For complete strangers, we were sitting very close to each other, a hair’s breadth from touching. Close enough to know that she wore no perfume or eau de cologne. If a woman wants to attract a man, that’s the way to go about it.
“Is this where we tell each other highly edited versions of our life stories?” she asked.
“I … well, we could.”
“Ask me a question.”
A clicking sound, like that of a shutter release button, came from her direction. Or perhaps just beyond her. I looked over her shoulder at the next table, but there was no one facing me, no one holding a camera. The bouncer was now standing by the wall, but his back was turned and his hands were in his pockets. I paused, gathered my thoughts.
“Why did you give me the drugs I asked for? At the clinic.”
“The cephalexin?”
“The pethidine.”
“What’s that?”
What’s that? “It’s an analgesic. Like morphine.”
“Ask me another question.”
Why don’t you know what pethidine is? Does it go by another name up here? “Does it go … did things work out for you up here? For your daughter?”
“Hardly. Her new friends are just as bad as the old ones. Worse.”
“Is she a student or …”
“She’s a stripper.” She pushed back her chair and stood up, displaying a patch of sweat under her arm. “She’s on next.”
Watching the daughter take her clothes off, I had a feeling, would do little to ingratiate me with the mother. Besides, I was dead. All this noise, all these people was a six-month allotment for me in one night. Worries about my ward, my sad-eyed lady of the highlands, were draining me as well. If I hadn’t left the two-way in the van, I’d page her right now … The clock-hands on the sandwich board by the stage said I had five minutes till showtime. I looked around at the faces—grinning, morose, laughing, blank. Then stared, for some reason, at the red serviette beneath the vet’s glass coffee mug. Except it wasn’t a serviette, it was a folded piece of paper. Like the one I had in my pocket …
I was reaching for it when the vet came into my peripheral vision, on her way back from the ladies’ room. There was pride—more, majesty—in her stride and bearing; all heads turned toward her like heliotropes toward the sun. Put another way, they drooled.
As I stood to hold her chair I entertained the idea of putting my hand lightly on her back, or long tress of hair, but entertaining it was as far as I got. She sat down as the music started and the lights dimmed.
“I really should go,” I said. “And care for my patient.”
Another slow smile. “If there’s anything I can do for her, let me know.”
“You wouldn’t … no, never mind.”
“I wouldn’t what?”
You wouldn’t want to live in a church would you, you and your daughter, and becomes Céleste’s stepmother? “I’m looking for a black truck, a bear truck. Big tires and broken headlight. Does that … ring any bells?”
She shook her head. But with a faint look of surprise?
“A shot in the dark,” I shrugged.
She offered her hand, which I thought of brushing with a kiss, but shook instead. It was unflinching, her handshake, as firm as marble, perhaps reserved for clients whose pets she could not save. “You know how to reach me,” she said. “But take this anyway.”
I took what was offered, a green business card. “You know I’ll try.” The words came streaming out and made my heart somersault, somersault like a teenager’s heart.
“I know.”
I told her my name, which I should’ve done earlier, but she didn’t tell me hers. She turned to look at the brick-built bouncer, now lurking by the bathroom door, and then at the stage as Diana the Huntress, with pink bow and arrow, made her entrance.
He kissed the veterinarian, whose name he still did not know, on the mouth. Without premeditation or hesitancy or overhaste. They were haunch to haunch, heart to heart! He could not imagine what had taken possession of him …
I was trying to rewrite that last scene while descending the stairs, but was distracted by a figure on the bottom step. The real estate agent. He was leaning against the banister, minus hunting cap, minus girlfriend. He looked rather drowsy. And didn’t return my greeting or appear to know who I was.
Outside the snow was still falling, but the neon sign no longer blinked; it buzzed and fizzed instead, like a beehive. I cleared snow off the Westy with my forearm, then climbed inside. Fired her up first try. Turned on the heater, then the wipers. While watching them, thinking about the vet, I flashed to the green business card and red slip of paper. I plucked each from my back pocket, put on my glasses, turned on the dome light. The card had a poaching hotline but no other number:
SOLANGE LACOURSIÈRE, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Morphologiste légiste
Centre québécois sur la santé des animaux sauvages
St-Hyacinthe (Québec)
SOS BRACONNAGE 1-800-463-2191
I turned it over. Her cell number was written in pencil, double-underlined.
The red sheet was next:
XXXMAS ULTRA-HORROR—BY INVITATION ONLY
1. Casuistry (Canada, 2002, 88 min.) In May 2001, three young artists from Toronto torture a cat to death and videotape themselves doing it. Casuistry takes its title from a word for specious reasoning that rationalizes dubious behaviour. The leader of the group says he discovered the word in a dictionary directly above “cat.” Two local gallery owners and a government grant officer defend the action on the grounds of artistic freedom.
2. Bleu blanc et rouge IV (Canada, no dial., 26 min.). In this continuing series, a Laurentian hunter-artist once again dips an animal—this time a wolf cub—into a vat of blue enamel, slices off its paws, and the animal slips and slides across the canvas until he has breathed his last and another red-white-and-blue masterpiece is born.
3. Black Macaques (Indonesia, subtitles, 45 min.). A Taiwanese captain of a tuna trawler orders a dozen crested black macaques delivered to his boat, alive. Trappers are sent to the jungle, to the Tangkoko Nature Reserve in Indonesia, to bag the rare monkeys. To take the babies alive, the mothers are shot. Aboard the trawler, galley hands bind the animals’ hands and feet. Using sharp bamboo sticks, the crew then punctures the babies’ soft skulls. As the convulsions ebb, the brains are served raw.
Good Christ. This may explain why they built a psychiatric institution nearby. And why the vet was here tonight. What are the laws regarding animal-kill videos? If the outdoorsmen shows on TV are any guide, I would assume there aren’t any.
I blew out onto the highway with tires spinning, thoughts spinning, stomach churning, unaware that I was speeding dangerously, with no pedal left to go. That’s all I need, more disturbing images running around my perma-fried brain, banging at the walls. More things to impair me when I think of them and madden me when I dream of them.
I never tailgate, but I did so on this occasion. My bicameral mind was in a state of entropic frenzy, with billiarding thoughts about cats and cubs and black macaques and mausolean strip clubs. I was driving one-handed, white-knuckled, buzzing Céleste while passing the car in front, recklessly on a blind curve, when it registered. That the car in front was a squad car.
XXVIII
Every time I write in this book I ask myself, “Will this be the last time?” Bazinet will be out soon, any day now, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m working on a defensive plan that will save Nile & an offensive plan that will probably get me killed.
So I’m going to assume this will be my last entry & talk not about humans but animals, really interesting ones that no longer exist.
Around 10,000 years ago, 3/4 of the large mammals in the Americas were wiped out. Like the Mastodon, Woolly Mammoth, Sabre-Toothed Cat, Woolly Rhinoceros, Cynodesmus (a giant dog), Cave Lion, Cave Bear, Giant Ground Sloth, Mountain Deer, Four-Pronged Antelope, Dire Wolf, Castoroide (a beaver bigger than a bear), Pecc
arie (a pig bigger than a tiger) & our own native Horses, Lions & Camels.
What caused the great dying? It wasn’t a meteor or anything like that. It was something scientists call the Pleistocene Overkill. When the first tribes came across the Bering Strait (which was land at the time) & down through the Canadian Rockies, they entered a hunter’s paradise: forests with around 100 million large mammals. The animals hadn’t a clue about humans & their ways, so the hunters’ spears & arrows caught them by surprise. Totally. And killed them by the hundreds of thousands. The human population exploded. And whenever you satisfy the basic needs of life, anthropologists say, people use their free time for sport. The early tribes killed these great beasts not only for food & clothing but for fun, for trophies. Hunting was seen as an act to test & prove your manhood.
Modern man has done as much damage as the Clovis hunters of the Pleistocene era. From the 18th century on, North American hunters have wiped out many more species, including the Sea Cow, Great Auk, Labrador Duck, Eskimo Curlew & Eastern Cougar. Not to mention the Passenger Pigeon, whose flocks could number up to 50 million birds, who could blot out the sun as they passed. And whose last member was shot in Canada.
I would like to talk briefly about 4 of these animals, ones that don’t get a lot of ink.
Sea Cow
On land the only bigger mammal was the Elephant. So “Sea Elephant” might be a better name than “Sea Cow.” The largest specimens, females, could reach 10 metres (32 feet) & weigh over 6,000 kilos (7 tons). It was a common species in the North Pacific, but ancient hunters practically exterminated them. They survived only around the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea, where nobody lived. The first European to see these creatures was a German naturalist named Georg Steller. In 1741 he described the way they were hunted:
Their capture was effected by a large iron hook, with the other end being fastened by means of an iron ring to a very long & stout rope, held by 30 men on shore…. After an animal was harpooned in the back, the men on shore, grasping the other end of the rope, pulled the desperately resisting animal laboriously towards them. Those in the boat made the animal fast by means of another rope & wore it out with continual blows, until tired & completely motionless, it was attacked with bayonets, knives & other weapons & pulled up on land. Immense slices were cut from the still living animal, but all it did was shake its tail furiously & make such resistance with its forelimbs that big strips of its skin was torn off. In addition it breathed heavily, as if sighing. From the wounds in the back the blood spurted upward like a fountain….
They have an extraordinary love for one another, which extends so far that when one of them was cut into, all the others were intent on rescuing it & keeping it from being pulled ashore by closing a circle around it. Others tried to overturn the yawl. Some placed themselves on the rope or tried to remove the hook from the wound in the back by blows of their tail, in which they actually succeeded several times….
It is most remarkable proof of their conjugal affection that a male, after having tried with all his might, although in vain, to free a female caught by the hook, and in spite of the beating we gave him, nevertheless followed her to the shore, and that several times, even after she was dead, he shot unexpectedly up to her like a speeding arrow. Early next morning, when we came to cut up the meat & bring it to the dugout, we found the male again standing by the female, and the same I observed on the third day….
After modern man first saw it, the Sea Cow survived for only 27 more years. Which makes it the all-time record-holder for the quickest extermination of any species.
Great Auk
The 10th-century Vikings were probably the first Europeans to see these fabulous flightless birds, these “penguins of the North.” They were quick in water but slow on land. So they were totally helpless when nesting.
When Jacques Cartier visited Funk Island off the coast of Newfoundland in 1535, his crew captured hundreds of the birds & crammed them into barrels. And robbed the nests of as many eggs as his crew could carry. The Great Auks nested not only around Newfoundland, but also on the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and in the Gulf of Maine & Massachusetts Bay. In the eastern Atlantic, they nested on various islands, especially St. Kilda (off the west coast of Scotland), and several tiny islands off Iceland. Everywhere they nested, they were slaughtered.
Here’s how the Auks were greeted on Funk Island off Newfoundland circa 1800. Thousands of the birds were herded into huge pens, crammed so tight the poor things could barely move. Gangs of men then waded through the birds swinging spiked clubs, either killing them or stunning them. Other men followed the strikers & threw the birds over the walls of the pen into piles by the fire pits. To loosen their plumage, they were boiled dead or alive in giant cauldrons with the oil of the birds killed before them. Another gang stripped the feathers off them, which would be sold to make pillows & powder puffs. The naked bodies were then thrown into the fire.
By 1830 there were almost no Great Auks left in the world. Their last stronghold was Geirfulasker, a volcanic island off the coast of Iceland, which erupted that year & sank. The few birds that were left had just one place to go — the island of Eldey. On June 3, 1844, some sailors landed there, sent by a collector to see if any Great Auks could be found. They spotted a pair standing high above the smaller seabirds. The female was sitting on an egg — a last hope for the future of the birds. The two Great Auks frantically tried to reach the water, but one was trapped between some rocks, and the other was caught at the very edge of the sea. Both were clubbed to death. And the egg was crushed under a sailor’s boot.
Eskimo Curlew
This AMAZING bird had the most complicated & dangerous migration cycle ever. It started in the north, in the Canadian sub-arctic, then followed a huge clockwise circle: east through Labrador, down through the Atlantic & across the southern Caribbean, then on & on until reaching the Argentinean Campos south of Buenos Aires! In the spring it completed the cycle, crossing Texas & making its way through Kansas, Missouri, Iowa & Nebraska back to Canada. It seems to have travelled with every single one of its species, in one gigantic flock. Some people compared their singing to the “jingle of sleigh bells.”
When they landed the sight must have been awesome: a flock covering nearly 50 acres was once seen in Nebraska. But you have to realize that this might’ve been the entire world population of Curlews.
When the birds reached Newfoundland they were stalked along the beaches. Men would come after them in the darkness, blinding them with lanterns & hitting them with sticks. When the Curlews got blown into New England by gales, every gunner got to work.
On their northern route over the great plains, the “prairie pigeons” flew into gigantic ambushes, annual massacres. Hunters would fill wagonload after wagonload of dead birds. Sometimes they’d leave huge piles of them to rot & then go back & shoot some more.
In the late ’50s there were some sightings (and even one photograph) of single migrating birds in Texas, and in 1964 a Curlew was shot in Barbados. People still report seeing them from time to time. But assuming they’re not seeing ghosts, there’s no hope for these single survivors. Their instinct is to migrate the length of two continents — but in the safety of large numbers. So if there are any Eskimo Curlews still out there, they’re doomed.
Eastern Cougar
This big cat goes by many names — Cougar, Catamount, Mountain Lion, Panther, Puma concolor — and once roamed over all of the Laurentians, all over this continent, by the tens of thousands, in the old-growth Boreal forests. They were wiped out — hunted, poisoned, trapped — a half-century ago. Up near Mont Tremblant, a guy named Jimmy Doucette turned in over 200 cougar scalps for the bounty between 1896 and 1906. Today, the only mountain lion remaining in the Laurentians is Kitty, a stuffed & moth-eaten specimen on display at The Cave on Hwy 117, killed on Christmas Day in 1958. Officially, the animal is extinct.
But people up here keep claiming they see cougars or their tracks up & dow
n the Laurentians. And scientists say there may be a small number of them living in the wild. In the 1990s DNA evidence from droppings confirmed that they hung out in Quebec, Vermont & Massachusetts. And an apparently healthy male cougar was killed by a bus near St-Jovite in the summer of 2006.
Nile says he’s seen a big cat in the cemetery, once in December, once in January. And I believe him even if he doesn’t believe it himself. It’s the only hope I’ve got left, it’s all I cling to — that the woods out there are still big & deep enough for the last of their lines to live.
XXIX
The squad car, its gumball turning, did not pull me over. Its driver was speeding too, obviously out for bigger fish than a two-beer joyrider like me. I eased my foot onto the brake, pulled back into my lane. Spared for a future time.
At the rectory all the lights were on, including the one in the attic, which I had instructed Céleste never to leave on. Its shutter rattled as tangled strings of cold black wind wound the house.
On the kitchen table was a note, whose handwriting I recognized. I had a dreadful feeling about it, and was almost afraid to read it. The letters went in and out of view, as if written in disappearing and reappearing ink. A ransom demand? Suicide note?
“Céleste!” I called. “I’m home!” No answer. With banging heart I stared at the note until the letters stopped squirming. Lawyer Volpe called.
I ran up the stairs and down the hall to the attic door. Flung it open, took two steps up. “Céleste? You all right?” No answer. I ran back to her bedroom, whose door was open the merest chink. I pushed it all the way.
My heathen angel was spread-eagled on the bed, writing or drawing in her sketchbook. “Hello, Nile,” she said huskily, without looking up. “I must be going deaf. I didn’t hear you knock.”