The Other Side of the Bridge

FireFighters Battle BushFire

Lost Bear Hunter Located by Plane: In Bush 40 Hours

' Temiskaming Speaker, May 1957


On a small farm about two miles outside Struan there lived a beautiful woman. She was tall and willowy with a lot of fair hair that she drew back into a thick plait and tied with whatever came to hand ' a bit of frayed ribbon, an elastic band, an old piece of string. On Sundays she rolled it into a shining ball at the nape of her neck and fastened it somehow so that it wouldn ' t fall down during church. Her name was Laura Dunn. Laura, her own name, soft and beautiful like she was; Dunn, her husband ' s name, solid and lumpen like her husband. Arthur Dunn was a farmer, a big, heavyset man with a neck at least twice the width of his wife ' s, and to Ian, sitting with his parents three pews behind, he looked about as exciting as dishwater.

Ian had first noticed Laura Dunn when he was fourteen ' she must have been around all his life but that was the year he became aware of her. She would have been about thirty at the time. She and Arthur had three children, or possibly four. Ian wasn ' t sure ' he ' d never paid any attention to the children.

For a year he made do with watching her in church on Sundays ' the Dunns came into town for church every Sunday without fail. Then, when he was fifteen, Ian ' s father said that he should get a job working Saturdays and holidays and start saving up for his further education, the theory being that you appreciated things more if you ' d helped to pay for them yourself. Ian couldn ' t recall anyone asking him if he wanted more education ' it was another of the many assumptions people made about his life ' but in this particular case he didn ' t argue. He got on his bike and cycled out to the Dunns ' farm.

The farm was an oddity in the Struan area because Arthur Dunn still worked his land with horses. It wasn ' t because he couldn ' t afford a tractor ' the farm was prosperous enough ' and it wasn ' t through any religious convictions like the Mennonites farther south. When asked about it Arthur would study the ground thoughtfully, as if the question had never occurred to him before, and then say that he guessed he liked horses. No one bought that explanation, though. They all believed that Arthur had been put off tractors years earlier, when his father got one and drove it down to the lower forty, where he rolled it into a ditch and killed himself, all within two hours of its arrival on the farm. Even the youngest and least intelligent of the plow horses would have known better than to fall into a ditch. The day after the funeral Arthur got rid of the tractor and harnessed up the team again and he ' d been plodding along behind them ever since.

He was out in the fields when Ian cycled up to the farm. Ian saw him, off in the distance, being towed along by two great heavy-footed animals like a picture postcard of a time gone by. Ian leaned his bike up against the pump, which he guessed would only be used to fill the water trough ' all but the most remote farms in the area had running water, and electricity too; they ' d been connected up to the grid two years ago, when the power lines were run in for the sawmill.