From the Little the Much is Known

Part One - Aite nan Con (The Place of the Dogs)

After picking a long stalk of blue wildrye grass, she proceeded over the rough ground to the cairn. Built in the 1960's, the weathered circular stone cairn with its patinated brass tablet pointing out prominent features – both manmade and natural – and their distances, was situated on the highest point of the hill. It was a bare rocky hilltop – a tonsure of scarred stone, dirt, and worn asphalt surrounded by luxurious grass and groves of stunted and misshapen Garry oak. Tall waving stalks of wildrye, bentgrass, sweetgrass, and orchardgrass, and crooked arbutus thickened the hill below the cairn while narrow strands of glossy Oregon grape with leaves turning scarlet in the fall waved occasionally in the light breeze. The wide open vista before her extended to the towering snow-capped Olympic Mountains in the south and the distant West Coast mountains in the north and allowed for an unhindered view of Victoria and its famous hills, Mount Tolmie and Mount Douglas to the northeast.

The early October sun was brilliant, and as a cool breeze rolled in from the southeast, it still cast a delightfully warm blanket over the hilltop so recently bathed in the long, hot summer of a west coast summer. Jennifer sat on the edge of the cairn, felt the heat of the brass tablet absorb through her leggings, and closed her eyes. The fleeting warmth of the air settled on her, and the burning hate she had felt at school slowly faded to be replaced by the sadness that always seemed to inhabit her. She tried to shake it off – to push past the unsettling feeling and the nebulous notions of guilt that plagued her. As tears rose in her eyes and her lip quivered, the vague imagery lurking so deeply in her soul rose through the depths of unconscious denial and emotional subterfuge to appear in her waking mind – the red plastic ball at rest on the seat, the laughing eyes in the rear view mirror, the truck grill of an eighteen wheeler, the shadowy memory of a hand, and the faint words, "I love you."

Jennifer buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Slowly, the disjointed memories faded back into their distant caliginous holding, and she wiped her eyes and nose with her sleeve. The darkness passed, the sun burned through the pain and misery, and Jennifer breathed a heavy sigh. Yet her face crumpled into tears again and she buried it in her hands. The memories, benign in their individuality, were horrific as a collection.

The accident had happened seven months before. A drive to Duncan to see a friend of her father's; the rain pelting down as an early March gale roared over the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Traffic on the often treacherous Malahat Drive was heavy with the oncoming lights blinding in the pouring rain; chatter from her little brother about a Lego set he wanted for his birthday in April was a distraction.

Then nothing.

Jennifer woke up two days later with her arm in a cast and her mother sobbing beside her.

Her father and little brother were dead.

It had taken months, over the long solitary spring and summer, to even begin to get used to the loneliness – no little brother to look after or to annoy her with his incessant teasing; no father to lavish her with the love and attention that only a doting father could. There was nothing now – just emptiness.

Wiping her nose again, Jennifer stood up and brushed the dust off of her leggings. It was time to leave, time to go home to her mother. The path down the hill was short and wound through the wild grasses that had grown tall and faded to a dry golden hue in the heat of the summer, but were again growing luxurious in the autumn. She crossed the old ball field at the base of the hill; the flat, desiccated field muddy and churned from the wet of first hard rains of autumn was now filled with dogs and their owners and children going home from school. She picked up her pace, for she knew Brian Howard and his toadies would be scouring the area looking for blood.

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