The Extinction Club (4 page)

When I checked to see if there was any bleeding, the plastic sheet was drenched. But not with blood. Good Christ, how could I forget about that? In the kitchen I rummaged around for something to serve as a bedpan.

On the second day she would neither eat nor drink, and her temperature was off the scale. Starve a fever, as they say, but not here: malnutrition would slow clotting. She needed an I.V., but I’d have to settle for an older type of force-feeding. I prised her lips apart as if examining a horse. Her teeth were stained and crooked, like the cemetery stones. I tilted her head back and with an eye-dropper squeezed as much water as I could down her throat. I thought she’d cough it back up, but she didn’t. I then tried some milk. It went down too, drop by drop. I stopped when she began spewing it back up, along with some greenish slime that dribbled down her chin.

I wasn’t eating either, mind you, though I was drinking nonstop: black-sludged coffee that wired me twenty-four hours, cup after cup till my hands shook. I had slept two hours, tops, since finding the body. And maybe two more on my feet, like a horse. My mind, however, was surprisingly clear. It was a novel feeling being clean, a song of innocence, a return to the sweet long ago.

Around midnight I heard faint gurgling sounds, like those made by an infant. I stood over her and saw her lips tremble, her lids gradually open. She had no eyes! No, they were just dark red. I gaped at her, as though she were in a freak show
or zoo, and she looked vacantly back. Her lips began to move, or was it my imagination? Ever so slowly, into the form of an “o.”

Did she mean
eau
or
de l’eau
? I ran to the kitchen and returned with a full glass of water. I placed its rim next to her lips, but she didn’t raise her head. She didn’t have the strength! With my free hand, I gently lifted her head from behind. Then tipped the glass. Too abruptly—water ran down her neck. I tried again. This time I felt the straining of her neck muscles and heard a suction sound, an intake of air. She was drinking on her own! And swallowing, again and again, like a parched desert nomad. She then looked up at me, as if to say “enough.” I eased her head back onto the pillow. She closed her eyes and fell asleep.

She slept most of the time, drinking only occasionally—water, vegetable juice, orange juice—but never eating. I tried to interest her in some beef consommé, but she just sniffed at it, her mouth firmly closed. A new plan was needed, so I crumbled some bread into a glass of milk and woke her every two hours, forcing her to eat a spoonful or two.

When I changed her dressings or washed her or took away the bedpan, she lay stone-still, watching my face with her tiger eyes, frighteningly bright and anxious, eyes filled with viridescent depths, with exotic ancestral blood—ancient Macedonian perhaps, or some lost Indian tribe.

«
As-tu mal?
» I asked. I studied the empurpled patches of ecchymosis that racooned her eyes and tattooed her throat. «
Est-ce que tu souffres?
»

Less alive than dead, she shook her head, although “shook” is hardly the word to describe that painfully slow movement. It was our first real mental contact, save for those bloodied green eyes boring in on me. I’ve seen green eyes before, but
nothing quite like this: these eyes were from another age, another world.

It snowed for the next two days. A thick fall burdened the branches of the trees, whitened and concealed the river. There was a brief let-up on the third day, with brilliant sun shooting through clouds, but the fourth day was worse: walls of silver dust driven by howling northern winds. The trees, groaning under the weight of the snow, shook and swayed until heavy branches cracked and fell, vanishing into the soft white vaults below.

Grey bone-cold days followed, with black starless nights and blizzards one after the other. There seemed to be no pattern in the way the winds were blowing; they came from all points of the compass and at ever-changing speeds. I had picked a record year for snowfall, I found out later, the most since ’71. I was not unnerved by these convulsions of nature; I found them bracing, a welcome distraction from my personal convulsions. Nor was I worried about starving or freezing to death—there was lots of food, and firewood everywhere you looked. What I was worried about was running out of medication. Her dressings had to be changed daily and she’d need more antiseptics, painkillers, anti-clotting agents. But how to get them? The van’s DieHard was dead, but even with a live battery the road was impassable. It was a
chemin saisonnier
, to make matters worse, which meant that it wasn’t plowed in winter.

One early morning, after a long dervish dance with insomnia, my regular nocturnal visitor, I returned to my neighbour’s to look for snowshoes. Sweeps of high-drifted
snow covered the porch steps and pressed against the door. With a small blue shovel, one better suited for the sandbox, I carved out a path.

Inside, despite the creaking baseboard heaters, things were starting to freeze, so I fired up the wood-burning stove. And nailed a wool blanket over the broken window. While doing so I spotted something out front, half-coffined in snow. A Sno-Cat.

This could solve all our problems, I thought exclamatorily, even though I’d never driven one of these before and had no keys. I wouldn’t need any, as it turned out, for after unburying the Cat I saw that she was wounded, fatally, with snipped tubes and severed arteries and an instrument panel that looked to have been staved in with an axe. I say this because an axe was stuck in the glass. A decal on the chassis said
RIDE SAFE, RIDE SOBER
. I trudged back inside, and with little else to do as my patient slept and the snow piled, I began to root around.

Despite the deer head over the mantel, a trio of oil paintings of alpine grandeur, and a large calendar with a moose fending off wolves under a full moon, the place was more like a general store or survivalist refuge than a hunting cabin. A locked pantry, whose padlock I easily picked, contained a gas stove and canister, a survival blanket, Second Skin, bandages, compresses, a bivouac sack and liner, a GPS locator, a portable red flasher with cigarette-lighter adapter, and, best of all, a morphine shot. Inside a knapsack I found cashews, Jersey Milk chocolate, water, Advil, tea bags, and a hunk of mouldy cheese.

But the most intriguing item was a large metal trunk, like one of those road cases that rock bands haul their equipment in. It had a high-tech digital lock on its clasp that was
impossible to pick so I unscrewed the hinges, which took over an hour. I counted slowly to three before lifting the lid.

Green plastic garbage bags, each of them knotted, enclosed other green plastic bags, in the manner of a Russian doll. The third and final one held a Christmas cache of treasures: a fleece pullover, thick wool socks, camouflage jacket, Gore-Tex snowboots, Frontiersman Bear Spray. I would have left it at that, but noticed that the floor of the box was a tad high, and not metal but wood. A double-bottomed box? I prised out the sheet of plywood and discovered a large black parka underneath, unwrapped. On its breast pocket was a blue and yellow crest: a rainbow trout and Canada goose in the middle,
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
along the bottom,
FISH & WILDLIFE
along the top. From the parka’s bulging side pockets I pulled out a stun gun and service revolver. Inside the zipped-up coat was a Kevlar vest and a scabbard case, and inside the scabbard case was a .300 Winchester Magnum.

   III   

T
hat was the kind of roll I was on. I’d broken into the home of a law enforcer. But why was he living here, and why American, and where was he now? Where was his car or truck or whatever forest rangers drive? I’d heard about cars caught in whiteouts and not found until spring, when the coffin of snow had thawed. I’d heard about wardens shot by poachers and reported as hunting accidents or left in the forest to rot. Should I report this? How?

I was debating these questions while clearing my driveway with my plastic shovel. It was backbreaking and rewardless work, like rolling snowballs up a mountain. I was about to call it a day when I heard a faint creaking, scraping sound, which got louder and louder. An airplane? An airplane with engine trouble?

Some hundred yards away an odd-looking machine appeared on the horizon like a mirage. It rounded the bend, slowed on the downhill stretch, and passed in front of me, creating a higher bank of snow at the end of my drive than the one I’d just removed. It was a snowplow, either customized or from another era. It had a Plexiglas dome out front, attached to the cab window like a gunner’s turret.

I raised my toy blue shovel at the driver. He stopped and shut off his engine. Then gawked, mouth ajar, tongue protruding.

« Didn’t expect to see you out here! » I shouted in French.

He didn’t roll down his window because both were already
down. Frost clung to his eyelids and nostrils and his black beard was crawling with white snakes. He looked me over carefully before speaking. « Chief said there’s a new uniform out here. Animal cop or warden or shit. That you? »

He spoke in a hayseed Québécois that took some effort to crack. « No, » I replied.

« What you doin’ out here if you don’t mind me askin’? Huntin’? Trappin’? » The words shot out of his mouth like bullets, leaving puffs of smoke.

« Something like that. »

He spun in his seat, climbed out of the cab. He was a pylonic man, two and a half yards high, but with a fleshy middle: an ectomorph with a paunch. Clad in an army-green parka, camouflage snowmobile pants and Montreal Canadiens tuque—all strained, all undersized. On his feet were furry snowboots that looked like two raccoons.

« You with that lumber outfit out by Hawkshead? » He wiped his beard and nose with a grease-covered snowmobile glove. A nose made for the nasalities of
joual
, sticking out of his face like a cork.

I was about to flap my hand at the stench in the air, the smell of clothes worn two weeks or more, but thought better of it. I shook my head.

« That your shootin’ shack? » He nodded toward the cabin while grinning with an array of cement-coloured teeth. « A bit o’ pump action on the side? »

Seconds passed before I realized what the man was asking, realized that this was not hunting jargon. « You mean am I cheating on my wife? »

He continued to grin.

« No, I’m … just, you know, a hermit. On vacation. »

The snowplower stared at me through watery pale blue eyes
that suggested ill health or imbecility or both. His arms hung with the palms facing backward, cavemanishly. « Alone? »

Hermits are generally alone, yes. I nodded.

« You don’t get lonesome livin’ way out here? Way off in hell-and-gone? »

It makes up for years of pointless companionship. « Not really, no. »

« Just enjoyin’ the rare beauties of our woodlands, that it? »

Was that what I was doing? What did the rare beauties of woodlands mean to me? The absence of people. A system that ran perfectly well without humans. « You might say that. »

« You one of
them
? Tree-hugger? Leaf-eater? Bambi-lover? » Eyes fully open, mouth half open, he seemed to be waiting for the joke to be confirmed so he could erupt.