Bluebeard's Egg (31 page)

“And guess what she found?” says my father.

I try to guess, but I cannot. What would my mother have found on the roof? Not a pine cone, not a fungus, not a dead bird. It would not be what anyone else would find there.

In fact it turns out to be a dropping. Now I have to guess what kind of dropping.

“Flying squirrel,” I hazard lamely.

No, no. Nothing so ordinary.

“It was about this big,” says my father, indicating the length and the circumference. It is not an owl then.

“Brown?” I say, stalling for time.

“Black,” says my father. They both regard me, heads a little on one side, eyes shining with the glee of playing this ancient game, the game of riddles, scarcely able to contain the right answer.

“And it had hair in it,” says my father, as if now light will break upon me, I must surely guess.

But I am at a loss.

“Too big for a marten,” says my father, hinting, waiting. Then he lowers his voice a little. “Fisher,” he says. “Really?” I say.

“Must be,” says my father, and we all pause to savour the rarity of this event. There are not many fishers left, not many of those beautiful arboreal voracious predators, and we have never before found the signs of one in our area. For my father, this dropping is an interesting biological phenomenon. He has noted it and filed it, along with all the other scraps of fascinating data he notes and files.

For my mother however, this is something else. For her this dropping – this hand-long, two-fingers-thick, black, hairy dropping – not to put too fine a point on it, this deposit of animal shit – is a miraculous token, a sign of divine grace; as if their mundane, familiar, much-patched but at times still-leaking roof has been visited and made momentarily radiant by an unknown but by no means minor god.

Acknowledgements

Material in this collection has been previously published as follows:

“Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” in
Queen’s Quarterly;
“Betty” and “Bluebeard’s Egg” in
Chatelaine;
“Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of the Language” in
Saturday Night;
“The Sin Eater” on the CBC Radio program
Anthology
and its printed anthology,
Small Wonders;
and “Unearthing Suite” in a limited edition by Grand Union Press.

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939, and grew up in northern Quebec and Ontario, and later in Toronto. She has lived in numerous cities in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.

She is the author of more than twenty-five books – novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, social history, and books for children.

Atwood’s work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. She has won many awards, including the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the Canadian Authors Association Award. Her most recent novel,
Alias Grace
, won the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy. She is the recipient of numerous honours, such as
The Sunday Times
Award for Literary Excellence in the U.K., the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., Le Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and, most recently, she became the first winner of the London Literary Prize. She has received honorary degrees from universities across Canada, and one from Oxford University in England.

Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.