It was the last hunting trip Curtis had been asked to go on. It was just the three of them: Curtis, his sister, and his dad. He was seventeen at the time; she was twelve and twice the shot. They stayed at a cabin somewhere high in the mountains east of Mackenzie and the weather stayed cold the whole week. Cold enough that as they started out each morning the dry leaves on the ground were frost white and his fingers ached in his gloves. There were flurries of light snow that, in the shade, stuck to the ground. The cabin was nothing more than a log shack with a corrugated tin lean-to at the side for storing wood. On the peak above the door hung the bleached skull of a moose, antlers spread open like palms. Inside, a couple of hard bunks and a wood-burning stove, a table, a countertop for preparing food, and an aluminum sink with cold running water from a nearby creek.
His dad woke them up before dawn each morning and they drank sweet, milky coffee around the table, the cabin smelling of gas from the camp stove. Then they headed out on quad bikes, breaking frost over rough trails to a navy-blue lake on a high plateau between several mountain peaks. They held binoculars to their eyes, scanning the rocky cliffs and pale scree faces for billies. On the first day they saw a bunch of deer and scrabbling marmots and at least one fox, but no goats. Erin was disappointed and their dad was impossible to read as usual, but Curtis was relieved. He didn’t like killing things. In his life he had shot a few pheasants and squirrels, which was no big deal, and one deer, which he’d fucked up. He hit it broadside and the poor bastard staggered off into the trees, squawking. His dad ran after it and took aim and put it down. Came back shaking his head. “Never take the shot until it’s right,” he said. “You should know that.”
They didn’t see any goats the second day, or the third, and Erin started to complain. She wanted to shoot something. His dad put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a shake.
“Half the fun is getting so cold and tired your bones hurt. You’ve got to earn your kill. You think the goats are going to advertise themselves?”
“No.”
“Have a little patience.”
“But I’m excited.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Curtis watched them, his sister’s head on their dad’s shoulder, hunters in arms. They walked together to the lake’s edge and skipped stones. Curtis decided that if he had to, he would kill a goat.
It wasn’t until the end of the week that they spotted goats on the mountain. There were four or five of them. A few does, a kid, and a billy. Erin saw them first and passed the binoculars to their dad for approval. He slapped her shoulder, told her she had eagle eyes. They tightened their packs over their shoulders and started to hike up the mountain. Only a few hundred meters up his dad found one of the trails that the goats had broken to the lake, so the going was relatively easy. Steep but clear. They climbed in dense trees for the first two hours and then came out onto scrub and rock, squat pines that grew only to their shoulders. Out of the trees, the wind blew cold and hard. Snow started to fall and then turned to rain. The trail followed rock face and cliff, at some points so narrow and close to the edge that his toes ached with the anticipation of falling. Here, he would have liked to trade the rifle that hung from his shoulder for a bag of weed and his bike. He fell behind the other two, then found them sitting under a rocky outcrop, eating sandwiches and drinking hot chocolate from a steaming thermos. It seemed to him that they stopped talking as soon as he arrived.
From the outcrop, they left the trail and headed diagonally up a steep slope, crashing through old silvered timber and wind-toughened thistle. His dad seemed to know exactly where he was going—how that was possible Curtis didn’t know. They couldn’t see shit, only the slopes ahead, or back across the valley toward the lake. Eventually they came around a bend in the land, and up above, on a rocky, bushy cliff face, were the goats. About three hundred meters up the cliff, one of the does stood eating, and fifty meters above her, the billy was sitting on a rock, possibly asleep. Massive. Big as a bear. Curtis had no idea they could get that big.
“Should we give Erin a pop at him?” his dad whispered, winking at Curtis.
“I guess.” Of course the first shot would be hers.
Erin was bristling. She took off her bag and squinted up at the billy, hands on her hips. Curtis slid the rifle off his shoulder and handed it to his dad. He raised the scope to his eye and pointed the gun up the mountain and stood there not moving. He lowered the gun and looked at Erin.
“It’s too steep to get a good angle. We’ll traverse to higher ground.” He handed her the rifle and she proudly slung it over her shoulder. “Be quiet as you go,” he said, and tossed her bag to Curtis as he turned to follow her up the mountain. The throw was short, and the bag landed at Curtis’s feet. He picked it up and attached it to his own, and then caught up to them as they climbed through crags and shrubs. The wind blew painfully. They stopped at a table of rock where the land leveled out, and again his dad took the rifle and scoped their position.
“This is good,” he said, passing the rifle back to Erin. “Now where are you aiming for?”
“Just at the top of the shoulder, sort of behind it. The heart.”
“Yep. You can’t get him while he’s bedded down like that. Wait for him to stand up and turn a quarter. We’ve got the unfair advantage and we owe it to him to kill him right. No distress or pain.”
“What if I miss?”
“Don’t think that way. Look.” He pointed. “He’s less than a hundred meters away. Imagine it in your head first, and believe it’s going to happen the way you want it to. You’re a hell of a shot.”
“I could still miss.”
“You won’t. But if you do, then we haul ass up there and finish it.” He nodded at Curtis.
Erin got down on her knees and held out her arms for the rifle. Their dad stood a little behind her, watched as she flipped off the safety, brought the gun up to her face. It looked bulky in her arms, almost funny, and Curtis wanted to laugh but didn’t dare. And she held it with confidence; she held it steady. Curtis watched his dad watching Erin, Erin watching the goat. Nobody said anything. The wind blew against his neck, sweaty from the hike, and he shivered. When the billy finally stood, Erin rose up taller and lifted the rifle, secured it in her arms, and then settled into a solid squat. Curtis’s dad watched her go through each step, nodding.
“Bring the scope to your eye,” he whispered. “Don’t lean into it.”
She did this and pointed the barrel up the cliff, her other eye squeezed tight. Curtis stood back, looking from the goat to his sister and back to the goat.
The shot popped cleanly through the air, and almost at the same time a cloud of white dust burst from the rock under the goat’s feet. The billy took off and so did the doe, and another doe came bounding from behind an outcrop, and before Erin had the safety back on, they were all gone.
“That sucked,” she said. A crescent of blood was welling on the inside curve of her right brow.
Curtis pointed at her eye, a smile tripping across his face.
“What?” She touched the cut and then looked at the blood on her fingers.
“You scoped yourself,” he said.
Two days later, their last day on the mountain, they still hadn’t shot anything. They were on the same cliff, at a higher elevation, stalking the same billy. This time Curtis held the scope to his eye and watched the goat through it. The billy stood on a rock two hundred meters above Curtis’s position, the bulk of his body turned stubbornly away. Curtis would kill this animal. He would. Would cut its heart out and eat it, if that’s what it took to belong. The billy stood motionless. Today the sky was blue and there was little wind, and they’d hiked with their shirtsleeves rolled up. The billy turned to the side and Curtis pictured the trajectory of the bullet and he squeezed the trigger, and for a moment after the rifle recoiled into his shoulder he heard nothing. There was a puff of fur and the billy fell onto his back and rolled from the rock, all four legs in the air. He teetered on the precipice of t
he next outcrop down and then dropped and landed on the shelf below, and fell again from that one and gained momentum as his limp body flopped mercilessly down the cliff, dropping farther and farther until it looked as though he was going to fall off the edge of the world. He seemed to come to rest at last but then rolled and fell again, the blood patch from the gunshot wound growing bigger across his fur as his beaten body tumbled. Curtis looked away.
“Great shot,” their dad said, suddenly close and slapping him on the back. “Perfect shot.”
“Lucky shot,” said Erin.
“Come on,” said their dad. He picked up the bags and the rifle. “Let’s go get him. Did you pack your knife?”
Curtis shook his head. “I can’t.”
“You can’t what?”
“Rip his skin off and cut him all up. I don’t want to see it.” Blank eyes like holes, tongue hanging out between worn yellow teeth.
His dad looked confused. “You’ve done this before.”
“Didn’t you see the way he fell?”
“He was already dead. You shot him right.”
“I don’t want to hack at him and rip his guts out. You guys go.”
Now his dad was angry. “That’s not the deal here, Curt. Kill the animal, quarter it in the field, carry the meat home, and eat it. You don’t leave it on the side of the mountain to rot.”
“I wouldn’t want to take the pleasure away from you.”
“We’re going to make sausages,” Erin said.
“Shut up,” said Curtis. He sat down and folded his arms over his bag.
His dad stood over him. “You really going to just sit there?” he said. He waited for an answer, and when none came, he looked out across the valley, chewing on his top lip. “You don’t start something like this unless you’re prepared to finish it.”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.”
“I guess you weren’t.”
13
A fickle wind off Takla Lake blew Tom’s trailer most of the night, and in the early morning he climbed out of sleep on the contrail of a familiar dream: Erin, mother to her own kids. They follow her like ducklings and she waits for them to catch up with her, scrabbling one by one out of shallow green water. And when one of them turns its head, the smallest one at the back of the line, it is Erin, her duck feet webbed and pink and unstable. She slips back into the water and when she emerges she is nubile, a princess. Her period has started and he can’t help her. He turns his face away because he knows she’s bleeding and naked and shows the first small buds of new breasts, and she needs someone to teach her how to manage the blood. He wraps her in a towel and she molds perfectly in his arms. She is weightless, awkward, fragile as an egg. He holds her in the palm of his hand and she is the size of a mango, a plum, a peanut. Shrinking until she falls through his fingers to the floor.
He sat up wearily in his bunk and pulled on his t-shirt, and over that a fleece sweater. He slipped his feet into his jeans, pulled the cold, stiff denim up over his knees. If he had had this dream at home, he would have gone to her room now and listened at the door for the sounds of her sleeping.
Outside the day was bright, and the trill of herons blew across the water like wind through a train trestle. The previous night’s fire smoked weakly from a pile of white ash. Beer bottles lay scattered like teeth around the fire pit, chip bags fluttered low to the ground. At his feet: an empty vodka bottle, half a sandwich, orange peels. Tom stood very still, taking stock of each piece of garbage. Leaving food out was a stupid thing to do; it was negligent. He swore, kicked at the ash, crushing the black embers that still pulsed weakly under its blanket. He picked up the sandwich and stuffed it in one of the chip bags, collected a bottle with each finger. He put all this in one of the secure, bearproof garbage bins at the back of the cook van, letting its heavy lid fall with a boom. He’d had a good time with these people the night before, but he should have said something when he turned in. People needed reminding of details that out in the world amounted to not a lot but here in the bush meant everything.
He wiped his hands on his jeans and stood silently, regarding the camp. A gray wool sweater, heavy and dark with dew, lay curled in the dirt. By the water, the planters’ brightly colored tents dotted the trees at the edge of the clearing, like a handful of dropped candies. For extra protection from the rain they had suspended bright blue tarpaulins over their tents by tying them to the trees. The light wind lifted the tarpaulins quietly, in a rhythm not dissimilar to that of footsteps, or the deep breath of sleep. Because of their day off, most of them wouldn’t wake for hours. But Tom had a long list of things he needed to do. Matt’s crew van was already falling apart, and Tom had to readjust the ground pipe that supplied the showers and fix the pressure. If he managed his day right, there would also be enough time to make the trip to the outpost for a supply of cooking oil and bog paper. He looked across the lake at the mountains, tempted by their peaks. Only two or three hours of good, hard climbing to get to the top.
There was movement in the mess tent, a dry shuffle of cardboard. The flap was open. Maybe it was Nix, setting up for breakfast. But the door to the cook van was closed, the hatch battened down. “Someone in there?” he called.
Something brushed against the inside of the tent. Tom walked slowly to the open flap, his arms testing the way ahead as if he were making his way in the dark. If it was a cornered bear, he would have to go for his rifle. And wouldn’t that, he thought, be a hell of a way for his planters to wake up. A cry—Kak-kak! Kak-kak!—hammered dully against the heavy canvas walls of the tent. A hawk.
Inside the tent, the light through the canvas a yellow haze, Tom moved slowly across the beaten grass. There was a deck of cards on one of the long wooden tables, candles wedged in wine bottles, a few abandoned coffee mugs. More food left out thoughtlessly—an apple core on the ground, a bag of salted nuts sliced open. The animal was injured. A light stroke of blood was feathered across one wall of the tent. A swish and a flap by a stack of boxes at the back. One box fell over and the bird flew up to the tent’s apex and hovered for two flaps of wing, and then glided back down and rested on top of the boxes. It was a goshawk and, judging by its size, a female. Blue gray along her back and the top of her wings, underbelly striped black and white. Her stark, white brow a warning over deep, sunset-orange eyes. Her long tail feathers were bent at wrong angles, as if she had been in a fight.
Tom pulled out a chair and sat, looking up at the bird thoughtfully. The hawk regarded him with superiority, her chest heaving. Her sharp black talons clicked against the cardboard.
“What am I going to do with you, bird?”
He went to the tent flap and opened it wider, called for the bird to come, but it didn’t. He was going to have to catch her, and he needed some kind of protection.
The door to the cook van was locked and Nix had the only key. Tom didn’t know which tent was hers so he picked his way through the blue tarpaulins calling her name softly, tripping and cursing over tree roots and taut ropes. He was only a few meters into the trees when mosquitoes found him. First one, then like rain, countless, indivisible. In his eyes, his nose. Finally he stood in one place and called angrily, “Nix, which tent are you?”
Someone called out, “Fuck off.” Sleeping bags shifted. A snore sputtered and then died midstroke.
A zipper zipped farther into the bush. Nix’s voice croaked echoey through the trees. “Who is that?”
“I need you to open the van. It’s Tom.”
He waited for her by the van door, watching the open flap of the mess tent, hoping the hawk would find its own way out. Nix was wearing the clothes she had been wearing hours before, when he had turned her away at his trailer. Her eyes were sleep-swollen; her short hair was flattened to her head on one side, and he was, unexpectedly, embarrassed to see her.
“What the fuck, Tom? It’s seven thirty in the morning. Day off?”
“I need towels and gloves. The gloves you use for the oven. Have
you got stuff like that?”
She glared at him and put her key in the door. When she came back out she handed him quilted gloves and a handful of rags. “What’s it for?” she asked. She stretched her arms up behind her head and yawned. Her black sweatshirt lifted to reveal a crescent of pale skin at the top of her jeans.
“There’s a hawk in the mess tent. You want to help me get her out?”
“Won’t it just find its own way out?”
“She’s injured.”
“So?”
It was quiet in the tent now, and he thought maybe she had gone until he heard a sucking sound and a whip of air. The bird flew from behind the boxes to a stack of chairs at the far corner, where she seemed to fight with herself. A downy white feather rose up and was carried by a current of air.
“What are you going to do?” Nix asked. She stood by the open flap. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and hugged her arms stubbornly around her small frame.
“I need you to help me corner her.”
“What kind of bird is it again?”
“A hawk. Big one too. Looks like about five pounds.”
“Do they bite?”
“Yup.”
“People?”
“She’s a hunter. She preys on little guys like squirrels and rabbits. Other birds. I’ve heard wolverines too. If she takes a nip at you it’ll hurt, but you’ll live.” He offered her back the gloves.
She came toward him, scowling, and put on the gloves. She feebly kicked her leg at him, catching him on the rear. “I was having a good dream,” she said. “You ruined it.”
“Listen, just come forward with me, really slowly. When we get close, you go that way, make your body as big as you can. I’ll try and grab her.”
As they approached, the hawk seemed to transform herself into stone under the stack of chairs, her body pulsing. Her head was cocked down and at an angle away from them, reminiscent of Curtis when he was a kid, averting his eyes from the attention of some new adult, because, he seemed to believe, if he refused to acknowledge that the person was standing there, that person would no longer exist. Tom crouched low and motioned to Nix to move toward the left side of the stack, blocking the hawk’s exit. Swiftly, the bird opened her body and flew out from under the chairs. A wing whomped past Tom’s face and a talon scraped his right cheekbone. He pressed the thin wet cut. The bird flew erratically above their heads, screaming. She charged at Nix, stopping just above her head, before landing back on the boxes.
The Mountain Can Wait Page 8