The Last Woman (27 page)

When the day came, he helped load up the floatplane they had hired for the trip north. Richard sat beside the pilot. It was his first time in a bushplane, and he peered out the windows the whole way. Below, the Vermillion River crawled past, banded with the small, quivering threads of rapids, between flatwater stretches as still and dark as a bog. Seeing such planes cross the sky, he never imagined how rough, how deafening, their ride actually was. Everywhere he looked, the hazy bush spread to the horizons. Here and there, water flashed where immense lakes caught the sun, their shapes like pieces of jigsaw flung across the carpet of trees. In the distance, the bush seemed to retreat even as it came forward, into the unassailable keep of the horizons. He felt that no matter how far on they flew, they would never come to the end of it.

Directly below, the tiny shadow of the Beaver raced with them – fleeing like a spirit over yellow poplars, skimming a marsh, darting up a bluff to flicker through the crowns of pines. He kept looking down at it, entranced and oddly
moved by its companionship, its tenacious demonstration of loyalty and good faith.

Now and then Billy leaned forward from his rear seat, shouting over the engine to answer Richard’s questions or point something out. Richard had travelled, but walking for the first time into Chartres or glimpsing beyond sun-baked hills the historic blue of the Mediterranean had not moved him like this. And it wasn’t just the bush, flooding below in its incalculable immensity, or the prospect of hunting: Billy’s invitation had spawned a sense of possibility, of a new spaciousness as immeasurable and beckoning as the forest unfurling below them.

And now – Silver Lake – its long jagged shape broken here and there by islands, joined by deep bays that sent up sparkles of light. Just before the pilot brought them in, Richard found the roof of the cabin. The smoke took him aback: he had not expected others.

A native man in a tweed cap emerged from the trees and stood waiting as they taxied toward shore. Catching the rope Billy flung to him from the pontoon, the young man turned with it to a tree and tied them snug. Immediately – there were no introductions – Billy and the man began to unload the plane. Richard helped pile up the packs and boxes, and as the plane drummed away across the lake, he took up a load and began to climb the path toward the cabin, feeling queasy from the ride. The steep path wavering under him, the box cutting into his back, sharpened his sense of disappointment. Perhaps the man was only helping temporarily – perhaps he had just dropped in to get the
place ready – to help them stash the supplies Billy had brought in for the winter season. But others were here as well. Across the clearing, two women were working at a table, one of them Matt’s wife, Emma. Her hand pausing over the fish she was gutting, she acknowledged him with a nod. Beside her, the other, younger woman kept her head down.

Dumping his load, Richard paused in the bright sun. A small triangle of pain had lodged behind his eyes.

Near the women, smoke filtered from a teepee of poles wrapped in a plastic tarp. Fresh kindling littered the dirt, a rifle stood against a stump. He only wanted to lie down.

Matt appeared from behind the cabin, tucking in his shirt.

“This is how he gets out of the work,” Billy told Richard as he slung down his load. “Spends all day on the thunderbox.”

“Can’t resist the view,” Matt said. Since their first wary meeting on Pine Island, Richard had got to know Billy’s uncle a little better. But he could not completely relax around the older man. His silences conjured a world where Richard did not feel welcome.

Nearby, the young man who had met their plane stood quietly, his pocked, grinning face fixed on the ground. George. He took Richard’s offered hand. Richard felt overbearing – large and out of place. No one spoke. Across the clearing, the knives went on clicking.

George, he learned, was Billy’s cousin. He and Hattie, his wife of only a year, were helping to get the cabin ready
for Matt and Emma, who would spend the winter on their trapline. That morning they had hauled in the mess of lake trout the women were now cleaning and hanging in the smoke to cure. They would need dry meat too: moose meat. Richard and Billy would be hunting for necessary food.

Over the next couple of days, Richard tried to make himself useful. He and Billy cut evergreen boughs for the bivouac they would share outside the cabin. He carried buckets from the lake, and in the bush worked with a bucksaw to fell standing deadwood for the stove.

His sense of his own awkwardness never entirely went away. His size seemed an impediment, as he stooped into the crowded cabin for a meal. Billy’s family was cheerful and friendly around him, far more so than the people on Pine Island, who could be withdrawn to the point of sullenness. There was a feeling of celebration at Silver, which Billy clearly shared, as if their time here signified a release from the constrictions of the reserve. But all the same, Richard could not forget that he was out of place – a guest eager to earn his keep, but who for all his goodwill could not enter the complex current of their lives. He felt this most around Hattie, a Cree from James Bay. He had never seen such shyness in an adult person. With others – with her husband, with Emma – she could be quite chatty. But when he approached, she immediately fell quiet. And this quietness, this sense of stillness into which she withdrew, bothered him: it seemed a rejection. He would watch her covertly, admiringly, as she worked, her head bowed over her sewing, or heaved her bad leg (she had been crippled
at birth, Billy told him) up and down the banks of the lake. He sensed an innocence about her that he felt could not survive the assaults of the larger world. He wanted to protect her – though from what, exactly, he could not have said.

As dark fell, they’d sit in the warmth of the stove, in the fluttering light of the Coleman lamps. Often they worked – mending equipment, fashioning new parts from wood or leather, or sewing clothes and blankets. Now and then a few stories might be told. Richard heard of near-drownings, of hungry times, of a man who had walked three days and night without sleep to get help for his sick wife. They spoke with a drollery that belied the hardships they had endured.

Occasionally, Billy and George referred to the upcoming hunt, casually dropping the name of a locale where moose might be found, recalling a past success or failure, making random comments about browse, about the weather. Over at Crown Lake? Maybe not: there was a logging road in there now and Harry Jansen said there was lots of trucks on it. At these times, Matt contributed little, though Richard had the impression that the younger men were waiting for his comments.

Turning the thin pages of his bible, Matt sat smoking his pipe with an absorbed air, seeming to ignore the others until, one night, under a drifting island of smoke, he remarked that two cows should be enough for their purposes: “Two nice fat ones.” Billy and George glanced up, as if expecting more. But the old man went back to his reading.

Richard was tired of cutting wood and found these endless deliberations frustrating. Why didn’t they just
go
? When they were alone, he asked Billy what they were waiting for.

“Have to figure where they are,” Billy said at last.

“The moose –”

“Takes time,” Billy said. Richard was in his sleeping bag, which was covered by the tarp Billy had also drawn over his own blankets. A small fire flickered at their feet. “You can’t rush the animals, they don’t like it. They don’t come to you.”

“What do you mean, come to you?”

“Same thing you mean, I guess.” But it was not the same thing. The moose came twice, Billy explained. They came in a dream, or in a sudden thought. You would see them by a certain lake, in a certain grove. Later, they would turn up in exactly that place.

At least, this was Richard’s understanding. Privately, he was skeptical. Was this just another irrational holdover from the old days, like a belief in thunderbirds? Remaining silent, he settled more deeply into his bag. Overhead, stars pulsed.

Then Billy was rousing him. It was still dark, and very cold. There was already a light in the cabin. The men ate an enormous breakfast of bannock and fried fish, bent in silence to their plates as if to some crucial job.

Matt and George left first, setting off in Matt’s canoe. Long after the mist had enveloped them, Richard could hear the steady drone of their motor, and then, as it faded,
the tentative knocking of a woodpecker across the lake.

He and Billy followed the shore path. Billy walked quickly with short, unvarying steps. Richard’s jeans were soon soaked from the dewy bushes. They turned inland, climbing through pines. There was little undergrowth, and the going was easy over the duff where the shadows of the great trees striped the hillside, among slabs of sun.

Richard found it hard to get used to the weight of his gun, the lethal power it held. He kept shifting it from one hand to the other and checking the safety, conscious of Billy on the path ahead.

They descended the far slope, in shadow now, and came to a marsh, its borders rimmed with ice. Down an avenue of reeds, the open water of a lake gleamed. But it was not Branch Lake, the lake they were heading for. It was only a small lake, Billy said, scarcely more than a swamp – just the first of several they would have to pass that morning.

It took them three hours to reach Branch. Richard was hungry and tired; his soaked pants chafed his legs. Along the frozen mud of the shore, Billy searched for tracks. Squatting, he picked up a ball of dung and crumbled it.

They reached a burned-over area where the charred trunks of trees streaked the brown air. Billy made a gesture with a crooked finger: there was something over the hill. Straining, Richard could hear only the shivering of a few dry leaves.

Creeping up the incline, they crouched behind a granite ridge. On the other side, perhaps twenty-five yards away, a bull moose was whipping his antlers at a bush. Then he
paused and lifted his head, sniffing at the air. A scrap of something, like a rag, was dangling from his rack.

Now the animal began to walk away; picking up speed, he rode the stately carriage of his own bulk up a slope. Richard could see all of him now, the freakishly long legs, the powerful hump of the shoulders, the muscles working under hide, the great, absurd rack riding above him, with the scrap swinging to and fro.

Richard felt the kick and seemed only later to hear his shot, though perhaps it was only his shot’s echo. By then he had discovered Billy’s hand on his gun, and the moose was trotting up the hillside, his rump jigging over his flashing hocks as he climbed among the burned trees and out of sight.

“What!” Richard shouted. He knew something had gone terribly wrong. “I had a clear shot! What did you do that for?”

Billy had knocked down his gun. Richard had never met the anger of those eyes before, and it was like a physical assault.

“It was a bull,” Billy said, through gritted teeth.

“Yes, a big one.” Richard was tired of Billy’s indirectness. Tired of tiptoeing around his sensitivities. “I want to know why you did that!”

“Just forget it.” Billy wheeled away. He said nothing further, not immediately. Down by the lake, he took some food from their pack. Richard sat with his slab of bannock, unable to eat.

“Bulls this time of year,” Billy said finally as he tossed a bit of bannock on the water, “don’t have much meat on them. Don’t smell too good either. Got their minds on other things.” Puzzled, Richard looked at him. “Women?” Billy said.

They did not get a moose that day, though they hunted a wide area around the lake. Richard wondered if his shot had scared them off. But he did not ask Billy, because Billy had withdrawn and in any case by now he had remembered what Matt had said about wanting cows.

They did not go home by the same way. Billy worked them farther south, and eventually they came out on a bluff with a view of a valley where several graders and bulldozers sat abandoned, vivid spots of yellow against the dull bush, along a road of raw earth.

There was a sadness about the valley, Richard thought. The violence of the roadway, the sleeping violence of the machines, and over the bush, the shadows of clouds lying like a dark lake on the trees. It seemed to him that his failure was connected with what he saw. He was not used to thinking of himself as a representative of his culture, of his race. But he glimpsed this now – the new road was in some way his creation, his fault. In the view of his Ojibway friends, it was a destructive force aimed blindly at their way of life. It was not what the road-builders intended.
They
believed they were bringing a better
future: raw materials, jobs, prosperity. They meant well. But he had meant well too, shooting at the moose, and now the hunt was ruined.

The incursion of logging roads into their traditional hunting and trapping grounds brought considerable anxiety to the people of Pine Island. Some had begun to talk of launching a claim to defend those lands, and later that fall, Billy asked Richard what he thought of their chances in the courts. Richard said he’d look into the matter and found the names of some lawyers to call in Quebec and British Columbia. In a few days, he reported that the situation looked promising. “The federal government’s started giving research money to any band who wants to initiate a claim. Really, since the Calder case out in B.C., there’s a feeling that it’s only a matter of time before native title to the land gets recognized as a right.” But Billy was concerned that there still wasn’t enough support on Pine Island for a claim. Many, he explained, were wary of rousing the sleeping dog of white alarm. After generations of quietly surviving on the edge of things, they thought it foolhardy to draw attention to themselves by taking up the white man’s instrument, the law, and turning it against him. Some feared for their jobs in the lumber industry, or for their relationship with cottagers around the lake. Others felt that Pine Island should not be squandering its meagre resources on the long shot of winning a claim.