‘How far from here did that plane go down?’ I suddenly shouted. I hadn’t planned on asking but out it came anyway. I hadn’t promised Eva Spiller I’d help her but it felt like I had.
There was no need to say which one. Oskar squinted at me through the rain. I expected him to say nothing. I’d already been pestering him about the prison.
‘Not so far,’ he said finally.
‘Can you get near it from here?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you wanted to,’ he said. I could barely hear him. I could tell he’d had enough. I tried one last question. I’d been meaning to ask it before.
‘Did any of them escape?’
‘Who?’
‘The prisoners.’
He ran his hand over the back of his neck and stared down into the liver bucket. The edge of the storm was passing over us now. The wind picked up and up until it was turning over the leaves of the balsam poplars, exposing their brown undersides, making it look as though the storm had huffed and puffed the forest into fall. Oskar was yelling something at me.
‘Let’s get the rest of these leeches and get out of here,’ he was yelling.
The storm had already passed by the time we got back. In our cabin I discovered all the knives and forks and spoons spread out on one side of the kitchen table. They were worryingly bright and glittering. They must have been polished so hard the metal had got hot. I wanted to tell my father about the prison but at first I couldn’t find him. I checked the shed and the woodpile. I knocked on the outhouse door. I walked up to where he parked the truck. The truck was there but he wasn’t and I began to feel it then: the slow familiar creep of anxiety, settling on my skin like a sweater made from prickly spiders’ feet. Eventually I ran out to the end of the dock, where I could get a fuller view of the bay. It was from there I spotted him. He was sitting out on the point, in the dripping shade of the Toad.
I went back inside. On the other side of the table were a pile of books and his moleskin notebook. I flicked quickly through it. I occasionally checked it like this when he wasn’t around, hoping to find something different. I thought maybe, after the night of the homesteaders and his smile as we’d walked back and him remembering the line from the poem, it might be. I flicked through to the latest entry. This time he’d chosen another excerpt from David Thomson’s Narrative. Thomson and his two guides had capsized on the Black River and lost most of their equipment.
‘Late in the evening we made a fire and warmed ourselves. It was now our destitute condition stared us in the face, a long journey through a barren country, without provisions, or the means of obtaining any, almost naked, and suffering from the weather, all before us was very dark…’
The Burn
I was showing Eva the Burn when we spotted Lamar driving an Oldsmobile along the logging road towards Butterfly Creek Estate.
‘Oh, God!’ she said.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said.
‘Understand what? It’s just a car.’
‘It’s just too fucking weird is what it is.’
At the time I was thinking that about almost everything except the car. Eva was pretty weird. At home was weird. It was weird for me being in the Burn. I’d only walked through it a couple of times before. It was like the drop-off: if I could pretend it wasn’t there then I did.
At first Eva had been disappointed the remains of the house were gone. But she’d brightened up as we’d walked further on.
We’d followed the path of the burn for about half a kilometre, moving slowly between the charred tree trunks, until we reached a shallow valley formed by two burnt-over hills. They’d been stripped nearly naked by the fire and were curiously dome-shaped, with the skeletons of trees here and there on their summits. They looked like black minarets topped with charred crosses. Eva had wanted to climb one and check out the view. She was a redhead today and was wearing a flowing, smock-like white dress, the kind people used to get baptised in. She must have stood out for miles, like the snow-shoe hares that turned colour before the snow came.
As we’d walked up the hill she’d started picking up burnt pine cones and cradling them in a fold of her dress as though she were gathering fallen plums. I told her how the heat of the fire made them open and release their seeds. And how the ash fertilised the ground they fell on. It was the kind of thing I sometimes thought about to make myself feel better about the burn, whose random destruction otherwise depressed me. I guess this knowledge was a consolation of sorts for me, but Eva had seemed happy enough without it.
‘And this is what it left behind,’ she’d said. I’d assumed she meant the fire. ‘I wish I’d brought my camera,’ she’d said and then started darting from trunk to blackened trunk as though we were playing hide and seek. I’d never seen her so playful, so frolicsome; a flickering white spirit in all this desolation.
From the top of the hill you could trace the burn against the green of the spared land and mark the course the fire had taken, veering in loops and ox-bows and meanders – in the dark, charcoaled travesty of a river. In the other direction was the horseshoe of the bay and the thin blue ribbon of Butterfly Creek. It was from up here I’d spotted Lamar arriving in the Oldsmobile. Even from this distance you could tell it wasn’t new. He must have bought it second-hand from someone in town. I’d seen Eva’s mood change the instant she’d set eyes on it.
‘Too fucking weird,’ she repeated.
As I watched Lamar parking the car she threw one of the pinecones at me. It wasn’t exactly a playful throw. The fire had baked them as hard as rocks.
‘Quit it,’ I said, feeling the side of my head. ‘That hurt.’
She threw another. This one hit me on the shoulder.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said again huffily.
Sometimes when she said I didn’t understand something it was a statement, other times it was a provocation or an act of frustration. It was hard to figure out which was which.
‘But I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘Didn’t you notice anything when you were in the cabin?’
I hadn’t, apart from the obvious things. ‘He’s got a lot of moose heads,’ I said.
‘No shit, Sherlock. Did you even look at his pictures?’
Partly to give me time to remember and partly to change her mood and avoid another pinecone, I tried to change the subject and told Eva about finding the prison. I thought maybe she’d be interested in photographing it. It seemed to work.
‘What direction is it in?’ she asked. ‘Can you see it from up here?’
I pointed north. ‘No,’ I said distractedly. ‘It’s in the bush. You have to be right there to see it.’
I was trying hard to remember the wall of pictures in the main room of Lamar’s cabin. I hadn’t noticed anything especially unusual about them then and I couldn’t think of anything now – except maybe how similar they’d all been. There hadn’t been much history in them, so to speak. Everyone had appeared to be a similar age in every photo; Eva was wearing the same tee-shirt in most of them (it was a Spiderman shirt); there weren’t any of Lamar and his brother as boys, or of their parents, or of their graduation, or any of that kind of thing.
‘Is that north?’ Eva asked, pointing in the same direction I had.
I told her it was.
‘And we can look there?’
‘For what? The prison? I know exactly where it is.’
‘No, not for the prison. For the place,’ she said. ‘You know.’
I did know, even if part of me wished I didn’t. I told her we could look there if she really wanted to and she immediately started walking back down the hill, as though she was planning on going there right away. I was going to tell her what I’d thought about Lamar’s pictures but it didn’t look like she was interested in Lamar or his pictures any more.
There was a small creek trickling through the valley and
Eva stopped by its banks and sat down on a boulder, un-shaded by the blackened branches of a grove of pines. On the other side of the creek a pink-red bed of fireweed was smouldering up the slopes of the opposite hill.
‘You can sit here,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of boulder for the two of us.’
As we sat there we became aware of a twangy, crunchy noise coming from above us. It sounded like someone chewing peanut brittle and playing a Jew’s harp at the same time. Once you’d become aware of it you couldn’t block it out. On and on it went, the rhythm repetitive, relentless.
‘What’s that?’ Eva asked.
‘They’re pine bugs.’
‘I don’t see them.’
‘You can’t, they’re inside the trees.’
‘What are they doing in there?’
‘They’re eating them.’
‘Jesus! Even the wood isn’t safe around here!’ Eva said, looking down at all the bug bites on her arms and legs. There were a lot of them.
Across the creek we could see what I thought at first were other insects flitting amongst the fireweed blossoms.
‘Whoopedy-fucking-doo-da, another kind of bug!’ Eva said. ‘What do those ones eat? Flowers? Small children?’
I tried to work out what bug they might be before I gradually realised they weren’t bugs at all. They were small birds. They were hummingbirds.
‘They’re hummingbirds,’ I said excitedly. There were so many. I’d never seen so many. Even from a distance they were beautiful; darting and hovering over the flowers, flitting in and out of sight as though the world were one huge magician’s hat. I thought Eva would be as pleased as I was. It was a wonderful thing to see.
One, two, three … I tried to count them but there were too many to count. Beyond the monotonous crunching of the pine bugs the air seemed to hold what I couldn’t quite hear: the delicate zip and thrum of their wings.
‘You can almost hear them,’ I said, turning to Eva. But she wasn’t there.
Up ahead I could see the ash-smudged white of her dress disappearing through the burn.
The Pukak
‘What can you see down there?’
‘Mostly weeds,’ I said. ‘And some shiners and other minnows. And some bugs … and there was a pike here earlier too. But mostly weeds,’ I said, rambling. I was embarrassed about not knowing the proper names for anything, as I assumed she did. I was sitting on the shore of Wannigan Bay.
‘Do you mind if I join you for a bit?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
Judith sat beside me and nestled herself down into the sand a few inches.
‘Do you like fishing?’ she asked. My fishing rod was lying a few feet away on the sand.
‘I do. But I like just looking too.’
And then we both stared into the water.
‘It’s beautiful down there,’ she said after a while.
At first I’d thought her sitting beside me would be an interruption, but it wasn’t. Beneath the surface of the water everything stayed as it had been before. With her big white arms and blonde ponytail she looked as clean and clear as the winter she studied. Up close she smelt like a new bar of soap.
‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ I said.
‘That’s sweet of you. But really, there’s nothing to be sorry about.’
I felt so calm and comfortable I couldn’t shut myself up.
‘Why are you getting divorced?’
‘Oh, there’re lots of reasons.’
‘Like what?’
Judith looked up from the water and smiled at me, as if she was about to gently change the subject, and then she shrugged and looked back down.
‘You know, I think he hated me sometimes.’
‘Why?’
‘I think a lot of the time he wanted me to be something else.’
‘What did he want you to be?’
‘About a foot shorter, for a start,’ she said and began to laugh.
For a while then we said nothing. We just looked at the water.
‘If I look down there for long enough it’s like being somewhere else,’ I said.
‘I know exactly what you mean.’
‘Is it the same with the thing you study? The beneath-the-snow thing?’
‘The pukak. Yes, I guess it is a bit like that. Except of course I can’t look at it so easily.’
‘If you could, what would it look like?’
‘Oh, there’d be columns of ice and snow and openings and tunnels. If you were small enough to get down there I imagine it’d be a bit like travelling through a frosty subway system. Not that you’d be able to see much, not with our eyes. In the day you’d hardly be aware of the sun at all, only a kind of soft, bluish glow.’
‘And what lives down there?’
‘It’s really an incredibly rich and varied habitat…’ she began, and then pulled herself up with a half smile. ‘Mostly shrews and voles,’ she continued. ‘Plus the odd weasel or two. But mostly shrews and voles.’
As she was speaking some chippings began falling down the bank from the tracks. It was my father. He was skidding and stumbling his way towards us. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d found a sasquatch there. He never came out this way. My mother had often taken me to Wannigan Bay when I was a child and I think – in some vague way – he still considered it our private place.
‘Please, don’t let me interrupt,’ he said. ‘I just came to check up on Zack.’
My father had never once checked up on me while I was pike fishing.
‘Shrews and voles, you were saying.’
I knew then he’d been up by the tracks for a while. How long he’d been there for I didn’t know, but we still had to have the same conversation all over again so he could pretend he’d not overheard the first one.
After about ten minutes it was me who felt like they were overhearing a conversation. My father and Judith were sitting on either side of me, talking about the difference between above and below the snow.
‘The scale is entirely different down there,’ Judith said. ‘A shrew is a major predator. A fallen tree can be the limit of the world.’
‘And I never even knew it existed,’ my father said, shaking his head.
I noticed Judith had stopped trying to inch herself down into the sand and my father no longer looked like he was trying to swat a horsefly in front of his nose.
I hadn’t said a word for a long time. Every few minutes I tried edging my way over towards my fishing rod.
‘Oh, don’t go,’ they both kept saying whenever I did.
My father and Judith were talking about something called the Heimal threshold, and I was beginning to think I might end up sitting between them on the sand forever, when my father’s face went through several different alterations at once. His brows knitted together. His skin turned a kind of grey-white. Involuntarily, his front teeth slipped over his bottom lip and bit down on it.
Behind Judith’s shoulder a figure had emerged on the tracks, where they curved around the far shore of the bay. For most of the curve they were hidden behind a line of trees but in two places they hugged the shore so closely they were visible. The first of these was quite a distance away but was still close enough for you to clearly make out the figure as a person. You could also see they had long red hair.
By the time they’d reached the second place, a hundred yards or so closer to us, you could also make out they were wearing a purple dress. It fluttered this way and that as its wearer walked in tightrope fashion along one of the tracks. My father hadn’t spoken the whole while. He was staring intently at the figure, his mouth half open, almost as if he’d had a small stroke.
‘Is there something wrong, Mr Taylor?’ Judith asked.
‘My apologies,’ he spluttered abruptly. ‘I’d better be getting home.’
‘Oh,’ said Judith.
But by then he was already clambering back up the bank.
Judith and I watched him lurch hurriedly alongside the tracks towards
the cabin, each stride falling awkwardly in the gaps between the sleepers. Then we turned back to watch the figure approaching from the other direction.
‘Do you know who that is?’ she asked.
‘That’s Eva Spiller,’ I said.
She was wearing a red wig. I’d not really noticed before but I did now: it was exactly the same colour as my mother’s hair.
That night, before I went to sleep, I snuck out of my room to look at my father’s notebook. I flicked through its pages until my flashlight illuminated the latest entry. It was from Samuel Hearne’s account of his attempt to find the Coppermine River. He was discussing the effects of starvation.
‘Besides, for want of action, the stomach so far loses its digestive powers, that after long fasting it resumes its office with pain and reluctance. During this journey I have too frequently experienced the dreadful effects of this calamity, and more than once been reduced to so low a state by hunger and fatigue, that when Providence threw anything in my way, my stomach has scarcely been able to retain more than two or three ounces, without producing the most oppressive pain.’
Three Day Blow
The next day was the last day of school but my father didn’t drop me off to catch the bus. He didn’t say anything; when we came to the end of the logging road he just carried on driving. A few miles down the highway we passed Freddie waiting at the end of his track. He looked up hopefully for a moment as we approached, but then looked right back down at his feet when he realised we weren’t the bus, and Eva wasn’t with us (she’d only gone the once). In the rear-view mirror I watched him disappear in a cloud of dust.
For two days there’d been no cloud in the sky and a hot, dry wind had been blowing in from the west, from the prairies. My mother had called these three-day blows, and that name, together with the exotic origins and special scent of the wind – a mixture of pine pitch and parched grass and the smoke of unseen forest fires – had given it an almost mythical quality to my younger mind, like the reign of dragons, or their lairs, or their breath. She’d said the blow was the weather’s mind at work, deciding what it would be, and that until it did it could be anything. As a child I’d often imagined that if I walked far enough along the railway tracks into this wind, towards the west, I’d end up in another country, in some place I’d not even known existed. I was about ten before I realised it’d probably end up being Winnipeg.
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