The Fragrance of the Red Deer

The latch of the mess hall door did not so much click as crack, a sharp, brittle sound that traveled easily through the sub-zero iron of the northern Ontario morning. It was February 14, 1945.

For three months, Camp 41 had smelled of nothing but wet spruce, the vinegar tang of green cabbage, and the gray, greasy lard used to stretch the Red Cross flour. But as the third platoon of the German Women’s Auxiliary Corps shuffled through the snow—boots packed with dry moss, fingers tucked deep into the rough wool of their gray tunics—the air between the pine barracks changed.

It began as a thin, sweet weight on the wind. Then it broadened into something rich, heavy with the oil of juniper berries, the black heat of cracked peppercorns, and the metallic, iron-rich musk of wild meat seared in a deep iron pot.

Irmgard Köhler stopped. Her boots, twice re-soled with strips of discarded truck tire, sank three inches into the crust of the drift.

“Irmgard,” whispered Alfreda Müller from behind her, her breath rising in a quick, nervous puff of white. “Keep moving. The guard.”

But Irmgard could not move. Her nostrils flared, drawing in the steam that drifted from the chimney of the kitchen shack. Her tongue grew thick; the back of her jaw ached with a sudden, violent rush of saliva. It was a smell that belonged to another world—a world with thick stone walls, porcelain stoves, and leaded glass windows that looked out over the black, jagged spikes of the Bavarian Alps.

“It’s Hirschpfeffer,” Irmgard said, her voice dropping into the low, heavy dialect of the south.

“Don’t be a fool,” Brunhilda Schmidt muttered, her face pinched gray from the damp cold. “It’s horse. Or the offal from the logging camps.”

“No,” Irmgard insisted. A hot prickle of water hit the corners of her eyes, freezing instantly against her lashes into tiny beads of salt. “It’s red deer. A buck. Shot in the deep snow.”

The mind of a twenty-four-year-old prisoner of war is a small, locked chest, but that morning, the smell of the kitchen key turned the lock until the hinges screamed.

In November 1942, the world had still possessed a floor. Irmgard had been seventeen then, her hair braided tight against the crown of her head, her cheeks scrubbed pink by the rime of the Upper Palatinate. The war was something that happened in the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter or through the static of the Volksempfänger radio in the parlor—a series of distant triumphs, names of cities like Sevastopol and Tobruk that sounded like labels on exotic spice jars.

Her father, Heinrich, had taken her into the state forests behind Oberammergau for her first true hunt. They had walked for three hours through drifts that reached her knees, their breath matching in the silence of the firs. He had carried his old Sauer triple-barrel; she had carried the light Mauser carbine her grandfather had given her for her confirmation.

When the stag appeared—six points, his coat nearly black from the winter mud—her hands had shaken so hard the front sight beat like a bird against the white backdrop of the hill.

“Steady, Mäuschen,” her father had whispered, his hand a broad, warm weight on her shoulder. “Between the ribs. Do not look at the horns. Look at the life.”

The shot had been clean. That night, the kitchen of the old stone forestry lodge had been hot enough to melt the frost on the coats hanging by the door. Her mother, Martha, had stood over the great earthenware crock, her forearms dusted with flour, turning the cubes of venison in a marinade of sour red wine, wild thyme, and vinegar. Her brothers, Franz and little Ernst, had wrestled on the sheepskin rug by the hearth while her grandfather lifted a heavy silver goblet of dark beer.

“To the forest,” the old man had toasted, his whiskers wet with foam. “And to the girl who keeps the larder full.”

Irmgard had sat beneath the framed portrait of the Führer, her heart swollen with a terrible, sweet certainty. They were the people of the soil. The earth gave them its meat, the state gave them its purpose, and the future was a long, straight road bordered by old oaks.

Six months later, Franz was missing in the bend of the Don. By the winter of 1943, Ernst was digging trenches outside of Breslau with the Hitler Youth. Irmgard, moved by the grand, brassy music of the radio speeches and the look of hollow-eyed exhaustion in her father’s face, had volunteered for the Wehrmachthelferinnen—the women’s auxiliary.

They told her she would be a clerk, a keeper of records, a small, clean tooth in the great machine of victory. Instead, she had found herself in a concrete bunker outside of Aachen in the autumn of 1944, her fingers typing out casualty lists while the walls groaned under the thud of American artillery.

Then came the night the roof came down. Then the grey-coated men with the strange, flat accents who didn’t shoot them, but instead bundled forty-three of them into the dark, oily hold of a Liberty ship that smelled of bilge and vomit.

The Iron and the Snow

The train that brought them north from Halifax had windows covered in thick green shades, but Irmgard had found a tear in the fabric the size of a fingernail. Through it, she had watched the world turn from grey water to black forest—an endless, flat sea of spruce and birch that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Germany was a small place, a garden where every tree had a name and every hill had a ruin. This country, this Canada, was an indifference. It was a sky that went on until it flattened the earth beneath it.

Camp 41 was a collection of rough-sawn hemlock huts set into a clearing seventy miles north of the railway line at Hearst. There were no gardens here. There were only the stumps of trees cut down to clear the line of sight for the three machine-gun towers and the twelve-foot wire fences.

The women lived by a code of iron silence.

“We do not look at them,” Laurelei Adler had said on their first night in the barracks, her voice sharp as glass. Laurelei had been an interpreter for the district command in Stuttgart; her English was perfect, full of the high, clipped vowels of the British schools she had attended before the war. “We do not speak their tongue. If they ask a question, we give the name, the rank, the auxiliary number. Anything else is a betrayal of the boys in the East.”

So they had become ghosts. When the camp commander, Captain Aldrich—a dry, gray-haired man who walked with the stiff leg of a Somme veteran—came through for inspection, forty-three pairs of boots struck the rough floorboards in unison, but forty-three pairs of eyes looked through him, fixed on the pine knots in the opposite wall.

They did their work—scrubbing the grease from the guards’ mess, mending the heavy wool socks of the garrison, hauling the kitchen wood—with a rhythmic, machine-like efficiency that was more terrifying than anger.

“They’re like clocks,” Sergeant Proulx, a short French-Canadian with a mustache like a wire brush, told the captain. “You wind them up in the morning, they walk until dark, and they don’t look at you once. It gives the boys the creeps, sir.”

The barracks were a landscape of frozen water and grey wool. The small box stove in the center of the room burned green birch that hissed and sputtered, spitting out more smoke than heat. By January, the frost on the inside of the logs was two inches thick. Irmgard slept with her boots under her head to keep the leather from freezing solid, her fingers wrapped around the small, black-bound prayer book her mother had slipped into her small suitcase before the train took her away from Bavaria.

The only person who seemed to see them as anything other than gray shapes was Private Duncan Fraser.

He was nineteen, a long-jointed boy from the southern plains of Saskatchewan whose uniform always looked too large for his narrow shoulders. He had the wide, clear eyes of a horse that hadn’t been broken yet, and when he stood guard by the woodpile, he didn’t hold his Lee-Enfield rifle across his chest like the others. He let it hang by the sling from his shoulder, his hands shoved deep into his mackinaw pockets.

“You’re going to lose those toes, missus,” he said one morning to Crystal Wagner, the nursing assistant, as she struggled to lift a frozen log with fingers that had turned the color of lard.

Crystal didn’t look up. She didn’t answer. She simply hauled the log against her apron and walked past him.

Duncan had rubbed the back of his neck, his face reddening beneath his freckles. ” Suit yourself,” he muttered to the wind. “But the frost don’t care about the Reich.”

Three days later, the wind changed, coming down from Hudson Bay like a wet whip. The thermometer outside the guardhouse hit forty below. In the barracks, the water bucket by the door turned to solid ice within an hour of being filled. Nurse Constance Webb, the camp medical officer, came through with her lantern, her face grim as she checked the women’s heels for the white, waxy spots of third-degree frostbite.

“They need more fuel, Captain,” she told Aldrich in the office that evening. “And another stove. If two of them lose feet, Ottawa will have an inquiry. They’re still protected under the convention.”

Aldrich sighed, looking at the map on his wall—a vast, empty expanse of blue and green where Camp 41 was nothing but a red dot at the end of a pencil line. “The supply train is stalled at Cochrane. We’re short on dry wood ourselves, Constance.”

Duncan Fraser had been standing by the door, his cap in his hands, waiting to deliver the evening log. He cleared his throat—a loud, dry sound in the small room.

“Sir?”

Aldrich looked up, his glasses slipping down his nose. “What is it, Fraser?”

“The old logging camp three miles back, sir. There’s a pile of seasoned cedar under the collapsed shed. It’s dry as tinder. And there’s an old cookstove there. A small one, but iron. We could haul it on the horse-sled.”

Aldrich looked at the boy for a long moment. “That’s three miles through five feet of snow, Private. It’s dark in an hour.”

“I know the trail, sir,” Duncan said simply. “My dad always said a cold horse won’t pull for long. It’s the same with people, I reckon.”

They brought the stove in at midnight. The noise of the iron legs scraping against the floorboards woke Irmgard. She sat up in her bunk, her blanket pulled to her chin, watching through the dark as the tall Canadian boy and Sergeant Proulx wrestled the heavy box onto a hearth of flat stones. Duncan’s face was black with soot; his eyebrows were white with frost.

When he finished hooking the pipe into the chimney chimney hole, he knelt by the small door, blew into the kindling until a orange tongue of flame caught the cedar shavings, and then stood up, wiping his hands on his trousers.

He caught Irmgard looking at him. For three seconds, neither of them moved. The room was silent save for the first, clean crackle of the dry wood. Then Duncan gave her a small, awkward nod—not the salute of a soldier to a prisoner, but the quick jerk of the head a farmer gives a neighbor across a line fence—and walked out into the snow.

The Wild Game

By February, the camp had grown small. The snow had reached the eaves of the barracks, turning the compound into a trench of white walls. The food was down to salt pork and gray peas that refused to soften, no matter how long the cooks boiled them in the copper vats.

On his day off, Duncan Fraser took his own rifle—a heavy Winchester .30-30 his father had sent him in a greased canvas wrap—and walked out past the wire.

He had been raised in the scrub-oak coulees of the Qu’Appelle Valley, where you could see a coyote five miles off if the sun was right. Here, the bush was a wall. You didn’t see the deer; you heard them—the sharp snort of a buck through the hazel bushes, the dry rattle of a hoof against a frozen branch.

He tracked the doe for two hours before he found the buck standing in a cedar swamp where the snow was packed hard by their winter yarding. It was a big white-tail, eight points, his neck thick with the winter rut. Duncan knelt in the snow, his bare thumb checking the hammer of the rifle.

He didn’t think about the war. He didn’t think about the Germans or the King or the three dollars a day he earned for standing on a wooden box with a loaded gun. He thought about his grandmother’s kitchen in Moose Jaw during the dry years of thirty-four, when the wind blew the topsoil into the cracks of the baseboards and the only meat on the table was the jackrabbits he and his brothers killed with rocks.

“If you have a loaf,” she used to say, her fingers grey with the flour she’d sifted three times to get the weevils out, “you give a slice to the man at the gate. Not because he’s good. But because you’re human, and the flour belongs to the Lord anyway.”

He took the buck behind the shoulder. The report of the rifle was flat and small under the great canopy of the spruce.

“He wants to do what?” Captain Aldrich asked, looking over his ledger at the boy.

“Share it, sir,” Duncan said. He was standing straight now, his boots dripping onto the linoleum floor. “The whole thing. The boys in the guardhouse haven’t seen fresh meat since Christmas, and the women… well, the nurse says they’re getting the scurvy. One buck won’t change the war, sir. But it’ll fill the pots.”

Aldrich looked out the window at the wire fence. A single German woman—he thought it was the one who had been the translator—was shoveling the path, her movements slow and heavy.

“The regulations don’t cover local game, Fraser,” the captain said softly. “But they don’t forbid it either. Tell the cooks to use the big kettle. And Fraser?”

“Sir?”

“Don’t make a speech about it.”

The stew boiled for five hours. The camp cook, a fat private from Toronto who had worked in a hotel kitchen before the enlistment, had found two bags of dried onions and a handful of juniper berries in the bottom of an old crate.

When the doors of the mess hall opened at noon on February 14, the steam did not rise; it rolled out over the snow like a white cloud.

Irmgard sat at the long wooden table, her tin bowl between her hands. Around her, the other forty-two women sat with their heads down, their eyes fixed on the empty zinc surface. No one spoke. Laurelei Adler sat at the head of the bench, her fingers laced together so tightly the knuckles were white.

Sergeant Proulx came through first, carrying the heavy aluminum bucket. He didn’t ladle it out with his usual careless splash. He set the bucket down with a heavy thud and looked at Laurelei.

“The Canadians said,” he muttered, his French accent thick, “‘Wild game stew.’ Eat it while it’s hot.”

The ladle dipped. A thick, dark stream of brown gravy, studded with pale discs of onion and heavy, dark chunks of venison that had fallen apart into long, ropy fibers, hit Irmgard’s bowl.

She lifted the spoon. Her hand was shaking—not with the palsy of the cold, but with a strange, internal vibration that started in her chest. She put the meat to her lips.

The taste was a blow. It was not the salt-dead meat of the rations. It was the taste of moss, of cedar bark, of the dark, rich blood of the earth that had been processed through the life of a wild thing. It was exactly the taste of the Oberammergau hills.

Across from her, Alfreda Müller let out a small, wet sound—half a choke, half asob. She covered her mouth with her apron, her shoulders heaving beneath the gray wool.

“Don’t,” Laurelei whispered, her own voice cracking like dry ice. “Alfreda, don’t.”

But it was too late. The silence of the camp—the hard, defensive shell they had grown over themselves like the bark of the spruce trees—was breaking. Brunhilda Schmidt was weeping openly now, her tears falling straight into her tin bowl. Crystal Wagner had dropped her spoon; she sat with her face in her hands, her hair falling forward over her fingers.

Irmgard did not sob. The tears came down her cheeks in two steady, hot lines, tasting of salt and grease. She chewed the meat slowly, forcing it down her throat like a sacrament. They had not been broken by the crossing, or the wire, or the gray, indifferent guards. They had been broken by ten ounces of wild meat and three wild onions.

They had been reminded that they were women who had homes, who had fathers, who had been loved before they became numbers in a ledger in Ottawa.

The Breaking of the World

By March, the sun had some teeth to it. The snow along the wire began to settle, turning into a coarse, granular slush that smelled of damp earth.

During the one-hour recreation period, Irmgard walked the inner perimeter path alone. Her boots were still bad, but her feet were warm; the cedar stove had done its work.

Duncan Fraser was standing by the secondary gate, his hands on the cedar post. As she approached, he didn’t look away or straighten his rifle. He watched her come.

She stopped five feet from the wire. The space between them was filled with the shadow of the posts.

“You’re from the mountains?” he asked. His voice was low, staying under the noise of the wind in the wires.

Irmgard looked at his freckles, at the way his red hair came out from under the edge of his wool cap. She had forgotten how to speak to a man who wasn’t an officer or a clerk.

“Bavaria,” she said. Her English was stiff, the words tasting like gravel in her mouth. “The south. The big trees.”

Duncan nodded. “My granddad came from Scotland, but we’re on the prairie now. No trees there. Just grass. You can see the weather three days before it hits you.”

“The stew,” she said, her voice dropping lower. “It was… like home.”

Duncan looked down at his boots. “It was an eight-pointer. Good fat on him. My dad always said, you don’t let meat go to waste when there’s folks with an empty belly.”

“Thank you,” she said.

It was the first word she had spoken to a Canadian that wasn’t a number or a rank. It felt heavy, like she had dropped a stone into a deep well.

He looked up, his grey eyes clear. “You’re welcome, missus.”

The world ended on April 20, 1945.

It did not end with a bomb. It ended with three copies of the Toronto Daily Star that Captain Aldrich laid on the long table in the mess hall after the morning roll call.

“You should look at these,” he said. He didn’t look angry; he looked old. His face had the grey color of the mud in the ditches. “The whole platoon. You need to know what’s been found.”

The women gathered around the papers slowly, their sleeves brushing against one another. Irmgard stood behind Laurelei, looking over her shoulder.

The photographs were black and white, but the black was too dark and the white was too clean. There were hills of shoes—thousands of them, small shoes with buckles, children’s boots, women’s pumps with the heels broken. There were long, low buildings with high brick chimneys, and outside them, things that looked like cords of wood but had ribs and teeth and eyes that stared up at the sky like frozen fish.

“It’s a lie,” Brunhilda said, her voice rising to a shriek. “It’s the English. They make it with dolls. They make it to shame us!”

“Look at the soldiers,” Laurelei said. Her voice wasn’t glass anymore; it was dust. She pointed to a figure in the corner of a photograph—an American sergeant with his face turned away, vomiting into his helmet against a wire fence. “You can’t photograph a man’s stomach turning like that. It’s real.”

Irmgard looked at the name of the place: Buchenwald. Then another: Bergen-Belsen.

She thought of her grandfather’s silver goblet. She thought of the portrait of the man with the small mustache that had hung over their table while she ate her first deer. She thought of her own uniform, the clean gray wool with the little eagle on the breast that she had brushed every morning with such pride.

The building she had spent her youth inside had not been a temple; it had been a slaughterhouse. The floor beneath her feet didn’t just slide; it disappeared into a black hole that had no bottom.

She went out into the snow behind the laundry hut and sat down on a box. She did not cry. Her eyes felt dry and hot, as if she had been looking into a blast furnace. When Duncan Fraser came by with his wood-barrow an hour later, she didn’t look up.

He stopped the barrow. He didn’t say anything about the papers. He reached into his coat pocket and took out a small piece of spruce gum—the clear, hard resin that wells up from the bark of the trees when the sun hits them.

“Chew on that,” he said, setting it on the log beside her. “It cleans the taste out of your mouth.”

The New Roots

When the radio in the guardhouse played the brassy, distorted notes of the BBC announcement on May 8, the camp did not celebrate. The guards had a double ration of rum, but they drank it quietly, sitting on the steps of the office.

In June, the big grey trucks came back to take them to the train. Thirty-three of the women stood by their barracks bags, their faces pale but clear. They were going back to the ruins—to Hamburg, to Essen, to the British zone where their mothers were living in cellars and trading their wedding rings for sacks of potatoes.

But ten of them did not move.

“You have to sign the waiver,” Captain Aldrich told them, his pen hovering over the ledger. He looked at Irmgard. “Your father is still in the forest lodge, Köhler. The French have the district. It’s safe enough.”

“There is no lodge,” Irmgard said. Her voice was flat. She had received her first letter through the Red Cross three days before. “The lodge was burned in March. My mother is in Munich. She lives in a room with five others. My brothers… they are not there.”

She looked out the window at the spruce trees. They were green now, the new growth at the tips of the branches bright as jade against the dark old needles.

“The Germany I served does not exist,” she said. “And the one that is left… I do not know her.”

Duncan Fraser stood by the door, his mackinaw gone now, his summer shirt open at the throat. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes were on her face, steady as the front sight of his Winchester.

They were moved to a displaced persons camp outside of Sudbury, and then, in the autumn, the sponsorships came. A Polish family named Zawadzki, who had a small farm three miles from Duncan’s home in the Qu’Appelle Valley, had lost their own daughter to the Germans in thirty-nine. They needed someone who could speak enough English to deal with the grain elevators and enough German to talk to the old grandmother who had come from the borderlands.

Irmgard arrived in Saskatchewan on a day when the frost had turned the poplar leaves to beaten gold.

The prairie was everything Duncan had said it was. It was a clean slate. The wind came off the buffalo commons with a long, steady roar that sounded like the sea, and there were no old stones to tell you who had died there or what blood had been spilled to keep the land.

Duncan would come by on Saturday evenings in his father’s old Ford truck, the fenders rattling against the gravel of the valley road. They would sit on the porch of the Zawadzki house, the old grandmother watching them through the screen door while the oil lamps flickered inside.

They didn’t talk about Aachen or Aachen’s bunker. They talked about the price of red spring wheat, the way the gophers dug their holes under the granary, and how the deer in the valley were smaller than the ones in Ontario but faster on the draw.

In 1948, they were married in the small stone church at Lumsden. Irmgard wore a dress made from cream-colored parachute silk that Alfreda Müller—who had found work in a tailor’s shop in Winnipeg—had sent her in a cardboard box.

By 1970, the valley had grown up around them. The house was larger now, four rooms with a wide veranda that faced the south coulee. There were three children—two boys with Duncan’s red hair and a girl, Martha, who had her mother’s dark, quiet eyes.

Every November, when the first true blizzard came down from the north, turning the wheat stubble into white waves, Duncan would come through the back door with his wool mackinaw stiff with frost. He would drop a burlap sack on the linoleum with a heavy, wet thud.

“Got a buck behind the old schoolhouse,” he’d say, blowing into his knuckles. “A nice four-point. The fat’s an inch thick on the rump.”

Irmgard would take the meat to the white porcelain sink. Her hands were no longer the hands of an auxiliary clerk; they were wide and hard-palmed from twenty years of garden hoes and bread pans.

She did not use the sour wine of her mother’s kitchen; there was no wine in the valley except the chokecherry stuff the neighbors made in stone crocks. Instead, she used a cup of black vinegar, three tablespoons of brown sugar, a handful of wild juniper berries she gathered from the coulee hills, and two large onions bought from the Chinese gardener in Regina.

As the iron pot began to simmer on the oil-range, the kitchen would fill with that same heavy, iron-sweet steam that had broken through the wire at Camp 41 twenty-five years before.

Her daughter, Martha, came in from the porch, her schoolbooks under her arm, her cheeks red from the walk from the bus.

“Smells good, Mom,” the girl said, leaning over the pot to draw in the air. “Is it the German way?”

Irmgard turned the meat with her long wooden spoon, watching the dark gravy coat the white rounds of the onions. Through the window, she could see Duncan out by the barn, his tall, lean shape dark against the white expanse of the prairie sky, hauling a bale of straw to the calves.

“No,” Irmgard said softly, her thumb tracing the old scar where her confirmation Mauser had pinched her skin so long ago. “It’s the Canadian way. You take what the winter gives you, and you make it stretch until the spring.”