NINA

IT WAS THE BEGINNING OF autumn, 1999. After Labour Day and the departure of the cottagers, tranquility had returned to the shores ringed by the forests of Kaganoma. A concert of shrill voices filled the yard where the chickens roamed at will. The yard, about a hectare in area, formed a vague parallelogram, one side of which was the lake. It had been only partially cleared by the previous owner, and fallen black pines had been left to rot among their own saplings, ferns, yews, blueberry bushes, and Labrador tea.

Nihilo wandered to the edge of the clearing, passed under some chickens that were roosting in tree branches, as passive as old biddies. A bit farther on, he came face to face with a feral cat that must have weighed forty pounds, reddish feathers sprouting from its mouth as it sat contemplating him, unperturbed. The feline moved off unhurriedly through the striations of sunlight that slanted through the understory.

It came back later that day, the same or possibly a different cat. Nihilo went out, aimed his shotgun at its huge round head framed by sideburns, raised his line of sight a good metre, and fired. The beast disappeared in a few bounds.

The next time he saw it, Sam fired two shots at it, again aiming over its head through branches of spruce, three metres from the chicken coop. Stretched out like a sphinx on the carpet of spruce needles, his visitor continued to look back at him with the same air of suicidal indifference and fathomless consciousness. This time it didn’t even bother to move off.

At the municipal library in Maldoror, across from the hockey arena, Sam cruised the bookshelves for anything he could find about lynxes. He sat at one of the tables near a window and went through the pile. He read about the Spanish lynx reintroduction program, and about another in Colorado, releasing individuals captured in the Yukon and near Abitibi.

The Canadian lynx consumed an average of two hundred hares a year. The kits, usually two in number, spent the first winter with their mother.

Old French trappers had called it the pichou, a word derived from the Algonquin pesheen. At one time the term was also used to refer to snowshoes made from deer or caribou hide.

In a book on animal symbolism in Amerindian cultures, he read that the lynx was considered a kind of “holder of secrets.” Another work, entitled Discover Your Animal Totem, confirmed that to penetrate the deepest secrets you needed to resort to the medicine of the lynx. According to writs of this medicine, the Egyptian sphinx was obviously not a lion, as had always been assumed, but rather a lynx. “If the lynx knocks on your door, pay attention!” concluded the authors, who then went on to issue this advice: “Become a lynx and smile like Mona Lisa!”

Sam met Phil Baron at the White Wolf, where Marie-Québec had four or five shifts a week waiting on tables, usually from three o’clock to nine. Phil was one of their neighbours on Lake Kaganoma, a balding man in his fifties with a long, uniformly silvered ponytail who had dropped everything and blown six thousand bucks on his dream: a hunt camp, rough as they come but with a lease from the Ministry of Natural Resources tacked beside the door. Phil lived with Joey, a young groundhog that accompanied him wherever he went, nestled under the hood of his ancient Dodge Chrysler, curled up on the chassis. Phil liked lifting the truck’s hood to show you the brownish red lump huddled up against the engine block. Joey had come into Phil’s life during a spring fishing trip when, after drinking half a case of beer, he’d parked his truck above the animal’s burrow to take a piss. It took him a while to figure out why, when he was leaving, the fat groundhog had taken refuge in his truck; the engine, well known by his friends for its musical talents, made a noise like a groundhog: a shrill whistle followed by a tremolo.

Now, whenever Phil parked in the town, he looked for empty yards and vacant lots with plenty of clover and dandelions.

From customers at the Wolf, Sam also learned that during the mid-1980s, Richard Godefroid, the former FLQer, had spent a few summers in the area. Once, he’d even rented a cottage on the next lake down from Sam’s, Salaberry Lake. Phil Baron had known him well, his informants added, and could maybe be persuaded to talk about him.

Baron’s hunt camp was about a kilometre north of Kaganoma. There was always a fire burning somewhere in that corner of the dense forest — dead leaves, branches, slash, old boards, bits of broken shingle — among the slanting “cypresses” (black spruce) that served as his backyard. An open case of twenty-four was always within reaching distance. A chainsaw that could use a good sharpening had been left out in the trees. The yard was a dump. Inside, the camp was a minefield. The dock was a work in progress.

Helping to make a dent in a six-pack of Miller Lite, Samuel listened to Baron tell him that Gode, as he’d been called, had been from the area, from Villebois to be exact, a tiny village pretty much smack on the 49th parallel, just above La Sarre. When he needed to make himself scarce after his release from prison, Gode had gone to Abitibi and worked for a few summers as a brush remover in the forestry concessions of the Northwest. That’s how Phil knew him. They’d removed slash together out by Joutel, and it was Phil who’d provided him with the tiles for his cottage on Salaberry Lake. They’d hunted together, drank together. When Gode left, they’d arranged to keep in touch from time to time. If he was passing anywhere near Maldoror, Gode always stopped in at the White Wolf around four o’clock, where he was sure to find his old bud in his usual state of alcohol-induced stupefaction. Once, he even came to introduce a documentary he’d co-produced at the film festival, but his arrival had coincided with a period during which Phil had had a maddening tendency to get himself so pissed he could fail a Breathalyzer test from a metre and a half away, and then conduct a perfectly straight, two-hour conversation with a line of coke in his nostrils as big as the Kaganoma esker. He didn’t remember a single thing about Gode’s visit.

While Phil was talking, Samuel Nihilo was thinking that, for the second time, their paths had almost crossed, his and Godefroid’s, in fact, somewhere on this sandy terrain sprouting severely malcontent pines, the future had turned into the past. It was as if he and Gode occupied the same home range, a territory bigger than that of a cougar, on which they circled warily around each other, distancing themselves, coming closer together, without being aware of it.

“You wanna hear a good story?” Baron blurted out, crushing an empty Miller can with his fingers. “In 1969 or ’70, I don’t remember exactly, me ’n’ a few friends broke into the local firehall and took off with a half-dozen FN and some walkie-talkies. Nothing to do with the FLQ. The stuff later ended up being used by a poaching outfit specializing in moose meat, but that’s another story. Except that when the War Measures Act came in, they hauled me in from the room I rented by the week above a stripper bar, and I became the first political prisoner to be arrested in the history of Maldoror. A few years later, the police chief bought me a beer by way of apologizing, and so I got the last laugh on that. He told me that two days after the special law came in, he received a phone call from the head of the QPP. The guy’d called to warn him that from his perspective in Montreal, the guys who drove around Maldoror with a cherry on top of their cars were spending too much time in the doughnut shop. Three arrests in the whole of Abitibi? That wasn’t good enough. They needed more. He said he was sending up a few helicopters. Make it look ugly up here, he said, the big kahuna, and then he hung up.”

“That’s really what he said? Make it look ugly?”

“Yup. With helicopters.”

“Did Gode ever talk to you about the death of Lavoie?”

“Never.”

Sam read The Seagull. Then he read it again. He thought about it. “When Trigorin sees Nina and the seagull that had just been shot,” he wrote, “he instinctively perceives it as a symbol, he imagines the whole story right there: Nina free as the air beside the lake, seduced by Trigorin’s idleness, condemned to a death of the soul by something as useless as Treplev’s gunshot. The idea of the ‘short story within the play,’ which takes the place of the ‘play within the play,’ means that Trigorin, thanks to his creative compulsion, foresees both his liaison with Nina and its aftermath. But Chekhov’s vision is larger than that: it isn’t Nina’s seduction that provokes her actual or symbolic death, but the fact that the writer immediately conceives their idyll in the form of a narrative, a story. Something that aligns with real life, but which, unlike the great, romantic love stories, contains its ending in its beginning. In fact, Trigorin doesn’t seduce Nina from idleness. On the contrary: he seduces her through activity . . .”

Maire-Québec was fading. She didn’t like her job. The regulars at the White Wolf mistook their bar stools for a shrink’s couch and drained all the energy out of her, not to mention that if she had a dollar for every time she heard the words “tits” and “ass” she’d be a millionaire. But a job was a job, and a kind of social standing (however mediocre and libidinous) came with it. Whereas being in a Chekhov play in Maldoror didn’t count for much. Because of their precariousness and their isolation, regional troupes saw themselves prevented from participating either in the travelling provincial circuit or on the stages of Montreal, so that being booked for four, five, six, or seven nights maximum, in places like the Loblaw’s Happy Times Theatre, was the most they could hope for by way of success, despite all their hard work: the slow approach to the text, the ever-deepening reading, the memorization, line by line, the rehearsals, the blocking, the body movements, the putting on of this second skin of words, the mastering of the role, the dress rehearsal, the performance, the exaltation, the exhaustion, the labour and the stage fright, and then the return to darkness.

At the beginning of autumn, she seemed to oscillate endlessly between chronic fatigue, bouts of insomnia, PMS, polymorphous flashbacks to an old case of mono, and black thoughts that could drag her into something resembling postpartum depression but wasn’t. What’s eating you, anyway? he wanted to shout at her. But he held back, as though he feared provoking an irreparable breach. Waking up the sleeping cat. And it was as though the characters she inhabited during the production prevented her from showing her true self other than to make it die again in the soft glow of the footlights.

He found her sitting out on the deck. As the autumn advanced, her inner unhappiness had become a mask that she could put on or take off at will.

Samuel drew up a chair, sat down, and leaned his elbows on the table.

“I have to go to Montreal . . . I have work to do there. People I need to see, archives I have to consult.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll be leaving first thing.”

“And by three o’clock you’ll be in Montreal while I’ll be here listening to Phil Baron making propositions that would make a porn star blush . . .”

“He does that?”

“They’re all the same. You should hear them.”

“Not sure I’d like that as much as you do.”

“Ha!”

“But I don’t want you to stay here alone.”

“And where would you like me to go?”

“Why not visit your parents?”

“No way. I’ll stay here. The Ghost of Kaganoma will keep me company.”

“Okay. But I want to do you a favour first. I want to show you how to use the shotgun.”

“Are you out of your mind? If you feel guilty about leaving me alone here, that’s your problem.”

“Maybe, but a 12-gauge aimed at the gut is a universal language.”

“Don’t waste your time.”

“What if a bear tries to get in? What would you do?”

“If you think it’s so dangerous for me to stay here, then why are you leaving?”

“To work.”

“Yeah, right!”

Sam got up and went into his study. A rifle is a strange tool that gives birth to a threat even as it averts it. He went back out onto the deck, the Baikal broken and hooked over his arm. Marie-Québec turned her back, looked out over the blue lake and, superimposed on it, the great forest that stretched all the way to Maldoror. She shook her head. No.