Northern Borders (42 page)

“This must be quite a setback for you,” my grandfather said, getting out of the canoe and stretching with his hands in the small of
his back. “You seem to have been greatly looking forward to disposing of our remains.”

Mr. Snowball gave me a wan smile. “Your grandfather has a pretty good sense of humor,” he said. “We ought to get along fine up here, him and me. I've got a sense of humor too.”

To Gramp he said, “Did you find the old chief's camp you told me about on the train?”

“We did,” Gramp said. “And very nearly killed ourselves a dozen times over coming up that godforsaken river. They can flood it off the face of the earth now so far as we're concerned. Right, Austen?”

I nodded, remembering the night in the gorge, the towering flames from the forest fire.

“Is that your cabin?” I asked Donny.

“Mine and your grandfather's,” he said. “Didn't he tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That we're going partners on a trapline up here.”

I whirled around and stared at my grandfather, who just turned to Mr. Snowball and said casually, “The fur sign looked good on our way up the lake. The pilot find it all right?”

Mr. Snowball nodded. “No problem. That map you drew me and him was right on the money. But I don't think anyone's ever been here before us. All kinds of animal sign. Otter. White wolf. Marten. Some wolverine. We ought to do all right if we don't go through the ice and drown. An American fella named Brewer went up to the English River to trap back four, five winters ago—”

“Tell us about Brewer later,” my grandfather said. “The plane's due in to pick up Austen tomorrow, and he wants to go fishing now.”

“Down off the bottom tip of the island,” Mr. Snowball said sadly. “Best I've ever seen.”

“That's a shame,” my grandfather said. “Unlimber your fly rod, Austen. You and I are going brook trout fishing.”

 

I was stunned by my grandfather's disclosure that he planned to stay on in the Barrens with Mr. Snowball. He refused to discuss the matter, however, until we'd had our trout fishing, which turned
out to be the finest afternoon and evening of fishing I have ever experienced, before or since. Brook trout weighing up to six pounds were congregated in enormous numbers in the rapids and the gravel riffles off the foot of the island, and over the next several hours my grandfather and Donny Snowball and I caught and released hundreds. At last the trout wore me out. My casting arm ached from playing them, and as the sun lowered over the Barren Lands in a great wash of crimson and gold, I sat down on a boulder beside Mr. Snowball.

After a while he motioned toward my grandfather, who was still fishing, and, in the gathering dusk, had seemed to become more and more a part of the river and the wilderness.

“He belongs up here, eh?” Donny Snowball said.

“You don't think he'll fall through the ice and drown? Or burn up in a forest fire?”

“Oh, maybe. Very possibly, in fact. But he belongs here anyway. I don't know why he ever left the first time.”

“I do,” I said, and Mr. Snowball looked at me curiously but didn't say anything else and neither did I. My grandfather could tell him about Mira in his own time, or not tell him. I wasn't about to breathe a word of what I knew.

We kept just three medium-sized trout to eat that night, and after we'd finished them and Mr. Snowball had gone inside the new cabin to go to bed, my grandfather and I had a final mug of tea together while he smoked one of Mr. Snowball's cigars. I had not asked him anything else about his decision to stay in Labrador. But there wasn't much time left. The plane taking me out would be here in the morning.

Although we'd had a spell of Indian summer after the big blizzard on No Name Mountain, the late-August evenings had turned very chilly. My grandfather threw another chunk of spruce on the fire. Then he rummaged in the old wooden grub box for his pocketbook, from which he handed me three hundred dollars.

“Your summer wages,” he said.

Next he handed me a carbon copy of a typed document. By the firelight I saw that it was the deed to the Farm in Lost Nation, signed over to his four children. Attached was a separate, shorter document deeding his hunting camp, Labrador, to me. “The taxes
on everything are paid for the next four years, Austen. Zack Barrows has a copy of the deeds in his office. I mailed your father and Rob and your aunts theirs the day before we left to come North.”

I looked at my grandfather in the firelight, and his face seemed at repose. I thought of Mr. Snowball's observation. “He belongs up here.” And although I knew that Donny Snowball was right, I could not seem to reconcile myself to the idea.

“So you really aren't coming back?”

“No,” Gramp said. “There's nothing to go back to.”

“Who's going to farm the place? Who's going to farm the Farm in Lost Nation?”

My grandfather made that rasping click in his throat. “There isn't any more Farm in Lost Nation, Austen. There hasn't been since I quit shipping milk. It was just barely a farm for years before that. The sawmill's played out too. There aren't ten acres of usable timber left on the entire place.”

My grandfather threw his tea leaves into the fire, in a gesture dismissive of the Farm. “Lost Nation Hollow is a bygone place. I watched it pass into history and so did you, though at the time you were too young to know what was happening. The farms are all gone. The big woods are gone. The best of the hunting and fishing is gone. The kids, including all four of mine, have grown up and gone away and not come back. What is there for them to come back to? What is there for any of us to come back to?

“Now, Austen, they say living in the bush adds twenty years to your life. I don't know about that but I intend to find out. Not sit around the stove on a gone-by farm and dry up and fade away. And I'll tell you something else. Lost Nation is no place for you to live now, either. Use the camp for a hunting camp if you can find anything left to hunt. But don't go back there to live. What would you do there, even with a college education? Go to schoolmastering like your father? That would be a fine thing for a smart young fella like you that's supposed to be heard from. The world is bigger than Lost Nation, boy. That's what I'm saying to you.”

Suddenly I was very angry with my grandfather—angrier than I'd been when he had insisted that we put in eighteen-hour days mapping the territory we'd crossed, angrier than when he'd led me on
the forced march up the flooded gorge and on through the fire-ravaged country into the blizzard. I was angry because he and I had been inseparable for twelve years and now his decision to stay here seemed like a rejection of me.

“Fine,” I said. “Then I'm staying too. You and Mr. Snowball and I can all run the trapline together.”

“You'll do no such thing, mister,” my grandfather said.

“Then where the hell else do you think I should be? I can't stay here with you. Lost Nation's dead and gone. I can't go back there. Where should I be?”

“In college,” he said. “I promised your grandmother I'd see you through your schooling, Austen. By my calculations, you've got four more years to go. In the meantime, you can come up here and work for me summers. I can pay you some from my trapping proceeds. I'll need a man to help me map these Barrens, no doubt. There's a lot of them.”

Again my grandfather began to rummage in the grub box. “These are for you, Austen. Take proper care of them because someday, despite what you think now, you'll come to value them.”

He'd taken out the flat metal case containing the maps he'd drawn over the summer of the Great Lost Gomer of Labrador. The only maps in existence of that vast tract of wilderness, soon to be inundated by an inland sea.

I didn't know what to say. The maps were undoubtedly the greatest gift my grandfather could possibly have given me. But he just threw his cigar butt into the fire after his tea leaves and said, “This meeting is adjourned for the evening. Douse the fire before you come to bed.”

When he reached the entrance of the cabin my grandfather turned back. “Austen,” he said out into the darkness, “you did all right this summer. You're a good fella to go down the river with.”

 

My grandfather was both right and wrong about life in the Far North. Living in the bush did not add twenty years to his life, but it very well may have helped to add ten. For a full and happy decade, he dwelt on No Name Lake with his trapping partner and
friend, Donny Snowball, and I spent some of the happiest summers of my life visiting him there.

In the late fall of 1970, when the caribou began returning from their summer migration to the big hidden lake beyond the Snow Chain Mountains, my grandfather, then eighty-two though looking scarcely sixty, went through the ice on No Name's outlet and took a bad chill. He and Donny had been on their way into the Barrens for the fall trapping, and Donny told him flatly that they should return immediately to their cabin and wait there for Gramp to regain his strength. “You stay out in the bush now, you'll catch pneumonia and die sure as shooting,” Donny warned him.

“When I can't stay out in the bush anymore I don't give a good goddamn if I do die,” my grandfather said, and insisted on pushing on.

Four days later, Austen Kittredge died of pneumonia. Donny towed his body back across the ice on a hand-sledge and buried him under a cairn on the top of No Name Mountain, next to Mira, though how he managed this, alone in the Ungava winter, I have no idea. It was a great act of loyalty, after which Donny ran their trapline alone for another two or three winters, before establishing a fly-in hunting and fishing lodge on the outlet of No Name, which today is a lucrative business. “Things change, Tut. You can't predict the future.”

The Farm in Lost Nation Hollow? I stay there summers with my family, though of course the true hill country of my youth and the hill people who lived there then long ago passed into history. There has been no farming in the Hollow now for decades.

Recently I have found myself dreaming of family pictures, most never taken. I see my grandmother and my great-aunt, two young girls standing on a Halifax dock, looking gravely through the sleet into the camera of my imagination.

And my grandfather at seventy-two, with the best decade of his life still ahead of him, standing on the shore of the island at the outlet of No Name Lake as the floatplane I am riding in wheels and banks and whines off over the wilderness toward Schefferville.

Here I am at six, standing next to my grandfather beside his
millpond, learning to use a fly rod. “Cast short and straight, Austen,” he says harshly. “I won't fish with a fancy-Dan caster.”

In stark tones of black and white, I see my sable-clad grandmother against Lost Nation's wintery hills, drawing a bead on the great white snow owl. And I see her rising off the pillows of her deathbed, fierce and exultant in her vision of Egypt, and lying in state in the tamarack sarcophagus my grandfather built for her, surrounded by her strange and wonderful Egyptian artifacts.

They come at night, unbidden, just before I fall asleep and on nights when sleep comes slowly. They are photographs, sepiatinted. Most are of my grandfather and grandmother, who throughout my boyhood were at the center of everything for me. They remain at the center of my memories today, frozen in those recollections of my youth in Lost Nation, along with all their ancestors and mine back to my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Sojourner Kittredge. They are a lost nation themselves now, existing in my memory, and on these pages, and nowhere else.

H
OWARD
F
RANK
M
OSHER
is the author of ten books, including
Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account,
and
A Stranger in the Kingdom,
which, along with
Disappearances,
was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont.