The Last of the Lumbermen (26 page)

What I'm saying is that after an hour or so
of conversation, Claire and Esther are in the kitchen
talking up a storm and on the verge
of friendship, and my father and I are in
the living room talking — and close to ar
guing — about the wisdom of letting my half b
rother operate an illegal snowmobile on city streets.

I'm getting
the distinct impression that my father's attitudes ar
e borderline survivalist, and that he has more
in common with Wendel than he has with me. I'm
also getting bits and pieces of a very complicated life
story from him — cryptic details of the br
eakup with my mother from his point of view
, the alcoholic years, the depth of his gratitude to —
and affection for — Claire, the way they've brought up James.

There
is no carelessness or neglect there. My fathe
r's survivalism — if that's what it is
— is carefully thought out, but it isn't fanatical.
James has been brought up to take care
of him- self, and to understand the machines and tools
he uses. My father has planned the trail by which
he comes to and from town, he's gone over it
with him on foot, even cleared and leveled st
retches of the trail to make it safe. James uses
the Ski-Doo in the winter, and in other seasons a dirtbike.

My father isn't, of
course, aware that James has been bringing the Ski-Doo right
into town. He's supposed to park it in a r
ented shed near the bridge, and to use the bus system
from there. My father hasn't accounted for how
goofy an independent fourteenyear-old can be, maybe because he
missed that part of my grow- ing up.
We agree that both of us will talk to
James about it, and that, between the four of us,
we'll make sure he keeps the Ski-Doo off the streets.

Will we tell James that I'm his half brother?
Yes. When? We set a date for it: Tuesda
y, after the hockey practice. Esther and I will drive out, and we'll do it together
.

Explaining the way my life has gone to my father
and Claire is harder than listening to them relate their story. Mostly, and graciously, Esther tells it for me. She leaves out
the details of the bus accident, which I'll explain to my
father some other time. I'm pretty sure he
knows the story, since everyone else seems to. Questions will
be asked, answers given. A life stretches out in
front of me now, different than I could have imagined ten days ago, much more complicated but infinitely better.

TWENTY-EIGHT

H
OCKEY IS EASY WHEN
you've just won three games
in a row after a semi-permanent losing streak.
Even the practices. They're fun: fundamentals go out the
window, and with them goes the nastiness that
losing breeds. In the scrimmages you find yourself
stunting like the hockey stars you secretly hoped you
were, rediscovering the joy of play. That's
what the Mohawks do, and that's what I'd be doing — if I weren't on the
DL
.

That's all I
am now that Jack is back: an old guy on
the
DL
. I've been relieved of the general manager's
duties, and of Fang, who spent half his time with
Esther and I hanging from my pantleg and the r
est pestering Bozo and chewing on the furniture. We
weren't exactly unhappy to see him go, even if
we did offer to keep him until Jack is mobile.

He didn't take
us up on the offer. Maybe it was
the look on my face, or maybe it was the chewed-up
legs of the coffee table. “Gord's around
for a few weeks,” he said. “He can walk the
little thug until I'm back to normal.”

Jack's in fine form, meanwhile, crabby and cheerful at
the same time, glad to be home despite the cast and
crutches he'll have to put up with for the
next two months. Gord says the operation was a success,
as far as it can be, and Jack's way of dealing with it is a predictable mix of “one day at a time” and
“anyone who makes a cripple joke gets a crutch ac
ross the side of the head.” Okay by me. He's
pleased at what I managed to add to the team,
and I'm glad to be rid of the problems, Fang included.

But five minutes into Jack's first
practice James hasn't yet appeared, and that is a
problem. I let it go ten more minutes, then
begin to fret seriously. When another fifteen tick
by and he still hasn't showed, I retreat to
the dressing room to call Claire Bathgate.

She
picks up the phone on the first ring. “No,” she
says, “He left soon enough to get there on time.
In fact, he should have been a few minutes early. But the weather, you know …”

The way
her voice trails off triggers my alarm bell. W
e're thinking the same thing: the thaw could have made
the backwoods trail James uses to get to town
treacherous, particularly after last week's heavy snowfall.

“Listen,” I say, still stumbling
over the awkward nomenclature. “Is Ron … is my father around?”

Her voice is
instantly terse and decisive. “Yes,” she says. “I'll have him head down the trail.”

“Oka
y,” I answer. “Tell him I'll pick up
the trail from my end. I'm leaving in about two seconds.”

We hang up,
and I phone Esther to explain what's happened. She's as quick
on the uptake as Claire. “I'll meet you at
the bridge,” she says before I'm halfway through my explanation.

“Bring my snowshoes, will you?”

“I'll bring all your gear.”

THE DARKNESS IS
OMINOUS
beneath the bridge when I pull into the lot
where I think James has been parking the Ski-Doo
— when he's been parking it. On the way I
follow the route he'd be most likely to use if
he brought the Ski-Doo across the bridge, but
it's only a precaution. I'm pretty certain he isn't a complete idiot. With the thaw most of the st
reets in town are bare, and the bridge
itself is dry and completely clear of snow.

By the time Esther's pickup skids to a
halt beside the Lincoln, I've located both the empty parking
shed where he should have been storing the Ski-Doo and
the trail he uses. This isn't hard, despite the
time of day. Once out of the car and
in the open, the darkness isn't complete. We're just
on the far side of a full moon, and the ove
rcast of the last few days has lifted even though
the temperature is well above freezing. James, I
detect, has been up the trail in the last few hours but not back down.

The pickup hasn't come to a
complete stop before Bozo leaps out of the back and
is by my side. She doesn't give me her usual
slobbery greeting, and there's none of the usual
elated fumbling around. She's alert and composed, ready to
work. I'll be glad of her company and her tracking skills.
I just hope I don't need the skills.

Esther has b
rought everything else: snowshoe gear, a light pack,
an eighteen-inch Maglite flashlight, and a boy's axe. I pass on
the wool pants — too warm — but pull o
ff my leather jacket for the wool shirt, which
is lighter and breathes. She sets my snowshoes while
I remove my galoshes and lace up the leather
tops, and she straps on one snowshoe more quickly
than I can put on the other.

“I put your cell phone
in the pack,” she says, handing it to me with the flashlight and the boy's axe. “Go.”

Go
we do, but the going isn't easy, even for
Bozo. The thaw is in its fifth day,
and the snow is wet and heavy. With each
step it slips up into the snowshoe thongs, slowing
me. Worse, off the trail it's rotten and t
reacherous, forcing me to stay carefully atop
the narrow track of the snowmobile so I won't
topple into some barely disguised snag-filled hole.

If I slip from the
trail it's a piss-off, a delay, at most
a minor injury. But James is on a machine that
weighs nearly half a ton. I can suppress what lies beneath that thought, but I can't elude it. By the time Bozo and I are over the
first rise, I'm showing myself technicolour movies of James lying trapped
under the toppled Ski-Doo, chilled, wet, and injured. I
hope to hell he was wearing a helmet.

I have to push
myself to get any pace, and that makes my tender chest
muscles complain bitterly. Screw them, I think. Sc
rew everything. My legs begin to pump in synch with
my heartbeat, the familiar rhythm of the trail fueled by adrenaline.

A kilometre in, the trail
converges with a back road I recognize as leading
to an abandoned machinery dump. The dump, if it's the
one I'm thinking of, is an old gravel quarry cut
into a steep hillside, and filled to bursting with obsolete logging
equipment no one has been willing to take the
trouble — and expense — of recycling legally.
The dump also has a certain notoriety around town. A
couple of years ago some clowns with
M-16
s thought it
would be funny if they shot up the dump, and
one of them caught a ricochet above the ear
and had to be flown to Vancouver to have it
dug out. My theory at the time was that the
ricochet had hit him in a non-vital part of his body. And since he survived, and is back in town minus
his
M-16
and a few parts of his brain but still drinking beer and driving his pickup, I guess I was right.

On this day I'm glad for the road, and never
mind what it leads to. Someone ploughed it a couple
of snowfalls back, and the Ski-Doo's trail follows the shallow
grooves made by some fairly recent visitor to the
dump. For several hundred metres, the going is
swifter. Just before I reach the dump the
Ski-Doo trail diverges again, wandering uphill along the dump's
steep edge. I stop to catch my breath before
heading uphill, remove the flashlight from the pack, and
play the beam along the edge and across the
dump's expanse. There are signs of recent activity
in the dump, and they aren't very pr
etty. The snow is dotted with shiny, dark g
reen lumps — garbage bags. Someone, or something, has been
at them, because the snow around a number of
them is littered with debris. But when I play the Maglite's powerful beam along the upper rim of the slope,
there are no signs of the Ski-Doo having gone over the edge. That's a small relief.

Bozo, meanwhile, is perfectly still, sniffing the air. When
I motion her forward she hesitates, then begins to paw
her way slowly up the slope — not like her.

We're about halfway up the
rise when I spot the Ski-Doo close to the crest
and apparently abandoned. I push myself harder,
playing the beam across the base of the tr
ees near the top of the hill for signs of James.

We're no mo
re than fifty metres from the snowmobile when
Bozo stops in her tracks and backs into me, gr
owling. I spot James at the same instant. He's huddled
in the branches of a scrawny pine tree, about midway up, with his back to me.

A jumble of r
ecognitions hammer me. First, James is okay, or at least
alive and hale enough to have made it into a
tree. Second, he's likely been treed by a
moose or, worse, a bear. Third, a
moose ought to be visible from where we're
standing, so it must be a bear. Fourth, this
is the end of February, and even with
a thaw, a bear ought to be at den.
Fifth, this bear is a dumpsite bear, pr
obably denning inside the wrecked logging equipment stashed in the dumpsite.

If
a bear has James treed, Bozo and I ar
e already too close. I get just a split-second to
consider that and no time at all to study
the options before I hear a throaty cough.
A good-sized black bear clears the top of the hill
on a dead run. It's headed straight for us, and
that reduces my options to just one: run for
it. There's a spruce tree thr
ee or four metres away, about the same
size as the tree James is in, and it
has a solid-looking branch about three metres
above the top of the snow that I might be
able to make. I drop the axe and flashlight, punch
hard with my left snowshoe at the edge of
the snowmobile trail, take a long, lighter step with my right
leg, and launch myself at the branch. But the rotten
crust collapses the moment I step off the trail, the fingers of my left hand graze the branch, and I land in the snow.

I brace myself for the impact without looking up, but
it doesn't come. Instead, there's a thud and a snarl,
and a mass of black fur plunges into the snowbank
not more than a metre away from
me. It's the bear, and it's Bozo.

If I'm lucky, she's bought me enough
time for a second attempt at the tree. I st
ruggle to get erect and recognize my luck
— at least I landed horizontal, not head-first. While Bozo
and the bear disentangle themselves for round two, I
throw myself at the tree trunk,
get lucky, and clamp my arms and legs ar
ound it. The snowshoes are still attached to my feet,
but they don't matter. I couldn't do this normally
, but nothing about this situation is going to rewar
d normality. I snatch at the low branch with
my left hand, throw my body upward, and
as my right hand catches the limb I pole vault myself upwards, out of the bear's reach.

It's a
damned good thing, too. A third try wasn't in
the cards. Bozo is no match for the bear
once the surprise is gone. As I'm twisting my body
so I can see what's happening to her, I
see the bear land a blow that sends her spinning
over the edge of the slope.

No longer distracted, the bear
turns its attention back to its original quarry: me. It might
have been able to drag me from my
still-precarious perch were it not for yet
another a bit of luck. As it crosses the
snowmobile track, it loses its balance and crashes head-first into
the unpacked snow, halting momentarily. This gives me just
enough time to claw my way farther into the branches.
I don't have the time to kick off the
snowshoes. They're awkward, but I'm not performing these gymnastics
for the points, I'm just trying to get my
ass out of harm's way. The real leverage is
coming from my thighs and arms — and fr
om the adrenaline that got me into the tree
in the first place. My cracked sternum doesn't count.