Eye of the Day by Dennison Smith

Author:Dennison Smith [Smith, Dennison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443411899
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2013-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lonely, Amos reached down to pet his dog, forgetting no dog was there. The dog had died almost a year ago on the outskirts of a Quebec town where Amos had worked long enough to earn a bag of nails and a tired rifle. The wooded edges of towns were dangerous: the dog got caught in a bear trap and its hind legs had blackened with gangrene. Amos would have shot it, but he couldn’t spare the bullet. So he’d rubbed its ear a while, then lopped its head off with his axe. He’d skinned the dog he loved, so as not to waste it, and lining the inside of his lumberjack jacket with its fur, he’d travelled on.

How many miles he’d skied to get here, wherever here was, he couldn’t guess. He might have counted the telephone poles, but they’d fallen away to the east and west as he skied alone into the fathomless north. He’d left no sign of himself; the snow had erased the trail behind him, snow upon snow, as seamless as life and death where each is the source of the other. Only a handful of nails remained in his sack, but no one wanted this scrag wood anyway—from here on, the trees were dwarfs. If there was gold or iron underground, the miners hadn’t found it yet. Canada was cold and beautiful for its own sake.

He slid down over bedrock towards a frozen river. Over its ice, the crazy-woman snow lifted her skirts and spun around, but under its ice, a walleye meandered dumbfounded with cold-blooded sluggishness. After pounding a hole in the ice with his axe, he rolled up his sleeve and, dunking his hand in the steely river, waited for the fish. Staring at the pale, reflective water, he thought if he caught himself, he’d think himself too filthy to eat. His beard was knitted with drippings of fat, and the oils in his hair had frozen. The checks on his lumberjack jacket had dimmed with the unifying greyness of dirt. Fleas bred in the dog’s fur. Earth had worked into him everywhere his surfaces were porous or rutted: it lay in the lines in his cheeks and stuck in the corners of his lips, left a chisel mark under his eye. He could wash in the freezing waters and grind sand into his skin every day, but there’d be no stopping these changes: the earth had worked into him deep enough to make a hybrid thing of his flesh. Now a thaw in the air sweetened the scent of conifer mulch, and Amos’s hand in the ice hole grabbed a fish through the gills. He scrambled back up the bank, walleye under his armpit. The jagged rocks bloodied his knees, and his fingers ballooned with cold till he was forced to hold the fish with the flat of his palms because his thumbs no longer worked. He saw, beyond the river, a black bear eating its catch.

Digging into a high drift, he built himself a cave from snow that was coarse as sand.

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