Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

Men stand on corners, outside general stores, outside small banks, outside beer parlors with gray asphalt shingles on the walls. They have their hands in their windbreaker pockets. Some have dark, Indian-looking faces, others are merely tanned. They walk differently from men in the south, slower, more considering; they say less and their words are farther apart. My father jingles his keys and the change in his pockets while he talks with them. They talk about water levels, the dryness of the forest, how the fish are biting. “Chewing the fat,” he calls it. He comes back to the car with a brown paper bag of groceries and packs it in behind my feet.

My brother and I stand at the end of a ramshackle dock beside a long blue craggy lake. It’s evening, with a melon-colored sunset, loons calling in the distance, the drawn-out rising note that sounds like wolves. We’re fishing. There are mosquitoes, but I’m used to them, I hardly bother to slap them. The fishing goes on without commentary: a cast, the plop of the lure, the sound of reeling in. We watch the lure to see if anything is following it. If there’s a fish, we’ll do our best to net it, step on it to hold it down, whack it over the head, stick a knife in back of its eyes. I do the stepping, my brother does the whacking, the sticking. Despite his silence he is poised, alert, the corners of his mouth tensed. I wonder if my eyes are gleaming like his, like some animal’s, in the pink dusk.

We’re living in an abandoned logging camp. We sleep on our air mattresses, in our sleeping bags, in the wooden bunks where the loggers used to sleep. Already the logging camp has a feeling of great age about it, although it’s only been empty for two years. Some of the loggers have left inscriptions, their names, their initials, intertwined hearts, short dirty words and crude pictures of women, carved or penciled in the wood of the two-by-fours of the walls. I find an old tin of maple syrup, the lid rusted shut, but when Stephen and I get it open the syrup is moldy. I think of this syrup tin as an ancient artifact, like something dug up out of a tomb.

We prowl around among the trees, looking for bones, for hummocks in the earth that could mark diggings, the outlines of buildings, turning over logs and rocks to see what’s underneath them. We would like to discover a lost civilization. We find a beetle, many small yellow and white roots, a toad. Nothing human.

Our father has shed his city clothing, turned back into himself. He has on his old jacket again, his baggy pants, his squashed felt hat with the fishing flies stuck into it. He tromps through the woods in his heavy lace-up bacon-greased workboots, with his ax in its leather sheath, us in his wake. There’s an outbreak of forest tent caterpillars, the biggest in years: this is what fills him with glee, makes his eyes of a gnome shine in his head like blue-gray buttons. The caterpillars are everywhere in the woods, striped and bristly. They dangle from the branches on threads of silk, forming a hanging curtain you have to brush out of the way; they river along the ground like a rug come to life, they cross roads, turning to greasy mush under the tires of the logging trucks. The trees around are denuded, as if they’ve been burnt; webbing sheathes their trunks.

“Remember this,” our father says. “This is a classic infestation. You won’t see an infestation like this again for a long time.” It’s the way I’ve heard people talk about forest fires, or the war: respect and wonderment mixed in with the sense of catastrophe.

My brother stands still and lets the caterpillars wash up over his feet, down on the other side of him, like a wave. “When you were a baby I caught you trying to eat those,” says our mother. “You had a whole handful, you were squashing them around. You were just about to pop them into your mouth when I caught you.”

“In some respects they’re like one animal,” our father says. He sits at the table made of planks left over from the loggers, eating fried Spam and potatoes. All during this meal he talks about the caterpillars: their numbers, their ingenuity, the various methods of defeating them. It’s wrong to spray them with DDT and other insecticides, he says. That merely poisons the birds which are their natural enemies, whereas they themselves, being insects and therefore resourceful, more resourceful than humans in fact, will merely develop a resistance to the sprays, so all you get is dead birds and more caterpillars later on. He’s working on some thing else: a growth hormone that will throw their systems out of whack and make them pupate before they’re supposed to. Premature aging. But in the end, if he were a betting man, he says, he’d put his money on the insects. The insects are older than people, they have more experience at surviving, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us. Anyway, we’ll probably blow ourselves sky-high before the end of the century, given the atom bomb and the way things are going. The future belongs to the insects.

“Cockroaches,” my father says. “That’s all that’ll be left, once they get through with it.” He says this jovially, skewering a potato.

I sit eating my fried Spam, drinking my milk mixed from powder. What I relish the most are the lumps that float on the top. I’m thinking about Carol and Grace, my two best friends. At the same time I can’t remember exactly what they look like. Did I really sit on the floor of Grace’s bedroom, on her braided bedside rug, cutting out pictures of frying pans and washing machines from the Eaton’s Catalogue and pasting them into a scrapbook? Already it seems implausible, and yet I know I did it. Out behind the logging camp is a huge cutover where they’ve taken off the trees. Only the roots and stumps remain. There’s a lot of sand out there. The blueberry bushes have come up, as they do after a fire: first the fireweed, then the blueberries. We pick the berries into tin cups. Our mother pays us a cent a cup. She makes blueberry puddings, blueberry sauce, canned blueberries, boiling the jars in a large canning kettle over the outdoor fire.

The sun beats down, the heat comes wavering up off the sand. I wear a cotton kerchief on my head, folded into a triangle and tied behind my ears, the front of it damp with sweat. Around us is the drone of flies. I try to listen through it, behind it, for the sound of bears. I’m not sure what they would sound like, but I know that bears like blueberries, and they’re unpredictable. They may run away. Or they may come after you. If they come you should lie down and pretend to be dead. This is what my brother says. Then they might go away, he says; or they might scoop out your innards. I’ve seen fish guts, I can picture this. My brother finds a bear turd, blue and speckled and human-looking, and pokes a stick into it to see how fresh it is.

In the afternoons, when it’s too hot to pick berries, we swim in the lake, in the same water the fish come out of. I’m not supposed to go over my depth. The water is gelid, murky; down there, past where the sand drops away and it’s deep, there are old rocks covered with slime, sunken logs, crayfish, leeches, huge pike with undershot jaws. Stephen tells me fish can smell. He says they’ll smell us, and keep out of the way.

We sit on the shore, on rocks that poke up from the narrow beach, and toss bits of bread into the water, seeing what we can entice: minnows, a few perch. We search for flat stones and skip them, or we practice burping at will, or we put our mouths against the insides of our arms and blow to make farting noises, or we fill our mouths with water and see how far we can spit. In these contests I am not the winner, I am more like an audience; though my brother does not brag, and would probably do the same things, by himself, if I weren’t there.