‘Don’t tell me,’ she said as we came in sight of the second, ‘it’s a Finnish thing.’
Oskar wasn’t up and I didn’t knock. The day before he’d told me I could check the traps on my own. I hadn’t mentioned anything about taking Eva.
It took me about twenty pulls to get the engine going and when it did its sickly mechanical splutter limped all the way across the lake and came back in wheezy echoes. Avalon was going to take a while to cross. Eva was sitting up in the bow seat, facing me. Once we got moving she took the pith helmet off. Her hair was black and straight and fell in short bangs across her forehead. The breeze from the boat flipped it up into little waves and curls.
‘What direction are we headed in, skipper?’
‘North by north-west, more or less,’ I said.
‘Like the film?’
‘What film?’
Eva mouthed something at me but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. At first I thought it was the noise of the engine drowning her out but then I realised she wasn’t actually using her voice. She was miming.
‘You know, that film,’ she finally said.
I didn’t know. We’d never had a television. Sometimes they played a film at the Native Friendship Centre in Crooked River. You could tell when there was one playing because there were cigarette breaks every half an hour and everyone would be out on the sidewalk smoking.
‘I’m on the shark’s side, one hundred per cent,’ I’d heard someone say once.
‘Oh yeah, that one,’ I said. I didn’t want Eva knowing how little I knew about those things.
‘It’s like opening letters,’ Eva said.
‘I guess it is,’ I said, unfolding the aluminium trap and dropping the leeches into the tote.
‘Can you imagine getting one? Oh, great, look what they’ve sent me – another batch of leeches!’ Eva had been in high spirits the whole journey out. As we’d crossed the lake she’d leaned over the side of the boat and let her fingers slip along the surface of the water. They left the tiniest of wakes behind them.
Around the edges of the pond you could see the purple of irises. About a foot more of the beaver’s lodge was visible. The old wood piled on top of it was as smooth and pale as bone. I remembered to reset the traps at different levels. When I’d finished we landed and I took Eva to see the prison.
‘This is it?’ she said.
‘This is it,’ I said.
‘I don’t know. I was expecting something, you know, more prison-y.’
I looked around. She was right. As ruins went, it wasn’t very anything. ‘This is probably where the prisoners slept,’ I said, pointing to the mouldering logs. ‘And this is probably where they cooked.’
I didn’t understand myself. Last time I’d been here I hadn’t wanted it to be a prison at all. Now I was trying to show how it had been.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, for reasons that were beyond me.
‘For what,’ she said. She took her camera out and started taking pictures.
The two burrs on the birch tree bulged out at me like eyeballs.
By the time Eva found the old wood stove any hint of disappointment had disappeared. She knelt down to photograph the inside of it.
‘Do you think this ash is from back then? It could be historical ash.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you think any of them escaped?’
‘I don’t know. I guess they could have. There weren’t many guards.’
‘I bet at least one of them did.’
After taking pictures of the rusty kettle Eva announced that she’d found a key.
‘See,’ she said. ‘To open their handcuffs with or something. Or the door.’
It looked an awful lot like a fork to me. ‘I don’t think they were locked in,’ I said. Eva didn’t take any notice.
‘I knew it. What do you think his name was? Gunther. Yes, I think that was his name. Ver is Gunther? Gunther ist eskapen.
‘You don’t speak German, do you?’
Eva started marching between the trees. ‘Mein Gott! Herr Gunther ist goner.’
Beyond the site of the prison was a narrow ridge of naked bedrock. My father had made me some baloney sandwiches for lunch and, before heading back, we clambered up to the top of it to eat them. On one side you could see the beaver pond, on the other a creek snaked its way through the bush, flanked by the lighter, swampy green of reeds and bulrushes.
‘He must have gone that way,’ Eva said after we’d finished eating.
‘Who?’
‘Poor Gunther,’ she said, sounding genuinely stricken over the plight of her imaginary soldier. ‘It was tough going but I’m sure he made it in the end.’ She lit a green death and blew the smoke up towards the sky. Then she turned to face me and asked: ‘And which way will we go next time?’
To reach where, I was about to ask. For most of the trip I’d tried to forget the main reason she’d come with me. Part of me hoped she’d lost interest in the whole idea.
‘You mean to reach the Un-named Water Body?’ I said.
She nodded her head.
‘We’ll probably go up that way too,’ I said, allowing Gunther an existence despite myself.
Eva fixed her eyes intently on the creek, as though she could navigate it by looking alone and had already travelled far beyond the portion of it which was visible to us. And even though the morning’s mist had long evaporated you could almost believe it could lead to any place you wanted – to Gunther’s home, to the source of the three-day blow, to anywhere at all. Or at least you could for a second or two.
‘When?’
Not for a long time, I hoped.
Trains
Later that day Oskar and I walked down the tracks past Wannigan Bay to the Switch Ponds to set some minnow traps. They were called the Switch Ponds because of the rail switch beside the culvert that separated them. On our way there I’d made sure to give this switch a wide berth, worried it might clamp shut on my foot and trap me on the tracks like one of those women in black and white films.
On the way back we talked about leeches. I was asking Oskar where they went in the winter. I wanted to know if, beneath the ice, the lake became a kind of water pukak; if – beyond our sight – the summer version of it was dismantled like scenery behind a curtain and a winter version erected its place.
Oskar said he wasn’t sure what the leeches did in the winter. He said with no fresh blood on offer they probably just curled up somewhere and went to sleep like bears. But he didn’t know for certain. Sometimes the leeches were a mystery to him. In fact, they were often a mystery to him.
How different was it for the rest of the lake under the ice, I asked? He said I should have a good enough idea of that from ice fishing: that in the shallower parts it was colder and darker and most of the warmer water fish were sluggish and not doing much of anything. As for the trout, and the other fish that liked the cold and the deep, they just carried on as usual. At a certain depth the lake probably didn’t change much at all, whatever season it was.
We’d made it past the wannigans and were close to the culvert at Butterfly Creek. Out on his lawn, Lamar was hammering boards onto a frame. It wasn’t quite square or round, more a kind of hexagon.
‘What do you think he’s building?’ I asked.
‘Lamar is Lamar,’ Oskar said, which is what he usually said when I asked him something about Lamar.
‘Was he different before?’
Oskar crushed a horsefly on his neck.
‘Before what?’
‘Before the accident,’ I said.
‘He is what he is now,’ he said, stopping and crouching down on his haunches. He felt the track with his hand. ‘There’s a train coming,’ he said. And without another word we both moved off to the edge of the chippings and continued on our way.
We’d made it past the Burn before we heard its whistle. We were almost at the path leading down to my cabin when the engine shrieked and shuddered its way around the be
nd. Moving off a few feet towards an outcrop of granite, as though subconsciously seeking the safer ground, we stopped to watch it pass.
It’s as if the approaching commotion of that train, the screech of its brakes and the blare of its whistle (so soulful and melancholy from afar, so shocking and loud up close), have shaken loose my memories of the next few minutes; they judder by in stops and starts, in jumps and tremors. It was a long train, and these longer trains had to slow right down as they hugged the bends and curves of the lake’s shore. The trucks went by, one by one by one in what felt like endless succession, marked with ears of wheat, painted yellow and a baked, dusty red, the colour of plains and savannahs, and here and there decorated in sprays of bright graffiti that seemed, out here, to have been formed out of an entirely different alphabet – an outlandish and colourful hieroglyphics. It stretched further and further around the lake’s shore until it was like some huge python encircling it. By this time it’d slowed to almost a walking pace.
Eva was about two hundred yards in front of us when I first spotted her, standing near the edge of the Burn. She was wearing some kind of ancient poncho and looked raggedly triangular, like the top of a spruce tree. She nodded as each truck rumbled past, as if she was counting them. I called out to her but my voice was swallowed up by the train.
‘That’s Lamar’s niece,’ I shouted to Oskar, which seemed immediately rather pointless – it couldn’t really be anybody else. He didn’t reply and turning to face him I found he was staring at Eva. His skin had become terribly pale, intensifying the blackness of his eyes and making it appear as though they were reflecting the charred surface of the Burn. I looked back at Eva. She was still nodding her head. She was at least three or four steps closer to the train, close enough for the agitated air to lift up her brown curls and blow them across her face.
Oskar was standing beside me and then he was running towards her. He was silent and then his mouth was open and moving, although the sounds and words it made are lost. And then I was running too. I caught up to him and grabbed hold of his sleeve. I had no idea why I was doing this – I had no idea what he was intending to do; it was as though I was impelled by some kind of skittery, panicked unease or instinct, the type that makes animals bolt through gates and jump fences. By the time I’d caught up to him, Oskar’s baseball cap had flown off, leaving his hair sticking up in strands here and there as if the air had become electrified. He shook me off in one movement – with a physical strength I’d never suspected and which made him appear suddenly bigger – and began to run again. At that moment Eva turned, looked at us, smiled, and then, in two athletic bounds, stepped between two of the passing trucks and vanished.
It was a long wait. The thumping, rhythmic progress of the trucks seemed to count it out like some giant and deafening metronome. I remember watching the painted ears of wheat whooshing by, and Oskar standing a few yards in front of me where he’d come to a stop, looking as small as a child now, trembling, his pale face and black eyes pointed anxiously down towards the cinders. The trucks passed by, the other side of the tracks briefly visible in the gaps between them; the lake was there and then it wasn’t; one outcome was possible and then another – a double-sided card flipped back and forth. And then, just when it seemed there would be no end to it, the red of the caboose flashed by. I could hear crickets again. Eva was standing on the other side of the tracks calmly smoking a green death. As we stared at her, she stubbed it out and started heading back in the direction of Butterfly Creek. And in the slow diminuendo, as the rumble of the train ebbed away into the humming of the tracks, and the screeching of its brakes became distant groans, Oskar turned back towards me, picked up his hat and, without a word, walked away into the Burn.
North by North-West II
He wasn’t in his cabin the next morning and his boat was still tied to the dock. I looked out back around the wood pile; I checked behind the Toad. Then I walked the tracks all the way out to the Switch Ponds, searching the verges, stopping to look in the wannigans. I even forced myself to glance over the Burn. Usually, Oskar’s nature sleeps didn’t worry me (he’d been having them a long time before I was around) but this time felt different. I could picture how pale his face had been the day before; the ruddy darkness of his skin as horribly blanched as his bears’ skulls. He must have seen her in Eva.
When I returned to his cabin he still wasn’t there. I left a note on his door saying I’d check the leeches. Then, halfway along the trail to my cabin I turned around, went back, and left another note saying I’d check the minnow traps too. Then I stomped my way over to Butterfly Creek.
Outside on the lawn, Lamar was still hammering away at his timber frame. It looked like some kind of tower now. He nodded as I walked past but didn’t stop hammering. I might have asked him what it was but I guess we’d already reached the high water mark in our conversation.
Eva opened the front door, wearing the same pith helmet and beige shorts as she had the previous morning.
‘Why did you do that?’ I demanded.
‘Why did I do what?’ she said with an infuriatingly straight face.
‘You know.’
‘Oh, you mean my little trick with the train,’ she said, and smiled.
Behind her I could see two moose peering at me from the wall of dead animals. I had a sudden urge to rush in and punch one of them on the nose. Moose, I thought, had very punch-able noses.
‘It wasn’t a trick. It was dangerous. It was stupid.’
I had a lot more to say but it felt as though my tongue had swollen up and was too big for my mouth. It was what often happened in my dreams, even the ones that weren’t nightmares.
‘Why’d your leech buddy freak out?’
‘His name’s Oskar.’
‘Was it a Finnish thing?’
It was hopeless me trying to explain. Everything I wanted to say was clogged up in my head like a sinus infection. There was a painful pressure in my forehead.
‘It was dangerous. It was…’
‘Look, okay. No need to go on about it. I was lucky. What can I say, I’m lucky.’
‘You weren’t lucky. It was dangerous. It was stupid.’
‘Why are you crying, Zachary?’
‘I’m not crying.’
‘It sure looks like it.’
‘I’m not,’ I sniffled. I felt like throwing her in the lake.
‘When can we go to the un-named water body?’ she asked suddenly.
‘We could go today,’ I said huffily, glad the subject had changed. ‘We could go right now.’
The next thing I knew we were out on the water, headed north by north-west. It wasn’t what I’d planned that morning. It didn’t once occur to me that Eva hadn’t even needed to get changed.
The creek we’d looked at the day before petered out after about two or three kilometres, falling first into a rocky shallows and then into a weedy marsh.
‘What do we do now?’ Eva asked after we’d pulled the boat up.
‘We’ll bushwhack it,’ I said, looking at her map with its red dots and holes and trying to sound authoritative. I didn’t feel that way. I knew it was difficult to move that far through the bush without a trail or a river to follow; more difficult still to find something in it. A map will only give you so much when you’re standing in a forest: a direction – maybe; a destination – a considerably bigger maybe. If I’d learnt anything from my father’s notebooks and the walls of our school it was that now was a good time to pack up and head home. I imagined us starving or freezing or being eaten by bears, or else wandering forever in gloomy green circles like unhappy wood spirits. And yet I still walked right on into it, and the queasy feeling in my stomach wasn’t all dread.
In looking at illustrations of other forests – in books and magazines – I’d often been struck by how enviably open and accessible they appeared. The trees would be generously spaced, the ground beneath them pleasantly shaded and clear; somewhere you might stroll leisurely on a carpet of grass,
stopping to smell a flower or two, a deer ambling easily past. (Of course at night, or when the story had taken a more twilit turn, it was different.) But the forest I knew, or knew a little of at least, had never been like this. When you entered it, you weren’t walking along in a forest, you were clambering and pushing and crawling and stumbling through and over and around and under it. It was a place of obstacles, of hydra-headed opposition. Past one there was always another: the blow-down, the deadfall, the alder and balsam saplings, the thickly bunched young pines, the skinny, witch-fingered spruce boughs, the sphagnum- covered bogs, the swamps, the granite boulders and slabs. In there you could barely think beyond the next footstep you had to make, the next encounter. And all the time, beyond it, there it was, that feeling – jagged and darkly glittering like shattered obsidian: the fear of being lost; the strange, sharp, unexpected joy of being in a place where being truly lost was possible.
For half an hour, then an hour, Eva and I crashed and blundered our way north. Sometimes a space would appear to open out beyond the trees in front of us.
‘Do you see it? Is that it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How far did it look on the map?’
‘Further.’
‘Fuck, how far is this?’
‘This isn’t far at all.’
‘How did Gunther find his way through this shit?’
I snapped branches as we went, pushed over saplings. Hansel and Gretel had it almost right: make trails; the signs of where you’ve been may help you get back there. Behind me Eva moved recklessly forward, marking nothing.
And then, quite suddenly, without me even knowing we were close, we were there. I remember looking up and discovering there weren’t any branches poking into my eyes. Two wood ducks were winging their way over me and beneath them the light was sparkling on water. A beaver turned and slapped his tail in admonition, the mosquitoes hummed and whined, and below the low twanging of a green frog was the sound of our hushed footsteps, approaching slowly and tentatively now, as if it were the first day of the creation.
‘Jesus,’ Eva exclaimed in disappointment. ‘Is this it?’
Hummingbird Page 10
