A Very Bold Leap (27 page)

After eating a bland mixture of breakfast and lunch, he spent a long time in the bath trying to organize his thoughts, and in the end didn’t leave the cottage for his walk with Boff until after two o’clock.

The cottage had been built on a lake that was entirely surrounded by bush. The only other building he could see was on the opposite shore, and seemed to be uninhabited. After inspecting their surroundings, Charles found a wide footpath behind a wooded hill. The path had almost been reclaimed by the bush; it was probably an old forestry road used for hauling out logs. He’d packed some food in his backpack for the dog, along with a few matches, the compass that Steve had given him, and a large bottle of water, since his indiscretion of the night before had left his throat as dry as a soda biscuit.

There hadn’t been any great snowfalls so far that winter, and so they made good time walking along the path as it meandered through the woods. The icy air felt good in their lungs — it was a bit sweet, a complex mélange of scents from the forest — and it gave them as city-dwellers the sense of being able to breathe freely for the first time in their lives, filling them with a childlike exuberance. Boff walked courageously on ahead, exhilarated by the thousand smells and the mysterious tracks that dotted the snow everywhere. He darted from side to side, doubled back on himself, every now and then giving off a short bark as though letting off a head of steam caused by his own excitement. But after half an hour he grew tired, and took to following sensibly in his master’s tracks.

After a long rise, the path gave onto a large, open area strewn with slash from trees that had been cut down and removed, and criss-crossed with deep tracks from what appeared to be the tires of a giant truck. It was a clear-cut.

Despite the snow that mercifully tried to mask the degradation, the area left such an impression of desolation that Charles stopped, stupefied, his pleasure completely wiped out by the extent of the massacre.

A bitter wind blew across the forlorn battlefield on which nature had been so thoroughly routed, as though marking humankind’s stranglehold on the environment. Rewinding his scarf around his neck, he tried to see where the path led, but could find no trace of it. He decided to walk on into the forest to get out of the wind and away from the sad sight of so much destruction as quickly as possible. When he wanted to go back to the cottage, all he would have to do was retrace his own footprints in the snow.

Boff, sitting a few feet away, seemed to be awaiting his decision.

“Let’s go, boy,” Charles said, veering off to the right, where the forest edge seemed more penetrable. “We’re going to play coureurs-de-bois.”

After ten minutes, the shock of the “global forest management site,” as it was called in the civil service, had finally left him, and his good mood returned.

The going, however, was much slower. He had to cut back and forth between trees and around huge rocks that rose up suddenly before him, and bend low to slip under branches weighted nearly to the ground with snow, sometimes even break them off to make a path for himself. Boff had stopped barking and sniffing at every tree and was following at his heels, nose to the ground, stopping from time to time as if to ask, “Well, Mr. Coureur-de-bois, where the heck are you taking us?”

After a while, the cold began to get to Charles, and he decided to stop to make a fire. He cleared a small circle in the snow at the base of a large rock, then went off in search of branches and birchbark. Ten minutes later he was back with an armload of fuel, after a foray that had proved more arduous than he’d expected. Crouched beside the rock, Boff was shivering pitifully, raising one paw then another off the ground. Looking at him, Charles was suddenly filled with a vague feeling of misgiving.

“Are you freezing, old boy? We’ll soon have you warmed up. Watch this.”

He bent over and set the branches on the snow, then made a small pyramid of some of them, poking bits of birchbark and dry pine needles into the spaces between the sticks. Boff watched him with interest, as though he had guessed that this little pile of twigs would soon put an end to his shivering.

The wind blew out the first three matches. The fourth, however, sheltered from the wind by a strip of birchbark, finally passed its flame on to a spray
of pine needles. An angry crackling ensued. Charles quickly fed more birch-bark to it, then gave a cry of satisfaction: the fire was catching. After a few minutes it was leaping joyously up the rock, melting the bits of snow that had clung to its flanks and causing them to slide down to the ground.

Boff’s eyes half closed in contentment. He snuggled so close to the flames that he risked scorching his coat. Charles kneeled beside him, rubbing his hands together above the fire and whistling happily. From time to time he added more wood, and soon his supply dwindled and he went off to fetch a second armful. The fire leapt merrily, and was now surrounded by a circle of damp earth from which rose thin wisps of steam. It became so hot that Boff was obliged to back away from it.

Snowflakes began to fill the air, as though summoned to take part in the celebration. They swarmed in a delicate, capricious sort of dance: “Aha,” Charles thought, “the snow they were calling for tomorrow has come early.”

Looking up, he could just glimpse of the sky through the trees. It had turned from its former deep blue to a uniform grey. It was closing in on four o’clock. The sun was about to set. Even though they were only a kilometre or two from the cottage, they had better be getting back. But Boff seemed to be taking so much pleasure in roasting his flanks that Charles went off for another armload of wood.

When he came back fifteen minutes later, drawn by his dog’s barking, the fire was nearly out, and Charles sensed something akin to menace in the air, thickened as it was by the falling blanket of snow. It was time to leave. It would soon be dark.

“Wouldn’t you know it,” Charles sighed. “There was a flashlight in the drawer beside the kitchen sink. What an idiot I am — I should have brought it.”

So as not to have wasted his effort, he tossed his fresh supply of wood onto the dying fire, thinking it would snuff it out completely. Instead, the branches exploded into flame and light and, for a second, gave the impression that the weather had cleared and daylight had returned to the woods. Boff, heartened, wagged his tail. With darkness increasing and the cold becoming more and more biting, they were reluctant to leave the fire. If only they could keep it going all night! Wouldn’t that make a good story to tell when they got home, the winter night they spent in the impenetrable forest!

“Okay, Boff, let’s make tracks. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting hungry.”

Despite the cover provided by the trees, the snow was falling more thickly than ever. Charles had to give his entire attention to retracing their footprints.

From time to time he turned around to keep an eye on Boff. Chilled to the bone, the dog was picking his way painfully through the snow, and was slowing him down. Charles called encouragement in his most enthusiastic voice, but he was beginning to be fearful now, and his voice faltered. It was stupid to feel afraid, irrational, but fear was making his temples pound and his body sweat, despite the cold.

He plowed on for twenty minutes, bent over, snapping off branches as he went, stopping frequently to give his dog a chance to catch up, then was surprised to find that he had still not made it back to the clear-cut. Standing still, his eyes wide and straining in the near pitch darkness, he looked around and realized with alarm that his old footprints had disappeared. The new snowfall hadn’t had time to fill them in. It was he who had taken a wrong turning somewhere, no doubt had turned around in the darkness, mistaking humps in the snow for his own tracks and heading off in the wrong direction.

He was lost.

In the middle of the forest. In the middle of winter.

He stood stock still, frozen by awareness of his predicament. He slid his hands into his coat pockets and sighed deeply, his eyes half closed against the onslaught of falling snow.

A brush against his leg brought him back to reality. He leaned down over his dog, hoisted him up on his lap, and began to rub him. It was pitiful to see the poor animal shivering so much.

The blind confidence and endless patience Boff had had in him throughout this ill-fated excursion calmed Charles’s fears somewhat. After all, he only had to trace his footprints back to the place where he had deviated from his earlier tracks, and all would be well again. It couldn’t be very far. Before they knew it they would be back on the logging road, and twenty minutes after that they’d be in the cottage, this whole episode relegated to an unpleasant memory.

He set the dog down and began to walk, his gaze fixed on the ground at his feet. He was trudging through a stand of deciduous trees, their naked branches providing little relief from the wind and snow, which was now accumulating in huge drifts. He thought again of the flashlight he had neglected to bring, and self-recrimination tightened his jaw muscles.

Twenty minutes went by. He had to admit to himself what was clearly the truth of the situation: he couldn’t see a thing. He peered into the darkness, looking for a rock in whose shelter he could light another fire. That was the only way they would survive until daylight. He suddenly became aware of the fact that Boff, squatting in front of him, was making a strange noise as he breathed, a sound he had never heard coming from his dog before.

He leaned down, took off his glove, and pressed his hand against Boff’s side. It felt as cold as ice, and yet the dog was shivering wildly.

Boff was close to dying of exposure.

“Stay,” he said, his voice firm, almost cruel. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move, do you understand?”

Almost immediately he found himself in a kind of enclosure formed by two huge rocks; by some miracle, it was filled with piles of old branches that, when the snow was shaken off them, were dry enough to be perfect for lighting a fire.

He ran back to his dog, who was waiting for him without moving. Charles picked him up and carried him to the shelter. He was working frantically now, heedless of the branches scratching at his face and guided solely by the snow’s faint lustre, which was greatly reduced by the storm. In a few minutes he had cleared a space in the enclosure, shaken off the branches, broken some into short lengths, and made a second teepee of them close to where Boff was lying, immobile and silent.

The wind blew out the first match. Despite Charles’s care, it also extinguished the second one. He had only one match left.

It, too, went out in his fingers before he could get it to the strip of birchbark.

Devastated, he sat on the ground, his back against the rock, his dog pressed against his side, fear’s icy fingers once again clutching at his heart. He hugged his dog to him as much to protect himself from an invisible foe as to keep his companion from the cold.

He remembered a short story by Jack London, about a trapper in the Yukon who froze to death because he’d been unable to light a fire. Admittedly, there was a huge difference between the implacable cold of the Yukon and the kind of winters they had in Quebec. Here the storm was bound to end before long. Still, he knew that even in the forests of Quebec people died of hunger or exhaustion. Without a fire, without shelter, they could get hypothermia, their clothing too light to protect them from the elements.

But for the moment, despite his frozen buttocks and the shivers running up his spine, he didn’t think his life was in danger. He couldn’t say the same for old Boff, though, who was breathing and shivering in his arms but was otherwise still, as though he no longer had enough strength to move a muscle.

If he did nothing, this rocky enclosure would be his dog’s final resting place.

He took the compass out of his backpack, lifted the cover, and, squinting in the darkness, observed the needle dance until it settled pointing north, as it eventually always did. Good, so now what? A compass was no doubt a very handy instrument to have in the bush, but unless you knew how to use it, it was about as useful as an electric frying pan.

He spent a few moments entertaining such dark thoughts. Then he remembered something he’d heard a long time before, when there had been talk about a hunter who had died in the forest a few dozen metres from a road.
How he got lost was from getting turned around, which is what always happens to these poor lost souls. If he’d walked in a straight line, he’d have been saved
.

With the compass he could at least figure out how to walk in a straight line.

There was, however, one major problem. His dog was completely exhausted. Poor Boff would sink down into the snow after a couple of hundred metres, never to get up again, ever.

Then he had an idea. Taking his backpack, he put Boff in it so that only the top half of his body was sticking out. Then he slipped the straps over his shoulders and took a few exploratory steps.

The dog was heavy and the walking difficult, but he managed to make some headway. He set out farther, guided by his compass, stopping every so often to check his bearings. The storm had begun to let up a little, and he had the impression that his visibility had improved slightly, as though the snow were giving off a soft luminescence.

He once again found himself on a long incline where the scattered trees made the walking somewhat easier. The straps of his pack were digging cruelly into his shoulders and sweat began to run down into his eyes. Boff gave out an occasional whimper, since his cramped position was causing him pain, but he remained immobile, as though he knew that the heroic efforts of his master were meant to save his life.

At the top of the incline, Charles stopped and leaned against a tree to catch his breath. The whole of the steep downhill slope ahead of him appeared to
be nothing but shadow and confusion, an interlacing of branches and tree trunks and low brush laden with a white mantle of snow. He could no longer feel the toes on his right foot. And a terrifying, unthinkable idea began to torture him: what if, by heading due north, he was disappearing forever into these frozen wastes?