Through Black Spruce (28 page)

For a night’s camp, I found a good place on the bank near a small creek. Good wood around for a warm fire. By the time I’d set up my camp, night had fallen. I knew it was going to be a long one. Nothing much for me to do but keep the fire going and stare into it. I picked up my rifle and inspected its working parts. Me, I’d kept this thing cleaner than I ever had. Idle hands, nieces. Idle hands.

The thought of a bottle, of a drink, pulled my guts. But I’d brought none. A decision made earlier in the morning as I loaded the canoe to go it dry. Fucking idiot. Shouldn’t this have passed, this physical ache for a drink? If I was going to live and die up here in the bush alone, why didn’t I bring ten cases? A hundred? Shouldn’t a man be allowed to die how he wants? As that night crept by, I thought I’d rather die drunk and alone, screaming and hollering at imaginary enemies, than sober and alone at real ones. I tried to sleep, but it wouldn’t come.

The canvas tarp cracked with ice when I crawled out from under it. Violent shivering. No sleep for hours, and then two or three so deep they allowed the fire to die completely. The hardest part was crawling out of the little warmth left in the sleeping bag, the darkness just breaking into something that would eventually be morning. I stumbled a few feet from my fire and pissed, blinking and shaking at the black line of water nearby, the morning star, the black shadow of the bush that stretched on into forever. Mornings, they are the hardest. The hours when I was never sure of anything at all. When I was scared of the world in a way that the night always seemed to keep hidden.

Smart enough to keep some kindling under my tarp with me last night, I got it crackling to life fast with a match, and I built it up with the last of my woodpile. I dug through my duffel pack for my little pot and boiled water for cowboy coffee. At least I had this. This and enough tobacco at the rate I was going to last me another month or two. Then what? I wouldn’t worry about that now, but I promised myself I wouldn’t light a smoke until I had a hot cup of coffee in my hands.

My canoe loaded up, and bitter coffee in my belly, two thin cigarettes smoked and a third unlit in my mouth. The sun was ready to break soon. I’d push further up the river. Then I’d drift and dream of a bottle of booze tonight. Is this what my life had become? I wanted, instead, to dream of moose coming to the shore and offering themselves to me. I could live with that. But I hadn’t checked the scope on my rifle. I hoped it hadn’t been jostled too much in its travels. My canoe, I’d packed it well with weight in front for fighting the current.

Ah, the current of morning and the sun coming up. I fought against the water another hundred yards, two hundred yards, half a mile. I looked for moose and enjoyed each stroke that moved my canoe two lengths forward, the current pushing it a full length back. I hugged the shore and dug hard with my strokes, knowing that any rest would set me back the work I’d done. The rivers don’t flow quick at this time of year, the water down with the rains. Still hard, still a challenge even for a young man. A mile or so more of that, and I knew I’d be done.

I finally gave in and turned, the current catching me so that I could stop paddling. I sat back and let my body go loose, thought about tomorrow and how I’d have to begin searching out beaver ponds and traplines. I’d find a dam, bust through part of it, and set up snares in front of the break. Beavers hate nothing more than the sound of water rushing out of their pond. In winter, when the ice settled thick, it would be a matter of finding the active lodges by looking for the vents, the air holes that puff out the animals’ heat like steam. Then I’d chop through the ice and set snares by the entrance.

When I began to pay more attention, I saw I’d already passed last night’s camp and could measure an hour’s worth of hard paddling in ten minutes’ drift. I remember reaching into my pocket for just one more thin smoke when the shape and colour far down the riverbank caught my eye, too big for a rock, brown against the black of the spruce behind it. It had to be. It had to. But it was still well over half a mile down the shore. Slow as I could, I reached for my rifle. Slow. I scooched my ass off the seat so that I sat on the floor of the canoe, trying not to rock the boat or make any unnecessary movement. The canoe began to swing wide, though, and I didn’t want the animal seeing the boat’s full silhouette for fear of spooking it.

I held the rifle with my right hand and slipped the paddle into the water with my left, over-steering my boat so that by the time my scope came to my eye, an arm resting on the gunwale to steady the rifle, the hulk of the moose looked much closer in it. Not a big one, two years maybe, but enough meat for a long, long time. Don’t think of that. Never think too far ahead. Focus on each step, in turn, to that end. It stood still, maybe eight hundred yards or so away, too far for me. I might have tried the shot as a young man, when I could hump through the forest for hours on its blood trail.

The canoe began drifting sideways again and pulled my sight from the moose. Once more I slipped the paddle in and over-corrected myself. I accidentally bumped the paddle on the gunwale and held my breath. The animal drank, I could see now, head bent. Little wind, but what there was carried my scent to it. Under seven hundred yards. I’d take a shot if the animal startled. The canoe had found a steady current and aimed straight for it now. I pushed the safety to fire, the rifle ready to go.

Five hundred yards and the animal still drank, but as I drifted closer, it lifted its head, finished, and put its nose to the wind. I couldn’t wait much longer. My scope jiggled on the current about the moose’s centre, just behind its forelegs where the height of the chest was thickest. Four hundred yards, maybe, and the animal recognized something on the wind and turned its head toward me. I squatted lower in my canoe, but it stared at me now, an oddity on the water. It’s hindquarters shivered in my scope. It was going to bolt. Please, scope, be true. I breathed in deep, then half out, finger pressuring tighter on the trigger. I passed that point of pressure, and my rifle boomed, rocking the canoe like rapids.

With my crosshairs back onto the moose, in that second or two, I watched the animal bolt to the trees, then stumble, scuttling to keep itself up. Aiming again, this time with the fear it would find its legs and run, I fired at the brown mass of it. Panic. No good, but my second bullet found the moose, too. Lifting its head and bawling, still trying, the animal gave a great shiver. And then it tumbled to its side hard and kicked its legs to try and stand once more.

Paddling now as hard as I could, the animal still struggling, I readied to stop and fire again. A fine balance. I could shoot once more and end the struggle but destroy valuable meat. I needed that meat for winter. I kept my eye on it as I paddled hard, my whole body tensed to pick up my rifle.

The moose lay on its side, still alive, a young cow, bleeding out as I scrambled onto the shore, the same rush of the kill making my own legs weak as I jumped out of the canoe. It took me in with its large eye, lifting the heaviness of its head to me, staring. She lay there, many times the size of me. The first shot was a good one: the moose wouldn’t have travelled far. Blood pumped out with each heartbeat. But the second shot. Awful. I had managed to partly gut it, the shot low and ripping open its belly. The moose opened its mouth, blood on the long purple tongue, and let out a bawl that unhinged something in my chest. I raised the rifle to it and stepped up close, the scope useless. I placed it on the base of the animal’s head and pulled the trigger.

From my pack I took out a pinch of tobacco and placed it on the moose’s tongue. I held the mouth closed in hope it accepted my thanks, my apologies for a bad kill. I panicked, moose, but I panicked because I needed your meat to survive the winter.

Meegwetch
for your life, I whispered. I am sorry for the bad kill. I was scared you’d run off and die alone far in the bush. Your death alone would be useless, and I, too, might end up starving this winter without you.
Meegwetch
.

I was careful with the cutting. A younger cow, this one, and the field dressing wouldn’t be too bad a task. With the gutting done, the incision straight down the length of the animal’s belly and the cutting and rolling out of guts, careful not to pierce the intestines or its female parts, I took my axe and split the breastbone to remove its heart and lungs before I found moss to sop up the extra blood in the cavity.

I removed the head with my knife and axe, then halved the animal before quartering it. The weather, despite my sweating with the work, was plenty cool not to worry about the meat spoiling, and it was just a matter now of getting it home in the canoe. I lifted each section onto canvas and dragged it to my boat, placing it there before returning.

I carried a full load, water to the gunwales, but the going back to camp with the current and a moose made that day a very good one.

I only wish, now, the rest of those days might have ended up being so kind.

30
SORRY, GIRL

With the overcast day, the light snow falling makes me squint.

He’s still too nervous a rider to do anything but grip my hips hard as I steer the machine around the drifts and up the river’s bank. I stick my ass in his face as I stand to manoeuvre over the slope. At least he’s finally dressed properly for winter, now that it shows signs of weakening. Uncle Will’s old coats and boots fit him well. I’m sorry, Protector, that I hadn’t thought to raid Uncle’s house for spare winter gear a month ago when I first dragged you to my frozen home.

We’re looking for convex rises along the sides of the creek, air holes above the frozen water. My axe and some of Uncle’s traps bounce in the box sleigh I pull behind the snowmobile. I’ve also packed a picnic of Klik and hot chocolate. I’m missing my childhood, I guess.

Uncle Will’s small hunt cabin is just down the creek Gordon and I have passed. We’re five or six miles out of Moosonee. We might as well be a thousand. Not even another fresh snowmobile track along this creek, but I can see the old tracks covered now in blown snow. This is close to where it all happened. Me, I won’t stop at Will’s camp today.

It’s hard to make out the bump of the lodge I’ve been looking for until I’m upon it. I stop and slap the kill switch of the snowmobile, the sudden quiet of snowy trees and white river absolute. I ask Gordon if he sees what I’m seeing.

He looks around for a long while, then points out the white bump, almost just a nothing rise beside where the frozen creek and shore meet.

“I’ll make you into something yet!” I tell him, leaning down and rubbing my nose against his. I give him a quick peck on the mouth. He will regret the night he turned me down. He did right, but he will still pay for it.

I walk to the edge of the creek, my eye peeled for fast water under the ice. Despite the months of freeze, water sometimes doesn’t want to submit to its different form. It keeps running under a thin layer of ice. Bad ice. Weak ice. Always waiting for you to step onto it so it can collapse and drag you down.

This beaver lodge, I can tell, holds a big family, maybe more. I point out the chimney to Gordon, the vent. Steam rises from the top of the mound, the breath and body heat of the beavers below it keeping all of them alive.

If I were a beaver, where would the entrance to my lodge be? Only one way to find out. I ask Gordon to bring me the axe.

When I tire of chopping at the ice, I make Gordon do it. He finally hits black water two feet down, and when it rises up, it turns the snow to a tannin-coloured brown. I take over and widen the hole with the axe, then chop down a dead sapling and clean it of its limbs. I’m sweating under my parka so I unzip it. All I need now is the chills if I allow the sweat to wet my under layers.

Poking down into the hole beside the lodge, I feel around for its entrance. I bump along the sides of the beavers’ house, trying to find the place where the sapling will not meet resistance. Where I chopped through the ice made sense to me. The doorway to the lodge, I figured, would face downstream. I reach further with my stick, and, just as I’m about to hit water with my hand, I find the give of the entrance.

“Here you go, Gordo,” I say, handing him the axe. “Chop straight down here.”

As he begins chopping the new hole above the beavers’ entrance, I head up to the bank and find a longer, thicker spruce, this one the width of my wrist and taller than me. I sit beside it and light a smoke, watching Gordon work.

With the hole cut, the spruce sapling chopped and stripped of its branches, the conibear trap slipped onto it a couple of feet from its base, I sink the sapling into the hole and push its trunk down into the soft muck of the bottom to anchor it. The trap’s set, the square of it ready to snap in an X onto the next animal that swims through it and sets off the trigger. The death will be quick, probably an immediate broken spine. If the beaver lives past that, it will struggle quick to its drowning. Already the water around the sapling begins to freeze.

“The first beavers we get,” I tell Gordon as we heat Klik over a small fire on the bank, a pot of snow water heating for cocoa, “will probably be kits. They’re the most adventurous and have the least smarts. In a week or two, we’ll be pulling out the adults, and their pelts will bring good money.”

I realize I like sharing with Gordon what you taught me, Uncle, over the years.

Here’s a sad story for you. A story I want to tell you because it helped me learn something else important, too. A city story. I need to tell it to you.

The dirty streets shimmer in blinding white, and the noise of Manhattan, for once, is muted, the constant movement of this island frozen by an early snowstorm. December is still two days away. Gordon and I walk along the Hudson River, almost as wide here as the Moose River. The water churns black against the snow on the banks. I want to hold his hand.

DJ Butterfoot comes into the city tonight, though. He called and asked me if I was coming to his gig. I played it cool, wanting him to want me more. Everyone will be there. Soleil and Violet and the rest of the pussy posse in full force. All the usual suspects. I got a call from the agent today, too, and he thinks he’s about to land me some serious catalogue work. I need the work. Even without having to pay rent in this city, the day-to-day stuff adds up. I’ve got some money in the bank, but I’m not quite sure how much. Soleil’s people are taking care of that for me. I’d like my own place.

“It’s with a new designer,” the agent told me, trying not to sound apologetic. Then the happy tone came. “The money should be good, and the collection is by a very hip young up-and-comer. Are you ready?”

I told him I’d never heard of her. I could tell he hadn’t, either.

“This all might not be for me.” I say it out loud, finding myself stopped and staring at the flow of the Hudson, a tug pushing freight hard against it.

Gordon has stopped a few steps ahead. He looks at me, waiting.

“Is any of this for me, Mr. Tongue?” I ask.

He waits, looks out, as well, patiently at the water. I’ve kept my protector close to me since last seeing Danny. I’ve thought all of it out. Danny has disappeared since our run-in a few weeks ago. I promised Mum I’ll come home to visit. I will. Danny has to be back in Canada, and he can’t touch me here. He wanted Gus and claims he got him. I’m sorry if this is really true, Gus, but you got what you asked for. I have nothing to offer Danny, and I’m sure the same is true for Suzanne.

“What do you think about taking a trip?” I ask Gordon. “Going up to my neck of the woods. Meet my mum. My uncle. Maybe even my sis?” He keeps his eyes on the water. I nudge him with a light punch, my fist loose in my glove. I’ve promised that I’ll be home soon. I just need to tie up a few things here, finish a few jobs and make sure my agent books a few more for me early in the new year when I return.

I tell Gordon I need to warm up. A café and a hot coffee. He wants to walk, but I flag a cab. I’ve got money in the bank. Shoots booked, and promises for more. Money coming to me for sitting there and pretending I’m my sister.

Gordon doesn’t want anything at the Starbucks. He sits glumly with me at our table, watching the cars slip over the slush. He pulls out a pencil and scrap of paper. He begins scribbling. He slips the note to me.
Your friends aren’t really your friends. They’re going to hurt you
.

“What,” I ask, “are you suddenly a sorcerer?”

He takes the paper back. I need to just clear the air, tell him I’m with Butterfoot and that Gordon is sweet for worrying but he doesn’t need to. My mute protector is jealous.

“My real enemy is Danny the biker boy,” I say. “I love you because I know you will protect me from him. I love you because you will.”

I stare at him until he drops his eyes.

“Tell me,” I say to him. “Promise me you’re going to come with me on a holiday back home and meet my family.” What will I do with him after that, though? When I return here to work again? I’ll figure it out when the time arrives.

Gordon nods. I won’t invite him to the party tonight. He won’t want to come anyways.

I’ve got to admit that I’m walking away, for a short while, from something hard to walk away from. Butterfoot hasn’t called again when I get home. I want the phone ringing soon as I’m in the door, my face cold and flushed from my walk with Gordon. I want him to call and ask again if I’ll come. I’ll say yes this time and stop the games. I’m going to leave NYC for a while and go back home. But I’ll return.

Just as I need to make sure that I have gigs when I return here, I want to make sure Butterfoot understands he is mine, and I am his. And it will be more than some unknown designer knocking on my door, and my relationship with my DJ will be more than every other weekend when he makes it to town. I’ll take care of this business and then I’ll head home for a short while and see Suzanne and figure all of this out.

Maybe we can get a place here in New York together. Model and live well, and in the spring and autumn I can return home for the hunt. We’ll see. Some obstacles, though. Danny, I don’t think he’s gone for good. Maybe it’s as simple as he wants money to leave me and my sister be. And if money is as easy to come by as how I’ve been coming by it the last few months, then Suzanne and me, we can free ourselves from him and his people. I will see Soleil tonight and ask for her banker’s number. He will have solutions to our worries. Gus, you shit, if you aren’t already dead, maybe Suzanne and I can figure a way to help you, too.

Poor suckers already lined up for a block when I get out of the cab and wrap my pashmina around my neck against the night wind. I walk up to the door of the club, to the doorman himself. His head is shaped like a great sturgeon’s, all nose and jaw. He wears a gorgeous coat, the hood trimmed in fox fur. I recognize him. I want to joke with him, ask him if he trapped the fox himself, if he even knows it’s fox. He looks like he recognizes me, too. I smile.

“Annie Bird. On Soleil’s guest list.”

He runs his finger down the columns. I glance at the shivering girls and boys waiting in line. It’s long enough to see the blur of them going around the corner. I am Annie Bird, and I am Cree from a place called Moosonee, and I am a model, and I’m going into this club ahead of you,
wemestikushu
.

The doorman turns his massive head to me. I hope you all get in. “Don’t see your name on the list, Ms. Bird,” he says.

“Is there a guest list for DJ Butterfoot?” I ask. “Has Soleil already arrived? You can ask her.” The line stares at me, their mumbles growing in happy notes, knifing the air.

The doorman scans again through his sheets. He looks up. “Sorry Ms. Bird. Ms. Annie. I don’t see your name here anywhere.”

My ears begin to burn. The voices in the waiting line grow. I hear hushed laughs. “Are you sure? B-I-R-D. Annie. Is Butterfoot or Soleil here? They’ll vouch for me.”

The doorman shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Annie. You’re not on my list.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“You can always try to get in by lining up.” He nods his head to the crowd. I know they’re laughing. I won’t look at them. I whisper a thank-you and walk back down the stairs, turning away from the line. Me, I won’t walk the gauntlet twice tonight.