American Game Trails

A tremulous ribbon of celluloid unfurls, bearing two anachronistic argonauts—Buckland, all flannel and restless empiricism, and Cleary, taciturn as a hemlock stump—into the cathedral hush of New Brunswick’s emerald abyss. Between 1909 and 1910, while Manhattan’s grids clattered toward verticality, these men trade steam whistles for spruce gum, stepping off the end of cartography. The camera, jittery as a trapped lynx, watches them shoulder canvas packs that bulge with brass cartridges, glass-plate negatives, and the last gasp of Victorian taxonomy. They paddle a cedar-skinned canoe up tannin-dark rivers where mirrored clouds fracture around the bow; each stroke is a typewriter hammer striking the blank paper of morning. A bull moose—antlers like shattered cathedral organ pipes—looms from alder shadow, exhaled breath turning to pewter mist; the men freeze, not in fear but reverence, as though confronting a shaggy deity that predates scripture. Days later, beneath a cedar whose roots grip the planet the way guilt clings to memory, they discover a lynx kitten abandoned by fire and famine. Cleary pockets the tremorous scrap of fur inside his wool shirt, and the film’s heart begins to beat beneath borrowed ribs. Night brings a cinematographic coup: the first intentional, lit close-up of a living Canada lynx, eyes reflecting kerosene lanterns like twin nebulae—an image so primordial it feels exhumed rather than shot. Autumn smolders into a bruised violet dusk; they track caribou whose hooves drum against lichen like rain on sheet metal. A snowstorm arrives, white as amnesia, erasing the trail until only the lynx’s pawprints remain—dots of ink on a parchment of oblivion. In the final reel, Buckland releases the now-grown lynx back into swirling flakes; the animal pauses, looks once at the men, then dissolves into conifers. The camera lingers on their faces: not triumph, but the vertigo of having brushed the raw wire of existence. Fade to black over the sound of a river that will keep speaking long after the last projector bulb bursts.