Summer of the Horse

by Donna Kane

  Summer of the Horse

  The pack string anticipates the next strenuous section of the trail.

  Summer of the Horse

  Donna Kane

  Copyright © 2018 Donna Kane

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, info@accesscopyright.ca.

  Lost Moose is an imprint of Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

  p.o. Box 219, Madeira Park, bc, v0n 2h0

  www.harbourpublishing.com

  Edited by Barbara Berson

  Text design by Mary White

  Map by Barbara Swail

  Photos by Wayne Sawchuk unless otherwise credited

  Printed in Canada

  Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the bc Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kane, Donna, 1959–, author

  Summer of the horse / Donna Kane.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55017-819-7 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-55017-820-3 (HTML)

  1. Kane, Donna, 1959– —Travel--British Columbia--Muskwa-Kechika Management Area. 2. Horsemen and horsewomen—Psychology. 3. Human-animal relationships—Psychological aspects. 4. Trail riding—British Columbia—Muskwa-Kechika Management Area. 5. Packhorse camping—British Columbia--Muskwa-Kechika Management Area. 6. Muskwa-Kechika Management Area (B.C.)—Description and travel. I. Title.

  SF284.4.K36 2018 636.1 C2017-906693-5

  C2017-906694-3

  for all the wild hearts

  A float plane descends toward Mayfield Lakes and the next two weeks of expedition life.

  A caribou’s hoofprints give moss campion a chance to grow.

  One

  Notes from the Burn

  Near the Gataga River in British Columbia’s northern Rockies lies a chain of lung-shaped lakes unnamed on just about any map you look at. The most easterly lake, the one closest to the Gataga, is the one I know best because one spring I fell in love with a wilderness guide and that summer, my heart on fire, I drove up the Alaska Highway to Muncho Lake from where a float plane flew me to his cabin on the shore of what’s known as Mayfield.

  The first time I met Wayne I’d just flown home to northeastern bc from New York. Every chance I got, I was flying to New York. Feature it, as my grandmother liked to say. Feature my hooking up with a mountain man when what I thought I wanted was to live in the city.

  Wayne had already arrived at his cabin with his string of horses and expedition guests after having travelled for six weeks, starting from Mile 442 of the Alaska Highway. They had crossed the Toad River into the mountains, traversed Heaven’s Pass, then the Steeple and Bevin Passes, descended onto the glaciated valley of Sheep Creek, and finally crossed the Gataga to Mayfield. Accompanying me on the plane were writers, photographers, painters and filmmakers arriving for a one-week wilderness camp at Mayfield Lake. When the artist camp was over, Wayne and I would be alone for two more weeks until a final group of clients would be flown in and all of us would travel together back out to the highway. It would be Wayne’s last expedition of the season and the first of its kind, ever, for me.

  As our plane landed, Wayne was a speck on the wharf growing larger, the long, lean length of him taking shape as we neared: the bright coral of his dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, exposing his tanned arms; his face also tanned, a face defined by a white moustache and a square jaw and a calm and confident air, an air I did not share. I was certain I’d lose my balance walking the plane’s float to the wharf, as if I were crossing from one life to another and falling would confirm my recklessness. As I stepped from the pontoon onto the dock, Wayne reached out his hand.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  “You made it,” Wayne said, and as we hugged, his rich laugh resonated from his chest to mine. Beside the wharf was a weathered-log sauna and beyond that a slumped-roof cabin, built on the north shore of the lake where the water was rich with swamp grass. I’d soon learn that moose liked to wade there, dunking their meteoric heads, their dewlaps sluicing the afternoon light, their rinsed bodies glistening beneath the soaring mountains, the lowering sun gilding the limestone peaks.

  A few months before I’d arrived, the pine valley next to the lake had burned, the fire stopping just shy of Wayne’s cabin. So all that first summer, the valley was gimped by a leafless wind. It rasped the scorched bark, crisped coals flaking off while electric-green shoots broke through the charred earth. Arnica up first, its yellow petals so immaculate it startled, then poplar and pine and willow, all in a race to begin again. The horses grazed there, swishing their tails, their ash-plumed hooves cracking open more pods, slickened seeds gummed to their silver shoes.

  I was split open too, the person I’d been sloughed off, my senses a Leatherman flicking open its tools of cornea, cochlea, waft, touch, tart. Syntax glassing for anything that moved—olive-sided flycatcher, soapallalie, dwarf birch, furred muzzle of the northern caribou, sun through the thin-paned window of Wayne’s cabin, its light a pale wash on the oilclothed table; a tin butter dish with enamelled roses and a blue rim; a mosquito net hung from hooks in the ceiling, draped over the bed, where our bodies, in sleep, would turn in sync. There was such relief, as if it proved some vital and necessary force had brought us together. And some kind of proof, it seemed, was what I needed.

  There was a bench by the lake, its silvered planks worn smooth as the hooves of the horses grazing the burn, and we’d sit there, listening to the loons. One afternoon a family of otters swam near the shore, formed a circle and played, and I felt so far from home, sick with guilt for having left my husband, and aching for my children, though they were grown. There were days when, overcome with what I’d done, I’d leap from the wharf just to feel water’s axe-smack stripping off thought like a seed head slipped from its saw-toothed stalk—awareness deboned of thought, a gawking shimmering socket.

  We rode the horses on a trail up to the alpine, where the air was thin as a marmot’s whistle; where frost boiled up through glacial till, split plates of shale into toothy sprockets; where caribou tracks pestled the scree and moss campion grew in the hollows of their steps. When I walked on the caribou lichen (Cladonia rangiferina), it crunched like cornflakes. I felt first like a giant whose ill-placed steps were crushing a coral floor, then Lilliputian, sitting on the ridge, staring at mountains racked peak after peak. So much space and so much silence. Below, I could see Mayfield Lake, where Wayne had asked, “Do you think you could live here?”

  Every sound seemed directed at me, every gust of wind, every bunting darting by—muscles on a pull-string—every squirrel ratcheting in the trees, spruce needles clattering to the ground, the horse bells tolling. This was the news I received.

  One day I walked into the burn and found an insect that looked like the charred forest incarnate, its body black as charcoal, witching the root of a burned-out tree with its brittle antennae, its legs the rusty orange of dead spruce needles, its wings rattling and sizzling, a new exuberance rising from the wreckage. For a moment I could delete the past. I walked back to the cabin and stood there,
my hand on the small of Wayne’s back, beside a lake whose mud bottom was etched with beaver trails, its surface whisked by merganser wings. Where the water was shallow and fleshy with grass and moose plunged their heads, I gathered up my love and moved forward.

  Wayne Sawchuk has led expeditions through the Muskwa–Kechika for over thirty years. sally puleston mcintosh

  Two

  Book Fair

  I used to live in a big white farmhouse in the crook of a valley next to my parents’ farm. My husband and I built the house. It had a covered porch, a veranda that faced west, where on summer evenings we would sit with our two children and look toward the horizon, past my father’s fields, the warm air filled with the sweet smell of cut hay, the chaff from the mower pinked by the sun setting behind the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

  The foothills were a haze of blue in the distance, a velvet backdrop to our busy lives. I couldn’t have imagined then that I would one day wake inside a tent pitched beside a river many passes north of that mountain range and that the person beside me would be another man.

  When I tell people that I met Wayne at the Dawson Creek Municipal Public Library at a local authors’ book fair, their response is often bemusement, the setting so benign. I remember thinking I didn’t want to go to the book fair. I had just returned from a trip to New York with friends. I was wearing a purple blouse I’d bought at Macy’s and a black skirt, and my shoes had also been bought in New York in a little boutique off Fifth Avenue. My friend Ruth had talked me into them. On the day of the book fair, under all the bristle of my recent trip was a dead eros. I was forty-seven. My husband and I, married for twenty-five years, spent our evenings in different rooms—he in the living room reading and me in my study writing. Our two children were grown. For a long time we’d been saying that we needed to find more in common, but a kind of inertia had taken hold.

  I was late, and I rushed in and there, seated at their tables, were retired teachers eager to show what they’d published and a man with his personal memoir of moving to the Peace Country. Before I saw Wayne I saw his book, a coffee table–sized hardcover with a photo of a moose on its glossy cover, propped up on a display stand. I had heard about the book, and I knew the name of the author. My best friend, Emilie, and I had talked about Wayne’s photographs of the Muskwa–Kechika, a wilderness area in bc’s northern Rockies. To have taken such photos seemed exotic to me, and despite Wayne’s Ukrainian last name, he seemed a natural part of that wild world he now helped to protect.

  The tables at the library were arranged in the shape of a horseshoe, with everyone sitting on the outside looking into the centre. Wayne’s table was on one side of the U and I saw my place name set on a table on the other side—directly opposite, so that, sitting in our respective spots, we’d be facing each other from across the room. I stood in the centre, my back to Wayne, arranging my table display of one thin volume of poetry and several copies of an issue of BC Bookworld that included a short review of my book. Feeling the presence of someone behind me, I turned around. He looked a bit older than in the photographs I’d seen, but I recognized him. “You must be Wayne Sawchuk.”

  “And you’re Donna Kane.”

  His handshake matched mine. As I remember it now, at that moment we lit up, standing together inside the U, having an introductory chat that went on for quite a while, soon becoming banter and possibly flirtation. When I look back on it, I think of those other authors, Betty and Walter and the rest of them, how they witnessed a moment of chance that would set off an impassioned fuse of destruction—the instant in which our lives changed. Was it visible?

  I bought a copy of Wayne’s book. He bought a copy of mine. He offered to show me some photos from his summer expedition in the Rockies. We knew nothing about each other, but we both felt compelled to follow up with a ridiculous flurry of emails. He sent the first one. Why is this still so important to me?

  Before I told my husband and before Wayne told his partner, Wayne came to me and got down on his knees and said, “You’re the first woman I’ve said I loved and really meant it.” The speed of our coming together meant we had no song, no symbols or objects that would serve as reminders of first dates or anniversaries of when we met. After that first handshake, the rest became a blur, our bodies moving while our minds raced to keep up.

  Three

  First Summer on the Trail

  Wayne is dressed and out of the tent before I’ve managed to open my eyes. One of the guests has already lit the campfire and set a kettle of water on the grill. Others are rummaging through panniers asking for the oatmeal, and a delighted voice cries out, “Oh look, here it is!”

  It’s six in the morning. How can they be so chipper? As Wayne walks toward the group, I listen for his greeting, each morning the same, filled with the kind of cheer that inspires optimism, the words lifting then falling—“Good morning, good morning.”

  It’s not easy for me to jump into these early conversations, so I stay inside to pack up our sleeping bags and air mattresses while Wayne helps with breakfast and brings me a cup of strong coffee.

  During one of these breakfast chats, I hear one of the guests tell Wayne he’s been married forty-two years.

  “These days,” the man says, “when people vow, ‘till death do us part,’ what they really mean is, ‘until we get bored.’”

  Was that what happened with my twenty-five-year marriage? I press my knees into the mattress, focusing hard on the wheeze of expelled air.

  By the time I have taken down the tent, eaten my oatmeal and washed the Melmac dishes in a plastic tub, Wayne has collected the halters and is ready to find the horses.

  We hike off together, leaving the rest of the crew—Michael, a retired bureaucrat, his friend and former colleague Liz, who works to protect the burrowing owl, and Shirley, a young student from Montreal—to put away the cooking gear and wrap sleeping bags and tents inside canvas tarps, turning them into soft packs for the horses to carry.

  At the start of my twenty-five-year marriage, I took my husband’s last name. When the marriage ended, I went to the government office and filled out the form to get my birth name back: Donna Haight. With the ink still fresh from my reclaimed signature, I walked back to my car. I felt light-headed. I drove to the house I now shared with Wayne, pulled into the driveway and shut off the engine. I sat there, taking a moment to let it sink in. I picked up the yellow form from the passenger seat, unfolded it and stared hard at my signature. My handwriting had changed so much since the last time I’d written my birth name. Maybe it was the calligraphy classes I’d taken, something I’d done before my kids were in school, before I’d gone back to college, before I studied visual arts, before I turned to writing. I looked again at my signature. Who was Donna Haight?

  I had been Donna Kane for more years than I had been that other woman. “Donna Kane!” Emilie’s granddaughter said, whenever she saw me. “Donna Kane,” the receptionist said, when I arrived at work. Over time, my first and last name had become one, the two words seeming to fit together in rhythm and sound. For me, hearing my full name spoken made me feel more solidly a part of the world. Hearing my full name spoken gave me comfort. Donna Haight was someone I no longer knew.

  I started the car and returned to the government office and asked to have my name changed back to Kane. The woman who had helped before was still behind the counter. She must have seen it all. She shrugged and gave a little smile. “Not a problem,” she said. “No big deal.”

  I may have left a major part of my life behind, but the experiences of that past will continue to be a part of who I am.

  My halter slung over my shoulder, I follow Wayne. The horses are herd-bound, so haltering a few of the lead horses is usually enough to convince the rest to follow us back to camp. This year there are seventeen in all: seven for riding, nine for packing, and a spare, in case a horse is injured and needs a day off. Bringing them back to camp
can be exciting if the horses are far away and you have to ride your horse bareback. Their hobbles, loops of rope tied around their forelegs to slow their travel in the night, are now removed, leaving the horses fancy-free, frisky from a night of rest and food and working each other into a frenzy as they tussle for a position in line.

  For three months of the year, this is the horses’ life. Each day they carry their riders or soft packs or bright orange panniers filled with tins of fish and bags of rice over the mountain passes of the northern Rockies, descending into boreal forest, along swamps and sand flats, across creeks and rivers, to finally arrive at camp, where they are unpacked, hobbled and let go for the night. In the morning, we find them where the grass suits them best or where Hazel, the alpha of the herd, has had a mind to go. For three months of each year, it is Wayne’s life too.

  Some of the people who join Wayne on his expeditions are already familiar with the outdoors, while others have never experienced wilderness and this is their chance. Some want to become more aware of the Muskwa–Kechika, others are simply curious to see what it will be like, for them, to be in wilderness. It’s not advertised as such, but many of the people who sign up for Wayne’s expeditions are looking for something. Adventure, sure, but many come to reflect on where their life is at, or, more precisely, to have second thoughts about where their life is at. Being in a place disconnected from any communication with the regular world, standing on the top of a mountain pass, looking as far as you can and seeing no sign of human intervention, clears your head, shows you what’s important. Tells you what’s not. Last summer, one of the folks came off the trail, went home, quit his job, left his girlfriend, and last I heard he’d moved into a cabin north of Pemberton.