The Mountain Can Wait (22 page)

Weeks before
opening day of the autumn hunt, Tom drove his quad bike into the bush to where the trails ended, then hiked farther into the backwoods in search of tracks. After he found them, and several days' worth of droppings, he returned to the place often until he spotted the deer, a herd of eleven. He watched the herd for a week, watched them nimbly sniff and pick their thin-legged way through the trees, and got to recognize the different does and the fawns, the bucks. The strong ones who still had years of mating ahead of them and the weaker ones that, if taken, wouldn't leave a gap in the growth of the herd. He took note of their routine. About an hour after dawn, they came from the northeast to forage in a meadow rich with witchgrass and pigweed. In the trees around the meadow, he built a hide out of underbrush and pine, and went back to it every couple of days to integrate his scent and stalk the herd. He chose his mark: an old buck with a good rump who'd seen plenty of winters.

On the first day of the season, he woke up in the dark. He dressed in thermals, ate eggs and bacon, and repacked his bag: water and sandwiches, raincoat and toque, a box of soft tips and his two field dressing knives. The buck looked to be about a 160-pounder, and Tom would need to butcher it on-site and leave the bones if he had any chance of hauling it back to his quad bike. He secured his rifle and bag to the back of his bike and, in the dark, retraced the route he'd been following over the previous weeks.

With his rifle ready by his side, he settled himself onto the dirt floor of the hide and closed his eyes and waited for dawn. What was Curtis doing right now? Tom knew that they served breakfast at 7 a.m., and that if you weren't up and dressed with your bed made and your shoes tied tight, they took away privileges. That's how it seemed to work there—every action counted, every ounce earned. He imagined his son asleep, fetal, in a cot bed, and he imagined the cell to be monotone, gray. The blanket thin. He imagined that with every night that passed, a little bit of that haunting he'd seen in Curtis's face on Aguanish was fading, like lake mist burning off in the sun, leaving behind a version of Curtis that was closer to the boy he knew. In a few days, across a long plastic table, he would tell Curtis about today, describe it with as much detail as he could. Riding ditches on the quad bike, the knife tips of the tallest pines catching the first of the yellow light, the chatter and crick of the bush. For now, he would do the living for both of them.

As the blue of dawn dissolved to a crisp white morning, Tom sensed the first crackles of hooves as the herd made its way toward the meadow. He rubbed feeling into his cold hands and clicked the safety off his rifle, waited motionless until he saw his buck. It came into the clearing side by side with a young doe, and they stood together, munching witchgrass. He shifted his knees and both deer startled, looking straight at the hide. The buck bounded out of sight while the doe continued to eat, stopping every few seconds to sniff the air. A few others ambled in the meadow, constantly on the move, alert. After a few minutes his buck returned and stood alone, stood the way only a deer could, calm as a windless lake but ready to blow. Tom raised his rifle and tucked the buttstock into the pocket of his shoulder, and silently rested the barrel in the cup of his left hand. With that same hand he pulled back on the rifle so it sat snugly against his shoulder, and he kept the pressure there. He drew the stock up to his eye and rested his cheekbone against the cool metal and watched the buck through the scope, as if he were squaring up a photograph, visualizing the placement of the shot: just above the front left leg, at a forty-five-degree angle. He pictured the round passing through the heart, stopping the flow of blood, and then passing through the lung and preventing the intake of oxygen. He would take the shot when the fog around the buck's snout showed that he was exhaling. A clean and instant death.

The buck faced him, thirty meters away, and Tom waited for him to turn away, just slightly, to get his angle. His finger stroked the trigger while the buck stood, gently shifting its weight from one front foot to the other. It dipped its head to the ground and took a step forward, a step back, raised its head again, and began to move into the right position. Tom stopped breathing.

Something crashed and echoed in the bush somewhere off to the left, and in a clap the herd scattered and was gone. Tom engaged the safety on his rifle and propped it against the wall of the hide. He would come back tomorrow; he could wait.

A girl
with one blue eye, one brown, walks toward home on an empty road that follows the lower folds of a wooded mountain. She is a little drunk, and a little high, and she finds it gratifying to crunch bits of glass and gravel beneath the rubber soles of her white high-top sneakers.

There was a full moon the night she was born, her mother often tells her. Her mother says: We were driving to the hospital and I didn't want to be in the car. You were coming so fast; I felt trapped. I looked up through the window and there was the moon, full as my own belly, and for a moment, I was completely detached. I was free. And I thought, good, one day I will be able to tell you that you were born on a full moon.

When she was six years old, she learned to ride a horse at the stables in Pemberton, learned to ride with the shadow of Mount Currie at her heels. She could take her feet out of the stirrups and rotate 360 degrees in the saddle; she could trot confidently with her small arms stretched high above her head, as if she were flying.

And when she was eleven—her father tells this story all the time; it's family legend—she knocked herself unconscious water-skiing on the lake. No life jacket, and she went under. When he jumped in after her, he could just make out the bright-green stripes of her bathing suit, fading slowly to brown as the water took her deeper.

Tonight the moon is full but partially concealed by the heavy gray clouds that seem to sprout from the top of the mountain. Tightly packed pine trees make a tunnel of the road. White light sweeps across their branches, growing from weak to strong, and before the headlights are on her, before the truck connects with her body, crushing her pelvis, she is thinking only of the smallest detail, of the grit beneath her shoes. She is lifted off her feet and comes to rest in a ditch under the pines. And the wind blows a song through their stiff boughs as they stand witness in the dark, and they will keep this song a secret.

Thank you, James, for your endless encouragement, faith, and love, for all answers medicinal and mechanic, and for the weekends you let me go. And thank you, Eve, Ali, and Kieran, for leaving the study door closed when I asked, no matter how desperately you wanted to open it.

A boundless thank-you to Clare Alexander, for leaving legendary phone messages and loving stories with dogs, and to all the team at Aitken Alexander. To Mary-Anne Harrington at Tinder Press and Laura Tisdel at Little, Brown, thank you for your vision, your patience, and your trust. Mary-Anne, you had me at “hello,” and Laura, kudos to you for working on this book on the eve of, literally, your first hour of motherhood. Thank you so much to Carina Guiterman, Nell (I shall call you Eagle Eyes) Beram, Karen Landry, Barb Jatkola, Imogen Taylor, Tom Noble, Elizabeth Masters, Kapo Ng, Patrick Insole, and all of you who make up Tinder and Little, Brown. You've all taught me that, in spite of the loneliness of writing, in the end a novel is a collaborative thing.

For sharing your wisdom and making me believe I was able, I cannot thank enough you inspiring writers who have given so much of your knowledge and precious time: Susan Elderkin, Francis Spufford, Peggy Riley, Joanna Quinn, and Lorna Jackson. Thank you also to the tutors on the faculty of Goldsmiths MA in Creative & Life Writing.

For a big ol' desk by a window wet with Norfolk rain, a basketful of firewood, and homemade meals (even though you promised you wouldn't cook), thank you kindly, Emma Youngs. For all firearm and hunting-related clinchers, I am eternally grateful to the guys at Bar20Arms for their passionate, detailed, well-thought-out answers to my many, many questions. And to Brian Montague of the Vancouver Police Department, thank you for giving me what I needed to avoid sounding like a television show, and for not suspecting me of turning myself in for a hit-and-run. Any inaccuracies are mine alone.

To the early readers, Rose Vukovic and Zoe Bailey—you're wonderful. And finally, my love and gratitude to you precious people, for the plethora of reasons of which I can only hope you are aware: Meghan Lee, Alexandra Lamond, RV, Stephen Lindell, Colleen Hughes, Merrill Brescia, Sue and John Napier, Adele Byrne, Rosanne and Paul Marino, Jenny and Michelle Wesanko, and my dear brother, Joshua Leipciger.

Sarah Leipciger was born in Peterborough, Ontario. She spent her teenage years in Toronto, later moving to Vancouver Island to study creative writing and English literature at the University of Victoria. Leipciger left Canada in 2001 for Korea and Southeast Asia, and currently lives with her husband and three children in London, where she teaches creative writing to men in prison.

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