The Last Woman (19 page)

Emma was spending the winter in Black Falls to tend her sick sister. They were two men on their own: two mostly silent men, doing what needed to be done. They had no instinct for the extras that were second nature to Emma. There were no sweetcakes, no doughnuts, no bright cloth on the table. The little stove seemed to flicker less cheerfully.

After freeze-up, when Matt walked back to Pine Island to get the dogs, Billy stayed behind. At first, he experienced a loneliness that verged on panic. He lay on his bed, staring up at the gear hanging from the rafters. Eventually, he took his rifle and went out.

When he discovered the tracks of a moose, he followed them across the light snow – the deep, splayed prints, the wispy trail of a hoof, little craters filling with dusk, leading him into a grove where the animal had stopped to chew on a branch. With evening coming on, he gave up the chase. He was in a swampy area at one end of Silver Lake: a tiny lake in itself, where grasses had begun to blow dryly in a rising wind. On an impulse, he lay down, and after a while aimed his rifle at the sky. The echo of his shot
seemed to split several ways at once, as if the ice beneath him, the whole bush, were tearing apart.

They woke each day in the dark to ice in the water bucket. Billy would make breakfast while Matt got the dogs ready. The men ran behind the sled, while ahead the dogs lunged under the cloud of their own breath: through spruce, their snow-sheathed spires motionless against the deep blue of dawn, or under the trunks of leaning pines that now and then let slip a glitter of snow. The lakes were dazzling: held in a silence so deep it lent to any sound – the snapping of a branch, a rifle shot – the significance of a spoken word.

They trapped mostly beaver. They would find a lodge – its mound of sticks frozen to the hardness of cement – and hack their way down through a foot or two of ice to the underwater entrances, where they set their traps. Often when they hauled them up several days later, they found them empty. Once, they found the beaver had escaped with all but two nails. “I guess we’re toenail trappers now,” Matt joked. But on those times when they found the heavy, sleek body of a drowned beaver, there was a quiet sense of celebration. They dried the beaver by rubbing snow on it. Then it was on to the next set of traps, the next lake.

After the long, cold day, they were glad to reach the cabin. Usually, they hung the by-now frozen animals in the rafters to thaw. They worked on the pelts in the evening, scraping the hides clean, lacing them onto homemade stretchers to dry them flat.

Matt opened up a little, telling anecdotes from the past,
often about Emma, set off by something she had made – a bit of beadwork, a cake of dried blueberries. The older man seemed to take more notice of him now. He might grunt his approval over a pelt Billy was working on or tease him about his cooking. One morning on the line, they stopped to boil up some water for tea. As they hunkered close to their little fire, raising and lowering their mugs of steaming tea, Matt began to tell a story Billy had never heard – the story of how when he got out of the army in ’45 he had come back to Pine Island. “I was in pretty bad shape. Nerves all in a tangle. I couldn’t sit still for ten seconds. Jumped when the door slammed. Emma didn’t know what to do with me.” Matt chuckled at the memory. He was sitting on a pack, with his ear-lugs sticking out, grinning as though having your nerves in a tangle was a bit of a lark. He had come up to Silver Lake by himself, and except for returning briefly to Pine Island at Christmas, he had stayed up till spring. “I was a madman,” he said. “Bad dreams. Bad thoughts. They should have locked me up.”

“You trapped up here?” Billy said.

“Trapped. Did the things you do up here. It put me right. Not right away. I wouldn’t listen at first to what it was saying. But eventually.”

In the little fire, the spruce sticks snapped. Deep in the trees, a raven was crying, and for a moment Billy sensed the deep bush all around them – bigger and deeper than any man could think. He felt like weeping, but held it back. He felt as if something were being offered. But he did not know what.

One day, when they had stopped on an open lake, he saw a wolf trotting across the ice. It had its head down, and though it must surely have been aware of them, it did not bother to look in their direction.

The dogs, who had lain down, had not smelled it yet. But Matt had knelt to the sledge and was sliding out his rifle. And suddenly, Billy was in dread of him shooting the wolf. He could not have said why: only he felt connected to the wolf, and knew that it must live.

Matt raised his rifle: wolf pelts were getting a good price that year. But he did not fire; he turned his square face a little from the stock. Billy had never been able to meet Matt’s eyes for long; in fact, it was a mark of respect not to stare at an elder, or at anyone, for that matter. But now he fixed on his uncle’s dark, questioning eyes, which held him in return. All his self-consciousness was gone, as he pleaded in silence. Matt lowered his gun. Across the lake, the wolf trotted behind the next island.

They never spoke of the wolf they had let go. But a sense of release, of quiet gratitude, welled in him. Without knowing quite how it happened, his anger and shame began to fade.

Before him lies a dried-up slough. The hill on the other side has been half-stripped of trees – a vacancy of stumps and yellow dirt. Off to one side, a treaded machine is working. Wielding a mechanical arm, it grasps a big
spruce at the base, cuts it off with a scream of its saw, then lifts the tree aloft where for a few seconds it seems to be dancing – its pliant boughs whipping and flowing like the hair of a crazed woman. But almost at once, the mechanical arm turns the tree on its side, runs it through its “fist” and, with a sound like a wooden box being crushed, strips off every branch. The tree – now a pole – is tossed aside.

Crossing the slough, he starts up the hill, struggling through a heap of debris as he makes his way toward the summit. He has no further interest in the machine: along with its driver, it seems an irrelevance, and he has soon climbed past it, arriving at a small plateau where two pickup trucks have been parked and several men lounge about eating lunch. He strides past them. One, as if readying himself for an attack, stands up. Billy walks quickly, his gaze locked straight ahead. “Hey, chief!” another of them calls after him. “Where’s the fire?” Ignoring their laughter, he goes on past the last truck, past a splintered tree trunk, past a boulder sparkling with broken glass, up the deeply rutted road toward the sky.
Nothing left, Billy
. He had refused to believe her.

Before him, now, lies a desert. The trees are gone, or mostly gone. Here and there a solitary grove persists or an isolated poplar. But what dominates is an empty plain speckled with stumps, churned by the tracks of machines, stretching toward the horizon. He has seen clear-cuts before, but never here, on his home ground, and never on such a scale.

In the distance, windshields glint where machines chew at the remaining bush. Clanking treads float their music in the heat. A road has been cut down the centre of the clear-cut, and along this a truck is advancing toward him, dragging behind it a rising hill of dust.

T
he day is hot, still, overcast – a disappointment after weeks of blazing clarity. Richard only prays it won’t rain. Stooping, he bounces a ball and regards the tanned, bald man crouched with his racket at the far end of the court. Reg Benoit is an intense competitor, but – as Richard has discovered – not a particularly skillful one. It’s a problem: he can’t go drubbing the man whose blessing he is counting on.

Across the net, Ann stands in her whites, tapping her racket idly against her bare leg, frowning at some private thought. He wishes she wouldn’t make her lack of interest so obvious, her displeasure. The previous afternoon, Rowan had made such a fuss when Richard dropped him
off at the Ducettes’ that Richard had lost his temper; and though he’d tried to settle things down, he evidently hadn’t done a very good job, because at Inverness, Ann, primed by a phone call from their son, was ready for him. “He says you yelled at him. Really, Richard, I don’t see why you couldn’t have brought him.” “I don’t yell,” he’d responded grimly. He didn’t dare admit the truth: that he’d left Rowan behind because he wanted a child-free weekend, though he hadn’t framed it that way to Ann. Leaving Rowan had made him feel shabby. Driving away from the Ducettes’ had been hard.

Again, he bounces the ball and takes another swipe at a moth. For the last half-hour, the little creatures have been fluttering out of the woods.

On Richard’s side of the court, Marilyn Benoit faces her husband. A petite, shapely woman in a pleated tennis skirt that thrusts out at the rear, she’s a good twenty years younger than Reg and given to outbursts of enthusiasm in a voice that seems not to have changed much since she was thirteen.

He serves.

“Out!” Reg calls, readying himself again.

Richard bounces his second ball, waves aside another moth, and delivers an easy serve that Reg slams straight at Marilyn. Raising her racket as much to protect herself as anything, she lets out a squeal and the ball deflects to Ann, who takes a half-hearted stab and misses.

“Marilyn, you genius!” Richard tells her.

“I just stood here!” she says with wide eyes. Beyond her,
Ann is ambling off the court as if she were on some solitary walk. Retrieving the ball, she strolls back toward the net and tosses it over, underhand.

Serving to his wife, Richard double faults. Facing Reg again, he is sweating profusely, and his suspicion that the afternoon is not going well has deepened. Behind Reg, another cloud of moths sails out of the woods. It blooms behind the backstop, and – and as Richard watches in irritation – makes its spinning way across the court.

In the end, the moths are so thick they have to call off the match. The air boils with them: they mat on their rackets, tangle in their hair, obscure the view of the baselines. “
You!
” Marilyn cries in disgust, spitting one out. She is slapping ineffectually at the moths as she hurries with the others toward shelter. “I’m amazed,” Richard tells his guests. “It’s never happened before. It’s never happened before, has it, Ann –” His wife does not respond. Turning, he finds her gazing up like a child entranced by a snowstorm.

The two couples go off to change for a swim – Reg and Marilyn to the guest cabin, Ann and Richard to their bedroom in the cottage. Stripping off his damp tennis things, Richard flings them in a corner and pulls on his suit. “I know this isn’t exactly your idea of fun,” he says. She has turned her back to put on not the bikini she usually wears, but a one-piece, rather old-fashioned suit he considers unattractive. “I just wonder if you could try a little harder –”

Wriggling into her straps, she does not reply.

“Honey?”

“What.” She turns back to him.

“Why aren’t you wearing the bikini?”

“The way that man looks at me, I’d rather wear a bag.”

“Oh, Reg’s a bit of a rogue. But he’s a good head.”

On the path behind the cottage he waits for his guests to appear. Over the side-channel, a few moths go sparkling by – stragglers who soar among the branches or rest on the tree trunks like little bows, slowly fanning their tiny wings as if contemplating further outrages. The muggy air is oppressive, and in the cloudy light, Inverness seems to him seedy and depressing. He can hear the Benoits in their cabin – arguing, it seems. Two happy couples, Richard thinks, grabbing at a moth. He is wiping it off on his trunks when Marilyn appears in a minute bikini. She meets him with a smile that seems to say, Yes, I know I’m nice, you can look at me all you like! His spirits reviving, Richard stands talking with her until Reg arrives, looking gym-fit in his flowered trunks, if a bit grim. Richard leads the Benoits down the path, stopping to point out the carved brackets under the eaves of the old boathouse. “Ann’s grandfather built it. He was a real old-country craftsman. We still have some of his tools from Scotland.” Suddenly Richard is ambushed by a wearying sense of taking up a role, for he has spoken these exact words to guests many times. For a moment he is adrift, unable to find the chain of his thoughts while he smiles helplessly at Marilyn, who does her best to help him out with an enthusiastic “Fascinating!” Remembering, finally, he launches into the
always popular anecdote of how Peter Scott first arrived on Lake Nigushi.

When Ann appears, she is still wearing the black swim-suit, but he senses she’s making an effort now: laughing at Reg’s joke about the moths; listening to him with an intentness that verges, Richard worries, on parody. But Reg seems charmed. When Ann swims out into the channel, Reg swims after her and soon their heads are bobbing together, under the far shore.