When the Osprey Cries

When the Osprey Cries

By Heather McLeod

Chapter 1

Just before seven a.m. that Sunday morning, on my second lap of the unpaved, single-lane service road that circled the Rauch Homestead Shooting Range, thirty minutes deep into the Purcell Mountains, I heard only the pat-pats of my shoes.

And then: the shouting.

I’d started running as the sun peered through the campground’s evergreens. When I zipped the door of my tent closed in that raw morning light, the thin air bit my bare arms and legs and goosebumps rose on my freckled skin in the cold.

This campground, this forested shooting range, this valley in the southeastern corner of British Columbia, was three-thousand feet above sea level. Only a masochist would wear a tank top and shorts outside on a July morning.

It was true: I wanted the discomfort. I needed it.

Two weeks ago I had run on the northern tip of Newfoundland, circling Pistolet Bay Provincial Park’s campground again and again for an hour. By the time I’d silenced the voices in my head and was ready to make some morning tea, my fingers were too cold to light the camping stove. I’d had to drive into St. Anthony for Tim Hortons, my palms guiding the steering wheel.

This morning, after two laps around the range, I radiated heat. I’d tied my carrot hair up into two side knots, to keep it out of my face: sweat dripped from my scalp. Thirsty, I licked my lips and tasted salt.

Grounded in my body, I felt nothing and thought nothing. I ran on autopilot and followed the tire tracks in the dust between gravel patches: the caretaker’s side-by-side; the thin, braiding prints of bicycles. There were horseshoes and the parallel impressions of a deer or some other ungulate. Mine were the only human footmarks. Four sets of identical shoeprints, to mark my laps this weekend.

It was almost time for the rest of the campers to stir. Time for day two of the weekend archery shoot to begin.

It was in this state, wonderfully numb, when I heard the shouts.

I heard the shouting and recognized Levi’s tenor voice, the man I’d flirted with until midnight.

Shameful. And exhilarating. Our heads together in the glow light while the campfire smouldered, others reviving the flames with dry spruce and fir. Cans of Bud and flavoured gin in every adult’s hand, the sweet, lukewarm bubbles down my throat. The smell of Deet bug spray, evergreens and sweat through the smoke.

It was the first time I’d been drawn to an athlete’s body, that triangle frame of broad shoulders and narrow waist. I wanted to touch his jawline, lit up by the fire, to see if this fairy tale creature was real.

Had the others noticed us? Did they see Levi’s long fingers cup my knee?

I cringed at the thought. Shameful.

Hot and slick from my run, my lungs full of pine-scented air, I stopped to listen, stretching my legs to keep the muscles warm. My body had responded to Levi’s voice with a thrill of endorphins, but there was something wrong: a note of panic and crisis. He was shouting: something, something.

“What did you do?”

Wrong and jarring in the calm stillness of the forest. Like my friend Hettie and her husband battling last night, their words barely muffled by their camping trailer’s thin walls.

I turned toward Levi’s voice and ran between the trees.