Mrs Schneider was halfway to the islands. She wouldn’t quite reach them; she never quite reached them; it would have taken an alteration in the dimensions of the world for her to reach them. Every morning and late afternoon she’d set out from the shore in front of her cabin and swim exactly two hundred strokes towards the islands before turning around and swimming the two hundred strokes back to the shore. Her routine had never varied. She was almost seventy-five years old. For Mrs Schneider, to repeat was to persist.
There was something soothing about the invariability of this routine, about the rhythmic splash of her pale arms breaking the surface of the water. It was like watching the sun rise and set over a familiar skyline. And it was during these times that my father would attempt to broach those subjects which we otherwise tried to keep at a safe distance; those subjects which revealed the cruelly ragged and random aspect of the world. He found it extremely difficult to talk about such things but he didn’t want me to be ambushed by them either, as we had both been before.
‘You know what happened to Eva’s parents, don’t you? You heard about the accident? You remember it?’
I wished then I’d said something earlier and spared him having to ask these questions. Of course I’d heard about it, everyone in Crooked River had heard about it, although my memory of it was far from clear. Fortunately I’d remembered enough not to ask Eva anything awkward earlier. There’d been a family on holiday. There’d been a plane crash. There’d been no survivors. It was a sad and dramatic story and perhaps I would have remembered it more clearly had it belonged to another time. But the fact is it had happened not long after my mother had gone and a peculiar blurriness had overtaken me. It would be difficult to describe this condition, if it was actually a condition at all. (For several months my father’s colleagues at the school had tried to convince him to send me for treatment but he’d refused.) I can only say that during this time everything had become obscure and vague to me, not only events and incidents but people and what they said. Everyone around me and their words – the nurse who put her arm around my shoulder, the police officer who drove up our track to ask if my father owned any guns, the girl in school who gave me a lasagne her mother had made for us – all of them, and all they said, had seemed to recede into a distant background. Even if they were standing right there, close enough for me to see their lips moving, they’d seemed like bats in a faraway cave – a darkly twittering chorus whose separate voices I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, hear.
‘I do,’ I said. My father was in quiet agonies. You could tell he didn’t want to go into the details – they were not happy ones – but felt it was his duty. I could hear one of his knees knocking against the bottom of the table. We both looked out at Mrs Schneider for reassurance. But today something was different. We leaned simultaneously forward in our chairs and craned our necks. It was a multiplication of arms. There was no doubt about it. There were four of them.
‘It must be Judith,’ my father said.
Judith was Mrs Schneider’s daughter and was as rare and elusive a visitor at Sitting Down Lake as a Mountain Bluebird. If she came at all – and some summers she didn’t – it was often just for a day or two at most. Sometimes the only sighting we got of her was this one – of the top of her head and her bare arms as she swam with Mrs Schneider. Comparing them with her mother’s you would not have thought of them as related at all. One pair of arms was long-boned and fleshy, the other short and wiry; one head of hair was blonde, the other – despite its years – resiliently black. When they stepped out of the water Judith was revealed as at least a foot taller. Standing on the beach they looked like water nymphs from entirely different mythologies.
The reason for the rarity of Judith’s visits was apparently her husband, who didn’t like it at the lake. I could only recall seeing him once. He’d had a carefully trimmed beard and a bathing suit that was too small for him and bug bites all over his legs. Whenever she’d been near him, Judith had stooped her back and shoulders to appear smaller (he was a good few inches shorter than her, and more slight too). Whatever Mrs Schneider thought of this husband we never knew. Complaining about husbands must have been a very private affair for her, if it was an affair at all. Her own had been dead for nearly twenty-five years, long enough to have become nearly flawless.
We watched the two pairs of arms move out towards the islands, the one seeming to wink and dart through the water, the other to slosh and churn, and then, before reaching them, in a moment of unexpected, and almost perfect, unison, turn and make their way back. And as we watched them it was as though we were gliding silently together past the crashing plane and Eva’s dead parents and the cruel, leering face of accident and disaster. My father didn’t feel the need to discuss them anymore, which was a great relief to the both of us.
The Leech Gatherer
‘Zachary,’ I heard my father calling the next morning. He always used my whole name when he was waking me and then, when I was good and awake, he’d switch to the shorter version. He must have thought the extra syllables would help lead me more gently out of my dreams.
It was still dark outside. Through my window I saw several fading stars eclipsed momentarily by the ragged wings of a homebound bat. A paraffin lamp was burning in the kitchen; it cast a soft, faintly liquid light, which gleamed off the lenses of my father’s glasses.
‘Maybe you should wear an extra sweater,’ he said.
The extra sweater was a winter ritual he was slow to relinquish. He’d keep suggesting it until the end of July.
‘I’ve made some Red River Cereal, Zack. You want some?’
This was also a ritual. My mother had tried to get me to eat Red River Cereal. I remembered her asking me every morning if I wanted some, as if eventually I’d simply forget I didn’t like it. I guess it was one of her things my father wasn’t prepared to give up on; a question of hers he felt still needed asking.
‘No, thanks.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I don’t really care for it,’ I said, for probably the thousandth time. My father had a curiously old-fashioned sense of table manners, even for back then. You never ‘hated’ something – even ‘not liking’ something was considered a touch strong – you ‘didn’t care’ for it. As a child I had a rather aloof relationship with various root and green vegetables, as well as the Red River Cereal.
After breakfast, while I stood in the porch waiting to leave, he kept popping his head in and out of the kitchen door and telling me to wait a second. He was trying to remember a line from a poem he’d learnt in school. After about the third time he knocked his glasses off on the door jamb.
‘Wait, wait, I’ll remember it,’ he said, fumbling around on the floor trying to find them. ‘It’ll come to me any second now.’
He said the poem was all about leeches.
‘I’ve got it,’ he announced, appearing extremely pleased with himself and flailing a hand sideways against the coat rail. ‘All things that love the sun are out of doors,’ he quoted.
It was still dark outside.
The sky began to lighten as I made my way along the edge of the bay, following the trail that led to Oskar the Finn’s cabin. It was hardly a trail at all any more. Over the winter the snow and the wind had brought four or five trees down over it. In some places it was no different from the rest of the woods and the only way you could tell it was there was by looking for the gummy scars on the tree trunks where branches had been cut. Fortunately it was hard to lose your way because on one side it hugged the shoreline. At the mouth of the bay the three bigger islands emerged out of the mist and gathering light like the looped back of the Loch Ness monster. There was a big squat boulder on the tip of the headland, which my father called a glacial erratic and everyone else called the Toad, and about three or four hundred yards beyond it was Oskar’s place.
Oskar’s cabin wasn’t like any of the others on Sitting Down Lake, or anywhere else for that matter. It was like something out of a fairy ta
le. For a start, it stood on stilts. It was built on a platform constructed around four tree trunks, cut about fifteen feet above the ground so that their tops protruded up from the corners of the roof like extra chimneys. The cabin itself was a higgledy-piggledy affair, tilting a good few inches to the right and made of logs that jutted out at odd and uneven angles. It looked like a building that’d been ripped from its foundations by a passing tornado and, after a spin or two, been deposited in the branches of the forest.
Directly behind it there was a tall white pine and about twenty feet up its trunk, facing back into the woods through ever-watchful sockets, was a bear’s skull that had been nailed onto it. There was a second bear’s skull above the front door, which you had to clamber up a home-made ladder to get to. This one hadn’t been nailed on as tightly and sometimes, when the breeze picked up, would tilt to the left and right as though it were craning on an invisible neck. The air made a slight whistling, whooshing noise passing through it, like the sounds inside a shell – which I’d been told were like the sea.
I’d often pestered my father about these skulls, and why Oskar’s place was on stilts.
‘It’s a Finnish thing,’ he’d say, as though this explained everything
I knocked four times and there wasn’t any answer. The skull peered silently down at me. There was no wind yet, not a breath of it. I was about to knock a fifth time when the door opened and Oskar shambled past me. It wasn’t until he’d gotten to the bottom of the ladder that he appeared to notice I was there.
‘You set?’ he said.
Oskar often seemed as erratic to me as the boulder. He did what he did and went where he went and saw little need to explain anything. (I was beginning to learn how this was a habit of solitary people.) Except sometimes, even when he wanted to, he couldn’t explain what he’d done or how he’d ended up in a place. (I was beginning to learn how this was a habit of people who drank a lot.) During the spring and summer he worked for a man called Jay Boyette, trapping minnows and leeches to sell to the fishermen who used his fly-in camps and outfitting business. I was helping him this year. I’d only been out a few times so far – to get minnows from a nearby pond – but was planning to go with him more regularly when school finished.
Today we were trapping leeches. Down at the dock Oskar started loading the traps into his boat. They were squares of thin aluminium folded into envelopes and tied at the corner with a piece of string.
‘Did you see Lamar’s boat?’ I asked.
He grunted and carried on loading his traps.
‘They put the two halves of it back together.’
This time he didn’t bother grunting. Apart from Oskar and my father, and occasionally Mrs Schneider, there wasn’t anybody to talk to at the lake. Not that any of us were great talkers in any case, but for some reason I felt a strong urge to that morning. And the boat was our big news. I thought about mentioning Eva too but there was the risk it might bring up other subjects, like the accident and her dead parents.
‘It’s stuck in the creek.’
‘Why don’t you go get that bait.’ If Oskar didn’t want to converse there was no point pushing it.
A few yards down the shore from the dock there was a bucket hanging by a piece of old rope from the branch of a cedar, out of the reach of foxes and bears. As I was untying the rope a bunch of bright red blood slopped over the rim onto the front of my jacket. The bucket was full of beef livers.
‘That’s meant to be for the leeches,’ Oskar said as I carried it onto the dock. He was fumbling with his outboard. It didn’t have a maker’s name; it looked like a mechanical Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled together out of engine graveyards. After a few mumbled curses he managed to get it started. The air at the back of the boat smelt of gasoline and bilgy water and Crown Royale whiskey. I went to sit in the bow.
We headed out towards the northern shore of the lake, coming eventually to a long bay shaded by tall pines and poplars which narrowed and tapered until it became a creek full of rocks and snags. I stood up in the bow to direct us. Every twenty feet or so Oskar would stop and put a trap in, stooping over the bucket first to slice up pieces of liver for bait.
‘You’ve got to use fresh stuff,’ he said. ‘If it’s rotten they won’t give it a sniff.’ I watched him carefully from the bow as he slid pieces of bait into the spaces between the folded aluminium, which is where the leeches would, hopefully, gather. His fingers were shaking, and slippery with the blood.
I never knew exactly how old he was. Seen from a distance you might have mistaken him for a child. He was a short man; barely, if at all, over five feet. He always wore the same red and black check shirt and grey woollen pants, whatever the season or weather, and under the folds of his clothes he was wiry and compact, like jerky wrapped around bone. He must have been over seventy but it was hard to tell sometimes. His features were pressed tight to his face – a flat nose, shallow cheekbones, nothing left exposed. His skin was dark, the rest darker: black eyebrows, black hair, black eyes. He looked native to a different north, a further north.
The creek led into a beaver pond and we manoeuvred around its twiggy edges, setting traps as we went. Oskar spent a lot of time staring into the water as if it were a book he was reading or a riddle he was figuring out.
‘Put some shallow and others deeper,’ he said. ‘You can never be sure where they’ll be.’
Because I was concentrating on Oskar and the traps I didn’t see it and so wasn’t expecting the sound. It was as sharp and percussive as a rifle shot in the morning air and before I’d worked out it was the admonitory slap of a beaver’s tail I’d flinched and overbalanced and was under the water. It felt like I’d been punched everywhere on my body at once. Only a while before this water had been ice. I grasped frantically at the side of the boat and tried to haul myself out but Oskar made me swim the extra few yards to the shore. It was safer, he told me.
Once we were both on land he sent me to fetch wood. It was better, he said, for me to keep moving. One thing we learnt in school was that around Crooked River more people died of hypothermia in May and June than in January. People were less afraid of the cold when they saw pictures of trilliums on calendars, and when people were less afraid the world was more dangerous. We didn’t have the most optimistic of curriculums.
While I was drying myself out in front of the fire, Oskar started cooking some gobbets of beef liver on the end of a stick, like marshmallows.
‘You want some?’ he asked. ‘It’s fresh.’
I said no and began to wish I’d said yes to the Red River Cereal.
By then I could feel my hands and fingers again and decided I’d go fetch more wood. The ground around us was wet and swampy but a bit further back it became drier and firmer. I’d gone about a hundred yards when I stumbled upon the remains of a barrel stove. It was rusted but not all the way through. You could still tell what it had been; I even thought I could see a patch of ash in the back of it – though that might’ve been dirt. A few feet further on I found the top half of a bucket and the rim of a tin bowl. Behind them was the remnant of a log wall. Three of the logs were still balanced on each other, as though bound there by the moss and lichen that covered them. The rest had fallen and returned to mulch and litter and earth.
It wasn’t so unusual to discover abandoned places like this in the bush. It was dotted with trappers’ shacks and old logging camps and other places, like our swamp house, that people had simply left behind. It wasn’t unusual, but there was something about this one that made me even more shivery in my damp clothes. I hurried back to the fire.
Oskar was finishing another piece of liver. ‘What was that place?’ I asked, pointing back into the bush. He knew everywhere around Sitting Down Lake, and everything about it. He took his time finishing the liver and then stared at the fire for a while, the same way he’d stared at the water – as though it were a riddle or a book.
‘That was the prison,’ he said eventually. I waited for an explanation
but he offered none.
‘What prison?’
‘The one for the soldiers,’ he said.
‘What soldiers?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ he said. Then he got up and I knew that that was all I was going to get today. We set the rest of the traps and headed back.
I’m not sure whether it was because my clothes were still damp, or that the word prison had conjured certain gloomy associations, but for the entire journey home – and long afterwards too – I found myself uncharacteristically moody and restless, unsettled by a combination of curiosity and misery. I kept recalling details about the place in the bush, details I’d barely noted at the time, and then thinking about them in ways I would have preferred not to.
There’d been two birch trees beyond the fallen wall. Someone had nailed horseshoes onto their trunks and over the years the wood had grown around them so that the iron was all but submerged beneath two large burrs, which were as lumpy and contorted as a witch’s chin in a children’s book. It seemed awful to me that the original shape of these horseshoes had mutated into something so disfigured and ugly – the very opposite of luck. Long after going to bed their shapes, transformed now into two horridly leering faces, mocked me from the insides of my eyelids.
Eventually, unable to sleep, I got up and went to sit out by the fireplace. My father had lit a fire before going to bed and its remains were still glowing. Earlier, I’d heard the springs of the old chair squeak and groan as he clattered onto it, and then the pages of a book being turned. The embers cast a gentle light over the small table beside the chair. My father had been reading the Narrative of the explorer, David Thomson. There was a grey moleskin notebook beside it on the table and picking this up I turned to the most recent of several new quotations copied into it. Thomson was describing a trapper he’d known from York Factory.
‘An old acquaintance who had a long range of traps, had neglected to leave firewood at the hut at the end of the range, arriving late in the evening had to cut firewood for the night, with all his caution a twig caught the axe and made the blow descend on his foot, which was cut from the little toe, to near the instep; he felt the blood gushing, but finished cutting the wood required; having put everything in order, he took off his shoe and the two blanket socks, tore up a spare shirt, and bound up the wound, using for salve a piece of tallow; he was six days journey from the factory and alone …’
Hummingbird Page 3