Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  Without another thought of Rawhide Lake and all the muskrat push-ups that yet had to be staked, I flung into the saddle and trotted the horse all the way home.

  Lillian eyed me with surprise when I stalked into her kitchen. “I didn’t look for you back this early,” she said. “Aren’t there many muskrats in Rawhide this year?”

  “Maybe more than there’s ever been before.” And a bit sheepishly I went on to explain: “It was too lonely out there on the ice, and every once in a while I’d forget and start looking around for Veasy.”

  Lillian moved her head in a gesture of understanding. “It’s like that here too. Things seem altogether different now that he’s gone. And I keep forgetting too—” She broke off, smiled faintly and then went on, “I started to make a prune pie this morning. Veasy always was hungry for my prune pies, though you hardly ever ate a slice of them. I started pitting the prunes before it came to me that there wasn’t much sense in me baking a prune pie anymore.”

  “Not much sense in me staking muskrat push-ups either,” I said moodily. “Maybe I’ll just run a line of mink traps up and down the creek, put out the old fisher and lynx set in the woods. We can take two or three hundred muskrats in late March when the snow has gone from the ice and I can see the push-ups without their being staked. Not much sense in me wearing myself to a frazzle trying to catch a lot of fur when—”

  “You can tend the mink traps on horseback, can’t you?” Lillian cut in.

  “Until the snow gets real deep, yes. Then it’s easier to run the traps on snowshoes.”

  “Then until the snow does get real deep, I’m going with you whenever you tend the traps,” Lillian declared.

  When next we heard from Veasy he was a private in the Royal Canadian Regiment, based at a training camp in Ontario. He’d signed up for a three-year hitch in the army. And Ontario was thousands of miles away from Meldrum Lake, B.C. Every once in a while he wrote a letter home. As regularly as we could get out to Riske Creek with mail, I wrote him of almost all that was going on in the woods. But I made no mention of the fact that this winter there would be mighty few push-ups staked, or that I’d only got twenty or thirty mink sets out around the beaver marshes when rightly there should have been twice that many.

  We didn’t see hair nor hide of the boy again until Christmas Eve of 1952. Then he was given seven days of what he in his letter referred to as “embarkation” leave. Embarkation! The word stirred my memory. In World War I two of my brothers had been with British troops in the crater fields of Passchendaele and at the blood baths of the Somme. One had been killed in action a few days before the November 1918 armistice. I knew of what was meant by the term “embarkation” leave, and the word had a sinister, disquieting flavour to it.

  “What does he mean by embarkation leave?” wondered Lillian. And because I knew it was no use beating around the bush I told her outright that Veasy was going overseas. “Germany, maybe,” I hinted lightly. “Guess maybe his outfit is going to relieve other Canadian troops over there.” I glanced at the letter, letting on that I was reading it. Then, with forced assurance, I told her, “Sure, he’s going to Europe. Do him a pile of good to see something of England and France, and a little bit of Germany. A real holiday, that’s what it will be to him.” But there were Canadian troops in other parts of the world than Germany, and Korea was one of them.

  Lillian slipped into an apron and began rolling her sleeves. I raised my eyebrows. “What are you aiming to do?”

  She said: “I’m going to bake a couple of prune pies.”

  We drove out to Riske Creek to meet him the day before Christmas. In that early winter of 1952 the weather had treated the wilderness with a kindliness that wasn’t always its lot at such a time of the year. A scant six inches of snow covered the game trails, and out on Island Lake Flats there wasn’t a single drift. The air was clean and as clear as spring water seeping out of the moss. It was fifteen above zero and the tires of the vehicle made a pleasant crunching sound as they broke tracks through the snow. Before leaving the house Lillian had spent almost all of an hour fixing herself up. She wore the neat gray suit that was only lifted off its hangers in the clothes closet on extra-special occasions. Three or four years ago Veasy had taken three unusually large weasels in his traps, all spotlessly white save for the black tip at their tails. He’d sent the skins away to a furrier and had them made up as a neckpiece for his mother. Of the hundreds of weasels that we’d taken in our traps, Lillian declared that there never had been such weasels as those three. This morning the weasel stole was around her neck.

  I fidgeted around the Jeep, brushing off the seats and polishing the windshield. I stalked in and out of the house, stamping my feet and aiming suggestive glances at the clock. Finally, and with impatience, I asked, “You fixing up to go visit the Queen?”

  She retorted, “You wouldn’t want Veasy to see me in slacks and all untidy-like, would you?”

  “That I wouldn’t,” I said fervently.

  He was waiting at Riske Creek when we drove in. I had to look a couple of times to make sure it was really Veasy standing there, smart as a Grenadier Guard in his well-tailored uniform. I greeted him: “Khaki sort of suits you.”

  “I prefer overalls myself,” he quietly came back, and there was a quality to the way he said it that told me yes, he really did prefer overalls.

  Then I hurried into the store, not because there was any occasion for hurry but because I reckoned that Lillian would want to have Veasy all to herself for a minute or two anyway.

  Soon we were halfway across Island Lake Flats, on the way home. Veasy was at the steering wheel because he always could handle the Jeep a shade better than me. “You off to Europe?” I suddenly asked.

  “No.” There was a long silence. Then: “Korea,” he said quickly. And the word sank into our hearts.

  Seven days’ embarkation leave. But that was from the moment of his stepping away from the training base in Ontario. He’d used up three of those precious days just getting to Riske Creek. It would take another three days for him to get back to his base, which only gave him one full day at home. But still, that day was Christmas, the best day of the year. The way I saw it, we were God Almighty lucky he was able to spend this Christmas Day with us before taking off for Korea. For Korea seemed awfully remote and pretty frightening to Lillian and me.

  Veasy and I took a long hike along the ice of Meldrum Lake on Christmas morning. “I figure there are a dozen active beaver lodges in the lake this year,” I said. “How about you and me going around just to make sure?”

  It wasn’t that I really wanted to count the beaver lodges but because I knew that Lillian always did like the house to herself Christmas morning, what with all the cooking to tend to. And if we stuck around the house, every once in a while wandering into her kitchen, lifting a saucepan lid here and there, maybe giving her a bit of unsolicited advice now and then, she’d sniff and grumble, “Now what does a man know about cooking the Christmas dinner? Why don’t you go and set some rabbit snares or a trap for that coyote that was howling its head off last night?”

  That night we sat around the radio, listening to a church service being broadcast from Vancouver. Lillian always did like organ music, and now the organ was accompanied by a real choir. And our stomachs were so full of turkey and plum pudding, and mince pie and cake, that any sort of talk was a matter of huge effort.

  I went and sprawled out full length on the lounge, eyes partly closed. My thoughts shifted back over the years, to some twenty-two other Christmases that we’d spent deep in the heart of a wilderness. It was calm and peaceful there in the sitting room, and the church service came in soft and subdued. The cat had jumped up on the lounge and flattened out alongside of me, purring easily and contentedly. Its belly was full of turkey too. Spark, our Labrador retriever, lay by the heater stove, nose on paws. I thought, “Queer how that dog can stand so much heat on his belly.” Spark’s stomach was full of moose meat because dogs prefer moose mea
t to turkey, even on Christmas Day. Veasy had picked up a book that Lillian had given him for Christmas and was riffling through its pages.

  Twenty-two Christmas Days! Didn’t hardly seem possible that so many had come and gone, and all spent back here in the woods. My eyes came open, shifted around the room and came to rest on Lillian. She was seated in an easy chair by the radio, arms folded, listening to the church service. And looking at Lillian I knew that it must have been that long. Only that many years could have lined her face as it was lined and sprinkled her hair with the gray that was in it now. “Shucks,” I thought, “who are you to think about Lillian’s hair beginning to gray—you’re getting as gray as a badger yourself.” And mighty darned quick I’d have to start wearing glasses, because last fall I could no longer see a deer standing stock-still in the woods a hundred yards off. No, I couldn’t see the deer at all until it picked its hoofs up and started to move away. When first we came to the creek, I’d have seen the deer there even if most of its body was behind a bush. So Lillian’s hair was graying and mine was graying too. And maybe come spring I’d take a trip to the Outside and go hunt up an optometrist, and maybe he could tell me why now I couldn’t see a deer when it was standing still in the woods watching me.

  Twenty-two years is a tidy stretch of time when all have been spent in a wilderness, shut off from the rest of the world. But apart from the graying heads and failing eyesight—and that would have happened almost anywhere—the years had treated us fairly. They owed us nothing at all; we owed them much. And not a one of them had been in vain—you only had to travel up and down creeks, marking the occupied beaver lodges, to be quite sure of that.

  My eyes closed again. The organ music stopped and the preacher was starting the sermon, solemn and serious. His voice had a sort of mesmerizing cadence to it. Spark moved off from the stove a few feet, then flopped down again. The cat flexed its paws. Korea. Veasy was going to Korea. Why should Veasy be going there to mix in with their disputes? Why wasn’t the whole world peaceful as it ever was at Meldrum Lake? “And the Lord Jesus Christ—” The preacher’s voice droned on, mixing in with my thoughts. Twenty-two years, and the Lord Jesus Christ had seen us safely through all of them. And that’s how it would be with Veasy when he was fighting in Korea. The Lord Jesus Christ would see to it that Veasy came back to us all in one piece. Of that much I was sure.

  Chapter 29

  Had it not been for the radio, Lillian and I might have never known that Veasy had taken part in a single battle. But on the fourth of May, 1953, the radio told us of the battle that had been fought the day before, and according to the news commentators it was one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles of the whole Korean War. But then news commentators often exaggerated a little, and maybe the battle hadn’t been quite as bloody as some of them tried to make out. Just the same, they wouldn’t have stated that the 3rd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, had borne the main brunt of the battle unless that had been so. And we knew that Private Veasy Eric Collier was part of the 3rd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment.

  It was knowledge of that that took the colour from Lillian’s face as the news came in over the radio and left her a grayish white. And made her set her teeth just as she’d done when the bus went out of sight around a bend in the road, carrying Veasy away from her with it.

  It was knowledge of that that compelled me to snatch at my breath while my troubled mind groped for the words I wanted. And when they came to my tongue, I moved over to her side, laid my hand gently on her shoulder and told her, “Now don’t you go to worrying. He’ll come back, just you wait and see if he doesn’t.” That’s what I said at the time because there was little else I could say.

  Three weeks later the large brown envelope with DEPARTMENT OF NATIONAL DEFENCE printed on its left-hand corner arrived at Riske Creek. I didn’t bother opening it until late that evening, when we were back home, and when all other envelopes had been opened and their contents read and digested. Large brown envelopes from any government department seldom had much of interest in them.

  We were in the sitting room, and the sun was about at the setting. Lillian was seated on the lounge, resting. A few minutes ago she’d been working in her flower garden, setting out some plants. There was a smear of dirt on her forehead, and a streak of blood on her chin where she’d squashed a mosquito. I picked the envelope up from the table with scant interest and slit it open. Inside was a sort of scroll-like affair, eighteen inches long and seven or eight wide. I tensed with a dreadful premonition as I began reading the printed words that danced before my eyes. When I reached the end of them I exhaled a pent-up breath.

  Lillian glanced at me sharply with question in her eyes. “It’s from Department of National Defence,” I explained, “about Veasy.”

  “Veasy!” The word was loaded with anxiety.

  “Now, now, there’s nothing for you to get alarmed about. Here, you’d better read it yourself.” And I began to get up from my chair.

  “No,” she insisted. “You read it to me.”

  So, word for word, I quietly began to read:

  Award of Mention-in-Despatches to SK 13874

  Private Veasy Eric Collier, 3rd Battalion, The

  Royal Canadian Regiment.

  I paused a moment, trying to steady my breath, and when I had it under control again, I continued.

  During the night 2/3 of May, 1953, C Company, 3rd Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment, sustained a heavy attack by superior enemy forces accompanied by an intense artillery bombardment. Private Collier was on duty as a relay station operator in No. 7 Platoon position of “C” Company which bore the brunt of the assault. Throughout the action Private Collier remained calm and efficient, keeping his wireless sets operating at maximum efficiency. On three separate occasions when his aerial was shot down, he exposed himself to heavy enemy fire to re-erect the damaged aerial, and subsequently when the Assistant Signals Officer and his Platoon Commander were obliged to leave the Command Post, he continued to keep communications open and remained on the position until ordered to leave. This soldier’s gallantry and devotion to duty in keeping communications operating contributed in a large measure to the successful conduct of the battle.

  I laid the citation down on the table and got up from the chair. Lillian had dropped the little file, or whatever it is that women use to clean their fingernails, on the lounge, and her hands rested in her lap. She sat there very prim and straight, and gave me not so much as one quick glance as I went out through the door and down to the lake. Though there was a stiffish breeze at the time, I had no eyes for the wavelets jigging on the water. In fact, instead of open water I saw ice and a dusting of snow on the lake, and the spruces and pine trees around it were weighted down with snow. And a child was moving up the ice toward me, short, stout little legs pushing the skis over the snow. And I saw something else there too: behind the child, a hundred yards behind, padded five lusty timber wolves, and when I saw them, the crisp winter air I was breathing into my lungs became pregnant with terrible danger. “Keep coming, son—steady—just like that. Don’t let them bluff you, don’t panic. Steady—steady—steady—” And the child hadn’t panicked, and a few minutes later he was there at my side, showing me a dandy mink that he’d taken from his traps.

  The vision melted. The ice was gone, and there was no snow on the evergreens as the breeze swayed their tops. But the words “don’t panic” still sang in my ears. Perhaps that’s how it had been over there in Korea when Veasy was fixing the aerial. He hadn’t panicked, when such panic might have changed the whole course of the battle, because of all the things that the wilderness had been able to teach him, above all not to panic was one of them.

  That summer, we irrigated the hayfield, cut the crop and hauled it away to the corral. Then, after what seemed to be only a very brief pause, it came season to dig the potatoes, gather the other vegetables and stow them away in the root cellar.

  We hunted no geese that fall, although flocks of a hundred
or more settled down on the beaver ponds, tarrying a while before continuing their southward trek. “Eric, it’s been two years or more since you last shot a goose,” Lillian commented with surprise.

  I stroked my chin. “That it has. You think I should go shoot one now?”

  “No.” It was an emphatic no, too. Lillian loved the geese. Even in those other years when the price of a Christmas turkey had to be spent on more urgently needed things, Lillian had to steel herself into flushing the geese and putting them over my gun.

  The lakes became ice overnight, then snow rustled down from the north. “Remember the bear dens?” I asked, pulling a chair up to the heater stove and patting my pockets for tobacco pouch and cigarette papers.

  She made a little grimace. “I’ll never forget them.”

  I rolled the cigarette, lit it and teased, “Were you ever even a bit scared?”

  “Always.”

  I winked. “Me too.” And after a long puff at the cigarette: “You’d rather have store lard, wouldn’t you?”

  “Now that we’ve the money to buy it with, yes.”

  Not too many traps were set out in cubbies that winter. Just enough to give me exercise, a run of two or three miles on the snowshoes every afternoon.

  I trapped a few muskrats in March. Not too many, although the marshes were dotted with push-ups. Enough to give me the exercise I had to have. And maybe enough to inform me that for some reason or another the snowshoes were heavier now than they’d been five years ago.

  The winter clung on as our winters so often did. It was mid-April when I chained up all four wheels of the Jeep, backed it out of the old log cabin that had been converted into a garage and steered it through the snow still quilting the hayfield. For a hundred yards the vehicle painfully bulldozed its way through that snow, then the wheels started to spin, and we seemed to be marking time. “We’re into a drift,” I commented without any surprise at all.