“What can I do for you, Thomas?” James asked as he sat eating his breakfast.
His son-in-law, Thomas Byers, stood uncertainly. “I maybe got some bad news.”
James rose from his bowl of porridge.
“I was back early to the head field,” Thomas recounted. “Wanted to get a load of seaweed spread afore breakfast. Partway back, I heard Buster barking. Then John Young’s dog came tearing past, and the both of them set up a terble ruckus. When I came over that hill o’ your’n by the stony bridge, I saw a big black shape run off into the woods. I reckon the dogs scared it off.”
“A bear? Spring, sure, that’s the time.”
“Well, them oxen, your two, they was back there...”
Yes, enjoying the fresh spring pasture beyond the stony bridge, but surely no bear would attack them? But then, springtime, a mother bear, with cubs, and nothing to eat...
“Well, I’d best be off, they’re waiting breakfast on me.” Thomas sighed and left.
James found himself sitting down again. Neither he nor Catherine spoke for a moment.
“Jim can deal with it when he gets here.”
James nodded. “But who knows, maybe that bear’ll come back. Bears can make short work of a cow, or an ox, if they’ve a mind.” But his own fears multiplied. “I’ll just take a look.” He put on his jacket, and then went for his musket.
Catherine frowned. “Now James, you’re not going after that bear!”
James shook his head. “No no, don’t you worry. I’m only going for a look-see.”
“James, I’ll not have you going off after a bear at your age.”
“Send Jim back, then, when he’s in from Saint Godfrey. Anyways, I’ll just sit by the oxen a bit, keep watch.”
And with that, he was up the hill with his musket. After all, had he not hunted moose, shot bears, tracked wolves? He’d be quite all right.
At the top, having forced his pace, he had to stop and lean against the trunk of an old birch. Feel that old heart working! No doubt about it, he was short of breath. What old age did to a man, eh? But he still was quite spry enough to face any bear.
He headed out over the spring-moist fields. Dark spruce, highlighted by white birch, seemed motionless as if in stoic disapproval. High above, herring gulls happily mewed and wheeled in their open playgrounds, beneath malevolent clouds.
He opened the gate onto the track back around the Hollow, trying to build up his pace, but the easy stride of yesteryear had disappeared. What would happen if a bear came at him? Well, of course he’d be ready. He glanced down into the Hollow at that cedar rail fence by the brook that he and Jim and Nelson had put up last summer. It would last his lifetime, and probably Jim’s, too. If only Jim would get a wife, and have some offspring, it might outlast them, too. If he didn’t, what then? All this overgrown and returned to wasteland? He shook his head at the thought...
Had he been wrong to pasture Keen and Smudge back down in the gully by the stony bridge? Bears did roam in springtime. Last year, Ed Legallais had a couple of sheep taken. Twelve years ago a wild cat, probably a cougar, had actually gotten a cow back on Joe Young’s across the brook. He himself had gone to check on the half-eaten animal and saw the tracks. Thinking of that, the scar on his shoulder from that cougar attack at his cabin his first year here began to itch.
Musket loaded, he strode on. You needed a steady aim to kill a charging bear, that was for sure. Well, his aim had always been steady, in the past. Was it still?
Nothing could be more glorious, James thought, than walking among these stubbled shoots of wheat in the hot sun, which now this fine spring day beamed down, coaxing up a fullness that would encourage the kernels to ripen, and later, be ground into loaves of thick, rich bread, yes, all hidden now in the thrusting stalks. How James enjoyed his land and the cultivation thereof, hard though it had been. He reached the long field before it dipped into the gully, gripping the musket even tighter. Better be ready. He swung the musket up to his shoulder, sighted, but the darned barrel kept wavering. Oh well, no bear was around, he was sure. The explosion itself would be enough to frighten any fool animal. Unless it got enraged...
When Keen had been born, James laid him across his knees and held him up to get a good suck at his mother’s teats. He had been worried that something was amiss with the little calf. But no, soon as he got a good bit of nourishment, he could stand and suck like the others.
Frisky little fellow. Good breadth across the chest. Dark brown splotches against a white hide, playful. But then the difficult day came when he and Charlie Chedore had to neuter him. His first bull, Broad, he’d slit the bag at the bottom and squeezed out the balls, then cut them off and sewed up the bag. Big chance of infection. Nowadays, they never cut, just fixed a rig, two small boards screwed together tight enough so that the large drooping ovals below withered away. Keen wasn’t so frisky after that, but still ‘keen’ and full of life, no doubt. Broad One, way back, his first ox, had been the making of this farm. How well he remembered that trip from Paspébiac with the little fella draped round his neck and those two ruffians after him.
Young Keen had not liked one bit being yoked to old Broad the Second. But after James had put him in a lightly loaded cart beside Broad, Keen had to fall in. Yes indeed, not long in getting the trick of hauling, in fact, he even enjoyed it, doing his best to out-pull the other fellow. The next year he put on weight, gained strength, and also, it seemed, intelligence. Soon, no finer ox on the Coast than Keen. James crested the rise before the stony bridge and stopped short.
Keen lay there, his back half torn off.
Smudge stood forlornly by. Seeing James, he began to bawl.
Slowly, the realization took hold and James’s shoulders slumped. He began to run forward as best he could, but he knew it to be a lost cause.
“Yes yes, Smudge, coming,” he called, but Keen needed water. He hurried down to the brook where he’d left a bucket and filled it.
When he brought it up to the fallen ox, Keen saw him and did his best to rise. But with his skin clawed off, he could not rise. Back broken by the bear’s weight.
The great ox looked up at him with huge eyes and lowed. James tipped the bucket so that Keen could take a couple of great gulps, spilling some.
He knelt beside his old working companion and stroked his nose. Then he bent and put his head against the temple of his old friend. So much had they shared over the years. Why is it, he thought, as his eyes grew moist, why is it we are born into the world, we have our day, so very short, and then, leave? Such a short sojourn.
How the fifteen years had sped by! Each time he’d said goodbye to a farm animal, no small pain ensued. But none stabbed with such anguish as this. He put his arm around and scratched the ox behind the ear, where he loved it.
He heaved a great sigh. “You and me, Keen, where does it all go, eh? So much happens that neither of us will ever understand. Just keep going, I guess, we all have to do that, no matter what.”
James coughed, pulled himself together, and got to his feet. Can’t spend all day. That new yearling will have to be castrated and trained. The farm has to go on. He turned to Smudge, and yelled for him to leave. Did he want him watching while he put an end to his friend? He went to smack him on the backside. Smudge looked around, surprised.
“Go on, Smudge! Go! Get! Skedaddle!” He whacked him again.
Smudge obediently trotted off, but then stopped and turned back to look. He set out to smack him again, and stopped. Smudge would just turn and walk back. Nothing for it but to get the deed done, no matter how difficult.
James knelt a final time, stroked the great ox along his strong broad neck, gave him a couple of slaps of affection, and then rose. Quickly as he could, he pointed the muzzle behind his ear, slanted it so that it would destroy the brain in one shot, and pulled the trigger.
Keen, his faithful worker, lay dead.
* * *
Jim came bursting into the room, sweat dripping. “Byes you know how much I paid for them nails we needed?” He stopped as he saw his mother upset. “Where’s Poppa?”
Catherine glanced down. “Tom Byers came in. Said he saw a bear back by the oxen. Your father, stubborn old fool, took his musket, and off he went.”
“What? Alone? Not after a bear?”
Concern showed in his mother’s eyes. “I told him to wait, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“When?”
“Breakfast,” Catherine seemed close to tears.
“Breakfast! That long ago?”
Catherine nodded.
“I’ll take the other gun.” And grabbing it, out he went.
Before long, Jim reached the long rise and looked down beyond the stony bridge. He stopped short.
What a grisly sight! Keen lay torn open, dead, in a pool of blood. Smudge again bawled when he saw Jim coming. But Ol’ Poppa, where was he? Jim began to search the damp spring ground for tracks. Yes, bear prints, no doubt, a mother bear and one or two cubs. Danger for sure! His father would never be a match for the likes of them.
And there, yes, the flat-soled prints of his father’s boots. They went off in the same direction. Oh-oh! Should he go for help with the bear? Or track his father? He stood in the sloping field beside the great dark woods that stretched back for almost a hundred miles, broken only by the Second Range Road a mile back, and the beginnings of the Third, another mile, and then nothing but wilderness, wolves, caribou, moose — and bears.
Silence filled his ears as he pondered his decision. He lifted the musket and began to load it. Sure looked like his father was heading after the bears. In search of revenge? Fearful, Jim traced those footsteps to the bridge over the brook, and then into the pasture. Now where? Should he keep following? Or go back, get others to come beat the woods, spread out, send calls. He tipped his head back, and shouted his father’s name.
Silence. He shook his head. This time, he was really afraid. He knew in his bones what had happened. His father crashing through woods would have attracted that mother bear. Sensing a decent dinner, with her stomach raging, she must have come upon him. Old Poppa, he’d have gotten off a shot with his wavering aim and weak eyesight and then, trying to run, had tripped, and right then and there been torn to pieces.
Gripping his musket, heart beating, trusty Rusty at his heels, Jim went forward to seek out the worst.
* * *
Leaving the fallen ox, James had turned his attention for badly needed solace to the June woods. This glorious invigorating wind that blew in across the fields carried its aromas of manure, seaweed fertilizer, cattle out on new grass. If only it could always be spring.
So now he’d better head home along the Hollow trail, and get Jim Wylie the butcher. Keen would supply them and his friends with many a good feed of beef this summer. He threaded his way among the trunks of huge cedar, as he had done as a young man with the Micmac. But hard going! He used to swing through the woods at a fine trot, heavens, all the way from Port Daniel; now, he found it hard even walking.
The relentless march of time.... Again, he tried to grapple with this mysterious pattern laid down by the Almighty. What does life prepare you for? Only to leave this world and move on into the next? If there were a next. And he knew, having asked Milne as well, that the clergy seemed only to offer pat, obvious, scriptural answers. No vivid illumination. Maybe he’d have to find that himself?
He stood next to a giant pine, his hand resting on the rough trunk. So silent. But was it? No, something moving through the woods! But where? Behind? Thank heaven his hearing had not diminished. Yes, an animal, but not stealthy, no sir. He gripped his musket hard. “Well, Mrs. Bear, I’m ready,” he whispered. “I’ll just wait till you get closer, otherwise I might miss.” Adrenalin poured through him.
And then he heard a shout. The Nelson boys, crossing the brook. Well, why not? What an old fool to worry. They faded off.
Did it seem, in the impressive stillness, that all was proceeding according to some Divine Providence, God or no God? The call of a crow, almost beautiful, as was the song of the ‘oh happiness bird’ in a spruce. The brook’s gurgling nourished these songbirds; all around, small animals going about finding food, making nests for imminent broods, muskrat and mink playing in the icy waters. Further up this very brook, two beavers had made a dam to submerge their new house. And the bears, yes, on the prowl no doubt. Keep alert, he reminded himself.
He passed by shreds of birchbark on a narrow trunk reaching fifty feet up to catch sunlight. On another, intricate lace of blue green moss ascended, draped in odd patterns. He could smell so many surging plants and delighted in perky wild flowers in patches of sunlight. But there, an aged tree had not made it, withered into sticks.
Quietly in the heavy farm boots McRae had fashioned from hides of his own cattle, James made his way past turns of the brook and found them familiar. Then, by some happy intuition, he turned left and stopped. There, what remained of his cabin, still standing! Well, walls of logs and roof fallen in. Fifty years old. He sighed.
The door lay aside, rotting, but he went forward and sat on the sturdy bench he had made. Here, he had begun a good life. Never dreaming his family would begin a new community, now so grown. He leaned back and took a deep breath.
How long he sat there, he didn’t know. Had he been asleep? He heard a definite crashing through the woods. That mother bear — had he forgotten her? He stood, he’d show them all, he’d show his mettle, an old man but a sure shot still, he’d prove that by finishing off the damned killer bear, no doubt. He lifted his musket, aimed at the sounds, heart thumping.
“Poppa, Poppa.”
He shook his head. What could be wrong? He cupped his hands and hollered back, “Here, at my cabin. Come see.”
Jim ran up, frantic.
James frowned. “Something wrong back at the house?”
“Nothing’s wrong, Poppa. I...I was just worried. You know what time it is?”
James looked up to check the sun, hidden by leaves. It did seem past noon. “Must be soon time for dinner?”
Jim threw his head back in a relieved laugh. “Dinnertime? That was an hour ago. You missed it.” He grinned again. “But don’t worry Poppa, they’re holding you a plate.”
James clapped his hand on his son’s shoulder, and they set off. Father and son. To mourn their loss together.