Kanata (31 page)

Edward looked like an illustration of a prince taken out of a children's book. A bit spoiled, aloof. His family were originally German. A vain man, always beautifully dressed. He usually had a cigarette going. I looked at him and thought about all those pink countries on the map—the colour of the British Empire—that would be under his patronage, more or less. And I looked at his face, a bit vacant, like a toy soldier, and I knew, even then, that the maps would be redrawn again.

In the meantime, we went to the movies. Everyone had had enough of reality: The war and the Spanish flu had seen to that. Cars and movies swept us off our feet. Movement and fantasy. It gave America the chance to sell its relentless promise to the world, and we weren't the only ones that bought into it. Germany, England, France, everyone sat in the dark and entered that celluloid world like children. Even in black and white, America was seductive.

1

A
LBERTA,
1921

He was trim, a compact man with no fat. His posture gave him the illusion of height, his hair immaculately combed, standing in a checked shooting jacket, tan riding pants, and gleaming boots, nimbly taking a cigarette out of a silver case.

“This is the man I spoke of, Your Royal Highness. This is Mr. Mountain Horse.”

Michael looked at Edward's face. The Prince of Wales had an expression that looked as if he had just received bad news but was taking it well. Edward extended a hand.

“Very good to meet you, Mr. Mountain Horse.” The Prince stabbed out his cigarette after only a few puffs. “I understand you were overseas.”

“Yes, the Royal Canadian Dragoons.”

“Hellish, hm.”

“Yes.”

“Back in God's country, then. Very well.”

T
he fog along the river valley was contained by the banks as if it was liquid; the air cool, too early to be warmed by the sun. Michael walked softly through the tall grass toward the poplar groves in search of deer. To his right Edward marched with his exquisite royal gun cradled downward. On his left was Ballantyne, Edward's royal handler. The dawn showed clear skies but Michael could see a slight massing of cloud near the mountains. This early walking was his favourite part of the hunt. He had no appetite for killing anything. In his rucksack, Michael had their lunch: two bottles of Pétrus, jellied pheasant, gherkins, grainy mustard like the kind he had in Paris, and bread. Michael observed Edward, who was walking slightly ahead of him. His nose was turned up at the tip, foxlike, giving his face a natural snobbery and a look of perpetual expectation. Let him bag his deer and he'll go away, Michael had been told by a local. There was something in Edward, the impending throne, the implied formality of a palace thousands of miles away, that made people tense. Michael saw it in the eyes of the cattlemen. Some part of them was watching themselves with the Prince, as if they were on stage and in the audience at the same time. Still, Edward had a democratic bent. He talked to the locals, rode the boundaries of his property, and even spent a slightly staged morning chopping wood. He was a curious man, balancing glamour with a common touch, unsure of his role. Perhaps a bit shy, Michael thought, aware that he embodied something distant and shimmering to
those who rose before dawn and wiped the snot from their children's noses and saved suet in a can by the stove.

The west wind was picking up, coming over the mountains with its hint of snow. They were downwind; whatever was out there wouldn't catch their scent. The clouds rolled toward them, the light still radiant, glancing off the royal guns.

They walked uneventfully for four hours, then, at eleven, Edward stopped and said, “Lunch, gentlemen, don't you think.” There was no hint of the interrogative. Perhaps it was a form that had passed out of use among the royal family, an evolutionary casualty, like the useless gills that some lizards retained as reminders of their days as fish.

Michael put his rucksack down and spread out the blanket. He handed Ballantyne a bottle of Pétrus and three tin cups.

“How do your rate our chances, Mountain Horse?” Ballantyne asked. “Haven't seen hide nor hair.” Ballantyne had a heavy face, small veins joining in a dense network at the nose and spreading onto his cheeks in the pattern of a butterfly. He might have been forty-five, a military background, now a royal minder, managing Ed, as the ranchers called him. Enjoying the comfort and collateral luxury, eating and drinking what Ed ate and drank, faced daily with Ed's lofty emptiness.

Michael pointed to a stand of poplars that ran along a ridge to the northwest a mile away. “There might be something there. On the other side there's a clearing.”

Ballantyne poured a glass of wine for Edward, who sipped it, and then stared blankly, assessing it.

“This is fine land, Mountain Horse, some of the finest I've seen,” Edward said. “There are aspects of the Scottish
Highlands, a bit of Switzerland. Marvellous. Marvellous spot for one to be raised.”

“Yes.” Michael had abandoned the Highness appendix to every response, which felt alien and comic here in the foothills.

“Are there grizzly bears in this part of the country? I should like to get one on my next visit. Perhaps you can arrange a hunt.”

Michael nodded.

“I'm told they can stand to a height of ten feet. Enormously powerful. You've seen one, Mountain Horse.”

“Yes.”

Grizzlies were a rarity this far south and east, preferring the mountains or the northern bush. Years ago, when Michael was twelve, a bear had moved into the foothills, its path unmistakable: a shed swatted into kindling, a calf taken, its remains found two hundred yards away, dogs broken like toys. Maybe it had exhausted its own territory and kept shuffling east, or had been forced out by a larger rival, though this seemed unlikely given its apparent size. Men gathered and spoke of this new threat and hunts were organized. A rancher named Granger claimed he put four bullets into it but they didn't have any effect. The bear became mythic and its singular menace grew. It was spotted in a dozen places, the sightings vivid and unreliable and occasionally coincident. Over the months its threat evolved, no longer mere nature but something primeval, conjured out of the dark imagination of settlers who recognized their essential puniness in God's country.

After the first snow, the ranchers assumed it would hibernate and in spring they'd have another chance. But the killings kept up through December. Two calves from the Bar
C, another from the Double D. A bluetick hound was found with its stomach missing. The tracks in the snow, widened slightly with the sun on them, showed the bear was as big as they thought. The fact that it wasn't hibernating fuelled its mythology. Like all evil, it was relentless.

It was Stanford's idea to track the bear. Winter was the best time; they could pick up a trail in the snow. He drew a map—local, unscaled, idiosyncratic—that showed sightings of the bear on it. It spanned an area of roughly twenty square miles. Stanford made a dot where he calculated the centre of the sightings to be, and he figured the den was somewhere nearby. The next day he and Michael took blankets, food, and a rifle and walked the ten miles to Stanford's dot. They set up camp, cutting spruce boughs for a mattress and gathering wood for a fire. At dusk, they moved through the forest, sliding through its darkness, silent and thrilled, the ancient ritual sitting in their heads like a promise. It was early January, a warming wind coming down from the mountains. They walked for eight hours until Stanford saw a track. There was no mistaking it. They picked it up and followed carefully, tingling with fear and purpose.

They came on it in the dead light of a quarter moon: the grizzly standing in a clearing, its humped mass swaying over the carcass of a black bear, its muzzle red and glistening. The sight transfixed them. A bear eating a bear. Michael had never heard of this. The cannibalism seemed human in its wickedness. It stood up slowly, a graceful unfolding, and looked around, like a giant suddenly aware of interlopers. Stanford slowly raised the rifle to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel. Michael held his breath, waiting for the shot. Maybe Granger had been telling the truth; he put four
bullets into it and it didn't blink. Maybe it was unkillable, a monstrous totem that had endured through millennia and couldn't be stopped by man. Stanford held the rifle there for a full minute. He had the shot, his cold finger on the trigger, the finger growing numb and less trustworthy. In that moment of hesitation he felt unsure of this kill. They were hunters, they had killed deer, patiently taking a large buck in September and watching it fall soundlessly. They bled and field dressed it, carving off pieces like a bloody puzzle, and then drew two lines of blood on one another's cheeks as a private initiation. But killing the bear would be something else, somehow unearned; two adolescents following a map made of fear and rumour, and with blind luck they'd found the beast. Perhaps it was some nagging juju drifting back from the Bloods: They weren't worthy of the bear. And maybe something else, Michael thought: Stanford realizing even then that he had more in common with the bear than he did with the ranchers. By the time he left for the war, Stanford was an uneasy presence. His temper was unpredictable, and he made people nervous and they shied away from him. And maybe Stanford weighed all of this in that minute he had its heart in his sights.

When he lowered the gun, they both stood motionless. Fifteen minutes later the bear moved off, going north in its threatening waddle. They waited another five minutes, freezing, their faces mottled with cold, and then walked over to the dead black bear, a male, not fully grown, torn apart like a chicken. They walked back to camp and made a fire and warmed themselves. What was left of the night passed slowly and they set off for home in the morning. A snowstorm blew in from the northwest, unable to penetrate the coniferous forest with any power, but waiting for them on the plain.

“Grizzlies don't come this far south, usually,” Michael said to Edward.

Ballantyne surveyed the poplar along the ridge. “We'll go to the east of that stand, Mountain Horse. You come in from the south and drive them out into the open. If there are any.”

So Ballantyne was taking care of the hunt now. It was fine with Michael.

Edward lit a cigarette, drawing deeply, and stared at the scenery. The Prince ate little of his lunch and had drunk more than a bottle of the Pétrus.

“This country, what you can see of it from the train, will be the future of the nation,” he said. “It is up to the Empire to see that its population is British and not alien.” He stabbed out his cigarette and stood up. “It's a real life out here. I envy you that, Mountain Horse.” Edward and Ballantyne began walking. Michael packed up the remains of their lunch and followed.

An hour later Ballantyne and Edward split off to come from the east. Michael kept his western tack and approached slowly, curling up from the south, climbing the incline with effort. The cloud had rolled over them and the afternoon light was flat. Michael stepped carefully on fallen leaves that weren't dry enough to rustle. There was deer scat on the ground, desiccated, a week old. Edward and Ballantyne would be set up by now. Michael edged to the east, staying downwind. He stood for a minute, looking through the trees, the dappled grey light sitting like a fog. Eighty yards away a schematic of horn bobbing lightly, the rest of the stag obscured by trees. Michael moved toward it in an arc, quietly stepping, keeping his eye on the deer. He came at it from the east, between the deer and the Prince, then broke into a run, spooking it westward, away from Edward. The haunches
propelled it quickly through the trees, its magnificent silent speed briefly on display. Then it was gone.

Michael sat down and leaned against a poplar trunk. He wondered if Dunstan was bringing his mother any happiness, if happiness was possible. A part of her died with Stanford, and it would take an effort to animate what was left.

After twenty minutes he walked out of the trees and saw the Prince standing disappointed in the meadow among the last of the yellow flowers, a boy denied a sweet.