The Cure for Death by Lightning (36 page)

“You shut up!” said Nora’s mother. “Dirty old squaw. Don’t you tell me how to live my life.”

“You should listen to Mum,” said one of Bertha’s other daughters, the one with webbed fingers. “You’ll learn things. She’s been there, where you haven’t been yet.”

“She’s got nothing to teach me,” said Nora’s mum. “All the old ways are dead. She’s got to learn that.”

The baby started to cry. Her mother stood up with her and walked
around the fire. “Old Alfred Johnny says listen to your ancestors,” she told Nora’s mother. “Hear what they’ve got to say. Even those who’ve passed over. They guide us.”

“That’s witchcraft,” said Nora’s mother. “The only ghost you should listen to is the Holy Ghost.”

“You lived too long with the white men,” said the daughter with the webbed fingers, and all the women, Bertha too, laughed at that. Nora’s mother stared at her feet. Her anger rolled off her in waves, and Bertha turned her back to it. My mother didn’t laugh with the other women, or say any more about her mother. She drank from her cup of cocoa and stared into the fire. Billy, still sitting up, was dozing in and out of sleep. The party went quiet and soon after a wind smelling of snow came down from the mountain bringing a cold with it that the fire couldn’t ward off, and just like that winter was on us.

A
ND WHEN WINTER CAME
to Turtle Valley it came quickly, without hesitation. I woke the morning of All Saints’ Day to a new clean brightness that put a shine to everything in my room and made the whole outside world seem settled and quiet. Snow! The house was quiet too. My mother had already been out doing chores for hours. She’d let me sleep in. I bundled up quickly and went outside.

The world was as transformed as it had been that day when blue flax rained down, except the world was white this time and getting whiter. White capped the barn roof, the house, my father’s old Ford, and clung to the stick arms of the tree stretching through it. I stood quietly in the yard for a time listening to how the snow deadened every sound. There were no saws cutting in the distance, or harness bells ringing, or voices echoing off the hills. The quiet filled my ears. Then, slowly, I began to hear the noises that made up the silence. The shush of snow kissing the ground, the raw calls of crows, the crack of expanding wood, and my mother talking sweetness to the calves as she fed them from the bucket of skim milk.

There was the knock of hammers too. Dennis and Billy were over in the orchard, putting up the last bit of the new wire and post fence. The Swede’s old billy was eyeing them as they worked. They’d put up a board gate that morning, leading from our orchard pasture to the Swede’s.

I waved at them as I kicked my way through the snow in the orchard
and opened the gate into the Swede’s meadow. As I closed the gate, I saw Coyote Jack standing at the edge of the meadow near the bush, watching me. Here, in daylight, in the fresh, clean snow, Bertha and Billy’s stories meant nothing: Coyote Jack was just a shy sad man watching everybody live from the outside. He turned and vanished. I looked over at Dennis and Billy to see if they’d seen Coyote Jack, but they were working with their heads down.

I stood in the meadow for a while longer until I heard the bell ringing, one bell. Thinking it was a sheep that Dennis and Billy had missed, I followed the ringing down Turtle Creek well past the Swede’s outhouse. Behind the reserve the creek widened and dropped into a gully — Watson’s Gully, named after Bertha’s first husband. The Y in the creek sent water one way to the reserve, another to Bertha’s house.

The bell was one of our sheep bells, I was sure of it, and that meant trouble. A sheep off alone in coyote country always means trouble. I trudged up a low rise at the mouth of the gully so I could take a look down into it. The sight was something. Everything was white, whiter than white, silver and sparkling. A patch of deep blue water opened at the crotch of the Y of Turtle Creek and it was there that I found the source of that ringing: a patch of red so brilliant in all that white, it could blind you with loveliness, and it was one of our sheep, all right. She was dead, lying down there with her belly as open and scarlet as a whore’s mouth, and he was eating on her, that coyote, eating on her belly and into her breastbone, so each bite he took, each push of his nozzle into the warm bloody cavern of her body, rang the bell at her neck and threw the ringing up into the walls of the gully. He knew I was there watching him, but he also knew that I was unarmed and too far off. After a time he shifted the ewe, pulled her body a little farther onto the bank, and stopped the ringing altogether.

I
SPENT THE MONTH
of November trapping coyotes on the trapline that had been my brother’s. I knew trapping. I’d gone out trapping coyotes with Dan every year since I had turned eleven and I loved it. It was a chance to get away from the house, to get out of chores, to have my brother to myself. I’d learned all the trapping tricks my brother knew; he’d learned them from Billy and Dennis, who in turn had learned them from Bertha and their aunts on the traplines behind the reserve.

Coyotes are smart, so you’ve got to be smarter. When trapping coyotes you must keep in mind that each coyote is very much an individual, with habits of his own, and that what will work on one coyote may not work on another. You’ve got to understand a coyote to trap him — to stop him from eating your livestock. You’ve got to know his habits.

Coyotes like open country, pasturelands with clumps of bush, the very landscape farmers created for them. Most times they eat voles and mice, but they’ll eat anything they can get their teeth into. They’ll get drunk on the fermented fruit rotting under snow in an orchard, steal chickens from the coop, gnaw on squash left in the field, and when they’re really hungry they’ll take down a lamb or calf.

They sleep days in clumps of bush, holes in rocks, or burrows they dig for themselves, and then go out skulking at night. They are creatures of habit, with regular routes that they travel. Like dogs, they
mark their territory with their scent by urinating on clumps of grass, snags, bleached carcasses, and the old bedding grounds of sheep. Where they urinate, they scratch the dirt or snow and these are the places to hide traps, where they stop and sniff. They like woods, bushes, shadows.

You know a coyote trail by the footprints and by the scat you find on it. A coyote’s trail is a straight line and looks for all the world like the trail left by someone jumping a pogo stick. Coyote scat is made of hair and bone, and you find it at the center of the trail, often at a crossroads, where two trails meet. I put out traps at these crossroads, on snags, old carcasses, and clumps of grass. I used the scent made from mice and fish that my brother had concocted, putting a few drops against a stump or tree about a foot off the ground. I then hid my traps at various distances around the scent.

In open country I killed a porcupine, fool hen, or rabbit and put it in the center of any small clump of bush I could find, and then set snares on the coyote trails leading into it. In the bush I fixed snares on very young trees, about ten inches off the ground, on any trail frequented by coyotes. When a coyote passed by, the snare caught it by the neck and the coyote choked to death.

My mother or Billy skinned and cleaned the coyotes by the implement shed and stretched the skins inside out on frames shaped like ironing boards. Once they were dry, my mother packed them in boxes and shipped them by train down to the fur buyers, Little Brothers, in Vancouver, the same place we got the trapping supplies, the snare wire that came in a hundred-foot coil. As my bedroom wall was right behind the kitchen stove, my mother hung the skins to dry on my wall. They smelled wild and raw.

“You’re not going to join up,” I said.

“Nah,” said Billy. “Missing (shit) Dan?”

“Yeah. I got mad at him sometimes. But he made me feel safe. He took care of me, sometimes, when Dad went crazy. He taught me stuff. He hasn’t even written.”

“He’ll be (fuck) all right,” said Billy.

We were out walking the trapline in mid-November. I had tried to go out again by myself, but my mother made Filthy Billy go along, with
his gun, to protect me from some crazy bear or wild man, to chaperon me, to make sure Dennis and I didn’t meet up in the bush. I was bundled up in a couple of sweaters, and, under my skirt, long johns, and old wool trousers with their long cuffs stuffed into my boots. Billy wore my brother’s tin coat over layers of sweaters. The stiff material in the coat made a scuffing sound when he walked.

This was Christmas tree country, and every year hundreds of thousands of trees were shipped from the district by train, bound for export in the United States. The trees where we walked were full and stately, decorated with snow and the empty nests of birds.

As we walked into a clearing, a deer stepped out of the bush, very close to us. Billy held out his hand and when the deer took a step back, Billy reached down slowly, so slowly, and plucked a leaf of dry grass poking up through the snow. He put that grass between his hands and blew through it, making a mewing sound just like the sound of the fawn Nora and I had seen at Coyote Jack’s cabin. The deer put her head up and took a step forward, confused by the sound of a fawn crying. Billy blew his mewing whistle again and held out his hand. The deer took a few more cautious steps forward, sniffed his hand, then bounded off as if it were on springs. It disappeared into the bush.

I was delighted. “She wasn’t afraid of you,” I said.

“Aw (shit). Excuse me. Anybody can do that.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, then called “Fox and goose!” and gave Billy a slap on the shoulder, so he was fox. We both put our guns down and went running off, stamping a circle in the snow. We made an X in the circle, and the game of tag began. I was the goose and Billy chased me, but we had to stay on the paths we created in the snow, on the circle or the X, or we lost the game. Billy was catching up to me so I stood dead center in the circle, the safe place, where he, the fox, couldn’t come and eat me. We stood there for a minute, facing each other, giggling and excited, our breath clouding the air. I took off as the deer had done, and Billy lost his footing and fell and took a moment to catch up to me again. Then suddenly Nora was there, chasing behind us, being fox, and both Billy and I were silly geese. We ran, laughing and throwing snow, accompanied by Nora’s bells, until Billy stood his ground in the center of the circle and I joined him, so close in that little safe spot that our noses touched. We giggled at each other, enclosing ourselves in
breath, so Nora couldn’t get us. We stood there too long, maybe, giggled too loud, stood too close. Whatever it was, it made Nora mad and she pushed the both of us to the ground. Instead of getting mad, Billy and I giggled louder and made snow angels there, in the middle of the circle, in the safe place, and that just seemed to get Nora even hotter.

“Let’s go!” she said to me. And when I didn’t answer, and went on making a snow angel, she said, “You going to stay here or come with me?”

I was giddy. I giggled and flapped my arms in the snow and didn’t answer her. Billy flapped right along beside me as Nora stomped off through the snow and disappeared down one of the bush trails. Billy and I stood up, laughing, knocked the snow from our clothes, and looked down at our snow angels that were holding hands.