Swamp Angel (10 page)

Sometimes the fish osprey cruises above. He has a nest at the top of a high tree at the far end of the lake. He cruises and cruises. Then suddenly he drops. He hits the water hard in flying spray. He rises and shakes himself like a dog and the spray flies in a fountain on the still lake. He rises into the sky. In his talons he carries a fish that looks silver in the sunlight. It is a rainbow trout. He does not carry the fish at right angles to his body. His talons hold the trout parallel under his body and so he rises unimpeded and rapidly and moves off toward his home, looking like a bird with one slim shining pontoon suspended underneath him. Sometimes the loon seems to warn the creatures of the lake that the osprey is coming, for he is a great hunter. He has to be. Sometimes he comes in silence.

When the naked lake is placid beneath the sky, the Kamloops – or rainbow – trout leap and leap. That does not mean that they will take the fly. It may mean that they are lousy, or perhaps they leap for joy. It must be great fun, leaping straight up from water into air, propelled by those small strong smooth muscles – two, three feet or more above the lake – and falling again. In the evening, when the sky and the water are shot with tender colors which grow more violent in lake and sky, this leaping is beautiful to see, here, there, there, near at hand, and diminished across the water. You hear the delayed plop of the leaping fish. Little fountains are everywhere on the lake. One at a time – no – two, three, four. It exasperates, at last, because the leaping fish has no intention of taking the fly.
It is when he weaves – bold, timid, swift, secret, hidden – through the opaque waters, or when he is feeding at the edge of the weeds or in some fine undisclosed rich place that he will, perhaps, try the fly, either from hunger, curiosity or some other fishy attribute of which we know nothing. At Three Loon Lake the water is nearly always very cold, and the fish are lively, striking and running, like whiplashes; the fisherman must play strongly and delicately, for the fish is never his until it lies in his net, impotent.

On the edge of Three Loon Lake Haldar Gunnarsen had cleared land and built, in the Scandinavian fashion and also in the fashion of the Western interior country, a rather large log cabin with eating place, kitchen, a small bedroom for his wife and himself, a cubbyhole for his son, and a storeroom. There was, of course, a stove in the kitchen, and there was also an iron stove of the kind called an airtight heater in the eating room which was a living room for guests if they had any. He added a plank veranda to the front of the lodge and an extension of the cedar shake roof, supported by lodgepoles over the veranda. There were two privies at the back. Then he built five very small log cabins among the trees, each with a stove. He would build a smokehouse when he could afford it. He had, at first, another returned man to help him for a while, and two neighbors who lived some miles away and had a buzz saw helped him too. He used his gratuity money after the war. The wood cost him nothing, except some labor and some planking for the floors. He had to buy nails, stoves, windows, and cement for chimneys and chinking. How he grudged the money for beds and blankets and tin washbasins and many more things which, to his surprise, he found to be necessary – and boats, of course.

His wife was nearly as much interested as he was, but not
quite. She was restive, discontented. However, looking forward, she was able to see a row of nice cabins, a better car to make deliveries easier, an improved road, and kitchen help, money in the bank and retirement. She was not quite sure that she wanted her little boy Alan to grow tied up, as it were, to the country, but she knew that you can’t have everything the way you want it, and if Alan grew up to be as good a man as his father Haldar, her heart and her head told her that she should be satisfied; yet she was not. However, at first her mind jumped the next few years, and saw the lodge at Three Loon Lake as well known, filled, and famous to the far parts of the continent. Americans from California, New York, Honolulu come for the fishing to remote points of British Columbia, so she was right to be hopeful. Canadians come from all over the West.

There was, in Kamloops, this man called Henry Corder who knew Haldar Gunnarsen very well. Henry Corder knew every fishing place in the region, and the owners, and the fishing, and the kind of place that would suit the inquiring visitor. He could sum you up as he sat at his bench, and knew how much roughing-it you could take or whether you wanted tablecloths and indoor plumbing. He also knew the kind of fishing you would get at these places and whether, at that very moment, the fishing was good there. He was honest. He did this for love, although some benefits accrued, because he had the gift and the passion. Everyone deferred to Henry Corder. He liked Haldar Gunnarsen very much and encouraged him in his venture. He could not see why Haldar’s lodge at Three Loon should not, in a few years, have as fine and justified a reputation as any lodge in the district.

It was therefore a keen disappointment to Henry Corder and to many other people when, the summer after a promising
but incomplete first season, Haldar Gunnarsen’s car slid in the gumbo off the trail in one of the bad spots about six miles from his lodge, and he was pinned beneath the car. Some fishermen driving in that evening found him. Haldar was alive but his hip was broken and he had other injuries of various kinds. The car was salvaged. That was in the middle of the first full season. Mrs. Gunnarsen and the child Alan closed up the lodge and came down to Kamloops. After eight months in the hospital, Haldar began to move about a bit. While he had lain in the hospital, and, partly in order to divert his mind from severe physical pain, he had planned his next season, and the next season after that. He was undefeatable (he thought), and as time went on he communicated with a man whom he knew, and liked moderately well, who might find it worth his while to see him through the next season, and then, of course, Haldar would be all right. He did not wish to do this, as he had a fiercely possessive feeling for Three Loon Lake, and did not really want this man to have any part in it. But the poor, who also meet with misfortune, cannot always choose. So, as Haldar did not at any time consider pulling out of Three Loon Lake, he had to compromise. Things were made still more difficult for him as his hip did not knit well. He suffered, daily and nightly, a good deal of pain, but, as he was a philosopher, he disdained the pain and attempted to ignore it. He refused to recognize the fact that he would not be of much use at the lodge.

His wife conceived a strong dislike for Three Loon Lake, and wished Haldar to sell it. This she urged him to do as soon as she thought he was well enough to be faced with her strong feelings on the subject. A difference of opinion grew to a bickering and then the subject was closed. Haldar persisted in regarding his crippled condition as a temporary affair and
irrelevant, and the lodge at the lake as being intrinsically established and permanent. His judgment had become impaired to the extent that he thought that his wife was unreasonable, and he did not see, or know, that below her argument was a growing fear and dislike of the future with a crippled man and a child at Three Loon Lake. She developed a jealousy against the lake as against a person. He did not even know that he would be a care to her. He regarded himself as a strong man, but temporarily a little lame. There were several reasons that bound Haldar Gunnarsen to Three Loon Lake and it was remarkable that these binding attachments had grown so fast, but land can do that. The land was his, and had at once assumed the character of having been intrinsically his, always, waiting only ever since lake and shore were made, for Haldar. The place was his future, and he had never had a future, only an imperative present. The character of the place was so much the character of Haldar that he conceived of it as being almost sentient, waiting for him, and that it would wait for his son. This waiting feeling was intensified by the nights and the days that he spent in the hospital when, tirelessly, he roamed Three Loon Lake, and knew that it was his, water and shore.

None of these reasons, or passions, bound Mrs. Gunnarsen to Three Loon Lake. She blamed the place for her husband’s disability and accumulated within herself other reasons why she did not wish to see it again. By May, however, the Gunnarsens and a man called Chuffey, together with further supplies for which Haldar had to raise a loan, were at the lake again. They began once more, and a few fishermen came, recommended by Henry Corder. The lodge was not well run, and the cabins were not very clean. Mrs. Gunnarsen was not efficient and had too much to do. Chuffey was lazy, talkative, irresponsible about money and had a large appetite.
Haldar Gunnarsen, in his effort not to show that he suffered pain, was morose, and he worked far too hard, moving slowly in a manner that was painful to witness. Their little boy became bad-tempered because people had no time for him, but he carried the firewood to the cabins and saw that the boats were really tied up, and he helped to hang out the washing, a job which he despised.

They closed the season early, and after trouble with Chuffey, the Gunnarsens found that with all their labor, and his pain, and her resentment, they had ended the year with reduced debt as far as the lodge was concerned. But still there was debt and no money anywhere. Mrs. Gunnarsen worked in Kamloops during the winter and Haldar had a small sedentary job. What a change this was from the fine couple of two years ago, Gunnarsen so strong and light-hearted, and Mrs. Gunnarsen moderately happy although she rather preferred to be unhappy, and now there was something between them that could not be resolved, and they were resentful with each other and with all circumstances, and poverty looked steadily at them through the window, and all on account of six inches of mud.

All winter Haldar made plans for the next season. “Oh,” his wife cried aloud when she was alone in the room, “he is crazy! He’s mad! Whatever can we do!” The continued conflict was painful to Mrs. Gunnarsen. That hidden sweetness of marriage which reveals itself between two people in the common ways of touch and sight and peculiar word had gone into a past which could not refresh them. They no longer knew the happy gestures of love; they were too anxious. But she could never never leave him and she would do what he wished, although she would spoil things by doing it grudgingly. Living with her could hardly be called a pleasure.

As spring drew near Haldar Gunnarsen’s condition made him unwillingly aware that he was hoping like a fool. But he said to himself “Once up there … you’ll see …” and he still prepared to go, with the first misgivings untold. He had taken the future for granted, and he now realized that all he had been taking for granted was hope.

It was that spring, just after the Gunnarsens had been driven up to Three Loon Lake that Maggie Lloyd arrived in Kamloops and went to talk to old Henry Corder.

When Maggie went up to Three Loon Lake with her knapsack and her canvas bag and her rod and the little yellow bowl which was now her household god, and a large order of foodstuffs that were essential to her cooking (bought and paid for), and all her strength and gentleness and good will, Henry Corder said to everyone who came into the store, “Say! Whaddaya know! … I wish to tell you there’s some justice! …”

I
t was a fine morning – the whole season was fine, one day like another – when the Carruthers men brought Maggie to Three Loon Lake with the weekly supplies, on their way to their ranch five miles further in. Henry Corder had forwarded a grapevine message to Haldar Gunnarsen that he was sending in a woman who’d suit them dandy. He would come up in about a fortnight himself, and he bet the man he gave the message to, who was to give the message to another man if he just happened to see him – he bet that this lady who was a crackerjack would fit right in and take a hold of things and the Gunnarsens would get a break at last. And what’s more I’m telling you, I got that much confidence in her that I’m sending them three doctors I know from Vancouver ast me where to go next weekend and her no chance to get the layout yet, she’s not a no-vice, she’ll take em in her stride. The message reached the Gunnarsens in pretty much the form in which it was sent, and Mrs. Gunnarsen, lifted from the apathy which had spread from her to the detriment of her husband and child, gave the kitchen a clean-out, so as to make a fair impression on the newcomer. She was almost happy. Her load seemed for a time
to slide away. Only a woman who pulls too heavy a load for her strength and skill could know Mrs. Gunnarsen’s emotion. Not even a horse.

Haldar Gunnarsen received the message with some relief. Behind his relief was the entrenched feeling that he and Vera could have managed this alone if Vera hadn’t behaved the way she behaved, and if he just hadn’t had this bad spell. Henry Corder had said nothing about wages for this high-priced character, and Haldar bet himself that when she saw the setup, she wouldn’t stay. Little Alan Gunnarsen did not mind one way or another.

Haldar, sweeping out the house slowly and painfully, stopped, and looked toward the trail which emerged from the trees. He heard a car. It might be the Carruthers’ truck. “Vera,” he called.

The little truck rocked and bounced out of the rough forest road into the sunshine. A woman sat between the two Carruthers men. All three got down from the truck. The woman wore a sweater and skirt and a dark raincoat. Her short curly hair was blown. She stood and looked about her. Haldar liked her looks. He thought she seemed strong and plain and sensible. Vera Gunnarsen had a feeling that the woman was beautiful. The woman turned toward them with a smile.

She bent to her small baggage and then came forward. The Carruthers men carried the cartons of weekly supplies to the kitchen door, stopped for a few words and departed, turning the truck and clattering away into the forest.

Maggie and the Gunnarsens shook hands. Maggie smiled at the little boy Alan and then shook his hand too. Alan looked up at her.

“I’ll show you your cabin, Mrs. Lloyd,” said Vera Gunnarsen. “It’s a bit rough,” she said deprecatingly, “but I
guess Henry Corder told you….”