Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare Page B

journey and he took it.”
    â€œThe hunter needs to see the wolf,” he told her grandmother on the evening he asked her to marry him. He had flung at least a hundred categories of pelt out of his employer’s windows to dry on the railings, including cross fox, silver fox, hare flank, opossum, fitch, vicuna, wallaby and Tibetan lamb. “But I haven’t seen one in the flesh.”
    He spent a summer with three trappers at Fort Chipewyan, working at night because of the deer flies. At dawnbreak on the fifth day he wrote to his fiancée: “I’ve skinned my first animal – a buffalo.” He smeared the fleshed skin with fish oil and drummed it in sawdust and that winter used it as a sleigh robe, heading east through the unanimous snowscapes of Manitoba.
    Over the following year, he learned that riding in a sleigh wears out a fur more quickly than walking. He wore out the furs of a moose, a lynx and a priceless black fox.
    His favourite fur – it became his favourite word – was the muskrat. In Gimli, he lived for a season with an Icelandic Indian and his wife Snjólaug who taught him how to slit the skin at both hind legs from heel to vent, skin out the toes and leave them with the claws on, and pull the skin from the body. From that day on he could never pass a muskrat coat without stroking it, still seeing the animal which had given up its fur, its white bones on the prairie and the coyotes gnawing at the frosted meat. Before he sailed for Germany, he had a muskrat stuffed by a taxidermist in Toronto.
    One winter night, three hours down-country from Kenora, his trap caught a wolf. Saliva frothed in the starlight and yellow eyes stared at him, insane and fretful and wild. He saw the bloody knee and heard the rasp of tattered gums on the metal and decided it was time to go home.
    He arrived back in Leipzig in time for the first World Fur Congress. He heard Ernst Poland’s rousing opening speech and attended a lecture on ear mange in silver foxes and another lecture on the extreme difficulties of bleaching skins. In Gimli, Snjólaug had taught him how to hand-bleach rabbit skin. Within six months he had started his own business in the Brühl, developing her process.
    â€œThat’s why my grandmother calls me Snjólaug. Because of her, they were able to live.”
    Peter tore his eyes from the tiled figure above the doorway. Her enthusiasm had infected him. “You can’t know, but this might have been my city. Maybe it can be my city. Maybe I can come and study here.”
    â€œWhy, what do you have to do with us?”
    He explained how once upon a time an English girl from Lancashire went to sing in a Bach competition in Leipzig and sheltered a man on the run. “Let me ask: how would you go about finding him?”
    â€œListen,” she said, wetting her finger and rubbing at the wall. “You’re here for a weekend. You’re not going to be able to reach anyone. The only people who have any idea or who would be able to help are Party or police.”
    â€œI’ve been told I can’t go to the police.”
    â€œOf course you can. These people are on our side. They’re here to provide protection.”
    â€œDo you know someone?”
    â€œI know someone in the Party,” revealing more porphyry. “He might be able to help.”
    â€œCould you speak to him?”
    â€œGladly. Give me your address. I could write to you.”
    He hunted without success for a piece of paper.
    â€œWrite it here,” holding up the novel.
    On the inside back cover he wrote down his address and telephone number. “If I ever come and study in Leipzig, will you be here?”
    â€œCome on, we’ve only just met.”
    â€œI think you’re lovely.”
    She looked at him with a grave expression. “You don’t have a right to say that.”
    He wasn’t listening. He sensed a thickening in his throat, spreading into