October 1970 Read Free Page A

rifle?”
    When he looks again, the chair that the former Liberal minister was occupying has been taken by Noune, the cat he has had for the past two years. Noune is playing with a mouse, no, not a mouse, a shrew, a masked shrew. The cat is sitting back on its haunches, its teeth and claws bared, boxing at nothing, like a diminutive kangaroo. With a swipe of its right paw, which has the power of a slapshot by Guy Lafleur, Noune sends the thing spinning under the stove.
    When the game resumes, Sam goes to the woodbox, selects a length of birch log, goes back, and, holding the log like a tomahawk, whacks away at the shrew’s upper body. This necessitates another paper towel. Those sponge pockets work miracles . Then he reheats his coffee in the microwave. The thick, oily residue at the bottom of the cup makes him think of the Athabasca River tar sands as he goes back upstairs to pack his bags.
    Sam drives a grey Toyota Corolla that rolled out of the factory in 1989, but it could just as easily have been a green Mazda Protegé or a red Colt as it takes him to the Maldoror airport, a distance of thirty or so kilometres, give or take. He’s learned to leave himself twenty minutes for the trip to Maldo, the Hub of the Northwest.
    The lake road runs north-south, along the ridge of an esker (a natural filter for potable water composed of several hundred metres of sand and gravel), more or less parallel with the lake’s shoreline, which remains mostly hidden behind a thick stand of boreal forest. It winds its way through a series of undulations lined with black spruce, Scots pine, and sickly birch whose leaves, half-eaten by insect larvae, started turning red in the middle of August.
    The snow that fell during the night makes the glare on the road almost painful. When the sun comes out between the clouds, which look like two chunks of lead threaded onto a fishing line, Nihilo can make out the bird tracks along the pristine roadside. Ahead of him, a vast cluster of Scots pines descends toward a peat bog. A bit farther along, the dirt road crosses a log bridge over the bog’s drainage outlet. Spruce grouse forage in the tall grass on either side of the road, poking up with the regularity of cuckoos in Swiss clocks, and the car startles two or three of them, which then perch in some bare pines by the roadside. Sam keeps a .410-gauge shotgun in a pouch under the back window and has more than once got himself a free dinner with it, but he doesn’t see himself trying to go through customs at Charles de Gaulle with a brace of grouse in his underwear.
    He slows the car, rolls down his window, and keeps the vehicle moving at a walking pace. In the snow, he sees the large round paw prints of a lynx and follows them with his eyes to a point under a pine where a flurry of dark feathers are scattered in a circle. He smiles: the mark of a successful hunter. He looks briefly into the forest, into the thick underbrush, at the play of blue-tinted shadows between the spruce trunks, into clearings cauterized by the cold. Behind him, the slanted rays of the autumn sun beat down beneath the nearly black trees.

MADAME CORPS
AND THE SNOW
    THE BEACH LOOKS LIKE A marble floo r: fine white sand, well compacted, smooth. The tall concrete rectangles that overlook it form a kind of colony of giant vases around the circumference of the bay, the hotels, condos, and casinos give the impression of having been carved out of the same material. They have an incandescent glow, like the purest chalk bathed in light reflected off the sea.
    The sea is nearly invisible, as if the horizon has pulled it toward itself like a carpet. The line of it can just be made out in the distance, under a fine golden fog. To get to it, Sam would have to walk across this porcelain Sahara, and he prefers not to. The beach is too white. Walking on it would only dirty it. He’s happy admiring it from afar, from the height of a concrete promenade.
    And Madame Corps