The Moose Jaw (31 page)

“Morgan?”  I said softly, “You in there?”

Still no answer.   I pulled back the flap.  It was empty.

I hurried back down the path and ignored Haywood’s worried expression as I swept past him and went through the door into the cabin.  She was, indeed, gone.  There was no trace of her.  No Levis, no shirt, no boots.  I turned quickly and almost ran into Haywood who was standing in the open doorway.  I tried to get past him so I could go down and check the creek bank.  His pitchfork hands clamped around my upper arms.  His grip was like a vice.  I tried to pull away but couldn’t.

“God damn it Haywood! I’ve got to…” I began, but he cut me off.

“What you’ve got to do, Gus,” he said quietly, “is you’ve got to get a grip on yourself.”

He said it gently but he meant it.  Concern showed in his eyes.

   “Remember what Hard Case told you.  Funny things happen to a guy’s head when he’s out here alone for a long time.”

I laughed, relieved.  “No, no.  You don’t understand,” I told him.  “She’s real.  She was here.  Look at the table.”

He still had a death grip on my arms, so I couldn’t look back into the cabin myself, but he could.  I knew the remains of last night’s dinner would convince him I wasn’t crazy.  He looked over my head.

“What about it?” He asked, still holding me immobile.

“We ate dinner together there last night!”
  I cried out in exasperation.  “Use your goddamned eyes – two plates, two cups…”

I never finished.  Haywood had released me and I turned as I spoke.  I was lifting my arm to point, but I stopped.  A single lit candle stood on the table.  Nothing more.  I stared, speechless.  As if in a trance, I walked to the table, ran my hand over its clean, wood surface, and sagged into a chair.

Haywood pulled up the chair across the table and sat.  He didn’t say anything.

“This isn’t right,” I said.  “This isn’t right at all.  We had a good-bye dinner last night – goose stuffed with rice and mushrooms.  We had a bottle of white wine.  She must have cleaned it up while I was meeting you.  But where would she…why would she…” I trailed off.

Haywood was a good friend.  We had been close friends for many years and had come to know each other well.  He puffed on his cigar slowly, pensively.

“O.K.,” he said, appealing to my reason, which he respected.  “If – I say if – she was here, and mind you, I’m not saying she was or wasn’t.  If she was here and she walked away, she had to have left sign.  Agreed?”

I nodded.

“Right,” he continued.  “So, if she left sign, a seasoned old sign reader like myself ought to be able to cut her trail, don’t you think?”

I nodded again.  He nodded too.

“Good.  So, you sit here and smoke your pipe and wait for the coffee to perk.  I’ll go out and scout around a bit.  What was she wearing on her feet?”

“Hiking boots,” I answered.  “Old style, high-top lace ups.  L.L. Bean I think.”

“Vibran soles?” he asked.  “Waffle stompers?”

I thought for a minute.  “No, just smooth leather soles.  You know, old style.”

“Right then!”  He slapped a big hand down on the tabletop and stood up.  “Save me a cup of coffee.”

With that he went out the door.

***

I sat there, lost in thought until the hiss of coffee boiling over on the stove brought me back to the present.  I went outside, removed the pot from the burner and turned off the flame.  The acrid smell of burned coffee hung in the cold morning air.  The simple task of cleaning up the stove and making a fresh pot took my mind, for the moment, off Morgan.  But, while I sat there on the stump waiting for the new batch to perk, I kept asking myself why she had left.  Where had she gone?  I remembered our conversation over dinner the night before.  I remembered her looking at me with those beautiful green eyes and raising her wine cup to me.  And I remembered her words.

“When he comes, I’ll depart alone.” 

Could she have meant precisely that?  She would leave, literally, alone?  But that made no sense at all.  She had nowhere to go.  She had no food, no equipment, no jacket.  She didn’t even have socks or underwear.  As I went over all this in my mind, it occurred to me that, perhaps, she had just decided to go off alone for a little while before flying back to civilization.  Soak up a little store of wilderness before she left.  I could understand that.  I’d probably do the same thing myself.  I felt a little better with this line of reasoning.  When the coffee stopped bubbling up in the perk dome, I went over to the stove and turned the flame to low.  As I did so, I scanned the tree line and the creek bank, hoping to see her striding back toward me. 

I kept watch while the coffee settled, and through my first two cups.  She didn’t appear.  When I was pouring my third cup, Haywood came into view from upstream.  He was working his way slowly along the creek, eyes to the ground, stopping now and then to study something he saw in the mud or the sand.  I had a cup poured and waiting when he finally walked up the bank to the cabin.  He took it and sat on his stump.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Plenty,”  he said, sipping his coffee. “Moose, bear, wolf, beaver, ducks, geese and martens.  No boot prints other than your own.  He looked at me pointedly.

“She was here,” I insisted.
  “She was real and she was here!  She ate, drank, slept, walked and talked.  She even shit my bed for Christ’s sake!”  I was getting angry.

“Shit your bed?” he asked, incredulous.  I explained.

He sat thinking that over.  He lit the stub of his cigar and puffed it until it glowed to his satisfaction.

“Well,” he said, “I can’t see you making up a dream girl for company and then having her shit your bed.  Unless there’s a dark side to you I don’t know about, you’re just not that sick.  Besides, I’ve read all your journals and you haven’t got that much imagination.”

He held up a hand in anticipation of my objection. “Don’t take that wrong.  You’re a good writer but you write about stuff that really happened.  You report.  You write facts.  Sure, you embellish it some but, at the end of the day, you write honest-to-god, it-really-happened stuff.  Unless you’ve undergone a hell of a sea change while you’ve been out here, I don’t think you could make up something like this.  Be that as it may, I’ve been all over and around this place and your mystery woman didn’t leave any tracks.”

“That’s impossible,” I said.  “She left tracks in the mud down at the landing yesterday.  She was barefoot.  You didn’t see them?”

He shook his head.  “I checked the landing very carefully.  The only tracks down there are yours.”

I stood up.  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

I marched down the bar to the landing.  Haywood didn’t follow; he stood by the cabin and watched me.  He knew, of course, I wouldn’t find what I was looking for.  I didn’t.  Her tracks were gone and so were the bear’s.  This was too much.  I walked downstream a few paces and looked at the tree on the far bank.  I’d been confronted daily by the sight of those three white scars on its trunk since Trilogy had clawed them into the bark.  Now, they too were gone.  So was the tree.

I walked slowly back up to the cabin.  Haywood didn’t say anything when I returned.  He just handed me my cup as I sat down on the stump.  There had to be an explanation.  We sat silently sipping our coffee for a while.

Finally, I said.  “O.K.  No tracks.  That’s possible.  She usually wore my ducks when she went outside and I didn’t actually see her put on her boots this morning.  She may have left barefoot.  If so, and she stuck to the gravel, you wouldn’t have been able to pick up her trail.”

“True enough,” he agreed.  “But, you’d figure, sooner or later, she’d have to cut up into the woods or down to the water.  Either way, she would have left a print in the sand or mud, barefoot or not.  I would have found that track.”

I thought about that, but I could still see where she might have walked away without leaving any sign.  Then too, good as Haywood was, he could have missed something.

“Yeah,” I answered, “you’d think so.  But, for now, let’s just say she left no sign.  As I see it, the first thing I’ve got to do is convince you she was real, and I haven’t gone round the bend.  Let’s look over the inside of the cabin.  She spent nine days in there.  There’s got to be a red hair on the pillow or something that will prove she was there.”

He nodded and stood up. 
“A redhead, no less,” he said,
and followed me into the cabin.

We went over every inch with a fine-toothed comb.  After a half hour of searching we had found nothing.  No hair, no nail clipping, nothing.  I slumped into one of the chairs.  Haywood tossed the mattress back on the bed, folded the blankets and laid them on top of it.  Then he went to the shelf and brought over the bottle of Dew.  He poured us each a generous dollop. 

“It’s close enough to noon,” he said.  He lifted his tin cup in my direction and then sipped the whiskey.  I took a mouthful and swallowed.  We finished that drink and he poured us each another.  It was helping.

“How much of this stuff you been drinking?” he asked me.

“Not much,” I answered truthfully.  “Couple of shots at night before I turn in.  Certainly not that much.  You left me with six full bottles when you went out in mid July.  Still got this one.”

He looked at the half full bottle on the table and nodded.

“Been eating any strange mushrooms?”  He was smiling a little to take the sting out of the question.

“No stranger than usual.”  I told him.  “Boletes and Scaly Tooth mainly.  I scrambled up a couple of Shaggy Manes with some eggs last week.  No exotics, if that’s what you mean.”

He considered this in silence.  After a little while he leaned back in his chair and his face took on a look of mild amusement.

“Haven’t been scooping a handful of that goose grease and having a go at yourself, have you?”

“Haywood…”

He went on as if I hadn’t interrupted.  “Man can wank himself to death, you know.  It’s a proven medical fact.”

“Haywood!”  I wasn’t in the mood for good-natured ribbing.

“Injure yourself at the very least.”

“Goddamnit, Haywood!”  I started out of my chair. 

He held up a hand.   “Alright.”  He was serious now.  “That was out of line.  Sorry.”

Then, after a slight pause,
“You do look like a wanker, though.”

In spite of myself, a laugh snorted out me. 

Humor had always been Haywood’s weapon of choice.  The hurt and rage I had experienced at Morgan’s departure drained out of me as we sat quietly and sipped our whiskeys.  Over our third, Haywood said, “Well, can’t hunt the day you fly.  May as well get drunk.  Let’s finish these, fetch all the gear I brought, and then we can settle down to some serious drinking.  There’s more whiskey in one of the big totes.  And, while we’re getting shit faced, you can tell me the whole story.  I know you well enough to know you kept a good bit back.  I want to hear it all.  Fair enough?”

I saluted him with my cup.  “Fair enough.  You didn’t happen to bring in some proper whiskey glasses did you?  I’m getting tired of drinking everything out of a goddamned tin cup.”

“As a matter of fact, I did.” 

“Good.”  I downed the rest of my drink in one gulp. “Let’s go get ‘em.”

***

It took us four trips to haul everything up from the landing strip to the cabin.  He’d brought his sleeping bag, all his hunting gear and several game bags.  There was also enough food and whiskey to restock the cabin and leave it well enough supplied to see a stranded traveler through the winter.  This was a common courtesy in the bush.  He’d included a real set of dishes and glasses and a teakettle.  House warming gifts he said; they weren’t for me, they were for The Varmitage.  There was also a fold-up camp bed, complete with mattress, not for me either.  It was for himself.  My present was two cases of Rolling Rock beer.  I was delighted because I had run out two weeks ago.  We opened a couple of bottles and sat on the cooler by the airstrip and drank them.  I’d forgotten how good a cold beer tasted.

The real surprise, however, was rolled up in a canvas sack.  He said he’d show me when we got back to the cabin.  So we gathered up the final load and headed back.  After we had everything stowed in its proper place, and he’d unfolded the camp bed and laid out his sleeping bag on it, we opened two more beers and went back outside.  He indicated the canvas bag with the tip of his boot, and told me to open it. 

I undid the tie straps and shook the contents onto the ground.  There were two, seven-foot long one-by-three pine boards and three short one-by-sixes.  There was also a roll of fiberglass screen and door hardware; all the makings of a screen door.  I was very pleased.  It was a great gift.  Now I could air out the cabin during the day without the black flies and mosquitoes taking over the place.  That had been a problem in the tent all summer.  I laughed and thanked him.

“There’s enough mesh in that roll to make screens for all three windows too.  You’ll have to make the frames out of limb wood, of course.  But you’ve got everything you need for the door.  Now you’ve got your first project for next summer.”

I clapped him on the back and we opened two more beers and drank a toast to a bug free summer.  He settled down on the top step of the porch, and I sat on the bench so I could lean my head back against the warm logs, close my eyes and feel the sun and the breeze on my face.  It was a comfortable afternoon.

Haywood lit a fresh cigar and inspected the glowing tip.

“Start from the beginning,” he said.  The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

So I started from the beginning.  I didn’t dwell on the goose grease sessions, but I told him everything else.  He only interrupted once, when I mentioned shooting Roy.  He held up his hand for me to stop.

“Are you telling me you skulked up to these guys’ lodge and just shot one of them?  Dead?”  He had been listening with interest until this juncture; now he was riveted.

“Dead.”

He shook his head in wonder.