Archibald Samuel: Arvida

In the cabin, Armand and his father were drunk. Murielle, Armand’s wife, was also drunk, but less than Réjean and Luce, who had arrived in the meantime. The adults were playing cribbage, drinking, shouting, and talking sex under their breath, thinking Jim wouldn’t understand. Jim made himself a grilled cheese sandwich. He prepared coffees with some local brandy and whipped cream for the women, then when he was tired of it all, lay down on the couch behind the table with Sunny alongside him. About three in the morning, his father woke him and said, “We’re off.”

Jim always drove through the bush when his father was drunk. He helped his father climb into the truck and wended his way slowly along the forestry company’s road. His father was snoring beside him when it happened, just before the pitted incline that always made him nervous, and that the truckers called Gear Hill, full of ruts where they often broke their transmissions. An animal was walking far in front of the truck, crossing the road diagonally. He was never able to say what it was. Not a bear or a moose. It was too big for a fox and too high on its legs to be a lynx. His father had woken up, and he wasn’t sure either. In the glare of the headlights, its fur looked tawny or white. Almost silvery.

In bed, his father turns to the wall and stifles a cough.

“Yes,” says Jim, “I saw it again.”

“Was it your cat?”

“No.”

In his sleep, Jim went over the drive on Gear Hill, slowed then sped up, turned on his high beams and hit the horn, trying to immobilize the animal. He didn’t see it any better than the day before, but he replayed it enough times to understand it better.

“It was a wolf, Pa.”

“You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Could’ve been worse.”

They always talk that way, as if their dreams weren’t dreams at all, as if they each lived the night, then the day, like two lives, one inside the other, of which one, but never the same one, sometimes seems stranger than the other. The kettle begins to whistle. Jim goes to the counter, throws three spoons of coffee into the bottom of the pot, and pours in water. He lowers the piston very slowly, millimetre by millimetre. The cottage smells good of burnt wood and steaming coffee.

“I made you coffee. Want Aspirin too?”

“Please.”

He gives him four without thinking twice, and brings him a glass of water. Back from Armand’s the night before, his father went to the outhouse while Jimmy turned on the gas and opened the cottage, making his way through the darkness with the help of his flashlight’s dim beam. His father came out of the toilet reeling, his pants down to his ankles, and his penis bobbing left and right in the night air. Climbing the steps to go into the house, he stumbled over the bear board. Jim had to wrench the plank full of nails off the sole of his boot, support him as far as the bed, help him to get undressed, and toss his underclothes and underpants stained with piss, blood, and shit into a garbage bag.

Ordinarily, Jim didn’t go to a lot of trouble for his father the morning after a night of drinking, but yesterday, at Lac de la Belette, just before his father woke him up, Jim saw him through his half-closed eyelids over the furred neck of the dog that was lying on top of him, and he was kissing Luce. They embraced for a long time, then Luce murmured something in his ear and they separated. Jim didn’t know where the others were. Fallen in combat, probably. Jim may be barely thirteen years old, but he’s old enough to know how a man feels, having enjoyed the kisses of a drunken woman the night before, which she would not have accorded him were she sober.

“If your head doesn’t ache too much later, we could maybe get dressed and go fishing. Should be good after the rain.”

“We could. If the weather gets a bit better. Let me drink my coffee and eat something first. You want eggs?”

The man from whom his father had bought the cabin eight years earlier did not fish, and only went there for the big hunt in autumn and to get drunk in winter on his skidoo. The house was too far from the main road for there to be visitors. The lake, their lake, which like a horseshoe embraced the chalet on its peninsula, had practically not been fished for ten years. That ought to have made it a paradise for fish breeding, but it’s not what happened. Left in peace, the trout had prospered and increased in size in the lake, before growing scarce beneath its placid surface.

At a certain point, they’d begun to cannibalize each other.

You need patience to fish on the lake. Jim and his father pull in barely twenty trout a year, but they’re all as big around as a forearm, with the protruding brow of a freshwater salmon. On the skin of their backs, stippled with red, blue and black dots and the colour of old steel, dark meshing runs between the head and tail, around a dorsal fin as stiff in the cold water as that of a shark. Their bites can’t be compared with the electric tugs little stream trout give to the line. At first it’s as if a diver hidden in the lake has rolled the line around his fist before giving it a good yank. Then, once well hooked, they heave with all their strength towards the bottom, running the line and bending the rod until its joints start to creak. At the last moment, they’ll sometimes rise and slam against the side of the boat, snapping the hook or ripping it from their mouths with a hard, sharp jolt. At the end of May, just after the lakes have crested, when you dip your hand in the icy water to rinse off the blood and silt, you’d think the lake was sinking its teeth into your flesh like a creature that’s more rapacious still.

*

Early November.

You’ve gotta have lots of time to waste, Doris said, to run after a hare in the deep woods in the middle of November, but that’s exactly what Jim is doing, leaning forward to try and see the hare’s silhouette under the bell-shaped firs, their branches weighed down by the heavy snow, his arm muscles stiff from holding the rifle, his clothes soaked with sweat and the water dripping from firs and spruce. He’s climbing towards the road, his lungs on fire, he hears his own steps cracking dead branches under the snow, his own breath, and the brook water down in the coulee burbling away under a thin film of ice.

He and Doris had seen the hare cross their path as they were following the trap line on their four-wheeler, a big Yamaha Grizzly. They got down from the Grizzly to follow it. The hare was very small, but searching for it they flushed another one, a beautiful fat hare, well primed for whatever winter might send its way. Jim kept his eyes on it for a while, where it was moving about in the midst of a small stand of birches that had lost their last leaves two weeks earlier, but it kept stopping with its back turned, in a position that gave you nothing to shoot at. Jim would have liked nothing more than to cram lead up its backside as far as its ears. Doris gave up the chase pretty fast.

“Go on and follow it,” she said. “I’m going back for the four-wheeler. I’ll be there when you come out onto the road.”

She embraced him the way she always did, whether he was on his way to the outhouse or going to the dock for water, without holding back, as if he were off to the war or leaving forever.

The woods are so dark that he’s dazzled when he comes out onto the road. He adjusts his eyes to the light, looks about, and sees, to the right, fifteen metres ahead, the hare, a bit set back under the branches beside the path, still facing away. He begins to move forward quietly, taking long steps like a tightrope walker so as not to frighten it. He hears Doris coming up behind him in the Grizzly, and he knows the hare is going to bolt in a few seconds. It turns its head towards him. Jim shoulders the gun, aiming a bit to the side, and fires. The rifle goes hot in his hands. The hare shudders and falls in the road, its body shaken by small convulsions. Doris arrives. Jim takes a few steps towards the hare, and suddenly stops.