Summer of the Horse Read online

  Every two weeks a new group comes in to replace those going out, a rotation that continues throughout the summer. They arrive by float plane, landing on a nearby lake, or they come in on a small-wheeled plane that sets them down on an airstrip belonging to an outfitter’s camp—a camp that might include a makeshift corral from logs once peeled, now furred by moss and lichen, a few buildings with elk antlers over the door lintels and, if a building is made of plywood, a wall bashed in where a grizzly has walked through as if it were cardboard, having caught a whiff of dried moose blood or someone’s forgotten cheese sandwich.

  Before Wayne became a conservationist, before he was guiding eco-tourists through the mountains, he was a logger and a hunting guide. As we hike along in our search for the horses, Wayne stops to peer into a small dip in the trail filled with rain from a recent storm.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Wolf,” he says, pointing at the paw print, the track appearing magnified through the water.

  We look along the trail for other tracks, for the prints of the horses’ hooves, which will tell us the speed and direction of travel. The signs of movement, of change, are everywhere. It’s how we recognize life. Wayne stops. I stop. Both of us listen for the horses’ bells. I think I hear them, but I’m too unsure to say so. Maybe what I hear is a bird. Maybe it’s the clinking of the halter’s buckle against my shoulder. “There they are,” Wayne says.

  The first time Wayne introduced me to the horses, I spooked them. I moved too quickly, I waved my hands in front of their faces. They could sense my nervousness and became nervous too. Although I’ve come to know them better and have now learned the different dispositions and personalities of each, I still seem to end up putting things on backwards or in the wrong order. Things such as halters. More than once Hazel has tried to shove her nose past my hands as they fumble with what feels like a Gordian knot, as if trying to help or say, Okay. Just stop. I’ll show you how it’s done, and pay attention so you get it right the next time.

  I rehearse the steps in my mind as I walk: Approach a horse from its left side and stay calm. Use your left hand to orient the halter, your right to bring the crown strap over the horse’s large head. I think of Sunny the Belgian—I am sure that if I curled into a fetal position, I could fit inside her skull.

  I walk up to Hazel. Once the halter is on, I have to do up the buckle. Seeing a buckle on a halter and being unable to cinch it up is to see a buckle in a whole new way. How had I failed to notice the tang, like a miniature crowbar with a tapered tip, how it rests in that small groove etched in the right-hand side of the buckle’s rim, the tang’s other end bent around the cross brace that splits the frame in two? How did I not see that the two windows formed by the middle brace are not the same size, the opening between the crossbar and the groove the exact reach for the tang, while the other side is wider, so that the tang, when flicked across that gap, can’t reach the far edge.

  I have twisted the crown strap of the halter, the buckle flipped upside down so that the wider side of the buckle’s frame is closest to the tang. Realizing this makes all the difference when I’ve spent too much time situating the halter and the buckle won’t buckle and now all the other horses are unhobbled and heading with gusto back to camp. I feed the strap through the larger window. The tang can’t catch and I am bewildered, struck by wildness, what I am left with when everything I know has changed.

  It was fall when, for the last time, I left the house I’d lived in, the house where my children had grown up, making their way from kindergarten to university; a home where Christmas decorations were made from playdough one year, clothespins the next, where stories were read one chapter a night, unless the hobbit was in serious danger, then we’d read more, where habits were so comfortable and deep you didn’t even know they were there.

  The house having sold, I’d gone back to wash the floors, the cupboards, to pack up the last of my belongings, and to spend one last night in the house with my daughter. She’d come home from university for the summer to be with her father, the man who had been my husband for twenty-five years, a good husband, but now, somehow, not good enough. On my last night there he was working night shift, his work schedule still something I know off by heart.

  The next morning the sun shone through the lilac leaves whose bushes I’d dug from my grandmother’s garden and transplanted beneath the kitchen window. The shrubs grown so large they required regular trimming to keep them from blocking sunlight through the windowpane—light that had touched our faces as we made toast, poured coffee, made plans for the day. The red-winged blackbirds sang by the pond (scolded, really), my daughter still asleep in her room (no, not asleep; she was still in bed, but we had said goodbye, her face firm and resolute, insisting, as she always has, “I’m fine.”). Outside, I looked up at her window, where she wasn’t sleeping. I looked at the pond, at the trees, at the copper lanterns, with their candles inside, hanging from the eaves of the covered porch. Each look a leave-taking.

  We return with the horses to camp, me leading Hazel, who is anxious because we have lagged behind. Once in camp, the horses are saddled and packed, and our day on the trail begins. Wayne’s horse, Bonus, is spirited and moves faster at a walk than most of the other horses in trot. Bonus tosses his dark mane, his taut neck muscles giving him a regal air as Wayne, his body lean and strong, holds him back as best he can, the rest of the string falling behind regardless. When the distance is such that the other horses are whinnying madly, or a guest at the back is calling to the front, Wayne waits for us to catch up. Usually, by the time we’ve closed the gap, Wayne has already slipped his camera or binoculars back into his saddlebag, and all we see is his backside fielding a trot with an air of yippee-ki-yay.

  But this morning, at the foot of a pass, Wayne stops long enough to show me a dip at the edge of a bank. Where the meadow was exposed to the spring’s full sun, cow parsnip, hellebore, lupines and asters shot up, bloomed and flourished through the summer, and now, with September in hand, their stalks have turned to straw, the flowers fisted into seed. Without a measurable distance between them, the shaded flowers, where the snow was late to melt, are still glossy with an off-kilter spring, their leaves plump with chlorophyll, stamens dusting their brittle neighbours with pollen. Both patches had the same potential to bloom, to make seed, but it was external conditions, the sun with its light and heat, that determined when that potential would be realized.

  “Choice, what choice?” Wayne will say when I go over, again, our choice to make a life together. The first time I heard him say it, it seemed at odds with his pragmatic nature, but I don’t think he was being romantic. Or, if he was, then it was a romance defined as a belief in the necessity to recognize one’s potential. We responded to each other not because we were unaware of the havoc our actions would cause, but because choice, as Wayne said, was not part of the equation.

  But was that really so for me? I might not have had a choice over the resonance I felt, or how that resonance would come, but I could have resisted it. Like the plants at the foot of Bevin Pass, I am compelled by the external world, forces that bring me to yes. To no. For me, there is also maybe. I chose to leave my old life behind. You were bored, a voice says, you wanted an adventure. Yes. No. Maybe there will never be an answer good enough.

  Four

  Where He Comes From

  Wayne’s mother must have loved wild men. Although she was kind and gentle and refused to learn how to use a rifle, she allowed her sons to aim theirs out the kitchen window to take potshots at squirrels and birds. Her husband, Mike, smashed dishes when in a rage. Once, Freda surprised them all by smashing a dish too, then another, until there were no dishes left, at which point, or so the story goes, she threw the kitchen chair out the front door. The chair lay on its side until it yellowed the grass beneath it and the veneer began to blister from the rain and dew. It was Mike who brought the chair back in.

  Wayne grew up
near Hasler Flats, just west of Chetwynd in northeastern bc, with his parents, two brothers and a sister. Their home was set in a forest of spruce and aspen along the Pine River. His grandparents lived on the Pine too, a few miles downstream.

  Southeast of both homes, the Sukunka River enters the Pine after arcing around a foothill that forms part of the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. When Wayne was fourteen, he figured if he could hitch a ride to the Sukunka side of the foothill, ahead of where it joined the Pine, cross the river and then hike over the hill, heading slightly northwest, he’d end up back at his grandmother’s house. She made excellent biscuits and stew. If anyone asked, he would say he wanted to walk from one river to the other for the adventure of it. Maybe he wanted to impress his grandmother. But I think it also had to do with the fact that the two rivers converged, that the Sukunka disappeared into the Pine. Wayne loves to tell how rivers slice through rocks as if mountains were cheese, and that many of the rivers in the north were flowing before the mountains were formed.

  By the time Wayne was fourteen, he was reading everything he could about geology, about the age of rocks and the way they layer and how they grind themselves down. He liked the idea of seeing the present becoming the past. To the southeast of Chetwynd, the Sukunka is in the present; a few miles north, downstream, it is in the past.

  No one else wanted to go with him, so Wayne had his parents drive him to the south side of the foothill and leave him on the bank of the river. After watching the dust billowing behind the tail lights of their blue Volkswagen Beetle, he started to undress. With his boots, socks, jeans and briefs tied to his Trapper Nelson packboard, he made his way across the Sukunka River. In his pack he also carried an axe, matches, a plastic tarp and a sleeping bag. Also three cans of Irish stew and a package of red Twizzlers, a 30-30 calibre rifle with shells, and a hunting knife. It was early September.

  If his father worried about Wayne, he never showed it. That summer Mike had shot a bear in the back, wounding but not killing it. He brought his emptied rifle to Wayne and told him to finish the job, gesturing impatiently in the general direction of where he’d shot the bear. “I gotta go to work,” he said, and went off in a huff. You could say he was trying to teach Wayne how to survive, and that would be true.

  The canvas-and-wood pack was heavy and the cans of stew threatened to throw Wayne off balance as his bare feet slipped over the stones on the river bottom. He knew how to ford a river, recognizing where to cross by the ripples that chopped the water, but the Sukunka still rose to his chest and its northern cold numbed him from the heart down. When he reached the other side, he felt alive and triumphant. His body invigorated, he wobbled about on the stones along the beach, careful to keep dirt out of his socks. He saw the track of a black bear incised in the sand, the print clear and sharp, the fine lines that mapped its calloused pad, the press of each toe. He could even make out the small flame of one claw.

  The trip to his grandmother’s house couldn’t be made in one day, and that was part of the plan. A few yards from a small pond where the clay was rich with minerals, creating a natural lick for wildlife, he set up camp, tying a sheet of plastic between two trees with some rope. He had read many books on knots, and his fingers looped the rope into bowlines with ease. He found two aspen logs and placed them on the ground, parallel to each other. Gathering bits of twigs woolly with witch’s hair lichen from under a spruce tree’s spreading branches, he made a small pile. With his hands cupped around a match, he struck and lit the kindling in one go. He was pleased. He added bigger twigs, and then branches of aspen and willow. Standing over the fire, Wayne was a young man glowing with the energy of independence. Like the flames, he was blazing on his own.

  He ate a can of stew. He thought of the girl in his math class who bought records by the Bay City Rollers and wore a tartan vest. Like many of his friends, Wayne had been growing his hair longer. His father hated it. He heard a splash and saw a cow moose in the pond, close to the edge, licking the mineral-rich clay along the shore. Wayne gripped his rifle and watched. It grew dark, but the moose stayed put. When she did leave, Wayne could no longer make out her form in the night, but as she went he heard her hooves crunch the crisp poplar leaves on the ground, one hoof knocking a wind-fallen log.

  Wayne stoked the fire for several hours. He felt himself suspended in a bubble of light in the midst of a vast, dark universe that went on forever. He was aware of being inside his particular body, his particular bones. Although his parents were Seventh-day Adventists, Wayne no longer believed in God. For him, no one else was on this side of the river. He was alone.

  He heard a twig crack. Then silence. Something, maybe the wind, maybe a mouse, rustled some leaves. He listened so intently that he could track the sound of the wind, hearing it first as a rolling wave, a surf surging between the trunks of the trees and then the clatter of leaves. He heard another splash, and then the quacking of ducks. Finally he let the fire burn down and, curling up in his sleeping bag, he tugged the drawstring tight around his face.

  He was up early. He liked that he was breaking camp, a phrase he had read in books about explorers. He had read everything he could find about wild places. Three Against the Wilderness was his current favourite, a story of homesteading in bc’s Chilcotins. It seemed to him that the people in the story led exotic lives on a wild and perilous frontier. It didn’t occur to him that his life on the Pine River was equally wild, giving him the skills he would need to live in the wilderness himself. He didn’t realize that the wilderness had been pushed north year by year, that the Chilcotins were no longer the frontier, that the frontier was all around him. He walked down to the lick and saw fresh tracks of moose, of deer and elk—a life going on. In the night he had not been alone; he’d been a part of that life; he’d been their neighbour.

  Wayne shouldered his pack and struck through the heavy forest where aspen windfall slowed him down and thorns from the rose bushes caught on his jeans. Then the sloping hill rose sharply, the aspens growing smaller and the grassy slopes giving way to a band of grey sandstone. Looking for a way around the cliff face would have seemed a failure to him, so he climbed higher on the rock, his rifle in one hand, an axe in the other. He reached a broad horizontal ledge that led to the left and around a corner. Above him, the face of the rock bulged outward. The ledge grew narrower but there was something at the heart of this boy that knew only forward. The rubber soles of his hiking boots gripped the edge of the ridge but then slipped on a loose piece of rock and his pack swung sideways. He fell. Nothing in the moment of his falling seemed in any way a part of him. He landed on his back, hard, head facing downhill. He felt the weight of his pack slam into his shoulders before he slid down the scree, through bramble bushes, his body coming to rest against the trunk of a small aspen. His axe had left a deep gash in the stock of his rifle but his bones were unscathed. At first, he was stunned by his fallibility. Then he was amazed by his intactness, a kind of shock that helped him realize he was a part of the mortal world.

  He paused, ate a Twizzler and considered a safer route. It took him a few hours to climb a grassy slope that brought him to a crest. He began to work his way along the slope of pine and aspen, the forest thickening with alder and willow and then small bogs with black spruce that he had to pick his way through carefully, so as not to get sucked into the mire. Now he had to use his navigation skills, finding markers as guideposts. As he made his way through the thick bush, over moss and past shrubs of Labrador tea, he watched the sun and made sure he kept it at a constant angle.

  The mountain sloped gently downward now, and finally, occasionally, he could catch a glimpse of the deep valley of the Pine. He felt a sense of comfort as well as disappointment that his adventure was coming to a close. He reached a rough road that descended to the riverbank. He would cross the river and then he would make his way past the beach and up onto the highway that led to the driveway of his grandmother’s house. He looked back at wher
e he had come from; he looked ahead. He knew where he was and where he was going.

  Chrissie gets braver with members of the expedition.

  Five

  Ulla

  Ulla, one of Wayne’s pack horses, had given birth to a foal in the spring. All during our first summer together, Wayne worked to gain Chrissie’s trust. As I watched him spend time with the young horse, quietly walking around her, standing close but not interfering, I could see my own shyness reflected in Chrissie’s. I could see how both of us were becoming more used to the trail. Parts of me were growing calmer too, less worried about riding Hazel, my confidence building to where I might click my tongue for Hazel to go and mean it. And tasks like setting up tent poles or putting a bit into a horse’s mouth caused me less fluster than they had at first.

  If I managed to get my riding horse saddled and bridled and ready to go in time to help with the pack horses, it was always Ulla’s gear I went for. Ulla didn’t spook easily. I’d scan the horse crowd looking for a heavy-set dark bay. She’d stand quietly, tolerant of me even if I put the pack saddle on backwards or if I forgot that the blanket goes over the pad and I needed to take the whole thing off and start again. Ulla was unflappable, but also indifferent. She wasn’t a horse who vied for human attention. And I was okay with that, my feelings leaning more toward gratitude than kinship.

  While Ulla went about her quiet way, her nimble grey foal, Chrissie, would run up and down the pack line, playful and spirited by curiosity. When we stopped on the trail for lunch, Chrissie would come over to sniff our waxed cheeses and tins of fish. If she was feeling extra brave, she might nibble the brim of my hat. By late August, Wayne was able to place his hand on Chrissie’s neck, to stroke her back and feed her alfalfa pellets out of his hand.