Machine Without Horses

by Helen Humphreys

  This morning, when I went outside to gather my daily handful of beans and pick a couple of tomatoes, I found that most of the tomatoes had been eaten, chewed through while they were still attached to their stalks. Not nibbled, like a squirrel would do, but bitten into by something with a large and strong jaw. A groundhog perhaps, or a rat? A fox?

  Megan Boyd had a family of foxes living under her cottage. A young man who was learning to tie flies from her and would occasionally sleep over at her house remembered the racket they made at night beneath the floorboards. When he asked about the noises in the morning, she said, “It’s just the foxes.” Her antipathy about killing salmon extended to all animals. She co-habited casually with the wild creatures around her cottage. She always had a dog as a companion. Her shed where she tied flies was papered inside with pictures of dogs torn from old calendars. Her love of animals was the reason why she could not bear to kill fish.

  Megan and I have dogs in common.

  One of the beautiful things about a dog is that when you get a new one, you forget the pain at losing the old one. My new dog is six years old now, although I still think of her as “new.” Her dominant characteristic is her confidence. A confident dog feels on top of life, trots along the trail with a jaunty bounce and her tail in the air. She has dominion over all she surveys and likes to prove this by killing smaller animals. Thankfully, Charlotte is doing this less frequently as she ages, but when she was in her most highly confident stage as a three-year-old dog, walking behind her on a path, I would come regularly upon her victims—a dead snake, dead chipmunk, dead vole, dead frog. Others would no doubt be horrified by my not keeping her leashed at all times. But I admire her confidence. It is a rare thing to be so full of self, and I wanted her to expand into her nature, not be curtailed by mine. And she stopped the needless slaughter on her own, only occasionally attacking what is in our path, to protect me. As she has aged, she has come to the logical conclusion that it takes more energy to kill something than it does to let it live. She will still give chase, especially if an animal doesn’t instinctively flee her presence (squirrels are particularly stupid in this regard), but it’s only a half-hearted lunge off the path and then she’s back to her usual jaunty trot.

  She is confident, but she still has need of me, likes to sleep with the smallest piece of her body touching mine—a single paw, the tip of her tail. We’re not alike, but our natures mesh, which is, I guess, why we have an easy camaraderie. I appreciate her confidence, because it’s not what I always feel myself, and I think she appreciates that I leave her be, let her mostly live life on her own terms. Or else, she appreciates my appreciation of her—flattered by the flattery. But it doesn’t matter. I am grateful for her love, however I have earned it.

  What the dog gives me is peace. I follow behind her on our walks and I feel calm in the quiet of the early morning or in the low light of dusk. I am happy, walking through the woods, or across the fields where we sometimes see deer. The dog exists in the moment she is in, and when I am with her, then I can be in that moment as well.

  This morning, we went out early, before the heat had started to rise. We went to the woods that border the edge of the city. There was an osprey on a telephone pole by the lake, and three rabbits in the field. Charlotte flushed a family of grouse from a thicket and they rose into the air with such sound and shudder. Frogs hopped over my boots on the parched path, and we saw a family of raccoons sleeping tucked in the crook of a tree. I didn’t think of anything but where we were and the constant unfolding of the forest and its inhabitants.

  It was a good morning. There aren’t many better.

  15.

  THE FLIES THAT MEGAN BOYD TIED WERE from the Victorian era. They often relied on exotic feathers from the plume trade as part of their makeup. Increasingly during the twentieth century, the practice of killing rare or endangered birds for their feathers was discouraged, and fly dressers began to substitute as various materials became unavailable. There was a move to use the hair from squirrels and deer, the feathers from local pheasants, but Megan was a purist, and when she was no longer able to purchase particular feathers, she simply stopped tying the corresponding fly.

  In her lifetime, feathers from the following birds were some that became harder, or impossible, to procure, as the birds themselves became endangered, extinct or protected:

  The grey junglecock, also called junglefowl, is found in southern India and Asia and is the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken. It likes a moderate, canopied forest with low grass cover. At night, it roosts in trees. Habitat loss and the use of its feathers for fly-tying have contributed to its endangered status.

  The junglefowl was first introduced into villages about eight thousand years ago, not as food but as an oracle. Wild chickens were thought to be able to tell fortunes and predict the future, a belief that was also popular elsewhere in the world. The Romans used to take chickens with them to the edge of a battle and, depending on the chickens’ appetite, they would predict who would win or lose the battle.

  Another odd, though interesting, fact about chickens is that they can recognize up to a hundred different chicken faces, helping them to retain the “pecking order” and to be subservient to the more dominant of their brethren. Also, they seem to prefer good-looking human beings to ugly ones.

  The Spey cock, now extinct, was a large Scottish chicken—often weighing as much as ten pounds—bred in the Spey Valley. And the gallina is a small, endangered Asiatic wild chicken.

  The cotinga, also known as the blue chatterer, is a brightly coloured bird found in the tropical rainforests of Central and South America. They eat mostly fruit from high up in the canopy. The males have bright blue and purple plumage and their wings make a whistling sound when they fly. The iridescent blue of their coat is the result of air bubbles in the feathers that scatter the light and make it appear as though the blue is shimmering. Deforestation has resulted in significant habitat loss for the cotinga. A feather from the blue chatterer is the definitive element of the salmon fly that began it all for Megan Boyd, the Blue Charm.

  Macaws have seventeen current species, many of them endangered. They gather in flocks of up to thirty individuals, mate for life and can mimic human speech. They can live up to sixty years, but their numbers in the wild have decreased because of illegal trapping for the bird trade—many people are interested in owning parrots—and because of the destruction of the rainforest in which they live. The largest parrot, the hyacinth macaw, has a wingspan of over four feet. For some of the flies that Megan tied, she used feathers from the hyacinth macaw, scarlet macaw and great green macaw.

  Another endangered bird whose feathers were once popular with fly dressers is the purple-naped lory, a colourful parrot found in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

  The great Indian bustard, from India and Pakistan, is a large bird, much like an ostrich. It is one of the heaviest flying birds and thrives on grasslands. It is popular and easy to hunt, which is why it is now critically endangered. Apparently, all parts of the bird are tasty. Also, its habitat is under threat as the grasslands are being encroached upon. Once, the great bustard was considered for the national bird of India but was decided against because of possible misspellings of its name.

  The Australasian bittern is another large bird. It dwells in wetlands, making its nests at the edges of swamps. A secretive bird with drab markings, it has mostly nocturnal habits and is the basis for the Australian mythological creature the “bunyip,” which is said to hold dominion over the swamps and wetlands, eating any hapless wanderers who cross its path. It has been called the “spirit of darkness and the punisher of all wrong-doers” and has an eerie, booming night call. The bunyip is the only mythological beast to have crossed over from aboriginal lore to enter the mythology of the white European settlers.

  The blue bird-of-paradise, lovely to watch in its natural jungle habitat in Papua New Guinea, has been hunted almost to extinction because of its beautiful plumage.

 
I wonder if Megan ever thought of the birds when she used their feathers? She would have had whole skins of birds in her supplies, as that was the way fly dressers purchased them. Would she look at the shining blue pelt of a cotinga and imagine that bird flying through the rainforest canopy, or did she separate out the living creature from its material essence—the way she distanced her flies from their purpose in killing salmon?

  On a rainy, dull winter day in Megan’s shed, the feathers and skins of the dead birds would be the brightest objects in her immediate landscape. If she didn’t think about the birds themselves, then she couldn’t fail to be influenced by the colourful feathers. Did they cheer her? Was she surprised by the sharp start of colour every time she opened the shed door? When a breeze blew in her open window and ruffled the feathers, did the movement please her, or startle her?

  Megan Boyd’s work contributed to the decline of certain birds, but she was also a conservationist. She was an energetic supporter of the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, an organization engaged in buying out the commercial fishing licences for the fleets overfishing the North Atlantic salmon stocks, and she often contributed her flies to their fundraising events. Granted, her conservation tendencies had a personal motive, because if the salmon were overfished in the North Atlantic, then the numbers returning to spawn in the local Scottish rivers would be greatly reduced. Less fish in the rivers would equal less fishermen. Less fishermen, fewer customers for her salmon flies.

  16.

  THERE ARE THREE MAIN QUESTIONS TO consider when beginning a novel: What is the story, whose story is it, and how are you going to tell that story? Of these questions, the third one is the most interesting and deserves the greatest amount of thought.

  Most stories have, quite frankly, been told before. Most themes have been touched upon. So, it matters how you choose to tell a story. And it pays to spend a long time trying to figure out what the optimum way to do this is going to be. Often, the first thing that occurs to a writer is just the most overused trope. Turning approaches over, spending days, weeks, months, considering all the elements of your story and how they will best be served, will yield up more interesting options for the narrative.

  A few years ago, a novelist wrote a story about a woman in the 1930s who walked from New York to Alaska. A basic travel story, with the journey changing the character fundamentally so that the person who arrived in Alaska was no longer the same person who had left New York City. Most writers would have chosen to tell this story by showing the long, epic walk and its day-by-day progression. But this novelist made a different and more radically inventive choice. She decided not to show the walk at all, but rather to give us the character when she stopped somewhere. The effects of the walk were registered on her body and psyche when she paused for the night, or for a couple of days. Telling the story this way kept the tension up, because only by the pause would you know what had happened on the journey. It was a brilliant lesson in structure, and it was what gave the novel a large readership.

  So, how do I tell the story of Megan Boyd? Do I begin with her birth and move forward from there, in a fairly conventional biographical chronology? Do I make jumps in time to increase the drama, because the bare facts of the life aren’t very dramatic and drama is what gives a story its fuel? I could do a sort of day-in-the-life approach, because most of Megan’s life would be apparent in a single day and it seemed that her days tended to resemble each other (with the exception of Sundays). Or I could section the novel according to the different flies she tied, including instructions for making the fly at the beginning of each of the chapters.

  But the trouble with turning Megan Boyd’s life into fiction is Megan Boyd herself. She was, while not a recluse, a very self-contained woman who led a very self-contained life. A solitary perspective is difficult to convey—unless the person is insane, or a murderer, or has some very unique way of seeing the world. Novels are inherently social and they depend on relationships, and something also needs to be at stake in the relationship in order for there to be enough tension in the story to carry it for the whole length of a novel. It is not going to be enough to write about Megan’s customers, or her many kindnesses to the young and old in the village, or even her country dancing adventures. I need her to have a lover, someone to flex against. I need her to feel vulnerable, to not always be in control. I am going to have to bring back Graham and Evelyn.

  17.

  I TAKE THE DOG OUT AFTER DINNER, WHEN the heat of the day has subsided somewhat. We stroll through the woods and out onto the strip of grass before the river. There are a few other people walking the path, but just below a small waterfall, a knot of people are gathered together on the riverbank. A police officer is unrolling yellow crime scene tape around the trees.

  A teenager rides past me on his bike.

  “They found him,” he says excitedly. “They found him in the river.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “The dog walker,” he yells over his shoulder, pedalling furiously as he rides off.

  And then I see the body of a man at the feet of the people who are gathered on the riverbank. He is on his back, both hands above his head, which is probably how he was removed from the water, carried out by his arms and legs. Someone has thrown a coat over him, but it only covers his head and upper torso. I can see the skin of his midriff. I can see that he only has one shoe on.

  “Come on,” I say to Charlotte, who has wandered closer to the scene, curious about the group of people by the river. We retrace our steps through the woods, back to the car.

  Life is so different from fiction. A random, cruel event can occur in life, coming out of nowhere and surprising everyone. A man can be walking his dog and then he can be dead. A person who was never sick and in the middle of their busy life can suddenly die of cancer. It doesn’t matter that it’s unfair. People don’t get the deaths they deserve. Good people can have bad deaths, because death, ultimately, is not within our control, and this is the most frightening aspect of it.

  But fiction can’t work like that. A writer must slowly build a story and characters, as though they were making a machine, with each part intersecting snugly, each sentence casting forward to hook onto the next. Once you have created someone, you must lean the way they lean, have the understanding they have, never step outside the limits you have determined for them. You cannot just kill them off with no real warning. It will feel unbelievable to readers and they will stop trusting your story. Fiction is measured and reassuring in a way that life isn’t, and perhaps that’s why we read it, and also why I write it.

  18.

  IT RAINS IN THE NIGHT. NOT ENOUGH moisture to do any real good to the plants and trees, but the grass doesn’t seem quite so dry when I walk across it on my way to the car in the morning.

  I hate how parched the countryside looks on my drive to Paul’s. After my brother died, I was so broken open that I thought I could feel the trees reaching and stretching as they grew. Now it seems as though they are curling into themselves, shrivelling away to dust.

  Paul is sitting on his front porch when I pull into the driveway of his bungalow. He jumps up when he sees me.

  “Greetings!” he says, a bit too enthusiastically. The dog, thinking the bouncy lilt in his voice is meant for her, knocks against his legs, barking with approval.

  “Sorry.” I grab at her collar. “She thinks that you’re really excited to see her.”

  “Oh,” says Paul. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. “Do you know everything your dog thinks?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He opens the door for me, and the dog bounds into the house.

  “Now she thinks that because you’re so glad to see her, she will grace you with her presence this morning. She’s kind that way.”

  “Oh,” says Paul again. “Well, I suppose that can’t be helped.”

  “You started it,” I say. I am annoyed at his eager welcome, which I know was meant for me. I wish I’d never thrown those frozen dinners into t
he lake.

  The dog moves down the basement stairs with tentative fluidity, like a Slinky. She flops on the floor by my chair, letting out a simultaneous groan and fart as she settles her body onto the cool concrete.

  In the basement, I forget my irritation with Paul. I like the look of my Jock Scott in the vise. It’s not as sharp as Paul’s, but it’s not terrible either. We’re halfway through and I feel that I am beginning to get the hang of it now.

  “How long to tie one in real life?” I ask. “How long would it have taken Megan Boyd to make a Jock Scott?”

  “A few hours,” says Paul. “But she was probably fairly quick, seeing as that’s all she was doing.”

  “But she might have only tied a half-dozen flies a day?”

  “Yes.”

  No wonder she had a four-year backlog and worked up to sixteen hours a day.

  The whole enterprise seems weighted against her. I can’t see how Megan could ever get caught up with the demand for her flies. It must have been very stressful to always feel so behind in your work. I have a new appreciation for the singularity of her life and the overwhelming busyness of her days. She probably never expected to become so famous. Did she even like her popularity? Wouldn’t her life have been more manageable if she hadn’t been so good at what she did? But in one of the photos of her that was in a magazine, she is sitting at her workbench, concentrating on tying a fly, and she is wearing lipstick. She has made an effort for the photographer. So, perhaps, although she didn’t love the constant busyness, she did like the attention.

  “How’s your story going?” asks Paul. He passes me a blue feather.

  “Hey, I thought those were endangered and not allowed?”

  “It’s kingfisher. A substitute for blue chatterer. I would never use a bird that’s endangered.”