carrying him into deep water and
holding him until he got the idea, but
that didn’t work. The black Shepherd is
the last in. She always is. The
neighbors taught her how to swim by
tossing her into-a Jake. She never
stays in very long.

he water down here is cold. Cold

like the sting of every bone in your
body sliced open, the bloody centres
suddenly exposed. | step in cautiously.
Baby fish dart away from my feet. In
deeper water, | can make out the
shapes of adult trout, curving away
from the churning dogs. The crash
of the waterfall fills the silence.
Downstream, the river goes out into
mist. The forest conceals the
shadows of coyote wolf cougar
bear. A friend of mine saw a cougar
a five minute walk from here; he
climbed a tree in fear. The cougar
ignored him. It was after deer. | feel
suddenly isolated, like people are
something that is very far away from
where | am. But | am used to this
feeling. Even my house is a paltry
excuse for human habitation. There
are bear claw marks in the window
screens, skunks in the walls,
woodrats in the basement,
deermice in the living room, alligator
lizards in the bathtub, frogs in my
mother’s bedroom. | take another
step. Breathe. Plunge in.

The first thing | notice is that the dogs
seem larger. Then | notice the cold.

My friend Samantha told me a story
once, of how she used to live ina
house built on stilts over water at the
edge of a forest. At night, the dogs in

the neighborhood used to form into a
pack and hunt. One night, they chased
a deer into the water beside Sam’s
house. Her parents fought off the dogs
and brought the deer into their house.
It died. From exhaustion and from fear.
What do you do when an adult buck
deer dies on your living room floor? |
thought they must have eaten it, but
they didn’t. They buried it.

| can see it now, the broken brown
body plunged deep in the earth. | can
see the dogs’ eyes in the darkness.

 

“| knew you when you were seven
weeks old,” | tell my dogs. “l taught you
to ‘sit.”” | feel ridiculous; these words
are nothing. The sun retracts from the
water and brittle black bodies unfurl
themselves down to the water’s
surface to drink. Bats. The trees are

 

 

standing in shadow, | know | will be
walking back up in the dark. A friend of
my highschool art teacher stepped on
a sleeping grizzly once.

| am afraid of my dogs. Their eyes
are glazed. My looks glance off the
hard surfaces. They are too close and
their breathing is much too loud. Their
faces are straining with the effort of
swimming, the wet fur slicked down
and shiny. | can feel the motion of the
water from their pumping legs.

There is nothing malicious in them,
to cause my fear. But there is never
anything malicious in this place.
The water beneath me is absolute.
| know there is a bottom down
there, but | don’t know this. | know
there is a slimy dark crevice going
down to the centre of the earth,
and | can feel it reaching up and
pulling me down. | call to my dogs
for help, but they churn in place,
their eyes empty holes. Something
is down there. The whole world is
down there.

“In. BC people see monsters.”
Terry Glavin, the founder of the
newspaper | work at, told me that
in a Japanese restaurant, in one
of those closet rooms they put you
in, while we ate foreign food and |
curled up on the bench half-
asleep. | was waiting for him to
say that there are monsters in BC,
so | could dismiss what he was
saying and feel safe, but he’s too
good a journalist to do that. “The
natives say there are places, where
one river joins another river, where one
world also joins another world. There,
they say, you can sometimes see
people in boats—they’re people in

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