Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [81]
How long is it before they realize they’ve gone up the wrong river? Far too long. They cache some of their food so they won’t have to carry it; they throw some of it away. They manage to shoot a caribou, which they eat, leaving the hooves and head behind. Their feet hurt; their moccasins are wearing out.
At last Hubbard climbs a high hill, and from its top he sees Lake Michikamau; but the river they have been following does not go there. The lake is too far away: they can’t possibly haul their canoe that far through the forest. They will have to turn back.
In the evenings their talk is no longer of discovery and exploration. Instead they discuss what they will eat. What they’ll eat tomorrow, and what they’ll eat when they get back. They compose bills of fare, feasts, grand blowouts. George is able to shoot or catch this and that. A duck here, a grouse there. A whiskeyjack. They catch sixty trout, painstakingly one by one, using a hook and line because they have no gill net. The trout are clear and fresh as ice-water, but only six inches long. Nothing is nearly enough. The work of travelling uses up more energy than they can take in; they are slowly dissolving, wasting away.
Meanwhile the nights become longer and longer and darker and darker. Ice forms at the edges of the river. Hauling the canoe over the shallows, through the rushing stone-cold water, leaves them shivering and gasping. The first snowflurries fall.
“It’s rough country,” says my father. “No moose. Not even bears. That’s always a bad sign, no bears.” He’s been there, or near it; same sort of terrain. He speaks of it with admiration and nostalgia, and a kind of ruefulness. “Now of course you can fly in. You can cover their whole route in a couple of hours.” He waves his fingers dismissively: so much for planes.
“What about the owl?” I say.
“What owl?” says my father.
“The one they ate,” I say. “I think it’s where the canoe dumps, and they save their matches by sticking them in their ears.”
“I think that was the others,” says my father. “The ones who tried the same thing later. I don’t think this bunch ate an owl.”
“If they had eaten one, what sort of owl would it have been?” I say.
“Great horned or boreal,” he says, “if they were lucky. More meat on those. But it may have been something smaller.” He gives a series of thin, eerie barks, like a dog at a distance, and then he grins. He knows every bird up there by its call; he still does.
He’s sleeping too much in the afternoons,” says my mother.
“Maybe he’s tired,” I say.
“He shouldn’t be that tired,” she says. “Tired, and restless as well. He’s losing his appetite.”
“Maybe he needs a hobby,” I say. “Something to occupy his mind.”
“He used to have a lot of them,” my mother says.
I wonder where they’ve all gone, those hobbies. Their tools and materials are still around: the plane and the spirit level, the feathers for tying dry flies, the machine for enlarging prints, the points for making arrows. These bits and pieces seem to me like artifacts, the kind that are dug up at archaeological sites, and then pondered over and classified, and used for deducing the kind of life once lived.
“He used to say he wanted to write his memoirs,” says my mother. “A sort of account. All the places he’s been. He did begin it several times, but now he’s lost interest. He can’t see too well.”
“He could use a tape recorder,” I say.
“Oh help,” says my mother. “More gadgets!”
The winds howl and cease, the snow falls and stops falling. The three men have traversed across to a different river, hoping