Kathleen Winter - Annabel

The fertilizer bag in which he had brought his socks, underwear, and toothbrush was a multi-purpose bag. It was light and portable, which made it good for transporting sawdust, yet it was strong enough to carry fifty pounds of fifteen-thirty-fifteen fertilizer, and it could carry more weight than that if need be. Treadway saved fertilizer bags the way he saved wire and any kind of rope, and he had brought this one to St. John’s because it fit easily into his sleeping bag with his clothing in it and because he knew what else he could do with it.

It would not be hard to find Derek Warford and appeal to his vanity and to his wallet.

“They told me at the shop on the corner,” he imagined himself saying, “that of the young fellows around here, you’d be the one who best knows your way around. I’d like to see what all visitors come for: Cabot Tower and the trail down over the cliffs, but I can find those myself. What I want is to get off the main road.”

What this reconnaissance trip was for was to see if everything he had thought of doing was in fact feasible, and it was. Treadway took the fertilizer bag out of the waistband of his trousers. At the pond’s deepest shore he found a large stone. He put the stone in the bag and hid it under the bushes, marking the location in his mind. He had to use the steeple of St. Andrew’s Church in the distance down below as one of his markers, and for the other he used the tip of a transmitter tower on the Southside hills. He was not used to using manmade markers for trapping, and he kept thinking this would work only as long as the same men who had built the steeple and the tower did not decide to come and remove them, which could not happen with a mountain or a river bend or any of the markers he used when hunting in Labrador.

He hid the stone and the bag and he remembered the lynx. Roland Shiwack was a man who was not careful enough with his traps, in Treadway’s opinion. Treadway had trapped many a lynx but he had rarely trapped one that remained alive in the trap. He had used the right kind of trap in the right terrain, whereas Roland Shiwack made do with substitutes for the best trap, and that was why Roland’s lynx had been going crazy when Treadway found it. Treadway had not had his gun at the time, but he did have snare wire, and he had a bag like this one, and he was in a part of the land where there were boulders and a river with rapids that contained a deep pool. Any kind of cat will instantly calm down when you haul a bag over its head, even a wounded lynx, and then you can tie the bag with wire at the animal’s neck, and if you are lucky enough to be beside deep water you can carry the lynx to the pool, and as long as you have tied the snare wire properly and the stone inside the bag is the right stone, you can drown the lynx, and thus end one of the little pieces of torture that plague the secret corners of this earth.

This is what Treadway had in mind to do with Derek Warford. He had doubts, as he had done when he drowned Roland Shiwack’s lynx. What if the bag did not calm the lynx? What if the lynx clawed through the bag before the stone plunged him deep enough? What if the lynx, or Derek Warford, was stronger, or smarter, than Treadway knew?

But Treadway knew instinctively that Derek Warford did not have a lynx’s intelligence, and he knew that while he was almost sixty, his own strength still came when he needed it, and that someone like Derek Warford, who had not trapped in Labrador and had not been alone in the wilderness for months and years and decades of his life, did not know how to fight the way Treadway knew, and would not be expecting Treadway to do the thing he had planned. Still, Treadway knew it was possible that Derek Warford, because he was younger, could overpower him.

He thought a lot about that possibility, and he also thought about the question of malice: was there malice in himself, directed at this person, Derek Warford? He thought about it and he knew there was no malice. He did not want to punish Derek Warford as much as he wanted to simply remove him. A person like that, a person who would do such a thing as Derek Warford had done to Wayne, needed to be removed from the scene. That was all. It was a question of ridding this little place in the world, the Battery, of someone who had done this crime and who would probably do it again to someone else. It was not a crime about which Treadway Blake wanted to consult the police, or anyone like the police. That thought did not rest in his mind at all, the thought of police stations and forms and explaining what had happened to his son, and having to explain the femaleness of his son. But there was someone at the top of Signal Hill with whom Treadway did want to consult.

Treadway had seen a hawk from Military Road and had watched it circle the top of Signal Hill and plummet for prey, then rise and circle again. He had watched it until he knew where it lived, and now he climbed Signal Hill and took the orange he had bought at the Parade Street Dominion out of his pocket and placed it in the grass on a remote tuft of the hill.

He sat for several hours, and the orange was the only bright thing in the grass. When the hawk came, it did not alight. It was a red-tailed hawk whose body glowed red-brown. It hovered, and Treadway spoke to it in the same way he spoke to the boreal owl and to other wild animals in Labrador. He did not have to speak out loud but had only to silently present his idea about ridding the world of Derek Warford. Treadway knew a hawk is a merciless animal. He knew that if a woman happened to be up here on Signal Hill picking blueberries or partridgeberries with a baby, especially a newborn, she had better watch out or the hawk could take that baby. It had happened before, perhaps with this red hawk, and it would happen again: a hawk was a carnivore and it could take a large bird or a baby away and kill it. Treadway had seen a hawk carry off Graham Montague’s biggest rooster. He did not expect a hawk to have mercy for a person like Derek Warford.

But Treadway had read Pascal, and the Bible, and the essays of philosphers, and he had read poets, and against his own will the hawk reminded him of things he had read. It did not speak to him out of its own wildness, perhaps, he thought, because it had spent too much time circling above steeples and libraries and museums that held the thoughts of civilized men. He had not thought a hawk would do this. Now, as it dipped and circled close to him on its flight path between the crags of Signal Hill and the ocean below where its own prey lay — capelin and young cod and sea urchins with peach-coloured roe — this hawk told him something old, the same thing over and over again. It was not what Treadway wanted to hear.

“I would dearly love,” Treadway told the hawk, “to finish off Derek Warford in the manner I have planned.”

The sun was setting and the orange glowed in the grass. The hawk still did not say what Treadway wanted it to say. He had been hoping for a blessing. He had thought the hawk would understand carnage and vengeance. He thought if anyone understood how he felt in his heart at the thought of what Derek Warford had done to his son, his daughter, in that van, the hawk would understand. The hawk had possibly seen with its own eyes what had happened and knew better than Treadway how much Derek Warford deserved to be sunk with a stone to the bottom of a bottomless body of water. But the hawk did not recognize any of this. It did not swoop down and take the orange or land near Treadway. But it hovered. It hovered in front of him and it reminded him of the same words over and over again, from the books of Deuteronomy and Romans and also the book of Hebrews in the bible Treadway kept in his trapper’s hut: Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

“When?” asked Treadway. “When is the Lord planning on getting around to it? Because I can have it done by this time tomorrow.”