THROUGH THE NEEDLES
Ian Sewall
The black flies, noseeums, were back. They came greedy for us tree counters, as we lumbered up and down the diamond shaped cut-blocks in Grande Cache. We were split, two of us to a 17 hectare block, separated by dirt and slash and the land. We counted pinecones, took slope readings with a clinometer, and snagged topfil white thread fluff around broken sticks to measure our distance between sixty meter plots. Those were the days before GPS became commonplace. We were tree counters, not to be confused with tree planters.
I wore a red cruise vest with slick side pockets that held one litre of water, a green relish and layered baloney sandwich, bear spray, and a McIntosh apple. Inside my wallet was a Firearms Acquisition Certificate to purchase a defender shotgun as protection from the near daily run-ins with black bears and an occasional grizzly. The shifts were ten and fours, ten days on, four days off, and that’s ten days in the bush. Many of us got bushed, completely habituated to daily life of walking through the woods, so that when we returned to Grande Prairie for our days off, we were often bewildered by the city entrapments. A hot shower became a luxury, cleansing off the thick dust and muskeg mud.
Our boss was generous to a fault and paid us for drive time, too. I would take a nap inside the Ford extended cab, as we were driven out to a new cut-block. We counters all had our own duplicate time booklets to keep track of our hours, and we were highly paid. If a worker could make the season, university could be paid for debt free. The thing is, many of the people that did this job didn’t last the summer. One of my best friends got beaver fever from drinking out of a stream. No joke.
But if you made the summer, hell if you made a ten day shift, you walked fast, you were taller, you were braver, you were changed, you showed what kind of logs made wide shingles. Always two pairs of socks, steel-toed boots, an orange dented hard hat, and when the rain came, we just kept grinding it out.
One August afternoon I took out my Silva Ranger compass. It was attached by a stringy black cord. I sighted it in and began walking through a patch of juvenile spruce. Sometimes you hear things in the wild, the wind, snapping branches, whistles of sorts, like the whole forest is breathing you in. When I squeezed through the trees, some of the more poky and menacing boughs and limbs slashed at me. My eyes almost shut, behind safety glasses and I heard a snorty huff behind me. I turned backwards and squinted through a forest slat of light. It was a big old black bear, over three hundred pounds in the perpetual prowl. Intelligent eyes, shaggy fur, the light brown fade from the snout, plantigrade paws. There was a spruce right ahead, that looked like it took a lightning hit, and about five feet up it was cracked, and a chunk of tree was horizontal, resting on the wet earth.
I scampered up that fallen conifer, perched on the edge like a whisky jack ready to take flight, and pulled out my bear spray. Cracked the orange plastic safety, better work, please please work. The simple quiet of the moment, the showdown, the heartbeats in both man and bear. I pictured that scene in Legends of the Fall where Tristan fought the bear, almost shapeshifted. Frozen into a timeless diorama.
Then I sprayed the pepper through the tightly spaced spruce. Sprayed in the general direction of the bruin. We looked at each other. The bear watched me, sniffed the spray. Sniff, sniff, sniff. And then a look of approval. This scene played out a lot differently in the bear safety videos we had to watch.
Time stood again. The sky became a deep turquoise. And the wind blew. We looked at each other a long, long time, and the Northern Lights would come and dance over both of us, as we embraced the moment, peering through the needles.
Ian Clay Sewall is based in Los Angeles. He is an MFA candidate at Antioch University, and serves on the Lunch Ticket Journal. His current short film “Man and the Motorcycle” can be seen at Landmark and Laemmle Theatres across the US.