Touch (6 page)

Before he left the orphanage and started walking west, the nuns had thought Jeannot would be a priest, and they taught him accordingly, but what he knew about religion when he started walking west was not of much use in the woods. When the creature came to him in the night, he thought that he had read too much into the tiredness of a dog. He did not want to leave Flaireur behind, but as he sat by the creek and waited for a fish to take his line, Jeannot knew that he was afraid of the creature’s return: its stench was too close to what he imagined the flesh of his own body would smell like in death.

The line tugged against his hand and he pulled it in slowly. In the still water along the edge of the bank, Jeannot saw that he had lip-hooked a small, bluish trout. Though the fish
was putting up a decent fight, it was not worth the effort to pick the little meat from its bones. He was willing to wait for something larger, something that he could split equally with Flaireur. He pulled the trout from the water, slipped out the hook, and tossed both the fish and his line back into the river. Instantly the fish darted back to the empty hook—the grub that Jeannot had used as bait now gone—and hit it hard, swallowing it down. Jeannot decided that, given his urgency to make ground before night fell again, the fish would serve his purpose.

Back at the camp, Jeannot cut off a thin slice of flesh from the trout’s back and threw it to the dog. Flaireur caught it in the air, but showed no intention of moving from his guard. The dog barked airlessly, still silent, and Jeannot threw him another piece. He turned the fish over and worked the tip of his knife up alongside the bones, taking off the fillet. He dangled it from his hand. As he swung the piece of fish back and forth, Flaireur’s head tilted, tracking Jeannot, but the dog did not move from his spot. Jeannot tossed the fillet through the air. As he did so, a glint of something caught his eye.

At first he thought it was sunlight off his knife, but when he looked down at the scraped carcass of the fish in his hand, Jeannot saw something gleaming from inside the trout. He speared the tip of his knife into the fish’s half-split insides and exposed the gold nugget to the air. He fished it out with his fingers and stepped over to the creek and washed it off. When he held the gold up in the air, it glistened in the sunlight. It was solid and misshapen, a damaged acorn the size of the end of his thumb.

He gave what scraps of fish were left to Flaireur, and then he picked up his shovel and a pan and headed down through
the woods and back to the river. Damn that sightless creature, my grandfather thought, and damn these woods; they would not drive him off. He had caught a fish with a belly full of gold, and no monsters, no whisperings from the trees would be enough to drive him away from Sawgamet.

MY GRANDFATHER DUG
by the banks of the river every day, sifting and panning for gold, first near where he caught the fish, and then further up the river, but he found nothing. At first he tried dragging Flaireur along with him, but no matter how much Jeannot beat him, the dog refused to follow my grandfather down to the river, staying near the lean-to and continuing to bark soundlessly.

Jeannot lost count of the days. He caught fish and gathered berries and nuts, trying to reserve the depleted stores of beans and flour that he had carried with him from Quesnellemouthe. He stood in the river panning until his feet were numb and then he dug along the banks. He looked for gold in the moss and the grasses along the edge of the Sawgamet. He worked until his hands turned to leather and his muscles grew stiff, but more gold eluded him. The same hardheadedness that had allowed him to be beaten but not defeated on his trip west, that had kept him going through cold and hunger and allowed him to ignore the warnings of men who had headed west and returned home empty-handed, kept him digging until well past the time when the leaves had turned and began to litter the ground.

It was not until the first of October when my grandfather
realized what he had done. He was bathing in the river—it was never truly warm, even in the heat of the summer—but as he came naked out of the water, he felt a sudden coldness on his skin, and he seemed to see for the first time the ice that had already begun to cling to the bank. It had taken him one less than forty days and nights to walk from Quesnellemouthe, but he did not have that much time before the snows would be upon him. He had to winter in Sawgamet.

Flaireur still would not move from the clearing, so Jeannot did the only thing he could think of. He dug shallow trenches in the ground around where the dog sat barking noiselessly, marking out where the cabin’s walls would stand. He took down trees, limbed them, and stripped the bark, working in haste and barely sleeping. Had Jeannot thought he would need to protect himself for more than a single winter, he would have put more care into footing the cabin, but all he worried about was the simple expedience of shelter and the need to stock food for what he expected to be a cold winter. The cabin took its form quickly, barely to the height of his shoulders. Jeannot decided that once the snows came he could use the enforced leisure of the dark winter nights to dig out the floor, giving himself room to stand. While my grandfather built the cabin, Flaireur stayed in the epicenter of the construction, mimicking the motions of a barking dog, leaving only to relieve himself in the bushes or to drink from the river.

IT TOOK MY GRANDFATHER
five days to build the cabin, working late into each night with the poor light of the fire, and as
he finished, snow began to settle in. The cabin was crude, the logs only partially stripped of bark because of his haste, barely big enough for him to lie down inside. It was nothing like the neat, securely built homes that Jeannot had been hired to help build in farming communities and mining towns along his journey west, but he did not mind. It was comfortable despite the sound of the wind pushing snow around in the darkness outside. He slept with Flaireur curled against his back.

He spent another two days hauling and fitting flat stones from the river until he had a workable hearth and chimney, and another day hauling enough dead and fallen wood to last him for a few weeks. More pressing than his need for firewood—that was something he could take care of even in the cold—was the necessity of packing in food before the last of the game went to ground.

He did not fool himself. My grandfather knew exactly what he was: a young man from Montreal who was, at best, a poor shot with a rifle. He still had some flour, salted meat, and beans left, maybe enough to get him through a few weeks, a month if he did not give Flaireur a share. Snow was starting to pile up against the sides of the cabin, and had my grandfather been a different sort of young man he would have despaired. He would have wondered if he should have risked the snow and headed back to Quesnellemouthe. He could have found a job and a room to rent and spent the winter in a place where he did not have to worry about finding food. But my grandfather was not the sort of young man to look back and question his decisions. Instead, he set himself to the task of procuring food with the same determination that he had brought to the task of panning for gold.

Over the course of two days, he collected as many of the berries and plants as he could find underneath the first coverings of snow, forcing Flaireur to eat a few bites of each variety to ensure that my grandfather would not poison himself. Then, taking up his rifle, he spent several days tromping through the woods, unaware that the few animals that had not gone to ground as the snow built were well warned by his heavy step.

He did not take a single shot, but he walked for miles and miles, from first light until dark, searching for something to aim his rifle at, and finally he was tired. It had been a week of building his cabin, and then a week of tromping through the snow in a fruitless search for food, on top of the thirty-nine days and nights of walking and three months of working the river for gold, and my grandfather could feel himself worn down. He was aware of his one singular strength—his ability to ignore pain and discomfort and to keep working and pushing until his body collapsed under some weight that he did not recognize—but this moment of weakness, this sudden fragility, terrified him. He did not understand the simple signs of tiredness, of having gone beyond the limits of his endurance, and for the first of many times throughout his life, my grandfather, Jeannot Boucher, thought with absolute certainty that he must be dying.

Clearly, of course, my grandfather was wrong. He lived long enough to leave Sawgamet, and then to return and tell me about it. And yet, when my grandfather told me this story, he did not smile when he said that he thought he was dying, and I can imagine the sense of isolation he must have felt: thousands of miles away from his birthplace, surrounded
by an unforgiving wilderness, worn out from all that he had endured to get to Sawgamet, and with an isolated winter ahead of him.

Though it was early in the afternoon, he built a small fire in the hearth of the cabin. He lay on the ground, too exhausted to even sleep. As if he knew something was wrong, Flaireur rose from his normal spot in the middle of the floor and ceased his soundless barking long enough to gently lick and nuzzle at Jeannot’s face. Jeannot reached up and shook the scruff of the dog’s neck gently and said, “You’ve been a good dog. When I die, maybe then you’ll be free to leave this spot.”

And then Flaireur began to sing.

For the first time in months—since the creature had passed them by in the night—sound came from the dog’s mouth, and it frightened Jeannot. He thought that the dog was calling for Death himself. Though my grandfather was so fatigued that even his bones were tired, he reached for his rifle. He would put up a fight. He was not going to let Death take him unscathed.

As Jeannot rose to his knees, he watched Flaireur sing. The dog kept his haunches firmly on the dirt floor, his muzzle raised into the air, eyes closed, and in the dog’s haunting voice, Jeannot, for the first time, recognized the lupine qualities of this dog that he had stolen from a witch.

Suddenly there was a knocking at the door, an uneven and constant beating that called to mind the legions of the dead that the nuns at the orphanage had always told my grandfather he would join when he went to hell.

Thuds attacked the door and then the walls and the roof. He could hear the flap of wing and some terrible cawing that covered even Flaireur’s desperate song. Jeannot crouched under
the low roof of the cabin, his hands shaking. He thought that Flaireur was calling for Death to come and seize them. The walls began to shake, and he was afraid that if he waited any longer the door would rip off from the hinges he had whittled from tree stumps, the roof would be torn asunder, and whatever monsters waited outside would destroy him. With his rifle in hand, hoping that Flaireur would cease his singing in order to rip at the Dark Angel’s throat, Jeannot opened the door, prepared to conquer Death and the legions of the damned that he had brought with him.

He was immediately knocked to the ground by a flurry of beating wings, beaks and claws tearing his clothing and ripping at his eyes. In the commotion, he fired his rifle into the ground before dropping it in order to cover his eyes. After a few seconds of confusion, my grandfather had the presence of mind to slam the door of the cabin, and then to latch it shut in order to keep the hundreds of birds—blue grouses, chickadees, ravens, jays, ptarmigan, even an out-of-season thrush that he spotted for a moment among the flapping hordes—from finding their way out of the cabin as quickly as they had been sung in by Flaireur. As he kept his hands pressed tightly over his eyes, he tried to look through the slits between his fingers, but the flying birds made him fear for his sight. He groped for his spare shirt and then quickly wrapped the cloth around his head.

Wings beat against his head and his arms, and he felt the sharp spear of a bird’s beak digging into his side, and the sudden wetness of blood. He placed one hand tightly over the wound and then pulled his knife from his belt. The cabin was so thick with birds that he could not see his slaughter. He
stabbed his knife into the air repeatedly. Flaireur, too, joined in the carnage, stopping his singing and opening his mouth to tear and bite. Feathers were in Jeannot’s mouth. The floor of the dirt cabin was slick with the blood of the birds, but after an indeterminable time of stabbing into the darkness, the sound of fluttering wings began to slacken, and he dared to pull the shirt off his head so that he could join Flaireur in tracking down the few birds that had managed to elude fang and blade.