by Donna Kane
Autumn was not far off. It was, in fact, making a bigger presence each day. The leaves of the buckbrush, the poplar, the Labrador tea, had started to shut off their chlorophyll, closing up shop. The bearberry plant was so red it seemed lit from within. The speckles of brown on the orange and red leaves of the dwarf birch were like chips of blown glass in the afternoon sun.
During a rest day at Bevin Lake, a kilometre west of the Rocky Mountain divide, Wayne decided to put a halter on Chrissie. He rummaged through the orange panniers and unearthed a small, yellow headstall from beneath the horse bells and nose baskets, chunks of leather and rope. To put the halter on Chrissie meant bringing the whole pack string into camp. Herd-bound, all horses move as one.
The horses were spending their rest day grazing on the hills that sloped into Bevin Lake. We were camped a short distance away, beside a creek that had startled me when we’d first arrived, the water a deep turquoise, the boulders it tumbled over coated white by a mineral that seeped from the rock glacier above. The creek looked Caribbean, as if I might see a cabana along the shore attended by someone in flowery shorts selling margaritas.
When we reached the lake, the water’s translucent green reflected the puffs of cumulus clouds, the surrounding landscape and the horses. Most had their necks bent down, their noses in the grass. I admired the way they scanned the plants with their velvety muzzles, their lips brushing each stalk and blossom, sensing by smell or perhaps by feel the difference in texture and weight between the lupines, which they liked, and the cow parsnip, which they did not, selecting goose grass and bluebells with the speed and dexterity of rummage sale shoppers.
When we reached the herd, we removed their hobbles. The first time I had watched a horse being restrained in this way, I was appalled. With the horse’s front legs bound a few inches apart, the hobbles looked like a medieval torture device. Wayne uses a twist hobble, a length of soft rope that is tied around a front leg then twisted around itself (three times is best) before being tied to the other leg. It seemed hard to imagine how a horse would be comfortable in such a contraption, let alone able to move. But a hobbled horse can travel up a mountain pass and down the other side in a single night while the humans are sleeping. If a moose ambles into the fray, a horse can forgo its leisurely gunny-sack hop and bound like a rabbit with impressive speed.
We freed the horses of their legholds, then haltered a few to lead back to camp, knowing the rest would follow. Once at camp, we kept the horses tied up while Wayne made a makeshift corral by stringing a length of rope around a circle of trees. He led Ulla inside the circle and Chrissie followed. Chrissie wasn’t convinced that a halter was anything she wanted or needed, but eventually Wayne was able to slip it on her. I videotaped the event, and when we watched it later, we could see Chrissie, skittish and wary, while Ulla stood quietly to the side, seemingly undisturbed.
With Chrissie sporting her new halter, we untied the rest of the horses and put their hobbles back on. Hobbles are synonymous with eating, so the horses are eager to be back in them. Ulla, however, kicked at her stomach and began to roll. It was unusual for a horse not to follow the others. While horses will often roll after a day’s work, rubbing away the salt and sweat from the weight of their packs, on that day Ulla’s behaviour was different. Wayne removed her hobbles so she could move around more easily, then watched in his calm yet considered way as she dawdled and fretted.
Wayne carries a few veterinary supplies—salve for cuts or sores, a tube of bute in case a horse is in pain—but a horse who requires a vet is out of luck. A hundred miles from the nearest road, at the foot of the Rocky Mountain divide where water splits in two, flows east and west, near a lake too small for a float plane to land, there is no easy way out.
By evening Ulla and Chrissie had moved closer to the other horses, and though Ulla still seemed uncomfortable, she didn’t seem worse. We hoped that whatever was bothering her would pass like a bad case of heartburn. Perhaps a bit of larkspur, a plant thought to be poisonous to horses, had been wrapped up with a lupine and she’d swallowed it in haste. Our group was quieter that evening, everyone retreating to their tents early, as if that might make the morning, and with it a recovered Ulla, come more quickly.
When Chrissie whinnied into camp, her voice entered my sleep the way frost feathers a pane of glass. A shiver pinpricking its way into whatever dream I was having inside a tent that blocked the light from the moon and stars. In those first few minutes of waking, it was so dark that I couldn’t make out the shape of my body. I couldn’t make out the shape of Wayne’s. Chrissie whinnied again, and this time my stomach gave a little flip.
Wayne groped for his headlamp, turned it on and looked at his watch—3:00 a.m. He pulled on his pants and shirt and unzipped the tent door.
“Should I come with you?” I asked.
“No, I’ll check things out and let you know.”
I was relieved. It was cold. I was tired. I still felt useless when it came to the horses.
I could hear Wayne talking to Chrissie in his calm, reassuring voice: “Hey Chrissie, how are you doing? Where’s your Mom? I don’t see your Mom.”
As his footsteps faded from camp, I pulled the sleeping bag tight. The warmth from Wayne’s body was quickly dissipating in the chilled air. I lay with my sleeping bag drawn tight around me, Wayne and Chrissie invisible weights in the night. I fell back into a light sleep but woke when I heard Wayne’s footsteps returning to the tent. He slipped back inside.
“No sign of Ulla. We’ll have to wait until morning.”
We lay beside each other with only the sound of the creek rushing by.
“It’s a beautiful night,” Wayne said. “The stars are glittering away.”
In the morning a skim of ice had formed in the water pail. The sky was clear, the air bright and crisp. After coffee and oatmeal, Wayne began to sort through the bridles, getting ready to find the horses and to look for Ulla. For most of the past two weeks, it had been me or Michael, a seasoned guest who returned each year to spend time on the trail, who accompanied Wayne on these morning treks, the rest of the group staying behind to pack up. But that morning, everyone wanted to go. Including me. It was like knowing there was a traffic accident ahead. Instead of avoiding the crash site, everyone wanted to change their course to ensure they’d pass by. But with every guest determined to go, I offered to stay and pack up. Armed with cameras and bridles, the group headed off. Maybe Ulla had caught her leg between some rocks or was in some other form of distress and every hand would be needed. Chrissie had left Ulla in the night and returned to our camp. If Chrissie was no longer in Ulla’s care, it followed that Ulla must have been unable to care for Chrissie.
I washed the dishes, put the grills and pots in their respective storage bags, packed them into the panniers, made lunch for the trail, took down the tent and doused the fire, retrieving bits of unburned material. Close to being finished, it occurred to me that if Ulla were alive but in need of convalescence, everything I’d packed up would have to be undone. Resentment took hold, not of the trail but of what it took to be on the trail. And maybe not even what it took to be on the trail, but at how inept I was. Wayne had moved through each task for so many years he no longer thought about it, but for me, everything was a struggle. There was a precise order to the way each chore was done. While I understood the necessity for this—how the many moving parts of a pack string needed to stay intact, that it was part of what ensured our overall safety—it irked me. Had I, in some crazy twist of fate, ended a quarter-century marriage for a relationship in which I had less autonomy than before?
Nothing in my past life seemed to serve me here. Never would I have signed up for such a trip in my former life. I was comfortable in the outdoors, but hiking along the river didn’t require the same set of skills needed to be part of a pack string. And it seemed to me that everyone who came on the trail was maddeningly confident, believing in themselves in
a way I did not, carrying out each task in a state of perpetual good cheer. I could see how they loved not just the wilderness but their bodies in it. There was a healthy pride in their abilities, one that didn’t make them defensive or churlish when they did something wrong. How happy they were, recounting their adventures around the fire at night or bent down at Wayne’s tent, offering him a cup of coffee, saying that if only they didn’t have to return to their jobs they would stay on the trail forever.
As I marched around the camp I thought, It would be easier if Ulla were dead. The thought was terrible and selfish, but for an instant it came, and then it was gone.
When the group returned, I could see Wayne in the lead, riding Bonus. He had a grim look on his face.
“Ulla’s dead.”
I listened, camp flunky, overseer of the Melmac cups, as everyone described Ulla, gibbous in the lake. She must have walked into the water for relief, Wayne said, and then drowned. She was found floating on her side, coasting on her reflection. An equine Ophelia, her mane fanning out on the water, the sun silvering her hair. I should have seen it, they kept telling me: it was tragic, but strangely beautiful. They seemed to bristle with the tragedy but also with the privilege of having witnessed something new. I stared at Wayne, busy packing up the horses, moving forward. Something in his being kept him from getting emotional.
“Didn’t it bother you?” I asked him some days later.
“Of course, but you can’t let emotions steer the ship. Your survival depends on having a practical response. What I thought was, Well, it’s a sad thing, now we have a foal to deal with, what’s going to happen to her, who’s going to take Ulla’s saddle. There were practical issues to deal with, a limited set of options, and emotions aren’t one of them. If a moose charges you,” Wayne continued, “screaming isn’t going to help. You’d better find the nearest tree.”
We packed up the horses and headed up Bevin Pass. As we led them up the scree, a thick chamber of cloud filled the valley below. Like whipped cream being piped from an icing gun, a venturi effect formed where the moist and constricted air of the valley met the colder winds sweeping down the hill. A seraph, a tribute, and beyond it we could now see the lake, though Ulla was too small to make out.
“My good horse Ulla,” Wayne said, as we looked down at the speck of blue. “It wasn’t common, the way the wind coasted her around the lake. It was so out of context for a horse.”
I thought of how out of context I had been all summer, how difficult it had been to connect with my surroundings, to embrace the horses, to feel I fit in with the other guests. It had made me self-absorbed. I felt a pang of shame.
Chrissie followed the other horses and their riders up the pass, Wayne in the lead. How quickly Chrissie stopped whinnying, her mind focused now on not being left behind. Had she watched Ulla floating on the lake as if she were nothing but a dewdrop on a lupine leaf? I thought of Ulla, how the wind would eventually drift her to shore. No longer Chrissie’s mom, she would become carrion to ravens, bears and wolves. She would bloat. Finally, she would be nothing but bone. The nails in her horseshoes would loosen and the shoes would slip from her shrunken hooves; if the hooves were still in the water, the horseshoes might clink together as they sank, silver and U-shaped, flipping end over end as they fell to the bottom.
Ulla had been, the others kept repeating, something to see, her body luminescent, bathed as she was in an otherworldly light.
Six
Tracks
At the top of Bevin Pass, all of us—the dog, the horses and the riders who have led the horses up the sharp incline—stop to catch our breath. I am sweating from the exertion of the climb and from the heat of the morning sun burning through the alpine air, but my bones still throb from the keen wind of the valley floor now two thousand feet below. Like a Baked Alaska, those fancy ice cream desserts that are oven-cooked, my body is simultaneously engaged in two very different temperatures, the cold from the past and the heat from the present.
I listen to my breath expending itself on a mountain pass—breath from the same body still chilled from the valley; breath from the same body that once moved through the Peace River farmland where I grew up and raised my children, a place where I’d walk through a grove of poplar and willow trees along a path that led to my parents’ yard, testing the season through the timothy that grew along the trail. In spring, I would pull on the stalks and they would unsleeve, thin pipings whose ends would be dark and flush with sap, sweet in my mouth. By fall, I’d pull on the stalks and the once green, dense heads would have bleached and dried. For an instant, before dissembling into a heap of minuscule seeds, the timothy head would keep its shape in my hand. It always seemed that in that moment, when the seed head was pulled from the stalk but stayed whole, I’d come as close to experiencing a liminal state as I ever had, a threshold between past and present. On the scree slope trail of rock debris, I feel the same enlivening sense that in a single moment I can discern two distinct experiences.
I’ve always felt a need to know that threshold, the still point, the seam, the defining thing that holds each change together. As if there were some omniscience to it. Maybe if I experienced that fulcrum, that moment distinct from the things on either side of change, I might know everything there is to know.
On a scree slope, it is not really possible to identify individual tracks. Standing at the top of the pass I look behind me and see a shadow leading up to where I am, a line that continues over the other side, a trail formed by a composite weathering of shale weighed down by the travels of caribou, sheep, bears, and now our group of horses and humans, each in their turn crushing bits of rock, pressing them a little more solidly into the earth. Shadows pool inside the subtle hollow formed from this packing down and that is the track I see—not the individual steps, but an overall movement.
When I think of my own movements, the progression of events that have brought me from birth to the top of this mountain pass, when I try to delineate the different experiences that have propelled me, I can’t. Everything, from the Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist doll that frightened me as a child, to watching my grandma turn strawberries into jam, to swimming in the silty waters of the Kiskatinaw River, listening to Ella Fitzgerald, falling in love, then out of love, watching my son and my daughter grow up and leave home, all bind together into who I am. I can remember individual events. I can say things like, “It was in that moment that Wayne and I shook hands,” but the things that built into that moment of realization are impossible to separate. Maybe, like the shadow that pools in this alpine trail, I have a shadow too. Maybe that’s what awareness is, a shadow that emerges from all my impressions.
Time is another word for drift, for the seamless motion of one thing turning into the next, a stiffening stalk, a subtle shift in colour. To be alive is to be in motion, a constant state of change.
At the crest of Bevin Pass, where the view of the valleys and distant mountain ranges is most exposed, just a few feet off the trail, a collection of stones are arranged in two parallel lines on the ground, the space between just wide enough for a human body to lie horizontally. Tufts of alpine grass and a silting in of dirt have built up around the base of the rocks, but it is still visible, the shale shards jutting up like a school of shark fins, the tips pocked with the crinoline blooms of lichen that ever so slowly grind the rock down. Wayne has known about these rocks for years. He thinks they are artifacts from Indigenous hunters. The assemblage, at first glance, seems inconsequential, something that could easily be missed in the grander geology of the region, but the slabs of shale, propped in a vertical position, each one similar in weight and size and set an equal distance apart, appear too reflective of a human’s patterned purposeful thinking to be coincidental. Too small for a permanent shelter and located on a mountaintop where none of the usual requirements of a camp are available—no trees to block the wind or to provide wood for a fire, no water nearby—Wayne thinks it
may have been the site of a spirit quest. I look at the rocks and have no idea what the assemblage means, but I recognize it as a thought-print.
A footprint communicates the way thought and language do. A single track or footprint is like the subject of a sentence. It represents the animal, place or thing. It tells you who was there. But we need more than a subject to complete a thought. We need a predicate as well, an action taken. For tracks to constitute movement, one foot has to make contact twice. If the animal is a biped, three tracks are needed; if a quadruped, five. Now you have a subject and a predicate, a complete thought, a full sentence, a “trackway.” Movement and meaning emerge. A trackway will tell you the distance between footsteps. If you have that, you can calculate speed and size of the animal, plus direction of travel, and sometimes, if the track pattern changes, it will tell you whether the animal was moving at a walk, trot, lope or gallop. Whoever positioned the rocks at the top of Bevin Pass in their patterned sequence of shape and size was communicating something too. The tracks they left behind hold the thought-prints of their mind.
When I am on the trail I spend so much time tripping on rocks, using the wrong side of the switchblade, struggling with knots and buckles, that I hardly trust myself. This assemblage of rocks calms me. In their patterned placement, the rocks seem to be saying, Come now, aren’t there some things that you still recognize, some things you still know? Count these rocks. Doesn’t one plus one still equal two? Look at their arrangement, doesn’t a rectangle still have the same shape?
The rocks also tell me that another human body looked from the edge of the peak of Bevin Pass, looked across at the mountain ranges just as I am looking now. This particular piece of the planet, still untouched by roads or human industry, is a place where I can gaze as far as possible and, aside from the trail and this arrangement of rocks, not see any evidence of human intervention. Whoever arranged the rocks so many years ago must have seen the same piece of Earth that I see now.