Later, of course, he cried.
Past The Pas the spruces were as narrow as wolves' tails and there were ripply warm brown rivers. Cormorant Lake was a pale miniature sea. There was swamp, and then muskeg, and white birch flashing and thrumming by. They passed silver lakes in the green-walled dusk.
Came a blue dawn of tiny skinny trees, of lake and lichen. He was approaching the edge of the continent, soft and flat and wet, speckled and boggy. Some lakes were blue with pulsing stripes of paleness in the breeze. Waterdrops struck the train window, making transparent worlds. The ground was now itself a map, the lakes minuscule blue continents in a greenish sea, all unfamiliar, and so many of them, countries he'd never known before. The world was larger than he had thought.
An old Inuk couple sat drinking from economy-sized bottles of ginger ale and staring alertly out the window, looking for animals. The man's dark hands were the color of bloodstains, the web between thumb and forefinger snug over the other wrist. The woman, who was fat, never stopped smiling. Sometimes they spotted small flocks of Canada geese resting on the tundra and watched them in silence. Sometimes the old man divorced his veincorded reddish hands, leaned, coughed, and spat into the wastebag.
The ground was pale with lichened tussocks. The dwarf spruces' branch-ends were like strange green-toed claws. Memories landed on him with a mosquito's six-legged crouch.
They came into Churchill where the land was spongy brown and green, with so many indigo Swiss cheese holes, with flat olive-colored trees along the river's bank, ocher sand-islands, small infrequent patches of snow like crusty flakes of dryness in the soggy boggy ground, and ahead the sharp cracked white ice of the bay forest with patches of bog eaten out of them. The atlas closed. His train riding was finished. No more nobody never. He was in the snow country now.
