Arvida Page 3

  “And then?”

  “Then nothing. I was in the dark. There was lightning and thunder and it was raining just like now. Maybe I wasn’t asleep any more, just turning over and over in bed.”

  He clears his throat.

  “Did you see your animal again?”

  The day before, they’d gone to Armand Guay’s at Lac de la Belette. They’d brought him beer from down below. When they arrived, Armand handed a bottle to his father, and asked Jimmy if he wanted to go fishing. Jimmy knew it was a way of getting him out of the way so as to get drunk with his father in peace, but they’d been in town for a week and Jim was dying to put his line in the water. He said yes, and Armand’s dog followed him to the dock and jumped in the boat without his having to say a word. He started the motor with three good pulls on the cord, and headed north towards the islands that block access to the bay. Lac de la Belette is full of pools and tributaries, and he fished for a long time with Sunny seated in the stern. Jim got a bit scared when it became dark, but right then there was an electric sizzle in the air. Armand had started the generator, and the lights over the boathouse burned bright like a beacon set into the mountain.

  In the cabin, Armand and his father were drunk. Murielle, Armand’s wife, was also drunk, but less than Réjean and Luce, who had arrived in the meantime. The adults were playing cribbage, drinking, shouting, and talking sex under their breath, thinking Jim wouldn’t understand. Jim made himself a grilled cheese sandwich. He prepared coffees with some local brandy and whipped cream for the women, then when he was tired of it all, lay down on the couch behind the table with Sunny alongside him. About three in the morning, his father woke him and said, “We’re off.”

  Jim always drove through the bush when his father was drunk. He helped his father climb into the truck and wended his way slowly along the forestry company’s road. His father was snoring beside him when it happened, just before the pitted incline that always made him nervous, and that the truckers called Gear Hill, full of ruts where they often broke their transmissions. An animal was walking far in front of the truck, crossing the road diagonally. He was never able to say what it was. Not a bear or a moose. It was too big for a fox and too high on its legs to be a lynx. His father had woken up, and he wasn’t sure either. In the glare of the headlights, its fur looked tawny or white. Almost silvery.

  In bed, his father turns to the wall and stifles a cough.

  “Yes,” says Jim, “I saw it again.”

  “Was it your cat?”

  “No.”

  In his sleep, Jim went over the drive on Gear Hill, slowed then sped up, turned on his high beams and hit the horn, trying to immobilize the animal. He didn’t see it any better than the day before, but he replayed it enough times to understand it better.

  “It was a wolf, Pa.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Could’ve been worse.”

  They always talk that way, as if their dreams weren’t dreams at all, as if they each lived the night, then the day, like two lives, one inside the other, of which one, but never the same one, sometimes seems stranger than the other. The kettle begins to whistle. Jim goes to the counter, throws three spoons of coffee into the bottom of the pot, and pours in water. He lowers the piston very slowly, millimetre by millimetre. The cottage smells good of burnt wood and steaming coffee.

  “I made you coffee. Want Aspirin too?”

  “Please.”

  He gives him four without thinking twice, and brings him a glass of water. Back from Armand’s the night before, his father went to the outhouse while Jimmy turned on the gas and opened the cottage, making his way through the darkness with the help of his flashlight’s dim beam. His father came out of the toilet reeling, his pants down to his ankles, and his penis bobbing left and right in the night air. Climbing the steps to go into the house, he stumbled over the bear board. Jim had to wrench the plank full of nails off the sole of his boot, support him as far as the bed, help him to get undressed, and toss his underclothes and underpants stained with piss, blood, and shit into a garbage bag.

  Ordinarily, Jim didn’t go to a lot of trouble for his father the morning after a night of drinking, but yesterday, at Lac de la Belette, just before his father woke him up, Jim saw him through his half-closed eyelids over the furred neck of the dog that was lying on top of him, and he was kissing Luce. They embraced for a long time, then Luce murmured something in his ear and they separated. Jim didn’t know where the others were. Fallen in combat, probably. Jim may be barely thirteen years old, but he’s old enough to know how a man feels, having enjoyed the kisses of a drunken woman the night before, which she would not have accorded him were she sober.

  “If your head doesn’t ache too much later, we could maybe get dressed and go fishing. Should be good after the rain.”

  “We could. If the weather gets a bit better. Let me drink my coffee and eat something first. You want eggs?”

  The man from whom his father had bought the cabin eight years earlier did not fish, and only went there for the big hunt in autumn and to get drunk in winter on his skidoo. The house was too far from the main road for there to be visitors. The lake, their lake, which like a horseshoe embraced the chalet on its peninsula, had practically not been fished for ten years. That ought to have made it a paradise for fish breeding, but it’s not what happened. Left in peace, the trout had prospered and increased in size in the lake, before growing scarce beneath its placid surface.

  At a certain point, they’d begun to cannibalize each other.

  You need patience to fish on the lake. Jim and his father pull in barely twenty trout a year, but they’re all as big around as a forearm, with the protruding brow of a freshwater salmon. On the skin of their backs, stippled with red, blue and black dots and the colour of old steel, dark meshing runs between the head and tail, around a dorsal fin as stiff in the cold water as that of a shark. Their bites can’t be compared with the electric tugs little stream trout give to the line. At first it’s as if a diver hidden in the lake has rolled the line around his fist before giving it a good yank. Then, once well hooked, they heave with all their strength towards the bottom, running the line and bending the rod until its joints start to creak. At the last moment, they’ll sometimes rise and slam against the side of the boat, snapping the hook or ripping it from their mouths with a hard, sharp jolt. At the end of May, just after the lakes have crested, when you dip your hand in the icy water to rinse off the blood and silt, you’d think the lake was sinking its teeth into your flesh like a creature that’s more rapacious still.

  *

  Early November.

  You’ve gotta have lots of time to waste, Doris said, to run after a hare in the deep woods in the middle of November, but that’s exactly what Jim is doing, leaning forward to try and see the hare’s silhouette under the bell-shaped firs, their branches weighed down by the heavy snow, his arm muscles stiff from holding the rifle, his clothes soaked with sweat and the water dripping from firs and spruce. He’s climbing towards the road, his lungs on fire, he hears his own steps cracking dead branches under the snow, his own breath, and the brook water down in the coulee burbling away under a thin film of ice.

  He and Doris had seen the hare cross their path as they were following the trap line on their four-wheeler, a big Yamaha Grizzly. They got down from the Grizzly to follow it. The hare was very small, but searching for it they flushed another one, a beautiful fat hare, well primed for whatever winter might send its way. Jim kept his eyes on it for a while, where it was moving about in the midst of a small stand of birches that had lost their last leaves two weeks earlier, but it kept stopping with its back turned, in a position that gave you nothing to shoot at. Jim would have liked nothing more than to cram lead up its backside as far as its ears. Doris gave up the chase pretty fast.

  “Go on and follow it,” she said. “I’m g
oing back for the four-wheeler. I’ll be there when you come out onto the road.”

  She embraced him the way she always did, whether he was on his way to the outhouse or going to the dock for water, without holding back, as if he were off to the war or leaving forever.

  The woods are so dark that he’s dazzled when he comes out onto the road. He adjusts his eyes to the light, looks about, and sees, to the right, fifteen metres ahead, the hare, a bit set back under the branches beside the path, still facing away. He begins to move forward quietly, taking long steps like a tightrope walker so as not to frighten it. He hears Doris coming up behind him in the Grizzly, and he knows the hare is going to bolt in a few seconds. It turns its head towards him. Jim shoulders the gun, aiming a bit to the side, and fires. The rifle goes hot in his hands. The hare shudders and falls in the road, its body shaken by small convulsions. Doris arrives. Jim takes a few steps towards the hare, and suddenly stops.

  A dozen metres in front of him, in a spot where the trail becomes less well defined, half hemmed in by the willows, an animal that’s a lot bigger than a hare is sitting, its back to him, surrounded by trees. Jim’s heart is pounding. Behind his shoulder he signs to Doris in the Grizzly to stop. He ejects the empty cartridge from his gun, shoves it into his vest pocket, then rummages underneath in the pocket of his shirt. His gun is a 12-gauge Remington 870, with a short barrel for hunting deer. Jim uses it for hares and partridge, because it’s easy to handle in the thick bush where he’s always hunting. The chokeless barrel produces a nice pattern of scattered shot that’s good for bringing down partridges in flight and allows him to cut off the head of his prey on the ground without damaging the rest of the carcass. The barrel can shoot deer slugs, and before he leaves on a hunt his father always gives him two or three, well separated from the dozens of cartridges loose in his pants pocket and jacket. It’s his insurance policy in case he runs into wolves, a bear, or an ill-tempered moose.

  He loads a slug into the gun and closes it very gently while pushing the pump forward. Describing a wide arc in the road, he circles the animal until he finds himself face-on to it, always alert for a movement, his breath shallow. It’s a big cat, a yellow-brown feline with big ears, black at the ends, still not moving as it sees Jim approaching with the gun aimed at its head. Jim passes in front of a still snow-covered fir, and then he understands. The cat’s head is a bit bent, as if it’s pondering, its eyes fixed on the ground. Against the white background you can see a black line running from the cat’s head to the trunk of an arched black ash sapling. It’s a lynx caught in a snare. Jim sees Doris approaching, and smiling broadly.

  “I’m pretty lucky to have a white knight protecting me from dead lynxes.”

  “Don’t give me a hard time, Doris.”

  “No, no.”

  Side by side they walk to the lynx, which must have been caught while hugging the ground, chasing a hare. Kneeling in front of it, Jim sees its pink tongue hanging out, and its yellow gaze, befogged, like milky tea or the pastis his father drinks in summer after he’s poured in a few drops of water.

  “It’s not even a good time for lynx. I keep telling Bernard not to make his fox snares too big.”

  “Are we on Bernard’s territory?”

  Bernard is another trapper who shares territory with Doris and her husband, the trapper Jacques Plante.

  Jim frowns. Doris blushes.

  “Yes. I took this path because I know there are always lots of birds and hares.”

  “I told you I didn’t want to make you take detours during your runs.”

  “And I’m telling you that I don’t see you that often, that I like hunting with you, and I’ll always have time to take care of them on my own, my runs and my traps.”

  They smile at each other.

  Afterwards they pick up the hare, free the lynx, load it onto the front bumper of the four-wheeler, and hurry to drop it off with Bernard so as to get back before nightfall. On the hills, this time of the year, darkness drops down like a curtain, between two blinks of an eye.

  Doris lets him drive, and climbs up behind him. Before heading off, he raises himself up to properly check out, from that angle, the dead lynx held in place by two elastic straps. Doris says, behind his back:

  “A beautiful cat, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not your cat.”

  “No.”

  She kisses him on the cheek, wraps her arms around him, and says:

  “He couldn’t be far.”

  In autumn, during the moose hunt, Jim wasn’t allowed to shoot with his 12 gauge or his father’s .410 bore. Hunters in ambush didn’t want to have guns going off around them left and right.

  For partridges, his father had bought him a lead shot break-action rifle with a little telescope. It could bring down a bird from quite close range, as long as you avoided the wing’s protection and aimed for the head or the base of the neck. Flushing the birds was a totally different kind of hunting from taking them down in flight. You had to spot the partridges from a distance, huddled together and camouflaged in the woods, approach without spooking them, and make a good shot. In the woods along the road you killed ruffed grouse, whose male was like a red-brown cock very high on its legs. Amid the spruce and the fir you killed Canada grouse, whose male did not sport a ruff, but whose breast and black head were spotted with white, and whose eyes were topped by thick red wattles. The females of the two species had the same cryptic grey-brown plumage, and it was almost impossible to distinguish them before cutting open their breasts with a knife. The ruffed grouse had the white, delicate flesh of a cockerel, whereas the flesh of the Canada grouse was a violet-red that resembled very lean beef when cooked, and tasted strongly of fir foliage and juniper.

  Often, the bird perched on a branch or curled on the ground amid the leaves and moss didn’t die right away. It went into convulsions, performing a backlit St. Vitus’s dance, soul-stricken against the sun, amid airborne feathers wrenched from its own plumage. His father had showed him what to do in such a case. You had to seize the flapping bird in a swift lunge, immobilize it, then crush its trachea between your thumb and index finger. If you put your hand on its breast at the same time, you could feel the bird’s heart quake beneath the skin and feathers, race, panicked, then finally pound out three or four heavy dull pulsations before stopping dead. His father said, “That’s what it is to kill something, Jim. You kill better when you’ve understood that. If you can’t do it, you shouldn’t hunt. You shouldn’t shoot anything.”

  Jim had done it once that day. He’d had his stomach turned upside down, and for a whole season he’d stopped shooting at the partridges he’d flushed, so he wouldn’t have to do it again.

  Then he got over the horror.

  It became a terrible, beautiful thing that came back every autumn, the first bird brought down whose tiny heart he smothered between his hands. Every time, he placed his hand on the bird’s body and matched his own breath to the pitch of the throbbing muscle. When the drumming stopped at last, he opened his eyes on the dead bird and discovered to his surprise that his own heart had not missed a single beat.

  *

  They always called him Jacques Plante the trapper to distinguish him from Jacques Plante the goalie. He’s the one who’d first talked to him about the cat.

  The year after the accident, Jim had spent almost all summer in the woods. His father left him with Doris and Jacques when he went down to the city. That summer, a doctor from Chicoutimi had set up a trailer nearby to fish on the surrounding lakes in a canoe. He’d probably intended to hunt moose there in the autumn. Doris and Jacques weren’t crazy about that, but they’d decided to be gracious with Doctor Duguay, as they were with everyone. The doctor had a dog, Spencer, a good-looking boxer with cropped ears, who didn’t seem quite at home in the middle of the thinned out forest.

  Doris and Jacques also had an old dog that
was to die the following year. His name was Boss. He’d been Jim’s best friend since he was born, and was perfectly at ease in the woods. He was a very big dog, a cross between a German Shepherd and a malamute. The doctor had come to visit them one night when it was the time for a fire, and the trappers’ camp was full of people. He’d stayed there, standing, had refused to sit and take a beer, and had advised them to tie Boss up during the day. “That would be safer,” he’d said, “Because Spencer is a dominant male.”

  Doris and Jacques had consented. He’d left quietly, heading back to his trailer. The trappers never tied Boss up, and one fine day the big wolf dog had come out of the woods at a trot, around dusk. Jim’s father was there. They were all sitting around the picnic table, eating corn and hot dogs. Boss was holding Spencer in his mouth, by the neck. The boxer was unrecognizable. Boss deposited the corpse at their feet, as if it were a huge hare, all disjointed.

  Jacques tied Boss to a post and they left, with his father, for the doctor’s trailer. On foot. As if there would have been something sacrilegious in transporting the dog by truck or in a four-wheel drive. His father and Jacques walked in single file along the path, taking turns with Spencer, whom they carried like an armful of logs. Doctor Duguay was all alone in his trailer, playing solitaire by the light of a gas lamp. He wasn’t hysterical or angry or sad. He took Spencer from the trapper’s arms and asked:

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know, doctor. I found him like that while checking my snares.”

  “Your dog?”

  “Oh, he was tied up, doctor. And Boss would never have been able to do anything like that.”

  “What then? A bear? Wolves?”

  “Oh, he would have defended himself against a bear better than that. And wolves don’t go for the throat that way. Excuse the expression, doctor, but they would have torn him to pieces. But I’ll tell you what could have done it. You can believe it or not, it’s all the same to me. A long time ago they sometimes killed really bad cats around here.”