Peyton stood up and leaned towards his father. He gestured helplessly. “John Senior,” he said.
The old man went back to skimming out the log, his arms repeating the same relentless and delicate motion along the length of the fir. Peyton watched the bark curl away in thin uniform strips. “You bastard,” he whispered. But his father didn’t look up from the stroke of the axe. The hired men turned back to their work. Ocean surf lapped blindly at the shore.
Trap season in the backcountry was usually the only time Peyton felt clear of all that tormented him. It was a less complicated place, to his mind. Or a place where the complications were balanced by compensations. The warmer weather might slow him down, but it also meant he was able to place simple drowning sets in open water near beaver slides and he took a fair number in dry sets on riverbanks.
Being out this early in the season also allowed him to scout the mounds of tender alder and birch that were carefully stacked in shallow pools to feed the beaver through the winter. Once the rivers froze over completely he would axe holes above them, slip the trap and chain rings over a long stake hammered firmly into the lake-bed, then lash a cross-stick above the ice in case the animal worked it free below. If the water was shallow enough, the carcass would sometimes be frozen into new ice by the time Peyton came back to the trap and he had to be careful not to damage the pelt by tearing it free. He worked bare-handed with a small axe and sometimes just the blade of a knife, chipping away chunks of ice attached to the fur before hauling the animal clear. It was cold, frustrating work. But it was a problem with a simple, concrete solution, something he could manage without confusion or embarrassment. He understood the backcountry, the habits of animals, the patterns of weather. And it was this knowledge that made him feel he was closest here to belonging, to loving something that might, in some unconscious way, love him in return.
But this year his anxiety followed him into the woods and would not leave him. Peyton couldn’t countenance allowing John Senior to take his men after the Indians without being there himself to keep a leash on their anger, and he had agreed to mount an expedition to the lake in March. Reparation was what John Senior spoke of, but he could see it was revenge that animated his father. He was burnished with anticipation, like a blade freshened on a whetstone. Peyton could feel the appointed month grinding towards him, inexorable as a Labrador icefield chafing its way south, ruining the few weeks of peace he enjoyed each year.
There was also that sense he had just now of being watched. Not concrete at all, he admitted to himself. He trudged on, deliberately not looking over his shoulder, not flicking sidelong glances into the trees to the left or the right. He was at a loss, for the moment, as to how to shake it.
He decided to walk the extra two or three miles to Reilly’s tilt on the River Exploits instead of kipping down in the lean-to at the end of the trapline. The sky was still grey with the day’s last reflected light when he reached it, but along the river it was dark, the forest unremittingly black and without definition. The tilt had been abandoned by Reilly years before when the rapidly expanding size of his family made the trip from Charles Brook unwieldy and he decided to run traps nearer to home. A gloom of light filtered through the broken roof, through the door hanging on by a single hinge. Peyton felt his way to the fireplace where a pile of rotten wood was stacked on the stone. He set about making a fire and once it was well alight he stopped a minute to listen as the dark gathered outside, trees swaying in the wind. Whatever had been with him most of the day, he decided, he had left behind.
It was a long, restless night. His body felt swollen and dull with fatigue, but he slept only in troubled snatches, the tiredness on him like a weight of water. The spruce logs of the tilt ticked steadily in the wind — the death clock, his father called it, a foreboding of someone’s dying. Several times he got up from his blanket to stoke the fire or to piss through the door into the snow and afterwards could not be sure whether he had actually done these things or simply dreamt them. He’d heard stories of men losing their minds in the backcountry. At some point through the night it occurred to him he might be suffering the first signs of that affliction.