William Deverell: Snow Job

Savannah, Zachary, and three other activists of what the press dubbed the Quatsino Five had canoed by night into a log-booming grounds below a hotly debated old-growth clearcut, armed with acetylene sets in backpacks. They’d cut through the boom chains, and by morning several hundred logs were afloat on the Pacific Ocean. Gourmet timber, yellow cedar, forty-thousand dollars per raw log in Japan. Much was salvaged, more pirated by scavengers.

A vicious and ruinous act of eco-terrorism, snarled the judge, getting his headline. He gave each defendant four years, and each served two and a half, unrepentant.

Others had answered Blunder Bay’s ad for caretakers, but Margaret made the politically precarious choice of these two newly sprung parolees. She believed in peaceful protest, she assured the press, and disagreed with what they’d done, but they’d paid the price and deserved a chance. Arthur echoed her loyally: rehabilitation not retribution.

Zachary and Savannah were in their early thirties, both from Vancouver, where they’d met and coupled a decade ago. Zack came out of prison wrathful and bitter, but Savannah somehow had taken it in stride, harboured little rancour. In the end, theirs was not a lost cause because half the ancient cloud forest they’d fought to save — a habitat for threatened marbled murrelets — was made a reserve.

“Sometimes a little serious monkeywrenching works,” Zack had said. Such musings made Arthur nervous, hinting of anarchist attitudes. He sensed Zack revelled in the role of hero to the more rambunctious elements of the environmental movement.

Though tenderfeet, both were intelligent and industrious, if cynical, and firm subscribers to an organic lifestyle. Neither owned cars, out of principle, relying on bicycles, but Zack seemed adept enough with the tractor and the Fargo, when it was on the road. And it was a break to have someone to talk to other than the layabouts at the General Store. However, they did tend to patronize Arthur, with his square, traditional world view.

Arthur ascended briskly to the second floor, his floor, with its own den, its ample bedroom and bath, its expansive ocean view: the San Juan Islands and the distant snowy Olympics. Might he bring out rods and tackle this evening? Bait some crab pots? So little time, so many things to do.

Clad in rough farm wear, he went down to find Zack barefoot in the kitchen, washing up. Of middling height, gaunt, angular. “Papillon pissed on my boots.” He swept a swatch of untrained coal-black hair from his dark sad eyes.

Savannah examined him critically from the doorway. “Jeez, Zack, change your pants while you’re at it. Lesson learned. Don’t stand behind the livestock.”

Arthur picked up a gamy, sweaty smell as she bussed him with pouty lips. A modern woman, brash and tart. Taller than her boyfriend, thick blond curls, a busty, eye-catching figure. Arthur had got used to her nighttime roaming — a sleepwalking disorder had plagued her since childhood.

She continued to scold Zack. “When are you going to get a damn haircut? You look like a palm tree in a hurricane.”

“Yeah, right, I’ll head right down to the nearest salon.”

“You need a weed whacker, pal.” She turned to Arthur. “So who won today’s battle between good and evil?”

Arthur regaled them with Judge Wilkie’s show of dismay as his punitive fine was dwarfed by later, generous ransoms.

“Sounds like the judge we drew,” Zack said. “Another guardian of the dying order. Maybe telling him to go to hell was a strategic error. Did Wilkie really think it was a caricature of himself?”

“I’m afraid that’s rather typical of the self-absorbed.”

“Reminds me of someone else. A pork-bellied flightless ostrich with its head up its patoot — who am I thinking of?”

“Huck Finn,” Savannah said.

The Conservative prime minister, she meant, Huck Finnerty. Whom the member for Cowichan and the Islands, in one of her more acidic sound bites, had accused of having his head up his exhaust pipe.

“Let me guess. They want a handout. Another delegation from another two-bit backwater coming here with their gold teeth and vodka breath and outstretched palms. We can’t be filling the beggar’s bowl of every Lower Slobovia on the planet while we’re in the economic doldrums — got to look after ourselves first.” Canada First, that was the horse Huck Finnerty rode to victory at last year’s convention. It was his pledge to the nation, and he was sticking by it.

“We come for cultural learnings for make benefit glorious republic of Quackistan.” Charley Thiessen, the public safety minister, the official jokester of Finnerty’s fractious Privy Council, his inner cabinet. They were meeting in the Round Room, off the horseshoe-shaped lobby of the P.M.’s parliamentary offices.

The foreign minister, Gerry Lafayette, joined politely in the laughter, though he found the humour boorish. He was mystified by Thiessen’s popularity in this august conclave. With his bonhomie and his square-chinned film-star looks, he was a vote-getter — but what a concombre! How did such a mediocre mind win a law degree? He’d earned his way into Finnerty’s cabinet as his tail-wagging poodle.

“What’s that place called again?” Finnerty asked.

“Bhashyistan,” Lafayette said. “And no, they didn’t approach us, we made the overture. It might help, Huck, if you and the ministers were to review the briefing notes from my Central Asian people.”

“Better if you just lay it out for us, Gerry.” The prime minister fought to maintain his big trademark grin. He wasn’t going to betray the slightest hint he was irked by Lafayette, a control freak, an elitist, patronizing everybody with his academic brilliance. Still smarting over losing on the fourth ballot. Never got dirt under his fingernails, never swabbed the deck of a working boat.

Finnerty knew he should have read the briefing notes last night instead of emptying a bottle of CC with a few of the boys from back home. He felt handicapped in this discussion because he had no clear idea where Bhashyistan was. Or what it was. One of those former Moscow satellites until the U.S.S.R. imploded. Bolshevik architecture. Pompous statues. Tribal feuds. Donkeys, or maybe camels. Mud wrestling.

“Some of us may be geographically disadvantaged. Show us on the map, Gerry.”

Lafayette ordered himself to be patient with this chuckling colon , who knew nothing about Central Asia or, for that matter, the entire world beyond the two-hundred-mile fishing zone. He rose from the circular table and directed a pointer at a map on a stand, a mustard-coloured glob — “about the size of New Brunswick, Huck” — bordering Siberia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan.

“What is now known as the People’s Democratic Republic of Bhashyistan can boast of having been subjugated by every tyrant who wandered by, from Alexander, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane to Empress Alexandra and Josef Stalin. Having been beaten into submission over the eons, the Bhashyistanis apparently find freedom too difficult a concept and have been hard-wired into a state of docility.”

Lafayette waited patiently until Finnerty raised his red-rimmed eyes from the briefing notes. The P.M. was a devotee of strong drink and junk food, his concept of haute cuisine a triple patty with a side of fries washed down with a tall rye and ginger. Silhouette of a septic tank.

“This diplomatic breach … Remind us, what happened there?”

“Bhashyistan’s ex-president — father of the current president — was assassinated fifteen years ago in Vancouver during a stopover on a state visit. I think it was in the newspapers.” Too snide, Lafayette was doing it again, showing his impatience with lesser minds. “Boris Mukhamed Ivanovich. Moscow trained, Muscovite wife, an apparatchik sent home to be secretary of the Bhashyistan Communist Party, and who slid into power on the demise of the Soviet Union.”