I’d spotted it lying in the ditch, one eye open, but perfectly still, its left side covered with black blood, its tongue hanging limply from its mouth. I’d stopped, as though the dead animal had been a boundary stone ordering me to a halt, and I’d taken the time to stare it down, thumbing my nose at death or bad luck.
It was a long-legged husky with lovely grey and black fur. Its half-open mouth showed off teeth more white than yellow. And even in this lifeless state, lying there in the ditch, it was impressively built. It was a dog from the north, well used to sniffing around bears and moose. It was also a pet, trained to warn humans of the dangers of the wild. But at the end of the day it was just another animal lying dead at the side of the road, hit by a pickup rattling by at 120 k.p.h. or a truck piled high with heavy logs.
And even though the sight of the dog was enough to spoil anyone’s appetite, I hadn’t eaten since the night before and hunger was gnawing away at my stomach. I looked at the animal, at its lifeless eye that would never see another thing, and I thought back to the grilled cheese I had eaten at nightfall at the rest stop in Hearst, the improbably French-speaking town in northern Ontario. I thought back to the coffee, too, paid for with my last few dollars, that I’d sipped slowly as I waited for morning to come. I recalled it sliding down into my stomach, whetting my appetite; I heard my stomach rumble and I thought of eating again, and told myself that I’d need to get to my destination before I could eat. And so I walked away from the dog, stuck my thumb in the air, and focused on the road. I walked. A cloud of smoke came out of my mouth and the frost creaked beneath my boots.
Three cars sped by, then nothing, then another, followed by long minutes of waiting, before a red Toyota Tercel slowed down, stopped behind me and tooted the horn, inviting me to hop in. The driver—a woman in her forties, with short blonde hair, wearing sunglasses and chewing gum—asked, “Where are you headed?” “Longlac,” I replied, having already flung my bag onto the back seat, knowing that it was on her way: along the two hundred or so kilometres separating Hearst and Longlac, the road doesn’t pass through a single town or village, just a handful of isolated homes, and row upon row of tall black spruce trees that stretch all the way to the horizon.
“Tree planter?” she asked, without looking at me. “Yes, ma’am,” I replied, knowing that with my three-day beard, my old military pants, and my steel-cap boots, I looked the part. “I’m up from Montreal.”
It was warm, almost too warm, in the car. I might have been tempted to doze off, but I was hungry, hungrier and hungrier, and the sound of the driver chewing her gum made my mouth water, the saliva running down into my stomach. And she didn’t say a word, and I didn’t say a word. And the spruce trees passed by on either side of the road, and I imagined the kilometres and kilometres of forests behind them, teeming with bears and moose, but mainly billions of mosquitoes, deer flies, midges, and other blood-suckers ready to come to life with the spring, just as tree planters arrived from all over Canada to work for the forestry companies, replanting kilometres of forests cut down the year before to produce tons of paper pulp, gluey and sticky like the gum the driver wouldn’t stop chewing on, the gum that was making her mouth water and mine too, and it seemed like all that was racing about in my stomach. She must have had something to eat with her, in her handbag or in the glove compartment—I don’t know, even a bar of chocolate—but she wasn’t speaking and didn’t offer me a thing, and we drove and drove and I imagined the meal I would get at the planting camp: bacon and eggs, most likely, or thick pancakes.
The scenery was monotonous, repetitive: always the same road that headed due west and the thousands of spruce that stretched skyward. There was nothing but the sound of the engine, the driver chewing, and the rumbling of my stomach.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“The hospital in Geraldton, just past Longlac.”
“Nurse?”
She didn’t answer, allowing a silence to linger. It remained impenetrable to me, unable as I was to catch her eye behind her sunglasses. And she was still chewing her gum, and I said to myself that it couldn’t taste of anything anymore, that it couldn’t be more than a piece of bland modelling clay by now, chewed over and over until it became disgusting. That’s what I said to myself, secretly beginning to hate her for not understanding that deep down I couldn’t care less where she was going, that all I wanted to do was eat, when she took an old Kleenex out of her pocket, opened her mouth, spat the gum into it, closed the Kleenex over it with her fist, put it back in her pocket, and said coldly and with way too much confidence:
“I’m going to see my husband. He’s working at a camp over by Longlac… He was in an accident yesterday.”
We passed a whole convoy of heavy trucks racing by at top speed. On both sides of the road, still nothing but spruce, all the way to the horizon.
“Anything serious?” I asked, a little uncomfortable.
“He hurt his head.”
Her voice was dry when she spoke, like it was coming out of a mouth with no saliva, the dry mouth of a dead woman. I didn’t know what to say.
“The doctor says he probably won’t recover,” she went on.
I opened my mouth, as though obliged to speak in the circumstances, but stayed silent, a sudden lump in my throat, and the driver didn’t speak again either. We headed inexorably west, through the spruce forests where I was going to spend weeks working, planting and replanting my shovel in the ground to plant thousands of trees that would grow and grow to be cut down again years later; we headed west and my stomach rumbled even more and it was awkward in the silence of the car; we headed west and I didn’t know what to say and I disgusted myself by thinking only of eating. We passed bright red Dodge pickups, the latest Jeeps, and old vans that were only good for the scrapyard. By the side of the road, I glimpsed a dead animal—probably a dog, or maybe a big coyote or a young bear—with crows circling above it. We headed west, and I imagined the blood-splattered head of my driver’s husband, I saw the dead husky in the ditch again, I recalled its eye, its dilated pupil, and I felt more dead than alive, wondering what I was going to do in the forests of northern Ontario, where I was going to be eaten alive for weeks on end by swarms of voracious flies and be confronted with the glacial rains of May, with days of hailstones, then with the too-hot days of June, cursing the saliva that still flowed from my mouth into my acid-filled stomach, and the lack of words I could find to speak to the woman who, at my side, despite her composure, despite her apparent self-control, must be feeling the imminent death of her husband grip her insides. I thought again of eating and I felt disgusting, as though I was nothing but one long digestive tract that could be rolled out all the way to the horizon. And a feeling of nausea rose slowly in my throat.
I didn’t say another thing, only a miserable “Good luck” when she dropped me off, and I walked into Longlac, the taste of vomit in my mouth.
On this May morning, the road stretched west, lined with dead dogs.
*****
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