“Find any hairs?”
“Nope.”
“And the pictures, Jim?”
“The pictures? Not great.”
Jim’s holding a digital camera in his hands that’s very practical because you don’t need film and you can see your photos on it right away. But those machines don’t like it when it’s really cold. The screen keeps flashing the message, “Battery error.” Jim has to turn the camera off and heat it up in the inside pocket of his coat before turning it on again. Twice already he’s scrutinized the least blurry of the three shots Bernard took, on a screen not much larger than a postage stamp. He saw black lines and blotches in streaks on a white background, he recognized the leafless trees and the conifers pushing up from the thick layer of snow on the ground. Beyond, behind a scrawny spruce and the thick trunks of two birches, there was an indistinct patch of fairly dark beige. Peering at it, squinting his eyes before the sun and the gleam of the sun on the snow, he saw the muscled torso of an animal take shape, with two powerful legs and a tail thrust into the air like an apostrophe. He followed the shape frontwards until he saw the head almost totally hidden by a tree trunk, and then part of the face, the curving arch of an eyebrow, the erect tip of an ear, the muzzle with a black spot on its surface, and the vague silhouette of a small creature thrust into its mouth like a gag. The camera freezes again, and now Jim can no longer reconstitute the image with so many details. Every time he turns on the camera the picture seems softer, as if someone had wanted to take a photo through a window just to capture his own reflection in the glass.
Bernard’s skidoo had broken down earlier in the day, while he was making the round of his traps with Roland. As he had his snowshoes and he knew he was very near two traps, he sent his brother-in-law back to the camp for spare parts and tools. They were on a large expanse of level ground, and Bernard began to advance, hearing no sound but the crunching of his snowshoes in the snow, the buzz of the other departing skidoo, and from time to time the cry of a squirrel. After walking for ten minutes he entered the dark woods, and stopped short on hearing a loud commotion. He advanced slowly, making no noise. He saw a large beast tearing apart his trap to reach the animal trapped inside. He was never able to say if it was a marten or a mink, because the huge creature fled, bearing it off between its jaws. Bernard had time to take a few photos before it was out of sight. He was panting, his heart was pounding, and by the time he got back to the skidoo he was close to blacking out. He took his portable radio and called Jim’s father on their usual frequency, “I think I’ve just seen Jim’s cat,” he said.
Afterwards, he gave them his coordinates with the GPS. Jim and his father dressed rapidly, and his father filled the skidoo’s gas tank while Jim called Jacques Plante the trapper and Doris on the radio.
Now they’re all there, studying a photo that reveals nothing, and tracks that will have largely disappeared by the next day, when the Wildlife Service agent arrives. Jim should be disappointed but he isn’t, not that much. He and his father take off on their skidoo and criss-cross through the underbrush until darkness falls, taking turns at the controls and peering as far as they can through the branches and trees. His father talks always of his cat in the singular, and Jim very much likes that. “You’ll see, we’ll find it,” he says. “One fine day it’ll pop out right in front of us.”
Of course, if there are still cougars around, it’s logical that there would be several, but Jim also likes to think of it as a lone animal, immortal, like the Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster, a creature that hides for the pleasure of being tracked, and shows itself from time to time to revive its own legend.
In these valleys where it sometimes snowed non-stop for days at a time, and where violent thaws and freezes succeeded each other with no sequence or logic, winter was more than a season, it was a landscape superimposed on another, where you had to orient yourself according to rare, unvarying signs in the snow and the intense cold.
Gaétan Fournier, a friend of Jim’s father, had his cabin in the bottom of a valley. There the accumulation of snow was so great that one year, at Christmas, Gaétan, his wife, his daughters and his sons-in-law, had to dig out the cabin with shovels from eleven o’clock in the morning until dusk. He’d stopped in the middle of nowhere on immaculate terrain, had got down from his skidoo and begun to take his snowshoes and round point shovel out of the sleigh. One of his sons-in-law had said:
“What are you doing, sir? Seems to me that the camp is still quite a ways.”
Gaétan had replied:
“The camp is under my feet.”
They’d shovelled as far as the cottage, lit a fire for the women with the wood they’d brought with them, and then shovelled some more until they’d reached the woodshed. They’d taken out logs and made a great inferno in the snow, slathering the wood with old motor oil. The next day their camp and its surroundings formed a huge crater in the snow-covered valley.
The snow built up on spruce and fir, gathered in thick layers that the deep cold hardened onto their branches. As of mid-December, whole hectares of the forest were transformed into dolmens of white ice that blazed under the boreal sun, as dangerous for the eyes as a welder’s flare. People came from the ends of the earth to meander through this lunar, monotone landscape.
When an outsider asked local people if they had a name for what they saw, they replied, “We call them ghosts.”
*
Early May.
Half asleep, he’s running on four legs, is conscious of the strength of his muscles in movement, and feels branches brushing against his fur. In great bounds he leaps the rushing water and dead trees that the forest throws up in his path. Half asleep, he hears his father, Doris, and Jacques Plante the trapper talking, seated around the table a few metres from his bed. He knows the beast is tracking something, he’s breathing a heady smell through his nostrils, sees through his dilated pupils the prey’s silhouette far in the distance, it stands out against the green of the trees, which he has never known so vivid. Half asleep, he swoops down on the prey and recognizes it. It is himself. The cougar is attacking him, and he is the subject of those fragments of conversation he’s hearing from the far end of his dream.
“How long had it been since he’d had the sickness?”
“Four years.”
There is silence. The beast buries its teeth in his throat and he tastes the salt warm blood that is loose in the creature’s mouth.
“That mustn’t have brought back good memories.”
“Not really, no.”
Two weeks earlier, Jim had come home alone from school, knowing that it had returned. It had been stalking him already for several days, like an evil shadow. He managed to open the door despite his trembling and the unruly beating of his heart.
His father, sitting at the counter, saw him come in, and leaped up.
“Jim, what’s wrong?”
He wanted to talk, he wanted to cry out, but by that point it was already in total possession of his body. He was elsewhere. For a long moment his father looked on as his son’s body was wracked by convulsions, arched back on the ground, the eyes rolled upwards, then he took him by the shoulders, turned him on his side, and began humming a lullaby while passing his hand over his sweat-dampened hair.
A few days after the crisis, he fell ill. The flu, which worsened over the period of a week. He wasn’t eating, and had a consumptive’s cough. His father took him to the doctor, who diagnosed a serious bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics and a great deal of rest. The next day, from his room in the city, Jim overheard his father talking on the ham radio he kept in the basement to communicate with people up north.