Caster's Confession

I'm Brandon, fifty-four years old, and I write this from the track-casting shed off Highway 8, where I spend most of my days reading mud and snow for sign of large carnivores. Bears mostly, the odd wolf, once a very committed wolverine that ruined a pair of boots I liked. The point is, I work alone, and I have gotten so used to my own company that people make me feel like I'm wearing somebody else's suit. Then three years ago, at a symposium in Winnipeg where I gave a talk nobody attended, a retired caster named Walt introduced me to Kaylee, who runs the quince festival in Gimli, and I have not been right since.

She was forty-five then, I was fifty-one, and she laughed at one of my jokes, the only person in the room who did, and after that I started volunteering at her festival every fall like someone who had lost his mind somewhere and hoped to find it in a fruit orchard.

Last week I did something worse. I wrote her a letter.

* * *

Dear Kaylee,

I need to tell you something and I don't know how to say it, so I'll do what I always do and describe an animal instead.

Last year, at the festival, I watched you burn the wasp nests in the old pavilion. You know the ritual, obviously, you run it, the copper bowls on the hay bales and the smoke and everybody standing back while you carried the nests out one at a time. I was supposed to be helping with the parking. I did not help with the parking. I stood in the rain and watched you work, and I have thought about it roughly every day since, which for a man my age is an embarrassing amount of thinking.

I don't know what you're supposed to do with a confession like this. I've spent thirty years reading tracks and I can tell you what an animal was doing six hours ago by a bent grass blade, but I cannot tell what I am doing now. I think about your hands on the copper bowl. I think about the light through the canvas. I keep volunteering and I keep telling myself it's for the quinces, and Kaylee, I don't even like quinces.

Sorry. That's the letter. Burn it if you want, you're good at burning things.

Brandon

* * *

Her reply came nine days later, on actual paper, which I did not expect from a woman who runs a festival with a smartphone and a megaphone.

Brandon,

A carnivore caster writes me a page and a half about a wasp nest and apologizes to the wasp nest. This is the best mail I have gotten all year and I get flyers for snowmobiles constantly.

You stood in the rain for forty minutes last October. Walt told me. He also told me you helped three old ladies park a Buick sideways and then vanished behind a hay bale when I came out with the second bowl. Very smooth, very stealthy. You're wasted on tracks, you should work surveillance.

Here's my question, and think before you answer. Why does a man who reads bear scat for a living care about quinces, wasps, and a small-town fruit festival that is mostly older ladies and one questionable tug-of-war? People don't volunteer six weekends for fruit. They volunteer for a person. So either you really love quinces, in which case I'll get you the good recipe, or you're telling me what I think you're telling me, in which case I dare you to actually show up to the burning this year and stand where I can see you instead of behind hay like a guilty elk.

Your hands are not the only ones on the bowls, by the way. But more on that if you're brave.

Kaylee

P.S. The wolverine story better be true.

I read it four times in the shed. Then I wrote back the same night, which even I could tell was a mistake, because the second letter is always the honest one.

* * *

Kaylee,

The wolverine story is true and I have photos.

You asked why I care. Fine. Here it is, plain, because you dared me and I apparently do whatever you dare me to do, which is a new problem for a fifty-four-year-old man.

I think about your hands. Not in a vague way, in a specific way, the way you hold the copper bowl with both hands and your thumbs rest on the rim and your wrists turn when you tip the nest in. I have watched you do it and then I have lain in my truck in the dark thinking about those hands, and I have imagined what they'd be like on me, on my chest, lower, and I'm blushing at a desk in a shed that smells like bear gland wax, which is not a romantic setting for this letter.

I imagine you deliberate. You do everything like you mean it and nothing like you're in a hurry, and I want, and I'll just write it since this letter is already ruined, I want to be the thing you handle like that. Slow. Certain. I want to find out if you make that same focused face.

Also I bought a sateen cummerbund. I don't know how it happened. I was in a thrift store in Selkirk looking for a rain tarp and there it was, deep green, and I thought of the copper bowls, and now it's on a hanger in my truck like evidence.

Brandon

P.S. This is the most words I have written in a row since college. Don't let it go to your head.

* * *

Her answer was a text message, which somehow made it worse, more immediate, sitting there glowing on my phone at six in the morning while I drank coffee in the truck. It was a photo. Kaylee, forty-eight years old now and built like the festival should pay her extra, standing in what looked like her kitchen wearing the deep green sateen cummerbund and, as far as the frame showed, nothing else. Her hair down, her arms crossed, one eyebrow up.

The caption said: Find me at the pavilion when hail starts.

I sat there for a long time with the phone in both hands. Then the sky over Lake Winnipeg went the color of a bruise, because of course it did, that's what October does here, and the forecast on the radio said hail by evening, and I put the truck in gear.

I was halfway to Gimli when the first stones hit the roof, and I pulled over at a gas station in Arborg, engine running, wipers going, hail hammering the canvas of my camper shell like applause from an unfriendly crowd, and I typed an email on my phone with two thumbs, badly.

* * *