“Go on and follow it,” she said. “I’m going back for the four-wheeler. I’ll be there when you come out onto the road.”
She embraced him the way she always did, whether he was on his way to the outhouse or going to the dock for water, without holding back, as if he were off to the war or leaving forever.
The woods are so dark that he’s dazzled when he comes out onto the road. He adjusts his eyes to the light, looks about, and sees, to the right, fifteen metres ahead, the hare, a bit set back under the branches beside the path, still facing away. He begins to move forward quietly, taking long steps like a tightrope walker so as not to frighten it. He hears Doris coming up behind him in the Grizzly, and he knows the hare is going to bolt in a few seconds. It turns its head towards him. Jim shoulders the gun, aiming a bit to the side, and fires. The rifle goes hot in his hands. The hare shudders and falls in the road, its body shaken by small convulsions. Doris arrives. Jim takes a few steps towards the hare, and suddenly stops.
A dozen metres in front of him, in a spot where the trail becomes less well defined, half hemmed in by the willows, an animal that’s a lot bigger than a hare is sitting, its back to him, surrounded by trees. Jim’s heart is pounding. Behind his shoulder he signs to Doris in the Grizzly to stop. He ejects the empty cartridge from his gun, shoves it into his vest pocket, then rummages underneath in the pocket of his shirt. His gun is a 12-gauge Remington 870, with a short barrel for hunting deer. Jim uses it for hares and partridge, because it’s easy to handle in the thick bush where he’s always hunting. The chokeless barrel produces a nice pattern of scattered shot that’s good for bringing down partridges in flight and allows him to cut off the head of his prey on the ground without damaging the rest of the carcass. The barrel can shoot deer slugs, and before he leaves on a hunt his father always gives him two or three, well separated from the dozens of cartridges loose in his pants pocket and jacket. It’s his insurance policy in case he runs into wolves, a bear, or an ill-tempered moose.
He loads a slug into the gun and closes it very gently while pushing the pump forward. Describing a wide arc in the road, he circles the animal until he finds himself face-on to it, always alert for a movement, his breath shallow. It’s a big cat, a yellow-brown feline with big ears, black at the ends, still not moving as it sees Jim approaching with the gun aimed at its head. Jim passes in front of a still snow-covered fir, and then he understands. The cat’s head is a bit bent, as if it’s pondering, its eyes fixed on the ground. Against the white background you can see a black line running from the cat’s head to the trunk of an arched black ash sapling. It’s a lynx caught in a snare. Jim sees Doris approaching, and smiling broadly.
“I’m pretty lucky to have a white knight protecting me from dead lynxes.”
“Don’t give me a hard time, Doris.”
“No, no.”
Side by side they walk to the lynx, which must have been caught while hugging the ground, chasing a hare. Kneeling in front of it, Jim sees its pink tongue hanging out, and its yellow gaze, befogged, like milky tea or the pastis his father drinks in summer after he’s poured in a few drops of water.
“It’s not even a good time for lynx. I keep telling Bernard not to make his fox snares too big.”
“Are we on Bernard’s territory?”
Bernard is another trapper who shares territory with Doris and her husband, the trapper Jacques Plante.
Jim frowns. Doris blushes.
“Yes. I took this path because I know there are always lots of birds and hares.”
“I told you I didn’t want to make you take detours during your runs.”
“And I’m telling you that I don’t see you that often, that I like hunting with you, and I’ll always have time to take care of them on my own, my runs and my traps.”
They smile at each other.
Afterwards they pick up the hare, free the lynx, load it onto the front bumper of the four-wheeler, and hurry to drop it off with Bernard so as to get back before nightfall. On the hills, this time of the year, darkness drops down like a curtain, between two blinks of an eye.
Doris lets him drive, and climbs up behind him. Before heading off, he raises himself up to properly check out, from that angle, the dead lynx held in place by two elastic straps. Doris says, behind his back:
“A beautiful cat, eh?”
“Yes.”
“But not your cat.”
“No.”
She kisses him on the cheek, wraps her arms around him, and says:
“He couldn’t be far.”
In autumn, during the moose hunt, Jim wasn’t allowed to shoot with his 12 gauge or his father’s.410 bore. Hunters in ambush didn’t want to have guns going off around them left and right.
For partridges, his father had bought him a lead shot break-action rifle with a little telescope. It could bring down a bird from quite close range, as long as you avoided the wing’s protection and aimed for the head or the base of the neck. Flushing the birds was a totally different kind of hunting from taking them down in flight. You had to spot the partridges from a distance, huddled together and camouflaged in the woods, approach without spooking them, and make a good shot. In the woods along the road you killed ruffed grouse, whose male was like a red-brown cock very high on its legs. Amid the spruce and the fir you killed Canada grouse, whose male did not sport a ruff, but whose breast and black head were spotted with white, and whose eyes were topped by thick red wattles. The females of the two species had the same cryptic grey-brown plumage, and it was almost impossible to distinguish them before cutting open their breasts with a knife. The ruffed grouse had the white, delicate flesh of a cockerel, whereas the flesh of the Canada grouse was a violet-red that resembled very lean beef when cooked, and tasted strongly of fir foliage and juniper.
Often, the bird perched on a branch or curled on the ground amid the leaves and moss didn’t die right away. It went into convulsions, performing a backlit St. Vitus’s dance, soul-stricken against the sun, amid airborne feathers wrenched from its own plumage. His father had showed him what to do in such a case. You had to seize the flapping bird in a swift lunge, immobilize it, then crush its trachea between your thumb and index finger. If you put your hand on its breast at the same time, you could feel the bird’s heart quake beneath the skin and feathers, race, panicked, then finally pound out three or four heavy dull pulsations before stopping dead. His father said, “That’s what it is to kill something, Jim. You kill better when you’ve understood that. If you can’t do it, you shouldn’t hunt. You shouldn’t shoot anything.”
Jim had done it once that day. He’d had his stomach turned upside down, and for a whole season he’d stopped shooting at the partridges he’d flushed, so he wouldn’t have to do it again.
Then he got over the horror.
It became a terrible, beautiful thing that came back every autumn, the first bird brought down whose tiny heart he smothered between his hands. Every time, he placed his hand on the bird’s body and matched his own breath to the pitch of the throbbing muscle. When the drumming stopped at last, he opened his eyes on the dead bird and discovered to his surprise that his own heart had not missed a single beat.
*