eight miles across the lake as sharp as an Ansel Adams photograph. Belle nodded, then cleared her throat. “How long have you . . . I mean when did you . . .”
“Forever. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Cub scouts.” He waved his hand. “Not that anything was happening at the time, but thinking back, I knew. Then there was Mr. Kluckhohn.”
“Our Grade Seven geography teacher? Don’t tell me he—”
“A sad old man, weeks from retirement. I told him I wasn’t interested in his dirty pictures. Then I played the waiting game until university. It seemed safest, especially with HIV/AIDS on the horizon. I owe you one, Belle. It wasn’t easy in the late Seventies. You helped me maintain a semblance of normalcy.”
She took a deep breath, laughed in spite of herself. “Are you saying that I was your . . . what do you call it . . . beard?”
“Peer pressure is very powerful at that age. I couldn’t take Richard Ralston to the grad dance, after all.”
“The salutatorian? Whose father was an Anglican minister?” She took him up to the porch, digesting the information that was constructing a parallel universe.
They sat for over an hour, filling each other in on their careers. At long last, honesty and a mutual sense of humour made them fast friends. “So when a kid told me to kiss his ass, I walked out of that school in Etobicoke before Christmas and came up here to take a job at my Uncle Harold’s business,” Belle said. “That was over twenty years ago. Since he died, I’ve been running it myself.”
“Do you still play the trumpet?”
“Last time I tried to put on lipstick, and don’t ask why, I couldn’t find my upper lip. Anyway, I’m much too lazy to keep up my embouchure by practising.” She wiggled the fingers on her right hand. “The muscle memory’s still there. Guess I could play the fight song.”
Together they sang, pumping their arms. “Fight on, SCI. Everybody’s rooting for you. Crash right through that line . . .” Then they dissolved into laughter.
Gary had a doctorate in zoology from McGill and was a full professor at Brock University. Field work, not the classroom, kept him in love with the job. “Obviously, there aren’t any elk down south. It’s exciting that Nickel City College and Shield University have been involved in restoring the species to this area.”
With a brief tour, looking out each window in approval across the eight-by-eight-mile lake, he agreed to take the house without persuasion at a thousand a month. “The Lavoies will be pleased,” she said, explaining how to handle the utility bills. Sweet Maureen was cutting her in for ten per cent of the rent.
As Belle climbed into bed that night, she wondered if she’d done the right thing by asking Gary to dinner. Where was this new relationship going? Heady stuff, but would it only confuse them both?
THREE
Arriving the next evening for dinner, Gary presented her with a book. “I remembered you loved films. Didn’t your dad take us to that screening room once? I wish my father had been a film booker,” he said with a nuance of a smile on his expressive lips. A slight gap between his two front teeth had added a very human feature to the little idol she’d raised.
She looked at the cover, recognizing Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen in a pensive but provocative pose in the 1927 Wings. According to the blurb, this “acclaimed history of homosexuals in film” documented over three hundred movies spanning eighty years. She leafed through it. “Wow. Edward Everett Horton as the poet-reporter in The Front Page. Bert Lahr as the cowardly lion? Are they serious? And all the way back to the silents, even before the Hays Office regulations. Incredible.”
Freya showed much interest in the new arrival, and the feeling was mutual, as Gary scratched her ears. Somehow Belle wondered if he was measuring the dog’s head for the boil pot, as he’d done before, assembling squirrel and raccoon skeletons in high school. They’d met as partners in biology, when they’d had to dissect a crawfish.
“Moose, deer and bear, sure, but I’ve never seen an elk,” she said as they forked into one of her no-fail casseroles, made with lean ground beef, macaroni, tomato soup, red peppers and cheddar. Mâché salad with homemade blue cheese dressing rounded out the menu, along with blackberries topped with sweetened mascarpone.
Gary pointed out the window, where a party barge was making for home, chugging along with its pontoons parting the rising waves. Raindrops had begun splashing the panes. “Lake Wapiti, isn’t it? ‘Wapiti’ is the native name for elk. Another coincidence.” As he blotted his mouth with the linen serviette, he told her that the elk (Cervus elaphus) were native to Ontario, but extirpated by the late 1800s due to hunting and loss of habitat. The Thirties and Forties had seen efforts to restore them, but the unfounded theory that they were passing liver flukes to cattle had initiated a hunt that decimated the fragile herd.
“What do they eat? Do they compete with moose?” The extra glasses of the Sicilian nero red that was a bargain at ten dollars were winging her into a time warp with this ghost from her past. A generation had been born and raised to adulthood since last they’d met. If they’d had a child together . . . The spectre brought visions of prodigies, not that she’d been interested in motherhood. It would have been handy to have a teenager to shovel snow. She smiled to herself as he plunged on with his lecture. Her toes were tingling, or was it her imagination? She put down the glass and thought about coffee. Strong coffee.
“Not exactly. They’re both grazers and browsers, but when the going gets tough in winter, moose head for dense coniferous stands and feed on balsam fir and eastern hemlock. Elk prefer cedar habitat along shorelines, pawing up buried grasses in early winter. A perfect compromise. Nature has a way of sorting things out, if we’d just let it.”
Their own story in fewer than twenty-five words. “I’ve heard moose in mating season. Do elk sound similar?”
He arranged his lithe fingers, tossed his head back, and gave a fair imitation of a “bugle,” which caused Freya to rise and come to his aid. Laughing, he ruffled her fur and accepted a kiss.
“Very different from the birch-bark-cone moose call.” She poured the rest of the wine into his glass, sad to see it go, but glad that she wouldn’t be running her mouth without inhibition. She was beginning to remember the feelings she had entertained for this man. Far more powerful than muscle memory. “What exactly is your project?”
“I’m based around the old Burwash area. Bump Lake. Sometimes I take the canoe into the more remote lakes. Cow/calf survival is my focus this time around.” He had also published monographs on parasitology and foraging trajectories.
With cottages her speciality and over a thousand lakes in the region, Belle was familiar with every puddle and pond. Yet some areas were less habitable than others. “Burwash? Isn’t that where a prison used to be? Or a correctional facility, whatever they’re called?”
“So I hear. Nothing’s left of the town. The jail’s just a shell, not that I went near it.”
“When did these elk arrive?”
“We did a pilot release here in 1998, and a few years later for a total of one hundred and seventy-two animals. A couple of hundred more in Bancroft, Lake of the Woods, and the Lake Huron North Shore. Moderate success, about four hundred and fifty in Ontario at last count. Ecotourism based on elk is a great possibility,
