Bear

In the winter, she lived like a mole, buried deep in her office, digging among maps and manuscripts. She lived close to her work and shopped on the way between her apartment and the Institute, scurrying hastily through the tube of winter from refuge to refuge, wasting no time. She did not like cold air on her skin.

Her basement room at the Institute was close to the steam pipes and protectively lined with books, wooden filing cabinets and very old, brown, framed photographs of unlikely people: General Booth and somebody’s Grandma Town, France from the air in 1915, groups of athletes and sappers; things people brought her because she would not throw them out, because it was herjob to keep them.

“Don’t throw it out,” people said. “Lug it all down to the Historical Institute. They might want it. He might have been more of a somebody than we thought, even if he did drink.” So she had retrieved from their generosity a Christmas card from the trenches with a celluloid boot on it, a parchment poem to Chinga cousy Township graced with a wreath of human hair, a signed photograph of the founder of a seed company long ago absorbed by a competitor.

Trivia which she used to remind herself that long ago the outside world had existed, that there was more to today than yesterday with its yellowing paper and browning ink and maps that tended to shatter when they were unfolded. Yet,when the weather turned and the sun filtered into even her basement windows,when the sunbeams were laden with spring dust and the old tin ashtrays began to stink of a winter of nicotine and contemplation, the flaws in her plodding private world were made public, even to her, for although she loved old shabby things, things that had already been loved and suffered, objects with a past,when she saw that her arms were slug-pale and her fingerprints grained with old, old ink, that the detritus with which she bedizened her bulletin boards was curled and valueless, when she found that her eyes would no longer focus in the light, she was always ashamed, for the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast.

This year, however, she was due to escape the shaming moment of realization. The mole would not be forced to admit that it had been intended for an antelope.The Director found her among her files and rolled maps and, standing solemnly under a row of family portraits donated to the Institute on the grounds that it would be impious to hang them, as was then fashionable, in the bathroom, announced that the Cary estate had at last been settled in favour of the Institute. He looked at her, she looked at him:it had happened. For once, instead of Sunday school attendance certificates, old emigration documents, envelopes of unidentified farmers’Sunday photographs and withered love letters,something of real value had been left them.“You’d better get packing, Lou,” he said, “and go up and do a job on it. The change will do you good.” Four years before, they had received a letter from a firm of lawyers in Ottawa stating that the residue of the estate of Colonel Jocelyn Cary, including Cary Island, the estate there on known as Pennarth,and the contents of its buildings,had been left to the Institute. The lawyers added that they understood that Pennarth contained a large library of materials relevant to early settlement in the area.Lou and the Director searched their files for references to Cary,and sent researchers over to the Provincial Archives. They unearthed a file in the archaic handwriting of Miss Bliss, Lou’s predecessor, regarding a visit from one Colonel Jocelyn Cary, in 1944, during the course of which the bequest was proposed. The Director had been overseas at the time; the Institute impoverished. Nothing was done to follow up the offer, and by the time Lou got her growing-up over with and came to work at the Institute, Miss Bliss had long ago taken to drink and larded her files with many impossible suggestions.“Well,” said the Director cautiously,“we’d better not get our hopes up. It’s never happened before.“The relatives sued, of course. Cary Island, they had all found out, was no longer an isolated outpost on a lonely river; it had been transformed by automobiles, motorboats, long holidays, and snowmobiles and cash to real estate.While the Director wangled legal assistance at the Provincial Government’s expense (for the Institute had gradually been taken over),Lou dug and devilled in library and files, praying as she worked that research would reveal enough to provide her subject with a character. The Canadian tradition was, she had found, on the whole, genteel.Any evidence that an ancestor had performed any acts other than working and praying was usually destroyed. Families handily became respectable in retrospect but it was, as she and the Director often mourned, hell on history. If Cary had had enough money and enough energy to build a house that far north, and fill it with books, he was unusual. It was up to her to find out how unusual he was, and in the meantime to pray to whatever gods, muses and members of Parliament overlooked the affairs of the Institute that enough would be revealed to develop the dim negative of that region’s history.

The Colonel Cary who made the bequest had included an outline of his ancestor’s accomplishments. It appeared that the old Colonel,born the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution to a good but untitled Dorset family,had been sent for a soldier at an early age and served in Portugal and Sicily during the Napoleonic wars.At the age of twenty, he had married a Miss Arnold, whose father was adjutant of the troops stationed at Messina.He had risen in the ranks of the artillery, bred a number of children on his wife, served with distinction in a number of campaigns in the Po valley and returned to England with his brood at the end of the wars unemployed. All this information had been verified by references to land titles, commissions, military recommendations and citations.

During his military service, the descendant noted, the Colonel had become attached to the idea of living on an island. The family legend was that one hot summer, stationed on Malta, he opened an atlas of the New World, closed his eyes, and picked out Cary Island with a pin. Lou thought of him sitting on a portable military thunder box groaning with summer dysentery,longing for cool water. No pin was necessary. After a futile search for employment in England, he sold what property he owned there and moved with his family to Toronto, then York, in 1826. Good. He was in the records. Cary. Colonel John William. Shuter Street, number 22. Gentleman. It was not until 1834 that he obtained the charter (‘Your petitioner humbly she weth…’) to settle Cary Island, having promised to build a lumbermill and provide a sailing ship for trade in the region. My grandmother,“wrote the descendant,“how ever,refused to go further into the wilderness and face the inclemencies of the north. She was meridional in temperament, if not in ancestry. The Colonel was forced to leave her behind in York with her daughters and the younger sons.He went north with his second son Rupert (I believe the oldest, Thomas Bedford Cary, was delicate, as he was buried in 1841 in the Necropolis Cemetery) and lived on the island very simply for the rest of his life.” Official references to Cary were scant. His petition for settlement of Cary Island and later his outright purchase, funded by the sale of his commission, were recorded. According to city directories, Mrs. Henrietta Cary continued to live in York at respectable addresses long after it was named Toronto.The Colonel was appointed Magistrate for the Northern District in 1836. And given a military funeral at Sault SteMarie in 1869 at the age of ninety. It was the years on Cary Island that Lou was to research and discover now. For the Institute had won its suit with costs and she was detailed to inspect the property this summer. It was only a matter, the lawyers and the caretakers of the property advised,of waiting until the weather was such that she would feel comfortable at Pennarth,which had never had central heating.

On the fifteenth of May she loaded her car with filing folders, paper, cards, notebooks and a typewriter. She had rooted out her old camping gear—moth eaten mackinaw jackets, hiking boots, a juvenile sleeping bag. The Director offered her a farewell handshake and drew back from the smell of mothballs.“Your man is called Homer Campbell. You turn off Highway 17 at Fisher’s Falls and follow county road 6 to a village called Brady. Turn left at the crossroads there, and follow the river shore until you get to Campbell’s marina. Homer will fix you up with a boat and take you to the island. I was talking to him yesterday. He says he’s connected up a new tank of propane and had someone clean the house for you.” The road went north. She followed it. There was a Rubicon near the height of land.When she crossed it, she began to feel free. She sped north to the highlands, lightheaded.The lawyers’inventory of the house and outbuildings indicated that she would not have much need for equipment. The house was no log cabin. It had six rooms, one ofwhich was a library. There were many sofas, many tables, many chairs. She could see their spread legs as they sat on the list. She felt everything was going to be comfortable.The land was hectic with new green. Crossing the bay, she shivered on the deck of the car ferry that connected the parts of the broken limestone arch of islands. Gulls wheeled and in the distance a foghorn blew.She passed one big island she had longed to live on all her life, and a little one, supposed by the Indians to be haunted, that she had been taken to as a child. She remembered going out to it in a big cruiser, landing, finding the paths obscured by poison ivy plants as tall as herself. Her parents were looking for fringed gentians and grass of Parnassus. While they searched she found herself riveted by the skeleton of the biggest dragonfly in the world, caught in a spiderweb in a cabin window, sucked dry.

Little islands floated innocently on the waves, rocked by bell-buoys.There were not many passengers aboard at this time of year: a few hunters, a couple of Indians in magenta skijackets, an elderly couple reading side by side at the top of the companionway. A French speaking family in new pastel sporting clothes. The tradition that everything for outdoors must be soiled and pilled and forty years old seemed to have died except in her. She thought of a man she knew who said it was now impossible to find a woman who smelled of her own self.It was nearly dusk when they pulled into the ferry dock. She had sharp memories of being here before. She remembered a beach, a lake the colour of silver, something sad happening. Something, yes, that happened when she was very young, some loss. It struck her as strange that she had never come back to this part of the world. While she waited for her car to be driven off, she watched the Indians getting into a new white panel truck.It was too late to make the marina before dark, for the trek on the ferry was, as usual, time consuming. She took a room in a motel on a deserted beach, spent the evening mooching along the water, listening to the birds. “I have an odd sense,“she wrote on a postcard to the Director, “of being reborn.“Driving off the island the next morning, she felt her heart lurch at the sight of the bald stone mountains of Algoma. Where have I been? she wondered. Is a life that can now be considered an absence a life? For some time things had been going badly for her.She could cite nothing in particular as a problem; rather, it was as if life in general had a grudge against her.Things persisted in turning grey.Although at first she had revelled in the erudite seclusion of her job, in the protection against the vulgarities of the world that it offered, after five years she now felt that in some way it had aged her disproportionately, that she was as old as the yellowed papers she spent her days unfolding. When, very occasionally, she raised her eyes from the past and surveyed the present, it faded from her view and became as ungraspable as a mirage.Although she had discussed this with the Director, who waved away her condition of mind as an occupational hazard, she was still not satisfied that this was how the only life she had been offered should be lived. it was late when she parked by the marina. She went into the cement-block store and asked for Homer Campbell. The round-faced storekeeper admitted his identity.

“You’ll be the lady from the Institute Mr. Dickson was writing me about,“he said.“You made good time.We can go over tonight.“He called his son and began unloading her car immediately. When she fussed a little about the typewriter, he shot her a look ofpity.He was middle-aged and cheerful. His son Sim was pale-eyed, pale-haired, a ghost, an albino, silently loading a second motorboat with boxes of supplies they had ready for her. He spoke to his son in chirps and clucks as he would to ananimal.The son was big-footed, bashful, passive: fifteen, fourteen, she concluded.She found it awkward getting seated in the motorboat: she seemed not to know how to bend anymore. Homer tried to show her how to start the motor, but she felt very far away.She had studied the water-charts. She knew Cary’s island was several miles up the reedy rivermouth they were penetrating. It was a likely-looking place on a map, but she already knew that the Colonel had not taken into account the fact that the river, for all its wide mouth, petered out to a stream further up, so that his marshy haven was more isolated than a cartographer would have reason to expect. His lumbermill had failed, she had read, because the elegant, English-looking river supplied only enough water to turn the wheel a day a week.Homer talked loudly at her over the motor’s roar.He seemed a loquacious man. She was more interested in the magical forms around her, the way rock ruggedness quickly converted to sand and birch, and islands no bigger than sandbars were crowned with shuttered old green cottages that looked lost and abandoned at this time of year. In this country, she thought, we have winter lives and summer lives of completely different quality. They slid down the chilly channel,Sim in a silver boat trailing behind them.You’re not so farout,“Homer shouted. “You’ll want to keep gas in the tank in case you need help,though.You won’t likely have no trouble with storms this time ofyear but you could get a lightning strike or a bad throat or something. Joe King lives over there when he has his traplines out in the winter, and his auntie, Mrs. Leroy, she’s an old Indian woman, she’s over on Neebish with her niece, so you won’t have no unexpected company.”There’s a woodstove and a gas stove and a couple of fireplaces.They had a space heater Joe and I took out, it was damn dangerous. Joe’s filled your woodshed, the old woman swep’the place out for you, you’ll be snug as a bug in a rug. If she comes back, you’ll know her. She’s as old as the hills and she’s got no teeth.“The boat was an old cedar strip outboard, but the motor was new. Homer assured her it wouldn’t leak so much once it had spent a little time in the water. There was a canoe in the boathouse; he didn’t know what shape it was in. He’d put a light motor of his own on the boat, figuring she wouldn’t want to haul the big twentyhorse-power up to the house when the weather got bad. Main thing was to keep it clean and dry, and keep the gas-can full. An enormous fog horn sounded. In spite of herself, she jumped. Homer laughed. “Sounds like a cow bellowing right up in your ear, don’t it? The shipping channel’s only four, five miles the other side of your place. We’ll have a good year. The river’s open early.“So this silent, creeping shore was Cary’s island.Sedge at the shore, then anonymous stones and trees.“There’s the point. We’ll round it in a minute.“There was something affectionate in Homer’s voice, as if he loved the place. He looked at her, and looked away. When they were around the riverbend, he pointed,and she saw the house looming white against the darkening sky. She sucked in her breath and waited; then, when they were close to the dock she saw that what she had thought was true: the house was a classic Fowler’s octagon.“Wow,” she said.“Pretty fine, isn’t it?” “It’s not mentioned in the textbooks. There’s an index of houses like that.” “Oh, we’re pretty cagey, up here.Nobody would know about this place who wasn’t running around in a boat; and none of us are telling. We send all the tourists down to gaggle at that house Longfellow was supposed to have written that Indian poem in,down there in the main channel. This place has been forgotten about, sort of, and around here we think it’s just as well. It’s a dilly, isn’t it? Wait til you come up the river on your own on a July morning. Nothing like it. Get the rope, Sim.” They tied up at a small dock,and Sim and Homer had the boat half unloaded before she was properly on her feet. “The relatives were fit to be tied when it was left to your outfit,“Homer went on.“Wanted the whole island shucked up in cottage lots. Government won’t allow that any more. Here,come on up and I’ll show you nside.“Staggering under the weight ofher suitcases, she followed Homer up the bank, over a wide green lawn (‘Sim here will mow her for you’) to the verandah of the house. “Hope you can manage without electric light,” Homer said. “There’s a couple of gas lights but they’re none too bright. You’ll need to work in a window. Plenty of windows, though.“She stood gazing at the house, letting his words slip after her. In the dusk, it was a gentle bulk. Its wide verandahs dimmed the windows of the ground floor.High trees arched over them.“Black birch,” Homer said. “There’s something special about those trees: it’s cooler under them than anywhere on a hot august day.““I don’t know that I’ll be here til August,” she murmured.“Nobody ever left this place that didn’t have to. That granddaughter in Cleveland would have given her eye teeth for it. Spent thousands trying to keep it from going to your outfit. Here, I’ve got the keys.“It was so long since she had seen a long, toothed house key that she had forgotten what it was called.“Didn’t need to lock up before the snowmobilers came,“Homer said.“You win some,you lose some.“Their footsteps sounded hollow on the porch. Homer opened the front door. She stepped inside and put her bags down in the front hall. She was surrounded by doors and windows.Ahead ofher was a broad stairwell leading to the top of the house. Smell of stove oil. Smell of mice. Smell of dust (last sun slanting low through small old window panes). Homer stood almost apologetically beside her, looking for her smile of approval. She looked up the stairs, to the left, to the right,and sniffed. Another smell, musky, unidentifiable but good. Homer turned to the right, opened the door, and laid her big type writer on a table in a dim room. The boy came with the duffle bags. Plonk.Plunk. He went back for more. “These houses are more or less round,” Homer said. “You come with me and I’ll show you around. Know how to light a kerosene lamp?““Yes.” “Show me.“An elaborate milk-glass lamp hung from the ceiling of the room she was in, but from somewhere else Homer produced a tin lantern like a railwayman’s. She lit it, and the room leapt into a glow of sofas and bow-legged tables,plant-stands and dead ferns. “You’ll be more interested in the kitchen. It’s through here.Remember the damerrson a wood stove?” “No.” “When you’ve had the grand tour I’ll show you.You’ll need it for a little heat in the morning. You could still get snow up here, you know.“The kitchen took only one plane of the octagon, as opposed to the parlour’s two. There was a modern propane stove beside the wood stove, a roll-top kitchen machine, and a tin sink with a pump.“There’s a better one outside,“Homer said.“We always had trouble with the leatherson this one.Now this next room’s a sort ofcombination woodshed and back hall, leads out to the real woodshed. There’s a yard out there, and a backhouse. Lucy’s cleaned the place up real good, hasn’t she? In here, this next room’s the masterbedroom, like.The bed looks kinda saggy. She’s laid you a fire. Here, I’ll light it for you, and take you along out back and show you what’s where.Come out the front doorand around.The back steps are bad at night.”