Four

Where He Comes From

Wayne’s mother must have loved wild men. Although she was kind and gentle and refused to learn how to use a rifle, she allowed her sons to aim theirs out the kitchen window to take potshots at squirrels and birds. Her husband, Mike, smashed dishes when in a rage. Once, Freda surprised them all by smashing a dish too, then another, until there were no dishes left, at which point, or so the story goes, she threw the kitchen chair out the front door. The chair lay on its side until it yellowed the grass beneath it and the veneer began to blister from the rain and dew. It was Mike who brought the chair back in.

Wayne grew up near Hasler Flats, just west of Chetwynd in northeastern bc, with his parents, two brothers and a sister. Their home was set in a forest of spruce and aspen along the Pine River. His grandparents lived on the Pine too, a few miles downstream.

Southeast of both homes, the Sukunka River enters the Pine after arcing around a foothill that forms part of the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. When Wayne was fourteen, he figured if he could hitch a ride to the Sukunka side of the foothill, ahead of where it joined the Pine, cross the river and then hike over the hill, heading slightly northwest, he’d end up back at his grandmother’s house. She made excellent biscuits and stew. If anyone asked, he would say he wanted to walk from one river to the other for the adventure of it. Maybe he wanted to impress his grandmother. But I think it also had to do with the fact that the two rivers converged, that the Sukunka disappeared into the Pine. Wayne loves to tell how rivers slice through rocks as if mountains were cheese, and that many of the rivers in the north were flowing before the mountains were formed.

By the time Wayne was fourteen, he was reading everything he could about geology, about the age of rocks and the way they layer and how they grind themselves down. He liked the idea of seeing the present becoming the past. To the southeast of Chetwynd, the Sukunka is in the present; a few miles north, downstream, it is in the past.

No one else wanted to go with him, so Wayne had his parents drive him to the south side of the foothill and leave him on the bank of the river. After watching the dust billowing behind the tail lights of their blue Volkswagen Beetle, he started to undress. With his boots, socks, jeans and briefs tied to his Trapper Nelson packboard, he made his way across the Sukunka River. In his pack he also carried an axe, matches, a plastic tarp and a sleeping bag. Also three cans of Irish stew and a package of red Twizzlers, a 30-30 calibre rifle with shells, and a hunting knife. It was early September.

If his father worried about Wayne, he never showed it. That summer Mike had shot a bear in the back, wounding but not killing it. He brought his emptied rifle to Wayne and told him to finish the job, gesturing impatiently in the general direction of where he’d shot the bear. “I gotta go to work,” he said, and went off in a huff. You could say he was trying to teach Wayne how to survive, and that would be true.

The canvas-and-wood pack was heavy and the cans of stew threatened to throw Wayne off balance as his bare feet slipped over the stones on the river bottom. He knew how to ford a river, recognizing where to cross by the ripples that chopped the water, but the Sukunka still rose to his chest and its northern cold numbed him from the heart down. When he reached the other side, he felt alive and triumphant. His body invigorated, he wobbled about on the stones along the beach, careful to keep dirt out of his socks. He saw the track of a black bear incised in the sand, the print clear and sharp, the fine lines that mapped its calloused pad, the press of each toe. He could even make out the small flame of one claw.

The trip to his grandmother’s house couldn’t be made in one day, and that was part of the plan. A few yards from a small pond where the clay was rich with minerals, creating a natural lick for wildlife, he set up camp, tying a sheet of plastic between two trees with some rope. He had read many books on knots, and his fingers looped the rope into bowlines with ease. He found two aspen logs and placed them on the ground, parallel to each other. Gathering bits of twigs woolly with witch’s hair lichen from under a spruce tree’s spreading branches, he made a small pile. With his hands cupped around a match, he struck and lit the kindling in one go. He was pleased. He added bigger twigs, and then branches of aspen and willow. Standing over the fire, Wayne was a young man glowing with the energy of independence. Like the flames, he was blazing on his own.

He ate a can of stew. He thought of the girl in his math class who bought records by the Bay City Rollers and wore a tartan vest. Like many of his friends, Wayne had been growing his hair longer. His father hated it. He heard a splash and saw a cow moose in the pond, close to the edge, licking the mineral-rich clay along the shore. Wayne gripped his rifle and watched. It grew dark, but the moose stayed put. When she did leave, Wayne could no longer make out her form in the night, but as she went he heard her hooves crunch the crisp poplar leaves on the ground, one hoof knocking a wind-fallen log.

Wayne stoked the fire for several hours. He felt himself suspended in a bubble of light in the midst of a vast, dark universe that went on forever. He was aware of being inside his particular body, his particular bones. Although his parents were Seventh-day Adventists, Wayne no longer believed in God. For him, no one else was on this side of the river. He was alone.

He heard a twig crack. Then silence. Something, maybe the wind, maybe a mouse, rustled some leaves. He listened so intently that he could track the sound of the wind, hearing it first as a rolling wave, a surf surging between the trunks of the trees and then the clatter of leaves. He heard another splash, and then the quacking of ducks. Finally he let the fire burn down and, curling up in his sleeping bag, he tugged the drawstring tight around his face.

He was up early. He liked that he was breaking camp, a phrase he had read in books about explorers. He had read everything he could find about wild places. Three Against the Wilderness was his current favourite, a story of homesteading in bc’s Chilcotins. It seemed to him that the people in the story led exotic lives on a wild and perilous frontier. It didn’t occur to him that his life on the Pine River was equally wild, giving him the skills he would need to live in the wilderness himself. He didn’t realize that the wilderness had been pushed north year by year, that the Chilcotins were no longer the frontier, that the frontier was all around him. He walked down to the lick and saw fresh tracks of moose, of deer and elk—a life going on. In the night he had not been alone; he’d been a part of that life; he’d been their neighbour.

Wayne shouldered his pack and struck through the heavy forest where aspen windfall slowed him down and thorns from the rose bushes caught on his jeans. Then the sloping hill rose sharply, the aspens growing smaller and the grassy slopes giving way to a band of grey sandstone. Looking for a way around the cliff face would have seemed a failure to him, so he climbed higher on the rock, his rifle in one hand, an axe in the other. He reached a broad horizontal ledge that led to the left and around a corner. Above him, the face of the rock bulged outward. The ledge grew narrower but there was something at the heart of this boy that knew only forward. The rubber soles of his hiking boots gripped the edge of the ridge but then slipped on a loose piece of rock and his pack swung sideways. He fell. Nothing in the moment of his falling seemed in any way a part of him. He landed on his back, hard, head facing downhill. He felt the weight of his pack slam into his shoulders before he slid down the scree, through bramble bushes, his body coming to rest against the trunk of a small aspen. His axe had left a deep gash in the stock of his rifle but his bones were unscathed. At first, he was stunned by his fallibility. Then he was amazed by his intactness, a kind of shock that helped him realize he was a part of the mortal world.

He paused, ate a Twizzler and considered a safer route. It took him a few hours to climb a grassy slope that brought him to a crest. He began to work his way along the slope of pine and aspen, the forest thickening with alder and willow and then small bogs with black spruce that he had to pick his way through carefully, so as not to get sucked into the mire. Now he had to use his navigation skills, finding markers as guideposts. As he made his way through the thick bush, over moss and past shrubs of Labrador tea, he watched the sun and made sure he kept it at a constant angle.

The mountain sloped gently downward now, and finally, occasionally, he could catch a glimpse of the deep valley of the Pine. He felt a sense of comfort as well as disappointment that his adventure was coming to a close. He reached a rough road that descended to the riverbank. He would cross the river and then he would make his way past the beach and up onto the highway that led to the driveway of his grandmother’s house. He looked back at where he had come from; he looked ahead. He knew where he was and where he was going.