EPILOGUE

I SPENT THE REST of the war, and the rest of my boyhood, in a prison camp. With its rows of wire fences, its wooden huts and sandy ground, it was like an enormous pigeon loft crowded with men and boys who had once been fliers.

We had lived in the sky, in that limitless world of moonlight and clouds, and to be suddenly caged in was too much for some. I thought at first it would be just fine, it would be jim-dandy to be locked in there, to be locked out of a world at war. But soon I was spending my days pressed against the wire, staring out at trees and hills. Through two winters and two springs I wore a trench through the sandy ground, from my hut to the wire.

Now and then the great Flying Fortresses thundered overhead. They didn’t even bother with camouflage paint anymore. Their aluminum skins shone like silver as they stretched their cloudy trails across the sky. It was heartbreaking to watch them, and the fighters that followed—like little sparks of sunlight. I came to understand the surly bonds of earth. They bound me down as the months crawled by.

But it wasn’t the sky that I longed for. I didn’t think that I would ever again climb into an airplane. I ached for the North Woods, for the cry of the wolf and the bursting of deer from the undergrowth.

In 1945 we were freed by American soldiers. We rode a train through ruined cities and flattened villages, past fields full of craters and rubble. A soldier beside me, watching through the window, said, “We sure liberated the hell out of this place.”

The war was over when I arrived in England again, and though I looked everywhere for Bert—from Land’s End to the Scottish Highlands—I found no trace of the old pigeoneer. In the hills of Yorkshire I found a deserted runway and the rubble of a pigeon loft. In London I sat by the bronze lions in Trafalgar Square. But the pigeons only saddened me, and the whirring of their wings brought sweat to my hands and a knock to my heart.

The things that I had seen and done never faded from my mind. The sight of a full moon, the smell of clover, the sound of a laugh like Ratty’s, would bring everything back in an instant. Every now and then I dreamed I was falling, and I woke in a sweat, kicking at the blankets.

There was nothing left for me in England, and I went home to Canada in the spring of 1947. It was the forest that called me, the great stretch of the Canadian Shield, with its red rock, its jack pines and leaping rivers. But I went at it slowly. I bought a train ticket only as far as Toronto.

Yesterday I climbed aboard and headed west. I huddled by a window as we clacked through little villages, through farmland and fields. The farther I went, the more the sky grew thick and stormy. When the sun went down, and there was only darkness around me—and the shaking of the train—I felt that I was flying. And last night, for the first time in many, many months, I dreamed the same old dream of spinning round and round, of the earth below me full of fire.

I woke screaming. I flung away my blanket, and it tangled in my arms. For a moment, amid the rumble of thunder and flash of lightning, I thought it was Percy beating his wings at my face. I woke the others in the railway car; I shocked them from their sleep. And their startled voices sent me back to a burning, spinning Lanc.

Even now, in the brightness of noon, they look toward me, wondering—I suppose—about my air force uniform and the deep lines in my face.

Lake Ontario sparkles on our left; the land on our right is green and flat. We’re getting close to the city now. I don’t know how long I’ll stay, or exactly what I’ll do. But someday I’ll carry on to the west, and home to Kakabeka.

The train rocks over a switch. The wheels click and clack. The engine sounds its whistle up ahead, and the sound sends me off again in my mind. I travel half the world, in the middle of a war, to a lonely airfield among the hills of Yorkshire.