BOW RIVER TRACK, CANADIAN ROCKIES
It was like there was a cougar about to attack, nothing could take that feeling away, soon the claws were striking at me through the air, we had been trudging through the snow for hours, i had been balanced on the edge of my nerves, they were a thick rope, i was losing my grip, the trees swaying and creaking as their black trunks froze, the shot gun sound cracked along the river, then another pine uprooting itselF from a shallow hold in the rocky soil, throwing its snow down onto the riverbed ice, the beaver's tooth marks in the wood, the banff wind in the tops of the trees like a whoosh and the silence all around us, the crystal clear cut air ripening up the blood vessels of our skin, turning us white inside somewhere, our bones were freezing like the frozen solid tracks, it makes us solid and the water inside us solid for the long winter quiet ahead, but still we insist on moving, you are telling me the story of your mother found in the snow, hiding from your touch like a wolf, ready to bite and spring onto your chest, tearing the thermal sweater apart, then the story about viola wilson, the mad woman who put an axe through the cabin door of your only childhood, by a maze of unending forest that swallowed life, how your father sent your family running for your lives, as the first blade opened up the wood from the other side, how within minutes he had abandoned the place and left it for dead, as Viola Wilson shrieked and chopped into it, through and through and through, like the splitting of an apple, she was a lost woman with enough rage and bright-eyed madness in her to split the atom or the world, to you it seemed as though you were half fumbling, half carried through the snow by your legs, and your parents anxiety, towards the town mall, the police station in Kenora, your aunty's house, there was something you thought you had left behind, like a teddy bear or a book or a dog, but suddenly you had to let it all go, as a force stronger than love smashed through the final threshold, you entered the great fog of childhood disorientation, i would not underestimate you again, soon we were fully immersed in the story, stumbling through the bushes of our own, me holding your hand as a couple of branches began to break, a colliding foot through the lighter softer snow, the crackle of ice beneath our boots like crockery, the dry ice thrown up like powder, as if sprinkling down from pine trees, sweet icing sugar onto a cake ready for frosting, so often it's them who take life and form instead of us, as we were tricked into blindly running, reaching out to anything without thinking, since we were off the track of reason, and deep into those directionless woods, that killed our young minds with confusion, while the heart starved and shrieked, a pretty owl with the killing eyes startled both of us, soon i saw the right track everywhere, until you said that none of them were really tracks at all, we were lost between the main road and the Bow River along a narrow splinter of snow wilderness, we couldn't seem to get entirely off the lines we were moving along, so close to the right way home, yet this is when the panic started to set in, about the cougars and our origins, and the direction in which we were heading i loved our wanderings like a season, but i couldn't take it anymore, to be lost in fog, to be killed by a big cat, i'd really had enough. |
