Archibald Samuel: Arvida

A dozen metres in front of him, in a spot where the trail becomes less well defined, half hemmed in by the willows, an animal that’s a lot bigger than a hare is sitting, its back to him, surrounded by trees. Jim’s heart is pounding. Behind his shoulder he signs to Doris in the Grizzly to stop. He ejects the empty cartridge from his gun, shoves it into his vest pocket, then rummages underneath in the pocket of his shirt. His gun is a 12-gauge Remington 870, with a short barrel for hunting deer. Jim uses it for hares and partridge, because it’s easy to handle in the thick bush where he’s always hunting. The chokeless barrel produces a nice pattern of scattered shot that’s good for bringing down partridges in flight and allows him to cut off the head of his prey on the ground without damaging the rest of the carcass. The barrel can shoot deer slugs, and before he leaves on a hunt his father always gives him two or three, well separated from the dozens of cartridges loose in his pants pocket and jacket. It’s his insurance policy in case he runs into wolves, a bear, or an ill-tempered moose.

He loads a slug into the gun and closes it very gently while pushing the pump forward. Describing a wide arc in the road, he circles the animal until he finds himself face-on to it, always alert for a movement, his breath shallow. It’s a big cat, a yellow-brown feline with big ears, black at the ends, still not moving as it sees Jim approaching with the gun aimed at its head. Jim passes in front of a still snow-covered fir, and then he understands. The cat’s head is a bit bent, as if it’s pondering, its eyes fixed on the ground. Against the white background you can see a black line running from the cat’s head to the trunk of an arched black ash sapling. It’s a lynx caught in a snare. Jim sees Doris approaching, and smiling broadly.

“I’m pretty lucky to have a white knight protecting me from dead lynxes.”

“Don’t give me a hard time, Doris.”

“No, no.”

Side by side they walk to the lynx, which must have been caught while hugging the ground, chasing a hare. Kneeling in front of it, Jim sees its pink tongue hanging out, and its yellow gaze, befogged, like milky tea or the pastis his father drinks in summer after he’s poured in a few drops of water.

“It’s not even a good time for lynx. I keep telling Bernard not to make his fox snares too big.”

“Are we on Bernard’s territory?”

Bernard is another trapper who shares territory with Doris and her husband, the trapper Jacques Plante.

Jim frowns. Doris blushes.

“Yes. I took this path because I know there are always lots of birds and hares.”

“I told you I didn’t want to make you take detours during your runs.”

“And I’m telling you that I don’t see you that often, that I like hunting with you, and I’ll always have time to take care of them on my own, my runs and my traps.”

They smile at each other.

Afterwards they pick up the hare, free the lynx, load it onto the front bumper of the four-wheeler, and hurry to drop it off with Bernard so as to get back before nightfall. On the hills, this time of the year, darkness drops down like a curtain, between two blinks of an eye.

Doris lets him drive, and climbs up behind him. Before heading off, he raises himself up to properly check out, from that angle, the dead lynx held in place by two elastic straps. Doris says, behind his back:

“A beautiful cat, eh?”

“Yes.”

“But not your cat.”

“No.”

She kisses him on the cheek, wraps her arms around him, and says:

“He couldn’t be far.”

In autumn, during the moose hunt, Jim wasn’t allowed to shoot with his 12 gauge or his father’s.410 bore. Hunters in ambush didn’t want to have guns going off around them left and right.

For partridges, his father had bought him a lead shot break-action rifle with a little telescope. It could bring down a bird from quite close range, as long as you avoided the wing’s protection and aimed for the head or the base of the neck. Flushing the birds was a totally different kind of hunting from taking them down in flight. You had to spot the partridges from a distance, huddled together and camouflaged in the woods, approach without spooking them, and make a good shot. In the woods along the road you killed ruffed grouse, whose male was like a red-brown cock very high on its legs. Amid the spruce and the fir you killed Canada grouse, whose male did not sport a ruff, but whose breast and black head were spotted with white, and whose eyes were topped by thick red wattles. The females of the two species had the same cryptic grey-brown plumage, and it was almost impossible to distinguish them before cutting open their breasts with a knife. The ruffed grouse had the white, delicate flesh of a cockerel, whereas the flesh of the Canada grouse was a violet-red that resembled very lean beef when cooked, and tasted strongly of fir foliage and juniper.

Often, the bird perched on a branch or curled on the ground amid the leaves and moss didn’t die right away. It went into convulsions, performing a backlit St. Vitus’s dance, soul-stricken against the sun, amid airborne feathers wrenched from its own plumage. His father had showed him what to do in such a case. You had to seize the flapping bird in a swift lunge, immobilize it, then crush its trachea between your thumb and index finger. If you put your hand on its breast at the same time, you could feel the bird’s heart quake beneath the skin and feathers, race, panicked, then finally pound out three or four heavy dull pulsations before stopping dead. His father said, “That’s what it is to kill something, Jim. You kill better when you’ve understood that. If you can’t do it, you shouldn’t hunt. You shouldn’t shoot anything.”

Jim had done it once that day. He’d had his stomach turned upside down, and for a whole season he’d stopped shooting at the partridges he’d flushed, so he wouldn’t have to do it again.

Then he got over the horror.

It became a terrible, beautiful thing that came back every autumn, the first bird brought down whose tiny heart he smothered between his hands. Every time, he placed his hand on the bird’s body and matched his own breath to the pitch of the throbbing muscle. When the drumming stopped at last, he opened his eyes on the dead bird and discovered to his surprise that his own heart had not missed a single beat.

*

They always called him Jacques Plante the trapper to distinguish him from Jacques Plante the goalie. He’s the one who’d first talked to him about the cat.

The year after the accident, Jim had spent almost all summer in the woods. His father left him with Doris and Jacques when he went down to the city. That summer, a doctor from Chicoutimi had set up a trailer nearby to fish on the surrounding lakes in a canoe. He’d probably intended to hunt moose there in the autumn. Doris and Jacques weren’t crazy about that, but they’d decided to be gracious with Doctor Duguay, as they were with everyone. The doctor had a dog, Spencer, a good-looking boxer with cropped ears, who didn’t seem quite at home in the middle of the thinned out forest.

Doris and Jacques also had an old dog that was to die the following year. His name was Boss. He’d been Jim’s best friend since he was born, and was perfectly at ease in the woods. He was a very big dog, a cross between a German Shepherd and a malamute. The doctor had come to visit them one night when it was the time for a fire, and the trappers’ camp was full of people. He’d stayed there, standing, had refused to sit and take a beer, and had advised them to tie Boss up during the day. “That would be safer,” he’d said, “Because Spencer is a dominant male.”

Doris and Jacques had consented. He’d left quietly, heading back to his trailer. The trappers never tied Boss up, and one fine day the big wolf dog had come out of the woods at a trot, around dusk. Jim’s father was there. They were all sitting around the picnic table, eating corn and hot dogs. Boss was holding Spencer in his mouth, by the neck. The boxer was unrecognizable. Boss deposited the corpse at their feet, as if it were a huge hare, all disjointed.