Late Nights on Air (32 page)

They all glanced at their sore hands with a certain amount of wonder and pity, and Gwen asked if they’d ever had their palms read.

No one had, except Gwen herself. She rolled her eyes. “The fortune teller told me I was a natural healer under a great deal of stress. I almost asked for my money back.”

Harry grinned. “You were hoping for fame and glory?”

“At least.”

The talk of colours and turns in fortune had Ralph thumbing through his copy of Farley Mowat, looking for and finding an excerpt from
Glimpses of the Barren Lands
by Thierry Mallet, a fur trader with Revillon Frères, who published his little book in 1930. One day Mallet came upon two little Eskimo girls helping their blind grandmother gather willow twigs. “‘
Their faces were round and healthy, the skin sunburned to a dark copper colour, but their cheeks showed a tinge of blood which gave them, under the tan, a peculiar complexion like the colour of a ripe plum. Their little hands were bare and black, the scratches caused by the dead twigs showing plainly in white, while their fingers seemed cramped with the cold.’

“What a painting,” Ralph exclaimed.

He read on and the story was unforgettable. Mallet encountered a small band of inland Eskimos fishing through the ice one winter. Like Hornby, they had missed the herds of caribou in the fall and they were starving. Mallet and his guide gave them some of their food—the Eskimos were courteous to a fault—and learned their intentions: if the fishing didn’t improve they would head for a lake twelve-days’ walk to the northwest in the hope of finding muskoxen. In the spring, Mallet’s guide and three others returned to the spot. Finding
the camp deserted, they headed northwest and soon came upon the end of the story. First, a bunch of traps. Then caribou blankets. Then a child’s grave, followed over the course of several days by a fish spear, a telescope, an axe, a snow knife, pairs of boots, then bodies, alone, or side by side.

They knew there were seventeen people in the band and three rifles. The old leader appeared to have fallen last, but he had no rifle beside him, and only sixteen Eskimos were accounted for. And so they kept on the trail. Five hours later they came upon the last body, a girl of twelve, who had continued on by herself, carrying the rifle,
with nothing but a sense of direction inherited from the old chief
.

How quiet they were when Ralph finished the account. After a bit, Harry joked huskily that they don’t make kids like that any more, they won’t leave home without a wallet full of travellers’ cheques. And Gwen reached for the book and said “Thierry Mallet” slowly, as if memorizing the name, and Eleanor very gently corrected her pronunciation. “Tee-ay-ree, I think it is.”

On the Barrens something happened to their sense of time. They were living every second of bad weather in a land that was barely out of the ice age, a place no different from how it had been a hundred years or a thousand years ago. They were seeing what Hornby and Samuel Hearne had seen, what aboriginal hunters had seen when they hunted here, far back. And so seconds ticked forwards and years swept backwards, and they got used to thinking of time passing in tiny increments and huge leaps.

Ralph would say that the long wait for the wind to die down—another two days of being wind-bound and ice-bound—made him think of Agamemnon waiting to set sail from Aulis. The north winds kept blowing day after day until they sacrificed Iphigenia, poor girl; then the winds fell away, the thousand ships set sail for Troy, and one thing led to another, until Aeneas fled his burning city and fetched up on the shores of Carthage, “where he broke poor Dido’s heart,” said Ralph, throwing Harry a sympathetic look.

With tender timing Eleanor and Gwen then compared the bruises on their legs, rolling up their pants and exposing shins that looked as if they had been beaten with sticks, but it was the ice they’d fallen against and battled through. The bruises filled Harry’s mind with memories of his life with Dido. She’d been like a stray, a waif that he’d found by the shore and brought home. During those six weeks, she’d never talked very much. Never really confided in him. The black eye had been her fault, she’d said. And the bruise he saw on her arm happened from banging into a cupboard. He had to suppose that when she was with him she was just resting, recovering, biding her time until she was ready to leave.

Finally, at one in the morning, the sky began to clear. They could make out four or five ptarmigans in the meadow beyond the willows. Through binoculars they studied the male, its red markings above the eyes, its plumage a mottled brown until it flew up, and then its wings flashed white.

“What does ptarmigan taste like, I wonder,” murmured Gwen.

“Ptough,” said Ralph.

Eleanor remarked that seeing ptarmigans on Ptarmigan Lake was rather like seeing Harry on Harry Lake.

“You mean I washed myself in Harry?” cried Gwen.

“How lovely,” said Harry.

It was noon of the next day. They were almost out of Ptarmigan Lake, having broken free of their snow-locked, weather-bound state by throwing caution to the winds. In the morning they’d hauled their canoes with ropes across the middle of the frozen lake, making several miles of progress. Gwen managed to tape the sound by hanging her tape recorder around her neck and holding the microphone between her teeth; Harry snapped a picture for what he called broadcasting posterity.

They skirted the blackest ice, the last stretch so rotten his feet did a little dance as he sped across. And then they were in open water. July 7.

In the early afternoon, a line of light blue appeared at the lower edge of the sky and in the distance something moved. A palomino boulder was swimming slowly across the lake. They paddled towards it and saw their first caribou, large and handsome, like a heavily built deer with a rack of dark antlers.

By evening the sky was clear. The light luminous and rich. Not brilliant as in the Mediterranean (where Harry once removed a splinter from a woman’s finger on the streets of Sète in light that acted like a magnifying glass). Gentler. Almost autumnal. The hills didn’t have light on them, they were in light, the way something is in water.

To Harry it seemed the Barrens relaxed.
One day something relaxed inside and I saw things in a new way
. The words came from an old book about an old botanist, and he felt the truth of them as they left behind frozen lakes and entered a land of flowing rivers. On July 8 they were on the Hanbury River, skimming along with the current, running two rapids and making three portages and completing a total of twenty-three miles. A grand day. That night they reached Sifton Lake and it too was melted, the next night they took advantage of an evening with almost no wind to keep paddling, hour after hour, in the pure golden light.

At midnight they beached their canoes and were about to make camp on an invitingly grassy bank when they saw, just across a small cove, something move.

They slipped back into their canoes and paddled closer. The grizzly was smaller than they’d imagined and very curious. It came to the water’s edge, then waded into the water, climbing atop a rock several feet from shore. From there it stood watching them for fifteen minutes, brownish-blond, face like a wide dish, close-set eyes. At a distance of fifty yards, or less, they took pictures in the evening light. Then the bear turned around, waded back to shore, and ambled up onto a grass-covered knoll, where it lay down and went to sleep. They had no firearms, having failed to take Teresa’s advice, and Harry suspected they’d been far too trusting, but the charmed evening had emboldened them. Even so, they paddled a full hour before they set up camp.

Several days after that, on July 13, a muskox in the afternoon. The bizarre beast appeared suddenly after miles of nothing. Dark massive head, down-curved horns, a fur coat
like a chocolate-brown kilt, except along the uppermost part of the animal’s back where it was lighter in colour as if faded by the sun. In the 1920s, said Ralph, after the decimation of the buffalo, muskox furs were in such demand for carriage robes that only protective legislation, inspired in no small part by John Hornby’s observations and recommendations, saved them from being wiped off the face of the earth. This fellow stood on the riverbank with the blue sky behind him and sparse leafiness around his feet. After a few minutes he lumbered off into the distance, Ralph in careful pursuit with his camera, Eleanor calling after him to be careful:
Ralph!

The next day, a group of three muskoxen. The animals thundered off and the humans inherited their flies. At supper mosquitoes plunged into the soup, kamikaze pilots in love with soggy death. Harry’s emptied bowl had a dozen dead mosquitoes in the bottom. Eleanor took the bowl, turned it three times, and read the mosquitoes like tea leaves.

“I see a boy stung by bees,” she said to Harry. “Six bee stings. No seven.”

“Not a girl stripping off her clothes?” cracked Gwen, handing her own bowl to gypsy Eleanor, who turned it three times and said she saw a sudden change of course followed by a wedding.

Ralph instructed Eleanor to see money in his mosquito-leaves, huge sacks of it, mountains of it. But Eleanor saw, instead, a great expanse of water and suggested to Ralph that he might be going overseas.

By now Gwen’s hair was sun-streaked and her face ruddy. “‘As brown in hue as hazel nuts and sweeter than the kernels,’” remarked Harry, addressing her with a gleam in his eye.

She blushed and raised her hands, which were too dried and cracked to close. “They feel like baseball mitts,” she said.

Harry surprised her by taking one of her hands in his. “I have just the thing.”

From his pack he produced a tin of udder balm for chapped and swollen teats, then proceeded to work the ointment into her skin, especially her split fingertips. “What about your feet? Take off your boots,” he said.

“What is the smoothest part of Gwen?” He reached for her bare foot, only to exclaim, “Not the heel!” His eyes widened. “You could do permanent damage with this heel.”

Gwen’s heels had never been so in the limelight, her rough, raspy heels. Harry would see them again when her tent blew down and she was out flying around in the middle of the night in bare legs and white heels and nightie, trying to restake and prop it up, while Eleanor held it down from inside. From his tent door Harry shouted at her to lay it flat and bring their sleeping bags in here, and Gwen shouted something back that he couldn’t make out, for in the wind their voices tore like fabric.

Gwen later admitted she had seriously underestimated the importance of good shelter by bringing “that shitty tent,” which sagged like a soft berry picked by the weather and manhandled between its fingers.

That night they lay across the floor of Harry’s tent like four slumbering sardines.

WHERE THE DARRELL RIVER
met the Hanbury River, they passed into the Thelon Game Sanctuary. It wasn’t a definite shape but a continuation of what they’d seen, yet it took on the shape in Harry’s mind of a garden, a garden in the wilderness. Now there were scattered trees again, more and more trees. On a single day, July 15, they portaged around Macdonald Falls, Dickson Canyon, and Ford Falls, about three and a quarter miles in all. Between the first and second carry, they walked back along the edge of Dickson Canyon and saw rough-legged hawks above, and churning water below, as well as three large pools to one side fed by the rapids, each pool feeding the one below, deep green water in which grayling swam. On a hill Harry noticed muskox hair caught in the willows and low trees, the soft wool called
qiviut
, so Eleanor informed him when she came alongside. She picked tufts of it off the twigs and slipped them into her pocket, reminded of poor Absalom caught by his beautiful hair in the branches of the biblical oak, and of Lorna holding that tuft of hair in her dead hand, and of the first Dido whose spirit wouldn’t leave her dying body, Virgil said, until Iris descended and cut off a tress of her hair.

When finally they came to a halt that day, Harry soaked his head and feet and sore knee in the Hanbury River. They were on a beautiful sand dune—white sand beyond their tents, white snow above the sand. Fox and caribou tracks in evidence. And Gwen washing her hair.

“Always washing your hair,” Harry said to her.

“Always watching me wash my hair,” she said back.

She got him to stand behind her and wave away the flies and he felt like a painter with “Woman Shampooing Hair” on his easel.

“Your face is thinner,” he told her when she turned around, her head wrapped in a towel. “You’ve developed cheekbones.”

Eleanor looked up and watched the two of them for a long moment. The out-of-doors as beautician, she thought. Tanning Gwen’s skin, lightening her hair, lengthening it (hair grows three times as fast in the summer she’d learned from Lorna Dargabble, as do toenails). Gwen’s shirt was bone-coloured, bleached by the long light. And now the animals were appearing and the story was coming to an end, the story her father was reading to her when he died, since that would have been what happened: the ostracized, runaway girl would have been helped by the animals in the forest, and then some admirer would have come along, perhaps a secret admirer who had always appreciated her without knowing he was in love. And wouldn’t the girl be looking the wrong way at the time, since isn’t it the hardest lesson in the world, learning to appreciate people if you’ve never felt appreciated?