Archibald Samuel: Arvida

Bernard’s skidoo had broken down earlier in the day, while he was making the round of his traps with Roland. As he had his snowshoes and he knew he was very near two traps, he sent his brother-in-law back to the camp for spare parts and tools. They were on a large expanse of level ground, and Bernard began to advance, hearing no sound but the crunching of his snowshoes in the snow, the buzz of the other departing skidoo, and from time to time the cry of a squirrel. After walking for ten minutes he entered the dark woods, and stopped short on hearing a loud commotion. He advanced slowly, making no noise. He saw a large beast tearing apart his trap to reach the animal trapped inside. He was never able to say if it was a marten or a mink, because the huge creature fled, bearing it off between its jaws. Bernard had time to take a few photos before it was out of sight. He was panting, his heart was pounding, and by the time he got back to the skidoo he was close to blacking out. He took his portable radio and called Jim’s father on their usual frequency, “I think I’ve just seen Jim’s cat,” he said.

Afterwards, he gave them his coordinates with the GPS. Jim and his father dressed rapidly, and his father filled the skidoo’s gas tank while Jim called Jacques Plante the trapper and Doris on the radio.

Now they’re all there, studying a photo that reveals nothing, and tracks that will have largely disappeared by the next day, when the Wildlife Service agent arrives. Jim should be disappointed but he isn’t, not that much. He and his father take off on their skidoo and criss-cross through the underbrush until darkness falls, taking turns at the controls and peering as far as they can through the branches and trees. His father talks always of his cat in the singular, and Jim very much likes that. “You’ll see, we’ll find it,” he says. “One fine day it’ll pop out right in front of us.”

Of course, if there are still cougars around, it’s logical that there would be several, but Jim also likes to think of it as a lone animal, immortal, like the Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster, a creature that hides for the pleasure of being tracked, and shows itself from time to time to revive its own legend.

In these valleys where it sometimes snowed non-stop for days at a time, and where violent thaws and freezes succeeded each other with no sequence or logic, winter was more than a season, it was a landscape superimposed on another, where you had to orient yourself according to rare, unvarying signs in the snow and the intense cold.

Gaétan Fournier, a friend of Jim’s father, had his cabin in the bottom of a valley. There the accumulation of snow was so great that one year, at Christmas, Gaétan, his wife, his daughters and his sons-in-law, had to dig out the cabin with shovels from eleven o’clock in the morning until dusk. He’d stopped in the middle of nowhere on immaculate terrain, had got down from his skidoo and begun to take his snowshoes and round point shovel out of the sleigh. One of his sons-in-law had said:

“What are you doing, sir? Seems to me that the camp is still quite a ways.”

Gaétan had replied:

“The camp is under my feet.”

They’d shovelled as far as the cottage, lit a fire for the women with the wood they’d brought with them, and then shovelled some more until they’d reached the woodshed. They’d taken out logs and made a great inferno in the snow, slathering the wood with old motor oil. The next day their camp and its surroundings formed a huge crater in the snow-covered valley.

The snow built up on spruce and fir, gathered in thick layers that the deep cold hardened onto their branches. As of mid-December, whole hectares of the forest were transformed into dolmens of white ice that blazed under the boreal sun, as dangerous for the eyes as a welder’s flare. People came from the ends of the earth to meander through this lunar, monotone landscape.

When an outsider asked local people if they had a name for what they saw, they replied, “We call them ghosts.”

*

Early May.

Half asleep, he’s running on four legs, is conscious of the strength of his muscles in movement, and feels branches brushing against his fur. In great bounds he leaps the rushing water and dead trees that the forest throws up in his path. Half asleep, he hears his father, Doris, and Jacques Plante the trapper talking, seated around the table a few metres from his bed. He knows the beast is tracking something, he’s breathing a heady smell through his nostrils, sees through his dilated pupils the prey’s silhouette far in the distance, it stands out against the green of the trees, which he has never known so vivid. Half asleep, he swoops down on the prey and recognizes it. It is himself. The cougar is attacking him, and he is the subject of those fragments of conversation he’s hearing from the far end of his dream.

“How long had it been since he’d had the sickness?”

“Four years.”

There is silence. The beast buries its teeth in his throat and he tastes the salt warm blood that is loose in the creature’s mouth.

“That mustn’t have brought back good memories.”

“Not really, no.”

Two weeks earlier, Jim had come home alone from school, knowing that it had returned. It had been stalking him already for several days, like an evil shadow. He managed to open the door despite his trembling and the unruly beating of his heart.

His father, sitting at the counter, saw him come in, and leaped up.

“Jim, what’s wrong?”

He wanted to talk, he wanted to cry out, but by that point it was already in total possession of his body. He was elsewhere. For a long moment his father looked on as his son’s body was wracked by convulsions, arched back on the ground, the eyes rolled upwards, then he took him by the shoulders, turned him on his side, and began humming a lullaby while passing his hand over his sweat-dampened hair.

A few days after the crisis, he fell ill. The flu, which worsened over the period of a week. He wasn’t eating, and had a consumptive’s cough. His father took him to the doctor, who diagnosed a serious bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics and a great deal of rest. The next day, from his room in the city, Jim overheard his father talking on the ham radio he kept in the basement to communicate with people up north.

“He’s not doing that well, Doris.”

“Why don’t you bring him up to the woods?”

“I can’t, not before the weekend.”

“We’ll come and get him, then. Antibiotics are fine, but I’ve got two or three other things in mind.”

Now he’s in his bed at the cabin and it’s night. His father had arrived a bit earlier, had sat down on the covers beside him and placed his hand on his chest. Behind them, Jacques Plante the trapper was seated at the table in front of a beer, eating pieces of cucumber. Doris was busy at the stove.

“Feeling better, boy?”

“Yes, papa.”

“Yes, he’s better. He’s been eating well since this morning. But he sleeps, the little rascal. Now we’re going to make you a mustard plaster and you’re going to go beddy-bye. Same for you, old man, you’re going to have a bowl of soup and some tourtière and you’re going to bed. You look tired too.”

Doris stirred up two teaspoons of dry mustard in a bowl, along with cornstarch and cold water. She spread the plaster over an old cloth that she applied to Jim’s chest. It was hot and dizzying. After five minutes, she came to lift it off for a few seconds, and kissed him on the brow. After a half-hour, she took it away altogether.

Now Jim is dreaming and listening. He hears what they’re all saying about him. He’d like to reassure them, to explain to them. He often has a dream with no up nor down, where the beast attacks him and devours him. It’s a dream of carnivorousness and violence, but not of death. He does not expire while the cougar is annihilating his body, he fossilizes within the animal like a memory of flesh. In its belly he dreams himself into a child itself of dreams, the stillborn offspring of a legendary creature, and there’s colour in the dream, and the sounds dogs make, dozing next to the stove.