Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  He came out of the tent, coughing in the smoky air. The wind was gusting out of the southeast, pushing the fire straight in our direction.

  “Now what do you intend to do?” I said angrily.

  “I intend to get out of this place and up into the mountains before that fire gets here. It’ll be light enough to travel in half an hour. Get the tent and gear in the canoe while I boil up water. We’ll have a quick mug of tea and get the hell out of here.”

  As soon as we could see a few feet in front of our faces we set off, tracking the canoe up yet another rapids by the tow ropes, feeling for our footing beneath the rushing dark water. The shock of that first icy immersion of the day was something I had never grown accustomed to, but today I hardly noticed. The advancing flames frightened me far more than the narrow-gauged gorge at the height of the flood.

  The sun was a lurid scarlet disk through the smoky air. A glaring incandescence had seeped out across the entire southern and eastern horizons. By mid-morning the fire was only a few miles away.

  Suspended in the haze ahead of us hung a good-sized lake. I hoped against hope that this was no illusion, though I well remembered Mr. Donny Snowball’s horror story about the prospectors who took refuge on an island only to burn to a crisp when the inferno jumped out to them.

  The fire appeared to be less than a mile behind us when we reached the lake, which to our great good fortune turned out to be a real lake, not a mirage. We rushed the canoe into the water and began to paddle frantically. The wind was fiery hot on our necks and backs. Flakes of fire as large as the palms of our hands spiraled down onto the surface all around us. Several fell into the canoe and we had to beat them out with our paddles. Waves kept creeping over the stem and spilling into my grandfather’s lap. Soon the bottom of the canoe under our feet was awash, but there was no time to stop and bail. Suddenly dozens of closely-spaced explosions went off behind us. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the fire had reached a belt of pitch-soaked young trees on the southern margin of the lake, which were detonating like fireworks.

  “Paddle!” my grandfather shouted.

  Outside our tent, the wind howled like the northbound freight to Canada at home in Kingdom County. We were camped partway up No Name Mountain, where, just hours after escaping the wildfire, we’d been overtaken by one of the fierce August blizzards Donny Snowball had warned us about. We’d just had time to lash the canoe to the base of a jagged boulder, throw up the tent, weight it down with rocks, and get into our sleeping bags before total darkness and the full strength of the storm descended on us simultaneously. Inside with us were our snowshoes and the grub box containing Mira’s remains. Everything else was beneath the canoe, itself no doubt already buried under many inches of snow.

  For some time we were both silent. But just when I was sure he’d fallen asleep, my grandfather spoke.

  “There were things between us, Austen. There were things between this girl and myself that come between a man and woman just once in a lifetime. For one thing, we thought a great deal alike. We always picked the same spots to stop and fish. We set traps the same places. Admired the same prospects when we were on the move. I didn’t know any of her lingo at first. But more than half the time I understood what she was about to say before she said it and she seemed to read my thoughts, too. Some days when we were tracking up the river, or snowshoeing a trap line in the winter, we’d go along for hours on end without speaking. But that didn’t seem to matter. One always seemed to know what the other was thinking. Look off in a new direction we wanted to explore, or at a likely place to camp for the night, look at each other, and nod.”

  My grandfather paused. Outside, the wind continued to howl. I didn’t say a word. “We were never married, of course. We met in the fall of the year when I was on my way back down the Rivière de la Mort with the survey party. There wasn’t any way to be married out in the bush like that. I suppose we eventually would have gone out to Chimo or Nain or somewhere and gotten hitched up by a missionary. At the time, what did it matter? As far as she and I were concerned, we were man and wife. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you would,” my grandfather said, to my gratification. “So you won’t be too surprised to hear that when winter came, she was pregnant. That was fine with her and with me. But in the summer, when the time came for her to have the baby, it all went wrong. Why, I don’t know. A strong young woman like her, who could run thirty miles a day on snowshoes, paddle a canoe like a man, Viking blood in her veins for all I knew. It just didn’t turn out right, wasn’t meant to be, I guess, and not a goddamn Christly thing her mother or her father or I could do about it. The baby was born dead and a day later she died. And she never made a sound or spoke more than one word. Not when the baby was born or when she went. She just looked off at that ridge where I buried her, and I looked at her and nodded to show I understood, and then she said the name she’d taken to calling me. That and no more, and then she went. Quick. Before I quite knew what had happened. Just like that.

  “It was a boy, Austen. A boy baby. I buried them together, up where she’d looked off at, where we liked to go together to look out at the country and see the mirages she was named for. Then I set out in a canoe and came home to Vermont. A few months later I married your grandmother. That’s all. That’s where the story ends.”

  “Did Gram know anything about all this? About Mira and the baby?”

  “She knew everything about it. Until now, she was the only one I ever told about it.”

  “And she wasn’t mad?”

  “Of course she was mad. She was mad about everything I did before I met her as well as after. But I’ll tell you one thing about your grandmother and me, Austen. We abided each other. We agreed on very little. And she wasn’t Mira, not by a long shot, and I reckon I wasn’t the fella she thought I was the day she first clapped eyes on me, riding that log down the Horserace on the Upper Connecticut. But your old grandmother and I abided each other for nearly fifty years and that’s more than a lot of married folks can say, and now that’s the end of all of this. In the morning, or whenever this storm blows over, we’ll bury them up on the top of this mountain, where they can look off at the Barrens and be content. Then it’ll all be over with, and you and I will both go ahead with our affairs. Now, good night.”

  But I couldn’t let it rest there. I just couldn’t.

  “Gramp?”

  He said nothing, so I nudged him. “Gramp? What was it Mira called you? What was the name she gave you? The one she said just before she . . . went?”

  He heard me. He wasn’t sleeping yet, and I knew he heard me. But for a long time he said nothing. Then when I had almost drifted off myself he made that hoarse click in his throat and said, “I could never get my tongue around the word in Beothuk, Austen. But as nearly as I could figure, it meant something like ‘The Fella Who Never Smiles Except When He Looks at Me.’”

  Even before I came fully awake, I knew that something about the world was different. An instant later I realized that the wind was no longer blowing. Outside, the August sun was shining brightly. My grandfather had already dug the canoe out of an eight-foot drift, and the sunshine on the two feet of new snow was dazzling to look at. The dark green canoe looked incongruous against the white mountainside.

  Ten minutes later we had taken down the tent and were hauling the loaded canoe up the slope by its tow ropes. The snow was already melting fast; it stuck to the bottom of the canoe and to our snowshoes. Every dozen steps we had to scrape it off with the paddles, but soon we reached the crest of the mountain, where most of the snow had blown away in the big wind the night before.

  From the top of No Name, the view was spectacular in all directions. Off to the south, the terrain we had fought through flood and fire to traverse looked as peaceful as a summer calendar scene. Beyond us to the north, the Snow Chain range dog-legged sharply east to form the Great Lost Corner. To the west lay the fabled Barrens, where the waterway
s drained north into Ungava Bay. No Name Lake, a huge body of water many miles long, gleamed invitingly in the sunshine.

  “Is it about the way you remembered it?” I asked.

  “No,” my grandfather said. “It’s exactly the way I remembered it. Now help me find our last survey benchmark, Austen. If I remember correctly, it ought to be right here, someplace.”

  My grandfather scraped some moss off a massive rectangular rock. Sure enough, there was the old brass plate, screwed tightly into the granite. The weathered inscription read: 1910 ROYAL CANADIAN SURVEY EXPEDITION. UNGAVA-LABRADOR BOUNDARY. ELEVATION + − 2,134.

  “I doubt anyone’s laid eyes on this marker since we set it here half a century ago, Austen.” My grandfather looked around again at the magnificent view. “This is as good a place as any I know of to put them to rest. That inland sea won’t reach up here, I reckon. And it’s a lovely prospect of the Barrens out there to the west. She and I had planned to go over there with the baby at the end of the summer, maybe spend part of the winter trapping that country.”

  “I’ll help you, Gramp.”

  My grandfather shook his head. “I’ll manage. You head in the direction of that big lake with the canoe. I’ll catch up with you before you run out of snow.”

  “Gramp—”

  He held up one mittened hand. “I’ll tend to matters here myself. This is between them and me, Austen.”

  With no further talk, I left him with the shovel and the canvas sack containing the bones and trudged down the west slope of the mountain, hauling the canoe behind me like a great green toboggan. Soon I came to a crease in the mountainside full of rushing snow runoff. At the foot of the mountain it widened into a negotiable stream leading out through the Barrens toward No Name Lake; and here, on the fringe of the snow line, I waited for my grandfather to finish the job he had begun fifty years ago.

  That night we camped partway down the stream to No Name Lake. We’d paddled almost until dusk, since the bush pilot out of Schefferville was scheduled to pick us up at the north end of the lake just five days later. The following morning we canoed out to the big body of water and started up toward our rendezvous point. We camped three nights on the shores of No Name, each time where wild-looking streams poured in from the west. For three days we paddled up the huge lake through the Barrens, which were both bleaker and lovelier than any of the country we’d traveled through yet. This was a terrain of violently-folded parallel ridges, long eskers, numberless rocks, moss of every imaginable bright color, riotously gorgeous sunsets and trout more brilliant still. There was no sign that anyone had ever been here before us. It was a land of bare granite, icy water, and wide vistas, and it filled me with a deep awe. At the same time, my grandfather seemed much more himself again, taking an hour in the evenings to fish, joking with me in his harsh way—“You might yet turn out to be a good fella to go down the river with, Austen”—and looking around and appearing to enjoy the country for the ruggedly beautiful place it was.

  Midway through our fourth morning on the lake, I heard the steady hush of distant rapids. The mirage of No Name’s outlet lifted into sight, high over the north end of the lake. Soon the river itself materialized. At its exit from the lake, it was divided by a good-sized island thickly forested with spruce, though most of the surrounding terrain was treeless.

  As we made for the island between the split rapids, I said over my shoulder to my grandfather, “How far are we from other people? A hundred miles? Two hundred?”

  He shook his head. “About half a mile.”

  Thinking I must have misheard him, I turned back around to see a lone man standing at the edge of the woods on the island, where a moment ago there had been no one. His hand was raised in greeting, and behind him in a clearing in the spruce trees I spotted a small trapper’s cabin, resembling my grandfather’s camp at home in Lost Nation. The cabin was so new the peeled logs still shone with fresh sap. For seventy-five days I had seen not one other person besides my grandfather. Now I could scarcely have been more astonished by an apparition.

  But no apparition could have duplicated the lugubrious, ironical expression of Mr. Donny Snowball as he waded out into the lake to help pull the canoe to shore. “Good to see you boys,” he said in the most sorrowful voice imaginable. He handed a wooden box to my grandfather. “Here, I bought you some cigars. White Owls. Then I thought I’d have to smoke them all myself. When you didn’t show up last week, I thought you’d drowned, down on the Rivière de la Mort. Or burned up in the wildfire. I saw a lot of smoke over across the mountains a few days ago, figured I’d have to go dispose of your charred remains.”

  “This must be quite a setback for you,” my grandfather said, getting out of the canoe and stretching with his hands in the small of his back. “You seem to have been greatly looking forward to disposing of our remains.”

  Mr. Snowball gave me a wan smile. “Your grandfather has a pretty good sense of humor,” he said. “We ought to get along fine up here, him and me. I’ve got a sense of humor too.”

  To Gramp he said, “Did you find the old chief’s camp you told me about on the train?”

  “We did,” Gramp said. “And very nearly killed ourselves a dozen times over coming up that godforsaken river. They can flood it off the face of the earth now so far as we’re concerned. Right, Austen?”

  I nodded, remembering the night in the gorge, the towering flames from the forest fire.

  “Is that your cabin?” I asked Donny.

  “Mine and your grandfather’s,” he said. “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “That we’re going partners on a trapline up here.”

  I whirled around and stared at my grandfather, who just turned to Mr. Snowball and said casually, “The fur sign looked good on our way up the lake. The pilot find it all right?”

  Mr. Snowball nodded. “No problem. That map you drew me and him was right on the money. But I don’t think anyone’s ever been here before us. All kinds of animal sign. Otter. White wolf. Marten. Some wolverine. We ought to do all right if we don’t go through the ice and drown. An American fella named Brewer went up to the English River to trap back four, five winters ago—”

  “Tell us about Brewer later,” my grandfather said. “The plane’s due in to pick up Austen tomorrow, and he wants to go fishing now.”

  “Down off the bottom tip of the island,” Mr. Snowball said sadly. “Best I’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s a shame,” my grandfather said. “Unlimber your fly rod, Austen. You and I are going brook trout fishing.”

  I was stunned by my grandfather’s disclosure that he planned to stay on in the Barrens with Mr. Snowball. He refused to discuss the matter, however, until we’d had our trout fishing, which turned out to be the finest afternoon and evening of fishing I have ever experienced, before or since. Brook trout weighing up to six pounds were congregated in enormous numbers in the rapids and the gravel riffles off the foot of the island, and over the next several hours my grandfather and Donny Snowball and I caught and released hundreds. At last the trout wore me out. My casting arm ached from playing them, and as the sun lowered over the Barren Lands in a great wash of crimson and gold, I sat down on a boulder beside Mr. Snowball.

  After a while he motioned toward my grandfather, who was still fishing, and, in the gathering dusk, had seemed to become more and more a part of the river and the wilderness.

  “He belongs up here, eh?” Donny Snowball said.

  “You don’t think he’ll fall through the ice and drown? Or burn up in a forest fire?”

  “Oh, maybe. Very possibly, in fact. But he belongs here anyway. I don’t know why he ever left the first time.”

  “I do,” I said, and Mr. Snowball looked at me curiously but didn’t say anything else and neither did I. My grandfather could tell him about Mira in his own time, or not tell him. I wasn’t about to breathe a word of what I knew.

  We kept just three medium-sized trout to eat that night,
and after we’d finished them and Mr. Snowball had gone inside the new cabin to go to bed, my grandfather and I had a final mug of tea together while he smoked one of Mr. Snowball’s cigars. I had not asked him anything else about his decision to stay in Labrador. But there wasn’t much time left. The plane taking me out would be here in the morning.

  Although we’d had a spell of Indian summer after the big blizzard on No Name Mountain, the late-August evenings had turned very chilly. My grandfather threw another chunk of spruce on the fire. Then he rummaged in the old wooden grub box for his pocketbook, from which he handed me three hundred dollars.

  “Your summer wages,” he said.

  Next he handed me a carbon copy of a typed document. By the firelight I saw that it was the deed to the Farm in Lost Nation, signed over to his four children. Attached was a separate, shorter document deeding his hunting camp, Labrador, to me. “The taxes on everything are paid for the next four years, Austen. Zack Barrows has a copy of the deeds in his office. I mailed your father and Rob and your aunts theirs the day before we left to come North.”

  I looked at my grandfather in the firelight, and his face seemed at repose. I thought of Mr. Snowball’s observation. “He belongs up here.” And although I knew that Donny Snowball was right, I could not seem to reconcile myself to the idea.

  “So you really aren’t coming back?”

  “No,” Gramp said. “There’s nothing to go back to.”

  “Who’s going to farm the place? Who’s going to farm the Farm in Lost Nation?”

  My grandfather made that rasping click in his throat. “There isn’t any more Farm in Lost Nation, Austen. There hasn’t been since I quit shipping milk. It was just barely a farm for years before that. The sawmill’s played out too. There aren’t ten acres of usable timber left on the entire place.”