serial fiction

Delroy and the Cheese — Part Four

About wildlife and dairy products

This is the fourth chapter of an 18 chapter series about life in a Canadian tree-planting camp. Feel free to comment either publicly or privately. If you’re new, you may want to start at the beginning or go to the complete list of Delroy and the Cheese chapters.

The next morning I was in a much better mood. For one thing, it didn’t rain on us as we walked out to the block.

You do a lot of walking when you’re tree-planting. Sometimes you’re walking and planting trees. Sometimes you’re just walking. Well, you’re never really just walking. You’re usually climbing over something or slogging through something or scaling up something or falling down something. In this contract, there was a lot of slogging through something. The something usually being a swamp or some nigh impenetrable brush.

Today most of our route was over terrain I like to call “mush”. It’s not quite swamp and it’s not quite mud, and it’s not quite brush. It’s light vegetation, tall grass, and short brush growing in soft, sodden ground that gets churned up and eventually becomes almost mud, almost swamp. It is a very undependable surface to walk on.

As we walked I stared at the little scrap of yellow hankie that was poking out of Delroy’s pocket. This effectively meant that I was staring at Delroy’s butt. I suddenly had the completely irrational fear that someone might be watching me watching Delroy’s butt and get the wrong idea. I glanced over my shoulder. There was no one there. Of course, there wasn’t. The cut line was empty. No people. No moose. No bears.

Wait. Wind that back. No people. No moose. One bear.

Shit.

Well, no need to panic. At least not yet. It would probably make sense to set some time aside for panicking in the future, though.

“Delroy!” I whispered as loudly as I could.

No response.

I sped up a bit and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Delroy! There’s a bear following us!”

Delroy stopped to look at the bear. It was about 100m behind us down the cut line. It had stopped when we stopped and was watching us watching it. “Cool,” said Delroy.

“It can probably smell your cheese,” I said.

“I doubt that. We’re upwind of it,” said Delroy.

“Exactly!” I said.

“Oh yeah!” he said. “I always get that wrong.” He patted the pocket that contained his cheese, then tucked in the little wisp of yellow hanky that was poking out. “Well, I doubt it’s my cheese. Why would a bear even know what good cheese smells like? It’s probably our lunch.”

“What does the quality of the cheese matter!” I said. “Anyway, why wouldn’t a bear be able to smell your cheese?”

“It’s not that he couldn’t smell it,” said Delroy. “It’s that I doubt he would know what it is. Cheese isn’t exactly naturally occurring up here.”

“Well, neither are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!” I said. “But that’s what’s in my lunch today. So why couldn’t it be your cheese? Jesus Christ, Delroy! Bears are mammals. They’ve been raised on their mother’s milk just like you and me. And what is cheese made from? Milk, Delroy! Milk! It’s a hell of a lot more likely that a bear would be familiar with dairy products than with peanut butter!”

Delroy didn’t say anything for a while. We both stood there watching the bear. It looked like it was sniffing the air. Then Delroy said, “I wonder what bear cheese tastes like.”

“Sweet Mother of Jesus!” I said. “Bear cheese?!? Well, why don’t you just go over there and milk it?” I gestured at the bear. “Go on! Milk that bear!”

Delroy shook his head. “For one thing, I think it’s a male,” he said. “And for another, even if it was female, they don’t produce milk all the time, you know. Probably only just after they’ve given birth, and I don’t see any cubs.”

“Well, thank fuck for that!” I said. “One bear is bad enough, but at least it’s not a mama bear and cubs.”

“Of course, they might be hiding in the tree line,” said Delroy.

I smacked him on the shoulder. “Why did you have to say that? Now I’m picturing hundreds of bear cubs lurking in the bushes!”

“Now just stay calm,” said Delroy. “She probably doesn’t mean any harm.”

“She!” I said. “I thought you said it was a male!”

“How am I supposed to be able to tell the sex of a bear from this far away?” asked Delroy. “I’m not a zoologist.”

“No! You’re a walking cheese shop!”

I made a grab for the pocket of his jeans that contained the cheese. Delroy twisted away from me and we stumbled around a bit on the mushy ground.

“Keep your hands off my cheese!”

“I’m throwing your cheese to the bear whether you like it or not!” I said.

Delroy kept turning away from me and I pivoted around him trying to get at his back pocket. We slogged around in circles in the muck and mired for a while. I made one final lunge and managed to snag the edge of his pocket but I was off balance and I fell into the mush, taking Delroy with me.

We struggled away from each other and back onto our feet. I was still irritated, but less about the bear and the cheese than I was about the fact I was now covered in mud and twigs and wet grass.

“Hey,” said Delroy.

“What?” I asked.

“The bear’s gone.”

I looked at where the bear had been. Sure enough, there was no sign of it or its possibly imaginary cubs. I scanned the cutline in both directions and the trees on either side. No sign of the bear. We both looked at each other and then turned around and continued walking toward the cut block where our piece of land was waiting.

“What is it with you and that cheese, anyway?” I asked. “You treat that block of cheese like it’s a pet or something.”

Delroy reached into his pocket and took out the cheese, still carefully wrapped in its yellow hankie. He looked at it for a second, made sure it was still tightly wrapped up, and put it back in his pocket.

“It’s a reminder of all the good things that are out there in the real world,” he said. “We only ever seem to get two types of cheese here in camp. Cheddar for sandwiches and grated imitation parm whenever they give us spaghetti. But, there are more than two types of cheese in the world, Stu. This cheese symbolizes all the wonder that civilization can provide. It’s not just cheese, Stu. It’s flush toilets, and cappuccinos, and pavement.”

“But you never eat it! You look at it. You smell it. But you never eat any of it!”

“The point of the cheese isn’t to eat it. It’s the possibility of the cheese that’s important. The whole point of the cheese is that it doesn’t belong up here. It is not of this world. At least not in this tree-planting world. It’s a Pecorino Sardo from Italy. That’s quality cheese. It’s a pearl in a bowl of Cheerios. You don’t just eat a cheese like that. How would you replace it? It would be impossible to find up here.

“Besides,” he added, “I may not eat it, but I do taste it from time to time. Well, to be completely accurate, I just lick it. No teeth.”

“You lick it?”

Delroy nodded. My mind boggled. We had arrived at our tree cache by this point and so I let the conversation end on that disturbing revelation. As we bagged up, I kept an eye out for the bear in case it made an appearance again. We put our packs in the center of the cache and I hoped our lunch wasn’t too odiferous.

It took us about an hour and a half to plant out our bags. When we got back to the tree cache there was still no sign of the bear. We bagged up again and kept planting. A little after noon, Griff, one of the foremen, came by and dropped off more trees at our cache. He walked over to where we were planting, stopping a couple of times to check our trees on the way.

Tree-planting is not just about the number of trees you plant. You have to plant them right side up as well.

Actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that. They have to be planted not just right-side-up but also to the right depth — not so deep that you bury any needles; not so shallow that the plug is showing. They have to be straight. And it’s not just the tree part that has to be straight. The plug needs to be straight as well. You can’t just jam it in the ground and hope for the best. And, of course, the spacing has to be right. They can’t be too close together; they can’t be too far apart. When a foreman checks your trees he counts the number of trees in a sample plot and if you have too many or too few in the plot it’s a fault — the same as if you’ve got anything else wrong with your trees. For example, if you’ve planted one of them upside down.

So, anyway, that’s one of the things Griff does with his day, checks our trees and makes sure we’re not planting them upside down.

“How’s it going, fellas?” he asked.

“Not bad,” I said. “How do our trees look?”

Delroy and I both kept planting. As I said, you can’t ever stop if you want to make money. Griff walked along beside us, watching as we planted.

“Pretty good,” he said. “Spacing looks all right. I found one planted a bit shallow back there, so keep an eye on that. And make sure you hit the high spots — this block is pretty wet. But in general, yeah, it’s looking good.”

“Cool,” I whacked my shovel on a stump to knock some of the mud off of it. “Oh, and we saw a bear this morning.” I planted another tree.

“Oh yeah?” Griff turned around and started scanning the block. “Black bear?”

“Yes.”

“Male or female?”

“I wasn’t really close enough to tell,” I said. “And Delroy can’t help you, either. We’re not zoologists, you know”

If Delroy heard me, he didn’t show it. He just kept planting — planting and humming.

“Where was it?” asked Griff.

“On the cutline on the way here, maybe five hundred meters before the edge of the block. We noticed it behind us when we were walking here. I don’t know where it went, though. We looked away for a minute and when we looked for it again, it had vanished.”

I glanced over at Delroy to see if he was going to mention our little tussle, but he just kept planting and humming to himself. “By the way,” I said, “do you think bears eat cheese?”

“I don’t see why not. They’re omnivores. They’ll eat anything.”

“Ha!” I said.

Delroy didn’t notice. He just kept planting.

Next chapter…

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