Stupid Girls

ONE

To collect our lost things, Forest drove us along the abandoned railway—the rain slowed, the lake calmed—and while Forest drove, he flirted, and teased us for not being stupid girls, and still that’s what I remember most, not the portages that hadn’t been cleared of freefall or the interior of the park wild and quiet, but how things always seemed more serious in the rain, and how Forest, older than us by a year or two, how he admired the stupid girls he wished we were.

TWO

Before our unplanned hike, before the rain, we laid in our two-person tent and I told stories about the bear who killed, maimed boys years back on this very lake, about how when I sleep in Algonquin Provincial Park, I always think of windigo, white-washed and safe on TV.

THREE

Crushing loose gravel pilled along the tracks, we dreamed out loud of penne all’arrabbiata, unlimited breadsticks from that fast food Italian place. Carbs would warm us. When we found the cabins, old enough that they predated the parklands, first we knocked on doors, our teeth chattering.

FOUR

All this cottage country was locked up tight.

“They’re gone for the season,” my best friend said.

I nodded toward a window. “Should we… ?”

“If we get inside, we’ll leave a note.”

FIVE

Once we met a grizzled man who lived inside the boundaries, who named his son Forest, as if this wasn’t too pointed. Once after a series of late August thunderstorms drove the moose into hiding, my fingers cramped around my paddle until I couldn’t unclench them. Once we left our rented canoe in the brush along old train tracks like we were writing a bad nature poem.

Jen Ferguson is Métis with ancestral ties to the Red River and white, an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD. She is the award-winning (and award-losing!) author of The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, Those Pink Mountain Nights and A Constellation of Minor Bears.