The Hatbox Letters by Beth Powning

Author:Beth Powning [Powning, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37552-0
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2004-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

9. Muskrat Trail

COLD-FLUSHED, GREGORY LOOKS GOOD. HIS CHEEKS are red, there are tiny bits of frost on his white-blond eyelashes. They’re cross-country skiing on the river. Prisms spin in the powder snow, and the sky is a hard blue, the light so intense that Kate squints even behind her sunglasses, feeling as if she’s in a National Geographic photograph of Himalayan explorers on glittering ice fields. Their clothing is brilliant in the flashing light: Gregory’s red jacket, black-and-grey wool cap with tasselled ear flaps; her own green jacket and wind-pants; the red markings on their white skis. As they set out from town, the river is wide, with snowmobile tracks running down its centre, but they keep to the edge, skiing over crisscrossing branch shadows. They round a bend and can see across the marsh. The light is like sea light: complex, reflective, brightened by the expanse of whiteness. On a distant hill, low light warms the wood-shingled steeple of the Anglican church, and smoke wavers from unseen chimneys. A bird flies up.

Gregory points with his pole, calls. She skis up beside him.

“Look,” he’s saying. “Hawk. Could be a rough-legged. Darn, I wish I had my binoculars.”

He’s boyish, excited. She forgets, seeing him in his city clothes, that he really does know these things. He can read animal tracks. He knows the constellations. She and Tom used to imagine Gregory as a small boy. He would, they decided, have been enthusiastic and pedantic. He would have had a mineral collection (labelled), a microscope, dead snakes in alcohol, scrap books of family trips filled with postcards of mountains and waterfalls; he would have had a shelf of fossils, arrowheads, skulls. What is it about Gregory, she thinks, squinting at the bird that wheels over the willows, that made them imagine him as a less-than-appealing little boy?

He’s leaning forward on his poles, squinting. He’s not wearing sunglasses; she sees lines fan beside his eyes. He’s intent. “Long narrow wings, long tail. Can you see the subter-minal band?” He doesn’t wait for her to answer. “Ah, look there. See the white at the tail. That’s it, then.” He grins at her. “Your neck-warmer is frozen solid, Kate.”

She feels the frozen wool batting her nose, stiff where her breath has frozen it. She laughs. Standing next to Gregory in the lowering light—their breath smoking, the light becoming richer as it declines, denser shadows creeping out over the riverbed—she doesn’t feel like part of a couple, yet he makes her aware of herself. Since she is not sure who he sees, how he imagines her, what he thinks of her, she feels interesting to herself, like a teenager.

“Come on,” she says. “We have to keep moving.”

“Just a minute, just a minute.” Now he lightens his voice, as if he’s hiding a surprise from a child. He slides his fanny pack around to the front, unzips it. He takes out a flask, unscrews the cap. “Brandy? Warm you up?” The sun is in his face, the frost on his lashes glitters.

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