They always called him Jacques Plante the trapper to distinguish him from Jacques Plante the goalie. He’s the one who’d first talked to him about the cat.
The year after the accident, Jim had spent almost all summer in the woods. His father left him with Doris and Jacques when he went down to the city. That summer, a doctor from Chicoutimi had set up a trailer nearby to fish on the surrounding lakes in a canoe. He’d probably intended to hunt moose there in the autumn. Doris and Jacques weren’t crazy about that, but they’d decided to be gracious with Doctor Duguay, as they were with everyone. The doctor had a dog, Spencer, a good-looking boxer with cropped ears, who didn’t seem quite at home in the middle of the thinned out forest.
Doris and Jacques also had an old dog that was to die the following year. His name was Boss. He’d been Jim’s best friend since he was born, and was perfectly at ease in the woods. He was a very big dog, a cross between a German Shepherd and a malamute. The doctor had come to visit them one night when it was the time for a fire, and the trappers’ camp was full of people. He’d stayed there, standing, had refused to sit and take a beer, and had advised them to tie Boss up during the day. “That would be safer,” he’d said, “Because Spencer is a dominant male.”
Doris and Jacques had consented. He’d left quietly, heading back to his trailer. The trappers never tied Boss up, and one fine day the big wolf dog had come out of the woods at a trot, around dusk. Jim’s father was there. They were all sitting around the picnic table, eating corn and hot dogs. Boss was holding Spencer in his mouth, by the neck. The boxer was unrecognizable. Boss deposited the corpse at their feet, as if it were a huge hare, all disjointed.
Jacques tied Boss to a post and they left, with his father, for the doctor’s trailer. On foot. As if there would have been something sacrilegious in transporting the dog by truck or in a four-wheel drive. His father and Jacques walked in single file along the path, taking turns with Spencer, whom they carried like an armful of logs. Doctor Duguay was all alone in his trailer, playing solitaire by the light of a gas lamp. He wasn’t hysterical or angry or sad. He took Spencer from the trapper’s arms and asked:
“What happened?”
“I don’t know, doctor. I found him like that while checking my snares.”
“Your dog?”
“Oh, he was tied up, doctor. And Boss would never have been able to do anything like that.”
“What then? A bear? Wolves?”
“Oh, he would have defended himself against a bear better than that. And wolves don’t go for the throat that way. Excuse the expression, doctor, but they would have torn him to pieces. But I’ll tell you what could have done it. You can believe it or not, it’s all the same to me. A long time ago they sometimes killed really bad cats around here.”
“Lynxes?”
“A lot bigger than a lynx. I’m talking about something about as big as a tiger, that could jump from over there to this tree here without even having to take a run at it. An animal that would make a meal of just about anything. From a rabbit to a moose.”
“So there’s a big cat in the hills?”
“Like I said doctor, you don’t have to believe me. I can only tell you what I know. There’s been no big cat killed around here for a hundred years, but I know some fellows who are in the woods all the time like me, who say it’s still there.”
The doctor was thoughtful for a moment. Jim’s father took the opportunity to add:
“If it turns out that your dog disturbed this cat while he was on a scent. You can’t know what one, that of an animal maybe, but maybe yours, or my son’s.”
“If that’s what happened,” said Jacques, continuing the train of thought, “then maybe Spencer saved Jim’s life.”
The doctor decided to bury Spencer right away behind the trailer. He brought out some scotch that the three men guzzled from the bottle while digging the hole, and he gave Jim a Saguenay Dry. By the time they headed back it was dark and they were drunk and it was Jim who lit the way with his flashlight. When his father and Jacques had gone a good distance from the trailer, his father said:
“That was some lie.”
In the trappers’ cabin, a bit later, Jim went up to Jacques and asked:
“Trapper, did it ever exist, that creature you were talking about before?”
“What creature?”
“The big cat.”
The trapper pointed to the shelf about two feet from the ground running around the cabin’s four walls. On that shelf there were the whitened skulls of dozens of animals, in decreasing size. It began with two big bear heads and five wolf heads, going down to the many tiny heads of martens and mink, of groundhogs and squirrels. Between them there were the heads of coyotes, of lynx, of foxes, of fishers, of porcupines, and even a wolverine. All that was missing was a moose, but a large set of antlers was attached to a horizontal beam and rose up over their heads, casting frightening shadows onto the ceiling.
“I’m going to tell you something, Jim. If it’s not on the shelf, it doesn’t exist.”
“Yes, but Jacques, there’s no human head on the shelf, and they exist.”
The old man smiled and brought his old hands down, like an eagle’s talons, onto his head.
“If you’re going to be a smarty pants, yours’ll be up there next.”
The doctor decided to move, and to set up his trailer a little less deep into the Controlled Harvesting Zone, where all the species were tracked. Still, he came to see us two or three times over the following weeks and he’d made his own inquiries. There really had been, he said, a big cat in the mountains. A ferocious animal, two metres in length, and capable of mighty leaps. Perhaps it was still there, yes, it was entirely possible, and that would explain everything. Doctor Duguay liked to sprinkle his sentences with Latin phrases, and from his grand pronouncements Jim had retained one term that echoed in his head ever after.
Felis concolor couguar.
*
Late January.
The men are gathered around the broken trap, far enough away not to interfere with the prints in the snow that start in a small coniferous wood on the other side of the small valley where they’ve left their skidoos, cross the snow-covered land, sweep around the shattered cage, and plunge even deeper into the bush. Jim had been able to follow them for thirty or so metres before losing them for good between two big balsams, whose warmth had made soft holes in the snow.
“You say that nobody’s seen that bugger since the 1940s?” asks Bernard.
“1938,” says Jim. “They killed it at the Maine border.”
“And they’ve come back?”
“Maybe they never left. Hard to know.”
Bernard looks at Jacques Plante the trapper.
“And you believe that?”
“It’s not a matter of believing or not believing. There are some biologists from the University of Montreal who put out some bait. About fifty miles that way. They must know what they’re doing.”
Jacques Plante the trapper, on his snowshoes, bends over the two paw prints, big as saucers. Between the prints there are lines you’d say were whipped into the snow with sticks. Jacques clears his throat, sends a large gob of spit flying forwards, and looks in turn at Bernard, his brother-in-law Roland, and Jim.
“That sure looks like your cat. To make lines like that in the snow, you need a big tail.”
Doris, sitting against a birch trunk a few steps behind them, says:
“It could have been a wolf.”
“Yeah, but they don’t hang out around here this time of the year. And that’s not a wolf I saw.”
Very early that year, November burst winter wide open to let in the wind from the northwest, and a little dry cold that bit into your cheeks and chilled your blood. Everyone is dressed in thick fur jackets or parkas. Doris and Jim are also wearing scarves over their lined hoods, to protect their faces. The sun is an opalescent smudge in a white sky that glints on the dark glasses of Bernard and his brother-in-law. The trapper asks: