In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [2]
Even the real names are beautiful. Amber-winged skimmer. Bush cricket. Throughout the summer he records their visits and sketches the repeaters. Is it the same creature? He crayons the orange wings of the geometer into his notebook, the lunar moth, the soft brown – as if rabbit fur – of the tussock moth. He will not open the screen and capture their pollened bodies. He did this once and the terrified thrash of the moth – a brown-pink creature who released coloured dust on his fingers – scared them both.
Up close they are prehistoric. The insect jaws munch. Are they eating something minute or is it subliminal – the way his father chews his tongue when in the fields. The kitchen light radiates through their porous wings; even those that are squat, like the peach-green aphid, appear to be constructed of powder.
Patrick pulls a double-ocarina from his pocket. Outside he will not waken his father, the noise will simply drift up into the arms of soft maple. Perhaps he can haunt these creatures. Perhaps they are not mute at all, it is just a lack of range in his hearing. (When he was nine his father discovered him lying on the ground, his ear against the hard shell of cow shit inside which he could hear several bugs flapping and knocking.) He knows the robust calls from the small bodies of cicadas, but he wants conversation – the language of damsel flies who need something to translate their breath the way he uses the ocarina to give himself a voice, something to leap with over the wall of this place.
Do they return nightly to show him something? Or does he haunt them? In the way he steps from the dark house and at the doorway of the glowing kitchen says to the empty fields, I am here. Come and visit me.
He was born into a region which did not appear on a map until 1910, though his family had worked there for twenty years and the land had been homesteaded since 1816.
In the school atlas the place is pale green and nameless. The river slips out of an unnamed lake and is a simple blue line until it becomes the Napanee twenty-five miles to the south, and, only because of logging, will eventually be called Depot Creek. “Deep Eau.”
His father works for two or three farms, cutting wood, haying, herding cattle. The cows cross the river twice a day – in the morning they wander to the land south of the creek and in the afternoon they are rounded up for milking. In winter the animals are taken down the road to a pasture barn, though once a cow headed towards the river longing for back pasture.
They do not miss it for two hours and then his father guesses where it has gone. He runs towards the river yelling to the boy Patrick to follow with the field horses. Patrick is bareback on a horse leading the other by the rope, urging them on through the deep snow. He sees his father through the bare trees as he rides down the slope towards the swimming hole.
In mid-river, half-submerged in the ice, is the neighbouring farmer’s holstein. There is no colour. The dry stalks of dead mulleins, grey trees, and the swamp now clean and white. His father with a rope around his shoulders creeps on his hands and knees across the ice towards the black and white shape. The cow heaves, splitting more ice, and cold water seeps up. Hazen Lewis pauses, calming the animal, then creeps on. He must get the rope under the body twice. Patrick moves forward slowly till he kneels on the other side of the cow. His father puts his left hand on the neck of the animal and plunges his right arm into the freezing water as low as he can go beneath the body. On the other side Patrick puts an arm in and waves it back and forth trying to come in contact with the rope. They cannot reach each other. Patrick lies on the ice so his arm and shoulder can go deeper,