Snow had started falling that morning, dropping over everything like a gauze curtain, isolating objects in a white haze. Gradually, the rough, bare patches of cinder and the wiry tufts of grass along the edge of the railway tracks were covered.
“Rabbits?” Cliff queried, opening the door of the railway station to peer across the platform. A crest of poplars less than a hundred yards away was blurred and indistinct.
“In this weather?” Arlene replied. She rubbed the heel of her hand over the window to clear the mist from the glass. On the other side of the tracks, the slab fence with its broken and tilted boards looked like a line of lost cripples struggling blindly through the storm.
“This is the weather for it. No wind. Fresh snow so we can see new tracks.”
Arlene hesitated. Just after breakfast, they had fought, not loudly or violently but with a sudden flurry of words as sharp and painful as bits of jagged glass. It had hurt them both and left them wary of attempting to bridge the silence, a silence that the sullen clouds and grey light had reinforced.
For the last two weeks, their days had been filled with indefinable exasperations, making them irritable with each other and quick to take offence at even so slight a thing as a tone of voice. Being alone so much, Arlene was certain, had a lot to do with it, but it was not the only reason. Worry over their too rapidly eroding savings weighed on them both.
When they had been crowded into a small city apartment overflowing with oil painting and pottery equipment, the idea of buying an abandoned railway station in the country had seemed an excellent idea. There would be no end of space: snug living quarters and lots of storage area, but best of all, a large waiting room, which, with its black, pot-bellied stove and windows on three sides, could be turned into a studio large enough for both of them. During the summer, the highway location would allow them a prime display area for their work. Passing motorists, on their way to their summer cottages, would be good prospects. Then there had been the added benefit of being on the edge of a small town. While they would have the necessary privacy for their work, they would be able to walk to the grocery store, the movie house, the skating rink. Expenses would be minimal.
Now, if anything, they had too much privacy. The local farmers never came to town except when driven from their homes by the need to purchase groceries or to have broken equipment repaired. The townspeople were reticent to the point of being rude. Suspicious of anyone who painted pictures instead of working, especially pictures that contained no recognizable objects, they remained aloof.
In the city, Arlene and Cliff had both fought for and cherished every second they had for their work. Now, they brooded through weekends, hoping every car that used their parking lot to turn around in was bringing visitors. What made it even more difficult was the knowledge that their plan to spend a full year as artists was going awry.
She drew her hand away from the window and wiped it on her jeans. Rather than turn around, she studied Cliff’s image in the blurred window.
“Okay,” she consented, without any softening of her voice that would indicate she wanted to make peace.
They pulled on their parkas and their mukluks. The mukluks, soft, smoky-smelling moosehide boots so flexible and light that they were no heavier than a warm sock, were their only real extravagance since coming to Eddyville. Cliff’s mukluks, because they were men’s, were lavishly decorated with beads. The leggings were fitted with red and green felt. At the end of the drawstring that held them tightly to the leg were two orange and blue pompoms. Arlene’s were plainer, more practical, their leggings undecorated except for a band of arctic hare.
Cliff took their twenty-two calibre rifles down from the rack and spilled a cascade of small bronze shells into her palm. They went outside to stand under the protection of the wide eaves. Snow had come late to Manitoba this year, but it was now falling in earnest. The grove of trees had disappeared and the fence was only a faint image, as though it had been brushed onto white paper with pale grey water. They waited in silence, adjusting to the loneliness of the enclosing snow. For Arlene it was a good feeling, a clean feeling, as though her mind was being swept clear of complexities in preparation for the task before them.
Arlene liked to hunt. That fact had surprised her. She had been born and brought up in the city, only making quick weekend trips to the country for swimming or barbecuing, rituals that could as easily have been performed in the suburbs. When they had first come to Eddyville, she had been nervous about the empty fields and thick groves of trees, but they had inexorably drawn her to them.
At first, she had walked the railway line, secure in the rigidity of the metal rails and heavy crossties. Then, a little at a time, she struck out, exploring the fence lines, surprising herself with a keen sense of direction. She had noticed the crudely lettered sign in the grocery store offering the rifles for sale and had talked Cliff into going to see about them. In the afternoons they had sat on the edge of the platform, shooting tins off the crossbars of the fence. Then, rather than buy dressed rabbits at ninety cents a pound from the lady who brought eggs and, occasionally, scrawny chickens good only for soup, they had begun to hunt.
Cliff took the lead as they started off, following the railway spur that in clear weather branched off in a long graceful curve. It provided an easy path to an old cut in the bush where irregularly spaced brush piles formed low, domed lodges for small animals. Instinctively, she watched for landmarks, but those that did appear were pale and insubstantial, hardly recognizable. The rails were covered over, and Cliff kept to the tracks more by touch than sight.
At the barbed wire fence that marked the end of the railway property, they rested, squatting on their haunches, their rifles across their knees. A slight wind had risen so they sat with their backs to it, facing each other at an angle.
The hood of Cliff’s parka shadowed his face, but Arlene could see snowflakes that had gathered along his eyebrows. He was fair, with a child’s pink skin and hair so blond that it was nearly white. His cheeks were bright red from the cold and his exertion. He was tall, over six feet, and had the loose build and large hands of a basketball player but none of the grace. Although he was twenty-seven, he still retained traces of adolescent awkwardness. Arlene was dark and slight. When they had first met, Cliff had thought she might be partly Spanish. To keep up the fantasy, he liked her to wear bright skirts and shawls.
“It’s good to get out,” Cliff ventured. After they quarrelled, he always tried to establish dialogue with indisputable statements. She knew that if she did not reply, he would begin a monologue of truisms.
“We’ve got to do something about getting jobs,” she answered, refusing to make peace until the point was settled. Usually, to her annoyance, he found some way of avoiding painful decisions. For once, she was determined to see something through to the end.
“We’ve only got a thousand dollars left,” she continued, stubbornly clinging to her morning’s argument, “and five months to go before the tourists come. Even when they do, we have no guarantee that they will buy anything. We can’t survive on two hundred a month. The heat alone comes to fifty.” She did not mention that she had quit using the kiln to keep the electricity bill down, but they both knew it.
They had been over it all before, trying to avoid the facts, making up improbable schemes, pinning their hopes on sales that did not come, grants that were turned down. An open house for the local people, with paintings and pots priced at little more than cost, had brought the minister, a sincere middle-aged man who had taken an art course as an undergraduate, and five shy high school girls who giggled at everything. Except for what they drank themselves, the coffee Arlene had prepared went untouched. The minister, not knowing how to escape gracefully, bought a teapot with a rattan handle.
After that, she had made a set of posters offering private lessons. She had tacked them up at the school, the general store and the skating rink. A lady in a blue dress with a flowered hat had stopped by. She had not wanted to use the wheel. She had wanted to decorate greenware.
Cliff sat still, the snow gathering in the crevices of his jacket, his face empty. Arlene felt that if she reached out and pushed him with the tip of her rifle, he would topple rigidly to the ground and lie unmoving as the snow covered him.
“We’re going to have to see about teaching school,” she said.
At last, it was out. Before this, they had always stopped short of the conclusion, managed somehow to avoid admitting that they would have to be what they had promised themselves they would never become. There was always a need for art teachers. The schools sucked them in, chewed them into cripples and spit them out so fast that the supply was never large enough to meet the demand. One friend of theirs had lasted three months. Another had lasted a week.
During their years in art school, Cliff and Arlene had mocked the Saturday Morning Specials, the public school teachers who had once wanted to be artists. Every Saturday morning they came for studio classes, frighteningly unsure of themselves, as if they were ready at any moment to be rebuked. After working dispiritedly or desperately for four hours, they disappeared again, wrapped in a defeated silence. As Arlene had watched their savings begin to run out, the ghosts of all those ruined ambitions had haunted her.
“Let’s hunt rabbits,” Cliff said, at last.
He still had not looked at her. She had the feeling, at times, that he resented her, as though he felt that if he were by himself, he would somehow manage, conveniently forgetting that she had contributed more than half the capital for the venture. She did not mention it, for as blunt as she had been about the need for jobs, she did not want to set between them the question of who earned what.
Before them was a brush pile. They circled it, looking for tracks, then Cliff said, “Jump on it,” and she heard the sharp, metallic sound of his rifle being cocked.
She tensed, then kicked the brush pile with all her strength. The white dome cracked, then dissolved, revealing a Crosshatch of tangled branches. Expecting, at most, one rabbit, Cliff was rendered helpless when two appeared. He paused, unable to decide, then, too late, swung for the one on his right, wasting a bullet on the already invisible figure.
At the next pile, he kicked and Arlene stood ready, but the jackrabbit sprang directly at her. She was so startled that she did not have time to shoot.
As they moved from brush pile to brush pile, they paid no attention to where they were going, not that it mattered, for once having crossed the fence there were no landmarks to guide them. The ground, the sky, were all white. Behind them, their footprints filled in within moments. Arlene paused, suffering a sense of vertigo, wondering if she should not go back to the house. Her mother would have, she thought. Her mother would have stayed in the kitchen washing the dishes, baking cookies, while her father would have gone out there beyond the kitchen window to do whatever it was that men did. Her mother and father had been married for forty years, and that was how it worked.
At the fourth brush pile, Arlene backed away, squatted, holding her rifle loosely with her right hand. The rifle was small, no longer than her arm and so light that she could hold it easily in one hand. When the rabbit bounded to the left, she swung the rifle in a smooth arc, her arm straight, her index finger pointing along the barrel. She fired automatically and the rabbit, hit from so close, was knocked sideways. With a feeling of satisfaction, she picked up the warm body and tied its legs to her belt with a piece of cord.
Annoyed with her success, Cliff said, “Maybe you could see if the local school board would hire an art teacher. There’s no use my asking. I don’t have as many education courses as you.”
Stiffly, she replied, “I had thought we might both work part-time,” and started away.
Angrily, she searched for another brush pile. When she found one, she looked behind her for Cliff. With a surge of fear, she realized he had refused to follow her. Her first impulse was to cry out and run back the way she had come, but she caught herself. There was no need for panic, she thought, her lips just forming the words. Although the station and the town were not visible, she knew they were there. In spite of the rising wind, it was not particularly cold and she was warmly dressed. She rested, gaining control of herself, getting used to the idea that she was alone. She made herself realize that there was not endless, frightening space around her. On either side, even though she could not see them, were straight rows of trees.
She took fifty steps in one direction. Finding nothing, she stopped, turned and started forward at a right angle.
When she had gone thirty steps, the tree line materialized. The panic that had surged inside her subsided. The worst that could happen was that she might go in the wrong direction, but even if she did it was not serious. Going west would bring her to the highway. She would then have to turn around and go back until she reached the fence. What was important was to keep calm, to remain in charge.
She rested again, her back to the wind. Her hand went to the rabbit, feeling its fur under her mitten. Its being there gave her a feeling of confidence.
All at once, she heard Cliff call her name. His voice, muffled by the snow and distorted by the wind, was just barely recognizable, and it was impossible to tell from which direction the sound came.
She went to reply, then did not, settling into herself, preparing for the walk back. Cliff’s voice grew louder and louder, then fainter. Once, he came close enough so that in the half-light she was able to make out movement, to discern a dim form robbed of any recognizable identity, but still she said nothing.
Instead, she sat motionless, her head turned sideways inside her parka hood, as he called across a vast and unbridgeable distance.