Five

Ulla

Ulla, one of Wayne’s pack horses, had given birth to a foal in the spring. All during our first summer together, Wayne worked to gain Chrissie’s trust. As I watched him spend time with the young horse, quietly walking around her, standing close but not interfering, I could see my own shyness reflected in Chrissie’s. I could see how both of us were becoming more used to the trail. Parts of me were growing calmer too, less worried about riding Hazel, my confidence building to where I might click my tongue for Hazel to go and mean it. And tasks like setting up tent poles or putting a bit into a horse’s mouth caused me less fluster than they had at first.

If I managed to get my riding horse saddled and bridled and ready to go in time to help with the pack horses, it was always Ulla’s gear I went for. Ulla didn’t spook easily. I’d scan the horse crowd looking for a heavy-set dark bay. She’d stand quietly, tolerant of me even if I put the pack saddle on backwards or if I forgot that the blanket goes over the pad and I needed to take the whole thing off and start again. Ulla was unflappable, but also indifferent. She wasn’t a horse who vied for human attention. And I was okay with that, my feelings leaning more toward gratitude than kinship.

While Ulla went about her quiet way, her nimble grey foal, Chrissie, would run up and down the pack line, playful and spirited by curiosity. When we stopped on the trail for lunch, Chrissie would come over to sniff our waxed cheeses and tins of fish. If she was feeling extra brave, she might nibble the brim of my hat. By late August, Wayne was able to place his hand on Chrissie’s neck, to stroke her back and feed her alfalfa pellets out of his hand.

Autumn was not far off. It was, in fact, making a bigger presence each day. The leaves of the buckbrush, the poplar, the Labrador tea, had started to shut off their chlorophyll, closing up shop. The bearberry plant was so red it seemed lit from within. The speckles of brown on the orange and red leaves of the dwarf birch were like chips of blown glass in the afternoon sun.

During a rest day at Bevin Lake, a kilometre west of the Rocky Mountain divide, Wayne decided to put a halter on Chrissie. He rummaged through the orange panniers and unearthed a small, yellow headstall from beneath the horse bells and nose baskets, chunks of leather and rope. To put the halter on Chrissie meant bringing the whole pack string into camp. Herd-bound, all horses move as one.

The horses were spending their rest day grazing on the hills that sloped into Bevin Lake. We were camped a short distance away, beside a creek that had startled me when we’d first arrived, the water a deep turquoise, the boulders it tumbled over coated white by a mineral that seeped from the rock glacier above. The creek looked Caribbean, as if I might see a cabana along the shore attended by someone in flowery shorts selling margaritas.

When we reached the lake, the water’s translucent green reflected the puffs of cumulus clouds, the surrounding landscape and the horses. Most had their necks bent down, their noses in the grass. I admired the way they scanned the plants with their velvety muzzles, their lips brushing each stalk and blossom, sensing by smell or perhaps by feel the difference in texture and weight between the lupines, which they liked, and the cow parsnip, which they did not, selecting goose grass and bluebells with the speed and dexterity of rummage sale shoppers.

When we reached the herd, we removed their hobbles. The first time I had watched a horse being restrained in this way, I was appalled. With the horse’s front legs bound a few inches apart, the hobbles looked like a medieval torture device. Wayne uses a twist hobble, a length of soft rope that is tied around a front leg then twisted around itself (three times is best) before being tied to the other leg. It seemed hard to imagine how a horse would be comfortable in such a contraption, let alone able to move. But a hobbled horse can travel up a mountain pass and down the other side in a single night while the humans are sleeping. If a moose ambles into the fray, a horse can forgo its leisurely gunny-sack hop and bound like a rabbit with impressive speed.

We freed the horses of their legholds, then haltered a few to lead back to camp, knowing the rest would follow. Once at camp, we kept the horses tied up while Wayne made a makeshift corral by stringing a length of rope around a circle of trees. He led Ulla inside the circle and Chrissie followed. Chrissie wasn’t convinced that a halter was anything she wanted or needed, but eventually Wayne was able to slip it on her. I videotaped the event, and when we watched it later, we could see Chrissie, skittish and wary, while Ulla stood quietly to the side, seemingly undisturbed.

With Chrissie sporting her new halter, we untied the rest of the horses and put their hobbles back on. Hobbles are synonymous with eating, so the horses are eager to be back in them. Ulla, however, kicked at her stomach and began to roll. It was unusual for a horse not to follow the others. While horses will often roll after a day’s work, rubbing away the salt and sweat from the weight of their packs, on that day Ulla’s behaviour was different. Wayne removed her hobbles so she could move around more easily, then watched in his calm yet considered way as she dawdled and fretted.

Wayne carries a few veterinary supplies—salve for cuts or sores, a tube of bute in case a horse is in pain—but a horse who requires a vet is out of luck. A hundred miles from the nearest road, at the foot of the Rocky Mountain divide where water splits in two, flows east and west, near a lake too small for a float plane to land, there is no easy way out.

By evening Ulla and Chrissie had moved closer to the other horses, and though Ulla still seemed uncomfortable, she didn’t seem worse. We hoped that whatever was bothering her would pass like a bad case of heartburn. Perhaps a bit of larkspur, a plant thought to be poisonous to horses, had been wrapped up with a lupine and she’d swallowed it in haste. Our group was quieter that evening, everyone retreating to their tents early, as if that might make the morning, and with it a recovered Ulla, come more quickly.

When Chrissie whinnied into camp, her voice entered my sleep the way frost feathers a pane of glass. A shiver pinpricking its way into whatever dream I was having inside a tent that blocked the light from the moon and stars. In those first few minutes of waking, it was so dark that I couldn’t make out the shape of my body. I couldn’t make out the shape of Wayne’s. Chrissie whinnied again, and this time my stomach gave a little flip.

Wayne groped for his headlamp, turned it on and looked at his watch—3:00 a.m. He pulled on his pants and shirt and unzipped the tent door.

“Should I come with you?” I asked.

“No, I’ll check things out and let you know.”

I was relieved. It was cold. I was tired. I still felt useless when it came to the horses.

I could hear Wayne talking to Chrissie in his calm, reassuring voice: “Hey Chrissie, how are you doing? Where’s your Mom? I don’t see your Mom.”

As his footsteps faded from camp, I pulled the sleeping bag tight. The warmth from Wayne’s body was quickly dissipating in the chilled air. I lay with my sleeping bag drawn tight around me, Wayne and Chrissie invisible weights in the night. I fell back into a light sleep but woke when I heard Wayne’s footsteps returning to the tent. He slipped back inside.

“No sign of Ulla. We’ll have to wait until morning.”

We lay beside each other with only the sound of the creek rushing by.

“It’s a beautiful night,” Wayne said. “The stars are glittering away.”

In the morning a skim of ice had formed in the water pail. The sky was clear, the air bright and crisp. After coffee and oatmeal, Wayne began to sort through the bridles, getting ready to find the horses and to look for Ulla. For most of the past two weeks, it had been me or Michael, a seasoned guest who returned each year to spend time on the trail, who accompanied Wayne on these morning treks, the rest of the group staying behind to pack up. But that morning, everyone wanted to go. Including me. It was like knowing there was a traffic accident ahead. Instead of avoiding the crash site, everyone wanted to change their course to ensure they’d pass by. But with every guest determined to go, I offered to stay and pack up. Armed with cameras and bridles, the group headed off. Maybe Ulla had caught her leg between some rocks or was in some other form of distress and every hand would be needed. Chrissie had left Ulla in the night and returned to our camp. If Chrissie was no longer in Ulla’s care, it followed that Ulla must have been unable to care for Chrissie.

I washed the dishes, put the grills and pots in their respective storage bags, packed them into the panniers, made lunch for the trail, took down the tent and doused the fire, retrieving bits of unburned material. Close to being finished, it occurred to me that if Ulla were alive but in need of convalescence, everything I’d packed up would have to be undone. Resentment took hold, not of the trail but of what it took to be on the trail. And maybe not even what it took to be on the trail, but at how inept I was. Wayne had moved through each task for so many years he no longer thought about it, but for me, everything was a struggle. There was a precise order to the way each chore was done. While I understood the necessity for this—how the many moving parts of a pack string needed to stay intact, that it was part of what ensured our overall safety—it irked me. Had I, in some crazy twist of fate, ended a quarter-century marriage for a relationship in which I had less autonomy than before?

Nothing in my past life seemed to serve me here. Never would I have signed up for such a trip in my former life. I was comfortable in the outdoors, but hiking along the river didn’t require the same set of skills needed to be part of a pack string. And it seemed to me that everyone who came on the trail was maddeningly confident, believing in themselves in a way I did not, carrying out each task in a state of perpetual good cheer. I could see how they loved not just the wilderness but their bodies in it. There was a healthy pride in their abilities, one that didn’t make them defensive or churlish when they did something wrong. How happy they were, recounting their adventures around the fire at night or bent down at Wayne’s tent, offering him a cup of coffee, saying that if only they didn’t have to return to their jobs they would stay on the trail forever.

As I marched around the camp I thought, It would be easier if Ulla were dead. The thought was terrible and selfish, but for an instant it came, and then it was gone.

When the group returned, I could see Wayne in the lead, riding Bonus. He had a grim look on his face.

“Ulla’s dead.”

I listened, camp flunky, overseer of the Melmac cups, as everyone described Ulla, gibbous in the lake. She must have walked into the water for relief, Wayne said, and then drowned. She was found floating on her side, coasting on her reflection. An equine Ophelia, her mane fanning out on the water, the sun silvering her hair. I should have seen it, they kept telling me: it was tragic, but strangely beautiful. They seemed to bristle with the tragedy but also with the privilege of having witnessed something new. I stared at Wayne, busy packing up the horses, moving forward. Something in his being kept him from getting emotional.

“Didn’t it bother you?” I asked him some days later.

“Of course, but you can’t let emotions steer the ship. Your survival depends on having a practical response. What I thought was, Well, it’s a sad thing, now we have a foal to deal with, what’s going to happen to her, who’s going to take Ulla’s saddle. There were practical issues to deal with, a limited set of options, and emotions aren’t one of them. If a moose charges you,” Wayne continued, “screaming isn’t going to help. You’d better find the nearest tree.”

We packed up the horses and headed up Bevin Pass. As we led them up the scree, a thick chamber of cloud filled the valley below. Like whipped cream being piped from an icing gun, a venturi effect formed where the moist and constricted air of the valley met the colder winds sweeping down the hill. A seraph, a tribute, and beyond it we could now see the lake, though Ulla was too small to make out.

“My good horse Ulla,” Wayne said, as we looked down at the speck of blue. “It wasn’t common, the way the wind coasted her around the lake. It was so out of context for a horse.”

I thought of how out of context I had been all summer, how difficult it had been to connect with my surroundings, to embrace the horses, to feel I fit in with the other guests. It had made me self-absorbed. I felt a pang of shame.

Chrissie followed the other horses and their riders up the pass, Wayne in the lead. How quickly Chrissie stopped whinnying, her mind focused now on not being left behind. Had she watched Ulla floating on the lake as if she were nothing but a dewdrop on a lupine leaf? I thought of Ulla, how the wind would eventually drift her to shore. No longer Chrissie’s mom, she would become carrion to ravens, bears and wolves. She would bloat. Finally, she would be nothing but bone. The nails in her horseshoes would loosen and the shoes would slip from her shrunken hooves; if the hooves were still in the water, the horseshoes might clink together as they sank, silver and U-shaped, flipping end over end as they fell to the bottom.

Ulla had been, the others kept repeating, something to see, her body luminescent, bathed as she was in an otherworldly light.