Lonesome by Chris Czajkowski

Author:Chris Czajkowski
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Touchwood Editions
Published: 2014-09-30T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WE WERE, IT TRANSPIRED, ABOUT to embark upon a very different adventure.

Early one morning, right after we turned our backs on Lonesome Lake, we drove upvalley and began to groan and grind up the tortured switchbacks of The Hill. It had been full spring in the valley, but at the top, snow lay thickly beside the road, just as it had done when we first drove this way. We did not stop on this occasion, although we called briefly at the float-plane base at Nimpo Lake (whose water was still frozen solid). After a while we drove out of the snow again and across the winter-tawny landscape of the Chilcotin. We reached Williams Lake, turned south and were soon bowling along the highway up which we had driven so long before. We did not retrace our route exactly, however, for a quieter road offered us a pleasanter ride eastward, and we eventually found ourselves crawling down another very long, steep hill. While it was by no means as tortuous as the one into the Bella Coola Valley, it was to afford me a moment of great terror.

The truck, already quite ancient upon my first acquaintance with it, was not getting any younger. Like my human, it had distinct eccentricities; recently, I am sorry to say, it had developed a most unpleasant ailment in its alimentary canal. Most of the time the affliction was in abeyance, but the long downward slope must have triggered some sort of rebellion in its bowels, for suddenly a series of tremendous gaseous eructations were unleashed right under the floor of the box. The bark of Simon’s rifle, which had so discombobulated me before, was a mere rap of the knuckles compared with these mind-shattering detonations.

I was riding in the open back of the truck as usual. The cab was the kind that was equipped with sliding windows facing the box, which, on that warm spring day, were open. I hardly stopped to think; I leapt through the windows and onto Chris’s lap. (I had not, you must realize, sat there since I was a very small puppy.)

Chris tried to push me off. “I can’t see, Lonesome, you nitwit,” she said. The truck wobbled dangerously toward the drop. However, there was absolutely nothing that was going to make me budge. Chris, flint-hearted creature that she was, started to laugh. She laughed so hard she had to stop the truck for fear that she would drive us off the road. But nothing would induce me to go back into the box until I was very sure that the digestive disturbance had been cured.

This long descent from the high interior plateau to the Thompson River Valley brought us once more through a dramatic change of climate, from winter into spring. “Ah, smell the cottonwoods,” Chris iterated. But I, still piqued at my great fright and not a little humiliated by Chris’s unsympathetic response, could see very little to be happy about; once we were on the flat, however, the bowel disturbance quietened down, and gradually I relaxed.

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