LITMIR.BIZ

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I ran my fingers over her face and felt it twitch.

      “Yvette, do you hear me?” Pierre persisted. “She is, how you say, out cold, eh? I get help.”

      “That’ll take too long. We’ve got to take her out ourselves. Check her legs to see how badly she’s hurt.”

      Pierre didn’t move, but his face suddenly loomed through the dark in a cadaverous glow as he sucked on his cigarette.

      “At least use your lighter to give us some light,” I snapped back, annoyed at his unwillingness to help. I turned my attention back to my friend. “Tell me where it hurts.”

      No response. I felt the same sticky wetness on the hair at the back of her head. A pool of it had collected on a rock by her ear. Fearful of causing further injury, I decided not to lift her head to search for the wound. I heard several clicks of a lighter, and the young woman’s crumpled form sprang into view. She’d landed close to the stream on what thankfully appeared to be one of the few patches of moss. She lay on her side with one leg flung out at an awkward angle.

      “Broke, eh?” Pierre muttered.

      I ran my hands over the leg, but it was impossible to feel any break through the heavy denim of her jeans. However, I viewed it as a promising sign when she didn’t grimace or make a sound while I shifted her leg to a more comfortable position. Too worried about what such a fall could do to her back, I didn’t dare move her body. Instead I ran my hands over first her right, then her left arm, which elicited a sharp cry of pain.

      “Looks like her arm might be broken,” I said. “We can’t move her.”

      “Like I said,” Pierre retorted.

      “Okay, so you were right. Now go to her father’s place. I’ll stay with her.”

      “No, I go to the Fishing Camp.”

      “But her father’s closer.”

      “I go to the Camp.”

      I leaned back on my heels and looked towards the cigarette glow that marked the corner of his mouth. “Afraid of the old man, eh?”

      His only reply was the brighter glow of his cigarette.

      “Okay, whatever,” I said in exasperation. “Just go. Use my truck, the keys are under the front seat. And do me a favour, will you? Get my pack from the other side of Kamikaze Pass and throw it down.”

      He didn’t move, but instead asked, “What she doing here? The old man woulda locked her up, that’s for sure.”

      “I’m as surprised as you are. But we don’t have time to waste wondering. Now get going.”

      I heard him scrambling up the side of the cliff, then remembering the other female, I shouted after him, “Where’s Chantal?”

      “Gone ahead,” came back the quick reply, immediately followed by the sound of his retreating footsteps.

      I hoped she’d made it back to the Fishing Camp in one piece. The last thing I needed was another member of my crew in trouble.

      The echo of his passage through the defile faded. I had barely gotten used to the silence when his footsteps returned.

      “Attention!” Pierre yelled and tossed my pack over the dropoff before I had a chance to shout my location. Fortunately it missed me and landed with a sharp thud several metres away. Without so much as a pause, his footsteps faded into the night.

      I crawled to the spot where I thought my pack had landed. Finding it, I returned to the injured girl and retrieved the emergency blanket that thankfully I’d remembered to bring along. I wrapped her as best I could in the heat-reflecting mylar fabric, but I didn’t dare try to place it under Yvette for fear of a spinal injury.

      Rescue could take at least three to four hours to arrive. In the meantime, I had to keep this young woman alive and myself calm. And it was dark, very dark. Although I liked to think that I’d overcome my fear of the dark, I’d never put it to the ultimate test; being utterly alone in the impenetrable night of a forest alive with the sounds of its inhabitants.

      I took a deep sip from my water bottle and wished it were lemon vodka. If there was ever a time for a mind-numbing gulp, now was it. But I’d no sooner expressed this thought, than I shoved it aside for fear that the old desire would take hold. I used to be a drunk, but in the past two years I’d barely had a drop, thanks to Eric, who’d made me face up to my problem.

      I gulped more water and tried not to notice the rustles, the scrapes and the twitters that shattered the deadening silence. My night demons were converging. Every nerve ending was on high alert. I jumped at one sharp snap just a little too close and knocked against Yvette. She groaned.

      “Sorry. You awake?”

      No response. If I didn’t calm down, I’d become a blubbering mess and useless to Yvette.

      I lay down beside her, hoping my body heat would help keep her warm. Her hand lay beside mine. I gripped it as much to give myself strength as her reassurance.

      Her breathing, although faint, sounded regular, which I took to be a good sign. But it worried me that she was still unconscious. On the other hand, it was probably for the better. I wouldn’t want her awake with her pain knowing that rescue was hours away.

      I had yet to come up with an explanation for her unexpected presence on this trail. I’d left her in the controlling grip of her father. And judging by the anger in his eyes when he’d pulled her from my crew, he was going to ensure she never strayed again. Nor was she one to disobey. I’d learned that much about her. The only time I’d seen her go against his wishes was the previous summer, when she’d suddenly turned up at my home at Three Deer Point.

      I’d known of Papa Gagnon by his reputation alone. In this vast but thinly-populated land, anyone the least bit odd was immediately noted. But I hadn’t known of Yvette’s existence until she’d knocked on my door. I was sitting in the screen porch away from the hot sun and the bugs. My dog, Sergei, was lying flat out on the floor, dead to the world. So silent was her arrival that even this giant black poodle failed to provide warning with his usual half-hearted rendition of a guard dog.

      “I want speak English,” she said in that soft anxious manner I soon learned was her. “I pay.”

      She stood before me in a faded but immaculate gingham dress, the kind of dress a farmer’s wife might have worn thirty years ago, her dark auburn hair caught up in two long thick braids, her brown eyes, open wide like a startled doe poised to escape. Clenched in her hand was a crumpled five dollar bill. In the other, a plastic grocery bag bursting with lettuce and carrots.

      “Please come in,” I replied in French, “and we can talk about it.”

      She hesitated, her hand halfway to the door handle as if trying to make up her mind whether to enter or flee. Then after a deep intake of breath, she whispered, “Merci, madame,” and stepped silently onto the porch.

      I had intended to talk her out of it, convinced I didn’t have sufficient knowledge to teach the constructs of my native tongue. But the sight of her scars changed my mind. Yvette hadn’t meant me to see them, but Sergei’s welcoming snout brushed her full skirt briefly aside. The second I glimpsed the faint purple tracks of old cuts above her knees, I knew I was dealing with a deeply troubled young woman.

      I’d seen similar scars once before on a girlhood friend, whose self-esteem had bottomed out to such an extent that she’d taken to slitting herself periodically with a razor. Although I’d never known what was behind this selfmutilation, I’d suspected the source was my friend’s parents, who were more prone to punishment than kindness.

      I decided that I could at least offer this young Québécoise the basics of English, and more importantly, perhaps my place could become a refuge from whatever it was she was trying to erase with her pain. As for payment, we agreed that it would be an exchange. She would help me improve my French.

      We established

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