Permanent Astonishment by Tomson Highway

Author:Tomson Highway [Highway, Tomson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

26

If we have pet loons then we have pet rocks, we have pet minnows, we have pet horseflies that serve us as kites, we have pet squirrels. Longtime residents of this gnarly old spruce tree in whose kind shadow stands our tent, they are our alarm clock. Rene and Florence once raised Arctic terns from age one day. Mostly owing to his age, which was four at the time, Rene lost his to an accident after one week but Florence raised hers successfully; it helped, of course, that she was fifteen that summer. The story of her pet’s life goes much like that of two other birds who joined our family the summer that followed…on a lake called Seeseep.

June is at its end. We have just arrived home from boarding school, Daniel and Florence and I. Yet another one of those long, golden Sundays—being that close to the land of the midnight sun, we see this magical effect every year in late June and early July—it is Dad’s day off from fishing. And as sometimes happens, once we have finished our picnic lunch of pike tripe grilled on a stake over an open fire, on the mainland in this case, we go walking on an esker. An esker? Picture a hill an eighth of a mile in height and some two hundred miles in length and which slopes its way from lake level up, up, and up to a ridge where the forest cover of spruce and pine gives way abruptly to a surface of sand, the meadow that results also, like the hill, two hundred miles long. The forest may begin its downward journey on the ridge’s other side until it re-connects with land that lies at lake level, but the sand ridge itself gives the impression that a mole of proportions gigantic has burrowed beneath it for it snakes its way and snakes its way to the high sub-Arctic. Golf courses in the clouds, a Moony-ass bush pilot once cryptically called them (for us it was “cryptic” because we wouldn’t see a golf course until years later, and that not in reality but on TV) but that is an esker. A breathtaking sight, it was carved by glaciers of the Ice Age receding northward as temperatures rose, has said Father Cadeau. Today, as always when we scale one to hunt for ptarmigan or pick cranberries, the Highway family has this esker all to itself.

Our feet kicking up clouds of sand as fine as powder, we are walking. And walking and walking. The conversation spare, intermittent, we prefer the whisper of the breeze as it winds its way through our lives. And the chatter of squirrels and birdsong. We come upon a pine tree the height of a church, rare for the north. And quickly discover that, at its summit, sits a nest. An eagle’s nest. There is, however, no eagle in sight so it must be abandoned, is the general consensus. But then we hear the cries of what we think are baby eagles.

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