Free Far North by Marcel Theroux

didn’t, but I was afraid he’d kill me as much out of fear as design.
    So I holstered my guns and waited for him to come over.
    It seemed to take an age for him to pluck up the courage to approach, and by the time he was standing over me with his rifle up my nose, my behind was getting cold and I was starting to regret putting away my weapons.
    Now the others inched up too, their eyes beady and curious, but not daring to come as near as their companion.
    He had a startled look on him. And he was older than I expected – not as strong as those other two, I supposed, so more use with a gun than a saw. He was wrapped more warmly than them, as though he’d been expecting to stand guard while they worked. He had a sharp-cornered frontier face that had been frost-pinched more than once, and a big gristly nose which was pink at the tip from the cold.
    ‘What’s your business?’ he asked. ‘Where you from? Who you with? How many of you are there?’
    I asked him to take the gun out of my face, and told him that I was alone, and a constabulary officer from the incorporated city of Evangeline, and therefore licensed to bear arms.
    He had some trouble digesting that iormation. ‘Evangeline?’ he said. ‘There’s no one alive there. Where are you really from?’
    There was real indignation in his voice, as though I had told him I was from the moon and expected him to believe it. But the more I think of it, the more I’m certain the indignation he felt arose from shame. Catching him there, with his patched-up clothes, and old gun – to a man old enough to remember how things used to be, it was like opening the door on him in the outhouse.
    ‘I really am from Evangeline,’ I said. And his confusion was so great that he actually put down the gun. I told you he was no soldier.
    The other two were on his shoulder with a ‘What’s he say?’
    ‘He says he’s from Evangeline.’
    That they took me for a man suited me fine. Those weeks of travelling certainly hadn’t made me any prettier.
    I asked if anyone minded if I stood up, and one of the two woodcutters gave me a hand to my feet. Then I introduced myself by name, but didn’t get any kind of response out of them. They were staring at me in silence, so to prod them into conversation I asked where they were from. The woodcutter who’d helped me up said, ‘Horeb.’
    So now it was my turn to be puzzled. By their appearance and their English, I took them for settlers, but there was no settlement in the whole of the Far North I knew of that went by that name. And the notion that anyone alive now could have dredged up the will and the strength to settle a new place – that was almost beyond my comprehension.
    I had the feeling of something inside me that flipped like a fish in a net. It was hope. As much as I bad-mouth people in general and think the worst of them, I’m secretly waiting for them to surprise me. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to give up on them wholly. Even though they are nine and ninetenths dirt, now and again they are capable of something angelic. I can’t say that it restores my faith, because I really had none in the first place, but when it happens it does confuse you.
    Still, my new friends weren’t in any hurry to weigh me down with their hospitality. I couldn’t help feeling that they wished I would disappear much as I’d arrived. I explained to them that I had two horses with me, that I’d been travelling for weeks, and I’d be grateful to water my animals and wash, if it wasn’t putting them to any trouble.
    They weren’t as quick to agree or as cordial as you might expect, and a number of doubtful glances passed between them before the man with the gun nodded, and the friendlier of the two woodcutters came with me while I fetched the animals.
    Then I waited beside the old man while the other two finished their job of cutting. He couldn’t but have been curious about me, or at least where I’d come from. And I had plenty of