Gandhara

Gandhara

by M.G. Warenycia

The palette was all earth tones, each one muted like if the artist had blended a good deal of titanium white into the ochres, purples and daubs of terre verte – the effect of dust hanging in the stagnant air of the broad, level valley. Only the sun was bright – cruelly bright, scorching the sand, the stunted trees, and the line of low mud-brick houses, and the eyes of the soldiers who dared meet its merciless stare. Kyle imagined the paints; the actual, physical paints one would have to use to paint the scene, because it was one of his last clear memories of the life before he found himself clad in CADPAT, riding in a LAV through this Benadryl fever-dream of a land…

There had been a classroom discussion; the Art teacher’s position could be easily surmised, but the students were left to go at each other, provided there was no swearing or insults. They had been studying Neoclassical and 19^th century art, generally. Much money had been forked out for beyond-budget-allocation supplies. The debate must have broken out because of something in the papers that morning. Everyone’s family got a newspaper back then. One faction said it was Imperialism; Neo-Liberalism…the military-industrial complex needed an enemy, after all. Mahmoud, whose family immigrated from over there, told about the British and the Russians…Gabriela and Masha, indignant and keen to display their erudition, countered with a revisionist narrative of the immense social progress – hydro dams, atheism and girls’ schools – brought by the noble Soviets, inspiring Mahmoud to mutter a curse and Lukasz to drop his pen and plan a rebuttal. Jenna mentioned that she’d seen that newly-released documentary-movie about the Canadian citizen who traveled to visit her sister right before the war…Kyle saw through them. He said his peers wanted high-status jobs, with big salaries and bigger titles, which going to university would get them (so everyone believed). They knew they were going to run straight to that, so it was ridiculous to see them struggling to act like they really cared and were somehow authorities on events happening ten thousand kilometres away, given that actually participating in resolving any of these problems or helping any of these people they claimed to care about was the last thing in the world they would ever do. Kyle flung down his paintbrush like a judge slamming down his gavel. They, he told them (everyone was well aware that the army offered a great salary and job benefits), would sooner be homeless and begging on the street than pick up a gun and go achieve any of the grand global political goals they talked about as being so essential to the salvation and progress of the world.

Masks of outrage appeared around the huge, U-shaped arrangement of connected desks at which the three dozen teens sat to draw and paint, but no articulate speech rose to counter Kyle’s. He smirked, knowing he was right. So tedious…and they were going to spend four more years congratulating themselves, competing to dress the part of artists and activists, before they jumped into the rat race, just like their parents, whose blasé materialism they so loved to critique!….

Between that debate and this was a gigantic blur, less real than the sweat-drenched dreams he got in base before each patrol…

…Jean-Léon Gérôme, Edwin Lord Weeks, Horace Vernet…

Kyle wiped his goggles with the sleeve of his glove. It was better sitting on top than buttoned up inside. Bullets could one one easier, true, but the sense of being sealed in and blind was more unnerving than a somewhat elevated risk of a gunshot. The LAV moved as fast as it could, which was not very, keeping scrupulously to the centre line of the “road.” The dusty line narrowed and their vehicle slowed as the houses clustered densely – curious, in light of the vast, wild space stretching in every direction, limited only by the snow-capped fringes of the Central Highlands to the north and east, and, to the south, the Registan Desert, which flowed into others of its kind, farther than the eye could see or the mind fathom walking. It was as if the houses themselves were afraid of something, huddling together like that. Strangely, Kyle had observed no ruins nor even mounds or middens to indicate that anyone had ever lived in the vastness beyond the little hamlet. The wars had been going on for thirty years; surely something would have remained at least a few decades in the arid climate.

“Cresswell!” The sergeant’s voice barked from inside the hull.

Kyle snapped to attention.

“Check the goddam map again. No way in hell this is the right road. ‘Sposed to be a straight run to the ANA base once we got off the highway.”

Kyle pressed the map flat against the LAV’s roof to stop it from flopping as they bounced along. “Uhhh…yep, Sarge…”

“Yep what?!?”

“Yes, you’re right. It’s supposed to be a straight run…supposed to be. I guess we’ve just been moving slow; road probably isn’t what it was when they drew the map.”

The sergeant paused, then grunted. It was as much of a concession as one would ever get from him. They had, indeed, moved more slowly than they might have in a rugged and well-maintained vehicle over the dry ground. The schedule was planned precisely in advance, but, unconsciously, there had been a silent collective decision to do otherwise. The LAVs and Nyalas which comprised the convoy were harder targets than the Humvees of the Americans or the hapless supply trucks which careless Soviet commanders dared to dispatch along these routes, but this was not a place one could feel safe in, no matter how heavily armed or armoured. Kyle now and again doubted the wisdom of trying to see see as much of the country as possible. Knowing is supposed to alleviate fears, but, he’d discovered, it doesn’t always work like that.

Many people lived in the village: that was obvious from the tidiness of the dwellings (notwithstanding the abysmal poverty of the place). Someone ate the fruits heaped in polychrome pyramids and someone made use of the kaleidoscope arrangements of copper pans, silver teapots and gaily enameled thermoses stacked and hung in narrow shops whose awnings extended to the street. One could be forgiven for assuming that women were an extinct species in the area: not a single one was visible. Here and there, male figures were glimpsed, squatting in doorways, leaning on a windowsill, singly or in wordless conclaves of three or four, cross-legged and brooding over tea upon a dais behind unglazed windows. Kyle squirmed under the sun’s spotlight, straining to make out the details of the faces of his audience.

Somehow, he decided, it would have been less threatening if they’d been confronted directly by the village headmen, or if they’d found the valley abandoned. That would have been creepy, if they came through at night, but not so much in the afternoon, or so he reasoned with himself.

He carefully registered each watchful figure, establishing a type for his memory. The country was a collage of images; images whose meanings were inscrutable as ancient hieroglyphs: whether they spoke Dari, or Pashto, or Uzbek, he could not tell and would not understand…

“The broads are smoking hot underneath those sacks they wear,” a ruddy, distillery-scented corporal had insisted in a Kabul hotel where they’d gone for some training symposium, part of the eternally vague ‘hearts and minds’ strategy – mostly sitting through PowerPoint presentations by cherubic do-gooders from overfunded NGOs who’d leave the country as experts after three weeks. Kyle was intrigued. It had been drilled into them in training that they were to behave themselves. On the other hand, the idea of a war zone – especially a Third World War zone, as a place where men – especially men who, in their own country, were, to put it bluntly, not high up on the social ladder – could satisfy their every desire without consequences had been taught to him by endless reruns of ‘80s action movies set in ‘Nam (which the Americans always won on the silver scree). None of the delays, pesky and expensive courting rituals, interactions with in-laws, and other pretenses which might prevent one from having his way with even a small town diner waitress…no separation between Will and Action, he philosophized. Some Japanese samurai writer he’d first learned about in karate class had a quote to that effect…

The frequent risk of violent death was the bargain that justified the fantasy; made it believable according to a cosmic sense of justice. Unfortunately, soon after arriving in country, Kyle understood that there was no “me love you longtime” here, and his commanders were simply trying to minimize the amount of men who died or caused their comrades’ deaths on account of irresponsible recreation. Not that tantalizing rumours didn’t float around the smoke pit from time to time…

Kyle was shaken from his meditations by a subtle alteration in the terrain from what he must have subconsciously expected. Neither he and his buddies nor any foreigners in decades had driven upon this stretch of unpaved road, but Kyle had been on enough journeys in country to recognize that something was not as it ought to be – if things were ever as they ought to be there…

When his brain finally processed it, his next thoughts were fear as to what he’d missed in those tens of seconds which had elapsed right before. The fields on either side of the road were lush. Obscenely lush…In most of the region, wheat or barley was the principle crop, but, increasingly, the farmers here and in neighbouring Helmand Province had taken to planting corn…”Food security,” all those UN initiatives…the real reason was because corn grew fast – if you grew corn, you could get a food crop in before winter, on top of the cash crop, which was opium. Wheat or barley weren’t fast enough to beat the Afghan winter and, if, conversely, you went all-in for opium, you might get cash, but cash couldn’t always guarantee food in a land which was wracked by famine only a decade earlier. And, if western and ANA troops came by, you might end up with neither cash nor food.

Yes, grow corn, the officials nodded in approval. They didn’t need to be so many convoys or air drops of food – always vulnerable to insurgent ambush. A few weeks earlier, Kyle’s unit had supervised a platoon of ANA troops as the latter whirled metre-long canes like slo-mo lawnmowers, moving up and dowin in a line, severing the heads of the flowers which had been the only guaranteed income of the farmers. The kevlar and ceramic plates Kyle sweated under didn’t protect him from the gazes of the locals; gazes which oozed a hatred he could never understand because he had never experienced a world in which a momentary decision could condemn someone’s children to destitution. The mood of relief lasted until summer, when the corn was dense and eight feet tall. Then, it was time for regret…

An epiphany rolled into his head as they rumbled along: “Civilization is the state of being in which one’s ideas exist separate from material consequences…We are civilized…”

* * *

“You break it, you buy it!” The hoarse, thickly accented exclamation caught Stepan and Sophie off guard. Everyone had heard the line somewhere, but usually from stock TV characters in movies which could not be produced today.

“Sorry, ‘scuse me,” Stepan’s hands were numb with terror lest the sculpture touch anything else on that cluttered, seemingly deliberately wobbly shelf and thereby precipitate a domino effect, shattering both porcelain and Stepan’s desire to show his face in there again.

The sculpture attracted him because it was such a unique version of something so commonplace – commonplace, at least, for Chinatown, or, for that matter, in any self-consciously ‘spiritual’ bourgeois house downtown as well as unconsciously sincere ones in the suburbs to the north. It declared itself through use of the basic artistic canon that it was Buddhist and represented either Buddha himself or one of the bodhisattvas who more or less fill the role performed by saints in Catholic Christianity. The material, however, was unusual: a kind of slightly waxy stone, or earthenware rendered to resemble stone, with a nearly uniform yellowish-grey colour…not the jade, fake jade, glazed ceramic, agate or bronze which were typical for sculptures of such subjects. It could pass for an antique easily enough, especially in the less-than-ideal conditions for analysis present in the cramped, dimly-lit curio shop.

There was something in this sculpture, though; something ‘about’ it that achieved a powerful response somewhere deep in Stepan’s soul, though he hadn’t the slightest interest in Buddhism and only superficial knowledge of it. The sculpture possessed an essence akin to, yet not the same as, that of the red lacquered chests with brass-fitted drawers, or the worm-eaten, vinyl-bound copies of sutras and Maoist exhortations, or the tenebrous inkstones which some silk-robed scholar might have used to write the Qing imperial examinations – items left by those who long ago left this world, or sold off by their children; a quality inexplicably both creepy and entrancing.

Supper was very late, to allow for the darkness to become complete and everyone to finish with the business of the day. Their shopping hauls were laid out on or around the coffee table, which, as it was in the house of Sophie Belzer’s Beaches-dwelling dentist and psychologist parents, was huge and carved from solid Javanese teak. A mutual buddy, Delilah Brunton, had come after doing overtime at a community centre in distant, derelict Etobicoke, to share in the smorgasbord of snacks and to watch the screening of Death on the Nile (the David Suchet version, of course) in 65-inch plasma screen glory.

The movie had barely established the jealousy between the nervous socialite and her new husband’s ex-fiancé when Sophie’s father entered to fetch something from the adjacent computer room. “Don’t mind me, just passing through…Hey! Where’d you guys get this?” He halted, transfixed. The movie watchers turned to see that his attention was directed towards the Buddha head which Stepan had purchased.

“Uh, I don’t remember the name of it, but it was one of those narrow little trinket shops in Chinatown, the ones that sell all kinds of antiques and knick-knacks and things,” Stepan answered.

“Gosh,” Sophie’s father exhaled meditatively, tapping, then gently rubbing the sculpture with the tip of a finger. “Me and Sophie’s mom, before we got married, we traveled all over there – Afghanistan, I mean.” He shot a sideways glance towards a small rug hung on the wall behind the dining table. “The Hippie Trail, they called it, because, I suppose, that’s what we were. Traveled – adventured, really, you could say, because it was all on camels, or beat-up old Land Cruisers and those hand-painted buses…no electricity until you got to a city. It was safe, too, which is the craziest thing about it…learned to play the rubab – like a hybrid of a guitar and a mandolin. Well, I tried, anyway.” The younger folks could tell he savoured the stories which were obviously playing themselves out in his head, though it seemed he was describing not just a strange locale but an alternate dimension. Snapping out of his reverie, he asked, “How much did you pay for it?”

“Uh, twenty-five bucks?”

“Twenty-five bucks?” Mr. Belzer inquired of the sculpture, which stared mutely back at him, unbothered by his material concerns. “Nooo! You’re joking?…But, this…” He tapped it some more and held it to the table lamp. “Gosh. If your grandpa was still alive, Sophie, I’ll bet he’d have loved to have a look at this. Honestly, for the life of me, it looks like it’s genuine. You know they had a Greco-Buddhist kingdom then, before Islam? Their art was a mix of east and west…Huh…” He walked off in a daze. Sophie, Stepan and Delilah did not really believe in his speculations. Regardless, an exotic perfume seemed to suffuse the atmosphere and, while nothing changed about the room or the movie on the screen, they felt themselves subtly connected, as if by an invisible portal, to something else – not merely an ancient kingdom, and not quite the place on the news, but, maybe, to all those things and to something more which the mind could only almost imagine…

* * *

The Nyala was pulling ahead…well within sight on the mostly straight road, but it wasn’t how they’d been trained. Instinct was taking over the convoy, Kyle saw. Sarge didn’t see it, or at least nobody said anything. Kyle double-checked. Not imagining things, nope. His LAV’s driver also didn’t notice it. It was as if the drivers of the nimbler and the more sluggish vehicles were unconsciously adhering to the exact same level of of urgency on the steering wheel and gas pedal.

The orchards weren’t too bad – the spaces between the trees didn’t grow grass, couldn’t hide much. The melon fields were harmless, as were the wheat and rapeseed. Endless ribbons of green and yellow under an endless, milky cyan sky. Kyle was going to ask Corporal Alexander, the driver of their LAV, if they were going in circles: how did the road keep going on and on as it was? He waited for someone else to ask first. Noone did. He kept silent.

In a moment too gradual to notice and too swift to reach to, the level of the ground rose and the road began to move left and right, then left and right again. Not sharp turns, but the world before them began to shrink and what was behind them disappeared. A settlement came into view. Not a cluster village; just a double line of houses that shared an affinity with each other because they had nothing else to associate with, besides their people-less fields. These fields were small, divided by banks and hedges, hemmed in by outcroppings of dusty stone topped with thorny, dwarfish trees. The villagers grew much corn, and, behind the tall corn, undoubtedly there were poppies. Only the verdant health of the crops persuaded Kyle and his squadmates that they hadn’t, in fact, wandered into some parallel dimension or haunted zone where they were the only human beings. The architecture didn’t help. Everything was disturbingly timeless. Kyle searched in vain for a pane of glass, a plastic signboard, a scrap tire or sheet of corrugated metal roofing – something to prove they were not lost within a waking nightmare.

And nobody said anything! Were they blind to it? Was he mad? As these thoughts rushed in, Kyle noticed that the vehicle ahead of them had vanished around a shallow bend – who knew how far? He went into panic…

“Hey!” A voice of salvation. Corporal Alexander hit the brakes. “Listen, Sarge, Cresswell, this ain’t right…” The three men held conclave atop the LAV, various maps unfolded for comparison. Reading and rereading aloud the place names and plotting the distances with their fingers and the map legends, the two NCOs came to the same conclusion, confirming to Kyle that he wasn’t insane. They should have got in sight of the ANA base by now. Otherwise, they must have made the wrong turn somewhere. This, they agreed heartily on, yet Kyle could not help witnessing that, for all the increasingly insistent jabbing of digits on paper and despite the ever more voluble recitations of topographical names, none of the mentioned routes really resembled the one they had taken and no marked place quite matched the habitations they were now moving amongst.

“You think somebody should go ask one of them?” Kyle whispered.

“What?” Alexander barked back.

“I…” Kyle coughed, forcing his voice higher: “I was thinking, maybe we could ask somebody where we are,” nodding towards the low earthen courtyard of a farmhouse.

“These damn maps, eh,” The Sergeant opined with an unsettling amount of confidence. “Half of ‘em are from when the Russians were here. The way these people live, stuff’s bound to look different. Some of them highways are probably nothing but dirt and grass now.”

An exchange of glances decided that Kyle and the Sergeant would go inquire while the rest of the crew waited at the ready – the Sarge, for authority and the smattering of Pashto phrases he could string together, and Kyle for an extra gun. The farmhouse was the biggest in the settlement. It offered the best prospect of an owner who knew something of the territory beyond the boundaries of the village fields. Too, the wide courtyard – whose walls, on closer inspection, were composed largely of integrated outbuildings – offered a clear field of fire for Corporal Alexander and Private MacEachern as they kept watch, fingers on the triggers of their C7s.

Neither Kyle nor the Sergeant spoke at first. Anyone inside would know they’d arrived. The silence of the courtyard made the powdery dust crunch like gravel beneath their boots. A quern-stone sat under thatched eaves; a low well occupied the center. The unglazed windows and doors were of rough-hewn wood set in the clay of the walls. No flags to show allegiance. Inside his head, Kyle was still longing for a hubcap, a motorbike propped against a wall; a radio sitting on a window sill, anything to share the eerie sensation which he knew, yet could not trust, was a paranoid delusion.

The Sarge calleed out, “Salaam Aleikum! Umm, khe-chare! Za da Canada pauz. Canada army!” Without turning to face Kyle, he argued, “Somebody lives here! They gotta…”

“Scared maybe?”

“Or…Whatever. Doesn’t it bug you?”

“…” Kyle could not, under the constraints of the moment, articulate why the place creeped him out, even if he had a clear picture in his thoughts, no adequate verbal explanation could make it through the pounding of his heart in his throat. His hands clutched the rifle tighter, as much because of its polymer and aluminum nature as its lethal functionality.

“Like somebody took away all their animals…” The Sarge hissed.

“Animals?”

“You know. Farms. Should be animals. Goats, chickens, donkeys. Don’t look at me like that. You think Hadji’s plowing his fields riding around on a frickin’ John Deere?”

“No, I…hmm…” Kyle swept his rifle side to side, imagining shadows. The five p.m. sunlight was playing inscrutable tricks. It was so unnatural, even though this was as close to Nature as anyone had lived since the advent of agriculture. They finally stepped past the well – neither was ready to try the main entry yet. “You ever listened to Art Bell on the Radio?”

“Art Bell?”

Kyle shivered from embarassment. “You know. Or George Noury. Coast to Coast AM, that kind of show.”

“Satellite radio?” Kyle at each step expected a stingy rebuke form his Sergeant but, instead, the more experienced soldier was surveying the house, eyes darting left and right, back and forth, never resting, never finding what they were hunting for. As if with great exertion, he took a step back. Speaking coldly, “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about…”

The pair stood, guns at the ready, unsure how to deal with the situation. Walk back to the vehicle and tell everyone they didn’t get directions because they got the heebie-jeebies first? Then again, they both understood they would not find anyone inside to ask for directions.

“Hey, Sarge,” Kyle tilted his head to the left. The Sarge followed his lead. “Look!”

In the far left of the courtyard, perched on a gnarled and ossified apricot tree, was a small object, evidently animate though barely distinguishable from the tree itself. A second later, the two men made it out: a small tawny owl, sleepy, watchful…

Kalashnikovs rattled all around, multiplied in echoes off the walls. Somewhere, behind them, an ancient Enfield boomed and there was a fateful ‘whoosh.’ They dove behind the coping of the well, as it was the only solid cover in the middle of the courtyard; rifle muzzles seeking for something to shoot at. Then there was an explosion like metallic thunder, and Kyle knew a rocket-propelled grenade had found their LAV.

* * *

The museum employee beamed with pride as he strolled, hands clasped behind his back, through the interlinked rooms. The ceiling appeared almost black; the outside world did not exist once visitors were drawn towards the items, hermetically sealed under glass, bathed in lights that glowed rather than shone. The sober pediments, the fortress-like doorless gates that opened from each chamber into the next – he savoured the cocktail of coziness and intrigue which had made him fall in love with the R.O.M. as a child: thus, he knew he had succeeded – if, after a stressful adolescence and meandering career path, the magic found him again, it would find others, too. He turned to his companion, who was not a fellow R.O.M. employee but rather a longtime friend invited for the occasion: a journalist who worked at the Toronto Star. A third, a woman who taught international relations as an adjunct professor at the U of T, had come as the plus-one of the second.

“I wish you’d put on something this nice for some of the other, er, ethnic-themed exhibits,” remarked the journalist. “I mean, the lovely things you’ve done with the walls and the specific décor, and blending the displays of the artifacts with things in the present day. Time is a spiral, or whatever the saying is.”

“What? Oh, I’m afraid it’s an exceptional case.,” the curator confessed. “The plasterers, painters – even though a lot of the decorations are just styrofoam and plaster underneath – running a museum isn’t exactly a high-profit-margin business. We decided it’s time for a retrospective. It’s not every day, or even every decade, honestly, that Canadians find themselves enmeshed – like it or not – with history. We kind of live outside of it most of the time, if you think about it. And, too, it’s sort of a way to show that we have a role to play in the community, as a site of shared learning, shared memory; the idea that history and science shouldn’t just be something shoved to the side, just for the ivory tower, scholars and school trips, you know?”

“I always felt the same way myself,” the adjunct professor jumped in on the side of the curator. “All those years and we never really confronted things. We never really understood what we were there for or even where we were, if you get what I mean.”

“Totally agree,” her journalist companion insisted, seeking common ground as he pointedly examined a millstone and an arrangement of copper utensils backed by an explanatory text plaques and black-and-white photos of Soviet helicopters and troops patrolling the very site where the items were dug up. Alongside these images were others, in colour, but otherwise no different except for the models of the helicopters. “They had me help out with the Remembrance Day coverage for a couple years; twenty-twelve, twenty-thirteen. Half the interviews you couldn’t use, or, I felt we shouldn’t. Jingoistic patriotism. Everybody believed in ‘the mission,’ or else they had to pretend they believed in it, to be polite to everyone else there. ‘N, like, okay, I get it, thank you for your service and all that, but not one of the veterans I interviewed – I’m not exaggerating – not one single one of them could speak any of the languages they talk over there. I’m not talking fluently, I mean at all. None of them knew anything about Islam, except no pork, no booze, and cover your women. And I have to keep a straight face, all polite, but the whole time I’m thinking to myself, ‘we were over there for how long?’ What a shit show…”

“Ugh!” The professor grunted in disgust. “I’m sure the local customs didn’t stop them if they wanted something. You, your buddies, all with guns, no police, nobody to interfere…That’s the problem with armies in modern democracies. Aaah, whose book is it I’m thinking of? Maybe it was on JSTOR? There’s these lofty goals, but as the people sent to execute them are, you know…Of course, even if it was all educated experts that we sent over there, they would struggle with how to implement ideas like ‘nation building’.”

“And we hand the task over to the kids who, when we were studying in class, they were blowing up frogs with firecrackers and dropping out in Grade 10,” the curator lamented, perusing inlaid Qajar pen boxes.

“Exactly!” the academic huffed. “A lot of the kids who sign up just want to get away from their stepdad’s belt and to go kill people, legally. How do you build a nation, win hearts and minds with that? It was a pipe dream! I’d be scared if I found out someone like that was living in my building.”

“That’s partly why we put on the exhibit,” the curator offered. “We never asked, collectively, what to make of it.” He smiled slightly at the dense cluster of attendees, eagerly milling about, looking as if they might divine some secret of their generation’s national identity if only they contemplated the art and artifacts with sufficient intensity.

“I’m just glad we weren’t stupid enough to go down the road the Americans did in Vietnam,” the journalist declared.

“We couldn’t have,” the curator affirmed. “We’re more educated now. People ask questions. Plus, it went on so long. If you can’t tell anyone why you’re there and what you mean to achieve, you’re not going to get a whole bunch of university graduates with a future ahead of them rushing to sign up, especially not for what’s not really such great pay anymore.”

“The hubris of Empire,” the curator mused, with audible capitalization. “Alexander. Kublai Khan. The British. The Soviets. What did we think we were going to get out of it, when they all met the Fate they did?”

“Hm,” the professor cooed agreeably. “You know, you could say this exhibit you’ve put on, and in the Royal Ontario Museum of all places – it’s really about us as much as it’s about all these lifeless things plucked out of the empty sands where we were groping for meaning. All for ourselves, in a way. No?” She was extremely proud of her cleverly turned phrases. Everyone smiled, but no more than was appropriate for the mood of the event.

* * *

The rapid and ongoing cacophony of explosions had temporarily deafened Kyle. He was not cognizant of how he had come to be inside the building, but he recognized that his belly and ribs were sore and his gloves were scuffed down to the lining in places. His rifle felt light. He reloaded. Guiding the magazine into the mag well was like unlocking the door after staggering how from a bender at the clubs. He had as much control over his limbs as a puppeteer with a string puppet: his body wasn’t quite his anymore – he had enough rights to it to receive fear and pain, yet overall possession of its substance was clearly in dispute.

A ragged wave rattled the walls and roof, smacking a wooden window-beam down towards his feet – he was laying down and didn’t even try to evade it. The enemy was at least squad-sized, probably more, since they liked to have one group shoot while the other maneuvered around for a better vantage or to disengage and escape. However, these were probably local militia, not full-time Taliban regulars, judging by the motley assortment of weapons, which Kyle could differentiate by sound, plus the fact they didn’t seem to have anything heavier than the one RPG. If he could keep from getting killed, sooner or later (probably sooner), backup would roll in from base and push the guerrillas out. Somebody had to be looking for them already, the way they’d been last out on the road among the convoy. Helicopters, perhaps a Specter gunship – that would be even better. Revenge entered his mind – he wasn’t sure why. Now that his chance for heroism had come, he left it untouched like salad at a buffet. Medals didn’t matter, only making sure there was as low a chance as possible that none of those bullets hit him. He pressed his body into the carpet that covered everything on the floor, undulating like a caterpillar until he was in a niche, sort of a closet without a door, between two rooms whose purpose the lack of familiar furniture prevented him from speculating on.

Having no idea of the layout of the structure and where somebody might enter from in pursuit of him, he instinctively fell back on basic training for urban warfare…or tried to. Don’t poke your rifle out of the windows; hang back so you’re in the shadows…works, if you have buddies to watch your flanks. How many of his squad had survived the initial ambush? He listened for voices, but all he heard was some far-away cheers and orders that definitely were not English. None of the reports echoing around the thick moulded-mud masonry was a 5.56 of any type that he knew; only the distinctive ‘pop’ of AK47s and the occasional boom of a sniper rifle. Everything sounded pretty close; no further than the shrub-topped hillocks which his hazy recollection told him marked the natural boundaries of the village. The windows in the room he was in were all absurdly high off the ground. Bandits must be common in this district, he figured. The next room, though, which was larger, had a big, bright window that he guessed might look behind the house, right up to where the bulk of the shooting was coming from, and it was low enough that he could lie down and see out of it while barely raising his body. Or, better yet, peep out using a signaling mirror. The gunfire was just sparse enough that Kyle feared making noise by moving too speedily. This was fortunate, as, right when his helmet was about to pass through the space of the large room, a single powerful bullet tore a plank out of the window that held the shutters, throwing jagged wood splinters everywhere and gouging a bone-white scoop from the azure-painted interior wall. Kyle shuffled back into the previous room, keeping his eyes on the bullet impact. In what must have been three or five seconds, he did a minute’s worth of reasoning: he definitely had not been visible – he was sure he wasn’t deceiving himself here. None of his buddies, alive or dead, were holed up in this portion of the house. The enemy ‘marksmen’ were squeezing off precise single shots at…nothing. It was possible that the enemy didn’t know how many of Kyle’s guys were in there, or where they’d all scattered to, and they were simply dumping suppressive fire in the faint hope that they might hit something. The Talibs were brave enough for suicide bombing but the ones not set on that ending weren’t known for storming buildings with NATO troops still inside. Kyle huddled into a recess where the floating dust sparkled in the noonday shadows. So many vehicles…so many radios…someone would have put out an alert about the engagement and called for backup, he reminded himself again. Hell, it had taken them so long on the road, someone must have started looking for them already. They had to. If he could sit tight, undetected, the relief force would come barreling through in twenty, or ten minutes If he could survive that, or maybe even five minutes without the Afghans finding him…

* * *

Sophie launched into a brief lecture about Kammerer’s theory of synchronicity. After all, wasn’t it true that they had all been in a retrospective mood lately and none of them quite knew why? (Stepan mumbled something about events in the news). And, was it not also a fact that Stepan had only a day and a half earlier found that sculpture in the curio shop – been drawn to it by inexplicable impulses (“I didn’t put it that way,” Stepan cautioned)? Which was, astonishingly, genuine, as they were informed when they brought it to Professor Weisbrot at the U of T’s Department of Anthropology. So what if it was mid-20th century rather than 2^nd century BC? It was still genuine in the sense of being a folk craft, probably produced by the same methods as the ancient original and likewise imbued with the spiritual energies of its place of origin? (The University lab had not tested for the latter characteristics, but both Sophie and Stepan shared popular beliefs about haunting, feng shui and so on in a real, albeit doctrinally imprecise sense).

Now, to top things off, they had been invited to an unofficial reunion dinner, hosted by their ex-classmate, who had become (assistant…) curator of antiquities at the R.O.M. Not the best paid job among alumni of their small, academically focused high school, but certainly one of the coolest. Too, there would be Heather, who’d parlayed her bubble blonde charm into a reporter gig at the Star, Kenneth, who’d become an academic making a high salary on worthless predictions about geopolitics, and Charmaine Ngai. And the venue was the Pomegranate Restaurant at 420 College St., the same one where they have the booths on raised daises with low tables where you can sit on rugs instead of chairs.

“How did you get your invite?” inquired Stepan.

“SMS,” Sophie replied matter-of-factly.

“Eh? The text you got didn’t say anything…cryptic, did it?”

“Why? No.”

“Okay, because mine definitely sounded like something trying to be all cryptic, James Bond-y, like for fun.” He pulled out his phone to be sure of the words. “Lessee…’the four winds may scatter’ – it’s all in caps, by the way – ‘the four winds may scatter our willful souls, but the wheel of samsara spins, spins though we’re blinded by greed and sin, calls us in, bound in an eternal whole.’” He showed the message to Sophie. “I had my data turned off, got mine a couple hours late after you told me. When I tried calling the number back, I got ‘not in service.’ Figured it was a reference to the mandalas we painted in…was it grade 11 art class?”

A doubting Sophie tried calling the number on her phone, with the same dead-end result. “Huh. Look at my message history. It’s actually a different number from the one that messaged you. They’re obviously talking about the same event invite, though, so, I dunno. Maybe like someone using a secret number, like a VPN for your phone?” Her cynical grin switched to a confounded frown when she attempt to call that number which had texted her. It, too, was out of service.

They hypothesized about a hacker, but couldn’t conceive of a motive. Meanwhile, Charmaine and a couple others had messaged to say they were on their way and, knowing some of the guests would be using the subway, Stepan and Sophie knew they would have no cell service to respond to inquiries about potential phone hackers until they were all at the restaurant together.

Confused they were, but there was nothing weird about an informal high school reunion in of itself. Indeed, they’d all talked about doing one now and then over the years. Only, Delilah wasn’t going to come because she was laden with cases that evening; refugees experiencing integration troubles and an addiction ‘workshop.’ Everyone commented on the lovely and exotic atmosphere of the Pomegranate. Only the museum curator, Geoffrey, picked up on the coincidences, sparking a discussion. Stepan still had the Buddha head in his bag. The curator gave his verdict: “See the even pore structure and the even tones over the whole of the head,” he pointed out, scrutinizing it with the magnifying glass in his Swiss Army knife. “On the other hand, there’s no tool marks, like from a Dremel tool. So, none of the stains or patina you’d expect from something that actually dates to the 1^st century AD, which it matches stylistically. But the look is spot-on and there’s no doubt in my mind, this was worked and polished by hand. You’d think they’d at least have sandpaper and lathes. Somebody sure went the extra mile. Bit of a waste for a tourist-trap souvenir.”

Charmaine, whose father was devoutly Buddhist, remarked on how little we can learn about our world merely by looking at its present here-and-now, and lamented the recent politics which split apart people who should be appreciating how much they share together across distance and geography.

“I also got a strange message,” the Star reporter, Heather, sought to be the centre of attention. “But it must have come when I was in the subway. I didn’t think it was related to this here,” she jabbed a fork towards the table, “Hmmm…” She read the message on Stepan’s phone. “No, this was something different; it was about a scoop downtown today, to be near campus to meet an informant talking about sleeper cells and terroristic activism in ethnic student groups downtown, but they never called. I’ve been killing time in a cafe around the block for like four hours. This is a different number, too.” Someone brought up hacking of phones, and the journalist in her fired up. “”All those powers they gave themselves after 9/11, basically demolishing the Charter, did they repeal any of them?” she asked rhetorically.

“Well, the alternative was a danger to public security,” the IR prof conjectured. “You remember how freaked out everybody was back then. Nobody knew when the next one was going to be.”

“Umm, never?” Sophie rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, that is why we were in Afghanistan, after all, wasn’t?” Stepan joined in, deliberately sarcastic. “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here?”

Sophie, too impassioned to grasp his sarcasm, clapped down her teacup. “Fight who? Fight Mulhim? Fight Aksa?” She named two of their fellow alumni, currently distant but remembered fondly or at least without complaint. “That was the argument for Iraq, by the way.”

“Sorry, mixed them up.” Stepan shimmied his glutes upon the rug. “Sophie’s right,” he pleaded. “Gosh, I couldn’t think of killing Mulhim, or Aksa. Ugh, just, ugh.”

Heather stunned him with an angry retort: “So you’re saying their sacrifice was in vain, then?” leaning in, as if she was trying to get his hot take on the mic.

“Of course it was in vain!” Sophie replied for her friend. Looking to the curator, “We chose, or, our political classes chose to send soldiers to die, in the same failed adventures like so many other empires had done before us and which had been a disaster for all of them.” The curator nodded.

“Wha…excuse me,” Heather hadn’t planned on being other than a noble icon of impartiality in any matter of virtuous retrospection. “You don’t think women’s rights, schools, healthcare, safety, all the things we have; you don’t think it was worth it? To bring it to them?” She pouted.

“You don’t win ‘hearts and minds’ by burning villages and raping the local women and boys.”

“Did Canadian soldiers ever do that?”

Sophie hadn’t expected a debate when she accepted the invite, but was now caught in her role, which she felt even more strongly as she noticed that their waiter and the wife of the couple that owned the place seemed to be listening, hovering at the cash desk, curious to hear what the diners on the dais were arguing about.

“Not off the top of my head, but if you are part of an occupying force, and it’s a widespread activity among your comrades…” Stepan, his courage fortified by Sophie’s stand and eager to curry favour with his friend, gave a riposte. “You know, too, what kinds of people join the army…”

“Tell me,” the reporter snorted.

“Uhm, well, like we had this girl at the Starbucks I worked in back then. She went to U of T like us but she was from Thunder Bay and her brother joined the army then, during the war, and she wasn’t having it. Said he was a psycho that she’d never let near a gun. He said straight up, she told us, that he wanted to kill people, legally. That’s it. That was his reason for joining. And other, err, things that go along with that…situation. It got him real excited, apparently. She said it’s basically a system the government designs to get them out of society when they’re young, because, if it wasn’t Afghan villagers, it would be Native hitchhikers on the Highway of Tears or something.”

“Not like the government would care either way, except prison costs more than a soldier’s salary,” Sophie gibed.

“Yep, and she also told us, it’s worse when they come back alive, because they can’t adapt to normal peaceful society, and will just act out all those violent impulses on the public back home.”

“If you found yourself treated like a stranger in the country you were born in and fought to protect, especially if you had PTSD from fighting terrorists with AK47s in a literal hellhole…” Heather refused to abandon her sudden, hawkish position; she who had never seen a gun except on TV or in a cop’s holster. Her friends were taken aback; they had seen the contrarian ‘shit-disturber’ side of her before, but not the apparent sincerity with which she challenged them, on what they had all believed were perfectly mainstream, socially-approved understandings of the events of their formative years.

“More like, abused civilians so the villagers take up arms to get you out of their village…” Sophie scoffed. “As for hellholes, I would rather live in a self-sufficient farming community, if it was my own culture, than how our homeless and addicts and people in assisted housing live. If you want to blame something for crime…”

Charmaine was utterly ignorant of foreign affairs and had been stuffing her face quietly, was triggered into action by the talk of crime. “Actually, my dad is a detective,” – as if this was news to anyone who knew her – “and I remember him mentioning that guys who served over there are hugely over-represented not, like, in murders, but among, like, homeless people or the druggies living in those run-down old house apartments that are like four stories high and brown and ashy on Sherbourne and Jarvis Streets.”

“Trauma,” Heather whispered mournfully.

“But yeah, no, what Sophie or Stepan said, my dad agrees, it’s a psychology issue with the people they send; they’re already a selected group before they go over there. Explains why we didn’t have an explosion of psycho hobos after World War Two, even though way more people served in the army then.”

“Classism, gotta love it, eh?” Heather drawled.

Stepan wondered to himself, ‘what has gotten into you?’

“It’s not rich or poor; it’s psychology,” Charmaine insisted. “The same kids would be growing up to beat their wives, do drugs, get drug, sexually assault if they stayed here, too. At least over in Afghanistan, Somalia or some place the people can defend themselves.”

“You’d shoot a homeless veteran if he asked you for money?” Heather had forgotten her kuku sabzi, nourishing herself instead on moral superiority.

“If I could, oh my God, yes,” Charmaine answered frankly. “Right when I was coming here, walking like fifty feet away from the restaurant, just across the street, this crazy guy stopped me and asked for change. And when because I was startled, I said, ‘change?’, like asking him, he got pissed, ‘You promise? But you can’t deliver!’” She mocked a gravelly male voice. “Accusing me like I’d committed some crime against him or something. I was thinking, what the fuck, I was just, you know, surprised, like anyone would be when some horrible-smelling bearded guy jumped out at me and asked me for money. Then he went on about how my money can’t buy the change he needs and he’s already paid me more than I can return to him, and I’m over it at this point; like, no way, I don’t owe you shit.” Her dining companions listened in worry or awe. “I mean, I don’t mind giving people panhandling some money as an idea, but don’t come at me as if you’re friggin’ entitled. Anyway, I pushed him aside – washed my hands at least five times after I got in here, don’t worry.”

“He touched you?” Several mouths gasped. “That’s assault!”

“Not really, he stood in my way and I had to brush past him or else walk into traffic. It was gross, though, even if you can’t say it’s on the level of sexual assault. The creepiest part was how he laughed when I went away from him and he said ‘enjoy your meal,’ but, I hadn’t even moved to go inside the restaurant yet, and there’s so many other stores and food places on the street.”

“Lucky guess? Dinner hour?” Geoffrey attempted to demystify things.

“I dunno, maybe I telegraphed something with my body language.”

“How did you know he was a soldier? Or are you just bringing it up because of what we’re talking about now?” Heather asked.

“Uhhh, because of his army clothes and boots. Head to toe, only, with all the flags and rank-symbols ripped off.”

“You can buy those clothes at the surplus store in Kensington.”

“Whatever. He gave me that vibe. I don’t think he wanted to hurt me, but it felt like he enjoyed scaring me, or hoping he could scare me.” Charmaine was equally stubborn as Heather. “A menace to society. Women should be able to protect themselves.”

“Hmm…” Geoffrey uttered, trying to keep space open in the conversation while he processed his thoughts. “I am pretty sure I saw the same guy, but he was at the entrance to the subway, leaning against a building near where the steps come out on the sidewalk. Army clothes, sort of a duffel bag but I guess you could carry it as a backpack, with the shoulder strap. I paid special attention to him because he was sitting there, just sitting there, meditating, like a Buddha. If it is the same guy, he wasn’t bothering anybody. Perhaps it’s because your dad is a cop; usually they have had a lot of bad experiences with the law by the time they’re at that stage.”

“How would he know, though?” Charmaine laughed.

“I…I don’t know! Could be it’s the way you carry yourself. People can always tell an undercover cop.” It was hard to claim that the spunky, gregarious Charmaine – all five-foot-three of her, came across as in any way suggesting “police.”

Nonetheless, in her mind, she was very much her father’s daughter. A Facebook post by Stepan both depicting and describing the latter-day ‘artifact’ he and Sophie had purchased in Chinatown the other day was fresh in her thoughts. Buddha…White-people-influenced Buddha…Hipsters, who are sane to the highest degree of boring herdmindedness, will sit cross-legged atop some special, pigeon-haunted nook or pedestal, palms on knees or fingers clasped in a gesture everyone passing by will assume must be a symbol of some principle relating to the energy flow of the universe or other mumbo-jumbo. They do it for attention, fleeing either direction interaction or a thin and disinterested crowd. One never encounters their pseudo-Oriental spiritual practices in the Rouge, let alone Muskoka.

If a hobo is sitting silently, demanding nothing, decrying nothing, then he is either stoned out of his mind or he is attempting to appear utterly shattered and catatonic, that he might excite more pity and faster fill his coin-cup or upturned baseball cap. Neither possibility fit either of the descriptions of the man.

Whatever argument there had been was smoothed over with the geniality induced by a full stomach. Contrary to the norm for reunions of old fellow schoolmates, no one who had bothered to show was established enough in life to inspire soul-crushing shame, nor was anyone poor enough to feel shame and lose all desire to propagate the nation. This state of affairs did not go unnoticed.

Due to the coincidence of their residences’ location and their friendship being maintained better than in former times, Sophie, Stepan and Charmaine left together as the diner party dissolved with much affected adjusting of clothes and patting of bellies.

Charmaine raised the idea before it could escape her: “Which of us was it, d’you think, invited the rest of us?” The others stared at her dumbfounded. “Think about it, nobody was really the ‘host.’”

“Huh,” Stepan was enlightened. “You’re alright. I guess we didn’t notice because we all know each other and nobody’s got a beef, or jealousy or anything.”

“Think harder! You don’t think, maybe, somebody wanted us to beef?”

“Wanted us to have a reunion, and turn on each other? Like something out of Gossip Girl?”

“Well, we all have a history, things we never resolved; went our different ways…” Charmaine’s mental energies surged like a storm-fed river but could not find the right channel to flood into.

Sophie smiled politely. Yet, she bought it. It all did seem too much for mere coincidence. “Was anyone supposed to come who didn’t make it?”

Stepan shrugged. “Don’t know, except Delilah but she wouldn’t do some crazy psychological scheme. And there’s no easy way to figure it out now, is there?”

In silence, trying to think of something else to banter about, they strolled along Dundas Street, taking in the evening tableaux. Stepan meant to pop into an LCBO, since it was nearly closing time and he needed some Taylor Fladgate for the cupboard. Sophie stuck an arm across his chest. “Better not…”

The LCBO was bustling but the sidewalk between them and it contained drama that intrigued, as long as one didn’t smell or touch it. There was one of those stairways flanked by brick abutments which lead to below-street shops in certain old districts of downtown, like College and Dundas-Spadina, usually stores that sell niche goods which don’t pay for above-ground rent, such as anime DVDs, Chinese books, and pet supplies. It was clear from the discussion that this matter involved Tung Hoi Fish Centre and not Star Video, which may have been a defunct shell as far as anyone could tell from the darkness and the sun-faded posters covering the windows. A cold breeze reminded the wandering trio that it was not yet summer and of the importance of regular showers, also…but, for all of them, though only Charmaine would admit it, this was too spicy a scene to walk away from. One participant, backed against the abutment, was a classic downtown ‘street person’: disheveled, ruggedly bearded, clad in an olive drab coat (better burned than laundered). The other participants appeared to be a father and daughter who ran a family business.

The hobo seemed to know both of the shopkeepers – and the law. Only snippets of the conversation were legible past the effects of alcohol, madness and traffic noise. “…See, that’s where you’re wrong, pal,” the hobo said, in a voice strangely familiar. “You can’t do citizens’ arrest!”

“What you mean? I can’t do!” The man, a stout Vietnamese or Cantonese in a striped polo, growled. “This my store! I catch you robbing my store, I arrest you, wait for police.”

“That’s right!” His daughter advanced menacingly, stopping as she wrinkled her nose. “We won’t hurt you, okay, but you can’t just break the law. This is our family’s livelihood!” She had obviously been to university. Her father’s glare suggested he didn’t agree with his daughter’s restrictive use-of-force policies.

“Doesn’t work like that, pal, sorry. To make a citizens’ arrest, you have to actually see me commit a felony and not lose sight of me at all between then and when you make the arrest. If you took security training, that’s exactly what they would have taught you.”

“He’s right, you know,” Charmaine whispered to her friends.

“Smart hobo,” Stepan nodded.

The trio clunk back beyond the corners of a side street where the light of a restaurant patio and a rare ash tree partially concealed them when a cruiser rolled up. Someone had called the cops. There was a broad, confident smirk all over the hobo’s face; his soulful eyes glinting, trusting that reason would prevail over pettiness and paranoia.

The three friends were transfixed. Of course, there was the morbid curiosity of a little drama which affected none of them personally…but there was something extra; some undisclosed ingredient to this moment which gave it a truly irresistible savour…

One of the two cops in the cruiser stepped out and dealt with the situation in textbook fashion, walking between the parties. As the conversation developed, his voice dropped and his eyes widened. He must have handled plenty of weirdos and freaks already, but this was something new.

“Did he say what I think he say? The store owner, I mean.” Stepan was incredulous.

“Yep,” answered Charmaine. “The shopkeeper said the homeless guy is stealing fish. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

“Is that a metaphor for harassing his daughter?”

“Nope…”

As if to double down on the insanity, the shopkeeper demanded the cop search the accused’s pockets to detect if there were stolen tropical fish being smuggled out in them, or perhaps a lionhead or oranda. “Sir, you can’t arrest somebody, as a citizens’ arrest, for something you say happened on a prior occasion, over a week ago.”

“Told ya.” The hobo jabbed his chin at the shopkeepers. “I fought for your rights. But I guess you people miss living under tyranny.”

“Check his pockets!” The shopkeeper demanded, unplacated.

The cop sighed, clearly not wanting to have to handle the suspect or breath the air emanating off him for longer than he had to. “Sir, could you turn out your pockets, just so we can see ‘n be sure for this gentleman’s sake, that you didn’t take anything from his store.”

A barely noticeable tension shot through the officer as the hobo complied with a slowness and deliberation that were a fraction beyond the normal…The trio noticed, too; it was as if the guy meant to manipulate his jacket pockets in such a way that they appeared to be opened, while a small pouch of fabric remained inside the lip of the jacket shell.

If it that was the case, luck was not on the downbeat man’s side. A small transparent object ‘clicked’ on the pavement. The officer picked it up. A vial of something. “You mean to tell me what this is? Hashish oil?”

The hobo maintained a cold silence for a moment. “It’s not a fucking goldfish now, is it?”

“No, no, looks like hashish oil to me. What do you use this for? For yourself? Sell it?”

“To forget the nightmares by which I earned your ingratitude,” the hobo spoke with startling eloquence. “All of you.”

Stepan shuddered. The hobo did not twist his head far enough to actually look at them. Regardless, it felt like he meant to address them; like he knew they were there, although Stepan made sure not to ponder too much whether he was interested in them as mere spectating pedestrians, or as something more…

The policeman did not seem to grasp what the fellow was getting at. His facial muscles twitched nervously; he motioned for his partner in the car.

“…Don’t be scared; I’m not asking you to be scared,” the hobo begged the cop as if he felt sorry for him. “Gosh, eh, isn’t it funny how we can share so much, then some experience comes along; some twist of Fate, and we just…change, man; different directions…and we can’t see the other side. We don’t want to.” Again the man turned, with his shoulders too, this time. For the barest second he made eye contact, or, at least, Stepan imagined he did.

Yeah, for sure, life can be rough sometimes like that.” The cop concurred, edging backwards, hands held ever so slightly away from his hops, elbows starting to bend. “I’m gonna have to take this here though.” He indicated the vial in his hand. “We’re not gonna arrest you on simple possession; I’m okay to leave you with a warning, but we gotta figure out this thing between you and Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen here, ‘kay buddy?”

“You checked my pockets. Did you find anything that could possibly have been stolen from this man’s store – unless he wishes to admit to being a drug dealer?”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“He stole my fish! More five, six fish!” Mr. Nguyen fumed. “You have to arrest him, send him to jail, make him pay back my money!”

The notion of a shoplifter purloining ranchus and cichlids by stuffing them in his coat pockets was food for thought: did he eat them, perhaps cooked in some camping stove made from discarded tin cans? Alas, scholarly reflection on the fascinating topic was interrupted by a new twist in the situation, less bizarre but more likely to make it onto the news. In response to the cop’s gesture requesting assistance, his partner stepped out of the cruiser, hands near holstered nightstick and tazer.

Presumably, the cops intended to prevent escalation by demonstrating to the smelly, belligerent suspect that ‘overwhelming force’ was ready in generous portions and he would be wise to remain passive. It had the opposite effect. Stepan perceived that the hobo’s body and gaze turned to confront the sudden challenge; the shopkeepers were forgotten as if they weren’t there.

“You!” he half-yelled, half-bawled, throat crackling wetly. A wildness overtook him, his character transformed from disruptive yet pitiable street person to a pure, primal threat. The only possible reaction was to stop the threat as quickly and firmly as possible, or, in the case of Stepan, Sophie, Charmaine and the bystanders who’d broken from their commuting and trinket shopping to gawk at the proceedings hoping that someone braver and better armed than themselves would put a stop to things.

The policeman was feeling overwhelmed. He wasn’t worried, though – frequently, more than one sane and fit cop was required to subdue an unruly individual jacked up on alcohol, drugs, and traumatic flashbacks. Nobody was anticipating what happened next, least of all Constable Sutraj Singh Malhotra, who was caught off guard when this one among countless unhoused CAMH clients he’d politely shooed off of commercial premises in his young career would snap like an overstretched elastic, pressing him on top of the hood of his own cruiser before he’d finished telling the miscreant that he understood his difficulties but he had to move along now…

The warping sheet metal, the swearing and shouting of the cops and the chatter over the police radio plunged that section of sidewalk into a vision of urbanity befitting the early season of Law & Order. The three friends’ knees flexed, heads bent low, but nothing save a gunshot ringing out could have driven them from their excellent vantage point. “O-M-G!” Sophie squealed.

“Do you think they’re gonna…?” Before Stepan finished his question, a bursting hissss’ was added to the orchestra of crude violence and the hobo was rolling only the curb, knuckles grinding into his face, throat gagging. The cop he’d just assaulted was still lying bent backwards over the hood, holding out his can of pepper spray with one arm while shielding his face with the other. His partner quickly moved to cuff the offender and drag him into the back seat. Stepan thought about a song he’d encountered on YouTube some years prior: “That’s why I’m riding on the Cherry Beach Express; my ribs are broken and my face is in a mess…”

* * *

Sophie tapped the cannister delicately so that she would not feel compelled to rush to wash her hands after feeding the fish. The swarm of guppies materialized out of the groves of Anacharis and driftwood arches, devouring the ochre flakes like a wind-blown fire devouring a prairie farm. She stepped back and admired the aquarium and its surroundings: the stalwart faux ebony cabinet, the weighty books, the rug with woven Kalashnikovs and Mi8’s behind it carrying a warm red-purple colour scheme to contrast with the greens in the fish tank, and the alabaster sculpture of the ancient sage’s head. Sophie approvingly, then began sorting through DVDs on a nearby shelf. “Brideshead Revisited? The Heat and the Dust?…I’m feeling something languid and glamorous…”

“Sorry,” Stepan wore his anxiety on his sleeve. “I was thinking…”

“Of something depressing? Not allowed here! So we need something to get lost in. Either the Heat and the Dust or…The Night of Counting the Years? Oooh!”

“Not depressing, I suppose, just…do you remember the homeless dude fighting with the cops after we left the restaurant the other night?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t he look familiar to you? His face, if you took off the beard and dirt, of course?”

“Maybe, I dunno.” Sophie pressed a finger to her lips.

“I couldn’t help thinking, afterwards, there was some relationship to his being there, after all of us had reconnected, caught up on old times…”

“I see it, now, hmm…” Sophie’s eyes rested upon the Buddha, sitting impassively in disembodied meditation.

“I couldn’t help thinking, how different our lives would have been, if we’d made a single different choice back then. Agh! Where have I seen that face before?!?”

“It’s…” Sophie mused, barely audible, gaze not moving from the enigmatic sculpture. “It’s a lesson from the universe; a ‘sign’ not to take the path of anger and breaking our own reason with drugs and resentment. Don’t you think? We received a lot of lessons from each other growing up, you’re right. Makes us grateful we weren’t in some factory school.”

“Oh, I was gonna say,” Stepan corrected her, “That he looked like the hobo who used to harass patrons outside the Reference Library, but I think that was someone else. Ate the pigeons, supposedly – at least that was the rumour.”

“Eww! So, The Night of Counting the Years it is.”

終

Gandhara

by M.G. Warenycia

Between that debate and this was a gigantic blur, less real than the sweat-drenched dreams he got in base before each patrol…

…Jean-Léon Gérôme, Edwin Lord Weeks, Horace Vernet…

“Cresswell!” The sergeant’s voice barked from inside the hull.

Kyle snapped to attention.

“Check the goddam map again. No way in hell this is the right road. ‘Sposed to be a straight run to the ANA base once we got off the highway.”

Kyle pressed the map flat against the LAV’s roof to stop it from flopping as they bounced along. “Uhhh…yep, Sarge…”

“Yep what?!?”

“Yes, you’re right. It’s supposed to be a straight run…supposed to be. I guess we’ve just been moving slow; road probably isn’t what it was when they drew the map.”

An epiphany rolled into his head as they rumbled along: “Civilization is the state of being in which one’s ideas exist separate from material consequences…We are civilized…”

* * *

“Uh, I don’t remember the name of it, but it was one of those narrow little trinket shops in Chinatown, the ones that sell all kinds of antiques and knick-knacks and things,” Stepan answered.

“Uh, twenty-five bucks?”

* * *

“You think somebody should go ask one of them?” Kyle whispered.

“What?” Alexander barked back.

“I…” Kyle coughed, forcing his voice higher: “I was thinking, maybe we could ask somebody where we are,” nodding towards the low earthen courtyard of a farmhouse.

The Sarge calleed out, “Salaam Aleikum! Umm, khe-chare! Za da Canada pauz. Canada army!” Without turning to face Kyle, he argued, “Somebody lives here! They gotta…”

“Scared maybe?”

“Or…Whatever. Doesn’t it bug you?”

“Like somebody took away all their animals…” The Sarge hissed.

“Animals?”

“You know. Farms. Should be animals. Goats, chickens, donkeys. Don’t look at me like that. You think Hadji’s plowing his fields riding around on a frickin’ John Deere?”

“Art Bell?”

Kyle shivered from embarassment. “You know. Or George Noury. Coast to Coast AM, that kind of show.”

“Hey, Sarge,” Kyle tilted his head to the left. The Sarge followed his lead. “Look!”

* * *

“I’m just glad we weren’t stupid enough to go down the road the Americans did in Vietnam,” the journalist declared.

* * *

“How did you get your invite?” inquired Stepan.

“SMS,” Sophie replied matter-of-factly.

“Eh? The text you got didn’t say anything…cryptic, did it?”

“Why? No.”

“Well, the alternative was a danger to public security,” the IR prof conjectured. “You remember how freaked out everybody was back then. Nobody knew when the next one was going to be.”

“Umm, never?” Sophie rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, that is why we were in Afghanistan, after all, wasn’t?” Stepan joined in, deliberately sarcastic. “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here?”

“Sorry, mixed them up.” Stepan shimmied his glutes upon the rug. “Sophie’s right,” he pleaded. “Gosh, I couldn’t think of killing Mulhim, or Aksa. Ugh, just, ugh.”

Heather stunned him with an angry retort: “So you’re saying their sacrifice was in vain, then?” leaning in, as if she was trying to get his hot take on the mic.

“You don’t win ‘hearts and minds’ by burning villages and raping the local women and boys.”

“Did Canadian soldiers ever do that?”

“Tell me,” the reporter snorted.

“Not like the government would care either way, except prison costs more than a soldier’s salary,” Sophie gibed.

“Trauma,” Heather whispered mournfully.

“Classism, gotta love it, eh?” Heather drawled.

Stepan wondered to himself, ‘what has gotten into you?’

“You’d shoot a homeless veteran if he asked you for money?” Heather had forgotten her kuku sabzi, nourishing herself instead on moral superiority.

“He touched you?” Several mouths gasped. “That’s assault!”

“Lucky guess? Dinner hour?” Geoffrey attempted to demystify things.

“I dunno, maybe I telegraphed something with my body language.”

“How did you know he was a soldier? Or are you just bringing it up because of what we’re talking about now?” Heather asked.

“Uhhh, because of his army clothes and boots. Head to toe, only, with all the flags and rank-symbols ripped off.”

“You can buy those clothes at the surplus store in Kensington.”

“How would he know, though?” Charmaine laughed.

“Huh,” Stepan was enlightened. “You’re alright. I guess we didn’t notice because we all know each other and nobody’s got a beef, or jealousy or anything.”

“Think harder! You don’t think, maybe, somebody wanted us to beef?”

“Wanted us to have a reunion, and turn on each other? Like something out of Gossip Girl?”

“Well, we all have a history, things we never resolved; went our different ways…” Charmaine’s mental energies surged like a storm-fed river but could not find the right channel to flood into.

Sophie smiled politely. Yet, she bought it. It all did seem too much for mere coincidence. “Was anyone supposed to come who didn’t make it?”

Stepan shrugged. “Don’t know, except Delilah but she wouldn’t do some crazy psychological scheme. And there’s no easy way to figure it out now, is there?”

“What you mean? I can’t do!” The man, a stout Vietnamese or Cantonese in a striped polo, growled. “This my store! I catch you robbing my store, I arrest you, wait for police.”

“He’s right, you know,” Charmaine whispered to her friends.

“Smart hobo,” Stepan nodded.

“Did he say what I think he say? The store owner, I mean.” Stepan was incredulous.

“Yep,” answered Charmaine. “The shopkeeper said the homeless guy is stealing fish. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

“Is that a metaphor for harassing his daughter?”

“Nope…”

“Told ya.” The hobo jabbed his chin at the shopkeepers. “I fought for your rights. But I guess you people miss living under tyranny.”

“Check his pockets!” The shopkeeper demanded, unplacated.

The hobo maintained a cold silence for a moment. “It’s not a fucking goldfish now, is it?”

“No, no, looks like hashish oil to me. What do you use this for? For yourself? Sell it?”

“To forget the nightmares by which I earned your ingratitude,” the hobo spoke with startling eloquence. “All of you.”

The policeman did not seem to grasp what the fellow was getting at. His facial muscles twitched nervously; he motioned for his partner in the car.

“You checked my pockets. Did you find anything that could possibly have been stolen from this man’s store – unless he wishes to admit to being a drug dealer?”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“He stole my fish! More five, six fish!” Mr. Nguyen fumed. “You have to arrest him, send him to jail, make him pay back my money!”

* * *

“Sorry,” Stepan wore his anxiety on his sleeve. “I was thinking…”

“Of something depressing? Not allowed here! So we need something to get lost in. Either the Heat and the Dust or…The Night of Counting the Years? Oooh!”

“Not depressing, I suppose, just…do you remember the homeless dude fighting with the cops after we left the restaurant the other night?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t he look familiar to you? His face, if you took off the beard and dirt, of course?”

“Maybe, I dunno.” Sophie pressed a finger to her lips.

“I couldn’t help thinking, afterwards, there was some relationship to his being there, after all of us had reconnected, caught up on old times…”

“I see it, now, hmm…” Sophie’s eyes rested upon the Buddha, sitting impassively in disembodied meditation.

“I couldn’t help thinking, how different our lives would have been, if we’d made a single different choice back then. Agh! Where have I seen that face before?!?”

“Eww! So, The Night of Counting the Years it is.”

終

《Minivans》

Born it was, in the Reagan years, a transport innovation;

The sluggish box most popular

‘Mid the housewives of the nation.

Waiting in ranks for our regiments –

Like parrots or swarming monkeys –

As we fled scholastic prisonment.

Laden with bags and boxes, canoe on rooftop tossed,

Upon some holiday voyage –

Delights, in later ages lost.

A taxi for the hockey team

And sticks and skates and grub to nosh;

What, to the driver, did all those errands seem?

A steed safe and sturdy, but without pretense;

Choice carriage of suburban moms

Zealous, fretful, yet full of sense.

How silly now seem the petty fears

That wracked our minds in yonder years;

An era’s symbols: quite mundane,

And yet we’d wish them all come back again.

The Drumlin

by M.G. Warenycia

“Monday, May 4, 1981

To Gordon MacDonald,

Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources

580 Booth St, Ottawa, ON K1A 0E4

Re: Report on Survey of the Fermont-Nitchequon Zone

Dear Mr. MacDonald, Sir:

I regret to inform you that the expedition which was undertaken on behalf of the Ministry under the joint leadership of Dr. Fraser and myself has failed to discover any evidence of the predicted deposits of natural gas, nor of any other hydrocarbon resources in meaningful quantities. Due to the unfortunate absence of Dr. Fraser, I accept, in his stead, full responsibility for the failure of the expedition. All observations indicate that the theory, described in the paper co-authored by myself and Drs. Sacher and Catudal hypothesizing the presence of economically significant natural gas deposits along the passive margin at the confluence of the Superior Craton (Abitibi subprovince), the Nain Province and the Grenville Front was overly optimistic. In our defence, the hypothesis was not unreasonable, given the recent discoveries in the North Sea which are now being exploited profitably, as well as other major gas fields found along similar margins elsewhere in the world. It was entirely plausible that the geologic formations of the Shield would prove fruitful. However, as the Minister is only too well aware, prospecting for gas deposit is, at present, an inexact science, barely more advanced than dowsing (albeit considerably more expensive), not to mention the challenges of operating far from major transportation and supply hubs, under the pressures of the current Energy Crisis. I am afraid you will have to inform Mr. Lalonde that they will have to bite the bullet and cut a deal with Alberta as soon as possible.

If the RCMP needs me to explain certain matters further, my apologies, but I cannot tell them anything more that I have said already. Please disregard the more outlandish claims in some of the telegrams I sent you. Conditions were unexpectedly harsh, and the aforementioned challenges of weather and supplies created a great deal of stress and consequent ill health which may have affected my judgment. I would not be surprised if the testimony of the other surviving members is similarly affected.

Accordingly, I hereby resign from any and all roles and duties assumed with the Ministry and I will not respond to any further offers of employment.

Sincerely,

G. Herzog-Belzer, PhD, KNAW, FRS”

A hastily scrawled post-script to the above letter read: “Gord, as a professional and as a friend, I advise [‘advise’ was crossed out] implore you not to send out any more exploratory missions to the region marked on map. If anyone in the Ministry tries to suggest it at the review, shoot them down. There is nothing there.”

That letter to Gord MacDonald in the spring of ’81 was the product of my fevered brain, troubled by the experiences cryptically referred to therein as well as by the painful task of trying to persuade Gord, who had passionately defended my cause at the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources, as they used to call it back then. Gord fought tooth and nail to secure the funding for the expedition which the late Dr. Fraser and myself were to lead into the zone lying between Fermont and Nitchequon. God knows he paid for it. Cabinet made sure of that. Jeopardizing the relations with Alberta, which were already tense because of the National Energy Program? It looked bad. It was bad. And you better believe the folks out in Whitehorse would have liked to see the prospecting grants sent their way instead.

Well, the Albertans could laugh and say their ‘we told you so’s’. I did my best, hanging around the bars by Parliament Hills for a couple weeks after, dropping rumours and fuelling gossip to make sure that they had plenty of reasons to feel smug. Not that I cut a very authoritative figure. I doubt any of those oilmen or the federal bean-counters watched many TVO documentaries; my face wasn’t well known in those circles and it was the ‘Fraser Expedition,’ not the Belzer Expedition. Not to mention, I could tell the bartenders were thinking about their liability before they passed me my first drink. If they’d seen what I’d seen, or felt what I felt, out there…why, they’d have offered it on the house. Of course, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone just to get free drinks.

Our original report is stamped and filed; our expedition branded an abysmal failure – and now there’s probably nobody in the whole Civil Service who remembers the harebrained scheme. Good riddance! It disturbs me, though, that there’s people nowadays who are talking that because they’re taking gas out of the seabed off Labrador that it would be a swell idea to go mining the stuff beneath the glacial flats in the interior. Easier than building platforms, right? The idiots. If you’re gonna mine, you’ll need camps, and they’ll probably be year-round, too…it’s cold but it’s not the high Arctic. And then you got these people on the internet, going into these abandoned mines, ghost towns and the like, hunting the next creepy picture or tape of ‘found footage.’ I saw one blog the other day, some guy and his buddy took their snowmobiles out to one of those collections of silvering shacks among the ice-gorged valleys. They use it as their hunting camp; leave the snowmobiles, gas and stuff in the sheds. I don’t know if they stay overnight. If they did and…well, we wouldn’t know, now, would we?

Take my account for what it’s worth. You’ll see why the official report I submitted, the signed and sealed file mouldering in some battered steel file cabinet that was last opened by a guy who retired ten years ago, is as thin as it is. You’ll ask questions about our mental health, ask if we had to eat spoiled food or bear livers, or if cabin fever might have been affecting our reason. I want to say our judgement was unaffected, but we were eight fit, healthy public servants, and you don’t get cabin fever, even in the depths of winter, if you’re working, outside, for just a few weeks, with congenial human company, at 53 degrees, 17 minutes north latitude. It’s because we were eight – were eight fit, sober, fairly well-educated individuals that the things I saw, heard or thought I heard and saw…experiences is probably a more accurate verb, one that I can use without a risk of lying by accident…it’s because of these factors that I gave the Ministry that perfunctory version of events and kept the meat of our notes in a banker’s box in my study. All now I can’t tell you what to make of it. But I can tell you, since I don’t have anything particular against you, that if you intend on voyaging on a hunting trip for moose or bear, or if some egghead bureaucrat asks you to go prospecting for oil and gas in a location around about 53 degrees north, 68-70 degrees west, don’t. And if you do, keep within the forest, hold to the southern slopes, and, no matter how bad the wind, bear with it and don’t ever pitch your tent in the lee of one of the drumlins…

Consulting the expedition journal – the one I kept personally, not the one I made up afterwards to give to the Minister, I can’t make any more sense of it now than I could then. I can say for certain that the whole wretched idea was launched by a chance conservation I had in the Duke of York pub, at Prince Edward Avenue and Bedford Road, in Toronto, in January of 1981. It was and is a convenient place for U of T staff and students to tie one on, since it’s practically right next to Robarts Library. I was drinking a Sazerac, mostly for an excuse to stick myself among a bunch of living human beings for a moment. The endless winter nights were starting to wear on me and I’d been spending the slivers of daylight in my campus office doing a rush edit for a prick of a publisher. Half the faculty was still on vacation, which didn’t help.

Well, this fellow sits down to me, carrying a Sazerac in each hand, one of which he slides my way. “I can pay my own tab,” I told him. Like I said, I wasn’t in a cheerful mood. This fellow, though – he sure was. French Canadian by his accent, dressed in a herringbone three-piece underneath his overcoat, which he hadn’t taken off. I said to myself, the energy program isn’t working out so smooth as they’re saying on the news. The generous stranger wasn’t put off in the least by the cold reception. Right off the bat, he introduces himself in a funny way:

“I work with the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources,” he says, shakes my hand and talks about his job, telling me what a pleasure it is to meet the renowned Dr. Gershon Herzog-Belzer. Takes him a full two minutes before he remembers his name. “Paul Leduc, by the way!” I warmed up when he said he’d read the paper I co-authored with Sacher and Catudal and he was so impressed by it he showed it to his boss at the Ministry, Gord MacDonald. Now, my contribution to the paper he was talking about consisted of reading the rough draft, chatting with those two, and agreeing to lend my name to it, but there was no need to tell Mr. Laduc that, seeing how it was so popular at the Ministry. I had a hunch he was there to do more than praise my paper. Nobody goes and buys drinks for you because you wrote an academic journal article.

The conversation got going and pretty soon there’s three Sazeracs on the table and four Old Fashioneds, because most people have never heard of a Sazerac and fewer like them. Cabinet’s desperate, he admits. A real mess. Trudeau was tying himself in knots trying to get Québec and Alberta to sign on to the Charter and get the Constitution repatriated. It’s hard enough to beg somebody for one favour, but when you’ve got to ask them for another at the same time? This was after the Revolution in Iran, remember, and the second wave of the energy crisis was in full swing. Carter had just lost an election because he dared to tell Americans to put on a sweater, you know, because of the critical rise in the price of oil. Trudeau didn’t want the same thing to happen to him. It’s because he couldn’t take the pot off the fire is why Joe Clark had such a short run. The Revolution settled down, but P.E.T. was barely back in office when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and war broke out between Iran and Iraq, tankers in the Persian Gulf getting hit by missiles…it was clear the headache was going to last a long time, and Paul’s ministry was left holding the hottest of several hot potatoes.

“It’s not all bad,” I consoled poor Monsieur Leduc, who by this time was getting pretty hammered. “That Referendum last year tuned into a much ado about nothing; you don’t have a civil war to worry about anymore.” I was joking, but the Parti Quebecois had at least gone through with attempting to secede from Canada, which had really shaken up the national consciousness. I don’t know if things have fully settled all now.

“Yes, yes, we pulled it off, didn’t we?” My companion’s voice was shaky and he kept mopping his brow. I don’t think he got that I was joking. “That’s, err, what I came to talk to you about. The two things are connected. Oh, I haven’t been stalking you or anything like that. Your colleagues who you wrote the paper with, the French one, he told me you come here sometimes.”

“Yep. Robarts is a block away.”

“Yes…”

“Hold on, two things? What two things? You should slow down a bit with the, uhm…” I pointed to his glass.

He grunted and waved his palm at me. “I mean…the Energy Crisis, which is my daily torture, and the Separatists. Two birds with one stone…with one shotgun blast. Hah!” He pounded the table, drawing unwelcome eyes for a second.

“Easy! So you’re saying you want to, erh, there’s a way to…undermine, I guess? Undermine the Separatist movement, by something to do with your Ministry; something energy-related. What did Catudal say?”

“Your buddy? He looks like he never leaves his office. He’s not the kind of man we need. But…you – you’ve been to…to all over the world! I’ve seen you in National Geographic and on TV. You want to help your country, don’t you?”

I’m not the most patriotic man in the world, but, having travelled widely, I appreciate the boons granted to me by default of my citizenship in the Great White North. And, while I sympathized with the grievances of the Québec nationalists and have profound love for their culture as both an aesthete and an anthropologist – the only genuine peasant culture in all of North America, outside of Mexico – I was uncomfortable with the thought of the city where I grew up (Montreal) suddenly being in a foreign country. I generally approved of the direction Trudeau was taking the country in, whatever the ignorant rubes who pelted his train carriage with rotten fruit might think. If I could help with the situation somehow, I would.

Leduc leaned in till I was breathing in the hot whisky fumes. Speaking in a whisper, he proceeded to outline a plan that was considerably less of a crazy 007 scheme than I’d anticipated. The federal government was caught between a rock and a hard place. The economy was on the rock, in a recession that was lingering like a bad dream. Trying to make the analogy literal, the rock was Québec: Trudeau’s Liberals needed the votes of their traditional heartland in Central Canada, and Premier Levesque, not content to bury the hatchet after losing the Referendum, was doing his damndest to shove a wrench into Trudeau’s Constitutional dreams. As a Montrealer (still am, deep down), I understood why Trudeau moved with kid gloves; he hoped the political turmoil could be resolved without splitting the country into hostile tribes. Unfortunately, there were a lot of voters in English Canada who didn’t grasp this and felt they should just say ‘screw it, leave if you want’ to Québec.

Oil, as it always does, would solve our problems. So he told me and I’m not so much of a tree hugger that I would argue with him. Oil, or natural gas, for that matter, close to the main markets in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal- Québec City corridor; energy that had the dual advantages of not being controlled by the Albertans and providing top-paying jobs to Québecois to suck the wind out of the Separatists’ sails: a thoroughly Federal energy project. Spectacular idea. And, for what it’s worth, I’ll concede that, as far as I comprehend the subject, the seabed gas fields off Labrador do in fact extend inland. The arc of the Precambrian Shield practically declares it on the map; the mineral substructure being identical, once you ignore the couple hundred feet of water on top of the Labrador portion. I wouldn’t doubt that there’s substantial crude deposits underneath those bogs, as well, and, based on how the Alaskan production is competitive at current prices, I don’t suppose the permafrost is a challenge beyond the technology Petro Canada has at its disposal. At the very least, your average Canuck at the pump would be insulated from the shenanigans going on in the Persian Gulf.

But they should be happy I failed. And, anyhow, did they even think of the illogic of using a guy whose training is in anthropology, botany and the biology of tropical fish to headline what was, for all meaningful purposes, an engineering project? I hardly know more geology than we learned, or were supposed to learn, in high school. And, just because many of Mr. Trudeau’s voters have seen me on TVO, it doesn’t mean it has to be my name and face on every out-there project that can remotely be connected to the environment. I know why they did it. If it didn’t work, then I’m the spoiled intellectual who lectures the plebs to put on a cardigan and ride a bicycle whenever their diplomatic colleagues get us on the wrong side of politics in the Middle East (which they inevitably will).

[05/04/1981 Gordon – private – communicate to M. Lalonde – tact – NOTHING IN WRITING] … As you know, it starting with us heading up Route 389 in a gang of crew-cab trucks and cargo vans, on account of someone not being willing to pay for flights for the thirteen of us and our equipment. Our jumping-off point was Fermont, on the QB-Labrador border. If your boss doesn’t remember it, it’s because people have only been living there for nine – count ’em, nine! — years. To be more accurate, I should say it’s only been a permanent official settlement for nine years. The indigenous Naskapi-Montagnais have, of course, been in the area for considerably longer, but they never had any stable settlements in the spot where we were ultimately headed. The newness of the town made the strongest impression on me, the region being otherwise a perfectly unremarkable stretch of transboreal forest; the vast belt atop the middle-northern half of every province where the coniferous forest-sea gradually thins out amid glacial bogs until it merges with the barren tundra of the Arctic. But for the relative predominance of Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum), you could have dropped me there and told me it was Northern Manitoba or Ontario above Lake Superior, and I’d have no evidence on which to doubt you. It was certainly strange, therefore, to see that the area had undergone none of the chapters in the historical cycle of fish, timber and mining exploitation to which nearly all parts of the country possessing similar ecology have been subjected to. After all, we were in the earliest-settled province in continental North America and we are used to the boreal zones being sites of a past already vanishing as everyone with sane and sensitive souls flees them for the cities where one can live a life with actual socialization – art, cafes and much less cabin fever. I don’t blame them, since unlike the rural villages of Europe and Asia, all the settlements of this vast region were inorganic constructions, thrown up by people already fully formed by the mentalities and habits of elsewhere, for the sole purpose of facilitating some robber baron or Crown Corporation to make a buck off an extractable resource, then abandoned, usually before two generations could be formed in their environment. Lots of folks romanticize such places but, dammit, they horrify me. You’re thinking of escape before you arrive. Really, it is strange; the worse that our textbook histories pretend it’s a normal condition of humanity. Fremont had bars where men drank, played pool and fought, strip clubs where women who, in Toronto, could only have been confronted after downing a bottle of Bright’s, gyrated listlessly for obscene sums that would be pitifully wasted, a couple shops for goods of the rudest practical nature, and nothing else.

Of course, the reason me and Professor Moffat – Barney – were going along for the trip had nothing to do with the labours of the roughnecks. The resources available at Robarts Library which I was able to peruse back home were few and out of date. Regardless, there was plenty to suggest to me that, barren as the territory was and as limited as we were in numbers (your boss might consider sending more than one assistant per scholar on future expeditions), there was a chance I might find something to full an article about. Robarts contained no books specifically about the zone where are endeavour would take place, but the Moisie River – the upper reaches of which pass by Fermont and which is known as the ‘Nahanni of the East’ – occasionally pops up in the accounts of the Jesuits and Protestant missionaries who competed for the souls of the Indigenous population, as well as those of the Hudson Bay Co. Officers and whisky traders who competed in extracting their wealth…I almost said “their money,” but even today, the dollar sometimes doesn’t get you as far as will a can of gasoline, a case of condensed milk, or an offer to haul some firewood. The river, treacherous as it can be (particularly during the spring melt and fall freeze-ups), nonetheless provided the best route from the ‘civilized’ towns along the St. Lawrence into the Labrador interior, a region whose gloomy desolation the fits and starts of successive resource booms have failed to alleviate. Most of the sources I poured through mention the place only as a geographic point passed through or beside, en route to places where more important things are done. However, there was a curious anecdote in a work called “Deux Ans parmi les Montagnais,” or a paraphrase of that, which was the memoirs of a Renard Le Pellerin, a priest and schoolteacher. Written in the style of a Victorian travel journal, it was published in Montreal at the surprisingly recent date of 1940. In it, the priest tells of the dangerous canoe trips, the bad or non-existent roads, and his trials and tribulations attempting to imbue his few and irregular pupils with a rudimentary knowledge of reading, writing, and Catholic theology.

Trained in Switzerland, Fr. Le Pellerin, practiced a habit of long rambles in the countryside, sometimes journeying by canoe into the empty country to the south of what is now Fermont, a habit which caused his parishioners much anxiety, despite the absence of risk of avalanches or other hazards in the monotonous terrain. He scoffed at the dangers of wolves and bears, for which the Winchester he carried was adequate medicine, but it was neither of these wild creatures which concerned his flock, since (so they told and so his observation appeared to confirm) there were no bears or wolves in the area. What caused him to open his ear and put pen to paper concerning the matter was the fact that his casual remark that his own people had always shortsightedly exterminated the most enchanting beasts in Creation was disputed by the native folk, who insisted that even in the times of their grandfathers’ grandfathers no member of the Ursine tribe had ever denned in those parts, and that whatever wolves on might glimpse were simply trekking through. The priest wondered why this should be the case since, as he had seen for himself, the natural environment was undisturbed – unlike the long-cultivated domain of his fellow Habitants. The forest, though not as impressive as those in more favourable climates, had never been despoiled by loggers or (at least back then) mining companies. Berry bushes and edible fungi abounded – in fact, he had filled his canoe with them after his plans to shoot a moose had not met with luck. His native friends had no qualms about devouring the fruit and mushrooms he offered them, which made their aversion to the place all the more strange: clearly, there wasn’t some curse or taboo about the soil itself or its products.

The diary of Sean McDermot, a factor employed by the HBC who travelled into the Coté du Nord hinterland during the waning days of the great fur trade a full century prior to Père Le Pellerin, echoes the Jesuit’s cryptic remarks. Concerning the district roughly west of the Moisie River and south of Fremont-Wabush, the trader writes of having cherished high hopes for his trip, such that, a third of the way from Lac St. Jean, he pulled rank on a south-passing canoe du maitre, persuading its illiterate captain with his deed to a house in Québec City, that the Company required the boat and its crew to return to the interior and delay their furlough. For more than two centuries, the country from the mouth of the St. Lawrence through to Lake of the Woods in western Ontario had been roved over by trapper and trade, voyageur and Indian, all in search of the precious furs on which the wealth of the still-primitive colony was founded. The colony was still mired in the same rude stage of economic development – the days of exporting wheat and wood were still decades in the future – but the furs were running out. The heaver had been hunted nearly to extinction throughout the Great Lakes watershed, and the ploughs and muskets of Habitant and Loyalist farmers had driven the other desirable fur-bearing beasts deeper into the receding forest-sea. When McDermot and his crew portaged amid the network of streams and swamps which on aerial photographs resemble stretch marks revolving around the Precambrian Shield, they reckoned, probably correctly, that they were the first white men to have tread upon that ground. Understandably, the trader anticipated that the area, with its umbrous stands of black spruce and damp slopes covered with rhododendrons ought to be teeming with game – especially the coveted beaver, for whom the mazy wetlands were a virtual paradise. They arrived late in the afternoon, to which McDermot’s journal, incomprehensibly, ascribes the absence of beaver that first day. To his surprise and bewilderment, on the second and third days, they also saw no beaver – nor did they note any rabbits, woodchucks, martins, bear or other fur species. The steams contained pike and char, so the men at least had fish for their camp table, but this did not help the morale of the voyageurs who had been anticipating fun and frivolity on leave in the city and who were unused to performing their wilderness labours without meat in their diet. On the fourth day, two deer were spotted and shot at. One was killed on the spot and carried back to camp for roasting. But the other, despite being struck, was able to sprint off under a burst of adrenaline. All through this period, the crews of all the canoes – perhaps two dozen men in total – were plagued with inexplicable discomforts. Two or three greenhorns aside, these were all hard men, cut from cloth no longer manufactured in our safe and hygienic modern era. The diarist recorded that many – but not all – the men slept poorly. The journey was undertaken in May, and, though the weather can be harsh compared to the same seasons in civilized parts, all would have been used to much worse. The persistent sleep issues became such a problem that it interfered seriously with the progress of the expedition, causing McDermot to remark – notably without any harsh words for his crew – on their failure to get to the subsequent portages at the expected rate. Despite dwelling on the matter through several entries in succession, McDermot never stated the precise nature of the voyageurs’ nocturnal disquietude. At the date he was writing, “hostile Indians” or scouting that presaged raids by rival fur companies were legitimate possibilities, but they were also not things which anyone in those times and in that place would have felt compelled to avoid mentioning. Cryptically, in the entry of May 24^th, 1832, McDermot lamented not heeding the advice of a Cree elder who had settled among the whites, running a provision store in Sept Iles downriver, when he’d started his journey. “I had dismissed the old man’s tale as mere superstition,” he moaned, “creditable only in the childish minds of peasant women and Savages, told to conjure monsters in the minds of fellow travellers gathered round the campfire, that they may be persuaded by their own trepidation to refrain from venturing into certain parts, invariably those most rich in game.”

On a sojourn to Wabush to stock up on supplies and hire a couple heady-duty Ski-Doos to haul ourselves, the ones provided by your recession-afflicted overseers being only light recreational models, I took the opportunity to gather info that might be relevant to my portion of our tasks. Unfortunately, small, rugged frontier communities often take much less interest in their history than do metropolitan intellectuals and novel-readers. At the dismal local library, I found myself alone perusing the stacks, which contained mostly yard sale fiction, encyclopedias and repair manuals for automobiles no longer manufactured. The archives of the town newspaper were the only materials relevant to the remote land itself, and these were written fora public that read mainly for practical advertisements and to have something to argue about at the local watering hole…which I headed off to before it could be decently called evening.

When trying to learn as much as possible about a new place with the minimum of time and sacrifice, my favourite tactic is to seek out a bar, pub, cafe or hotel restaurant, depending on the milieu I mean to swim in – maybe all of them. I further seek out one or more old men, with worn faces and calloused hands and a knowing glint in their eye. I sit myself down beside them – these characters are pretty much always at the bar itself, or at a good window seat. I never buy them a drink first: I let them figure out that I am curious but bored, and that I’m (not to brag) somebody who people pay attention to where I’m from; someone who might share their stories with a wider audience. I let them earn my attention; they won’t dig the tastiest tidbits out of their bag unless they have to do so to obtain the coveted hungry ear. Only then do I buy them a drink.

I bought a half dozen drinks (Crown Royal!), each, for Fred Bywater and George Volant. The former was an Anglo miner and machinist, the latter a Montagnais who somehow managed to survive the mid-20^th century on an industrial-era version of the trapper-fisherman-hunter lifestyle which had sustained his people for millennia. They sat at opposite ends of the bar, each man lost in his own beverage. Their appearance told me that either might be a good source of local lore, so I engaged the barkeep in conversation about dully practical matters – snow conditions, which waterways were navigable in the season, the best local shops for engine parts and provisions, etc. I casually knocked back the most expensive whisky-and-water on the menu (blended in the bottle, I suspect) and nodded, serious but dispassionate, reflecting on how we were on Ottawa’s tab and how I was sorry that sampling rock cores and twiddling with theodolites would not give the CBC the exciting documentary they were looking for. The barkeep agreed passively, as is the nature of barkeeps, although I thought I detected an uneasiness that should hardly have existed in the proprietor of a public house who was raking in a windfall thanks to his new customers from the Big City. Enough scotch and water (even if it’s a lot of water) will put suspicions into one’s head, but I could have sworn that the barkeep’s eyes kept darting into the left and right corners of their sockets, even though he kept his head down over his bottles and rag like it was welded to them…darting towards the two old timers I was consciously ignoring.

“Where, uh, where again exactly did you say you were heading?” the bartender gulped.

Unable to give the precise coordinates off the top of my head, I did better, wiping the bar with a napkin and unfolding a map. “Here, or, I should say, in this general area – we have to move around a bit, obviously, since we don’t know where – or if – we’ll find any of the oil, or, really, any sign that there could be oil down there at all. It’s a crap shoot. I figure, too, with all the gear we’re lugging around, we’ll have to adjust our route as we go, to match the terrain.”

Dammit, the man turned whiter than his bar rag. “Uhhh, gosh, in that case…maybe I can help you fellers out a bit. Been around these parts for a while myself, y’know? He tapped his temple, seeming unconvinced himself. “If it’s oil you’re looking for, you don’t need to go down the Quebec side so far. Or you can go around over the other side, by James Bay. I know they do a lot of mining ‘n power stuff there, last couple years. Or you guys can keep more to the west of where you’re showing, along the highway. Should be easier to move your kit, too. Dunno why you fellers want to make it hard on yourselves when you don’t have to.”

I assured him that we weren’t looking for trouble; we simply had to go where the data indicated the oil or gas would likely be.

“Oil, right, okay, I understand, but…there was some folks…you’re from Toronto, you said?”

“Yes, well, me personally, yes.”

“Well, they were from…Vancouver, and they were prospecting for oil, just like you. Came through here…”

“They were working for the government?”

The rag squeaked in the glass. “Nooo…nope, they were…were working on their own account, I guess.”

“Uhuh. And when was this?”

“Nineteen…forty-something? A year or two before the war, something like that. Anyways, they were looking for oil, like you, but they went more…” the bartender pointed out to a location well outside the basin where we intended to do our exploration – but close enough that Wabush remained the logical depot to purchase supplies.

“Alright.” I was skeptical from the first. “But did they find it?”

From the way he nodded, “sure,” I knew he was luying, which got me thinking, because, what did it benefit him whether we poked around in one patch of dirt or another? “Funny, the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources has never heard of these gentlemen you’re talking about, and I think they’d at least want to know if what they’re blowing their money on is going to be profitable or not.” I nonchalantly knocked back another drink. “Not my concern, mind you. I’m only riding along for publicity. My wallet only cares that I don’t break my contract, and maybe I find something interesting enough to get me a spot on the CBC.”

A slightly imbalanced laughter came from my right. There was nothing intimidating in the feeble, toothless chuckle, but it sent the shivers up and down beneath my lumberjack plaids nonetheless. I ignored it. “You’re headed out south a’ town, around Moisie Lake thereabouts, are ya?” It was the old man in plaid and khaki denim overalls, his rubicund visage shadowed beneath a stained International Harvester cap. “I don’t need ta see yer map. If it’s where those folks were drillin’ fer oil back during the war, then you’ll find what yer lookin’ for.” If he wasn’t just egging us on for fun, then the barkeep was telling the truth. “But,” he added, the corners of his lips creeping up his cheeks. “’Course you might find something yer not looking for. Or it’ll find youse.”

“Sorry, excuse me?”

“Don’t mind him; he’s just pulling your leg,” the bartender assured. “After the war, oil was cheap. That’s why nobody stuck around. That’s all. You didn’t believe me?” He could tell. “Still, you could try a little closer to the highway…don’t need to go out into the sticks…”

I hushed the bartender. As much as I treasure the creature comforts of life in a cozy house in the Beaches, or maybe because of it, I’m not above a primal thrill. There’s something about going mano-a-mano against a bear or wolf or shark or something. It’s hardwired into us. “Hold on, why exactly? Bears?”

“Bears?”

“Well, he said something might find us. No need to obfu… – to beat around the bush. So, what are you talking about? I thought grizzlies were extinct in this part of the country and I don’t imagine polar bears come this far south. Or wolves?”

The barkeep was momentarily flummoxed. “Oh, you mean what he’s talking about? Ah, don’t mind old Fred. He’s a shit-disturber. Old Injin’ fairy tales. Don’t let it spoil your drink. But, like I was saying, you’d find it easier to move all your equipment if…”

“We brought rifles,” I mentioned, lest the rustics within earshot take me for a mere city-slicker, full of naïve fantasies about friendly wolves and bears more scared of us than we are of them. “Plenty of ammunition, if we need it. I don’t mind hunting, either, when I get the chance…”

Fred spoke up again, and I noticed his expression had changed and he sounded like he was challenging me, as if, by not acting confused and afraid, I was insulting the dignity of his little town. “I believe you; you can take a wolf, with one of yer cannons, and a guide spotting fer you out in the open, but it’s not so easy like yer thinkin’. The ground plays tricks on yer eyes, eh. Fools ya into thinking it’s flat and open, but you walk a couple yards and then it hides the landmarks you were reckoning by, and yer up and down, and it doesn’t make no sense. The trees look little, eh, but they ain’t so little once you get in the middle of ’em. People get lost out there all the time.”

Ah, yes, ‘the place I live in is tougher than you, stranger.’ Countless times I’ve gotten that. I wasn’t going to play along. “It’s ok, we have maps, a satellite phone, compasses, all of us. And that’s a lot of men; a lot of hands and pairs of eyes.” I finished the watered residues lingering among the ice cubes and felt for cash in my pockets as if I was about to leave. It wasn’t an act. My face must have been irritatingly calm, because Fred stood up in his seat and practically shouted.

“Well, be sure the loopik doesn’t get’cha, then!”

“Come again?” I asked, plopping back down on my seat, as anyone would. “Loopik?”

“Ahhh, for Chris’sake, shut up Fred, will ya?” The bartender scowled with venom you don’t use when just playing around with friends. “He’s only joking. Trying to make an ass of you,” he smiled at me. “Because you’re an out-of-towner, that’s all. You can pay your tab when you leave out or next time you drop into town, doesn’t matter.”

I suspected the only reason he was ushering out otherwise lucrative customers was because the old drunk telling stories was about as immovable as an iceberg. “No, now I want to hear this. Actually, studying and collecting folklore from different places is part of my job, back in Toronto. Go on. What’s this loopik and why should I watch out for it, or him? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything by that name.”

“Nobody has! He’s just making shit up. Can it, Fred, or…” I could tell the bartender’s anger was sincere and therefore I was more intrigued. On the other hand, it is my experience that 75% of what old drunks tell you in remote watering holes is bullshit, on top of which, as you should know, the word for this creature or being, at least as Fred pronounced it, didn’t sound right. Despite the similarity of ‘Innu’ – which it’s now become the fashion to call the Montagnais – with ‘Inuit,’ there’s nothing at all related between the two peoples. They don’t have the same ethnic heritage, they inhabit different areas, and they speak utterly unrelated languages, the Innu being an Algonkian people, like the Indians of the Central Canada cottage country, and the Inuit are, well, Inuit. Eskimos, as we used to say. ‘Loopik’ doesn’t sound like an Alongkian word, made-up or otherwise, though it is plausibly Inuit. How a word presumably derived from an Arctic language came to refer to a concept in the folklore of an Algonkian region, given the lack of friendly relations, or much relations at all, between the two groups, it was a question my mind was spinning over.

“Don’t ask me,” Fred threw up his hands, and I was about to storm off in anger at having been duped, however momentarily, by an inebriated hick. “I never seen one myself, either, and it’s not something folks know how ta explain, supposing they did see it. ‘N that’s if it lets ’em talk at all. Ask George there. He can tell you a whole lot. He’s seen one, y’know, that’s how I know about it – not that I hadn’t heard about it before. But I didn’t believe in things like that, that’s what I mean. If you’d seen uncle Georgie, how he looked when he came into our cabin right as we were sittin’ down ta have our supper, hoho! Can’t turn out a man who asks you fer a meal – folks are hospitable around here. Hehe, but we were scared he was gonna eat the whole spread, and the table to boot! Looked like a starvin’ ghost, didn’t’cha, Georgie? But, honest truth, he hardly touched a thing. Just bread and soup, and he didn’t sleep till almost morning. ‘N neither did we, after the story he told us. Tell ’em, Charlie!”

The gentleman so indicated was an elderly, worn-out and inebriated as Fred. Largely by virtue of his taciturnity, he’d preserved a semblance of dignity that his friend lacked, though. Strange that what seemed to be two old friends should sit across from but not talk to each other, but one sees stranger things in the North Country, especially if one is not looking for them. ‘Uncle’ George’s body language was casual but his visage was grave, whether or not he could walk in a straight line unaided. He was sizing me up.

“Well? Is Fred here just screwing with me?” I asked.

The man’s narrow eyes were there and not there. “It’s a story,” George replied bashfully. “Someone told me when I was a kid. Don’t remember who, ‘cept it wasn’t none of my teachers.”

“But did you see it – this ‘loopik?’ What is it? Is it real?”

He chewed his phrases before spitting them out. “I don’t want to say that. People see a lot of things that aren’t real.” The way he said it was bitter and mocking.

“Okay, but, speaking specifically about this creature…it is a creature, right? Not a ghost or spirit or something?”

“I don’t know. I told what I saw to my father and he says that’s what it was called. He was a trapper, my pops. Good man.” George took another sip.

“Alright, but what is it then? A kind of wolf? Bear? Why are you so afraid of it? How big is it?”

“Dunno. Only ever saw its eyes ‘n its shadow. Never saw it standing up. Only saw it once. Most people only ever see it once. Anyway, if you hear it in the nighttime, get in your boats or your jeeps and go. Go away.”

“Well, if I’m supposed to listen for it, what does it sound like?”

“Like the wind, but an animal. You can hear it sometimes, at night, where you’re going. Between the long hills, in the ravines. It’s a whistling that all of a sudden everything feels no good inside you. Worst is when the sun’s falling, and everything’s all gold and black…”

I was admittedly intrigued, but forgot everything when George very matter-of-factly said, “Never mind. Horse hockey! Made it up after getting spooked by a cat or a seal out mushroom picking one time, and then our kids started to share it and pass it along, like how kids do with things they hear and don’t understand from grown-ups.”

I paid my tab and left. I’d been entertained by the story but it was tainted by the disgust I felt towards myself for having bought into it for a moment.

Winter lingered harsh and long this year, so we had no need to switch to portaging and riding the inflatable rafts we’d brought, and were instead able to race across the taiga on our Ski-Doos. We arrived, earlier than scheduled, in our first prospecting location south of Fermont, between the top end of Lac Jonquet and the unnamed glacial lake which lies barely an hour’s walk west of it. Everywhere the topography bore evidence of the tremendous processes which gouged and moulded rock like the hand of a furious kindergartener squeezing and pulling a ball of Play-Doh. Of course, the transformations at the end of the Pleistocene are responsible for our landscapes further south, but there the retreat of the glaciers has been demurely marked by cities, forests, and the plough. Here, in the North, the rude sculpting of the ice sheets was fresh. You felt like, if you blinked, a mammoth might lumber out from behind a clump of tamaracks. The Woodland Cree have tales, you know, about hunting great woolly bears – several-fold larger than any other bears – that had two great teeth and ‘arms’ growing out of their faces…about hunting them with muskets. Far-fetched, sure, but if you left your desk to go out to these places…you could believe a lot of things might happen, if only because there’s nobody out in those places, and, therefore, nobody to see what you get up to. There’s no need to bury bodies when no one will be walking by for a century or two.

The ground in the hemiboreal zone is nowhere so steep that you can’t pitch a tent, nor is it so flat that its hard to find shelter from the wind. Staking the camp and setting up the machinery was a simple matter, apparently, for those who had to do it. So easy, in fact, that, since we ate on the trail, Mac, the cook, at the request of Barney, delayed started supper as Jim Bouchard and some of the mechanics wanted to hunt a deer or at least some rabbits for Mac to stew up. The oblong glacial hills, or drumlins, covered with a low but rich layer of thick-leaved shrubbery no taller than an unkempt lawn, mixed with feathery grasses and cattails in wetter areas, poking out beneath the snow carpeting their windswept flanks, offered a delectable banquet for non-hibernating herbivores. On the other hand, I was unaccountably tired, as if I’d walked rather than Ski-Doo’d the last six hours, so I confined my activities to circling the perimeter of the campsite, on the lookout for any telltale signs of past Indigenous habitation. I didn’t really expect to find anything in the short window of daylight that remained, but the land surprised me: probably disgorged from the roots of Festuca-topped hummock when a rainstorm eroded the soil, was an arrowhead. It was unmistakeably pre-Contact, since, French or English, the colonists are never known to have used flint weaponry. Indirectly, my find was evidence of the unusual geological activity of the area, which boded well, since ‘usual’ land in Central Canada doesn’t have any oil under it. You see, heavy rains last summer or not, it’s not going to be enough to dislodge, out of fairly level ground, stone tools that would have been interred potentially millennia ago. My fatigue and cynicism evaporated when I brushed off the moist earth and scrutinized it in the rays of the declining sun. Now, I don’t know what you know of Indigenous arts and culture, but this arrowhead was unusual in the extreme. I was second-guessing myself. It had a shape more typical of a spearhead, though, even as arrowheads go, it wasn’t very big – roughly the size and shape of one of the leaflets of an ash tree. Knapped with exquisite care to create a row of fine teeth on each side, it was made of greenish, flint-like chert, the most abundant material suitable for the purpose between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes. Most remarkably, it was not notched to accept fitting into a shaft. Seeing as the natives lacked metal to make ferrules and no screws or bolts could have been driven through it, I had to wonder how someone could spend hours on the arduous task of shaping the stone and yet leave the end product in a form that couldn’t be held securely to an arrow-shaft, much less endure the rigour of thrusting into the body of a moose or mammoth. Then my finger passed, or rather, was detained, in the act of rubbing across its smooth surface. I examined it more closed and observed a slightly discoloured band, matte in texture, where some type of adhesive gum or resin had been applied. That would work, but it was a mystery how someone out in the taiga of eastern Quebec could come up with the idea, while all the other native peoples around him before and since have only used bindings to fasten points to shafts. Impressive, too, was the fact that, in the acidic soil, the binding gum had endured for four or five centuries at minimum. I pocketed my discovery and told noone, but felt much better about our expedition.

My mood was not dampened by supper. The cook was forced to improvise after Jim and his hunting partners failed to come back with any game. The undulating ridges with their extremely dense ground cover should have proved literal breeding grounds for all sorts of small mammals, grouse and the like, but they were not able to bag even a single rabbit. They were not bad shots – quite the opposite – they simply failed to locate game. The sole exception was a whitetail deer which they shot at but failed to kill. Jim had boasted about his marksmanship and tracking skills and put himself out as something of a protector of the rest of the party, embarrassedly explained that the deer had come out of nowhere (“nowhere” being a spruce bog below the slug-shaped hill whose spine they were stalking along). It bolted, he insisted, with the speed whitetails reserve for when they are being chased by a predator or if a hunter has shot and missed. But he didn’t miss. Jim pleaded that they’d followed the blood trail. Ed, a driller, who accompanied Jim on the hunt, sneered that it mustn’t have been a very good hit, since the blood trail was faint; nothing more than scattered drops which petered out among the rhododendrons halfway up the opposite slope. Jim and Ed were the only ones that really cared. When you’re hungry, sitting out under the stars on a cold night, anything hot tastes good, whether freshly killed or poured out of a can.

I shared a large tent with Jacques O’Hara, the geologist and his assistant, an environmental science graduate from McGill. Our quarters were as spartan as the roughnecks’ but it was nice to have a mind to bounce things off of. Despite both being born-and-bred Québecois, only a generation removed from habitant life, neither Professor O’Hara nor his student knew anything of the folklore of the peoples who inhabited or, at least made seasonal use of our work site. Québecois culture is steeped in native lore, intensely syncretic as Catholic colonial cultures invariably are, but the moraines of the Côte-Nord’s interior were isolated from the development of classic Québecois settlement by barriers more daunting than walls or borders, and so, whatever myths the Montagnais who fished and hunted the taiga might tell about it, they would not have entered into the common stock of French-Canadian folklore. I decided not to bring up what I’d been told in the Wabush bar.

Over the next two days, our partly made excellent progress collecting soil and rock cores, more than a few of which, when subjected to our crude field tests, indicated a promise for future oil and gas developments. Moreover, notwithstanding the innumerable tamarack bogs which dotted the landscape, these were nowhere great in extent and could be drained, since the water and granite only thinly covered the granite bedrock – a perfect substrate for a pipeline or freight railway.

Disquietingly, I found myself called upon on account of my qualifications as a biologist, there being no medical doctor or nurse on the team. Nobody was overtly sick, but three or four of the men had been experiencing sensations of fatigue and listlessness, unaccountable in light of their otherwise excellent health and the relatively moderate work and conditions, considering what and where oilmen’s work is. Whether by progressive action or because they simply became brave enough to admit it, soon a third of the men had reported similar problems. These complaints never extended beyond that population however, to indicate the nature or source of the affliction. I ruled out the food and water, since those were the sale for all of us, and anything infectious would have spread. Stymied, I prescribed more sleep and coffee on waking, trusting that we had enough time and government grant money that a small decline in our team’s efficiency wouldn’t matter.

On the third night, we heard the whistling. I say whistling, because it was a stormy, albeit dry night, and there was nothing to persuade any of us out of the assumption that it was the wind…which, incidentally, shot between the drumlins with enough velocity that, as I huddled with book and flashlight in my sleeping bag, I proposed to Professor Moffat that we might want to construct a shack, which we could do as we had some prefab supplies and there was plenty of wood around. If this was going to be the normal weather of the season, our tents would prove inadequate. I know, intellectually, that there’s not much danger in the wind collapsing a tent on you, but, regardless, I was uncomfortable with the prospect of having our temporary homes destroyed in the middle of a pitch-dark night.

On the fourth day, the McGill student pulled up a core from the bedrock that was such that we didn’t bother testing it before we decided that an urgent cable must be dispatched to Ottawa. The core sample cylinder was oily as a fried sausage. First, we attempted to transmit a message via radio. Despite there being relay stations at Wabush, if not southwards over the moraine, we could neither transmit nor receive any signal. Hiking to the top of the drumlin didn’t help and we decided amongst ourselves that some quirk of the local geology must be responsible. The satellite phone, expensive as it was, fared no better, although we reminded ourselves that none of us was very experienced in its operation. Reluctantly, we called it a night.

By the fifth day, no one troubled about the lethargy that gripped about a third – and never more than a third – of the team. After all, with the continued failure of our communications devices, there was a perfect excuse to get back down south for R & R. There being nothing relaxing about sitting in a tent in a frigid wilderness, I busied myself trying to create work for myself. After the excitement of that first arrowhead, I had failed to find a single Native American artifact of significance, though I was keen on it, since the flora and fauna offered absolutely nothing of interest…except, a nagging feeling argued, for their lack of anything exciting. It was a confounding Catch-22: an area so seldom visited by hunters ought to have been turning with the sorts of game long since slaughtered or pressured out of habitats nearer to civilization. Likewise, a place so far from civilization, and nestled conveniently ambiguously near the ill-policed borders of the backwater sections of two provinces was a natural draw for hunters, legal or otherwise. That solitary deer, a prowling fox, and scattered flocks of migratory geese aside, I could not recall seeing any vertebrates at all in the vicinity of camp. Did the petroleum deposits below the surface impart a toxic quality to the vegetation? Yet the oilsands at Athabaska possess rich ecologies…During my promenade on the reverse slope of the drumlin opposite the one on the flank of which we’d pitched our camp, I spotted a rabbit or woodchuck burrow (the two species might of course use dens made by the other). I waited, but no rabbit came out, nor did making noise at the mouth of the burrow cause its inhabitants to emerge at an alternate entrance. The forbes growing in front of the hole were compacted, indicating the passage of a body of some weight – more likely a woodchuck than a rabbit – probably no earlier than that morning. I took my entrenching tool from my backpack and carefully dug atop the tunnel, acting on the knowledge that burrowing mammals often collect small human-made objects and despot them in their homes. These four-legged hoarders often save us scholars precious time searching and digging, through they may cost us many times that in the office as we try to decipher the mishmashed eras and sources of the jumbled items. Unfortunately, the soggy, stony earth did not hold its shape well, and an entrenching tool and enthusiasm are no substitutes for real shovels and layered excavation grids. I soon lost track of the passages as the burrow collapsed in on itself, never having ascertained the identity of its occupants. I managed to scrounge up a couple of small objects, although they were so caked with dirt that they would have to await washing off at camp before identification could be attempted. On the way back, I noted the tracks of a moose, which, as a keystone species, was an important observation, but I was too tired and the sun was too low on the horizon for me to try to follow the tracks.

At supper, the mood was better than it had been the previous nights. We…intellectuals were confident that our energy-mad backers would reward us as they never would for our scholarship, and the roughnecks foresaw another resource boom which they could eat, drink and lech through, saving them from seeking employment as roofers and factory temps in Toronto or Vancouver. The McMaster student (for the life of me, I can’t remember their name) actually believed he’d accomplished something of service to the country. After an unaccustomedly large meal, I took an enamel basin and rinsed off the objects I’d pocketed on my walk earlier. Taking them inside, to examine them by the light of the Coleman lantern, every one proved to be an item fabricated by human hands. This was not in itself odd. Rodents, corvids and other animals routinely take an interest in objects alien to their environment and give them pride of place in adorning their nests. What fascinated me about them was the variety of the periods and origins they represented and the inexplicability of their all being found together. Let me enumerate some examples: gilded metal buttons, French, military, from the time of Louis XV. A copper pipe-bowl, likely a Native trade good, indeterminate date but probably French from the heyday of the fur trade. The cap of a Sheaffer fountain pen circa John F. Kennedy and a flattish carved bead, fashioned from a material whose identity I’d not speculate, but which was neither bone nor horn, nor the tooth of a cetacean, and whose plausible date would have made me dizzy if I dared to contemplate it. These things I recorded in my journal. I could explain neither how they came to be where found or where they were probably initially acquired. Oh, sure, small odds and ends of clothing and personal items, you might say; we lose these things all the time in modern society as well. Fair enough, but in five days of surveying the glacial till – digging it, poking it – we had found no remains of tents, or lean-tos, let alone shacks or cabins left by the sorts of men who could have worn or made the objects in question.

The kerosene flame bred many questions. It answered none. Anyhow, I was hungry.

You’d expect men doing manual labour to have hearty appetites for all kinds of gross delicacies that would turn the stomach of the man who works in a heated office and you’d be correct. Most of us fell like starving hogs upon the drop biscuits, stewed prunes, corned beef hash, and margarine-soaked half-burnt toast et cetera, but Jim and the McGill student were abstemious, which was all the more surprising since theodolites are cumbersome things to lug around and chipping rocks and boring soil cores isn’t exactly light work. The workmen were mostly too busy stuffing their bellies to care. The guys on either side of Jim proffered him choice morsels, as though pointing with their forks would cause him to eat that which he could easily reach with his own. Like me, they chalked it up to illness. His stomach wasn’t used to the kinds of quantities of food necessitated by the North Country. He did seem out of sorts, like one does who is suffering a mild fever. My attention was soon drawn more to the geologist, O’Hara, however. He didn’t say anything, besides a perfunctory wish for recovery and a humble boast about all the work they had done that afternoon. The man’s body language, on the other hand…he was sitting stiff as the table; from his facial expression, he might as well have been a husband in divorce court, forced by the judge to keep his mouth shut while his soon-to-be-ex-wife gives her teary-eyed spiel to the courtroom. It didn’t make a damn bit of sense. Of course, I mentioned the artifacts I’d found in the rabbit burrow, but the consensus, if anyone was listening, was that typical ‘pack rat’ behaviour, common to many small mammals and birds, was responsible. In light of the species of animals that could have made or occupied the burrow, this required a stretch of the imagination, which we all tried to make. I began to think of the objects I’d left behind in the burrow…

Before we turned in for the night, I asked O’Hara about the student’s odd behaviour; if maybe we should call in a bush plane to evacuate him, since we didn’t have the means to look after anybody who was really sick, especially if it was catching (Jim was robust enough nobody worried for him). O’Hara was non-committal. Either way, freezing rain that started around 9:00 pm put aside any chance of a plane coming.

The night was worse than any of the previous. If – IF – you’ve ever been camping in cold weather, you’d know how, in otherwise tolerable temperatures, rain and dampness can penetrate your tent and suffuse your sleeping bag and coat, and the fire, unless it’s a huge proper campfire, will seem pathetically small. Before you say, ‘oh, it’s the woods, such it up,’ ehhh…it’s one thing to curl up sick in your own bed, but if you come down with a flu or fever out out in the real wilderness, it’s no joke. You should be afraid. It was me, O’Hara and the student in the tent. None of us talked but none of us could sleep, either. O’Hara was passing the time reading, with his back turned to me in his sleeping bag. The student glumly watched the tent flap, which looked out obliquely down the slop and at the tail of the drumlin opposite. Occasionally, thunder, or echoes like thunder, rumbled over the taiga. Bored and irritable, I scooted over to sit beside the student, who was an old hand in the woods, though he was no older than my PhD candidates.

“Usually in Toronto – actually in most places I’ve been, thunderstorms are a summer phenomenon,” I said by way of conversation. “But, then, we don’t have the Northern Lights, either.”

There was a contemplative frown on the student’s face; what’s more, there was a trembling in his eyes that should have sent chills down the spine of anyone who knew how unnatural that emotion was in his type which, despite the bookish veneer, was born and raised in a rural town of clapboard houses and apple orchards before he went off to university on a scholarship. “It isn’t – doesn’t happen this time of year in places like this, neither. It’s not supposed to, not that I’ve ever seen. Should still be getting snow, instead.”

“Snow?”

“Sorry, I was thinking…there’s a ski resort in my hometown. The snow makes a funny sound when there’s about to be an avalanche. The locals can always tell. I dunno about you, but this doesn’t sound like a thunderstorm at all to me. It sounds like the snow and ice, rumbling away just before there’s gonna be an avalanche…but there’s not enough snow for that…is there?”

“You think maybe we should have pitched our tents higher up? The wind’s not so bad tonight, and it’s not like we’re obligated by law. Could always just…move it, eh?”

But none of us really wanted to pack up and reset the tent a few metres higher up the ridge, regardless of whether the ground might be a bit dryer. We had staked one tent on a mini plateau of soft earth, because it was easier to drive the stakes (yes, the tent I slept in), and I was mildly envious of the others who had taken the extra time and effort to secure their own tents on the exposed rock, which you obviously can’t just hammer those yellow plastic pegs into. “Right,” I couldn’t neglect to ask, “If it’s not thunder, and we don’t have enough snow for an avalanche, you don’t think, what is it?”

The student was startled. “It’s a thunderstorm. Different latitude; a-seasonal weather patterns. Yeah.” This was unusually technical, compared to his habitual diction. He wanted that I should take him seriously.

I half-heartedly speculated about the importance of our research, which was essentially complete, but it required too much effort for either of us to connect sealed tubes of dirt and alphanumerically labelled rock chips with commuters grumbling slightly less at the pumps. After a few minutes of what must have been deliberate stalling on his part, the student gazed, with the eyes of an unarmed hunter – though he had a shotgun propped just inside the doorway – across the drumlin, up the pale, smooth oval of granite, brighter than the rainy sky surrounding it; up to the ridge where meagre black feathers of larch and spruce tethered the hard, stingy soil with the purple sky. We both absentmindedly drew our jackets close about the collar. Then he hit me with a question: “Not that it’s my business,” he asked with unaccustomed deference, “But you’re writing a paper after this, right? About what we’re doing out here?”

“Yes, well, I intend to. Not sure about it, at this point, though.”

“Fair enough. But you know a lot about, you know, the wildlife, plants, and how places…natural places I mean…how they change over time?”

“You could say that.”

“You heard they say we are headed for another Ice Age, right? I saw a documentary a while ago, with that guy who played Spock from Star Trek. It wasn’t a show though, it was science; there’s a lot of evidence for it. Would that lead to changes in the kinds of animals you see in which places? Changes we could see already?”

“It would, if it were true, but just because Leonard Nimoy on TV says…”

“So that might cause, say, a seal to come down into…like, these areas?” Doubting himself in the same breath, “Still, that’s a long way, and it was an especially cold winter, but the nearest seals are hundreds of miles away…”

“Excuse me, seals?”

“Umm, yeah, seals. I can’t say what kind. Not a big one, though.”

“What?!?”

“Tell you, Doc, I’ve seen every kind of animal in the Bush; hunted most of ‘em, but I never ran into a seal before.”

“You sure? I mean, a seal…What – when was this?” I smelt the air attentively for traces of alcohol fumes.

“Huh, okay, maybe it wasn’t a seal. But that’s what it looked like.”

“When was this?”

“Two nights ago.”

“Two nights ago?!?”

“Yeah. Before you ask, I hadn’t been drinking.” I hadn’t asked, but the thought occurred to me. “I was tired, though; dead tired. And I thought maybe I was seeing things. It wasn’t even nighttime yet; maybe four, five in the afternoon. We were taking down the frame around one of the drills and I’d gone into some bushes to take a leak, right where the slope meets the bottom, eh, and, I dunno, I just looked around like how you do and I noticed it there. Well, I didn’t notice it at first. It’s just my eyes were looking that way, and it was a clump of shadows beside some boulders and a spruce tree, except it moved up, not side to side, like something swaying in the wind would. And it moved too much, and that’s what made me notice it. I wasn’t a hundred percept sure it was an animal, until it opened its eyes.”

“How far away was this thing from you?”

“About…” he gauged the slope. “Seventy, eighty feet? If it was closer, maybe it’s not as big, but…I was tired…and nervous, and its eyes were red.”

“Red?”
“Like when you shine a flashlight in the dark, on the edge of the forest outside your car on the highway sometimes. I didn’t have a flashlight on me, though. It was like they made the light themselves. Anyhow, it was probably because I was surprised; didn’t expect to see it.”

“The ‘seal,’ you mean?”

“I was…mistaken. Never mind,” he enunciated carefully, breathing so as not to compete with the sounds of the wild.

The rain had thinned to a fine-droplet drizzle, and I could be sure enough to sleep, knowing we weren’t about to get washed away in a landslide, so I forgot the desire to relocate to higher, dryer ground. But I would not sleep just then. ‘Pleasure’ is the wrong word for it, but there’s something about sitting cross-legged, preferably on a slightly elevated spot, just thinking, taking everything in, meditating. The Tibetans understand. The fakirs of the Indian subcontinent certainly get it. However, our industrial culture has, until recently, quite literally busied itself with ignorance.

I thought about the disparate objects I’d plucked from the ground and how the dense carpet of sedges and rhododendrons might easily hide a thousand times as many from view. Perhaps even post-holes or charred fire pots related to the hunters who fashioned that arrowhead of green chert that so closely resembled Aborigine spearpoints from half a world away, which no one would ever learn about because their culture happened to have existed in places far outside the zones of major European settlement – nothing more than names on a map until centuries after smallpox and typhoid had scoured the landscape of its inhabitants. The very emptiness of the land led me to muse about what I might discover were I to return with more funding. The ecology is the key…yet what ecology was there to speak of? There was clearly the odd large ungulate passing through, but in spite of the lack of hunters and the untrammelled abundance of forage, it was as if the ecosystem had been cut off at the lower and topmost trophic levels, with no hare, nor grouse, ptarmigan, voles or shrews, nor martins or weasels to prey on them. Nor, I reflected, had I seen a hawk in the sky. The words of the old Indian in the bar in Wabush came back to me and I debated with myself whether he had told his tale of bad places and ill-fated prospectors out of drunkenness or whether he drank to forget something peculiar about these frigid barrens.

I could see it in the student, too. Something gave him the creeps, as well, but neither of us said a thing because neither of us had any idea what it was…the exact same quality of the light and texture, like the landscapes painted by Andrew B. Phin, that draw you in with their quaintness as you study them in the hall after leaving the washroom, then suck you into a world of depressive gloom and well-concealed sin that weighs on you like cold lead as you rejoin your host and, hopefully, other guests in a house or cottage you will never visit again. I had an inkling that made me want to run – no, jump into a helicopter – a sickening thought that I was about to be confronted with the source of the soul-crushing gloom of the painting in the cottage hallway. But nothing happened. There was the rain, and the whistling wind; across the gulch I saw an owl, Strix varus, I reckon, for I saw only the silohuette, perched atop a boulder below a half-skeletonized spruce. The poor creature was probably hoping that the unexpected rain upon the thin, poorly-drained soil would drive a vole or shrew from its den. Shivering myself, I figured it, too, must have been hungry and cold, for it swayed and bobbed on its perch; it must have clambered down and hopped up on the other side of the tree trunk, because it emerged there and I never saw it take flight. But owls, unless one is talking about the long-legged burrowing owls of the prairies, don’t hop about or even walk for transit. There must have been two of them, suffering equally from the cold and starvation. There is no morality in a food chain, but I found myself wishing that something – preferably a pair of rodents – would scurry out so that the unfortunate hunters might have a feast. Since they didn’t make any moves, I supposed the wish went unfulfilled. And…this seems somehow like a bad omen, after later events – I never saw them take wind and leave, although there was nowhere to conceal them, the trees being short and sparse.

“It’s embarrassing. They understand loyalty better than we humans do. A good reason never to get married.” I remember joking to the student. He seemed confused as if he hadn’t seen what I’d seen at all. I told myself it was good the expedition was coming to an end. I couldn’t put my finger on it, because we hadn’t really done much arduous work, besides the guys drilling the cores and the cook, nor had the weather conditions been truly harsh, at least by the standards of northern Quebec. Regardless, something had worn down the mental fortitude of a good portion of the team and it was getting to me, too.

I didn’t sleep much. Ehh, if you only understood, God, that it is normal – you should expect it – that you can ‘read’ the history of a place, whether a fish pond or Amerindian village, in the environment. Like a forensic detective reconstructing a chain of events from evidence. I’m talking both human and animal aspects of things. The great empty spaces on our maps are, as a rule, the richest in species diversity; the most teeming with life – empty of Man, full of everything else. Yet, there, which is still an empty space on the map…Ugh! As sleep overtook me, my mind lost its logical bearings. As you know, I have spent time in some of the world’s most inhospitable regions, full of venomous and predatory wildlife, virulent diseases, and dangerous politics. One assesses the danger and prepares accordingly. It felt…and I know this doesn’t make sense…it felt as though the land itself had it out for us.

Not the taiga, or Quebec; this specific spot…and all the while I hadn’t glimpsed so much as a paw print of anything that could kill a man, and the weather conditions had been annoying, at worst. I was sure – don’t ask me how – that the very hills and berry bushes and scraggly spruces were conspiring towards our doom. You remember what I said, about the Cree having stories about hunting bears the size of longhouses, with ‘arms’ growing out of their faces, though they’d never seen an elephant? Think, too, how the Kwakiut’l out in BC were carving animal masks that looked almost human but for the prognathous jaw, pouting lips, absense of a nose and copious hair. Since that was in later times, ‘experts’ dismissed them as depictions of mythical beings – oh, just like their representations of ravens, bears, eagles and orcas, I guess! — because the non-literate shellfish-gatherers could have had no concept of ‘ape’ or ‘monkey.’ You will be incredulous as I tell you that there was an entire town in Alaska – Portlock? — that was abandoned due to harassment and attacks on residents by large, hairy bipeds. If you assumed it was an old fur trappers’ or prospectors’ tale, I should mention that Portlock was a cannery town, manufacturing food for the war effort. And before you say ‘bears,’ bears don’t throw rocks or bludgeon men to death with logging equipment. We can accept that the Bengalee cannot effectively farm the Sundarbans because of the presence of tigers, despite it being a century since modern repeating firearms were introduced into the country. I reflected on the fact that, whatever technology we possessed, the capacity of our small band of men to control a hostile force in that environment, beyond the northernmost fringe of agriculture, was minimal. We made hardly more formidable prey than…my thoughts turned to the artifacts I’d found…hardly more formidable prey than some 18^th century Frenchman with a musket and hunting knife, or a turn-of-the-century prospector with his black powder revolver. Our flesh was certainly no less succulent…

Think of it! The improbability of sheer coincidence having kept the efficient, destructive hand of Homo europaeus away for so long…The old man in the Wabush bar had been laughing, not because he was drunk, but because he knew something and we city-slickers, with all our degrees and diplomas were blundering into…for the life of us I couldn’t remember what it was we were warned to stay clear of. Sleep got me but not before I decided that we, or at least I, was leaving the next day and if I could not build much of a report on a pile of buttons and pipe-bowls, well, too bad.

From a scientific perspective, I attach little significance to dreams. Under normal conditions, we can dismiss them once the day’s activities have begun in earnest, as the projections of the previous day’s thoughts and experiences, fermented and distilled by the imagination. I don’t claim that my nocturnal reveries that night belonged to a different category, but, night in the cold, star-spangled darkness hundreds of miles from the nearest city, is a different thing from the same in a comfortable modern house surrounded by millions of (mostly) sane, peaceable fellow citizens. Our internal censorship bureau remains active, but its verdicts are much less convincing.

I dreamed – it’s almost shameful to sound like I put stock in this – I dreamed that I was in a small boat, either a canoe or a rowboat of some rough beige material. There were bundles of goods onboard, but, for whatever reason, I felt no desire to inspect them. My coat was also a dull greyish beige, with heavy blue cuffs, and I felt a warm hat upon my head, but I never looked into a mirror. I ‘knew’ – nothing or noone in the dreams said this, but I knew it as by intuition – that it was my job to paddle as far as we could go, taking three or four of the swarthy rough-looking fellows paddling alongside me with me into the lands beyond for a mile or two, leaving the others to make camp. I did not know what I would find, but if I found it, we would stay longer. If not, we would paddle back the way we came. From the context, it must have been beaver we were hunting, but, then, it wasn’t real. The terrain was identical to that which we were actually encamped in. Despite the historical aspect of everyone’s clothes and the canoe, the scrawny forest and rhododendron-covered slopes were no more ‘primeval’ in appearance, although because the sun set on our left, we must have been approaching from the south, not from Labrador. There was a storm, and my small party’s journey of half a league’s distance became a convoluted trek as we exhausted ourselves zig-zagging among similar looking ridges, dry stream beds and spruce and alder groves. Eventually, in the side of a teardrop-shaped hill we found a spot where, sheltered from wind, the trees had grown to more substantial height and breadth, and a cut in the hillside – not quite a cave – offered some shelter for us and a small fire. The storm raged all night. Though we managed to stay warm and dry and were beat to death with fatigue, none of us slept. No man could sleep, hearing those sounds: a strange, whooping whistle. It wasn’t loud but it asserted itself through the wind and rain as if on purpose, to remind us that we are not the masters here. Henri – somehow I knew that he was ‘Henri’ – was frantic, tugging at my collar as I fought for rest. He was yelling something about les yeux, the eyes; le chouan, and the stones, like a preacher on a downtown streetcorner. I slapped him with a gloved hand, as I was entitled to do. When he did not stop, I moved to draw my sword, such was my fury, but…then I saw them myself. First on the hillside, then on the ridge, appearing and disappearing. Red eyes, which glowed – they couldn’t have been reflecting light because we had none. Then, amid what I’d taken to be the outline of a hummock or boulders, they appeared much closer, among the sedges and rocks of the dry streambed in front of us. All the while there was no sign of anything walking or flying towards us. They simply appeared. I tried to make out what manner of creature they belonged to, but it was hopeless. Sometimes they appeared disembodied in the utter blackness, but in one or two instances, there was a silhouette around them, not unlike that of an earless owl or a Scottish fold cat when perched and alert. How big they were – I couldn’t say, depending on if the outline was of one of the creature’s heads or its whole body, but, not very big. I naturally associated them with the whooping and whistling that had scared us…I took a blunderbuss and fired a shot wildly and the eyes and whistling disappeared, but none of us could be at peace, knowing that the beings – whatever they were – lurked around us. At the crack of dawn, we ran and stumbled back to camp to warn the others and flee south immediately. I don’t remember what we found.

After a dream like that, understandably, I woke up in a bit of a bad humour. I was astonished by my watch, which showed it past 8:30 in the morning. Amazingly, O’Hara and the McGill student were still asleep in their bags, as if none of our alarm clocks had gone off. Not being a jerk, I let them sleep and went to go get coffee for myself. The earth was a sponge beneath my boots. The rain had continued all night. I saw that a clump of people had gathered at the tents lower down, on the rocks. Pushing my way through, I asked but got no answer. A second later, I saw they could hardly have provided one. The expedition leader (at least, he saw himself as that), Barney Moffat, was still in his sleeping bag. He was not alive. No inquest was done, but I’ll speak for everyone when I say it’s better to search for your oil elsewhere and leave that God-forsaken snow-desert to itself. I don’t think the expedition’s report included photographs. We didn’t take any. But I can give you a fair description…

Do you garden? If so, do you grow tomatoes? If so, then, I assume you are familiar with the appearance of a nice, ripe beefsteak tomato which has been subject to depredation by M. quinquemaculata – the tomato hornworm? Well, imagine that, but the beefsteak tomato is the torso of a man. What’s more, when all was said and done, it appeared there was a hole in the tent floor as well and – mere coincidence – the tent had been set up atop a natural fissure of about six or seven inches in diameter, pierced through the granite bedrock. This, anyhow, was what we agreed upon in our report. We did not plumb the fissure to ascertain its depth, and, if you have sense, neither will you. Tell your boss that Alberta’s premier is a lucky man, and please forward my cheque to my account at the Bank of Montreal.

Regards,

Dr. G. H. Belzer”

終

ULMUS

Part One of the Three Ages of Toronto

by M.G. Warenycia

I stood here before the first white sail came

As a footnote to Monsieur Champlain’s fame,

When the Huron and the Iroquois warred,

Longhouses and maize-fields dotting the sward,

Already tall and in aspect genteel

When first my kindred kenned the bite of steel.

With axe and musket each tribe sought its place,

Till plague and hunger laid waste to their race.

For many a year, none but ghosts did dwell

Mid wild ravine and goldenrod-fringed dell.

Then was a turmoil in the land to the South;

They came for land to feed the hungry mouth,

Those hardy wanderers, Loyal and stern,

By the sweat of their brows their bread to earn.

Forests primeval were wrenched from the earth,

My kinsmen’s corpses stacked by the hearth;

They planted apples and other things new:

Wheat, and cabbage, potato roots too.

Toil and thrift were these settlers’ home-brought creed:

The Land of Winter brooked no softer breed.

Alone I stood, upon the orchard knoll,

Spared since I shared their sombre, brooding soul.

I saw fires upon stately gambrel roofs,

My trunk echoing soldiers’ horses’ hoofs:

In blue legions, covetous, marched the Yanks,

Coming to conquer while expecting thanks.

Bold Brock fell and many a farmhouse burned;

With guns and guts th’invader’s gift was spurned.

Fruitful the orchards—and the people too,

Though alone in the wilderness they grew

As the wild-grape vines, in odd directions;

Each household its law with no corrections;

The clapboard cottages their secrets hold

Of sowings and reapings best left untold;

No Light there was save the Boreal sun;

Islands in forest-sea, nowhere to run.

Then came the age of Confederation;

The folk, grudging, joined a two-tongued nation.

Uneasily, I held my ancient court

As southward a City sprang from a Fort.

Pleased I was when the prospering townsmen

Lines their streets with thousands of my children.

“Toronto” ‘twas named, from Native fables;

They built shops, mills, charming Bay & Gables—

Homes graced with gardens that were studded thick

With lilies, Orange as their politics.

Above the crowd’s hubbub, the streetcar’s chime;

Sports on a Sunday was a grievous crime:

However much it expanded and thrived,

The City with my nature perfect jibed.

Then rose a madness over the ocean,

Threatening the Crown to whom devotion

Beat yet strong in the inhabitants’ hearts.

The City’s sons did eager depart,

But seldom returned except cruelly changed,

And art and music, expressing, grew strange.

The decade that followed was harsh and dry;

Some did run rum for the Yankees to buy;

Others o’er the sea did curious peer,

Some with admiration and some with fear.

Thus again to subdue the Teuton’s wrath

The City’s sons marched upon a one-way path.

As many as my leaves in autumn shed,

So many mourned the folk—their honoured dead.

Fire-scoured forests with doubled brightness bloom,

So land and people in richness did boom:

Stoic and stalwart like a mighty Elm

Or a storm-bred captain seizing the helm;

I saw the folk full of hope’s raw vigour

Stride broadly forward, trusting the Future.

Alas! About the time when first unfurled

Their banner, self-woven, before the world,

Into my vast roots a rot was creeping;

The centuries sap was fast depleting,

And so with all of the established stock:

Our limbs withered, our bark was dry as chalk.

When the arborists came and hewed our tops

And ripped us all up by the grove and copse,

The sun shone fresh upon a grand parade

And the City emerged from our eldritch shade.

Mall Rats

The cell phones came in colours

Red, silver, blue, white and tangerine,

Twisting or flipping, bricks and sliders

Bought on reviews in a magazine.

Our meetings were a matter

Of weightiest import,

Peering as we did through crowds and chatter,

The first-come holding fort.

Bus and sidewalk calculated,

The hour collectively set;

The painful parking hour-rated,

Each owed the other his word and time in debt.

The attended face, the hoped-for hail-up greeting

And our conclave shall begin,

The bustling crowd concealing

Us as we seek to sate our hunger, somewhere beyond the din.

The DVDs were pirated—

Anime, crime, or horror flicks—

At the arcade we’d be riveted

To the Street Fighter control sticks.

Fast food and long conversation;

Suburban philosophers, we discoursed as we’d roam;

Children of imagination

Who’d soon not know this home.

Consumerism meant us nil:

We played, we fought, we wandered wide-eyed

In the sanctuary where we’d hide

From a world confusing, cold and ill.

Whatever the academics write,

They know the buying, not the Being

Of silly youths sincerely seeking out the Light,

Nor the savour of Dreams tasted, however fleeting,

On a breezy, moonlit summer’s night.

Some folks had forums, the square and the temple hall;

We had our great bazaar: the mundane, magic Mall.

Painting on a Summer Evening, Grange Avenue, Toronto

by M.G. Warenycia

A caterpillar is marching circuits

Around the window fame.

The chestnuts and linden lush

And perfumed with Jasmine tea

Smother the humdrum Sturm und Drang

As the hot and irritable City seeps outward

Like water squeezed from a sponge.

“The world has been getting smaller,”

She says the truth.

First school, then university seemed to fade;

“They still exist,” she secretly suspects,

Recalling walking past daydream backgrounds of

Faces and voices—but that was long ago.

A year? Two?

Club nights and parties became occasional effort

And then a crime.

All the places become Google images

Alone; all the people become pics and posts.

“The world is getting smaller”—

She paints to chase away the thought

And to lure ghosts

Of Yesterday, Tomorrow and Elsewhere

To make her feel familiar.

And there’s YouTube and Netflix,

Poirot and Studio Ghibli in HD DVD.

It helps and then it doesn’t

When, in the evening through the still-dark morn,

With the cold-sweat panic

To be Somewhere and Someone one isn’t.

Brew some coffee, put on a podcast, paint:

Emergency measures

Wielded with flagrant frequency

That would make dictators blush.

On the canvas, a moth

Has seen a light,

Flaps to fly

And hits the wall of a jar.

The jar is getting smaller…

The breeze at the window is so fresh

It feels wasted

On sleeping nostrils,

The light beyond so beautiful and bright

It aches; she wants to scream

But no one can hear her through the jar.

Downtown Eastside (Vancouver)

Oily pavement shimmers

Painted by neon and headlights

That warm to a false glimmer

Embers of dreams that live only at night.

Toothy brick scours leather-wrapped shoulders

Above too-small skirts and too-tight jeans;

The darkness uncovers

What we least want seen.

The passing cars and seductive signs

Blur into a cosmic river

Drowning those naively straining to divine

Howa bright-eyed child becomes a swine-flock’s fodder.

Pills and experience have inoculated

Against wind and rain,

For appetites must be sated

As the City fats on inner pain

Which dulls the voices saying not to ride

In the foetid truck whose driver, grinning,

Accepts another Offering

Washed in by the tide.

《毛蟲災（加拿大）》

安省鄉野小農莊，
暑天假期多舒暢。
樹木茂盛天氣熱，
孩子暫時停學業。
偶然風景似有怪，
具體遠古很難猜。
屋前田里古榆樹，
鴟梟棲息不舒服。
精神不安何說明？
忽觀天色耳緊聽。
環繞房子黑森林，
瞬間眨眼似來侵。
林邊樹枝忙扑騰，
驚悟今天沒有風。

The Swarm (Québec, 1742)

Winter had fallen, timid and mild,

The herbage springing fulsome and bold:

The apples and maples

Powder pink and fluorescent lime.

Bronze sinews bathed in brine

Salted the sun-baked grass

As the blackbird blared its summer siren.

The habitants’ fields splayed like a fish’s spine

Out of the great River

Whose whisper lulled work-hot heads to sleep.

Ti Yann, hilling squash, came upon a cowbird

And starlings six that lazed upon the shadowed dust.

They startled, but made no flight.

He thought of pie and fricassee

But, seized with the peasant’s eye for omen,

Crossed himself, said “Hail Mary.”

The sun set living flesh to broil;

The farmers in the corn slowed, looked up from their toil

Awaiting the cool hiss of the breeze

That they reckoned rustling in the tallest poplars’ leaves

And waited…and the air was still.

Gazing at the windbreak trees

They saw them doff their crowns,

Foliage sinking as sand in a timer-glass.

Leaning on their tools, they stood bewildered,

Agape at the woods

As gaunt as a cruel December.

In the bones of their toes they felt through the soil

That the grasses and the goldenrod

As if by some witch’s art

Had begun to seethe and boil.

Impelled by unbridled hunger

It came towards them,

A billion knotted bodies

Wrought into one consciousness.

They saw and felt It squirming;

Some swore they heard triumphant squeals;

Some fled to the town, whose whitewashed walls

Were writhing black and brown;

Some fled their Reason;

The lucky reached the boats.

To the very shore It came

As if menace was compassed in Its mind.

Those safe on the ships shook in wonder

At how the Land could sudden bear

More life than it had substance

And mocked themselves as mad

While the solem prêtres prayed

To Dieu for deliverance.

Seventeen hundred and forty-two

Says the musty tome in quill-penned scrawl—

Back when Intendant Hocquart’s hand

Ruled feebly a wild and forbidding land.

Robarts keeps it on a reference shelf.

Leaving that book-lined dungeon,

The City looms fresh and bright;

The soul relaxes in Metro’s vibrant bustle,

But the leaves of the campus maples

Shimmer disconcertingly

In the windless noonday light.

A Scene of a Street in Ancient Times

A scene of a street in times long ago,

Whence colours, people and dreams did flow;

Almost beyond memory

Are those days of bustle and revelry,

Before the Misanthropes

Cried wolf, were heard, and stifled hopes

Spiteful seeking to legally blight

Ambition’s envy-breeding light,

And mask the Beauty and choke the Arts

Which tear the veil from their petty hearts,

They who preached themselves as warriors righteous

For the addicts, the poor and homeless

Now they fume, and curse, and turn aside

If shown the bankruptcy, ODs and suicide:

It is a poison pill; a bitter herb

This trading work and commerce for eternal CERB.

Yet they hide and scowl, and bawling demand

Their castles’ rent from calloused hands;

Those who strive, they mock and scorn,

As Living itself from life is shorn;

But just as from Winter’s ice and mud,

The apples bloom and maples bud,

However hateful, a herd of sheep

Cannot forever frozen keep

The Love and Faith and Livity

That are our True Humanity.