Last Night in Twisted River

Other dog-walkers in the little park were disconcerted by Hero's lean-and-mean appearance, and by the bear hound's preternatural aloofness from other dogs. There were also the scars, the stiff-hipped limp--not to mention the wonky-eyed, baleful stare. "It's only because Hero lost an eyelid--he's not really giving your dog the evil eye, or anything," Danny would try to reassure the anxious dog owners.

"What happened to that ear?" a young woman with a brainless breed of spaniel asked the writer.

"Oh, that was a bear," Danny admitted.

"A bear!"

"And the poor thing's hip--those terrible scars?" a nervous-looking man with a schnauzer had asked.

"The same bear," Danny said.

It was their second winter on Charlotte's island when the barking began. Danny had parked the Polar airboat on the ice off the front dock; he was unloading groceries from the boat, while Hero waited for him on the dock. Danny tried once more to bark at the dog--the writer had almost given up. To both Danny and the dog's surprise, Danny's bark was repeated; there was an echo of the bark from the direction of Barclay Island. When Hero heard the echo, he barked. Of course there was an echo attending Hero's bark, too; the bear hound heard a dog uncannily like himself bark back.

It had gone on for over an hour--Hero barking at himself on the dock. (If Ketchum had been there, Danny thought, the former river driver would probably have shot the bear hound.) What have I created? the writer wondered, but after a while, Hero had stopped.

After that, the dog barked normally; he barked at snowmobiles and at the once-in-a-while airplanelike sound of a distant airboat out in the main channel. He barked at the train whistles, which the dog could hear from the mainland--and, less frequently, at the whine of the tires on those big long-haul trucks out on 69. As for intruders--well, in those winter weeks, there were none--there was only a now-and-again visit from Andy Grant. (Hero barked at Andy, too.)

One could never say that Ketchum's bear hound was normal--or even almost normal--but the barking did much to alleviate the sheer creepiness of Hero's one-eared, gaping-eyed face. Certainly, Danny's fellow dog-walkers in that little park near Scrivener Square were less visibly anxious about the bear hound--and now that the dog barked, he growled less. It was a pity that there was nothing Danny could do about Hero's silent farting or his colossal snoring.

What the writer was realizing was that he hadn't known what owning a dog was like. The more Danny talked to Hero, the less the writer was inclined to think about what Ketchum would have said about Iraq. Did having a dog make you less political? (Not that Danny had ever been truly political; he'd never been like Katie, or like Ketchum.)

Danny did take sides, politically; he had political opinions. But Danny wasn't an anti-American--the writer didn't even feel like an expatriate! The world that was captured in the barest outline form on his Toronto refrigerator began to seem less and less important to the author. That world was increasingly not what Daniel Baciagalupo wanted to think about--especially not, as Ketchum would have said, as a writer.

THERE'D BEEN AN ACCIDENT on 69 near Horseshoe Lake Road. A dipshit driving a Hummer had rear-ended a cattle-transport trailer, killing himself and a bunch of beef cattle. This happened the first winter Danny stayed on Charlotte's island, and he'd heard about the accident from his cleaning woman. She was a First Nation person--a young woman with black hair and eyes, a pretty face, and thick, strong-looking hands. Once a week, Danny drove the airboat to the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve; that was where he picked her up, and where he returned her at the end of the day, but she almost certainly didn't live there. Shawanaga Landing wa

s mostly used in the summer months, both as a campsite and as a gateway to the bay. The residents of the reserve lived in the village of Shawanaga, though there were a few First Nation people who lived year-round in Skerryvore--or so Andy Grant had told Danny. (Both areas could be reached by road in the winter months, at least on snowmobiles.)

The young cleaning woman seemed to like riding in the Polar airboat. Danny always brought a second pair of ear guards for her, and after she'd met Hero, she asked why the bear hound couldn't come along for the ride. "The airboat is too loud for a dog's ears--well, for his one ear, anyway," Danny told her. "I don't know how well Hero can hear out of the mangled ear."

But the cleaning woman had a way with dogs. She told Danny to put her ear guards on Hero when he drove to Shawanaga Landing to pick her up, and when he drove back to Turner Island without her. (Surprisingly, the dog didn't object to wearing them.) And when the cleaning woman rode in the airboat with Hero, she held the bear hound in her lap and covered his ears--even the mostly missing one--with her big, strong hands. Danny had never seen Hero sit in anyone's lap before. The Walker bluetick weighed sixty or seventy pounds.

The dog devotedly followed the young woman throughout her cleaning chores, the same way Hero attached himself to Danny everywhere on the island when Danny was otherwise alone there. When Danny was using the chainsaw, the bear hound maintained a safe distance between them. (The writer was sure that Hero had learned this from Ketchum.)

There was an ongoing misunderstanding in regard to where the young First Nation person lived--Danny never saw anyone waiting for her at Shawanaga Landing, or any kind of vehicle she might have used to get herself to and from the boat landing. Danny had asked her only once, but the young cleaning woman's answer struck him as dreamy or facetious--or both--and he'd not asked her for clarification. "Ojibway Territory," she'd said.

Danny couldn't tell what the First Nation woman had meant--maybe nothing. He could have asked Andy Grant where she was actually from--Andy had put him in touch with her in the first place--but Danny had let it go. Ojibway Territory was a good enough answer for him.

And the writer had instantly forgotten the young woman's name, if he'd ever really heard it. Once, early in the first winter she worked for him, he'd said to her admiringly, "You are tireless." This was in reference to all the ice-chopping she did--and how many full buckets of water she hauled up from the lake, and left for him in the main cabin. The girl had smiled; she'd liked the tireless word.

"You may call me that--please call me that," she'd told him.

"Tireless?"

"That's my name," the First Nation woman had told him. "That's who I am, all right."

Again, Danny could have asked Andy Grant for her real name, but the woman liked to be called Tireless, and that was good enough for Danny, too.

Sometimes, from his writing shack, he saw Tireless paying obeisance to the inuksuk. She didn't formally bow to the stone cairn, but she respectfully brushed the snow off it--and, in her submissiveness, she demonstrated a kind of deference or homage. Even Hero, who stood eerily apart from Tireless on these solemn occasions, seemed to acknowledge the sacredness of the moment.

Danny worked as well in his writing shack on the one day a week when Tireless came to clean as he did when he was alone with Hero there; the cleaning woman didn't distract him. When she was done with her work in the main cabin--it didn't matter that, on other days, Danny was used to Hero sleeping (and farting and snoring) in the writing shack while he worked--the writer would look up from his writing and suddenly see Tireless standing by that wind-bent little pine. She never touched the crippled tree; she just stood beside it, like a sentinel, with Hero standing beside her. Neither the First Nation cleaning woman nor the bear hound ever stared at Danny through the window of his writing shack. Whenever the writer happened to look up and see them next to the weather-beaten pine, both the dog and the young woman had their backs to him; they appeared to be scouting the frozen bay.

Then Danny would tap the window, and both Tireless and Hero would come inside the writing shack. Danny would leave the shack (and his writing) while Tireless cleaned up in there, which never took her long--usually, less than the time it took Danny to make himself a cup of tea in the main cabin.

Except for Andy Grant--and those repeat old-timers Danny occasionally encountered in the bar at Larry's Tavern, or at the Haven restaurant, and in the grocery store--the First Nation cleaning woman was the only human being Danny had any social intercourse with in his winters on the island in Georgian Bay, and Danny and Hero saw Tireless just once a week for the ten weeks that the writer was there. One time, when Danny was in town and he ran into Andy Grant, the writer had told Andy how well the young First Nation woman was working out.

"Hero and I just love her," he'd said. "She's awfully easy and pleasant to have around."

"Sounds like you're getting ready to marry her," Andy told the writer. Andy was kidding, of course, but Danny--if only for a minute, or two--found himself seriously considering the idea.