Crabbe

by William Bell

  “It took me awhile to fish you out of there, but everything seems to have worked out okay. I think you’d better go back to sleep, now. You’ve had a near miss and you need lots of rest.”

  “But I — ” I wanted to thank her, to say something.

  “We can talk later. There’s lots of time.”

  I didn’t argue because I could hardly keep my eyes open and I felt weak. So, handing her the empty cup I lay back and blanked out immediately.

  When I woke again, I was lying on my back. I imagined I saw a great, blood-coloured bird descending on me, and it terrified me until I realized I was looking up at a nylon fly that moved slowly, bellowed and was lifted rhythmically by the cool wind. I relaxed. My ribs and arm hurt slightly, like an engine throbbing in the background. I could hear the wind whistling in the trees around the campsite and every once in’ a while a crack or pop from the fire that glowed a dozen or so yards away.

  Soon I became aware of breathing near me and realized the woman was asleep right beside me. I looked at her. She faced away from me, curled up. She was fully dressed, boots and all, and had a hat on, one of those knitted toques your mother tries to get you to wear. She slept like that, I assumed, because I was in her sleeping bag.

  Who was she? I wondered. And what in hell was a beautiful woman doing way the hell and gone in the middle of nowhere? Was she alone? It seemed so. She knew what she was doing, unlike me, out here — one look at the campsite told me that. She could find and cook wild food; she knew first aid, did a really professional looking job of fixing me up. And that face. A face that beautiful, you’d think, belonged in a classy drawing room or on the screen.

  I looked at the thick hair that spilled from beneath her hat and thought that truth is stranger than fiction. There lay Crabbe, naked in a sleeping bag in the middle of nowhere, right beside a very attractive woman. Did I create fantasies from those ingredients? No. I rolled over, facing that friendly, comforting fire, and — fell asleep.

  The smell of the fire roused me to a morning already drenched in sunshine. I sat up in the bag (with difficulty), yawned and stretched as much as my ribs and sore arm would allow.

  She was at the fire, frying something that sizzled deliciously and smelled the same, her back to me. Beyond her, a snowy mist hid the water and skirted the edge of the forest. A beautiful scene, peaceful, with no traffic honks and screeches, no Mother screaming at you to get out of bed.

  She turned and spoke in a voice that seemed to fit the scene.

  “How do you feel this morning?”

  “Fine, I guess. Still sore.”

  “Want to try to get up, then?”

  “Not until I get my clothes.”

  She laughed and pulled my togs from a line she had strung between two birch saplings.

  “I got most of the blood out,” she said as she tossed them to me.

  I dressed quickly, finding my boots beside the fire.

  They were dry and toasty. I felt a bit wobbly when I walked, but otherwise my body seemed in decent repair.

  “You’re just in time for grub,” she said, and handed me a tin plate. There were two small fish, fried golden brown, and a chunk of bread that gave off a hot sweet odour that set my juices going. It was all delicious, washed down with strong, hot tea, strange tasting, but good. Later I found out it was Labrador tea she picked herself and dried.

  We ate in silence. When I put down my plate and gulped the last of my second cup of tea, she ordered: “Let’s see that arm.”

  I held it out for her while she untied the bright cloth strips that held the splints in place. Then she asked me to move my arm around, twist my wrist and so on.

  It hurt, but not badly.

  “Good,” she pronounced. “Not broken. I couldn’t tell for sure when you were unconscious.” She changed the dressing on the wound, an ugly slash across my forearm two or three inches above my wrist.

  She poured two more cups of tea from the blackened tin can that served as her teapot. We sat there for awhile, saying nothing, captured by the strange peacefulness of the fire, birdsong, and the wavelets at the shore, a small world under the huge, blue dome of the perfect sky.

  The mist had been burned off by the morning sun, leaving the air clear and still. I looked around the tidy, homey campsite. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on struck me about the place. The two person tent, clotheslines, chopping block, a little lean-to with gear in it — were arranged in a wide semi-circle around the fireplace that was made up of the ring of stones and what I took to be a sort of oven affair also made of stones. We were about twenty yards from the water on a piece of land that rose gently from the bay — a sort of meadow fifty yards deep and thirty wide, carved out of the forest behind and sparsely treed with young white birch and spruce. There was a patch of sandy beach at the water’s edge, but most of the shoreline was flat granite slab.

  The campsite was on a little bay, edged with grasses, almost closed off from the main part of a lake that could be glimpsed through the two granite arms clothed with juniper scrub. Then I saw it: this place would be impossible to find from the main lake. Marsh grass grew across the gap — at this time of year, of course, what I saw was the dead stuff from last year and in the middle of summer it would be much thicker. The bay was like a secret harbour. Coincidence? Or had this strange, skillful woman chosen it for that reason?

  “Now, suppose you tell me how it came about that you tried to shoot Trout Falls in a canoe, backwards.”

  Her words jarred me from my speculations. I said nothing for a minute, torn between the fear of letting my secret out and a sense of obligation to her. The peacefulness of the setting made me feel secure for some reason.

  I figured in the end that I owed her an explanation: she did save my life, after all. But I wouldn’t tell her everything. I started my narrative at Ithaca Camp. And I left out my name.

  The more I talked, the more unbelieving she looked. Occasionally she’d ask me a question and shake her head at the reply, but mostly she just let me talk. She was amazed that I just took off without really knowing where I was going and was totally shocked to learn I couldn’t read a map or use a compass.

  “It’s already clear,” she said almost snapping at me, “that you can’t paddle a canoe.”

  I went on. I got a little miffed when she laughed about the bear attack. (I left out some of the results.)

  “What’s so goddam funny?” I said angrily. “I almost got killed!”

  “Oh, I doubt that. The bear was rolling you around; it was curious to see if you had any more food -or if you were food.” She giggled this time - giggled for god’s sake. “If that old bruin wanted to hurt you, you’d be a mass of claw marks now. You were smart to roll into a ball and lie still.”

  “I wasn’t smart at all. I was terrified and then I fainted.”

  “Yes, I know. It must have been horrible.”

  I searched her face to see if she was making fun of me. Her eyes were serious, sympathetic. “But, you asked for it,” she said.

  “What the hell do you mean?” I shot back, not satisfied with her sympathy.

  “Well, look: it’s spring. Bears have been out of hibernation for only a few weeks. They’re hungry. And it’s around mating season, so they’re also bitchy. And the ones in that neighbourhood are well used to humans. What do you do? Throw peanuts around, spill fish oil all over yourself, and leave candies in your tent. You invited every bear within miles to check you out! All you needed was a sign and an ad on T.V.!”

  She laughed again. So did I. It was pretty stupid of me, come to think of it.

  Then she stood up:

  “Well, enough of this merriment. I’ve got to check the night lines.”

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “It’s a way of fishing without being there.”

  “Can I come?” Although I still felt weak and not really up to going anywhere, I didn’t feel like being alone either.

  “If you like,” she said casually
. She started walking toward the water. There was a little copse of black spruce right at the shore to the left of the beach and from it she lifted a sixteen foot, cedar strip canoe and placed it in the water, neat as you please. This was no weak woman, I’ll tell you. She handed me a paddle. “Put this at your feet. Don’t try to paddle; you’re too weak. In you get.”

  In I got, after she showed me how to do so properly. She shoved off and we headed out of the bay, across the open water then through the marsh grass at the gap. Once out, I turned and looked back toward the campsite. I had been right: the place was invisible.

  We were in a decent sized lake and to the left of us, a river, called the North, entered it. We moved upriver, past the dense spruce forest that marched right to the shore. The deep water reflected the flawless sky.

  And I’ll tell you. That woman could handle a canoe. After twenty minutes of swift, straight progress we got into strong current. The water got shallower and occasionally a menacing boulder stuck a finger into the air. But she just took that boat exactly where she wanted to go.

  The roaring of Trout Falls came upon us suddenly as we rounded a bend. We moved slowly now, but steadily, and finally entered a small pool at the foot of the cascading water. She manoeuvred us toward a little sand beach where the powerful current backed up on itself and left a calm spot. We, me with one arm, pulled the boat up onto the sand.

  The Falls was about twenty yards across the turbulent pool and about eight yards high. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying it was Niagara or anything. And it was quite narrow because of those big boulders up top that squeezed the river thin. But - it’s hard to describe the feeling of naked power and energy it conveyed as the tons of water leapt to crash in a boiling rage onto the black boulders scattered around the base. The woman said that the pool was incredibly deep and a vicious tangle of opposing currents.

  She showed me where she had pulled me out and pointed to what was left of my canoe - a shapeless mass of smashed red fibreglass jammed between two boulders around which angry water boiled and churned. The packs were at the bottom of the pool somewhere.

  I’ll tell you, I stared at that scene with my mouth hanging open for a long time. How on earth had I survived that? I asked her how she had fished me out. Very matter of factly, no bragging, like she was writing a newspaper report, she pointed here and there and described the events, how she had got me out, carried me to this beach, taken me home.

  “It’s a good thing the current is strong,” she said. “It pushed you to a relatively quiet spot of water and I was able to get to you.”

  I thought about it — hard — while she told it, tried to picture the whole thing. She must be incredibly strong, tough and brave, I thought. She risked her life for me. She brought me back into the world. I stared at her in awe.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said, embarrassed, I guess. “It’s no big deal. You’d have done it for me or someone else.” And then she headed toward her night lines.

  No, I wouldn’t, I said to myself. I wouldn’t have done it for anybody. I followed her, ashamed.

  Crabbe’s Journal: 11

  We spent an hour or so checking the lines, removing the fat little speckled trout from the hooks, and resetting them. She had a weight on one end of each line, from which six or eight shorter lines dangled, with a baited hook on each. She’d toss the whole contraption out into the current and tie the free end to a strong stick jammed into the sand. The trick was to set the line in such a way that it didn’t tangle or get swept downstream.

  On the way back to the campsite we made better time, being with the current. I got a good view of the lake from that direction as we left the river mouth, but I couldn’t find the campsite. She could.

  After we got back, she showed me the wonderfully interesting job of gutting the fish. What fun that was, blood and insides all over my hands, surrounded by unhappy looking fish heads and white entrails. Just as I threw all that stuff into the lake and washed the slime and blood off my hands, she served up the “grub” as she called it: bread, tea, and some tiny wild strawberries that tasted wonderful - not like those fat red blobs you get in the supermarket. She called the bread “bannock” and cooked it by packing the heavy dough around a peeled stick, jamming the other end between the fireside rocks and letting the sausage-like thing rest just above the coals. It cooked up steamy and aromatic and delicious.

  After lunch I got her mad at me. She wanted to change the bandage on my arm again and sent me to the lean-to at the edge of the trees to get some clean rags out of a pack while she mixed up more dough for supper. Not having listened too well to her directions, I fumbled with the buckles and straps of the first pack I laid eyes on. I just got the top flap open — it was one of those big canvas packs like I had — when she screamed. I mean, she didn’t just yell; she shrieked like a banshee.

  “Get the hell out of there! What do you think you’re doing?”

  She shot across that clearing like a crazy hornet and slapped my hands away violently, sending spears of pain up the wounded arm.

  “Get away! Don’t you ever go into this pack! Do you hear? Do you?” Her red face was contorted with anger.

  “Y-yes,” I stuttered. “I’m sorry; I...” Stepping backwards, clutching my aching arm, I caught a heel on a root and fell back, squatting heavily on my rear end and driving the air from my lungs with a whoosh. My ribs began to throb as I gasped for breath. I must have groaned.

  Looking over her shoulder at me as she buckled up the pack she said, “I’m sorry,” in a more normal tone. She took the rags from a small duffle bag and said, “Come over to the fire and I’ll redress that arm.”

  She would not look at me as she did so.

  “There’s very private stuff…in that pack. You must promise me you’ll never look into it.”

  She spoke in an embarrassed tone but there was no mistaking the fact that I had to promise. So I did.

  “Sure. Yeah, I promise.” I wouldn’t cross this woman! I’d never survive.

  I spent the next couple of weeks or so not doing much of anything, just lazing around the campsite mostly, doing little, odd jobs for her. I slept a lot. Nightmares visited me once in awhile — bears chasing me over waterfalls of vodka I tried to drink but couldn’t — and I woke up sweating and screaming occasionally. The woman talked to me for a few minutes and I’d fall back asleep. The urge to visit Silent Sam was kind of strong sometimes.

  I would putter around the campsite, trying to learn to make bread and brew decent tea and build a proper cooking fire (you make it small, using softwood for a fast, hot fire for tea; or with hardwood which you let burn down to coals for a hot, long-lasting fire). If I felt spunky, the woman took me up to the Falls or for a long walk into the bush where she checked and set snares on the edge of a swamp for rabbits.

  After I mastered bread and tea and fires, I graduated to the important task of tending the smoke fire. Not a fire that smokes — a fire to smoke meat, to prepare it for storage. She showed me how to cut the head off a trout, slit it open from gills to tail, gut it, take out the gills, then press it flat and lay it on a little rack made of green sticks that leaned over the tiny, smoky fire.

  After a few hours, the fish turned leathery and tasted like — you guessed it — fish and smoke. The rabbit meat was cut into thin strips and draped over the same rack. It took longer to dry to a brittle consistency, dark brown. It tasted like wood. She called it jerky. Because the meat and fish were fully dried, they could be stored for a long time. A neat trick.

  “How come you want to store all this food?” I asked her one day as I was slicing up more rabbit.

  “For the winter. Can’t rely on snares to keep me in grub. I also have to dry some berries and tubers so — ”

  “Winter?” I interrupted. “You’re going to stay all winter?”

  “Stayed last winter.”

  “Jumpin’ jesus!” I exclaimed. One of my favourite expressions, except around my parents, who go to St. James
’ Anglican Church, religiously so to speak. Except most of the religion leaks back out of them before they get home.

  “Which reminds me,” the woman continued, “you’ve been here long enough to begin to trust me, so I think we’d better have a long chat.” And she sat in her I’m­ going-to-relax-pose.

  That was a joke. I was to trust her, but she had taken that pack into the bush and hidden it the day after I’d opened it by mistake.

  “What do you want to talk about?” I said, sitting down, Indian style, across the smoke fire from her.

  “Well, for one thing I don’t know your name. For another, we have to get you back home sooner or later. Not that I don’t enjoy your company; but you can’t stay here forever.”

  “When are you leaving?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. A veil seemed to drop between us as her voice took on a bit of an edge. She tried to hide it, but she was becoming guarded.

  “But when I leave has nothing to do with you.”

  “Why not?” I could play this game, too. “By the way, I don’t know your name either.”

  We danced around like this for awhile. It was kind of amusing really; each circling the other, waiting, hoping the other would go first.

  Finally, she laughed — a rich, friendly laugh that dissolved the barrier of mistrust between us.

  “Alright, alright. You win. My name is Mary Pallas.”

  “I’m Franklin Crabbe. Please call me Crabbe. I hate the other name. Pleased to meet you.” And I reached across the smoke rack, holding out my hand. She took it in a firm, bloody grip.

  “Charmed, I’m sure.” She laughed again. “Come on, Crabbe. I’ll make some tea.”

  So we sat around the fire while a stew simmered in the pot for supper. I told her everything. Why not, I figured. If you can’t trust the woman who saved your life, who can you trust? I meant to hold some back but once I got rolling it all came out — everything — and the longer I talked, the more bitter it got. I knew that. I knew I sounded like a moaner, but it kept coming. Mary, the warm, sun-washed June day, the light breeze off the lake, the savoury aroma of the stew, all worked together to soak out the poison. And everybody got slashed in my narrative, my teachers, my “friends,” especially my parents, especially them. By the time I wound down, I was sobbing. And that’s something because I’ve never cried in front of another human being since I was three.