The Pacific and Other Stories (39 page)

“Reed told me that I had to keep up the southern and western fences.”

“No,” Cameron said, shaking his head. “South and
east
. When you get into Alberta, the custom changes. There are people straddling the provincial border who don’t have to worry about any fences: they’re on the line where ways of doing things meet, and they reap the benefits. Of course, it could have been just the reverse, too, and I’m sure that in some places there are those who have to tend their wire in all directions. We’re both lucky, though, in our way. We share the north wall. I’ve got a lot of river on my property as well, and there’s no fence like a fast deep river.”

“Now I know,” Sanderson said. “You can take over from here. Maybe I will send you a bill.”

“You can send it if you’d like. Doesn’t mean that I’ll pay it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sanderson said, and got on his horse. Although Sanderson appeared to be in no mood to talk, Cameron believed that there was never a better way for a man to make a friend than in a fight of little consequence.

“O
UR EASTERN FENCE
is mended, all but the last easy six,” Cameron announced to his wife at dinner that night.

“How so?” she asked.

“Sanderson did it. He thought it was his.”

“Did he put in much wire?”

“Plenty. I haven’t seen it all, but he replaced it, just as I do, not only where it’s broken but where you can tell it’s going to break.”

“You ought to give him back what we’ve gained.”

“He didn’t have to put it there.”

“I’ve heard that they’re having a hard time,” his wife said. “Why don’t you bring him some wire, and some beef, since they probably can’t afford to slaughter their own animals.”

“I suppose I could do that. He seems like a nice fellow. There’s probably a lot he can learn from me.”

“He may not think of it in quite that way,” Mrs. Cameron said.

“I don’t see why he shouldn’t. Our family has been here more than half a century—he arrived a few months ago. It shows. He spent four days fixing a fence that didn’t belong to him. But all right. When I go there,” he asked, “do you want to come with?”

“No. But tell me about Sanderson’s wife. If she seems nice, then I’ll ride over, too.”

The next day, Cameron found himself in front of Sanderson’s house, screaming “Hallo!” to no avail. Though a rich volume of smoke issued from the chimney, no one answered. They were away and had left far too big a fire burning unattended, or they wanted nothing to do with him. And he had ridden almost twenty miles, carrying heavy coils of wire and another big package, and to go visiting had put on his best riding boots and a new Black Watch shirt.

He decided to leave the wire on the porch and the meat just inside, away from raccoons and bears. He wanted to write a note, and thought that they might have a pen or pencil somewhere near the door. He wouldn’t have to go all the way in.

He took the leather off the coils of wire and carried them up onto the porch. When he stepped into the shade, he realized that on his way over he had been pleasantly sunburned by the June sun and the snowfields. “Hallo!” he said, rapping at the door. When there was no answer, he opened the latch and looked in.

The fire was ablaze. A large iron kettle hung over the flames, and was just beginning to steam. There must be someone here, he thought. And
then, as his eyes fully adjusted to the light and he looked about the room, he saw that there was.

S
ANDERSON
’
S WIFE
, her left hand clasped against her chest in fright, stared at him from across a wooden table. She was wearing only a slip, that was a pearly salmon color with a gray metallic sheen. To have been polite, Cameron should have turned away. To have been wise, he might have left for good.

But he couldn’t take his eyes off her. “I called and called,” he said. “Didn’t you hear me?”

As if to establish his credentials, he pointed at the coils of wire on the porch and held up the large package of steak. “I’m your neighbor. I’ve brought your husband some wire and some beef. I wanted to leave a note, but I didn’t have a pen, so I just stepped inside.”

As he waited for an answer, he was free to look at her. She remained motionless, her right hand gripping the side of the bowl with the golden rim. Just her arms, hands, and fingers were enough to mark her as a beauty. Her eyes were lucid and green, and the thick soft hair that was piled atop her head and fell about her face in long wisps and exquisitely curling locks was a matte red so rich and subdued that it made him giddy. And her complexion, which showed, too, on her shoulders and chest, was a cross between mottled red and ivory. Cameron’s paralysis was not lessened by her gorgeous expression of surprise, by her silver and gold rings, and by a light gold neck chain splayed across the lace trim of the slip.

She motioned for him to go outside. He moved back and looked at the bowl, trying to remember its smallest detail, down to the curl of the letters, for he wanted to be able to recall the scene with the power to renew it. Then he went out onto the porch, shut the door behind him, and stepped into the sunlight.

He wished that when she joined him in the daylight she would be ugly, and that the way she had struck him as so beautiful would prove to have been an illusion of the dim light—this for the sake of his lovely wife, whom he loved and did not want to wish to abandon, and because he was not suitable for Mrs. Sanderson. He imagined that a man suited to her would have to be many ranks above him, though Sanderson, it seemed, was not.

Since he could never have her, he would have to hate her for it. Even had she and he been unmarried, having her would have been out of the question. But, then, what about Sanderson? He was not a god. Perhaps she was as beautiful as she appeared to be only to Cameron. Perhaps, given time, she would leave her husband. Or, given more time, he would die. Perhaps, Cameron thought, his ride over the snowfields in the strong sun had been too rapturous. Then he remembered her face.

Having lost this debate with himself, he stamped his foot against the boards, sorry that he had ever seen her, bitter about the imbalance that the sight of her made clear to him, and angry that he felt so low when just that morning he had ridden across the high meadows, in sight of a line of snowy peaks to the north, feeling that there was no place higher that he or anyone else would want to go. As he was turning to leave, she walked onto the porch. She was in an old-fashioned flowered dress, and the sight of her made Cameron wish for Sanderson to come galloping in and distract him from her lacerating and untouchable beauty, which was even finer in the daylight than it had been in the dim interior of the house, where there had not been any of the blue glacial light that seemed to lift her off the earth and make her smile something not of this world.

She carried pencils and paper. “I don’t need that now,” Cameron said. “I was going to leave a message only if no one was in.”

She shook her head to say no, smiled, and pointed to herself.

She’s crazy, he thought.

Then she raised a hand perfectly adorned in rings, and tapped her left ear. When next she put her index finger across her lips twice in succession, he understood.

“You can’t hear,” he said, already moving his lips more deliberately, so that she might understand.

She nodded.

“You can’t talk.”

She sat down on the step in the sunlight and made room for him to follow. “I can talk,” she wrote on the pad, in a firm but delicate hand, “but they say it doesn’t come out very well, so I prefer to write.”

“Do you talk to your husband?” he asked.

“Yes,” she wrote. “Only to him and to my parents, who are in Scotland. I
also talk to the animals, since I am told they sound even worse than I do.” She smiled. “Please,” she continued, as he drank in every movement of her hands and eyes, “don’t mention this to anyone. In all of Canada, you are the only one who knows.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I am ashamed,” she wrote. She indicated emphasis and nuance with the pen (by writing very fast or very slow; by bearing down hard; by returning to underline or circle; and by drawing the letters one way or another, to look shaky, flat, tired, or animated) and with her facial expressions.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he told her, “nothing.”

“That may be so,” she wrote quickly, “but long experience has shown me that it’s best this way. I’ve always preferred to keep to myself.”

“But what if you have to go into Invermere? They’ll know then.”

“I’ve been there only once. If we have to, we go to Calgary to shop. It’s bigger, and no one knows us there.”

“Calgary is a long way off,” he said.

“Invermere is small,” she wrote back.

“Well, I can’t dispute that,” he answered.

“Are you married?” she wrote.

“Yes.”

“Then,” she put down, “please don’t tell even your wife. If I could hear and talk like everyone else, I would talk no end to other women, and I suspect that I’m not unusual in that desire, except that I don’t get to realize it.”

“She wanted to visit,” Cameron said. “When the pass is open, it’s not that far on a good horse. Would you enjoy that?”

“No” was the written answer. “Or, rather, yes. But, again, my experience tells me that it would not be a good idea.”

Cameron took a chance. “Because of me?” he asked bluntly, wondering if she knew the effect of her beauty.

Evidently she did, for she nodded, and then, as if for emphasis, wrote, “Yes.”

“Isn’t that a lot to presume?” He was bluffing. It wasn’t anything at all to presume, but he thought she might become interested in him if she imagined that he, of all men, could not see or did not care about her beauty.

“Experience,” she wrote.

Because Cameron looked dejected, she added, “If you feel distraught, don’t worry. It will pass.”

“I don’t think it will.”

“Don’t be silly.” Her hand flew across the pad. “A man doesn’t have his head turned forever. After all, you don’t know me.”

“And if I did?”

“I won’t demean myself. But I do tend to draw men to me very strongly at first, only to see them drop away much relieved and delighted to go.”

He wished that he had been more circumspect. But to have been so might have been a far greater fault. It was not the first time he had been defeated by great desire, and he felt completely inadequate, dismissed, rejected. He left abruptly, because he was sure that she wanted him to go, because he wanted so much to stay, because, quite simply, he loved her. He never remembered much about the feverish and unhappy ride home, or how many times he had dismounted to pace back and forth in agony and puzzlement. He did, of course, resolve never to see her again. And he was a man of strong and tenacious resolution.

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON
, Cameron came to the meadows that led to the high wall. These meadows stretched for a mile and were dotted with stands of small pine that grew sheltered from the wind in depressions and hollows. At almost nine thousand feet, the horse moved slowly and breathed hard, and his rider found himself in a trance of sparkling altitude. The sky was flawless and still as Cameron inspected the last portion of his fence. Progressing slowly upward, he was sure that there would be no breaks. Where the final meadow began to rise steeply to the wall, he was going to check the fence from a distance, and turn around without actually making a ceremonial finish at the cliff—in touching it the way a swimmer touches the wall of a pool before he will credit himself with a lap. But he saw from the base of the meadow that a long portion of the fence was down. The wire was shining in the sunlight, spread in every direction on the field. The posts had been pushed over, snapped at the base, and scattered. With luck, if he had enough
wire, and could salvage enough, and work fast enough, he might repair it by dark, and then ride home by starlight on trails that he could take blind.

He cantered over to the damage. He knew from the tracks that a grizzly bear had done this—or perhaps two, while the cubs watched. Either they had been too big to get through the baffles, which were untouched, or they had just wanted the high meadow to be completely open. Because the splinters were moist and the leaves of the moss compressed, he knew that it had happened while he was just a few miles away thinking placidly about his good luck. The bears themselves might be gone, or they might be taking a nap somewhere amidst the sunny boulders. Removing his rifle from its scabbard, he worked the bolt to put a bullet in the chamber, and leaned the weapon against a rock. It was not that he expected the bears to lie in ambush for him but rather that, in working hard, he might not notice them until his horse panicked.

They had pulled down sixteen stakes and broken eleven at the base, rendering them unusable. The wire was severed in two dozen places. Only a bear could have done that, even with the light steel that he had always used on the high meadows. His coil of wire was greatly diminished after the repairs he had made on the way up. If he had enough, it would be just enough, and still it would be hard to do it right. The splicing would be weak, with no tripled windings, and he would have to use fewer posts, spacing them farther apart than usual. But the fence might hold, especially if the bears were on their way to some distant, higher paradise in the north. He set to work.

First, he rode a mile and a half back into the timber. Although he could have used the meadow’s little pines for posts, at that altitude they took forever to grow, and destroying them might have turned the upper pasture into a rutted and barren hillside when the rains washed the thin layer of soil off its base of rock and scree. In the timber, hidden from the world by distance, height, and the maze of a thousand pines, he used his axe to cut and trim half a dozen small trees. He was a very strong man, he had used an axe nearly every day of his life from the time he was a small child, and the axe he used was the best available, sharpened with a soft stone and oil, and kept, like some kind of strange one-legged falcon, in a leather hood. The trees went
down in a stroke: they might as well have been celery. And he trimmed them of their branches with several sweeps close to the trunk. After a series of hatchetlike blows at the narrowing end, he had a sharp fence post soaked with its own resin as if it had been designed for placement in wet ground.