Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [50]
“We have to use up the film,” he said, “we’ve only got it rented for another week.”
Anna said “But there won’t be anything you want,” and David said “How do you know what I want?”
“There’s an Indian rock painting,” I said, “prehistoric. You might take that.” A point of interest, it would go with the Bottle Villa and the stuffed moose family, a new anomaly for their collection.
“Wow,” David said, “Is there? Neat,” and Anna said “For god’s sake don’t encourage him.”
Neither of them had portaged before; we had to help them lift and balance the canoes. I said maybe they should double up, both of them under one canoe, but David insisted they could do it the real way. I said they should be careful; if the canoe slipped sideways and you didn’t get out in time it would break your neck. “What’s the matter,” he said, “don’t you trust us?”
The trail hadn’t been brushed out recently but there were deep footprints, bootprints, in the muddy places. Two sets, they pointed in but not out: whoever they were, Americans maybe, spies, they were still in there.
The packs were heavy, food for three days in case the weather turned bad and marooned us; the straps cut into my shoulders, I leaned forward against the weight, feet squishing in the wet shoes as I walked.
The portage was up over a steep ridge of rock, watershed, then down through ferns and saplings to an oblong pond, a shallow mud-hole we’d have to paddle across to reach the second portage. Anna and I got there first and set down the packs; Anna had time to smoke half a cigarette before David and Joe came staggering down the trail, bumping into the sides like blinkered horses. We held the canoes and they crouched out from under, they were pink and breathless.
“Better be fish in there,” David said, sleeving off his forehead.
“The next one’s shorter,” I told them.
The water was covered with lily pads, the globular yellow lilies with their thick centre snouts pushing up from among them. It swarmed with leeches, I could see them undulating sluggishly under the brown surface. When the paddles hit bottom on the way across, gas bubbles from decomposing vegetation rose and burst with a stench of rotten eggs or farts. The air fogged with mosquitoes.
We reached the second portage, marked by a trapper’s blaze weathered to the colour of the tree. I got out and stood holding the canoe steady while Joe climbed forward.
It was behind me, I smelled it before I saw it; then I heard the flies. The smell was like decaying fish. I turned around and it was hanging upside down by a thin blue nylon rope tied round its feet and looped over a tree branch, its wings fallen open. It looked at me with its mashed eye.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Heavy,” David said. “What is it?”
“A dead bird,” Anna said. She held her nose with two fingers.
I said “It’s a heron. You can’t eat them.” I couldn’t tell how it had been done, bullet, smashed with a stone, hit with a stick. This would be a good place for herons, they would come to fish in the shallow water, standing on one leg and striking with the long spear bill. They must have got it before it had time to rise.
“We need that,” David said, “we can put it next to the fish guts.”
“Shit,” Joe said, “it really stinks.”
“That won’t show in the movie,” David said, “you can stand it for five minutes, it looks so great, you have to admit.” They began to set up the camera; Anna and I waited, sitting on the packs.
I saw a beetle on it, blueblack and oval; when the camera whirred it burrowed in under the feathers. Carrion beetle, death beetle. Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn’t they just throw it away like the trash? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill. Otherwise it was valueless: beautiful from a distance but it couldn’t be tamed or cooked or trained to talk, the only relation they could have to a thing like that was to destroy it. Food, slave or corpse, limited choices; horned and fanged heads sawed off and mounted on the billiard room wall, stuffed fish, trophies.