by Dave Godfrey
In the evening, once the child was asleep, they would come out and lie on the sheet on the grass and be protected by the ugly brick walls which rose on all four sides of the small garden and he would be able to talk to her and reassure her. In the winter the new child would come, safely.
“Did the doctor say why the odds were better?”
“No. I don’t know how he can tell without seeing me. He just said that if time goes by and nothing happens that even that is an improvement.”
“Okay. Okay.”
The Way We Do It Here
It was cold again that third morning. Outside squalls and drizzle obscured the dawn. A day for bending the scope out of the way and relying upon your natural sight. Horace poured beer into the pancake batter and said it felt to him like a lucky day at last. Swede changed from one set of clothes patterned with dried blood to another only slightly less caked.
“Ah, feels good to get into something clean,” Swede smiled. Smiling, he looked less than his thirty-five years, more like a college boy with the stack of girlie fold-outs under his hefty arm.
“Had a fellow up from Toronto once claimed he could quarter a moose without spilling a drop of blood on his white shirt. Said that three or four times. Wearing a white shirt. So I dropped a little four-hundred-pound moose calf in front of him one morning, a little grunter I hadn’t even gutted. Just dumped two shots from the Lee Enfield into him, before 8 o’clock, and slung him into the boat fresh. ‘Go to it,’ I said. ‘Get out the white shirt, Mr. Mulholland.’ But he didn’t feel up to it that particular morning, Mr. Mulholland didn’t. You bet your hobnails he didn’t. I like to step right inside a big grunter, with one boot each side of the ribs, and drive the butcher saw right through that hump. Now let’s just put this little lady where the propane will shine on her countenance.”
He moved Miss August over beside Miss September, onto the door of the food cupboard over the stove, so that light from the lamp-jet illuminated her glossiness, the jeweled derringer slung on her nude hip.
But nothing could irritate me, no sign of urban civilization. I had already accepted failure on this absurdly quick trip; I was looking forward only to a few more hours outdoors, even in the squall and drizzle, even if all I had to observe was the bravery of a wind-sniffing beaver, his nose and flat skull barely out of the rain-spattered water, tacking back and forth beyond the reddish Indian-tea bushes that made no attempt to hide my hunter’s body. It’s scent and noise you have to worry about with a moose; in the north their blindness is proverbial.
Traditionally, they will stand and let even a novice get five or six shots away at them, so long as he’s got the wind in his face. And in this season, the heart of the fall, the males enter rut, trumpet across the miles, and come plunging conveniently to the lakeshore as soon as the hunter starts grunting. But we were short even the trumpeting. The day before I had tried to serenade a distant bugle — with no luck at all. Perhaps just as well. For we later decided that the bugle belonged to Swede, who had been working a different part of the lake with his two Milwaukee hunters. The others were disgruntled at the illusionary nature of this wooing, but it amused me almost as much as it did Swede.
“If I see that white plane spotting again, I’m going to have a pretty unsporting trophy,” one of the men from Milwaukee said, somewhat bitterly. They had already been there five days.
One of them was a tavern owner and the other ran a small machine shop. The tavern owner had an immensity of gear, walkie-talkies and an emergency raft, and seldom spoke. The machinist deferred to the older man with whom he had been in the war and seldom was silent. He was proud of how he had built up his shop in a residential district by being very careful about his employees and when they arrived for work; he had only been caught after ten years, when a new machine was delivered by mistake at night when other men were at home. It was difficult to tell what their backgrounds were, but they both hated negroes and told stories of nasty rapes of nuns and young girls. They were very proud of the line that divided Milwaukee; they were ready to shoot the balls off any black bucks who crossed it intent on fulfilling the immense lusts they ascribed to them. They were both very good shots. One would skip a beer can far out over the lake and the other would shoot at it and try and keep it moving, spinning up into the air and bouncing off the water as it slowly crumpled and became shattered.
“Look at that, look at that,” the machinist would say as the tavern owner shot. “That’ll keep the bastards in their place.”
“You should read some Fanon,” I said.
“Is he dirty?”
“As only the French can be. All about Negro doctors treating white women.”
“Is that right? We had quite a time over there during the war. I’ve got to get a shot at something. If that big Swede doesn’t stop talking and put us within three hundred yards of something I’m going to dust the powder on that little white plane’s nose.”
My brother told of one such airplane hunter who had hopped out the door as soon as the plane landed, braced himself on the pontoon, and fired three shots dead into the engine, forgetting completely the inch or more of distance between the line of sight of his scope and the line of fire of his gun.
“You know,” said Swede to me, “after I heard you grunting, I thought I may have to breed one of them cows, if we stay up here much longer. But I don’t know if you’ve got enough meat on your bones to make it worth my while.”
It was a good camp; we all joked and played stuke together and after a while the men from Milwaukee learned to stop talking about negroes.
Yet I wanted my brother to have some booty to return to town with. I felt I had deceived him somehow, by not making my intentions clear. He lives up there, well beyond the lakehead, in the same town with Horace and Swede. He would be there through the coming winter, long after I fled back to the slush of Toronto and my mod-tie students of Defoe, Thoreau, and Rilke.
“If I’m going to come up all that way,” I had said when we were making the arrangements, “I want to go on a real hunt.”
By which I had meant the exact opposite of what he assumed. For me, the truth of a hunt was tempered by visions and memories of a previous long hunt, just myself and one other lumberjack hunter, Jean Lorignal, pussyfooting for five hours through the bush near Chapleau before we saw anything, slugging out hundreds of pounds of meat by ourselves, and then the discord and bitterness that followed. Bitterness and discord of which I had not often thought.
There is still some real, walk-in hunting done around Fort Frances. Horace prefers it, but other methods are considered more stylish. And since I was coming seven or eight hundred miles, my brother had arranged for us to go the first-class way, the American plan. At Fort Frances we had loaded our gear and guns into one of Rusty Meyer’s planes, a yellow Beaver, and flown some two hundred more miles deeper into the hinterland of Ontario.
Below, the land was an artist’s mind, a photo-micrograph of unidentified cells. As with the Sahara, or the coastal forests of Africa, seen from above, there is so much pattern that the mind leaps to abstraction. The snake’s movement of a river. Lakes adzed out of rock in imitation of a blackbird’s erratic flights. Such a massive fluxion that in the riot of shape and form it seems no artist would dare take a stance. We are too high to see a moose, even the largest bull, but all four of us peer steadily down.
“Where are we headed,” I asked, and saw the first omen of failure arise. Horace pulled a map, roughly folded, out of a pocket of his jacket, then spent five minutes before he could point out our lake.
And when we settled down just before dusk, Swede was busily adjusting a second motor on his boat so that he could cruise the entire shoreline in one day.
The first day we did almost the same thing, cruised, but then once Horace had fit the lake about him, we began moving up creeks to inner lakes, found some fresh sign, watched a few runs and some grassy shoreline. The
second day we came around into a bay of exactly the proper bogginess on shore. Near a beaver hut there were bubbles in the murky water, and a lacework of fresh track beyond the shore rank of trees.
So on the third morning, with the pick-up plane due to arrive at noon, we felt some hope as we set out into the drizzle. The wind had turned wrong for yesterday’s bay, but that left it right for several others we had spotted. It was too overcast for the small, white American plane which had been bothering us, swooping along the shoreline like an aluminium hawk, illegally spotting for the hunters high and dry inside.
“A moose is dumb,” Horace said. “It only seemed to take the wolves a year or two before they’d avoid the sound of engines, but the moose are learning. It may take them a generation or two, but you can’t tell me Mr. Whitewing’s not keeping everything up in the timber every time he flies around.”
They dropped me off on a long point covering a good bay and went ahead to scout a few others. The wind was hard. We had put up a small bunch of teal and they had fled the bay with their belly-down about twenty feet above the water. I settled the boat-cushion on the rocks and faced the rain. No more than five minutes after they had left me I heard a sound perhaps like shots or laughter, more like shouting, and I felt for my matches. If they had overturned I would have a cold day of it. I would have gone and looked, but the dawn was prime time and they were too good as boatmen to really permit worry.
And the wind came up the lake and across the bay like a hawk, a freshly stropped blade from Bunyan’s razor. I hunched in further among the black spruce branches, let my mind descend into my body, and prepared to practise the cold austerities of the waiting hunt.
The beaver carried poplar back and forth bravely.
The teal returned.
With the wind, the yellow leaves caught and were caught by the damp sleet.
My gloves became drenched and my hands curved around one another for warmth.
I waited, running my eyes along the beaver swamp of the far shore, waiting for the slightest of movements in the shoreline trees, sighting in the three or four open shoreline spaces, re-estimating the distance across the water. Silent. Only hunter conscious.
One should be able, I know, to rest like that for the entire day. If you’re on a good run, success is eventually inevitable. But success wasn’t really why I was there. After two hours or so, my city-pampered body switched back on my mind. Look around, it said.
Behind me there was a grove of my favourite conifers, shaggy, old black spruces; reaching up almost sixty feet. Not bad for them, this far north. I slid in among their quietness to knead some life back into my hands, to stretch up my back. To feel again beneath my feet that natural deep pile of moss, needles, and brush you find only in rich, old forests: reindeer-moss, black crowberry, spoonleaf sphagnum, ground cedar, bracken fern, dwarf juniper, running clubmoss. I had no need of identifying them, only of running some of the possible names through my mind, of feeling that inimitable crunch as each particular welcome mat gave beneath my feet. If that moment’s fear were true, if the boat that brought me had in reality overturned, I could take some reindeer-moss and dry it for flour. A world of chill possibilities was around me. And of memory.
On the moose hunt I had been trying not to remember, we had just pussyfooted up on a whole family of moose, through far thicker brush than this, earlier in the year when all the leaves were still on, through a half mile or so of nearly pure hazel bush and little balsam trees.
They were down in a pothole, a little bowler hat upside down, shaped just as though it had been scooped out for a washbasin. We could have walked right by them, but they must have decided to come up just as we were passing around the rim.
“Psst, psst,” said Lorignal. “Behind you, my friend.” And he would have laughed if he hadn’t been so determined on that trip. He was about ten yards in front of me. He said that all he could see were two brown patches, but I was near enough to make out the outline of the bull’s hump. I did a more dangerous thing than by then I had ever even considered.
I fell to the matted, tangled rug of the forest to let Lorignal shoot over me. I remember thinking, in small consolation before I dropped: at least neither of them is facing me. Although I knew too how quickly one slug could change their mind about which way to run, and to trample.
We were lucky; we had to be lucky on that trip. Lorignal and I. With one gun between the two of us.
He was a city refugee too, club-footed, who had left Montreal three years previously because there his strength and his flaw both seemed to work against him. Despite his twisted foot, he was strong. In the north he had turned himself into one of the richest lumberjacks of the region, the sound parts of his body hardened and strengthened, the right leg became tough as a kangaroo tail. So that he could easily outrun me in his leap-and-hop fashion: the strong foot down, thrust and movement; the crippled foot barely contacting the earth as he hopped on it, almost as though it were not a part of his body, a vaulter’s pole that at any moment he might release, at the apogee of his leap; then thrust and movement again.
Moi, the university had just finished dumping a year’s supply of ideals into my mind while crimping my spirit with its innate snobbery, its unresolved class tensions and distortions; so that I for learned reasons and Lorignal for experienced ones had together jumped to the support of a M. Blaise, the union man for that region, in his fight to organize Kapela’s mill and camp, in his struggle to get the minimum wages heading up closer towards the dollar an hour mark. A bitter fight. Kapela did not have a big operation. One man had made it, and was still there, and was determined to see what he had created grow and prosper.
The best workers left at the first sign of trouble; a lot of those who remained were old or flawed, refugees from Hungary or the Gaspe. There was violence. Bitterness. Scabbing. Sand-bagging. We won, eventually. The idealists and the refugees. M. Blaise signed an agreement with Kapela and spent an evening drinking vodka with him. The company store became a co-operative. The mill cut its work week to only fifty hours. And Kapela took the offered chance to fire seven or eight of the least productive workers and thus to make his woodcrews more efficient.
It was for the let-go workers that Lorignal had gone hunting. Without a gun, I was just a companion and meat-carrier, but I felt some of his guilt. Blaise had been the organizer of the struggle, but Lorignal its hero and I its brain.
So he took the chance and shot across me, clean into the bull’s hump so that it did drop at once and turned not upon us, the source of its pain. The cow turned equally quickly from her vanquished companion and in the turning was gone, with her calf, lost among the thick hazel and balsam.
“Cow’s tender, but I like meat with a little character,” said Lorignal. And we set to the hard work.
It took us two trips, in and out, more than six miles each way. Lorignal wanted it all there for the presentation he had planned. We slept one night in the woods and it was nearly noon the next day before we had the meat all packed out.
The fired men and their families were all packed up, into two old Studebakers and a red Ford pick-up. Bedsprings jounce-jangled on the car roofs.
They refused the meat. Out of pride, or a sense of betrayal, or just because they were unsure of their destination and whether they had room for it, or because it was not quite legally the moose season and they suspected a trap. I never worked it out.
But they refused it. Bitterly. Telling Lorignal he would need it himself for all the work he would be doing that winter. Suggesting what he could do with one of the moose legs. “Jouk aside, Frenchy, or I’ll shove that leg bone a mile up your garbage hole,” one said. Standing beside the two old Studebakers that hadn’t run all summer. There are few bitternesses equal to that of a poor man let go for inadequacy.
And Lorignal understood them. Scruffy little men he could have booted into the sawdust pile — even with his twisted foot. He didn’t
press it on them. He just bantered back at them and told them how he would enjoy the heart for lunch.
And Jean did that. We split the heart and said nothing about their refusal. But Jean Lorignal avoided tradition, he carried the quarters back into the bush and left them there for the lynx cats; he did not divide the flesh among the successful. He gave none to Blaise; none to Kapela; nothing but the heart to himself.
My hands were warm in the black spruce grove. I had been knuckling them and blowing on them all the time the story walked through my mind. “Let’s go pussyfooting here,” I told myself. And I moved slowly among the drooping trees, and out of them. Towards the beaver swamp and its fallen aspen poplar and tacamahac. Looking in the bog of mud and broadleaves for track. Grunting expectantly, although I really expected nothing.
And it was there my brother and Horace found me. Coming up by the beaver hut, past fallen trees which reached towards their boat.
“It’s not that shallow,” I said. “Watch the deadfalls and come up.”
“We’re full of moose, you know,” they said.
“You’re what?” I am back in a dream.
“We got one.”
But I hadn’t known. The wind disguising the shots. The shouting not for disaster, but one shot from each of their guns. And perhaps a bit of laughter.
While I had been sitting and pussyfooting, they had been quartering. There is an essential ugliness to a moose, especially when his body is broken into four. This one filled the bottom of the boat, his rib-cage exposed to the drizzle, one bare knee-knuckle jostling the wind, the sleet laced and globed in small mazes on the bristly fur.
