Anticosti Antagonist

“Gosselin rose again. It was more of a struggle now. His feet would have felt like blocks of ice if he could feel them at all. His legs as heavy as tree trunks. Those thick wool pants nearly froze through. Still, he soldiered on, lifting one leg from the slush, then the other, then plunging ahead. Plunging to the shore, the edge of the ice.”

What does he know about the cold? Yes, my feet are cold. And my hands. And my head. Everything. You get used to it. It’s winter in bloody Labrador! 

“He fell again. It must have been the tenth time since he started across the thawing lake but he’d stopped counting. The toboggan he was hauling had collected a thick layer of snow on the bottom. At another time he’d be aware of the added weight, the added drag, and had scraped it away. But he was desperate now, desperate to get across.” 

Sacre bleu! I’m surprised this clown of a writer hadn’t added that cliché to this mess. Mister! Hello? The snow on top of the ice would be slick. The toboggan would slide easily. In the prior chapter, you had me waxing the bottom – 18 pages ago. Did you forget? I’m supposed to be an experienced woodsman. A professional trapper. Now you have me, a bushcraft expert, making bush league mistakes? In case you missed the earlier part, the part where you wrote about me tying my snowshoes over the pelts, I think now would be a good time to get those on my feet, which, by the way, wouldn’t be frozen, not with those thick shoepacs on. Jesus H, think this through.

McNab did think. How could he get his grizzled trapper, a mean, surly, sonofabitch, across this lake? Maybe he’d overplayed the slush bit. A Google search had said that, yes, you could have a thaw, then a blizzard, and the snow on top would insulate the slush keeping it, well, slushy. Perfect. Gosselin got caught out. He wanted to follow his trapline, hauling in the biggest take of the season, and wave it in their faces at the trading post. Then he’d get drunk, maybe offer a round to the house. Or maybe not. That’s good he thought. He didn’t want his readers to like Gosselin. And a bigot! Maybe he’d write about Gosselin complaining that Mi'kmaqs sprung some of his traps. Yes, and then at the trading post have him, drunk now, yelling about it to a small gathering of indifferent trappers who’d heard about Gosselin’s bounty and chance of the free drinks.

This hack makes me a miserable loner because my girl Hanah Jesso died. Consumption it was, and she wasn’t alone. But damn McNab, if you’re a Jesso in this province, you’re a Mi’kmaq, and no two ways about it. Oh yeah, like I’m the bigot. I hope he has a good editor. 

“He made it. He made it to the opposite side and was blessed by what he saw. There, just up the marge of the lake, off the shingle, stood a stand of birches. On one he saw treasure; the black hoary mass, like some ugly massive wart, jutting from its side. Chaga. It was chaga. And from that soon, soon enough, he’d have a blaze. “Blessings,” he whispered through his blistered throat. “Blessings.”

I’ll give you the blessings of chaga. But let me advise you that 1) shingle doesn’t exist on any lake I know of, only by the ocean, and 2) as good as it is to find chaga, a grizzled sonofabitch like me wouldn’t follow his bloody trapline without matches to start a fire! I live in Canada, it’s winter, and if you’ve got me making it this far in a long life you’d think I’d know a thing or two. Oh, and Jack London, listen up. Chaga would have to dry before I can use it for a fire. FYI.

McNab looked to the ceiling. Should he have Gosselin run to the birch tree or stumble? Stumble was better. It went with the frozen feet. “Gosselin was smiling now. He’d have his fire. He’d boil water for his tea. He’d drag up that moose haunch and thaw out chunks for a stew. And then he’d rest for the night. The trading post could wait a day or two. It wasn’t going anywhere.”  

McNab tried visualizing the scene just as they told him to do in the writing class. “Show, don’t tell,” said the instructor who was nearly on the cusp of getting his own novel published. “Homoerotica might be an interesting element. That would be a good back element to why he was a hermit hating society,” he’d suggested. McNab struggled with fitting that in. He typed, “Gosselin whispered out loud, “I’m blethed! Birth trees!”

A lisp! Frozen feet and now a lisp? It doesn’t work McNab. I simply doesn’t work. 

He didn’t so much hear the voice as sense it. He felt the sense of the words, the intent; the character was unmistakable. It was the voice he’d been hearing since chapter three; the gnarly voice of his protagonist. And, no, he didn’t detect a lisp. 

Leave out that queer nonsense. How abouts I just don’t like people? By the way, most any trapper, guide, hunter, any gold bloody panner, doesn’t much care for people which is why we live out in the middle of God’s country. You made your protagonist, I mean me, an aging, arthritic, grizzled, bitter, nasty, loner of a trapper. I like him already. But homoerotic? 

McNab highlighted and deleted the attempt. He knew Gosselin. He’d created him after all. What he was learning was that Gosselin knew himself even better.

With almost every scene he typed, Gosselin was there, hovering over his shoulder like some cheeky raven contemplating when it could swoop down and grab a quick meal from some day-dreaming writer. “No,” came the voice. “That won’t work. “No moron, do you have any idea what a trapper carries?” No this, no that. McNab spent more time correcting details than imagining the story. He jammed his fingers down hard on the keyboard snapping off the T key. “God damn,” he mumbled. He did smile when he snapped the T key back in place and searched “traditional trapper outfits.” He tried to weave more vivid descriptions of wool into the story: wet wool, dry wool, warm wool, old wool, wool hats, wool socks. He wrote so his readers could smell it, wool soaked by the fall into the raging river, the stale stench absorbed through years of sweat and blood, and the musky lingerings of the fleshed-out creatures.

Wrong again. You left out the best smell. Smoke. You’ve got all these parts about me huddling by a fire, a smoky fire, to keep the skeeters at bay, to dry me off, to keep me warm. Write about that. Write about the little holes from random sparks blowing about when the wind hits. And why would you want to make me stink? Trappers didn’t stink. We have to be clean lest we leave our scent on the traps and, duh, spook them furry creatures were after. We’d air out our clothes for that reason. And what about me washing in all that cold water, scrubbing myself with sand and Labrador tea leaves? Put that in there. Do some homework!

McNab rolled his eyes and retyped. “Gosselin put his Mackinaw over the line. The breeze would clear out the smell. It needed to be clean so as not to spook the game. As it waved in the breeze like the flag at the distant trading post, he doused himself in cold lake water, scrubbing with sand to remove any scent…”

Not a Mackinaw! We’re in Labrador, not Minnesota. Make it a Hudson Bay coat and make sure you mention the black stripes. That’s authentic. PS, game? Game is what a hunter wants. For meat. I’m a trapper. I’m going for the pelts first, meat second, and I don’t much care for the taste of minks, martens, fishers, and such. Raccoon stew isn’t bad. Beaver tail is pretty good. You’ll want to add something about my accent. You know Gosselin is a Quebecois name. 

Again, McNab erased and rewrote. Okay, Hudson Bay coat; that made sense. The stench? Yeah, that too. He was typing about the musky, gamy, taste of beaver and raccoon, the disdain for the flesh of minks and martens, when he said out loud to the contemptuous coughing in his head, “Why don’t you write the bloody story Jack Lon….”

“I used that line already,” said his character adding a “Mais oui” for effect.

McNab went back to typing. Gosselin continued with his corrections.  

He stopped typing for the moment. McNab and tried to imagine a fork in the trail so to speak. He’d get Gosselin to the birch tree. He’d have him cleave off – knock off, came the voice, cleave means to split -- the chunk of chaga to make a fire, and to hell with Gosselin’s admonition that chaga fresh off a tree would be too damp to catch a spark. Then, dried out, rested, his aching joints settled down, he’d have him mush – no, not mush, you only mush with a dogsled! This isn’t the Iditarod! – drag the sled over fresh, cold, snow, revived, warmer, well anyway warmer feet, and a cheery slog to the trading post; whisky, tobacco, and friends. Okay, not friends, rivals maybe, jealous rivals, but Gosselin would display a veteran’s generosity to the cheechakos around him. “Drinks on the house, boys,” he’d yell. Then offer up a mentorship. “Boys, if you want to learn a thing or two, I’ll take you out. Gets kind of lonely out there and I ain’t as young as I was.” More cheers. Slaps on the back. And a young man, maybe an Indian, shyly approaches him. You could see a smile under Gosselin’s dense beard. Gosselin says, “Get your gear.” Off they go into a snowstorm. The end.

Cheechakos? Really?

“McNab,” came the gruff voice, this time coughing up something thick. It sounded bad. “What’s a cheechako?”  

McNab had him at last. “Cheechako,” he would mention in a footnote, was a newcomer to the wilderness business. So, Monsieur Gosselin, you don’t know everything. Well, voila.”

There was a bit more coughing, then a snarl which might have been part of a laugh on someone with a clear throat. “Cheechako is a tenderfoot alright, but not in Labrador! You’re in the wrong province mon ami, maybe the wrong country. Try the Yukon or Alaska. Anywho, a cheechako would be looking for gold, not pelts. Try calling him a greenhorn. That might work.” 

More coughing followed and spitting. The spitting would do. Yes, the spitting would do just fine. 

McNab typed away. “Gosselin reached the birch. The chaga came off easily with a mere tap of his ax. He held the brownish-orange inner mass, the spongy layer that would catch fire, and held it to his cheek. It was cool, still damp. It wouldn’t take a spark, not yet, but Gosselin was no greenhorn. He shaved off a sliver, no larger than a dried birch leaf and just as thin. He held it gently under the armpit of his Hudson Bay coat. Even now, out of the water, out of the wind, it would warm up, dry, and take a spark from his flint and knife. The flint was a piece of chert, once made into a spear point by natives who’d lived here thousands of years before. They followed the caribou who followed the melting glacier. Gosselin would strike the knife against its sharp edge and a resulting spark would ignite the thin edge of chaga. From there, he’d cradle into a bundle of tinder and blow, oh so gentle a blow, it into a flame.

“He'd done this before. Yes, a thousand times before. Yet it still gave him an immense satisfaction to see it burst into a fire. A fire that cooked his food, kept wolves and bears away. A fire that kept him warm. A fire that saved his life more often than he could remember.

“Gosselin scraped dried cedar bark from a nearby tree, shredded white birch bark into threads, and gathered those into a bundle the size of…

Here McNab struggled. The size of a what? He wanted to type a melon but wasn’t sure Gosselin would know what a melon was. So, he wrote melon, underlined it, with the intent to come up with something better later.

He challenged, “No complaints?” Go on, came the voice. 

Then he did something odd. McNab hunched over the keyboard, typing furiously, hiding the words as best he could. He tried not to think, didn’t dare think, he just tapped away.

What’s that? What are you doing? The voice seemed anxious.Where am I? Are we at the trading post? Where’s my bottle? Get me a bottle!

McNab smiled at the question and allowed a thought to permeate the screen. “Gosselin craved his drink. But his mind was foggy. “Whiskey,” he whispered. He should have known better. He knew Labrador. He’d known it for more than half a century. A trapper, even a successful one, would want Screech, the Jamaican rum that was a mainstay of the Labrador and New Foundland diets.

But whiskey? 

I’d never ask for whiskey. Never had a drop! Why’d you write that?

“Gosselin reached under his coat. The chaga had dried enough. He held it to the stone and struck with the back of his knife. Again and again and again. A few dull sparks flew but none took to the chaga. One big hit and the chaga flew out of his hands to the snow below. He swore. It was getting cold now, he felt that, with the sun setting. He cut another sliver, placed it again under his arm. A few minutes later he was at it. This time a spark hit the chaga. It was hardly a pinprick of light. Gosselin knew what to do. He gently fanned the spark until it grew to the size of a pea and reached for his tinder bundle.

It wasn’t there. He looked around, confused now, and saw it by the birch tree. He rose to get it but by now the glow on his chaga and burned out. He sat down, strangely warm despite the cold, and continued his effort. His hands were shaking. He felt hot, too hot. A few lame strikes and he dropped the knife on the ground. Bending over he started to cough. It was a vicious cough, worse than before. He needed hot tea. Whiskey, no Screech, what was he thinking…would be best.

Damn it McNab I can make a fire! Write that in! Never failed and won’t now. What’s with all this dropping? And let me tell you I’d have plenty of that chaga drying in my pocket, not under my bloody armpit. Where are those matches? You got this all…

Before the voice could finish, McNab typed on…”Gosselin fell onto his knees, blood streaming from his mouth as his lungs collapsed in spasms. He was lying in the snow, the back of his green and black plaid Hudson’s Bay coat convulsing as he coughed more blood, and his final breaths.

McNab sat back with a smile. He was deciding whether Gosselin would be found by other trappers, his pelts to be retrieved and pay off his debts at the Post, or, better, used for a celebration. Or may it would be wolves, drawn to the scent on his coat. Or maybe he’d just leave him in snow, the ancient, grizzled, trapper in his element. A smile frozen deep inside his beard. McNab like the beard image.

A voice, quieter than before, whispered A Hudson Bay coat would have a black stripe. Not plaid. That would be a Mackinaw. Just saying.