The next morning Ralph said to Eleanor within Gwen’s hearing, “I was dreaming about you last night.”
“What was I up to?”
“You were pointing with your finger at very specific places on your body that you wanted me to kiss, and I obliged you with pleasure.”
Then no sooner had all of this closeness come about than it dispersed. That night Eleanor asked Harry what he was going to do with himself next, and he surprised them by saying he wanted to leave Canada behind for a while, not radio but Canada; his friend Max Berns knew people at Broadcasting House in London; he might well move to England.
In thinking it through over the past weeks, turning this way and that in his thoughts, he’d reminded himself of
caribou at the river’s edge. They retreated once, twice, three times. He’d never known before that migration wasn’t one unbroken forward movement; it was sideways, backwards, forwards, a passage enlivened with indecision in the face of real and imagined danger. They came to the river, they shied away. He wasn’t like Eleanor, he thought. He felt attuned not to the God within but to the uncertainty within. His connection was with the poor, dumb animals.
Eleanor had her own surprise. She’d been thinking about opening up a bookstore just down the street from the post office in Yellowknife, and she’d almost convinced Ralph to be her partner. Ralph grinned. “She wants my pretty coins,” he said.
And once again Gwen’s favourite uncle was back in the States and the first day of school was looming.
BY NOW IT WAS JULY
25 and they were making swift and easy progress to their final destination of Beverly Lake, and their last night on the Barrens. A strong current, almost no headwind. A wolf, perhaps the same one that raked open the side of the little calf, swam across the river ahead of them. A grizzly and her two cubs appeared on the riverbank; one of the cubs stood between its mother’s hind legs and watched them as they paddled by. Passing an island on their left, they spotted a magnificent moose in a grassy marsh. Above them soared a golden eagle in the eggshell-blue sky.
They were seeing sunsets now. Mosquitoes became flecks of light in the evening. A rock in the water moved with flies when they approached.
The land continued hilly and pasture-green. They saw semipalmated plovers and low, protected blue flowers. The wind came back and the clouds and the rain.
That evening they boiled up a pot of soup and one of tea, a fire that would scar the tundra for years. Their effect, just passing through, wasn’t insignificant. And the effect of the trip on them?
They paddled on. The woods thinned out. The sun shone. They were within reach of Beverly Lake now, and felt the
swell of the lake reach up the river, waves high enough to splash Eleanor in the bow and chill her through.
They reached the lake on the afternoon of July 26. In time. The float plane would arrive in the early morning hours of the next day.
Their last campsite was on the north shore of a deep bay near the remains of two sod houses on the open tundra, little more than remarkable outlines, and the bushes around them full of muskox hair. The tundra wide, open, forever, the water calm and violet-blue, the light clear and the number of mosquitoes infinite. Eleanor pointed out a tern’s nest—or egg, since the beach was the nest, a pretty egg, green and brown with some dark spots; the tern flew off as she approached.
Across the big lake, the rolling plains and undulating hills turned the horizon into a thick to thin line of dark ink. The four of them were the only moving parts in a landscape more remote from settlements of any kind than almost anywhere else in Canada.
At supper Ralph announced that he was going to shave and put on clean clothes. “No need to leave the bush looking like part of it,” he said. After he reappeared, looking ten years younger, he asked Eleanor to go for a walk with him and they were gone a long time.
That evening it was perfectly still. Not a breath of wind.
Eleanor and Ralph were in the lee of a knoll on the tundra, lying together, listening to the silence, happy. Ralph told her a special memory of walking in an ancient rain forest and hearing music far away on a transistor radio, a party of geologists, he thought, and he headed towards it, curious, but the sound moved away like a bird. It was sound without a source,
he said to her, reaching over to stroke her face and her hair, it was the sound of the forest itself. Here on the Barrens there wasn’t music, but a hum, a vibration, the sound of the earth, he thought, and she agreed. In moments of silence, she’d heard it too. It reminded her of Buddhist singing bowls vibrating at their lowest octave.
She noticed crawling specks of light in Ralph’s hair, even the mosquitoes were beautiful. She noticed how smooth his mouth was without whiskers, his lovely mouth, and how their bed was mostly white labrador tea.
The sun was low on the hills when Ralph thought of ending the trip as he began, with a last paddle, a last few pictures. Eleanor was asleep. He took off his clean shirt and arranged it gently over her face to keep away the flies. Then he went down to the shore, grabbed another shirt from his pack, took his paddle and his camera, his life vest, and slid his empty canoe into the water.
Harry saw Ralph’s canoe far out on the glassy lake. He’d been walking on the tundra, and now his attention was diverted by a young caribou, perhaps a yearling, that came over the hill. It turned and skirted him. He stood still, while flies rained down upon his head and got into his eyes. He raised his hand to brush them away, by which time the caribou was some distance off. Despite the flies, he felt a tranquility on this piece of tundra that he’d hoped to feel more of the time and sooner. He headed back to shore and found Gwen sitting on a rock, tending her driftwood fire. He squatted beside her.
She’d made the fire inside a circle of stones, a little stone wall. She loved these outdoor kitchens, these uninhabited places suddenly inhabited—arranged for minimal comfort. Her brush with death was so recent, so vivid that she still felt marked, set apart from the others. It was Eleanor who’d suggested the bear might have been Hornby himself, guarding his bit of paradise, an idea that appealed, since it meant she’d been visited in a special way, visited and spared. But for what? “I’ve been wondering,” she said to Harry, “if this trip has changed me.”
He smiled.
“Has it changed
you?”
she asked. “I mean, besides drying you out.”
“Wretch,” he said, and to Gwen’s ears he made the word sound like the most affectionate of endearments. “Ask me in five years.”
“Let’s meet in five years,” she agreed eagerly. “We can be like Hornby and Critchell-Bullock planning to meet up years hence.”
“Except they didn’t meet up.”
“I know,” she said sadly.
“Time was so different then,” said Harry, musing to himself. “Those were the days of long voyages, long visits, long courtships, long seductions. In some ways I envy Hornby. The man was so busy surviving he didn’t have to learn how to live.”
“Are you really going to England?”
“I think I might.”
“But you belong
here.”
He put his arm around her as he laughed. Her small shoulders were rounded, dejected. In his view no one belonged to a
place unless they were aboriginal. The rest of us were like the dust of the earth blown east, west, north, south.
“Gwen, do you realize we’ve travelled the last few weeks without setting eyes on another human soul?”
He was poking the fire now and she watched his hands fix, arrange, finesse. In her loneliness she felt her chest tighten, and remembered their world as it was just a few weeks ago, blocked with ice and impassable, as it would be again in several weeks’ time.
“Oh, Harry,” she said. “I wish I were a different kind of person.”
He took off his glasses with one hand, a gesture she loved, and studied her. He was exposing himself to her gaze even as he was seeing her with his own eyes.
What kind of person, he wanted to know.
“Someone,” she said slowly, “who truly loves life.”
He was still looking at her, still cradling his glasses in his left hand. He said, “You’re the kind of person who never stops trying.”
She returned his honest gaze. He seemed to mean it. And so she let herself absorb this worthwhile compliment and her place in the world opened up. That’s what she would be. The kind of person who never stops trying. And though this wasn’t a moment of pure release, of the ice finally giving way, still, everything in her life would flow from this exchange.
On the water Ralph noticed the lake become a little wrinkled. He looked over his shoulder and saw Gwen and Harry, who
looked very small on shore. And then the wind hit—a soft blow to the side of his head—an offshore wind out of nowhere, and the canoe started to move. He set his camera on the floor of the canoe and picked up his paddle. He looked over his shoulder again and the wrinkle was a ripple moving towards him, darkened water, a disturbance of small waves racing in his direction. The wind swung him around. It came out of the northwest and he knew if he wasn’t careful it would blow him out into the middle of a lake two miles wide. He slid down onto his knees and moved forward until his belly was against the middle thwart and then he began to paddle hard, trying to swing the canoe into the wind, trying to get back to shore, but his knees slid around, he had nothing to lock his feet under, no way to get a good bite with his paddle. He did his best, he worked hard. There were little whitecaps now, but not too bad. He was thinking he’d been lulled by the perfect stillness into coming out too far, and it felt like a bad decision to be alone on a lake this size.
Once a lake is ten miles long it might as well be an ocean
. Some canoeist’s voice from another trip years ago. The bow of his empty seventeen-foot canoe was like a weather vane. The wind kept taking it and pushing him farther out. His canoe bounced on the waves, then started to bang, but the sounds were carried off by the wind.
Eleanor didn’t feel the wind come up, and neither did Gwen or Harry, the one asleep, the others sheltered beside their fire. They intended to bed down in the open air that night, since the float plane was expected in the early morning. Had they
pitched their tents they would have been aware of the wind sooner, the slight flapping.
Half a mile out it’s a different world.
The waves were eighteen inches high now, two feet high, it happened fast. Ralph was exerting all his energy trying to straighten out the canoe, but the errant wind was determined to blow him away. He no longer thought he was in control, but it took him a few moments to realize he was in trouble. The waves picked up his canoe and surfed it forward, and he felt the sweat pour down his back. Out of a clear sky he was thinking—a rogue wind like a mini-storm, a mini-hurricane, at least way out here. On shore, would they even notice?
The sun goes down so slowly, it hangs on the horizon and goes slowly down. A wave splashed over the back of his canoe, then another, and his knees were in two inches of water. He leaned out far, dug in extra-hard and the paddle gave way and he was in the water before he knew he was going over. In the water, holding the shaft of his cedar paddle in one hand, the blade gone. Gasping from the cold. He grabbed the canoe—it was wallowing upright—he grabbed it with his left hand, but he couldn’t catch his breath, the water barely above freezing, and nothing mattered, except getting out of it. He heaved what was left of his paddle into the canoe and tried to climb in over the side and the canoe rolled over. He tried to pull himself up onto its bottom, but the bow went up and the stern went down under his weight and the canoe slid out from under him. He tried once more from the side and
the canoe rolled over again and sat upright. Then he was just hanging on, hands on the gunwales, an iron grip, the shore endlessly far away.
Eleanor had slept for half an hour, perhaps. When she opened her eyes, she felt the warm shirt on her face and stood up and looked around for Ralph, and felt the wind. She walked back to their campsite holding the shirt in her hand, looking around her at the tundra, at the sky, then down at the uneven ground. When she came to some bushes, she stopped and gathered tufts of muskox hair off the twigs, slipped them into her pocket, a gift for Ralph. The sun was going down, it was ten o’clock by her watch, so she scrambled down to shore and saw Gwen and Harry talking by the fire.
She said, “Where’s Ralph?”
Harry stood up and scanned the lake. He’d forgotten about him. The last he’d seen, Ralph was a long way out and the water was calm. Now he couldn’t see the canoe at all and the lake was choppy. It was always worse out on the water than it looked from shore, he knew that. Maybe Ralph was behind that big island. Eleanor was reaching into her pack for her binoculars. The three stood gazing out at the lake, waiting for Ralph to come into view. While they watched, the sun went all the way down and the wind died away.
He had no idea how much time had passed, how much time he had left. So quiet now. So incongruous, he thought, to be fighting for his life when it was calm and peaceful.
Breathing is loud when there’s no other sound. It reminded him he was alive. He rested his head against the side of the canoe and there was the astounding silence and his breathing. He was eating apple pie with his mother. He was looking at the wedding ring on her floury hand. Then he was back in the present, an old man with no feeling in his submerged body, agony in his arms, hands like stone claws from holding on. He was sorry, so profoundly sorry to be losing everything, and so sorry about the trouble he was going to cause. He called for help, unsure whether any sound would come out. It did, and he felt relieved. He was still alive. He called again. His mouth couldn’t form a word, but his throat produced a sound. He heard it. He heard his breathing, and his breathing wasn’t inside him any more, but outside, disembodied. He was lying with Eleanor on the tundra. The warmth, the ecstasy. He was seeing to the bottom of the lake and it was covered in beautiful stones. A camera lay among the stones, his last pictures of Eleanor in the camera, and the camera was so close, the water was so clear, that the metallic parts of it were shining, and he could touch them. He could reach down and touch his canoe, which was glinting too. He could touch the floating man in an orange vest bobbing in the water beside his canoe.