The conductor talked on so long that he went to fill the mugs again with tea.
There was something in him that wasn’t satisfied living in a town, something — a longing — whose fulfillment could only have come in the bush.
“I feel it when the train stops at some lonely river to let off a trapper and his supplies, or when an Indian family gets off to canoe back to their camp, or when lumberjacks get off at small villages along the rail line on their way to the lumber camps far back in the bush. I’ll never really know what it is like again, to depend on the wilderness to live. The trappings of civilization are too much a part of me.”
The conductor then begged Shane and Theresa for more details of their plans. And he listened again as enthusiastically as he had talked of his own dreams.
III
A while later, Shane and Theresa awoke. It was getting light but the sun hadn’t yet risen. The train was slowing down for Casey. There was an old building on the south side of the tracks that served as a station and warehouse — mostly warehouse because there wasn’t much passenger traffic in the area. Across from that on the north side of the tracks was the little gathering of buildings known as Casey. About fifteen buildings were grouped along the two dirt roads going through the village. The town-site itself was poised between the tracks to the south and the river just to the north.
“Sure you wouldn’t like to stay here?” Shane asked Theresa. “All the comforts of home.”
“No, let’s go on,” she laughed, enjoying being teased. “How far is it yet?”
Shane picked up the map and measured off the distance. “Casey’s about twelve miles from our stop. Look here. There’s an old logging road or something that goes from the tracks up to Lac des Îles. We can carry our things up there if the river from Lac des Îles isn’t deep enough for canoeing.”
The train left Casey and, as it did, the conductor came to the car to tell them to come back to the baggage car and get ready for their stop.
“You know all these plans of yours about building a cabin,” he said slowly and thoughtfully. “Do it. I want to tell you that. Do it. It’s a fine idea and don’t give it up, I wish I were going along.”
The train rolled past a long lake on the south side of the tracks. When it had come nearly to the end of the lake, it slowed and finally stopped.
A trainman opened the door of the boxcar. Shane and Theresa jumped down and then began the long process of taking their things from the boxcar. The trainman and the conductor fed the supplies to the door of the boxcar; Shane and Theresa set them by the side of the tracks. They both struggled with the canoe. When they came to the small wood stove, the trainman jumped down from the boxcar, and the three of them together wrestled the stove to the ground.
They shook hands with the conductor as the train was pulling away, and were left alone in the bright May morning.
Chapter Twenty
I
Shane and Theresa watched the train disappear around the bend. Shane looked at what was going to be their conduit to civilization when they needed it. There were no buildings at the place, just a rundown logging road that, towards the north, would lead them close to Lac des Îles. In either direction along the tracks there would be an early view of the train so that they should have an easy time flagging it down when they needed it. And after the various crews learned that they were in the area, they would keep an eye for them along the tracks.
“There are no flies,” said Theresa. “Must be a little early for them here.”
“Let’s boil the tea pail,” she said as she rested for a moment on their dunnage.
Shane emptied an old coffee can of nails and went down to the creek flowing to the lake where he washed the can clean and filled it with water. Hanging from the cooking stick over the fire, it was not long before it was boiling. He threw in some tea bags.
Theresa opened a tin of canned ham and cut slices that she put on their store-bought bread.
After having eaten, they spent an hour moving the supplies into the woods near the tracks. Packing up the canvas wall tent, food and supplies for immediate needs, they started north to Lac des Îles.
The road was a slight one, the remnant of an earlier, small logging operation. Bordered by stands of spruce, with some birch and poplar, its surface was rough and uneven and would have been a difficult passage for a motor vehicle. Smaller vegetation had nearly covered the former roadway. Shane’s gaze was on the trail only long enough to keep him from stumbling over something. The rest of the time, he looked all around him on both sides of the road, making an inventory of stands for later use. To the right of the old road was the stream that ran from Lac des Îles in the direction of the tracks. Along the stream, and in a small swamp, were cedars large and small. Beyond the cedars on the far side rose a hardwood hill. “Look at the big birch on the hill,” Theresa said. “Maybe there would be one for a canoe there.”
“It might take a lot of walking anyway,” Shane said.
Their walking was easy; they had only enough supplies to last them a couple of days until they could come back on the first of many return trips they would have to make.
The leaves were just coming out on the trees. Still not completely dry from the spring runoff, the road was muddy and would be hard to negotiate carrying anything heavy.
Over the crest of a small rise, to the right and through a stand of pine, they saw blue water — Lac des Îles, their home and the last one Theresa would know.
Coming up to the lake on its western shore, they stopped a minute to look. It was not a large lake, but it would be big enough for them. It did indeed have some islands — and bays, many little places that would be fun to explore by canoe. The water was still calm; the day’s wind had not come up yet.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Theresa said to Shane as she walked over to hug him.
“Wait a couple of weeks until the black flies and mosquitoes come out. You’ll be ready to go back,” he said, knowing she was more likely to put up with it than he was. As long as she still had physical strength, she didn’t falter. He marvelled at her energy and endurance; knowing that she was dying yet acting like she had everything to live for. The physical effects of the disease hadn’t yet manifested themselves, except for the fatigue that occasionally overtook her. She was as full of life as she had been before, and just as beautiful, Shane thought.
They walked to the shore of the lake and scouted its banks.
“Let’s go back and get the canoe,” he said. “We aren’t going to be able to get through this bush to look for a place to put the tent.”
They made the hour’s journey back to the tracks. Shane carried the canoe back. Theresa carried more of their dunnage.
They pulled the canoe across the muskeg shore to the lake. Hardly a zephyr broke the surface of the water. They paddled around the shore of the lake from the western side to a small bay in the south. Spruce lined the shore; they knew they had only to find a level spot on the bank, and they would have all the building wood they needed.
Finally they found a place that pleased them — a little indentation of the shoreline that formed a cove. The land sloped gradually down to the lake. On the left, about fifty yards from shore, was a small, tree-covered island. Lac des Îles was only a mile wide: one main body with two large sheltered bays on the east. The cove where they landed faced north.
Within a few hours of coming to the cove, Shane had cut spruce poles. Then he set up the canvas wall-tent. He started to clear some more brush.
“What are you doing?” Theresa asked.
“Cutting this brush. We’ll be cutting most of these trees to clear a spot for the cabin. And we’ve got to get the brush out of the way and burn it.
“Didn’t Patrick Matchewan say that when you work, you cannot dream, and that wisdom comes in dreams?”
Shane hesitated, bush in hand.
Theresa said, “If we clear the bush this week or next it doesn’t matter. We’re here; that’s the important thing.�
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“You’re right.” He dropped the bush and came over to sit beside her.
The following day they returned to the Canadian National tracks for as much of their belongings as they could carry.
Three days later, there was a large area cleared around the tent site. It wasn’t so much that Shane was hungry for work. It was just that he was excited and curious to see what the cabin was going to look like. They had cut birches and some spruce with the saw and then cleared out the underbrush. Theresa worked at digging up sod and roots for a garden.
They slept in the tent, which Theresa had made rather comfortable by laying a bed of spruce boughs on the floor of dirt. The natural cushion also added a nice aroma to the tent but it had to be renewed every two weeks when the needles dried out and the bed lost its springiness.
Every evening, Theresa made a smudge, which she put into the tent before they went to bed. It helped to control the black flies and mosquitoes that had now come out.
During the fly season they did their heaviest work. Theresa had dug and planted the garden. She had to go through the woods to gather usable soil from various spots, which she then transported in a potato bag to the camp. Shane cut spruce trees in the area. Swatting flies created a bloody mess that was mixed with copious sweat and lots of dirt. They sweated doubly because they clothed every square inch of their skin that they possibly could, to ward off flies. They tied their pants tight around the tops of their boots. They wore gloves. Handkerchiefs stuffed under the back of their caps in a kepi-like arrangement kept flies from the neck. The temperature was more than ninety degrees Fahrenheit.
Shane knew his clothes smelled terrible. But there was virtually no other way of warding off flies during the season. He wasn’t about to spend the day washing himself and his clothes if an hour later they’d be in the same state.
Theresa had other ideas for coping with the situation. She jumped in the lake two or three times a day.
“Do you do that to keep clean or just because you like to swim in the nude?”
She just beamed happily.
Unfortunately for his concentration, she always swam in the nude. Whenever he saw her moving towards the lake, he could no more stay peeling logs than he could stay still and let the flies get him. The sight of her naked body aroused him tremendously. He had never really grown accustomed to her. She always excited him. For him, her attraction had never diminished. He never failed to jump in after her. And thus it was that so much of the time, of so many of their days, was spent making love.
Whenever he thought about what was going to happen to her, he thought about these times — when she lived things totally, when she was so excited about everything — and when she was so exciting. He saw too well what would be gone.
Shane’s work time was spent with the long, straight, spruce trees that would form the walls of their cabin. He cleared their cabin site of them and kept the ones that were straight. He set aside the other ones to use later for an outbuilding.
Theresa planted potatoes, lettuce, carrots, broccoli, onions, and other vegetables to provide them with a variety of fresh vegetables for a year. After she finished with the garden, she worked with Shane on the logs. She helped take the branches off with the axe. They both struggled to strip the bark from the trees, although it was less of a struggle in the late spring, when the sap was running, than it would have been in the fall.
The most laborious of the tasks was the stripping of the bark. It was harder and longer than cutting the trees and took many days. To do it, they used the drawknife, one of the tools they had made.
Mostly, they took time off from work — to dream, as Patrick Matchewan would have said. In mid-day when it was hot or when the flies were worst, they took off in the canoe for a trip around the little island lake. On the very hot still days the water was like glass. The brilliant disk of the sun shone on them from below as well as from above. They always hugged the shore of the lake, never crossing it directly. “That’s the Indian way,” Shane said. First, they wanted to see what was on the shore. They could glide along in the canoe five feet from the shore — out of reach of most of the flies — and look for edible plants and tea. As well, he looked intently for animal tracks. Shane tried to pinpoint good spruce and cedar, which he could later use to make a birch-bark canoe, a “real” canoe, as he said.
II
What they liked most in those early summer days while they were setting up their camp was to make a fire outside in the evening and then cook over the fire. After the meal was over, they’d sit by the fire in each other’s arms and look into it. The warmth of the fire was soporific, and many times they woke up in the middle of the night to a cold fire after having fallen asleep.
They worked in short but steady stints on the cabin. When they at least had cut enough wood, the fly season was well on the wane. They laid four large logs on the ground for a base and put the first two wall logs on top. They made notches by chopping through the half-log and forming a cup for the log below. It was as tedious and long as stripping the bark.
After their log cabin was finished, Shane and Theresa made their first trip to Casey. It was ostensibly a supply trip but they also made it an occasion for a celebration of the completion of their cabin.
There were only a few families in the village. They spent a little time in the village’s only bar, telling those who asked something about where they lived and what they were doing. They met an older couple who put them up for the night and helped them locate some plywood and shingles to take back to the cabin the next day. The older couple proved to be a godsend to Shane and Theresa. After Shane had inquired about where they could buy a larger wood stove than the very small one they had brought with them, the couple offered to look for one and for other things they might need. They would look around the village and, if they found anything, they would store it at their place. Shane and Theresa could then come look and buy the items or return them if they had no use for them. It was in this way that Theresa acquired the large bed she wanted. “I’m going to make a nice log cabin quilt for it,” she smiled excitedly.
Back on the train that first morning after returning from Casey, they got off at their stop and left most of the materials again in the woods, taking only one sheet of plywood and some shingles.
By the end of July, the cabin was completed and the wood stove was moved in.
They furnished most of the cabin with furniture that they made from logs. What they lacked they were able to buy from people in Casey.
The front door of the cabin — and the two windows on that side — faced the cove and the small island offshore and to the left. It faced north and, on a few nights, gave them a chance to look at the aurora borealis with only the window open. The stove sat against the west wall of the cabin; in a corner on the east side was their bed and just across from that, under a front window, was a dry sink and a counter. They took their water from the lake and constructed an outdoor toilet in the trees in back of the cabin.
Chapter Twenty-One
I
Despite all the hard work, Theresa didn’t complain. Shane couldn’t see any real physical change in her, except that she got short of breath more easily and had lost a few pounds. He attributed the weight loss to the exercise because he himself had lost weight. She was taking medication and they both knew that the medication prevented the leukemia from spreading. Shane thought that the pregnancy helped Theresa maintain her appetite.
Shane watched Theresa often as she worked, dreading what it would be like without her. Without the noise and pollution of the city they had settled into a truly rich existence, with the barest of essentials, able to relate only to each other. Even in the city when things had gone well, they had not gone this well; here the earth and sky were part of their being together, the water was good, and the air was redolent with spruce and pine. Theresa took the trillium — the lilies of the wild — that bloomed around the cabin and kept them fresh in a vase on their dinner table. They ate wild o
nion, cattail shoots, and skunk cabbage in salads and round patches of wild strawberries and raspberries. Lac des Îles had rarely been fished. The little lake supplied them with abundant catches of northern pike. Shane and Theresa filleted them and then grilled them on a fire in front of the cabin.
One night they sat near the fire. There was a display of northern lights in the north. The Indian name for this phenomenon — wawati — was Theresa’s family name.
“Do you think it’s the sunlight reflecting from the glaciers at the North Pole?” Shane asked.
“I don’t know,” Theresa said, as she cuddled in his arms.
“The old people say that the rainbow is really the spirits of dead wildflowers.”
Shane still couldn’t tell how Theresa was reacting to her illness. She seemed to be taking it quietly. She never actually mentioned it.
The black-fly season was over by the end of July, as was the hardest part of their work on the cabin. All that remained on the interior was a small amount of finishing work and the making of the furniture. Plants of the forest would continue to provide them with much of their food until the garden was ready for harvesting.
Wild plants also provided them with some of their most harrowing moments — thanks to Theresa’s need to find out empirically what was good and what wasn’t. While Shane put the finishing touches on the cabin, Theresa busied herself looking through a book they had on Indian uses of wild plants.
Speak to Me in Indian Page 13