The Snowfly by Joseph Heywood

Author:Joseph Heywood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

•••

In the cool dawn, the beginning of a morning twilight, faint and wispy lavender feathers of clouds glowed in the east. The fire was out. I tried to move but my muscles had hardened to cement.

“Good morning,” Pierrette said from the dawn.

“I’m wrecked.”

“That’s the only good thing about Turk’s piloting. He goes down a lot, but everybody seems to more or less walk away.”

“I don’t think that guy has all his marbles.”

She chuckled softly. “You don’t know who he is?”

“Obviously not.”

“Practically everybody in Canada knows Turk Moon. He was a hockey player with the Leafs. Their warrior, their fighter. Hands like granite.”

“It shows in his flying,” I said.

Pierrette laughed out loud. Her hand touched my shoulder. “When he left hockey, he bought a bush pilot business. He has five planes and people working for him. He loves to fly. Has no fear.”

“And no skill.”

Another laugh. “That’s it. He just can’t do it.”

“So you sent me up with a disaster.”

“No. He’s not allowed to fly and Luc is really angry, but sometimes the desire in Turk gets so big he can’t help himself. I think it would be terrible to love something so much and be bad at it.”

“How did you and Luc get here?”

“By the long route. We thought a plane would be faster for you.”

“For what?”

“You’ll soon know,” she said.

I was famished, but there was no food. Luc and Turk showed just after we got the sleeping bags rolled. Turk was sullen and looked like a chastised adolescent.

Luc said, “Ready to walk?”

“Where?”

“This fella asks a lot of questions,” Turk said to Pierrette.

Luc was wearing his pack. “Let’s do ’er,” he said and headed into the forest at a brisk pace.

Pierrette gave me a gentle shove in the back. “Go ahead,” she said. “Follow Luc.”

“What about you?”

“Just go,” she said.

We immediately climbed up a hill and followed a ridgeline. The sun popped in and out of mustard-colored clouds. Luc kept a punishing pace and I struggled to keep up. The terrain was steep and severe and there were small lakes and streams everywhere, but there was no game to be seen, not even birds, as we passed through stands of white and black spruce, hemlocks and balsams and white cedars, sugar maples, birches, various pines and poplars. All the trees had a lean to them and many of the trunks were twisted as if they had been under extreme stress. Rocks were gray and blue and some of them rusty and everywhere, trickles of water sweated from the rocks. It was early for ferns so the ground was relatively clear, but curled shoots covered the earth. They looked like tiny green question marks. Soon the forest would be lush green with a carpet of ferns.

Eventually Luc stopped and, when I caught up to him, we stared out at a lake whose water had been replaced by grayish yellow sludge. All the trees and vegetation along the shores and on a couple of small islands were dead and black, lifeless and leafless.

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