In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [53]
Four men on horseback attempt to capture Cato over the next week. But Cato knows snow country; he was born into it. He can, it seems, disappear under the surface of it. He avoids the familiar route, sleeps in trees, even risks crawling on all fours over thin-iced lakes – hearing the surface crack and groan under him. Now and then he sees flares belonging to his hunters. At each camp he writes into a notebook, jams it into a tin, and buries the tin deep under the snow or ties it onto a high branch. Meanwhile his package of letters is travelling, passed from hand to hand before it nestles in a bag next to a rolled-up swede saw on a logger’s back on the final leg of the journey.
While he is cutting a hole in the ice at Onion Lake, Cato sees the men. They ride out of the trees and execute him. They find no messages or identification on him. They try burning the body but he will not ignite. There have been union men before him and there will be union men after him. The man with the swede saw posts his bundle of letters in Algoma unaware that the sender is dead, shot to death, buried in the ice of a shallow river.
They lose two days a month because of wet weather. Travelling eats up $10 a season; mitts $6; shoes and stockings $25; working clothes $35. Being forced to buy their supplies in camps means 30 per cent tagged onto city prices …
Patrick reads, aware that the smell of smoke is no longer on the porous paper. The words on the page form a rune – flint-hard and unemotional in the midst of the inferno of Cato’s situation.
And who is he to touch the lover of this man, to eat meals with his daughter, to stand dazed under a lightbulb and read his last letter?
He remains standing alone in the room Hana has now left. She had seen him hypnotized, as if the letter stared back at him. He realizes what he is doing, that he has become a searcher again with this family. As if he had leaned forward to the woman he had just met in Paris Plains and said, Who is your lover? Tell me the most painful thing that has happened to you. For he has over the years learned the answers. He holds now the last ten minutes of Cato’s language. In his mind he sees Alice pick up the package which death has made impossible – after the murder, the discovery of the body in ice, his burial, and the acquittal of the bosses at the inquiry.
Patrick has clung like moss to strangers, to the nooks and fissures of their situations. He has always been alien, the third person in the picture. He is the one born in this country who knows nothing of the place. The Finns of his childhood used the river, even knew it by night, the men of burning rushes delirious in the darkness. This he had never done. He was a watcher, a corrector. He could no more have skated along the darkness of a river than been the hero of one of these stories. Alice had once described a play to him in which several actresses shared the role of the heroine. After half an hour the powerful matriarch removed her large coat from which animal pelts dangled and she passed it, along with her strength, to one of the minor characters. In this way even a silent daughter could put on the cloak and be able to break through her chrysalis into language. Each person had their moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the story.
Clara and Ambrose and Alice and Temelcoff and Cato – this cluster made up a drama without him. And he himself was nothing but a prism that refracted their lives. He searched out things, he collected things. He was an abashed man, an inheritance from his father. Born in Abashed, Ontario. What did the word mean? Something that suggested there was a terrible horizon in him beyond which he couldn’t leap. Something hollow, so when alone, when not aligned with another – whether it was Ambrose or Clara or Alice