A coastal hamlet in southwestern British Columbia, Canada. Present day.
Harry heads to the retaining wall wearing his waterproof work jacket and rubber boots. Only a narrow strip of Howe Sound’s ivory-colored water in front of his house is visible. A curtain of mist and clouds, hanging in the fjord for weeks now, blots out the shore on the far side.
In the past week he has left his property in Elderberry Bay only once. That was some days before Christmas. Kay had telephoned him several times, insisting that he spend Christmas Day with her, have lunch with her family, but he declined.
He wears heavy work gloves and carries a long rod and a steel pick for swinging into and catching the logs. The odor of the sea, its floor churned and spat up by winter storms, saturates the air. At the side of the house, pine needles and twigs and small boughs brought down in the storms threaten to bury the truck. It has been almost two weeks since he and his men stopped work for the season. He should have scrubbed and put away the lawn mowers, shovels, wheelbarrows, but they remain mud- and sapencrusted in the back of the truck.
It is supposed to be eagle season, a time when one expects to see them by the hundreds, perched in the highest bare-topped trees along the shore or cruising the length of the Sound as they scan for salmon carcasses. They should be easily spotted on the water, poised on spinning deadheads, a whole fish squirming between a beak or flapping in the talon of a raised foot. But, with this rain one minute, wet snow the next, the fog and the mist, not one eagle is to be seen.
In spite of blowing rain, Harry has propped the front door and left a few windows slightly open; should the telephone ring, he wants to be sure to hear it. He is tired, but the clump of deadheads banging against the retaining wall needs to be pried apart.
The New Year is just around the corner. Surely, he thinks, she wouldn’t make him wait until then. If only she would telephone and they could speak, even briefly, he would be freed, better able to celebrate the New Year. Otherwise, likely, he would spend that holiday waiting and alone, too.
But he wasn’t entirely alone on Christmas Day. Anil, his first friend in Canada, had made the hour-long drive from Vancouver to Elderberry Bay in the wet dark morning, his two grandchildren in tow, to pay the Christmas Day visit, a tradition now.
They sat on the enclosed verandah and watched wet snow fall. Harry warmed milk for the boys. They had brought him Indian sweets, which he put out on a plate and offered back to them. The children had expected that Harry, whom they knew to be a landscape designer, might have set up the yard with colorful prancing plastic reindeer, and the roof with a gift-laden Santa, one foot already down the chimney, but he hadn’t. They pestered him with questions about what decorations he had in his shed, about why he hadn’t put out any, about the neighbor’s decorations, about those of his clients, and more. Their disappointment was eventually diverted by the competing prattling of the lovebirds he had received as a present that summer past. Harry had become so used to the birds and their mess that straightening the living room where they were kept, any more than piling an array of landscaping and garden magazines and seed and equipment catalogs neatly beside the couch, hadn’t occurred to him. The boys were intrigued by the sour, salty odor of birds inside the house, by their scatter of seed hulls and flecks of paper the female used in nesting. They lost interest, however, when one of them opened the cage and, attempting to coax a puffed-up reluctant bird onto a finger, was nipped so hard that an inverted purple-colored V-line blossomed instantly just under the surface of his skin. They left within an hour of arriving. That is how he spent Christmas Day. That and waiting. He had expected, hoped, that Rose would call, but she didn’t. The last time Harry had taken it upon himself to ring, they spoke less than five minutes—she, whispering, nervous, from her bedroom, until Shem picked up the receiver in the den. Rose in an instant said, “You have the wrong number,” and hung up on her end. He heard Shem say, “Is someone there? Hello?” and Harry, without saying another word, awkwardly put down the phone. She had asked him not to call again, promising to ring every other Friday evening when Shem was away playing poker with friends. And now several Fridays have passed with no word from her. He tries to understand, tries not to resent that he is not free to be in touch with her when he wants, but rather, must wait on her.
Whatever made him think he could, by himself, fish out the logs, he wonders. If he were to fall into that frigid salt water crammed with mountain-slide debris and logs escaped from booms, he would be beaten to a pulp so fine that he could be formed into the newsprint on which his obituary would be announced.
He turns back toward the house; he will wait until after the New Year, when he will call on one of his workers to help.
It would be good to see an eagle. Weeks into the season, and still not one is visible.