The Sisken

I could still smell the nursing home as I sped north. That smell. It strips the patina off your nasal passage and stains the inner membranes making it linger long after you've left the building. They all smell the same. It's a malodorous blend of pea soup and urine; old skin and bleach; open wounds rotting and full diapers wreaking out from under blankets. I smelled it again as I drove north and shuddered. It was the smell of suffering, lined with a promise of death.

I'd been in to the nursing home to visit my Dad the night before. He cracked a thin smile when he saw me come in. His body looked frail and deflated beneath the cotton sheets. His hands were just bones wrapped in white skin, all knuckle and basically useless. Years ago, he sold it to the family that it was the kind of cancer you can live with. I didn't think that that meant watching someone get slowly eroded from the inside out year after year. Made me wonder whether the fast kind of cancer is better.

I took his hand in mine and squeezed it gently, waiting for him to squeeze back. He didn't, or just couldn't. I lay his hand back down and he told me to have fun up north. That's what I was for him now - his connection to the outside world. I said I'd bring back lots of pictures to show him.

I walked down the hall where all the odours blend together. A man yelled for help as I passed by one of the rooms. I looked at the nurse sitting behind the desk. She shook her head. "He says that every time someone passes." I looked at the congregation of old souls in their wheelchairs around the nurse's station. Gnarled knuckles, humped spines and toothless mouths frozen in half open looks of pain or fury. The man continued yelling for help as I walked down the hall. Death seemed to be imminent, squeezing all of them into different contortions of misery, yet somehow non-committal; aloof.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the elevator mirror and looked at my own face. I didn't look good. Eyes drooping, hair greying. "Middle aged." I'd just been to the doctor myself for an overdue checkup and that's what he labeled me as. Yes, but on another level, I refused to believe it. I still felt like that eighteen-year-old kid who used to drop everything and go on some canoe trip deep into the Canadian wilderness for days at a time.

My car shook a bit as it climbed a big incline. I was entering the park now. It struck me all of a sudden that I was here, in Algonquin; embarking on a solo trip with no idea where I was going. It was a tipping point that led me here. I just knew I had to get out of the city; away from the stench of hospitals and seeing all those inert bodies being rolled to one side by nurses. My own head full of the clatter that comes with living in a big city. I needed a vast, open space to empty into.

I was running from my own diagnosis, too. I know. At some point in my life I'd looked away and when I looked back, I was older. Time had put its foot down on the accelerator and everything was moving by quicker. Years used to move by like telephone poles; now they moved by like the broken center line beneath me. It was too fast for my head which had gotten lost long ago in the all the radio wave static that hangs over the city. My mind was like a radio needle desperately combing a garbled band of crackle and hiss for a clear signal. I didn't know where to go. I just knew I had to go.

It was mid October and it was clear and sunny and the forest was at its zenith for fall colours. I cracked a window and let clean air rush into the car. It was the smell of the forest slowly decaying before winter set in. More death. But a very different smell. Punky wood and detritus in the grips of a legion of spores' tendrils, pulling all of it into the ground and turning it into dark loam. Evergreens jettisoned the last of their cones and resin, the air herbaceous like diluted turpentine. Leaves rained down on the forest floor and dried out and got brittle and eventually shattered into dust. All of those aromas rising up in the heat of the sun and steeping in the breeze like an autumnal tea. I felt a paradigm shift inside me.

I turned off the highway and onto the sideroad that would take me to my access point. My heart quickened and my eyes narrowed. You're on your own now, I told myself. Time to focus.

But as I rounded the last corner my heart sank. Three charter buses were dumping their raucous payload into the main parking lot. A steady line of tourists poured out of the bus's doors. They kept streaming out, endlessly coiling in amongst themselves, as if the buses were defecating. Must've been a hundred of them. All clad in the universally agreed upon attire of a bus tourist: Tilley hats and fanny packs, black socks and brown sandals, polaroid flip-ups on prescription glasses. European, American I wasn't sure and it didn't matter. They're the same everywhere.

I made my way to the canoe rental center as they swarmed through me to take pictures of the fall colours. Their hands wedged into camcorders, yelling, smoking and clamouring over one another like some garish 19^th Century painting of fops at a royal feast shoving each other out of the way to get the last chicken leg.

I was so close, I thought. This was the final obstacle; a test maybe; some strange dumb-show I had to watch, knowing full well it corroborated what I already knew I wanted to get away from: the seething throng of Humanity.

I loaded up the canoe as fast as I could and set off hauling water with my paddle until the clatter turned to faint yipping sounds in the distance. I put two portages behind me and drifted. My head like a detuned radio. I listened to my breathing and the lap-lap sound of water against my hull.

The day couldn't have been more perfect. 19 degrees, sunny and virtually no wind. The forest was on fire; a panoply of candy apple reds, yellow ochres and burnt sienna. Dark Spruce rocketed through the colour like Gaudi church spires. Aspen with their brittle leaves would hiss when the wind passed through them, while Tamarack stood unmoved, like golden sentries at the mouths of bogs.

The whole area was teeming with activity. I saw thousands of baby spiders ballooning across the lake on a very non-committal breeze; the wisps of their silk glinting in the sunlight. Some would make it to the other side, many would spend the rest of the day skittering on the water's surface tension until the lake trout came for them at dusk.

I paddled on through an hour glass of waterways and stopped for some water. A whole family of otters startled me when they surfaced next to me. They looked at me with their little Wilfred Brimley faces huffing through their whiskers as they bobbed up and down. One of them snorted at me and they all disappeared below the surface, like old men late for work.

I saw mink weaving through the boulders along the shore, looking for crayfish or frogs. I continued on through a narrow passage and heard a kind of harried air turbulence bearing down on me. I swung around and saw three Mallards in tight formation fly over me. They beat past me like feathered bellows wheezing with each flap. Eyes wide, it looked like they'd taken a wrong turn into Hell and couldn't get out fast enough. They followed the water channel straight then took a sharp right and disappeared out of sight.

The air stilled and it was hot. I took a long drink of water from my canteen and wiped my mouth with my shirt. What was I doing out here again? Alone? Always coming back here, I thought. Looking for answers to unclear questions. You're still young, you'll figure it out tomorrow. That's what I always told myself. Youth was always cannibalising itself like that until one day you wake up and you're old. Was I old? Older, I told myself. I leaned back with my elbows on the gunwales and looked up: great columns of hot air spiralled skyward revealing themselves in a slow-turning kettle of vultures.

I continued on. I had some success in turning my brain off, but I knew it was a winding down process. I watched the rivulets of water whorl and suck daylight and surface spiders down and trail behind me as I drew my paddle.

Then a wet slapping sound caught my attention. Something was flapping in the water by the shore. I thought it was a fish but when I got closer, I saw that it was a bird. Small, like a sparrow. It was struggling, unable to take off. I put my hand in the water and scooped it up gently from below. It was weak and couldn't take off. Its eyes were vacant and its beak opened and closed without a sound. I took out my bandana and gently wrapped it. It was beige with black markings and a white underbelly. I wasn't sure what kind of bird it was but it was no bigger than a chickadee. A Pine Siskin, maybe. It must've got knocked into the water by something. I took off my long sleeve shirt and bunched it up by my feet. Then I laid the Siskin down in the makeshift nest. I continued to paddle watching it make gulping motions with its tiny beak.

I made camp on Tom Thompson lake by two-thirty. I placed the Siskin in it's swaddling in the crook of a warm rock and let the afternoon sun shine on it while I collected firewood. When I returned, she'd dried out and a bit of fluff on its head fluttered in the breeze. I smoothed it with the back of my finger. It had stopped its gulping and sat still. Her eyes were downcast and glassy.

I made a simple dinner and sat down next to the Siskin. The sun was low and I looked out and watched a hatch of flies scramble just above the lake's surface. Dragonflies mowed through the clusters. I sat and ate and watched fish break the water with kinetic slaps, so violent it looked like they'd been stricken with epileptic seizures. Further off, a beaver cut a thin wake with its chin as it swam home. Otherwise the lake was calm and full of pastel sky colours. Each of the many bays of the lake were home to a pair of loons. They dove for fish and skirted the edges of their territory. Occasionally, they let out a tremolo that sounded like a crazy laugh.

I looked down and watched a group of ants pulling and tugging a dead caterpillar ten times their size over the warm rock. I watched as they stuffed it through a little whole in the earth, down into their nest where, presumably, they'd segment it with their sickle-shaped denticles.

I noticed a Mayfly caught in the water and reached down and picked it up by its long tail. I offered it to the Siskin. She looked up and stared at it. The insect opened its wings and tried to fly away but I held it. She brought her head forward and took the fly in, crunching it while the scaly wings fluttered out the sides of her beak. She still looked weak but there was a little light behind her eyes now.

Night approached. The sun set fast - it seemed to move faster as it approached the treeline - sinking below a few clouds and sending them through a wash of progressively warmer colours. Finally, it dropped, like a big orange yolk slipping out of its albumen casing, disappearing behind a dark ridge of trees.

Darkness flooded in and made my head swirl a bit. I picked up the Siskin in her bedding and brought her close to the hearth. I laid her down in the crux of two logs where she'd be safe. I hurried to get a fire going while there was still light but a wind had kicked up suddenly and it skidded across the water towards me. It blew my fire out and pushed into the forest behind me. Big old white pines swayed and creaked above me. Tree frogs sent up a high-pitched whining alarm. My hands fumbled with the matches, trying to strike, then cradle the little flame in my hands.

With some difficulty, I got a fire going. The flames were white and whipped around in the wind, clawing at the sides of the hearth; tormented, as if it was itself undergoing immolation. It was dark and the light of the fire made the shadows swerve back and forth. Beyond the reach of the firelight I could see that the woods were very, very dark. Every now and then I'd hear the sound of branches breaking in the forest behind me. I pulled up a wall of flannel to better shield the Siskin from the wind. I sipped some wine from my flask and kept my axe next to me, not really sure what I'd do with it if I needed it.

Eventually, the wind subsided and the fire sat calmly in a bed of coals. It was warm and made me feel safe. I whittled a piece of birch with my knife and formed a soup spoon. I admired it in the firelight. I'll stir my baked beans with it tomorrow, I thought.

The Siskin looked like it was nesting in its swaddle and stared at the fire. A reflection of the flame danced on the vitreous of her little black eyes. Everything about her was fragile. It was hard to understand how such a harsh wilderness ever produced such a thing then asked it to survive there. It seems as though the Siskin found a tiny evolutionary portal it could fly through unscathed. Its whole world may only have consisted of two or three carriers of significance: The sun rising, the sun setting and 8 degrees Celsius - the temperature at which Mayflies hatch. A few others maybe, like mating calls, but any straying from this narrow path and the Siskin would be batted out of the sky and trampled under the great wheel of Nature.

The night settled into itself and the darkness flooded in. Creatures chittered and croaked in panicky efforts to ward everything else away. Then the moon rose in a shallow arc over the band of trees across the lake. It was big and full and the colour of bleached bone. It made the lake shimmer with turning light, like ten thousand silver coins helically rolling on a frictionless surface. Soon enough, it hypnotized all the loons on the lake and they wailed in a staccato of high-pitched cries. Their bodies raised up out of the water, wings outstretched, like zealots under their new god. They're now a cult of loons. Far below the cacophony, lake trout slept in the dark with their plastic stare. Mergansers buried their bills into their wings along the shore. And foxes stepped weightlessly through the thickets, their big ears triangulating for deer mice, their eyes wide with moonlight.

The stars gathered in their trillions. Clear cut diamonds and gauzy patches. All burning quietly up there in the cold night sky; perpetually heaving outwards towards the edges of the edgeless universe.

I threw another log on the fire and watched it catch. My joints felt sore from the day's paddle. Getting older. It seemed a bit easier to say this time.

The log blazed and the warm light lit up the coniferous canopy above me; undulating light and shadow like a primitive movie. And the fire itself like some gripping novel. As if watching things return to ash was the most interesting story on earth. Maybe it was the only story.

All at once I felt how ancient everything was. I looked into the fire and got a little hypnotized myself. I saw an astronaut drifting through space. His tether was severed and hung off his lifeless form like an umbilical cord. Like a stillborn cast off and slowly cartwheeling through the cosmos.

It would've gone on forever had the Earth's gravity not wrapped its tentacle around its ankle and pulled him home. Glowing red, it re-entered the thin air through the electric lattice of radio wave static that wraps the Earth.

My own head finds a signal and everything is quiet.

I'm standing in a dream. Not sure whose dream but it feels shared. Mythic in fabric.

A hunter dressed in the same pelts as the animal he's tracking is lost in the forest. He stands there with his elk head hood and antlers looking for the track.

Now he's the elk and I'm the hunter. I knock my arrow and draw it back in my cedar bow. I level it on the elk's heart. I can hear everything; every creature's heart thumping in their little chests; I can hear tendons twitching, irises dilating. I hear the underwater murmurs telling me where to aim. No words. It's a toneless song that comes from the part of the cortex that was formed before language was invented. It's the chorus of vibrations that made up the Earth.

I can feel the chord slipping off the tips of my fingers and the arrow launches.

The fire cracked like gunshot and sent an ember swerving up into the darkness. I looked at the little Siskin and her head was nestled into her breast. Her eyes were closed and I could tell she was sleeping.

Then the slightest glint of light caught my eye and that's when I saw her. A barn owl flew over me and the patagium of its wings caught the firelight. She moved through the air as if it was nothing. Perfectly silent. I thought there was something wrong with my hearing. She roosted on a scabby branch of White Pine, tucked her wings neatly behind her and looked down at me. Her face was round and white with two pieces of coal for eyes. Like a pantomime mask in a Greek tragedy or a Kabuki show. A phantom come to announce some great fortune or my own death. Either way, completely not of this world.

We looked at one another for an indeterminate amount of time. She rocked from side to side in a little dance then turned her head a whole half turn looking at me now with an upside-down head. She righted it again and stood still. Then she crouched and rose her huge wings in a silver crescent above her head. And almost all at once, she brought her wings down and got swallowed up by the night.

The stars continued their counter-clockwise burn through the cool night sky. Aquarius, Pleiades and Ursa Majoris. The great machinery of the universe up there banging and clanking and hissing. Not a single molecule out of place. More nothing than something. Meteorites, from some corner of the universe, tore through the firmament, their tails surging green for a moment, before ending their journey here.

The birds had stopped their chirping and the night was still. I was still also and I looked at the glowing embers ticking on and off as if it was set to a metronome; heaving almost, as if it was breathing. I heard something enter the water with a big splash a little way down the shore. It made the dark surface of the water wobble and it warped the moonlight till it looked like white ribbons on a slick of oil.

<<<>>>

I woke up the next morning in the same place I'd sat all night. I didn't know where I was. A thick shroud of fog blanketed the entire lake. The sun was not up and it was thick and ashen in colour. A one tree island that stood only fifty feet from my campsite was nowhere to be seen. I never made it to my tent. I must've been exhausted. I listened for anything, but the forest was still and quiet.

I remembered the bird and looked down at the nest of clothing next to me. I lifted the covering I'd made for her but she was gone. I got up and looked to see if she'd crawled away somewhere. I looked by the fire. I looked by the woodpile. That's when my heart sank. A splash of beige feathers with dark markings lay on a bed of copper coloured pine needles. She was gone. Something had snuck up and taken her in the night. A marten, or a fox probably.

I sat down and looked at the thin wisp of smoke rising from the ashes. It was dead when it hit the water. It'd been marked by the vultures and the owls and the foxes. They all know the moment a creature steps off its little worn path. It's like a radio needle finding a signal in the static. Everything in the Siskin's life had been a struggle out here. A struggle to stay on that path. On the path you were invisible. She took her eye off the path just once and she got marked. A lifetime of vigilance upended by a moment of distraction. And not a single sacrament from the universe who birthed her.

I revived the fire from a dying ember and fed it till it cracked and sputtered with flames. I took my bandana and ripped a thin piece off of it. I gathered the feathers and wrapped the piece of cloth around the quills cinching it tight. I held up the little bouquet of feathers then laid it in the fire. It ignited with white flame and burned and twisted and gradually disappeared. I held the image of the Siskin in my head but it also disappeared.

The fog hung heavy and refused to leave. I watched the sun try to come up across the lake. It was just a candle shining through vellum. And the wood smoke curled around it like dark calligraphy. The Siskin in there somewhere rising again and falling back into the great vat of molecules that is the Earth where it will wait for who knows how long for it to be churned out into another lifeform.

I emptied a tin of baked beans into a pot and set it on the fire along with a pot of coffee. I stirred the beans with my spoon. It was a good spoon, I thought. Perfectly designed for stirring beans. I cut two pieces of bread off a loaf with my knife and lay them on the grill where the flames weren't too high. I flipped them after a few minutes and toasted the other side till they were brown and coarse in texture.

I put the pieces of toast on my plate. I pulled the pot of beans off the fire and tipped them onto the toast on the plate. I poured the coffee into my mug and it steamed like a doused fire in the cool morning air. I set it aside till it was cool enough to drink.

The sun was higher now and it stirred the fog and the mist moved across the surface like souls coming out of Purgatory, having served their time. I watched the slow-moving cyclone of vapour on the lake's surface. The one tree island emerged like a ghost ship floating there in the ether. A row of trees on the other side of the lake were the last to emerge, dark and jagged like the teeth of a saw.

I'll need to pack up and head back soon, I thought. Back to the hordes and the masses, to the city clatter and the radio static. My brain like a fish caught in the net of all that noise. I was hoping to leave with a revelation but I had no answers. I came all this way to whittle a spoon, I thought, laughing to myself.

I mopped up the last of the brown gravy with my bread and ate it. It was delicious and warmed me up after the cold night. I took a sip of the coffee and it was good. I looked out across the lake and saw little breaks in the mist where the sun shone through. Bit by bit, I could see the sun more clearly. I looked at the fire and felt its warmth. The air was cold and clean and lined with wood smoke. I heard a prolonged, almost anguished, moan from something large come out of the hills behind me. It could've been a moose cow or even a wolf. The sound got muffled in all the fog.

Then the forest was quiet again.

Time to get moving, I thought.