"Who cares if they pollinate the blueberries?" Belle Palmer mumbled to herself as she raked at the bloody crusts behind her ears. You could eat only so much pie. Damn blackflies. Would some genius ever invent repellent that wasn't an oily, sticky solvent for plastic? Cheer up, they'll be gone in a month, ushering in mosquitos, cluster flies, horse flies, moose flies, deer flies, and pernicious no-seeums, which require a tent screen finer than silk. Welcome to Northern Ontario, where bugs are an equal opportunity employer: O positive is as full-bodied as A or B.
Belle usually avoided the woods from early May until the hotter weather switched off the worst biters, but the German shepherds were eager for a trek. Blondi had panus, a serious eye disease that limited her vision to a tiny keyhole of opportunity. Most people didn't suspect her problem, until they did a doubletake at the custom sunglasses. Freya brought up the rear, browsing every ten feet for an educated sniff at their p-mail. Was it like reading a book? Tracing Braille? Red squirrels, the stunted northern variety, chittered teasingly from the cedars; foxes had scheduled night maneuvers, littering the path with grouse feathers; and under the bracken, a rabbit hopped to safety, newly metamorphosed from white to brown again in seasonal camouflage. Under the arms of a massive yellow birch, Belle spied a tiny, freeze-dried wintergreen, popped it into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully.
Suddenly her third-class human nose wrinkled. What a stink! Yet not cloyingly sweet like carrion. Rancid, sharp, even burnt. The dogs had picked it up, and past hills of white trilliums and delicate ferns, they led her off the trail to a scene from an absurdist movie. Tied into the brushy alders were a dozen doughnuts-- grape jelly, under examination-- and stale. A lemon pie, ravaged by joyous ants, rested on top of a table rock. Miss Havisham's wedding feast? Moving toward a glittery hanging object, Belle skidded to her knees, breaking her fall against a rotten log shining in the sun. Soaked with used cooking oil, a generous gallon. The glitter came from a cheap plastic timer set with fishing line, Salvador Dali's surrealistic contribution. No saltlick this, no appleyard for moose or deer, but an ursine smorgasbord.
Belle narrowed her eyes in disgust and rubbed her hands on the grass with dubious success at removing the tacky mess. The hunt itself posed no problem. Ontario had 75,000 of the critters, last count. Bear meat could be delicious in stews and savory sausages. If a hunter wanted to equal the odds with a bow and arrow, or even stalk the prey, fair enough. It was the baiting that bothered her, ticket to the fifth circle of hell if she'd been devising poetic punishments for the afterlife. Rich Americans from Michigan, New York, and Ohio tooled Lincoln Town Cars up to the lodges north of Sudbury and waved inflated dollars. The scenario was simple. Set out tempting desserts or rotten meat, then climb into a tree perch, rough boards or fancy metal frames out of the Cabela outfitter's catalogue. Despite the morning frost, a pleasant wait with a few sandwiches, munchies, renowned Canuck beer or a mickey of rye, and presto, Bruno with insouciant pie face became an instant rug. Yet this was not lodge territory. And the timer suggested that the hunter was probably local, psyching out the animals' habits to accommodate shiftwork.
There was another motive more sinister than trophies -- the burgeoning demand for ancient Chinese medicines, especially for Hong Kong barons annexing Vancouver. Inflated bear gall prices had led Ministry officers into scenes of slaughter, gutted carcasses rotting in the bush. Squeaky clean Canada's shameful cousin to the rhino horn or ivory trade. And now that the loonie dollar coin had a new bimetal big brother (the twonie, toonie, tunie?) featuring a polar bear, all the more ironic.
"Come on, guys," she called. "Let's get out of this reek." The animals wheeled and padded back to the path, nipping at each other in fun.
Just before Belle hit the main road, she saw a familiar figure approaching, yelping beagle and bone-headed Lab heralding the procession. It was Anni Jacobs, who had cut and tramped these webs of paths. A slight but vigorous widow past sixty-five, she forged out daily to impress herself softly upon the forests. Too bad she didn't have better taste in dogs, but her husband had prized these two for bird hunting, so she was coddling them into ripe old age. Though Anni had shown Belle her trails years ago, they respected each other's privacy, passing a few words on the road at intervals. Childless, she seemed to need no companionship other than volunteering at the Red Cross. Belle thought that she had better relate her discovery, for though the area was Crown land, Anni's name was on it, so personal and firm were her footsteps.
Dressed in L.L. Bean's prime chinos, a light anorak, and a green net that covered her face, she greeted Belle as the beagle barked mindlessly. "Didn't recognize you at first. Life through a bug hat darkly. Haven't trampled any of my mushrooms, have you?" she said in a mock scold, raising the net and bending to pull out the yellow roots of a clover-leafed plant with a white star flower. "I see our goldthread's back. Pharmacopoeia of the woods. Aboriginals used the roots for cankers, sore gums, and teething."
"We have a problem worse than a toothache," Belle said. "I found a baiting spot not far from that grandfather yellow birch with the lightning scar."
"Should have suspected that. I heard gunfire Saturday morning. It's ruining the hiking. If I'm not ducking at a shot, I'm looking over my shoulder for bears straying from their territory, attracted to the free lunch." A black look crossed the healthy old face, like the grainy shading of a comfortable leather glove. "Last week a mother and two cubs were foraging near the swamp. Bears don't scare me, mind you, but I do want to know where they are. Likely they feel the same."
"Too bad it's legal." Belle ran a hand through her short auburn hair, discovering a delta-winged deer fly looking for a home.
Anni bristled like a venerable porcupine at bay, a slight sag to one eye lending an arch expression. "That's the disgrace. Bears are the only large game hunted in spring. Just when cubs are learning to feed with their mothers. Fresh from their dens and hungry."
"The quota is limited to boars, isn't it?" "And who monitors that? The Ministry of Natural Resources can't be everywhere. Shoot first and check later. Then the cubs die, abandoned." With her stout oak walking stick she prodded the beagle's rump to prevent him from sticking his nose into an anthill. "Legal maybe, but hunting is restricted to a mile from the road. And from what you say, they're well under that limit. What did you see?"
Frowning at the description, turning over possibilities like coins in her hand, Anni said, "This calls for extreme measures. I don't suffer fools gladly. Enough is enough."
"What are you going to do?"
With a conspiratorial grin, she ticked off steps on her wrinkled fingers. "One, destroy that sickening place. Rip everything down and bury it. And I'll give a good, solid burn to that oily log, safe enough before the dry season. Two, any strange truck up to mischief gets tires flattened or a spark plug tossed into the brush. They'll get the message."
"Uh," Belle said, shifting her feet uncomfortably, "that could be dangerous. Especially if they figure out who did it."
A wry smile teased one corner of the puckered mouth, as innocent as Lillian Gish in The Whales of August. "But, my dear, how can they? There are so many cottages. And I have a perfect disguise. The old are as invisible as children. You have to do what is right. All that is necessary for evil to thrive is for good...women to do nothing."
No arguments there, Belle thought with mingled admiration and uneasiness at the picture of a senior citizen guerrilla. "Please be careful. And keep me posted. You know my number." She watched the slender form stride down the trail, a five-foot challenge to osteoarthritis, one tough person, living alone twenty miles from town. What else to expect from a daughter of Manitoba, a rugged place where men were men and moose took precautions?
Back down the road Belle walked, heeling the dogs, alert to the sounds of approaching vehicles muffled by the hills, noticing as she passed smoking barbecues and laughing children that life had shifted seasons. The sounds of motorboats had returned, a different tenor from the guttural roar of snowmobiles. A few weeks ago the last ice floes had drifted out, and until Labour Day, the boats would hold dominion.
She turned at the Parliament of Owls sign that marked her driveway. Serving as personal totems were Horny, a foot-high brown owl with yellow marble eyes and threatening eyebrows, and Corny, his innocent snowy brother. Ever hopeful, Freya dug up a stone and dropped it at her feet like a precious gem. Shepherds were notorious stone-swallowers. Probably the bouncing rock resembled some chaseable creature in a Jungian doggie symbol mindset. "Oh, go chip your fangs, but remember that you can't get falsies," Belle said, skipping the prize across the gravel and climbing to the deck where ruby-throated hummingbirds back from Gulf Coast condos duelled for a sweet sip from the bright red plastic flowers of the feeder. Kamikazes, rattling "awk-awk's," they alternated dive-bombings with wild swings back to hideouts in the thick firs.
Inside the two-storey cedar house, "Fireworks Polka" by Strauss was playing on the CD, a lively treat with explosions of gunfire to discourage burglars. Belle took a bath, talced up, and put on a fresh t-shirt with a picture of Clayoquot Sound: "Pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth." After applying Blondi's steroid eye drops to the patient dog, she poured some tankcar red wine, and opened The Toronto Star. Referendum, wheneverendum, neverendum. Would the Quebec dilemma plague Canada until the rest of the provinces joined the US along with the multi-cultural city of Montreal? Protection of Francophone heritage or just plain blackmail? Humiliated spouse or whining wife? Nervous ethnic and Anglo votes had tipped the last results to a narrow 50.6% NO victory. None of this uncertainty was helping the confidence of the nation, interest rates, the stock market, and Palmer Realty -- her own gagne-pain-- bread and butter.
Mealtime meant sensible Purina for the dogs and equally sensible Kraft dinner for her. Why were people so snobbish about the legendary blue box? You couldn't beat the price, the convenience, the taste, or the plentitude, and the stuff was undeniably nourishing. Leftovers fried up into crusty magic. A salad of California red lettuce, artichoke hearts, and green peppers rounded out the meal with a vinaigrette of balsamic vinegar and extra-virgin olive oil. Now there was a contradiction in terms.
The satellite dish tuned to the American Movie Classic channel brought Garbo's growl in Anna Christie, "Gif me a viskey. Ginger ale on the side. And don' be stingy, baby." Between noisy bites, Belle mouthed the words along with the young prostitute and smiled on cue at the scene where Marie Dressler (a fellow Canadian from Coburg), the archetypal barfly, maneuvered her bulldog face and bag-of-toys body, weaving a hand through a hole in her tattered sweater with drunken bemusement. "Know what? You're me thirty years from now." Had they really had an affair? The spate of kiss-and-tell books after Garbo's death at eighty-five had been a gothic horror parade. The ice goddess doing handstands after intercourse as a birth control method? Too close for comfort. Belle had worshipped the enigmatical superstar from the first sight on the late night movies. Now at forty-five and ten pounds over fighting weight, she was beginning to identify with Marie.
