Six

Tracks

At the top of Bevin Pass, all of us—the dog, the horses and the riders who have led the horses up the sharp incline—stop to catch our breath. I am sweating from the exertion of the climb and from the heat of the morning sun burning through the alpine air, but my bones still throb from the keen wind of the valley floor now two thousand feet below. Like a Baked Alaska, those fancy ice cream desserts that are oven-cooked, my body is simultaneously engaged in two very different temperatures, the cold from the past and the heat from the present.

I listen to my breath expending itself on a mountain pass—breath from the same body still chilled from the valley; breath from the same body that once moved through the Peace River farmland where I grew up and raised my children, a place where I’d walk through a grove of poplar and willow trees along a path that led to my parents’ yard, testing the season through the timothy that grew along the trail. In spring, I would pull on the stalks and they would unsleeve, thin pipings whose ends would be dark and flush with sap, sweet in my mouth. By fall, I’d pull on the stalks and the once green, dense heads would have bleached and dried. For an instant, before dissembling into a heap of minuscule seeds, the timothy head would keep its shape in my hand. It always seemed that in that moment, when the seed head was pulled from the stalk but stayed whole, I’d come as close to experiencing a liminal state as I ever had, a threshold between past and present. On the scree slope trail of rock debris, I feel the same enlivening sense that in a single moment I can discern two distinct experiences.

I’ve always felt a need to know that threshold, the still point, the seam, the defining thing that holds each change together. As if there were some omniscience to it. Maybe if I experienced that fulcrum, that moment distinct from the things on either side of change, I might know everything there is to know.

On a scree slope, it is not really possible to identify individual tracks. Standing at the top of the pass I look behind me and see a shadow leading up to where I am, a line that continues over the other side, a trail formed by a composite weathering of shale weighed down by the travels of caribou, sheep, bears, and now our group of horses and humans, each in their turn crushing bits of rock, pressing them a little more solidly into the earth. Shadows pool inside the subtle hollow formed from this packing down and that is the track I see—not the individual steps, but an overall movement.

When I think of my own movements, the progression of events that have brought me from birth to the top of this mountain pass, when I try to delineate the different experiences that have propelled me, I can’t. Everything, from the Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist doll that frightened me as a child, to watching my grandma turn strawberries into jam, to swimming in the silty waters of the Kiskatinaw River, listening to Ella Fitzgerald, falling in love, then out of love, watching my son and my daughter grow up and leave home, all bind together into who I am. I can remember individual events. I can say things like, “It was in that moment that Wayne and I shook hands,” but the things that built into that moment of realization are impossible to separate. Maybe, like the shadow that pools in this alpine trail, I have a shadow too. Maybe that’s what awareness is, a shadow that emerges from all my impressions.

Time is another word for drift, for the seamless motion of one thing turning into the next, a stiffening stalk, a subtle shift in colour. To be alive is to be in motion, a constant state of change.

At the crest of Bevin Pass, where the view of the valleys and distant mountain ranges is most exposed, just a few feet off the trail, a collection of stones are arranged in two parallel lines on the ground, the space between just wide enough for a human body to lie horizontally. Tufts of alpine grass and a silting in of dirt have built up around the base of the rocks, but it is still visible, the shale shards jutting up like a school of shark fins, the tips pocked with the crinoline blooms of lichen that ever so slowly grind the rock down. Wayne has known about these rocks for years. He thinks they are artifacts from Indigenous hunters. The assemblage, at first glance, seems inconsequential, something that could easily be missed in the grander geology of the region, but the slabs of shale, propped in a vertical position, each one similar in weight and size and set an equal distance apart, appear too reflective of a human’s patterned purposeful thinking to be coincidental. Too small for a permanent shelter and located on a mountaintop where none of the usual requirements of a camp are available—no trees to block the wind or to provide wood for a fire, no water nearby—Wayne thinks it may have been the site of a spirit quest. I look at the rocks and have no idea what the assemblage means, but I recognize it as a thought-print.

A footprint communicates the way thought and language do. A single track or footprint is like the subject of a sentence. It represents the animal, place or thing. It tells you who was there. But we need more than a subject to complete a thought. We need a predicate as well, an action taken. For tracks to constitute movement, one foot has to make contact twice. If the animal is a biped, three tracks are needed; if a quadruped, five. Now you have a subject and a predicate, a complete thought, a full sentence, a “trackway.” Movement and meaning emerge. A trackway will tell you the distance between footsteps. If you have that, you can calculate speed and size of the animal, plus direction of travel, and sometimes, if the track pattern changes, it will tell you whether the animal was moving at a walk, trot, lope or gallop. Whoever positioned the rocks at the top of Bevin Pass in their patterned sequence of shape and size was communicating something too. The tracks they left behind hold the thought-prints of their mind.

When I am on the trail I spend so much time tripping on rocks, using the wrong side of the switchblade, struggling with knots and buckles, that I hardly trust myself. This assemblage of rocks calms me. In their patterned placement, the rocks seem to be saying, Come now, aren’t there some things that you still recognize, some things you still know? Count these rocks. Doesn’t one plus one still equal two? Look at their arrangement, doesn’t a rectangle still have the same shape?

The rocks also tell me that another human body looked from the edge of the peak of Bevin Pass, looked across at the mountain ranges just as I am looking now. This particular piece of the planet, still untouched by roads or human industry, is a place where I can gaze as far as possible and, aside from the trail and this arrangement of rocks, not see any evidence of human intervention. Whoever arranged the rocks so many years ago must have seen the same piece of Earth that I see now.

The Earth is a body too. A body that seems indifferent to mine. A branch whacks me in the face. I trip over a rock. The Earth doesn’t seem to care if I bruise or bleed. In the same way, my body seems indifferent to me; it bruises and bleeds no matter how much I complain.

Sometimes I think I love the Earth’s body more than my own. Maybe it’s because it feels more all-knowing, more absolute. Perhaps its separateness serves as that threshold, that still point I crave, the thing that holds each change in my body together. Maybe what I think is that the Earth knows everything about me, and the universe beyond knows everything about the Earth. Like nesting dolls, echoes and reflections reverberating outward in every direction.