Late Nights on Air (34 page)

The next day they paddled on. The air was calm. The mosquitoes ferocious, almost as plentiful as the caribou hair in the bushes and at the water’s edge, white, brittle, hollow hairs and some finer fluff, a floating mattress of hair. The shore, formerly flat and hard, was churned up by hooves.

Clumps of Labrador tea among the rocks. A few terns overhead. Ashes from their small tea fire blown about by a sudden gust of wind. And the need to make twenty-two, twenty-three miles a day if they were to reach Beverly Lake on time.

And again they were among the caribou. Thousands of them were crossing the river that afternoon. In their canoes they drifted with the current while the caribou circled around them and continued swimming to shore, then climbed the bank, their dark antlers magnificent amidst the greenery in this paradise of leafiness and sky. Clumps of trees thickened into woods on the hills, hair covered the water, the shore, the grass. Grunting, so many of them now, like pigs rooting, mud and grass churned up. A heavy manure smell in the air. And Gwen recording.

More and more came, the hillside emptied and filled again. Caribou filed across the horizon on a high ridge, then down the steep slope to the water, a line of strolling players with the sky behind them and a wolf invariably bringing up the rear. The effect was joyous and spellbinding and sobering. Over supper Eleanor said she felt like giving thanks for Judge Berger, who would see to it that these vanishing herds were protected.

“The government must rue the day they appointed him,” chuckled Ralph.

“He’s a special man,” Eleanor said, fingering the medallion’s chain around her neck. “I can’t imagine anyone else in the part.”

No one disagreed. For five minutes.

Then Gwen wondered aloud if he wasn’t too gullible. He gave the impression of believing every word every native witness said, but weren’t they as human as anyone else, as capable of self- interest and poetical exaggeration? She wondered if the bond they felt with the land and the animals was as genuine now as in the past, before they had high-powered rifles and snowmobiles.

Harry said she had a point, but insisting on purity wasn’t fair. The natives felt a connection to the land, he said, that was almost incomprehensible to us. He said he had the sense of miraculous brakes being applied. He was betting on Berger, betting he would manage to delay for a considerable time the onslaught of development. “And if that’s possible, what isn’t?”

The next afternoon they were looking at John Hornby’s grave in the sun. Three simple, weathered, wooden crosses shored
up by rocks piled at the base of each one. EC. JH. HA. The ruined cabin just to the left, its bottom logs still in place, but the roof fallen in, and the walls. Some caribou antlers inside the cabin and more just outside the door. It was July 22.

They had come 350 miles, from old Fort Reliance to this beautiful spot, an open bank rising up steeply on the north side of the river to the famous stand of spruce. Late afternoon, the warm sun shining, and after an hour of looking and taking photographs, they decided to stay for the night. Gwen wandered around the little makeshift cemetery, the remains of the cabin, and then she headed off on her own, her brown canvas tape recorder bag over her shoulder.

Harry was making supper. He was saying to Eleanor that young Edgar’s fate reminded him of what happened to the Eskimo girl in the Thierry Mallet story. The last one left alive carries on.

He’d borrowed Ralph’s copy of Whalley’s biography and read the final pages that described Edgar letting the fire in the stove die out. Edgar placed his companions’ papers and his own diary in the cool ashes, then lay down on his bunk and pulled the blankets up and over his head. Whalley imagined the sounds he might have heard, perhaps “the faint sound of ptarmigan feeding outside,” and the effect of the silence, “like wings folding about him.”

What Harry admired so much was Whalley’s restraint in telling the story. Whalley was like Berger in that way. He didn’t pick on people. He didn’t ridicule Hornby for his mistakes, or excoriate him. He could have so easily. A journalist would have.

He added another stick to the fire and saw Ralph coming up from the river, but he didn’t see Gwen. And then he heard her.

Gwen had climbed the wooded slope that rose gently behind the cabin, looking for signs of Hornby and finding them in the axe cuts in old stumps that she’d read about. She had her eyes down to negotiate the branch-littered ground, the thick ground cover. A little farther and she thought she might get a fine view of the river below. In the northwest corner of this fringe of trees between cabin and open Barrens, she expected to find the windbreak of stones Hornby had erected from which they watched for caribou. In her mind she was with Hornby and Edgar and Harold Adlard as they made the same ascent, alone or together, early on when they were healthy and strong, and then later when they were desperate. Once, they saw thirty caribou in the distance and thought salvation was at hand, but the animals disappeared before they could get close to them. She turned to look south towards the river, but the twisted, slow-growing trees, some of them at least four hundred years old, still blocked the view. She turned back and saw something blondish-brown out of the corner of her eye. Fifty feet away? They aren’t huge animals. They don’t have to be huge. It lifted its nose and sniffed.

Experts say to avoid eye contact. To back away quietly. Not to turn and run.

Gwen’s scream coincided with her seeing a set of small, black, gleaming eyes. She turned and ran.

It was like going full tilt down a flight of stairs covered in books. She felt her feet go out from under her even as she tumbled forward, and instinctively she grabbed at the nearest tree and slowed her descent at the expense of her arm. Her right shoulder wrenched out of its socket. Then she was lying in a small heap, the pain so intense she couldn’t make a sound.

Her head slid forward to rest on the ground and she bit down on the dead branch that offered itself, aware in a flickering part of her brain of an age when biting down on wood offered the only consolation in moments of physical agony. Her shoulder wasn’t there, nauseatingly not there, but her heart was bouncing her off the ground. She heard the bear behind her, then beside her. She heard its heavy breathing. She felt it nose her left leg and she bit harder into the wood. It nosed her leg a second time and she closed her eyes, lay completely still, apart from her thumping, cartoonish heart. She smelled the animal. Heard the saliva bubbling in its mouth. Kept as quiet as she always had at the dining-room table when a wave of fury would darken her father’s face. She braced herself for more pain, and heard the bear moving, and realized it was moving away.

When they found her, she was coming slowly towards them like a shell-shocked survivor of the trenches or the highway. She saw them and sank to her knees.

Harry was beside her.

“Shoulder,” she managed.

She felt his hands on her shoulder, and with a slight, subtle adjustment her arm was amazingly back in place.

“I thought you were proposing,” he would say later, bringing a weak smile to her face.

He helped her to her feet and she breathed out, “We’re not camping here.”

The next morning, before the others were up, Harry went down to the water. They had paddled two hours beyond Hornby Point (he and Eleanor taking more of the load in their canoe so that Ralph could paddle alone as Gwen rested her shoulder, to say nothing of her mind) and they’d camped on a steep bank on the opposite side of the river, to be extra sure. Harry hadn’t slept much, thinking about Gwen and the grizzly, wondering if they were travelling under a lucky star or if their luck had run out. He would never forget the sight of her coming down the slope. She looked damaged, lopsided, wrong. They had to brush twigs and leaves off her cheeks and forehead, but the imprint remained for hours.

They’d talked at length about how long it lasted, her encounter with the bear. Not as long as she thought, he was sure of that; a second with a grizzly is an eternity by any measure. He’d heard her terrifying scream, they all had, and they’d come charging up the hill and through the trees, but she hadn’t heard them. They were downwind for one thing. In Gwen’s mind there was only the noise of the bear’s breathing, a kind of huffing, a moist huffing, and the powerful reek of animal, and the memory of small, cold eyes. It nosed her leg “like a teacher tapping your shoulder in the hall,” she said, and she’d tapped Harry’s shoulder to demonstrate, not hard: sending a chill down his spine.
Detention, young man
.

Now, as he came down to the water, he saw a tiny calf, its side ripped open, resting under a tree. It struggled to its feet upon seeing him and ran desperately into the water, then tottered back to shore, then back into the water and back to
shore, where it collapsed, “all tuckered out,” he would tell the others at breakfast. Using the biggest stick he could find, he put the little chap out of its misery with three hard blows. Then he reached for his knife. It took him a long time to dress the meat; he was reminded as he worked of his grandfather, of all the furriers and trappers and woodsmen who constituted a dwindling breed of their own. Often they were the most softhearted of men, and it had to do with being on the land so much, something the anti-trappers would never understand. That night they had caribou veal and it was certainly his most delicious and most poignant culinary dish.

Eleanor told them about her father speaking very fondly of a dinner he’d had at the Waldorf Hotel in New York. Green turtle soup, double breast of grey partridge, and strawberry mousse. This meal was just as memorable, “but I wonder if I’ll talk about it quite so much.”

“Gwen?” Harry offered her seconds.

She was hungry, as hungry as someone who’s just escaped the firing squad, and she held out her plate. She’d done everything wrong, she knew, fleeing when she should have stood her ground, turning herself into prey. Yet here she was, still alive. The world around her tingled with life.

Gwen saw admiration in Harry’s eyes, and in Ralph’s and Eleanor’s too, and she basked in it. But when they told her how brave she was, she shook her head. “You should hear me when I get a paper cut.”

Later, she would say the bear’s eyes were like Eddy’s, small and mean. Harry would turn his hand into a microphone, “Now tell us how you
really
feel.” And Gwen would smile, until he dropped his microphone-hand back into his lap.
Then suddenly she remembered the shoulder bag containing her tape recorder and tapes. Back there, back where she’d fallen. Back being pawed by the grizzly bear. Thus occurred their first irretrievable loss.

Gwen sat disconsolate on a flat stone and the trip ran like a reel through her mind, erasing itself as it went along. The tinkling ice on Charlton Bay, the songbirds on Pike’s Portage, the sounds of paddling, straining, cursing, of crackling fires and roaring rapids and wriggling fish, of mosquitoes being slapped and long tent zippers being opened and more rapidly shut, of gargantuan snores, of footsteps among the ankle-turning stones and the whish-y tread of boots on tundra. Of Ee-zay saying pee-nuts ba-ta. Of ice-hauling accompanied by the tap of her teeth on the microphone. Most prized of all, the tapes of the Barren-ground caribou, their clicking hooves and strenuous swimming and muted eating, since who had ever recorded them before?

Harry’s efforts were good-hearted, if clumsy. He suggested she could recreate what she’d lost, using sound effects and words. Gwen let out a despairing groan, but he was patient. He told her what mattered more than sound effects was the effect of sound. He liked remembering car tires going through puddles and over melting snow on the street outside school, blue jays in the woods, squirrels high in the trees -sounds that evoked the soft days when winter was turning to spring and long summer holidays were around the corner. We had a bell in the Town Hall, he said. Tom Finnegan rang it every day at noon and at five in the afternoon. If it rang hard and successively, it meant fire. Train whistles were wonderful too, and dogs barking in the distance. And the radio. I always
loved the sound of the radio. “What’s the first sound you remember?” She shook her head. “Come on, Lippy.” And she gave in and laughed a little.

“Maybe it was the rain,” she said.

“And what about the first thing you heard on the radio?”

“‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ I was four years old.”

That set Harry off. His first piece on air was a movie review he recorded in a bedroom closet because he couldn’t stand his roommate hearing him read the script. A month later he was hosting a program, and two years afterwards he was working in Toronto. “That’s how quickly fortunes can turn,” he said, thinking as much of what had come after as what had gone before.

This was the evening they saw a strangely beautiful group of caribou emerge from the water and slowly approach, their pattern governed by hunger and available food—by the arrangement of leaves on willows fifty feet away. No matter how they moved around the low trees, reaching up or down or forward or around, the animals seemed exquisitely placed, as if by an Old Master.

Their little group of four was also being reconfigured. In the mornings Ralph took Eleanor a cup of tea, unzipping the door of the tent she shared with Gwen, and singing snatches of songs to her when she arrived at the campfire. One evening he reached for her hand and they moved in three-four time across the widest dance floor in the world.

There were summers in Gwen’s childhood when her father’s favourite brother came to visit from the States, and the anticipation of his arrival, that keen pleasure, was like this one of watching Ralph and Eleanor together. To witness the two
brothers greet each other, to gauge the level of their affection, to watch her sociable uncle take pleasure in her unsociable dad and her dad take pleasure in her uncle - all this was high, ardent drama. She wanted to see every moment of mutual delight and there was never quite enough to satisfy her. Did her uncle know - did he have any idea - how much her father loved him?

Something blossoms in an unlikely place. An oasis of trees miles above the treeline. An arctic river warmer than any other water they’d come upon. The four of them bathed in the waters of the Thelon, wading out into it, almost swimming. On shore they towelled themselves dry and dressed, and there was no feeling to equal the splendour of warm clothes on river- cold skin.