Late Nights on Air (33 page)

They were finding things, one after the other. A black thread hanging from a low willow. A weathered orange pip on a rock. A lantern base of heavy glass, and some fox traps left behind at the foot of a portage. A handmade sled runner, or so it appeared to Ralph, who pronounced it made in Captain Back’s time. The 1830s. In the absence of trees that shed their leaves in autumn, objects could sit in the open for decades, centuries.

One night Harry caught a sizable grayling, a fish that was dull-brown in the water but vivid out of its element—in its death throes it went through a troubled array of colours from purply blue-black on its body to brilliant red spots on its large dorsal fin. Harry knelt to clean and fillet the pretty fish. He cut across the backbone, but left the tail in place in order to have something to hold on to when he skinned it. The carcass he threw into the river, having first shown Gwen what the fish had been eating: smaller fish, partially digested, the colour and consistency of grey glue. Gwen had her cassette recorder over her shoulder and she taped the sounds of scraping, eviscerating, slicing, rinsing.

This was the night, July 17, Eleanor elected not to go to bed at all in order to experience the brief middle-of-the-night twilight with its profusion of violet clouds directly overhead and its yellow gleam in the northern sky. Dressed in wool pants, wool jacket, gloves, with bug repellant smeared on her face and neck, she lay on her back on the warm, mattressy tundra whose thick growth held on to the day’s heat. Tweedy smells rose from the soft tangle straight into her nostrils. The colours and textures at eye level, the russets, browns, blacks, reds, formed an embrace so gently erotic she dozed off with a smile on her lips, only to come awake when a ptarmigan
whirred by, or a snowy owl flew down and sat on a big stone twenty feet away, or loons cried in the distance. The loon’s long call seemed to her like a statement of the hour, a horizontal sound that tapered off into the horizon, while its laughter was vertical, high, flashy, rippling. The Barrens themselves were horizontal, but vertical, too, she thought. A vertical world of air: a country of clouds, an abundance of wind.

“You were the only sleepers,” she said in the morning. “Everything else was awake.”

The air, she claimed, was ten degrees warmer in among the plants than a foot above, and several degrees warmer still inside the actual blossoms. Ralph, wanting proof, knelt beside her and felt the warm air swell up from the heated plants, the tundra less a riot of colour, he said, to her everlasting delight, than a peaceful demonstration. She thought of the cool air that blows over your skin when you meet someone. Then with some few you feel warmer, as it was warmer by these vivid ten degrees close to Ralph, and close to the arctic ground, to the tussocks of moss and low cushion plants and ground-hugging berries and spreading mats of grasses and flowers and such.

Together they examined the tiny complete world at their fingertips. Over the last few weeks she’d identified flowers like yellow arnica, white-petalled arctic dryad with its look of wild roses, yellow and violet oxytrope and wild sweet pea, pressing them into her pocket-sized notebook and making sketches and lists: of the chickweeds or starworts with their little white starlike flowers, the violet and yellow louseworts rising up out of the moss, the pink arctic fireweed, yellow arctic poppy, twiggy Labrador tea with its neat, round clusters of white flowers and narrow rolled-under leaves, the buttercups, milk-vetch, white
and purple saxifrage, the small, white bells of the arctic heather, the red-violet clusters of Lapland rosebay like miniature rhododendrons, the dwarf pink azalea.

When she and Ralph stood up, their eyes took in the full extent of the boundless northern wastes. Every foot of evenly rising plains and worn-away hills was as detailed as the small bit they were standing on.

A long-tailed jaeger flew overhead, its tail like a dark, slender, beautiful paintbrush. Sometimes, said Ralph, the canny suitor, he felt life ripple through him, connecting him to every other living thing, and his own existence was the least of it and the most of it. Yes, she said.

They came down off the tundra as if hand in hand, and joined Harry and Gwen at the water’s edge. The river and the landscape it ran through stretched in immensity on either side—what vastness they had dropped in to visit—yet in each other’s company, this fellowship of four souls, they felt light-headedly secure.

The next evening Eleanor came upon Harry sitting by himself on a knoll not far from the campsite, smoking a cigarette. She sat beside him and without looking at her he reached over and took her hand. The tundra rolled away into the distance, the undulating barren hills, the immense light.

“I want to know something,” he said to her. “When Dido phoned you, did she even mention my name?”

Eleanor didn’t answer for a moment. “Do you mean, did she say she wanted to see you or talk to you? No, Harry. She didn’t.”

Harry nodded. With a bitterness he wished he could rise above, he said, “I can’t figure out what she sees in Eddy.”

Eleanor reflected. “Maybe he makes her feel good about being bad.”

Harry let out a short laugh.

“There’s Gwen,” said Eleanor.

They saw her heading off on her own, walking towards a ridge of land a short distance away. Her head was down. Her tape recorder was around her neck and she steadied it with one hand. She waved flies away with the other.

“What will become of her, do you think?” asked Eleanor.

“Eddy’s going to ruin her life.”

“I meant Gwen.”

“Ah,” said Harry.

Gwen had shortened the shoulder strap on her cassette recorder and hung it low enough on her chest to see the levels on the vu meter; easier to walk this way too. She looked down, alert to sounds, but otherwise lost in what Harry would have called a brown study; she was thinking about his soft, swollen ear and about his other appendages, wondering about them idly, not so idly, as the look of the scruffy heath imprinted itself on her eyes.

At the sound of loons, she automatically pressed record and stood listening to birds that mated for life, their beautiful mad laughter. What held her eye, however, was the look of her hand on the microphone. So weathered and chapped compared to the silver-metallic stem she was holding carefully, no rings on her fingers to click against the metal and transfer to the dark spool of tape, her equipment solid and unchanging
and Japanese, her veins purply under the roughened, reddish-brown skin. She saw her hand on a doorknob, pushing open a bedroom door, and the phrase “inquiry without walls” came into her head, the Barrens like Berger’s commission: you learned a great deal, more than you wanted to know sometimes, more than you knew what to do with. Could there be a more primitive, naked, intimate sound than the heavy breathing, the solitary moan and whimper she’d heard from inside Harry’s tent an hour ago? The physical side of life, which stretched in utter loneliness and tenderness all around her.

A WOLF, WHITE, OLD, MANGY, ARTHRITIC
, slowly stretched and yawned on the riverbank as they paddled by. A harbinger, had they but known. By now it was July 20 and they were on the wide, smooth, east-flowing Thelon River, seven days from the end.

Ralph spotted shapes moving in the distance. Gwen thought they must be geese, they were used to geese running along the shore. They drew closer and the scales fell from their eyes. A group of fifteen caribou were crossing the river ahead of them, antlers like high heels rising from their heads.

They paddled to the south side of the river, as did Harry and Eleanor, and waited with thumping hearts for the caribou to come towards them along the shore, but the animals clambered out of the water and went the other way. Then another smaller group swam across the river and they too went up the sloping bank through low willows and spruce, then up over the rocky ridge and out of sight.

They had lunch on the rise of land above the river and realized they were on the edge of a large herd. Caribou in the hundreds were all around them, in the distance and moving slowly, or not moving at all, blending in like boulders on the
open tundra of grass and heath and rounded hills. What they’d been hoping for was finally happening.

La foule
. The word came unbidden to Ralph from accounts of the great migrations of the past. It was like witnessing the arrival of a myth: the caribou emerged from the land and belonged to it, tentative, purposeful, graceful, shy, their colours buff, brown, grey, pale, Gwen’s colours when she first arrived at the station. What they were seeing was the mass arrival of something beautifully recessive and fleeting. They could have missed it just as easily, a few hours one way or the other.

Ralph nestled against the lip of a low hill and looked through long grass at the large herd on the other side. Eleanor was close to him. Not far away was Gwen, her cassette recorder around her neck, her microphone in her hand, when a cow and calf came thundering right up to them, unaware of their presence, then ran off a bit, then came closer again. Soon several caribou were eating willow leaves just twenty feet below them. Gwen taped the sounds of their soft lips pulling off small leaves, the quiet sounds of chewing. A male reached around and scratched his back leg with his antlers. Dark, velvet, bone.

Black antlers above the greenery, the willows, the water. The look of heavy mascara around their eyes. The ripples of movement that occurred when one animal started and the rest followed. They were like camels in the sand dunes, beautiful on the blond hills, moving and gathering, arranging themselves in small, elegant groups around the willows, like a series of almost still-lifes.

Harry called softly. A group of ten was coming down the shore towards their canoes. The others followed him and stood very still under the high-pitched hum of clouds of gnats, watching intently and with enormous excitement. Gwen taped the sound of hooves splashing at the water’s edge. Loud, their coming and going, yet subdued, and soon over. The large numbers that gathered on their side of the river all afternoon were spooked about seven in the evening. Having filed down to the water and along it, maybe five hundred, seven hundred animals, they suddenly drew back up over the bank and over the hill and out of sight across the tundra.

“I think we’re in a thin place,” Ralph murmured, remembering his father’s passion for the Celts. “Where seen and unseen meet.”

That being the very definition of this ancient caribou crossing, where the river narrowed and offered passage to the other side. The animals were every bit as sensitive as the witnesses at the Berger Inquiry had claimed, and this wasn’t even their most skittish time. The calving and post-calving had occurred farther north, and now, less urgently, they were engaged in the long return to the timberline.

So quiet, whispered Eleanor. So easily not seen, and then so easily lost. She and Ralph stood together watching straggling cows with their calves, and solitary calves. On the opposite shore a bull and a calf entered the water and began to swim across, a twosome. But halfway, the calf dropped out of sight and didn’t resurface, no matter how long they kept looking.

They were alone again “in the land of feast and famine.” Nothing for so long, and then abundance, and then nothing again, but a nothing haunted by the previous abundance.

That night, thumbing backwards through Whalley’s book, Ralph came upon Edgar, raw-boned and white in his photograph. Parted hair and ears sticking out. Then Hornby’s emaciated face after one of his starving winters near Fort Reliance. The sunken, glittering eyes. The amiable smile. The head of hair still dark and thick. In 1925, the year before his last journey, Hornby was travelling with James Critchell-Bullock, an ex-army officer turned traveller-photographer-collector. After a squalid winter near Artillery Lake, holed up in a collapsing cave dug into the side of a sand esker, they were making their miserable way to Hudson Bay. On the evening of July 23, they sighted “a large group of caribou moving southwest on the south shore: about two thousand animals, mostly females, ‘moving all over the hills making a tremendous noise calling to one another … a beautiful sight on the sand hills with the gold of the sunshine reflected on the water.’” Another sixty miles and the two men came to the sharp double bend in the river that took Hornby’s fancy and sealed his fate, for on the north side rose a fine stand of white spruce that inspired thoughts of building a house and overwintering.

Ralph set down the book, understanding an aspect of Hornby for the first time: he had been seduced by the idea of a well-built home instead of a filthy cave or soggy tent or crummy tarp. The tiny, extraordinarily tough, self-destructive Englishman had actually been seeking a wild kind of comfort.

In himself something similar was going on. He felt a growing desire to be attached, not to a place but to a person.
For years he’d made a habit of keeping his options open, of not letting himself be pinned down, an approach to life that seemed almost juvenile to him now. They’d come such a long distance already, he and Eleanor and the others. They were two-thirds of the way there, two-thirds of the way home, and he felt more sure of his next step than he’d ever felt about anything. Eleanor wasn’t even forty and he was sixty-one, but on the last night of their trip he would ask her to marry him.