The Piano Maker (22 page)

“Yes, I do think so. Thank you, Mrs. Yamoussouke.”

ON THE EIGHTH DAY
of the return trip, the snow stopped coming down in the late afternoon, and when the air in the distance had cleared they saw an elevation and a rock pile that according to Nathan’s notes and sketches weren’t supposed to be there. They took a compass reading and the needle veered wildly, and when it settled it told them they were heading west-northwest.

“How is that possible?” said Nathan. “How on earth? What’s going on? We’ve been travelling mainly south and a bit easterly the whole time.” He took another reading, and the heading was the same: 290 degrees west-northwest.

“What now, Nathan? Do we know where we are?”

“Give me a minute and I’ll tell you.”

The dogs stood in their traces and looked back at them with their tongues lolling. She melted snow and watered them and then melted more to fill the flasks.

While she worked, Nathan sat on the sled studying his
notes. He kept aligning his drawings with the compass and adjusting the bezel.

When she had finished with the dogs, she sat down next to him and he told her that for some reason they’d been going in a wide left-veering circle, and that the elevation in the distance was the sandy hill where they’d found the dead moose on the way out.

“And that rock pile?” he said. “It’s the one he pointed out from the other direction when we came up to the carcass. I’m sure of it. Except that now we’re looking at it from the east, not from southwest.”

“A circle. How is that possible?”

“I don’t know. Maybe compass deviation. Or magnetic outcroppings, iron ore. I read somewhere about the seven-day circle in some northern latitudes. The good news is that the weather has cleared, and so from now on we can go by the sun and my watch. And there’s something else: we’re not far from that moose carcass. We could get the rest of the meat. It’ll be frozen solid and should still be good to eat. So you could even say we’re lucky. We know again where we are, and we’ll just forget the compass and head southeast by the sun.”

“You’re sure, Nathan?”

“I am, absolutely.”

“All right. So let’s head for the moose. There was a lot of meat left on it. The whole underside. Can we still make it today?”

“We can try.”

She went to the front of the team and led it around, and
then they headed for the elevation. To her left the sun was one hand above the horizon, and the sky and all the air around shimmered with ice crystals. She walked next to Jack in her snowshoes, talking to him, cheering him on:
Come on Jack, I know you can do this. Good boy, show them how it’s done
. And Jack leaned into the traces and sometimes, looking sideways at him, she could swear he was laughing.

Where the snow was not so deep, she stopped the dogs and took off her snowshoes. She climbed on the sled and stood between the runners and drove them in the singsong voice she’d learned from Prosper.

They reached the foot of the hill in less than an hour. They could see where the dead moose would be, halfway up the elevation, on that ledge. By now the sun was below the horizon and it was getting dark quickly. Ahead it would be all sand again and difficult travel.

She stopped the dogs and talked about it with Nathan. Should they continue or should they make camp here and get to the carcass in the morning?

“We have enough meat for tonight, and the dogs are tired,” she said. “Maybe we should do the hard part when we’re all fresh and then head back.”

And so for that night they simply threw the tarpaulin over the sled and tied it down and then slept in their Arctic bags like mummies next to the skull on the platform. They heard wolves again and the dogs howled back. At one point Nathan climbed out of his bag and pulled the gun from its sheath. He knew she was awake.

“We don’t want them eating our moose,” he said. “I’ll just go take a quick look and scare them off.”

She heard him struggling with the frozen tie-downs on the tarp, and then he slipped out the opening and she could hear his footsteps moving away.

That was what she told them on the second day of the trial. The hall was filled again, and the light and the cameras were on her. This time several items lay on a harvest table that had been set up for the day’s proceedings next to the desk of the assistant Crown. Expert witnesses for the prosecution were waiting in the side room.

She sat on the same chair, but they had given her a glass of water on an upended vegetable crate nearby. The judge seemed quite taken with her narrative and he had cautioned the assistant Crown twice already not to interrupt, especially not with prejudicial comments.

She was less than an hour into her testimony when she said, “That was when it happened, Your Honour. I heard him walking away and maybe thirty seconds later there was a very loud sound, like a shot almost, a sudden loud crash, and then I heard Nathan screaming. I’d never heard anyone scream like that, like a huge curse and a scream with such escalating terror. I got out of the bag and grabbed the flashlight and climbed off the sled. The dogs were all up and howling, and I pointed the flashlight and
maybe twenty yards away I saw Nathan on the ground, but in a strange twisted way. He was still screaming but his voice was getting hoarse, and by the time I got there he lay with his eyes and lips pressed closed …

“A heavy metal thing with teeth had grabbed his leg. That thing was so strong, the teeth on it had gone deep into his leg above the knee from both sides and broken the bone there. Blood spurted out thick and fast. I could see this with the flashlight, and I ran back to the sled and got some rope and then I tied off his thigh above the injury.”

The assistant Crown stood up and said, “At this point I must ask the accused a few questions, Your Honour. We have the very object here: it is a number four O’Grady bear trap. It is illegal now, but until one year ago it was still being used. Mostly for large bears in western Canada. I would like to ask the accused now why she did not simply open the trap and free Mr. Homewood from it.”

“So ask, Mrs. Tancock,” said the judge.

“Thank you, Your Honour. Mrs. Giroux, why didn’t you just open the trap?”

Hélène looked at Mr. Quormby and he nodded. He seemed pleased with that question.

“I tried, but I couldn’t,” she said. “Mrs. Tancock, I’d like you to try and pull those jaws apart with your hands. Try it now.”

There was suppressed laughter in the audience and the judge said, “Quiet! Mrs. Giroux, please just answer the question.”

“Your Honour, I did try to pull the jaws apart, of course I did, but it was impossible. I couldn’t even get my fingers under them. The wolves and the dogs were still howling, and I think I was panicking with the horrible injury and all the blood, but I did use the flashlight to see if there was another way to open the trap. I could not find any. There was blood everywhere. Blood had gushed out, and even after I’d tied it off it kept pulsing down his leg onto the trap and his boots, and it froze there.”

“Your Honour,” said the assistant Crown, “I would like to call my first witness now. Would the clerk ask Mr. Samuel Merrifield to come in and stand on that marked spot at the other end of Your Honour’s desk.”

The clerk looked at the judge, and the judge leaned back and raised a hand and made the motion to proceed.

The clerk brought in a lean old man with white hair and a tanned face. He wore a black suit and black boots and a white shirt with a collar and a black string tie with a silver bead. The clerk showed him where to stand, and he held up the Bible and had the man put his hand on it and repeat the words of the oath after him.

“Mr. Merrifield,” said the assistant Crown then, “what is your profession?”

“I’m a fixer, ma’am. Was a trapper until last winter, but now I mostly repair things. Traps and tools to do with my old line of work.”

“Mr. Merrifield, please come closer and look at this trap here. Pick it up and show us how it works.”

The old man walked to the table and looked down at the trap. It was a massive thing of black iron and a chain and thick springs linked to the jaws where they were hinged to the frame. He dragged it off the table with visible effort and set it on the floor. For a moment it was all very quiet, and then the chain slid and rattled off the table and fell heavily onto the brick floor. At the end of the chain was a solid piece of iron hammered into a three-pronged grapnel hook. Mr. Merrifield looked over his shoulder and said, “That there is called a drag, ma’am. It catches on bushes and rocks.”

The judge leaned forward across his desk to see. “My,” he said. “Go on, Mr. Merrifield.”

The old man knelt on the floor and brought his face down close to the bottom of the trap. He stood up again. “There’s a sear on the underside, kind of like the sear in a gun lock but much heavier, and with this trap when more than thirty or so pounds of pressure comes down on the plate, it releases.”

“But now that it’s closed, how do you open it?” said the assistant Crown.

“Well. With the weaker ones you could use a spring clamp and reset them, but then these O’Gradys came along, and this one has four springs with a good eighty pounds’ pressure each. So they put a slip release under the base plate, and with that all you needed to do was hit it hard.”

“Would you please show us?”

Merrifield put the trap on its side. “I’ll see if I can kick it open.” He gave the underside of the trap a good kick, and the trap skidded a short distance across the floor but it did not open. Merrifield lined it up again and stood and swung his boot, and with the second kick there was a harsh metallic sound and the trap leapt up and then relaxed. When Merrifield stood it upright, the jaws fell away to either side.

“That didn’t seem to be very difficult, Mr. Merrifield,” said the assistant Crown.

“No, ma’am. Not if you know how and you get her sweet spot.”

“Could one not learn that from studying the mechanics to see how they work? They are openly accessible.”

“Well, ma’am. I suppose so.”

“Thank you, Mr. Merrifield.” The assistant Crown seemed pleased. “I have no further questions, Your Honour.”

“Your witness then, Mr. Quormby,” said the judge.

Mr. Quormby stood up and said, “Mr. Merrifield, have you ever seen an animal caught in one of these traps?”

“I never have, sir. But I’ve heard of it, out west. A few times, in fact. Couple of times a grizzly, and another time a cow. Broke all the bones and held fast to muscle and sinew.”

“A cow? With the release under the trap and not so easily accessible for a good kick like you’ve just shown us, how do they release the trap with a heavy animal in it?”

“They wouldn’t, sir. They’d kill the animal to get to the underside of the trap and kick it open. Better still, use an axe. The blunt side of it.”

“I see. Kill the animal and then use an axe on the trap. And if a man were caught in it with his leg broken and it’s deep-freezing temperatures, and let’s say there’s blood and frozen snow clumping on it, could that mechanism freeze?”

“Well, I suppose it could.”

The assistant Crown stood up and said, “Your Honour, he is leading the witness.”

“No more than you, Mrs. Tancock,” said the judge. “Carry on, Mr. Quormby.”

“Thank you, Your Honour. Mr. Merrifield, and if it’s in the snow in the middle of the night and you don’t know that there is such a mechanism, and a man is caught in it as we’ve just heard – how could one release the trap then?”

“Well, sir. I wouldn’t know.”

“If the jaws were closed, could you pull them apart, Mr. Merrifield? You, with your hands?”

“Sir?”

“Could you personally open the jaws of this trap with your hands, Mr. Merrifield?”

“Against a more’n-three-hundred-pound pressure? I could not, sir. I doubt that any man could. You’d need a horse and chains to do that. Or machinery. A pulley system would do it. Settin’ them was dangerous too. That’s one reason they’re not allowin’ that trap any more. That, and the damage it did to the animal.”

“Thank you, Mr. Merrifield.”

That night, blood kept seeping from under the tourniquet. She fought to control her panic, and eventually she managed to steady her hands and to refashion the tourniquet with loops at either end, through which she put a tent peg and then twisted it as tight as she could and locked it with the sharp end under the rope. She brought the tarpaulins from the sled and improvised a cover over them with walking poles to keep the canvas up and breathing holes where it did not meet the ground. Basic cover, and it would have to do for now. It was dark under there, and the smells of his blood and vomit were strong. She went back to the sled and brought the spirit burner. The thermometer on the sled said minus ten degrees Fahrenheit. Back at the tent she set up the burner next to the crawl-hole and melted snow.