead, but the bow? The bow had to choose the right route, usually with split-second precision and twenty-twenty vision, neither of which I was particularly blessed with.

  “It didn’t look like a ledge when we scouted it!” Ryan protested as he looked back at the river, a look of disappointment on his face.

  “You’d canoe Niagara Falls if you could,” I said, knowing there was a spark of truth to it. Ryan seemed to have no strong sense of his own mortality, but fortunately it wasn’t contagious. I suffered from no such illusions of immortality, especially when it came to a wet death.

  I looked at the river again, shivering suddenly, as if the water already had me in its grip. “This’d kill us,” I said, and I shivered again as the spray misted my face and left me feeling strangely apprehensive.

  Ryan suddenly caught me by the wrists, shaking me out of my thoughts, and pulled me close, whispering in my ear, “Lighten up Cordi, I’m only joking.”

  He jumped off the boulder then and headed back into the coolness of the woods. Of course he was only joking. I knew that, so why had I let it bother me so much?

  “Come on, lazy, let’s get the packs,” he shouted.

  “Lazy? You call me lazy?” I yelled at Ryan’s disappearing back. “The only reason you wanted to run these rapids was so you wouldn’t have to portage the canoe.”

  I could just hear Ryan’s answering chortle as I ran to catch up.

  The sun was at its hottest, directly overhead, and the water looked deliciously cool as it gently cradled the canoe, but there was nowhere safe to swim, hot as we were. We’d just have to scout around for a good spot at the other end of the portage. Ryan’s pack was now light enough for him to hoist it onto his back without my help. Most of the food from our two-week trip was gone, but my pack — with the tent, sleeping bag, clothes, and my small collecting pack — remained the same. Ryan, no doubt feeling guilty, helped me on with my pack, which practically dwarfed my 5’6”, 120-pound frame. After two weeks I’d adjusted pretty well to the heft of it, and the growing strength in my arms and legs felt good. I adjusted the wide shoulder straps and pulled the leather tumpline over my forehead to take some of the weight off my shoulders and then took off ahead of Ryan.

  I padded softly down the narrow trail, the needles of the pine trees on either side jiggling in the sunlight, dancing and leaping in the wind and sending shadows skittering across the path in front of me.

  I slithered down a damp, rocky incline and felt the pack try to take me in one direction. I lurched the other way to compensate, just as a green beetle gyrated past my nose and landed ten feet in front of me, right on top of a large piece of some dead animal, its smell ripe and pungent. I came to a sudden halt, struggling to keep the pack’s momentum from taking me with it.

  “For God’s sake, Cor. Give me some warning, will you?” said Ryan as he endeavoured to stop himself from slamming into me. But I ignored his flailing and kept my eye on the bug. I didn’t want to lose it.

  “This one’s a beaut!” I said.

  Ryan struggled up beside me.

  “What’s a beaut?” He stopped dead, as the stench reached him. “Oh, Jesus! What’s the stink? Who died?”

  “Probably part of a raccoon or porcupine, or maybe a deer. But there’s no hair so it’s impossible to tell.”

  “You would call a dead raccoon a ‘beaut.’”

  “Not the animal, Ryan. Take at look at what’s on it.”

  “Oh, gross. This is revolting, Cordi. How can you stand the stink?” Ryan pulled his shirt up over his nose. “It’s crawling with bugs!” he said in disgust and looked away.

&n
bsp; “They’re not bugs —”

  “I know, I know.” Ryan cut me short, pitched his voice higher, and I heard my own words coming back at me. “‘All bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs.’ You biologists are all alike. But to me a bug is an insect is a bug. It’s such a good guttural sound. Why waste it? You can really wind your disgust around that one little word: bug.” He dropped his voice so low that “bug” came out sounding like a twin of “ugh.”

  Ignoring Ryan’s diatribe, I pointed at the big green beetle balanced on a piece of the dead animal, its little antennae quivering in the wind, but Ryan kept his back studiously away from the beetle and moved upwind.

  “Oh, come on, Ryan. This’d look terrific on the cover of one of your magazines. Maybe Insect News would buy it? Lime green. The art department will go nuts, and besides, I don’t recognize it. Maybe it will be a brand new species and I’ll become famous.” I heard the wistfulness creep into my voice and smothered it with a nervous laugh.

  “Yeah, right,” said Ryan, who to my relief hadn’t seemed to notice. He was too preoccupied with the stink of the dead animal. “I can see the headline now: ‘Beautiful bug on putrid porker.’ Besides, you know Insect News pays diddly-squat.” Ryan sold his photos to the big-name magazines for good money, but bugs were seldom in great demand by the big guys, and so he usually tried to avoid taking their pictures at all.

  I simply ignored him, having heard it all before. I eased off my backpack and pulled out another, smaller knapsack. Inside was a fisherman’s tackle box where I kept all the vials and live jars for my day’s specimens until I could transfer them at night to other large containers strapped to the undersides of our canoe seats. Insects weren’t really my main line of research, but I’d taken enough courses and done enough research to know quite a lot about them, and that had landed me Jefferson’s notoriously boring entomology course. That, and the fact that I was low woman on the totem pole. I rustled through the plant specimens, scats, and other animal paraphernalia I’d already collected and pulled out some jars with mesh lids.

  “Cor, do we really need this? It’s crawling with bugs.” Ryan’s voice was muffled through his shirt. “Can’t we just pretend we didn’t see it? God, when I agreed to help you on this trip you never said anything about collecting bugs from dead animals. I’m fine with the mice and shrews and frogs, even the butterflies and spiders and the little nets and stuff, but frankly, this is revolting.”

  “Look, I’m not sure I’m any happier about this than you are.” I sighed. “But I don’t have any choice. I’ve got to come up with something for this taxonomy course that’s not boring. Maybe if I offer some live labs along with all the dry dead stuff I can generate some interest.”

  Interest my ass, I thought. How many undergrads were going to flock to the taxonomy course this year? And if they didn’t, what would the tenure committee think? Jim Hilson’s smirk floated in front of me like an irritating mote in my eye. He’d make himself too valuable to lose, and it was either him or me. I had less than two months to pore over the old course and come up with a new, madly exciting course before the fall term started. To boot, I had a paper that was close to being accepted for publication, but the reviewers wanted some extra analysis of my data. I wanted to concentrate on that, not on the entomology course.

  Ryan dumped his pack rather noisily on the ground next to the dead beast, but the insect miraculously stayed put.

  “You move the insect away from that ‘thing’ and I’ll snap its picture. Then you can collect your grubs for your live labs,” said Ryan in a voice that held itself away from the gruesome scene like a pair of verbal tweezers. He didn’t mind taking the photos for me as long as he didn’t have to get cozy with the bugs themselves.

  “Really, Ryan. If I try to do that he’ll fly. Just plug your nose.”

  Ryan resignedly squatted down beside me. He unclipped his camera gear from his pack and extracted one of his close-up lenses and a tiny tripod and set to work. Once the photos were done I cornered the little bug with a miniature bug net and put it in one of my jars. I then collected a number of the grubs, some of which were stuck to a cedar twig that went into a jar as well. While I was waiting for Ryan to store his equipment away I slung my collection bag over my shoulder and padded back down the trail. The pines lining the portage acted like a sieve for the early afternoon sun, which squeezed through the cracks, weaving a tapestry of light patterns that swarmed over the forest floor. The thumping roar of the rapids, the moist smell of rich humus, and the sticky heat of the sun were like an elixir — it just was not possible to stay depressed out in the wilderness.

  I walked further along the path a short way to see what lay ahead of us and suddenly stopped, cocking an ear in the gentle breeze. I could hear something crackling in the woods off to my left, but it quieted when I stopped and all I could hear was the loud buzzing of a bee as it flew past me, the hot sun dripping on me like heated honey. The crackle began again and slowly approached me. I could see the bushes jerking and could clearly hear the soft sound of an animal swishing toward me. I waited, watching the branches moving, judging the animal to be small: maybe a coon, maybe a weasel. It couldn’t be anything much bigger. I hoped Ryan wouldn’t come gallivanting down the path and scare whatever it was. I stood statue-still on the path, holding my breath as the animal came closer until I caught a glimpse of a small, slim black form. Not a coon. Maybe a marten. Too big for a weasel. And then it was there on the path in front of me, its golden eyes glowing in its black face, one small black ear dangling at a strange angle. The cat stopped and stared back at me. Slowly I stooped and held out my hand.

  “Hey ya, kitty.” The bedraggled cat held its ground, the leaves swished gently overhead, and then slowly, carefully, the cat moved, stiff legged, toward me; I noticed that it had only three legs as it brushed its body against my own.

  “What happened to you, eh, puss?” I asked as I glanced uneasily at the cat’s ear, matted with blood, its tip hanging on by a thread. There was a huge gash down the cat’s left flank, caked with dried blood, as though some animal had raked it with its claws. But the loss of its leg was an old injury — there was no blood there. I reached out my hand and tried to scratch the cat, but it backed off and stood staring at me, not moving. Suddenly it meowed loudly and moved off down the portage trail. It looked back once and then stopped as if inviting me to follow, all the while emitting a low, haunting whine that made me shiver. Why was the cat alone? Where was its owner? I called out to Ryan, and when he came loping down the path toward me he stopped dead when he caught sight of the cat.

  “Is that a cat?” he asked incredulously.

  I didn’t answer. Instead I moved forward slowly, but the cat loped away into the woods ahead of me, its agility surprising after the loss of a leg. When I reached the spot it had run to I could see the cat sitting under some bushes looking back at me, waiting. I looked up and saw something glinting high up in the trees about a hundred yards into the bush. As I watched, it seemed to swing slowly back and forth, like a pendulum sparkling in the sun. The cat sat patiently waiting, tilting its head, silently, unnervingly watching me. I glanced down into its golden yellow eyes and suddenly felt an inexplicable coldness steal through my sweaty body like a thief. I couldn’t fathom what it was trying to steal, but I didn’t like the feeling one bit. Instinctively I backed away and then felt foolish as the cat broke the spell by running back toward me and rubbing itself against my leg.

  “Someone must have left something behind, besides the cat,” I said as Ryan came up behind me. I pointed toward the woods.

  “Twenty feet up a tree?” quipped Ryan.

  I repositioned my collecting pack from my shoulder onto my back. “I’m going to take a look,” I said. “Just in case the cat’s owner is hurt.”

  “And I’m going to stay right here and have a snooze! No way I’m bushwhacking my way down that poor excuse for a trail. It’s probably only a piece of tinfoil.”

  “But what about
the cat?” I asked.

  Ryan shrugged, sat down, leaned against a tree, and pulled his cap over his eyes. “Let me know what you find.”

  chapter two

  I peered unenthusiastically at the tangled undergrowth converging on the old trail. It was going to be a lovely bushwhack. Did I really want to do it? I glanced at the cat. Something in the way it stared at me sent a shiver of fear down my spine. I looked back at Ryan, who had slouched further down against the tree in a spectacularly contorted position that looked impossibly uncomfortable, and yet he was already softly snoring. A wisp of his red-blond hair, like a coiled golden snake, had escaped from the confines of his cap and now sproinged across his right eyebrow, which suddenly twitched in annoyance. I took a deep breath and waded into the woods after the cat, shoving aside the branches and twigs of the dead layers of jack pine that grabbed at my legs and arms. I stumbled over a tangle of hidden roots and watched in envy as the cat nimbly moved through the underbrush, patiently waiting for me each time I got tangled in the bracken.

  Eventually the undergrowth thinned and we broke out of the bush into a glade, a legacy of the sudden violent death of a pine whose great gnarled and naked roots stood upended in a mocking reversal of life. After being torn from the earth, the great tree had toppled and taken out a handful of other younger trees. Directly in front of the downed tree and dangling from a rope thrown high over the limb of another tree was a medium-sized olive green canvas pack.

  The glint I had seen from afar came from the sharpened edge of the blade of a bush axe. As I approached the pack I could see that it was held in place by the other end of the rope tied around the girth of the same tree. The result was that the pack swung below the limb by about five feet and above the ground by about fifteen feet. It was a professional job: whoever had hauled the food pack off the ground to keep the bears and other wildlife at bay was no newcomer to the bush. I suddenly felt like an intruder and did not particularly want to be caught drooling over someone else’s food, but then again curiosity is sometimes a strong incentive to ignore common sense. I looked around. There had to be a campsite nearby.