He bends to brush fresh snow off his moccasins before raising the latch of the cookshack and going into the warmth and smell of coffee and fried bacon and unwashed men. The day shift driller and his helper sit one side of the table, the cook and Morris the foreman on the other. There is a tub of margarine and a half eaten loaf of sliced bread on the table.
‘It’s the Limey tourist,’ the driller says.
He grins at them, unzipping his parka and flipping back the hood. ‘It’s cold out there. Forty below. D’you guys see the see the hare prints out by the crapper? Fresh this morning, I reckon.’
‘Second winter in the bush and he thinks he’s a tracker, eh?’ The foreman swigs black coffee from a tin mug.
‘Eggs and bacon in the oven. Coffee on the stove,’ the cook says.
He nods. It is the same every morning, every day of the week unless they are moving the drill. In that case, the night shift crew would be at breakfast too. As usual, his two fried eggs will be hard and the bacon burned to a crisp.
‘You coming out to the rig this morning then?’ the driller asks.
He shakes his head as he pours a mug of coffee. It smells stale and will be bitter. He sits at the table next to the stove and upends the sugar shaker over his coffee and stirs it. ‘Boss was on the radio just now. Gave me co-ordinates of a bunch of claims I have to stake. On the edge of Reindeer, across from Stranger Island.’
‘That’ll be a long walk,’ Morris says.
‘Twelve miles. Six out six back. I’ve measured it already.’ He takes his breakfast from the oven, puts two slices of bread on the oil tablecloth and smears them with margarine. He puts the egg and bacon on the bread to make a sandwich and eats it.
‘You’ll be breaking trail in fresh snow.’
‘I know that, Morris. But it’ll be easier going once I get out on Reindeer.’
Morris Morisette nods. Morris, who is half Cree, takes an interest in him, looks out for him even. He likes that though he thinks he doesn’t need it. Not now anyway.
The driller and his helper and Morris get up and leave the cookshack. A few minutes later he hears the little John Deere tractor chug into life and the clatter of its tracks as it heads out on to the ice-bound lake. Morris will be driving, the driller and his helper riding on the sled behind, muffled in their hooded mackinaws feet warm in felt lined rubber bush boots. They’ll head north along the lakeshore for a mile or so then inland across the frozen muskeg to the drill site.
He sits with the cook and drinks a second mug of coffee. ‘You want to take a steak sandwich?’ the cook asks.
‘Yup.’ He gets up from the table. ‘And biscuits and a flask of tea.’ He goes outside, stops and looks at the thermometer tacked to the doorframe. Yep, forty two degrees below zero. Crispy all right. He breaths in through his nose feeling the moisture in his nostrils freeze. He walks on packed snow past the drillers’ tent to the one he shares with Morris. He remembers his trepidation that first winter when they told him his home would be a tent at sixty below. ‘If other blokes survive it, so can I,’ he said. Nobody told him the heavy canvas tents would be set up on plywood floors, with tar-paper wrapped around the aluminium frame and insulating snow banked head high against the walls. Or that the wood-burning tin stove could glow red hot and he’d have to get up most nights to douse it with water just to cool off. He opens the ply door and goes inside. It’s warm and filled with sunlight filtered yellow through the canvas. It smells of wood smoke, warm bedding and kippered socks. He had his weekly bath the evening before, going out on the lake to break the ice on the water hole and fill a bucket full of a slush and water. Back in the tent he set it on the stove and when the ice had melted and the water warm enough, stripped off and standing next to the stove washed himself all over with cloth and soap. The drillers mock his hygiene; they wash only their grease-blackened hands and splash water on their faces when they come off their twelve hour shift. And they change their underwear just once a month.
He picks up the aerial photograph from his work table, slips it into a plastic and canvas cover and puts this into a small rucksack. He hangs a prismatic compass on a lanyard round his neck. His Lee Enfield carbine hangs from its strap above his bed. He won’t take that – too much to carry. His leather mitts he shoves in his parka pockets and goes outside and back to the cookshack.
‘Take it easy, eh?’ the cook says handing him his lunch and flask. ‘Watch out for bears.’
‘In dead mid-winter?’ He shakes his head and puts the food and flask in his rucksack. ‘See you this evening.’ His snowshoes and axe are stuck upright in the snow beside the log pile. He buckles on the snowshoes, making sure the leather straps are snug behind his ankles, puts on his mitts, picks up his axe and heads out on the lake. The rising sun behind him casts his long shadow blue on the snow. He leans forward in the odd gait required by snowshoes, lifting his feet each step just enough for one shoe to slide above the other. He settles into a near trot. Not quite a trot, he thinks, but faster than a normal walk. He feels the bar of the snowshoe through his moccasins working as a fulcrum under the crook of his toes. He has the straps set just right and there’ll be no blisters at the end of the day.
It’s just over a mile to the dark line of jack pine on the far shore. He’s plotted a route on the air photo west from the camp across the lake then northwest three miles through the bush to reach Reindeer Lake which runs north-south along the Manitoba Saskatchewan border for a hundred miles or more. He loves this, the solitude, the sense that this is his alone. He’ll not see another soul until he returns to camp this evening. He is the only human in this boundless wilderness. Save of course for his drilling crew who sit in the noisy oily diesel stink of their drill shack and probe this great Canadian Shield for metal treasure. And that’s more or less at his behest. Well not exactly . . . . He stops in mid-lake and cocks an ear – yes there it is, the whine of the drill motor as they pull rods, hoisting a cylinder of fresh-drilled rock. Tomorrow he’ll be at the rig. Perhaps tomorrow he’ll find what he’s looking for. Probably not.
It’s cold. Of course it’s cold and moisture from his breath freezes in the stubble around his mouth and chin. But this doesn’t bother him. His parka’s fur fringed hood creates a zone of almost warmth around his face. His hands are toasty in the wool and leather mitts and his feet in two pairs of thick wool socks and soft moosehide moccasins are toasty too. He feels the catgut mesh of the snowshoe through his heels. He smiles, leans again into his gait as he clambers up the bank into the forest. He doesn’t need the compass, not with the sun behind him in this crystal world. Although once in the forest he checks his bearing, notes the angle of the shadowed trees and keeps it constant. And every fifty yards or so he cuts axe blazes on a larger tree to guide him back and as a sign to whomever might come after. His axe is razor sharp. Last summer Morris Morisette showed him how to use the finest file to hone the blade so sharp it would shave hairs off his arm. He loves this axe and has learned to use it with a woodman’s skill.
Once in the woods his snowshoes sink six inches down and he must lift them near knee high to clear the snow. As Morris said, it isn’t easy going and he pants as if he’s running hard. Crystal beads of ice condense on the fox fur around his parka hood and his breath is smoke in the freezing air. But he’s got a rhythm going and a whisky jack takes up station on his left flitting from tree to tree and whistling at him every time it lands. An hour of steady snowshoe work and the trees begin to thin and suddenly Reindeer Lake stretches out vast and blinding white before him. He stops at the edge, sticks his axe in the snow and takes the air photo from his rucksack. He studies it, looks north and south along the lakeshore. Yes, here he is – a deep inlet just to the north and beyond it a rocky promontory and what must be Stranger Island. He holds his compass up to eye level, flips up the lid and takes a bearing on the promontory – three-ten degrees, exactly right and just as he has marked. He cuts long blazes on two adjacent shoreline trees – marks that will guide him to his trail on his return this evening. He’s chalked a north-south rectangle on the photo covering the promontory. It’s the area he must claim. He sets out northwest across the lake. The going is easy now and he moves much faster. Out here the wind-blown snow is only inches deep and even less in places where his snow-shoes clatter and skid on naked ice. In fifteen minutes he’s at the promontory and wades up through drifted snow between the rocks. He takes off his pack, cuts skinny branches off the nearest pine and lays them on the snow and sits, eats his biscuits and drinks half the flask of hot sweet tea without removing mitts or snowshoes.
On his feet again, he takes the axe and trims a jack pine sapling to a five foot post, squaring off the top. From his pack he takes a numbered metal tag, nails this to the post and with a magic marker writes his name, the time and date beneath. This is the southeast corner of the claims. He sets the compass on the post, sights due north, picking out a tree some fifty yards ahead to give himself a line. Pack on his back and cutting blazes with his axe, he paces out along the line, squaring off posts each five hundred yards. The posts he marks with marking pen and claim tag. At two thousand yards he resets his line due west and carries on. It’s heavy going in thigh-deep snow but he keeps at it until past midday when he stops once more on the shores of Reindeer Lake. He takes a break to eat and drink his tea, but sweat-soaked, cools off fast and must move before he freezes. He heads due south now, marking line and claim posts as he goes.
By two that afternoon he’s back at his starting point, the block of claims completed in good time to trek the six miles back to camp. He sets off, now with the westering sun behind him, following the tracks he left that morning – his tracks, the only mark of humans in this pristine wilderness, save of course the mineral claims he himself has staked. And if indeed somewhere beneath those claims there lies the riches his employers seek, then humanity will desecrate exactly what he loves the most. He is the harbinger of wild life hunted, pristine forest flayed and crystal waterways polluted.
He sighs and stops, looks back the way he’s come then up the narrow inlet on his left. There’s something moving there, bounding down the western shore, dark against the snow – a caribou perhaps? In the depths of this northern winter he seldom sees much wildlife – just solitary ravens, jays around the camp, the tracks of snowshoe hares and twice he’s seen the oval prints of lynx. Three hours to sunset and four miles to go, gives him time to make a detour. Heading up the inlet he sticks to the eastern shore watching as the beast bounds down the other side. Drawing level he stops and stares across the ice. The animal also stops, head turned towards him. He sets out across the inlet to get a closer look. Halfway across he halts again and shades his eyes against the sun. And then it dawns on him – he’s looking at a timber wolf. It trots across the ice towards him. It’s huge, far bigger than the mangy pair of wolves he saw last summer, slinking round the camp. He turns, tries not to panic, heads for the eastern shore as fast as he has ever moved on snowshoes. He looks back twice. Both times the beast is thirty, maybe forty yards behind trotting easily across the ice, eyes fixed on him. If he’d not left his gun behind. . . . Reaching the shore, he’s missing something else – his axe. He put it down out on the ice while looking at the wolf. He stops and turns – he’ll not leave it there. That means coming back tomorrow, if the bloody wolf doesn’t get him first. Standing tall as he can manage, he walks toward the wolf. It stops, backs off for thirty yards, sits on its haunches, watches him. Breathing deep and steady, eyes fixed on his predator, he goes out into the middle of the inlet, retrieves his axe and walks back again towards the shore. The wolf lets him pass and takes up station once again some thirty yards behind. At least he has a weapon now, and a sharpish one at that. He can defend himself. He sets a steady pace now, not so fast to tire to soon or stumble, or even worse to fall, for then the wolf will be on him in half a dozen long and easy lopes. The damn thing must be hungry, wants to eat him and that’s a thought he’s never had before – something else’s dinner. He’s sweating heavily, his scent behind him stinking in the avid nostrils of the beast. Trying not to look behind he reaches the blazes he cut that morning when first he came out on the lake. He picks up his snowshoe trail into the forest. It’s slower going than on the lake but at least he cannot lose the way. His track’s not straight, curving round the denser trees or deeper drifts of snow. Looking back on straighter stretches he sees the lowering sun glinting through the pines and the wolf still there, loping easily along his path. It won’t attack him unless he falls. He took an hour to break this trail this morning so forty minutes should see him on the homeward stretch across the lake. And indeed it does. Out of the forest, the camp in sight, he almost runs the final mile across the lake, looking back just once to see the animal still thirty yards behind him, stark against the snow and setting sun.
‘There’s a wolf out there. It’s followed me from Reindeer Lake.’ He stands panting in the open doorway of the cookshack taking off his snowshoes.
‘Christ on a bike! Come in and shut the door. You’re letting in the bloody cold.’
‘I’m telling you Morris, there’s a wolf – huge bugger. It’s been following me.’ He goes into a fug of warmth and smoke. They are all around the table smoking – cook, two drillers and their helpers and Morris Morisette
‘Limey wouldn’t know a wolf if it bit ’im on the ass,’ a driller says.
He shakes his head. ‘I’m telling you – a wolf. It’s followed me for near three hours. Go out and have a look. You’ll see it’s tracks.’
Morris shakes his head. ‘Too cold out there boy. You probably imagined it.’
‘No I didn’t.’ He takes off his parka, hangs it on a chair and helps himself to coffee on the stove.