Three

First Summer on the Trail

Wayne is dressed and out of the tent before I’ve managed to open my eyes. One of the guests has already lit the campfire and set a kettle of water on the grill. Others are rummaging through panniers asking for the oatmeal, and a delighted voice cries out, “Oh look, here it is!”

It’s six in the morning. How can they be so chipper? As Wayne walks toward the group, I listen for his greeting, each morning the same, filled with the kind of cheer that inspires optimism, the words lifting then falling—“Good morning, good morning.”

It’s not easy for me to jump into these early conversations, so I stay inside to pack up our sleeping bags and air mattresses while Wayne helps with breakfast and brings me a cup of strong coffee.

During one of these breakfast chats, I hear one of the guests tell Wayne he’s been married forty-two years.

“These days,” the man says, “when people vow, ‘till death do us part,’ what they really mean is, ‘until we get bored.’”

Was that what happened with my twenty-five-year marriage? I press my knees into the mattress, focusing hard on the wheeze of expelled air.

By the time I have taken down the tent, eaten my oatmeal and washed the Melmac dishes in a plastic tub, Wayne has collected the halters and is ready to find the horses.

We hike off together, leaving the rest of the crew—Michael, a retired bureaucrat, his friend and former colleague Liz, who works to protect the burrowing owl, and Shirley, a young student from Montreal—to put away the cooking gear and wrap sleeping bags and tents inside canvas tarps, turning them into soft packs for the horses to carry.

At the start of my twenty-five-year marriage, I took my husband’s last name. When the marriage ended, I went to the government office and filled out the form to get my birth name back: Donna Haight. With the ink still fresh from my reclaimed signature, I walked back to my car. I felt light-headed. I drove to the house I now shared with Wayne, pulled into the driveway and shut off the engine. I sat there, taking a moment to let it sink in. I picked up the yellow form from the passenger seat, unfolded it and stared hard at my signature. My handwriting had changed so much since the last time I’d written my birth name. Maybe it was the calligraphy classes I’d taken, something I’d done before my kids were in school, before I’d gone back to college, before I studied visual arts, before I turned to writing. I looked again at my signature. Who was Donna Haight?

I had been Donna Kane for more years than I had been that other woman. “Donna Kane!” Emilie’s granddaughter said, whenever she saw me. “Donna Kane,” the receptionist said, when I arrived at work. Over time, my first and last name had become one, the two words seeming to fit together in rhythm and sound. For me, hearing my full name spoken made me feel more solidly a part of the world. Hearing my full name spoken gave me comfort. Donna Haight was someone I no longer knew.

I started the car and returned to the government office and asked to have my name changed back to Kane. The woman who had helped before was still behind the counter. She must have seen it all. She shrugged and gave a little smile. “Not a problem,” she said. “No big deal.”

I may have left a major part of my life behind, but the experiences of that past will continue to be a part of who I am.

My halter slung over my shoulder, I follow Wayne. The horses are herd-bound, so haltering a few of the lead horses is usually enough to convince the rest to follow us back to camp. This year there are seventeen in all: seven for riding, nine for packing, and a spare, in case a horse is injured and needs a day off. Bringing them back to camp can be exciting if the horses are far away and you have to ride your horse bareback. Their hobbles, loops of rope tied around their forelegs to slow their travel in the night, are now removed, leaving the horses fancy-free, frisky from a night of rest and food and working each other into a frenzy as they tussle for a position in line.

For three months of the year, this is the horses’ life. Each day they carry their riders or soft packs or bright orange panniers filled with tins of fish and bags of rice over the mountain passes of the northern Rockies, descending into boreal forest, along swamps and sand flats, across creeks and rivers, to finally arrive at camp, where they are unpacked, hobbled and let go for the night. In the morning, we find them where the grass suits them best or where Hazel, the alpha of the herd, has had a mind to go. For three months of each year, it is Wayne’s life too.

Some of the people who join Wayne on his expeditions are already familiar with the outdoors, while others have never experienced wilderness and this is their chance. Some want to become more aware of the Muskwa–Kechika, others are simply curious to see what it will be like, for them, to be in wilderness. It’s not advertised as such, but many of the people who sign up for Wayne’s expeditions are looking for something. Adventure, sure, but many come to reflect on where their life is at, or, more precisely, to have second thoughts about where their life is at. Being in a place disconnected from any communication with the regular world, standing on the top of a mountain pass, looking as far as you can and seeing no sign of human intervention, clears your head, shows you what’s important. Tells you what’s not. Last summer, one of the folks came off the trail, went home, quit his job, left his girlfriend, and last I heard he’d moved into a cabin north of Pemberton.

Every two weeks a new group comes in to replace those going out, a rotation that continues throughout the summer. They arrive by float plane, landing on a nearby lake, or they come in on a small-wheeled plane that sets them down on an airstrip belonging to an outfitter’s camp—a camp that might include a makeshift corral from logs once peeled, now furred by moss and lichen, a few buildings with elk antlers over the door lintels and, if a building is made of plywood, a wall bashed in where a grizzly has walked through as if it were cardboard, having caught a whiff of dried moose blood or someone’s forgotten cheese sandwich.

Before Wayne became a conservationist, before he was guiding eco-tourists through the mountains, he was a logger and a hunting guide. As we hike along in our search for the horses, Wayne stops to peer into a small dip in the trail filled with rain from a recent storm.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Wolf,” he says, pointing at the paw print, the track appearing magnified through the water.

We look along the trail for other tracks, for the prints of the horses’ hooves, which will tell us the speed and direction of travel. The signs of movement, of change, are everywhere. It’s how we recognize life. Wayne stops. I stop. Both of us listen for the horses’ bells. I think I hear them, but I’m too unsure to say so. Maybe what I hear is a bird. Maybe it’s the clinking of the halter’s buckle against my shoulder. “There they are,” Wayne says.

The first time Wayne introduced me to the horses, I spooked them. I moved too quickly, I waved my hands in front of their faces. They could sense my nervousness and became nervous too. Although I’ve come to know them better and have now learned the different dispositions and personalities of each, I still seem to end up putting things on backwards or in the wrong order. Things such as halters. More than once Hazel has tried to shove her nose past my hands as they fumble with what feels like a Gordian knot, as if trying to help or say, Okay. Just stop. I’ll show you how it’s done, and pay attention so you get it right the next time.

I rehearse the steps in my mind as I walk: Approach a horse from its left side and stay calm. Use your left hand to orient the halter, your right to bring the crown strap over the horse’s large head. I think of Sunny the Belgian—I am sure that if I curled into a fetal position, I could fit inside her skull.

I walk up to Hazel. Once the halter is on, I have to do up the buckle. Seeing a buckle on a halter and being unable to cinch it up is to see a buckle in a whole new way. How had I failed to notice the tang, like a miniature crowbar with a tapered tip, how it rests in that small groove etched in the right-hand side of the buckle’s rim, the tang’s other end bent around the cross brace that splits the frame in two? How did I not see that the two windows formed by the middle brace are not the same size, the opening between the crossbar and the groove the exact reach for the tang, while the other side is wider, so that the tang, when flicked across that gap, can’t reach the far edge.

I have twisted the crown strap of the halter, the buckle flipped upside down so that the wider side of the buckle’s frame is closest to the tang. Realizing this makes all the difference when I’ve spent too much time situating the halter and the buckle won’t buckle and now all the other horses are unhobbled and heading with gusto back to camp. I feed the strap through the larger window. The tang can’t catch and I am bewildered, struck by wildness, what I am left with when everything I know has changed.

It was fall when, for the last time, I left the house I’d lived in, the house where my children had grown up, making their way from kindergarten to university; a home where Christmas decorations were made from playdough one year, clothespins the next, where stories were read one chapter a night, unless the hobbit was in serious danger, then we’d read more, where habits were so comfortable and deep you didn’t even know they were there.

The house having sold, I’d gone back to wash the floors, the cupboards, to pack up the last of my belongings, and to spend one last night in the house with my daughter. She’d come home from university for the summer to be with her father, the man who had been my husband for twenty-five years, a good husband, but now, somehow, not good enough. On my last night there he was working night shift, his work schedule still something I know off by heart.

The next morning the sun shone through the lilac leaves whose bushes I’d dug from my grandmother’s garden and transplanted beneath the kitchen window. The shrubs grown so large they required regular trimming to keep them from blocking sunlight through the windowpane—light that had touched our faces as we made toast, poured coffee, made plans for the day. The red-winged blackbirds sang by the pond (scolded, really), my daughter still asleep in her room (no, not asleep; she was still in bed, but we had said goodbye, her face firm and resolute, insisting, as she always has, “I’m fine.”). Outside, I looked up at her window, where she wasn’t sleeping. I looked at the pond, at the trees, at the copper lanterns, with their candles inside, hanging from the eaves of the covered porch. Each look a leave-taking.

We return with the horses to camp, me leading Hazel, who is anxious because we have lagged behind. Once in camp, the horses are saddled and packed, and our day on the trail begins. Wayne’s horse, Bonus, is spirited and moves faster at a walk than most of the other horses in trot. Bonus tosses his dark mane, his taut neck muscles giving him a regal air as Wayne, his body lean and strong, holds him back as best he can, the rest of the string falling behind regardless. When the distance is such that the other horses are whinnying madly, or a guest at the back is calling to the front, Wayne waits for us to catch up. Usually, by the time we’ve closed the gap, Wayne has already slipped his camera or binoculars back into his saddlebag, and all we see is his backside fielding a trot with an air of yippee-ki-yay.

But this morning, at the foot of a pass, Wayne stops long enough to show me a dip at the edge of a bank. Where the meadow was exposed to the spring’s full sun, cow parsnip, hellebore, lupines and asters shot up, bloomed and flourished through the summer, and now, with September in hand, their stalks have turned to straw, the flowers fisted into seed. Without a measurable distance between them, the shaded flowers, where the snow was late to melt, are still glossy with an off-kilter spring, their leaves plump with chlorophyll, stamens dusting their brittle neighbours with pollen. Both patches had the same potential to bloom, to make seed, but it was external conditions, the sun with its light and heat, that determined when that potential would be realized.

“Choice, what choice?” Wayne will say when I go over, again, our choice to make a life together. The first time I heard him say it, it seemed at odds with his pragmatic nature, but I don’t think he was being romantic. Or, if he was, then it was a romance defined as a belief in the necessity to recognize one’s potential. We responded to each other not because we were unaware of the havoc our actions would cause, but because choice, as Wayne said, was not part of the equation.

But was that really so for me? I might not have had a choice over the resonance I felt, or how that resonance would come, but I could have resisted it. Like the plants at the foot of Bevin Pass, I am compelled by the external world, forces that bring me to yes. To no. For me, there is also maybe. I chose to leave my old life behind. You were bored, a voice says, you wanted an adventure. Yes. No. Maybe there will never be an answer good enough.