Page 4 of Death on a Rocky Little Island

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  There are lots of different ways to pack for a canoe trip.

  Some people start by imaging themselves paddling. “Canoe,” they write onto a list, “and paddles.” They squint then add “lifejackets and safety equipment.”

  Myself, I’ve been more than happy to be know in my previous world as an absent-minded professor. I make lists, or I’ll forget things.

  First on my list is the canoe section. Canoe, paddles, lifejackets, bailer, whistle, rope. I was much younger the first time I got to the water and discovered I’d forgotten the paddles. It was a short trip so Nils and I paddled with branches we found along the shore. We toured a little lake while some guy on shore kept up yelling at us because he thought he owned the whole lake.

  In my younger days, too, I used to carry an extra paddle. Somewhere on a portage trail I realized I’d carried one for over twenty years and never needed it. You realize these things on a portage trail because humans have only two hands and if you have three paddles, you’ll try to carry two in one hand. That doesn’t work. The thrice-damned things insist on trying to separate from each other and forming a giant bush-snagging “X”. Since then I’ve never carried a spare, just a bit of duct tape. I figure I can splint something from a branch if one paddle breaks.

  Ontario requires a lifejacket for every person in a boat. A small boat, such as a canoe, must carry a bailing bucket of some sort, a forty-foot length of rope, and a whistle. I use an old plastic windshield- washer can as a bailing bucket. I’ve cut the top off it and stuffed the yellow polypropylene rope and the whistle inside.

  I also stuff in a big sponge. A canoe is always picking up water in quantities too small for a bailing bucket. Much of this comes from drippings from the paddle as you change paddling sides. More comes from spray off the front guy’s paddle on windy days, because the guy in the front is always an idiot when there are waves, clipping wavetops with the tip of his paddle.

  And you get water when you step into the canoe if you’ve had your boots in water.

  Next is a waterproof bag with a compass, and a map in it. Take a Global Positioning System (GPS) gizmo if you think you’ll need one. I haven’t yet, at least when I actually had one with me, but if I’m ever being devoured by a bear on a portage trail I’ll be able to figure out where my bones will lie within couple of hundred yards of longitude and latitude.

  Besides, the number of useful gizmos is a fairly accurate indicator of one’s masculinity. You get five points for every useful gizmo, and lose three for every useless gizmo. You’ll end up with a few bruises when you try to define which is which on a canoe trip.

  It’s like keeping stuff in the back of the car. All the things you wish you’d taken balance the collection of odds you’ve moved a couple of hundred thousand kilometers without using.

  I always take a jacket because it gets chilly most nights and it’s probably going to rain. Especially if I set out to take some of my someday-famous pictures in the rain. Add waterproof gloves to that list. Water’s always running up and down a paddle and wet hands on a cold day do not make for a happy paddler.

  An emergency kit always sounded like a good idea, so I have a plastic bag with bandages and matches.

  I stuff a lot of my goods in a nylon bag. At the campsite I empty the bag then stuff my lifejacket into it. That gives me a lumpy, awkwardly-shaped pillow, but a pillow nonetheless.

  I’m with the people who need something to sleep on. Conventional air mattresses are nice, but heavy. Yuppies and wise men like me take self-inflating mattresses. These have only a couple of centimeters of sponge, and the shorter ones are just long enough for the area between your shoulders and your hips. But that’s usually enough to keep you from feeling the small stones and twigs and wiggly things you’re sleeping on.

  They make two shapes of sleeping bags. One is called the mummy shape and it tapers to your feet. It’s supposed to retain heat better, but personally I think you’d have to be dead a couple of thousand years to like one of the things. I take a rectangular bag, with enough room to roll over in, and enough room to reach down and scratch a mosquito bite without looking like Harry Houdini trying to get out of a strait jacket underwater.

  I had a tent once that was really light. It was also really small. The one time I tried to roll over to put the lumpy ground parts on the other hip, I pulled the tent poles out and ended up further downhill, wrapped in orange nylon, with tent-peg ropes tied all around the whole assembly. Since then I’ve opted for a slightly larger tent One in which I can sit up to check that it’s three-twelve in the morning and I’m still awake or put on my shoes to take another pee break.

  I used to carry a small hatchet, figuring it would come in handy for chopping wood, pounding in tent pegs, and bopping hungry bears on the head if they clawed their way through the nylon tent. However, there are few places in my camping areas to pound pegs, the campfire wood is usually dead and dry and the hatchet blade just bounces off it. And if a bear claws its way through my tent, I’ll try boring it to death with a first-year supply-side economics lecture.

  A flashlight. Now there’s one thing you think you can do without. You can go to sleep when it gets dark and get up when it’s light and in between you’ll not need a flashlight. If you have to take a leak in the middle of the night, you need to get just far enough away from the tent to check the wind conditions and pick a direction.

  Take a flashlight anyway. They’re cheap and light nowadays. You’ll need one to find the headache pills in your packsack because you had too many hot dogs and too much booze before going to bed. You’ll also need one to find those mosquitoes that somehow got into the tent and haven’t the sense to know you’d happily let them feed if they’d just stop circling your ear. And, of course, you need one to shine into the woods in the middle of the night, sighting down it like a pistol, looking for the eyeball reflections of whatever mutant grizzly or psycho moose is making all those awful noises just outside your tent. Having a chipmunk flee the light beam will get you back to sleep.

  Matches. For the sake of all that’s holy in this planet, check that you have matches or a lighter. You can, I understand, rub sticks together and make a fire. I saw tom Hanks do it in a movie, so I know it can be done. But it’ll be raining lightly when you try, and your life will run out before you succeed and you’ll have to get rid of all the uncooked food before you go home or else Aisha will laugh herself silly and remind you every time you go camping after that.

  Rope. Always take lots of rope. It’ll make you feel like a cowboy even if you seldom use it.

  There’s an old saying I just made up; the more stuff you take the happier your campsite and the worse your portages. You can work out the ratio of portages to camp time and decide whether to take or leave a lot of things, but I’d like you to know that humankind reached civilization in two major steps, the invention of fire and the creation of the lawn chair.

  Anyway, as I was saying, there are lots of ways to decide what to take. Making lists has got me through many eternities in meetings and economics classes. Yes, it’s possible to teach economics and do a canoe list at the same time.

  And every canoe trip has a different list.

  The problem is the portages. The more you take with you, the happier you are at the campsite. The more you take with you, the unhappier you are on a portage, especially a long portage.

  So you have to balance what you’d like at the camp with the length and severity of the portages on the way there.

  If you’re going to camp a few days you might want that cast-iron Paavo-pan to fry fish in. If there’s a 900-meter portage over a cliff on the way there, you might not want to take more than a light aluminum pot.

  Anyway, if you’re going out into Georgian Bay, like Phil and I were, you’re not going to worry about portaging. You can take whatever fits into the canoe.

  Keeping in mind, of course, waves and wind.

  A heavy canoe, loaded with wonderful artifacts of civilization d
estined for a campsite, is sometimes an advantage in wind. It sits lower, for one thing, so a side wind hits you less. On the other hand, a heavy canoe isn’t as nimble on a turn. There’s always the time when the guy in the front yells, “HOLY SHIT! Turn right!” and you know there’s a big wave coming in from around an island or from some damn power boat.

  That’s when it’s better to have a lighter canoe.

  And there’s the waves. You get wind, a few waves, and spray starts coming into your canoe. The lower your canoe is, loaded with, say, an icebox full of beer and steaks and a propane barbecue, the more spray you get.

  You get spray, and the canoe sets lower (water is heavy stuff). With the canoe lower, you start getting tips of waves coming into your canoe for a visit. This settles you, barbecue and all, even lower, and bigger waves slop into your canoe.

  Next thing you know, the only things above water are the heads of you and your co-paddler, from the chin up.

  By the time you’ve added in contingency materials like rain gear and six-days-of-storm-stranded-on-an-island stuff, you’ve got enough to fill five canoes.

  You’ve got to have some sort of rain gear, even if it’s only a plastic coat.

  A saw is handy, and lighter than an ax for getting wood to make fire. A lot of the dead branches available are too solid to chop. So a folding saw works, and if it’s the assemble type, you can look masculine and nifty by getting it together in less than half and hour.

  If you’re worried about dampness, something that’ll start your fire reasonably quickly. Those white things that they use to start charcoal barbecues usually work, and they’re light and small.

  Rope. You never have enough rope. Oh, I already mentioned rope.

  You don’t need a fork. Eleanor of Aquitaine is supposed to have invented these things back in the thirteenth century, but if you’ve got a knife (everybody needs a belt knife to look tough and outdoorsy) and a big plastic spoon, you’ll be able to eat just fine.

  A plastic cup and a bowl. Forget a plate; what you can’t eat out of a bowl your body doesn’t need.

  Modern campers always have a tiny little camping stove and some extra fuel. It means you don’t have to have a campfire to cook, and can save the local firewood until your campfire at night.

  A pot, and a lid. A frypan, if you’re going to fry things or have hopes of actually catching fish. Some sort of egg lifter to lift the fried things out.

  A pot scrubber. You can usually get away with a copper scrubber and not need soap, and that’s a better idea, ecologically.

  Paper towels. A roll, or a few, folded up.

  Spare underclothes, if you’re the sensitive type.

  A bit of loose tobacco, purchased from a tobacco store. You leave this on the shore to make the spirits happy.

  A poop scoop. You’ll want to bury your fecal trademarks in the ground, for esthetic, if not for ecological reasons. Unless you bring it all back with you. Some people do, and there are a lot of places in the Ontario woods where the ground between the various rocks are a tangle of roots almost impossible to dig into.

  I find it useful to take variety of plastic bags, right up to garbage-bag size. They weigh almost nothing and can keep things dry at the campsite. And if the bears actually do eat you, the people who find you will be able to carry what’s left home without getting little half-digested and gory pieces of you all over them.

  Make sure everybody has a whistle. The sound carries further than a shout, and if somebody in you camp gets lost while looking for firewood or a better place to piss, you can know exactly where that person is, and avoid them for a day or so.

  A couple of bottles of Pepsi are among the things I cherish on a canoe trip. It tastes better than Coke, but has more sugar so you won’t want it for daily living. On a camping trip, on the other hand, especially on the way home when you’re really tired and crabby, it can really pick you up. Mind you, nobody else seems to agree with me on this item.

  Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? There’s just no end of stuff that would make a campsite happier. You could take fishing equipment, since you’ll be surrounded by water. You could take binoculars to identify birds or locate portage signs at the other end of the lake.

  You could take a tarp. You’d use a big one with the rope to make a shelter if it rains all day. Or you could stretch a small one over the stuff in your canoe if it rains while you’re out on the water.

  Endless, ain’t it?

  At the end of the season, in November usually, when you go to put it all away, there’s a sadness for the things you didn’t use and the things you did use. One by one you put your stuff onto basement shelves. Beside the things you left from last year that you could really have used on one trip or another.

  I suppose you could tow four canoes like a train of pack animals, but people might laugh.

  Those that weren’t jealous for not figuring it out themselves.

  A canoe trip is always full of compromises in safety and comfort.

  So I keep a Master List, and check off the items I’ll take when I go canoeing, depending on where I go, the probable conditions, and who I go canoeing with.

  With some people, you can save space and weight by sharing a tent.

  Some people I don’t want to share a tent with. Like people who snore, and people who eat beans for breakfast and fart all night. And people who like to talk about guns and motorcycles and work/school till three in the morning.

  And, of course, there are always people who don’t want to share a tent with me.

  Phil and I planned to take separate tents. One of us fell into one or more of the above categories, you see.

  I selected a small tent, bought at a yard sale a few years ago, but one that didn’t require pegs. There’s not many places on the islands in Georgian Bay where you can pound in a peg. You can use rocks to hold down the pegs, but it can take a lot of rocks, and the pegs tend to sneak out of the rock pile in the middle of a windstorm in the darkest hours of the morning.

  The Drive

  By seven we were north of Toronto on the 400 and leaving that city behind. I was driving - the general agreement was that I would drive and Phil would buy me lunch. We’d split on the gas.

  Aisha never trusted my driving until I had one nasty accident. She always figured that nobody drives properly until they’ve had at least one accident, one moment when you’ve done everything possible for a drive to do and you come to realize that gravity and momentum are in control, not you.

  And she figures the roads are full of maniacs and drunks.

  I know I was lucky two times in a row.

  Phil would like to drive and he’s got better reflexes than I have but Aisha figured he hadn’t had his accident yet and I figure if the car gets in an accident, I want to be the one who’s responsible.

  Aisha doesn’t drive any more, of course. I think she consigns herself to whatever gods protect atheists and lets it go at that

  A lot of guys on the 400 north from Toronto shouldn’t drive either.

  “Lunch?” Phil asked, after a long silence. We didn’t talk much on the way canoeing: maybe we were practicing for the Great Silence of the Lake.

  “For sure.” I was hungry, but Phil was going to buy lunch. I tried to do a calculation on how much a driving effort was worth, in terms of lunch, and came up with a Pepsi, a burger, and fries.

  We found the Northlander a couple of kilometers after the Moon River turnoff, and parked beside a Winnebago. There was a sign outside that said, among other things, “iced coffee” and Phil always likes that stuff.

  When a Younger Person with lots of tattoos and some facial iron came to our table, Phil ordered the iced coffee. She looked puzzled. “I don’t think we serve iced coffee,” she said. “Wait a minute; I’ll check with Tashiklyn. The two girls communed behind the counter and shook their heads and looked in our direction and talked some more. When she returned the Younger Person said, “We don’t serve iced coffee. We can make you some cold
cappucino with an ice cube. It’s from a mix.” Her face wrinkled.

  In his younger days, Phil might have contemplated dragging her outside and pointing out the line on the large wooden sign that listed iced coffee right under “espresso” and before “waffles” in letter two hands high, but he’s mellowed.

  He ordered a Coke and fries for me, and a hamburger and a regular coffee for himself. And a cinnamon bun. He’s nuts on cinnamon buns, but has never found a perfect one. It’s like a grail quest for him.

  My home was now a couple of hundred kilometers behind me and I was into travel mode. Travel mode is the scent of sadness that’s lost to the fear that you’ll end up someday in some hospital bed regretting that you didn’t make this trip.

  I’ve traveled a lot, and most of the time nobody watching me could imagine that I was enjoying the process. But years of experience taught me that the regret of not having made a trip always outweighed the nervousness and paranoia that accompanied me on the trip itself. Your travel book of photographs will keep you going when you get old and one of your biggest regrets will be that you didn’t do it more.

  Phil had taken a bite of the cinnamon bun and was inspecting it.

  “Not meet your standards?” Like it would, ever.

  “A cinnamon bun is a spiral, like our galaxy,” Phil said. “The bun part is the gravitation and the white icing is the light from a million stars.”

  I looked at the bun. “That dark stuff – the cinnamon – that’s intragalactic dust?”

  “That stuff is not cinnamon. I don’t know what it is. I think we’ve finally found the missing dark matter of the universe. Maybe we’ll get a Nobel prize.”

  Ten minutes later, the girls came in. Heather raised her eyebrows at me as they sat. Nancy stood for a moment, legs wide apart and looking casually around like a gunfighter coming into the Deadwood saloon.

  “I have bad news,” I said, with a mouthful of meal and s slug of Pepsi attempting to flush it down towards my stomach.

  “Those two? They look like good news to me.”

  I choked up a piece of hamburger and snorted a couple of milliliters of Pepsi up my nose, backwards. It hurt.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Phil said. “It’s a waste of good food, to start with. And it’s not going to impress those chicks even when you get good at it.” He shook his head in puzzlement. Haven’t I seen them somewhere before?”

  The girls took a table by one of the windows. Outside, the couple from the Winnebago finally managed to get their act together enough to get out and stand in silence by the door. I guess they were telepathically trying to figure out what to order before they entered.

  “The redhead,” I said, “is the great-granddaughter of Big Paul Stanley. The other one is just a friend. You saw them in the bar where you gave me a copy of the map.”

  Phil looked at them. Phil looked at me. Back at them. Back at me.

  “I guess they’re following us,” I said.

  “How do you know who they are?” Phil said. He calmly turned so he couldn’t see the window, and continued with his fries.

  I told him about Heather and our intimate rendezvous in Jimmy’s Café.

  “Just when did you plan on telling me this little detail?” Phil picked up a fry. He dipped it into the ketchup. Finally, he twisted one end off, laid it on the table, and squished it with his thumb. It spread out in a pool of ketchup. Then he ate the rest of the fry. He did this with three of them before I thought up a reply.

  Not that I was worried: I knew Phil to be all bluff; he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Well, maybe a fly, but nothing more sentient than a mouse.

  “Out on the lake. I didn’t figure they were actually serious about it.”

  “I think you might be wrong about that.” Phil slowly impaled a fry on a fork, then added ketchup where the tine met the potato. “But why wait?”

  “It seemed like the sort of thing that would make for a chuckle over a campfire. After we were alone on the lake.” I closed my eyes tight for a moment.

  “I’m not so sure we’ll be alone on those islands.”

  “Well,” I pointed out, “they’re kind of cute.”

  “Tell that to Jane,” Phil said. He looked at me, “or Aisha.”

  I winced. “They came from Parry Sound to talk to us. Now they’re just probably on their way back home and we just happened to pick the same place to have lunch.”

  “They came in. They looked our way. They didn’t seem surprised.” He raised his eyebrows. “You got any more surprises for me?”

  “Hey!” I said. “It was your phone call to the Parry Sound library that got them onto our case, eh? Don’t give all the guilt trip to me.”

  He nodded. “Do we sabotage their car?”

  I thought it over. “I wouldn’t mind letting the air out of one tire, maybe.”

  We walked to the front to pay. At the counter, Phil said, “Whoops, I forgot my jacket on the chair.” He got his jacket and returned, passing the table the girls sat at. His elbow knocked a cup on their table, spilling coffee. We continued out the door. One of the girls said something but I can’t remember what it was. Maybe my mind blocked it out.

  I honestly believe we’d have let the air out of a tire on their car if we’d known which car was theirs. There was a car with two ocean kayaks on it, and another with a canoe. And if the pump attendant hadn’t been idly watching us all the way.

  So we drove north, watching the mirror and the woods go by and the scenery. Well, the woods, at least. You don’t get to see much water, even though the highway crosses over the Severn and the Moon rivers, and Go Home Bay and…. You see the sons-of-bitches that inhabit the accountant’s offices have convinced the highway designers that it’s a lot cheaper to put up plain concrete walls as sides to every bridge you cross. And the goddamn lawyers have convinced the designers that these blank monstrosities are safer than the old metal designs. The old designs were built so you could see through them.

  Aisha and I always look upstream or downstream when we cross water on a bridge. You can see our heads swivel and give every creek and bay a rating on its natural beauty and its potential canoeability.

  Not any more. All you see is featureless concrete when you cross a river in a car. Maybe the people higher up, in trucks and SUVs get a view, but not us car people. We get a view of some bureaucrat’s esthetic soul: bland, blank, and gray.

  The bigger the highway, the worse it gets. As you drive along Highway 401 just east of Kitchener, you cross the Speed River. There are little riffle rapids and poplars along the milkweed shores. There are the tumbled trunks of old willows where the tornado came through a few years ago.

  But you won’t see any of this. Not even a brief glimpse of running water. Not a half second view of the old willows. No little reminder that Eden wasn’t six lanes of clock-driven highway.

  No, the powers that govern road construction in Ontario have put those slabs of concrete along the sides of the bridge over the Speed. Flat, soul-sucking slabs of concrete as hard as the people who confine not only our cars, but our vision, to the highway.

  It’s epidemic. We did cross the Severn. I remember how you used to be able look to the east and see the last lock in the canal? The pleasure boats like a gathering of wildflowers at the marina, the waters tumbling over the dam, coming off a land that was too old for imagining when the first dinosaurs were made. The last lock seemed an end and a beginning for people who loved water.

  Or did you look to the west, out where the waters broadened into Georgian Bay? The wave-tops sparkling like God’s dance floor, and the islands spread out in a vision that would be hard to find in any other country on this planet. They sang to you! It was a painting that said, “Forget the silly computers and the piles of brick. Out here are weekends of real life.”

  You can’t see those things any more. The days of old iron railings are past. The bloodless, iconoclastic ghouls have put in a fancy new bridge. It is lined with those mind-washing slabs of concr
ete. For the people in the cars, the bay is gone — gone with all its reeds turning with the wind, with the rock, and the waters leaping free of the dam. The motorists get a good view of the concrete, though. A really fine view.

  Oh, I have no doubt the slabs are cheaper than the welded railings on the old bridge. You just set ‘em down and they’re there. Graceless, inhuman and dead, part of an artistic famine from some low-bidding pavement-tamper somewhere. Oh, and safer than the old bridge, I bet. The drivers can keep their minds on the cars ahead of them, and the passengers on their mortgages, without distractions. What car isn’t more likely to be saved from the running waters by that formless wall of white?

  Not, mind you, that I’ve seen a lot of the old steel railings torn away by careering cars and trucks in the time I’ve driven around this province. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any.

  Highway 401 denies the Credit, that little river that every angler in Ontario has heard of. There’s a half-second thrill in crossing that river, and I can’t help but think that a view would help a few people get through the day in some office north of Toronto. Fat chance for visions of trout waters, though. They’ve painted out our fishing glimpse with a concrete brush. All we get are the tops of the trees along the river.

  Oh, what a Protestant country we must be to ban the tempting views of paradise.

  By the time we’d turned down the road to Parry Island, I was wishing I’d never thought the damn trip up. I felt like a kid who’d volunteered for a spelling bee until he heard the words on the list.

  I get that way a lot. Things seem brighter and more promising the further away they are in time and space. An excursion to take a picture of a remote waterfall along the Ottawa seems wonderful, when I think of it, in the middle of February.

  By June, when the falls are green and the world’s dry enough to get to a waterfall, I’m down a few quarts on my enthusiasm level. But I pack up and go anyway, especially if I told someone else I was going to.

  By the time I’m on the expressway, the whole thing seems kind of stupid. The closer I get to the waterfall, the dumber an idea it seems. Somewhere along the highway I’m ready to turn around, but that seems even stupider.

  By the time I’m most of the way there, the whole idea seems insane and I’m ready to pull the car over, put up the tent and go back the next day, thinking up some excuse.

  Generally, it’s only the total inability to make up an excuse that keeps me going at that point.

  By the time I’ve parked the car and started hiking in, the waterfall has become my mortal enemy. I get there, and my mood lightens. I’ve actually carried out a plan I made so many months ago. There’s a certain unavoidable satisfaction in that.

  As I head homeward, the whole sequence repeats itself, but in reverse. By the time I’ve got home, I’ll have decided that the trip was, if not the greatest thing in the world, at least worthwhile.

  So it was as we made the turn onto Parry Island. I was in deep gloom. Why was I going to risk my neck out on Georgian Bay? I could get pictures standing on shore. Why was I going to spend a few days with Phil? Like most guys he had a set list of phrases and jokes and attitudes, and like most guys, these were extremely limited, so they got used a lot. Too much. Most guys were good for a day’s companionship, then they started to get annoying.

  I eyed Phil distastefully as we crossed the bridge.

  Parry Island is mostly First Nations territory. The only bridge to the island used to be a railway swing bridge, so it’s narrow (but very strong, I’ll give it that – and you can see up and down the channel all you want). The bridge has a little shack in the middle, where someone swings the bridge when a sailboat goes through. Sometimes, the same guy also collects a toll to get onto the island.

  Once across the bridge, I pulled over to the side of the road, and waited.

  “Problems?” Phil asked.

  Just in my soul, I thought at him. “Just taking a break,” I told him.

  “We can take a break at Depot Harbour,” Phil answered. “It’s just down the road. Besides, I’d like to get there before the pussy posse gets here.”

  I gave him a couple of raised eyebrows and drove along the road, took the turn, and followed bad dirt road to the water. Several weed-covered brick walls remained, and an old steam shovel.

  “It used to be a genuine ghost town,” Phil told me, but I already knew that. But I let him rattle on, hoping he’d blow off a bit of conversation so maybe he’d be more of a silent partner out on the water.

  There were no ghosts in the daytime, so the souls of the people who operated the harbour, loading lumber from the forests onto ships didn’t show up. There was one family picnicking, and us. Phil did the entire history of the place.

  Probably, I was just warming him up, but I hadn’t brought a roll of gag-grade duct tape with me, so I let him go on. Which he did. At length. I listened to him carefully. Not.

  You know, that fad about adding “not” after a sentence to reverse the meaning came and went sometime in the late 1990s? You’d say, “Freezing rain is my favorite type of weather. Not.” The “not always followed after just a little extended pause.

  There were, maybe a few million people amused to discover it, and maybe a half billion people really happy to see it go.

  Me, well, I always liked it, except maybe when it got overused. But I saved it for further use. At least it kept people from jumping on anything you said, just in case you added “not” about the time they got their teeth apart to say something.

  Actually I’ve learned that the same word and the same use was a fad in 1790’s Britain. I guess it’s due to come back into style in 2190, give or take a bit.

  Maybe I’m not a great conversationalist, because I don’t like to listen to people and I don’t like to talk much.

  If I didn’t do so many silly-ass, downright stupid, entertaining things in life, I’d have no friends at all, I figure. People who need a clown in their lives come to me.

  Anyway, where was I. Parking the car at the edge of Depot Harbour. In the grass, not in the road, with its deep ruts. But first I made Phil get out and check that there were no broken bottles or nails for me to run over.

  For years it was the place where trainloads of lumber came from the interior to be loaded onto ships. Then for a few years it was a picturesque, decaying ghost town.

  Then, of course, someone tossed a match, and now it’s a few stone walls and a few rusting bits of machinery, and a place where the locals throw beer bottles against the aforementioned stone walls and condoms onto the ground in among the weeds.

  “Follow me,” Phil said. He asked me to open the trunk, and dug out his metal detector from under the piles of camping equipment.

  “Coming?” he asked, pushing through tall weeds.

  What could I do? I grabbed my red hat and followed, collecting a few burrs from this year’s crop on my pant legs.

  Avoiding the broken beer bottles and dodging boards with nails sticking up, we made our way into the concrete ruins of what might have been a mining office, or maybe a very sturdy house, it was hard to tell. Let’s just say it was house-shaped, with windows. There was a partial roof of rusted steel beams and rusted steel sheeting.

  The interior was filled with sumacs, some of them twenty feet tall. The sumac branches, and those of a couple of aspens, came out the windows. “Stand in the window,” Phil said. I did. I looked at Phil, who was leaning against a wall, then looked out the window, where I saw Heather’s car come around a grove of cedars, then stop.

  “They see you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Great. Now duck down, and give me your jacket.”

  “Who?” I asked, ducking.

  “Your jacket.”

  What the heck; I gave him my jacket. He used it, and his own jacket, to completely cover the detector. “Now,” he said, “we’re going out the back way.”

  I followed him, head down, around a few bushes and over to a larger set of rui
ns. When we got there, Phil straightened up, and strolled casually back to the road.

  “Seen enough?” he asked.

  “What? Sure. I can always come back later if I want to see any more.” I liked ruins when I was younger.

  Phil and I made our way over to the car. “Don’t look at them,” He said, so I ignored the other car. He threw the metal detector into the trunk and handed me back my jacket.

  “What was that all about?” I asked when I’d got the car back onto the main dirt road.

  “Just laying down a false trail.” At my raised eyebrows, he went on. “Now they’ll wonder if maybe there isn’t something important hidden in the old building.”

  “The first one.”

  “Yeah.

  “What good will that do?”

  “Well,” Phil said, “It might not do any good at all. But there might be sometime, somewhere, when they lose track of us and can’t decide whether to turn left or right.”

  “And?”

  “And one of them might say, “Hell, we’ve lost them; lets go back and see what they were after at the ruins.”

  “You think so?”

  “Could happen. Maybe they’ll decide we’ll eventually show up at the ruins anyway.” He smiled at me. “Could happen. At least we know how close they’re following, now.”

  The road wound through aspen and maple, with the odd small house at the edge. I looked into the rear-view mirror; through the dust I could see the front of Heather’s car. “Pretty close, that’s what I’d say,” I noted. “They’re eating a lot of dust right now.”

  “Well, I guess they’ve got a legal right. Say, you want to pull over and I’ll take a leak.”

  “Now?”

  “Whenever convenient.”

  Phil does impress me, sometimes. I think, “impress” is the word. Another kilometer or so along I found a grassy flat area beside the road. I slowed and gently drove until the car was mostly off the road. “I checked the rear-view mirror again. “I guess they’re going to wait,” I said.

  “They’ve gotta,” Phil said, unbuckling his seatbelt. “They don’t know whether we’re going to launch from Oak Point or Rose Point.” He got out, unzipped, and pissed against the back tire of my car, looking at the treetops and whistling.

  As we got back onto the road, I asked. “What, my tire needed cleaning? You were a dog in a past existence?”

  Phil just looked at the road ahead.

  “You wanted to show them how long your dick is?”

  “By Jove,” Phil smiled. “I think he’s got it.”

  “Did you ever wonder why you have so much trouble getting girlfriends?” Actually, he didn’t seem to have many problems in that area. Keeping them – that was a different proposition. Let me advise all lonely men that being tall, dark, handsome, charming, and rich is s good way to get girlfriends. But if most or all of them haven’t been working so well for you, then try being really, really bizarre. There’s a subgroup of women on this planet who are attracted to bizarre men.

  I suspect these women feel constrained by social conventions and react by seeking the bizarre. Or maybe they’re just nuts, I don’t know. Maybe I should write a book, Hanging with the Filberts: Women Who Like Crazy Dudes. Aisha could endorse it.

  Phil broke into my thoughts, the bastard. “Those girls – ah, women – behind us have a perfect right to drive wherever they want and a perfect right to paddle their kayaks wherever they want. Until we can prove they’re harassing us, there’s nothing legal we can do.

  “However,” he went on, putting his hands behind his head, “I intend to mislead and discourage them as much as possible. Now you’re thinking,” Phil smiled, “that having a piss isn’t going to bother them. And, logically, it won’t.”

  I kept driving. A pickup truck passed us, kicking up a spatter of gravel.

  “But there are things,” Phil said, “that aren’t logical.” He looked at me. “Men, to start with. And men’s tendency toward illogical, uncivilized behavior towards women.”

  “You’re talking like a baboon.”

  “Right,” Phil said. “I’m trying to trigger a raw primeval fear of male uncivilized aggression. It could be argued that the entire history of civilization is mostly an attempt to keep the male gender from exercising his natural primitive behaviour.”

  “And,” I said, “we’re heading away from civilization.”

  “That always makes women nervous.”

  “And the fact that we’re about as wimpy and over-civilized as it is possible to make a male has nothing to do with it?”

  “Like they know us?”

  “They’re still following us.”

  Phil looked into the visor mirror. “But not quite as close. Maybe sometime that little bit of extra distance will be all we need.”

  “Maybe sometime they’ll revert to primitive femalehood and feed your dick to the lake trout. Become known as the Bobbiting Boaters of the Bay.” I made the turn to Oak Point. The other car dropped back until it had disappeared around a corner.

  “If they had closed the gap between the cars I’d be worried, but they dropped back, and that tells me my dick is probably safe for now.”

  “For now.”

  “For now.”

  The road ended at the marina. A two-story building held a few boats still stored for the season. A dozen more were tied up at the set of large private docks and two smaller boats were moored to the outside of the public dock.

  I parked under a tree on the grass while Phil went in to pay and make arrangements for camping and parking.

  The marina was in a narrow sheltered inlet. Out past the tree branches waving in the wind there were rows of whitecaps in the open bay, and a distant sound of rock and water meeting somewhere. The inlet was calm, with little lines of small leftover waves walking into it from the bay.

  I watched in the mirror as Heather’s car rolled up behind mine, then past and up to the store parking lot.

  Phil came out of the store and walked like he was stepping out into the street with a .45 strapped to his hip to meet the last bad guy in the town. I made a note to ask him if he had an extra Y chromosome somewhere. He walked up to my window without looking at the other car.

  “Got us a couple of night’s camping. They’ve got a campground here,” he said.

  “Not going to try to outrun the bad guys?”

  He nodded towards the lake. “The water’s full of canoe-hunting waves this afternoon. A kayak would have fun out there, but us canoeists might just want to wait for a quieter time.”

  “Gotta agree with that one, I said, relieved. I like water, but I’m like a guy that likes snakes; I recognize that there are good ones and bad ones. That was bad water out there, bad for canoes. The pounding noise from the shore reminded me of a pack of wolves in a cage, chawing at the steel bars and eyeing my muscle tissue.

  Campsite 27 was one of the better ones; Phil must have done some fancy talking at the store. There was a picnic table that was more or less together and a firepit. Someone had dragged part of a dead limb up, but I could see there was going to be a need for some purchased firewood.

  There was also space enough for the car and two tents, and then some. Private campgrounds tend to be crowded, so this looked pretty good.

  “Set up the tents and then go into town?” Phil asked?

  “Town?” Parry Sound was more than half an hour away.

  “The snack bar,” Phil said, grinning. “It’s as close as you get out here.”

  -------------

  “You’re Win?” she said. Outside the café a dog barked and some guy tried ordering his family around in a small cabin cruiser.

  I sat on a wooden chair by a wooden table eating a hamburger and fries. Nothing like a teenage meal to boost a person’s spirits. I looked around for Phil, but remembered he was still back at the campsite.

  It was a day as no other. We had come to the borderland where the dark forest stopped against the water, and out there were hu
ndreds of islands. Islands no bigger than a house, but full of mystery and promise.

  The wind sang in the treetops of secrets we might find or never find but our lives would never go on the same. There was a lift to the air at the end of our known world, and the only thing that could make it better would be a young woman with dark hair and dark eyes smoldering like a campfire about to burst into flame.

  She was a cute chick, but she was not a happy chick.

  “Most of the time.”

  She sat down. “You’re an asshole,” she said, looking evenly at me.

  “You have fine tits,” I said, “but your legs are short. What’s your name?”

  “Your friend is the shit that comes out of an asshole.”

  “Windy today,” I said. “Your hair’s a mess. And you’re not all that good at metaphors. Probably time you changed your tampon.”

  “It’s dangerous water out there.”

  I nodded at the plate in front of me, then stuffed a bunch of fries in my mouth, letting a few hang out and one drop to the table. “Is that a threat?” I asked, very slowly. You can still speak clearly with a mouthful of French fries if you take it slowly and open your mouth real wide. Of course I lost a couple more half-chewed chips.

  She was getting less happy by the moment. I wasn’t going to win the conciliator’s annual award at this rate. I added a bite of hamburg to the half chewed chips in my mouth and decided to continue winning her heart. But I shifted sideways in case she decided to boot one of my tenderer areas. “I feel safe enough,” I added, but with a mouthful like that, the “f” was a tough act and the “s” wasn’t much easier. Ketchup dripped down my chin, but I managed not to spray onion chunks all the way across the table.

  She blinked a couple of times, then got up and left.

  I swallowed my food and wiped my mouth with a paper napkin. I looked around. The Guy In The Kitchen Area was looking out the serving window. He was laughing silently. “You’re scaring away the customers!” he choked out.

  “Geez,” I said. “Now I’ll have to eat twice as much.” I stuffed a bunch more chips in my mouth.

  He laughed again. “You guys got a problem with those women.”

  “The usual stuff,” I said. “Canoers and kayakers; the eternal conflict.”

  “You going to a cottage?” he asked.

  “Pictures. I’m planning on taking a few pictures of the islands. You make good hamburgers.”

  “Frozen patties,” he said, “but we like to get the best onions and tomatoes we can. A couple of cottagers bring them in from Hamilton. And a local woman makes a special chili relish for us.” He hesitated. “Careful what you take pictures of out there.”

  “Trees,” I said, “and water and rock.”

  “That should be okay,” he said. “Just remember that some people are shy of cameras out there.”

  “I’ll remember that.” I hadn’t a clue what he meant. The islands had a number of cottages on them. In the old days you could put a cottage almost anywhere, but nowadays the government requirements are a lot stricter, to control sewage pollution.

  The family from the cabin cruiser came in. The father wasn’t ordering people around any more. It didn’t look like they were talking to him, anyway. I wondered if the rest of the family was ready to walk home. It would be a long walk.

  Another guy came in. He stopped in the doorway, looked around carefully, then stepped up to the serving window. He was one of those big guys who commanded service at once just because of his size. He looked like someone who routinely wrestled moose to the ground.

  “Hi, Cork,” The Guy In The Kitchen Area said, “What can I get you?”

  “Tomato soup, please, and a toasted cheese. And coffee in a cup would perk me up. All to go, don’tcha know” Cork was wearing jeans, a brown plaid shirt, and good moose-wrestling boots. He walked over, surprisingly light on his feet, and sat down at the table next to me. I was just finishing up my fries and tea.

  There is a quickness, a lithness about some men that reminds you of cat. A cat in a man’s clothing, if you will. It’s in the way they move, a fraction of a second faster in everything they do, like an athlete. It’s in the way the eye misses nothing, like a bird of prey watching from a tree.

  It’s in the movement of backbone and the turn of wrist, in the placement of feet and the sweep of an eye. You think it’s an attitude, and it’s only partly his attitude, and he smiles like he’s being your friend because he doesn’t rip off your ear in a too-quick movement and eat it.

  Klutzes like me resent the gift of animalness given to such guys. We resent the fact that we have to be nice unless there’s a cop at the next table. We’re jealous of the women that are attracted to these men, that bed that calls them to danger instead of shelter.

  We really resent guys like this if they’re also smart. I could tell by the eyes and the turn of the head that this Cork guy had some sort of smarts. Hell, he might have a higher IQ than I did. A man that you treated with care, however casually you disguised it. I’d known the guy almost thirty-eight seconds, and I’d like to have seen his head on a sharpened stick.

  “Out to do some canoeing?” he asked. “I don’t recall seeing you around here before, not in this store.” The Kitchen Guy delivered a foam coffee cup and bowl to his table, as well as a sandwich wrapped in plastic.

  “Gonna steal canoes,” I said, putting some vinegar onto the last fry. I looked him sincerely in the eye. “People in the cottages, they always got extras and nobody ever ties them down. Me and three other guys go out and get maybe twenty or thirty canoes and string them in a long line and bring them back to the shore.”

  Cork raised his eyebrows.

  “Burn ‘em,” I said. “Big bonfire. Secret society. Summer equinox. Eat fish eyeballs on a stick.” I scratched my head. “The fiberglass canoes, they don’t burn worth a shit, but the plastic ones make up for it.” “Watch for the smoke at midnight,” I added as he got up.

  I suppose I could have given him my card with the “nature photography” bit on it, but I didn’t see that it was any of his business. I smiled.

  “Meat,” Cork said, smiling back. “Fish food out there. Nobody knows what happens when the wind gets up. Police find the bodies a-floating into the shore and they’re so decomposed that nobody finds out that they’ve been fucked and screwed with and interesting things have been shoved up their assholes. Just meat to the fish and just meat to the police. Canoers from down south.:

  I set my last fry on the table, set the sugar container on it, and squashed it.

  Cork got up to get his take-out meal. “There is no summer equinox,” he said as the door closed behind him.

  “Big guy,” I remarked to the Guy From the Kitchen. I felt like some boots with steel toes had just gotten off my feet.

  The Guy From the Kitchen watched Cork get into a pickup truck in the parking lot. “He’s a guy you gotta watch,” he said. “I went to school with him, and there were bigger guys, but none quite as…..”

  “A bully?” I asked. I’d been pushed around at school, too.

  “Not really. He just sorta got his way whenever he wanted something. Like, some bigger kid would push one of Cork’s followers around, and then one day, he wouldn’t.” The Guy From the Kitchen shook his head. “Then one day the bigger kid would start avoiding Cork. And he’d never get near him again. Sometimes Cork would go up to the guy and suggest he do some silly thing like put his hand on his own head, and the guy always would. Nobody ever really knew why, but us kids always made up the stupidest stories.”

  “But nobody got hurt?”

  “There were always people getting hurt, and once one kid just disappeared. They found him drowned in the river. A lot of people knew that he’d stood up to Cork, but nobody ever proved a thing.” He shook his head again. “Maybe it was all just rumors.”

  “But you believed it.” I got up.

  “Listen. Cork spends a lot of time around town with some people I wouldn’t invit
e to a dog fight, and he’s been spending a lot of time out in the islands. He just makes me nervous. Always has. Somehow, every time his name comes up, people start talking blood and bone.” The Guy From the Kitchen bent his head and looked at me over his glasses. “I wouldn’t miss him, if he never came in again.”

  When I got back to the camp, Phil had something cooking in a pot. The little stove was sitting on the picnic table. I could see that Phil had set up both tents.

  “You’re a good slave,” I said, “or a good wife.”

  “Probably live a lot longer than you will after whatever you ate at the café.”

  “The hamburgers are good.”

  “I’ve cooked up some chili. Want any?”

  “I’m pretty full now.”

  “That’s okay, I only made enough for myself. I was just being polite. Phil turned the stove down to simmer as I settled into a lawn chair. We didn’t have plans to take the lawn chairs in the canoe, but I was glad we’d brought them. Always make room in the car for lawn chairs; a hard rule in life. Phil tasted the mix.

  “There’s lots of beans in that mix?” I asked.

  “Can’t make healthy chili without beans.”

  “Glad we got two tents.”

  “You’re always too tense.”

  “I just hope my tent’s upwind from yours.” I contemplated the wind that still shook the leaves above our heads. At least the wind kept the bugs down.

  “Going to get me a beer?” Phil turned the stove off. “Last chance to get some award-winning chili.”

  “I’d want to see that award first. It’s probably from the ordnance division of the Canadian army.” Actually, I knew that Phil made perfectly wonderful chili. A bit on the hot side, but still great stuff. But I have a thing about stuffing myself full of junk food in between Aisha’s healthy cooking and the camp food I’d be eating for a few days. I got Phil a beer from the trunk of the car. We’d brought genuine booze for the trip, but, like the lawn chairs, we’d included beer “for emergencies”. Of course, we got to define what constituted an emergency.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You can have one, too, if you want.”

  I’d already opened one. “Thanks a lot. Especially since I bought the beer.”

  “You’re welcome.” Phil poured the chili into a plastic bowl, took a couple of slices of bread from a loaf, and started eating. Actually, it looked good.

  “I met Nancy Barnes at the café.” I told him.

  “And now you’re engaged.” Phil washed down some chili with a swig of beer.

  “I wouldn’t go that far. She might let us live if we turn around right now.”

  “She said that.”

  “We didn’t actually converse much,” I said. “But I can read the look in a woman’s eyes.”

  “Was the other one there?”

  “Heather? Nope. I guess they didn’t think it would take two of them to handle me.”

  “I should have been there. I love it when you get nasty towards women. It’s a wonder your family ever reproduced.”

  “There was another guy, somebody named ‘Cork’, who was asking where we were going.”

  “You drew him a map, of course.”

  “I told him we’re canoe thieves.”

  “Might have better prospects.”

  “Any of that chili left?” I asked him.

  “I saved you some. But I didn’t know you liked it.”

  “I just want to be able to fart back at four in the morning if required.”

  The sun was getting low and the wind died, so some mosquitoes came out and jabbed us here and there. “You think this “Cork’ guy is just being curious?” I asked.

  “There aren’t many people up this way, just the locals and the cottagers and the kayakers,” Phil said, working on another beer. “The locals talk about each other and the cottagers try to stay mysterious ‘cause they want to get away from everything. The kayakers come in groups, usually as part of a tour.”

  “We’re anomalies,” I suggested.

  “They’re bound to be curious, you know.”

  “In case….?”

  “In case we’re canoe thieves!” Phil laughed.

  Afterwards, Phil heated some water for dishes, and I wandered off to look at the shore. The road for the campsite was a pair of dirt tire ruts, with a hump of grass in the middle. It meandered around among campsites, some good and used a lot, others barely used and deep in weeds. Most of the picnic tables needed repair.

  “I’m here to talk some sense into you,” a voice said, startling me.

  I’d been sitting on a log on the shore, watching the sun prepare to set and contemplating the wind in my lack of hair and the way the waves rolled in. “Jesus Christ Almighty!” I said. “I didn’t see you coming.” I’ve always been a Master of Stating the Obvious. Not that I actually got up from my log. A rocky shore has a limited number of comfortable places to sit and, as far as I could see, I had the only one for quite a ways.

  “You,” Heather said, “are a master of stating the obvious. Glad you didn’t have a heart attack, anyway.”

  “I’m not so sure Nancy would feel that way.”

  “Well, I gather that if you had a heart attack and pitched face-first into the water she’d stand on your head for a while to make sure.” She smiled brightly.

  “I win friends everywhere I go.”

  “Hence the name, or nickname, obviously. Although I suspect it’s short for ‘Winter’ or something like that.”

  I looked up, startled. Mine wasn’t a name anyone ever guessed. “Winston” was the most common guess, and many times I’d let it ride rather than trying to explain why my parents named me “Winter”.

  “Ah,” she said. “Not a common name, but a good one.”

  “I never thought so.”

  “There’s a lot of winter in your soul.”

  “And there I always try to be Mr. Sunshine.”

  “And that’s why.”

  Maybe it was. “Nancy know you’re down here consorting with the enemy?”

  “She’s busy making supper and muttering to herself about some guy she should have diced up at the café.” Heather walked down to the water’s edge, the toes of her hiking shoes just out of the splashing of the waves.

  “She’s a hard-hearted woman.”

  “She has a wildness in her, and doesn’t know what to do with it.”

  “You look into people’s hearts and souls?”

  “I live there.”

  “Seems like time for an eviction notice.”

  “I was there before they were.”

  “Welcome to the Wonderful Mystical Planet,” I said. “Deep revelations fifty cents.”

  She laughed. “Tell it to the wind. If the wind makes any sense to you, tell it to the water.

  “Might make more sense.”

  “Than me?”

  “Yup.” I chucked a rock into the waves. The sun reached towards the horizon like a groundhog heading for safety.

  “Do you know why the wind comes?”

  “Basic meteorology. High pressure systems. Low pressure systems. Nothing mystical.” She was starting to annoy me.

  “You can predict every little gust?”

  “Nope. Can’t. Basic chaos theory.” I started to get up.

  “You believe you know and yet you believe in a universe in chaos. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “That’s what the whiskey’s for.” I got up.

  “That’s what the dance is for.” She began an elaborate dance on a flat rock.

  I sat down. It was a good dance, for a woman with her clothes on.

  Eventually the sun was completely down. I finally left her dancing where land met water and night met day and the chaos of a universe abutted a woman dancing on a rock.

  Phil had a fire going and a couple of hot-dogs cooking on sticks. He had them propped up with rocks so he could stare at the fire and drink beer at the same time.

  “Out watching the sun go down?” he asked. br />
  “I did. It did.”

  “Hot dog and a beer?”

  “Damn fine idea.”

  He opened me a beer and wrapped a cold bun around a rather-overdone wiener. Outside the range of the fire the world was dark and chaotic. The wind whipped the tops of the poplar trees and we edged up closer to the fire. We talked guy talk, which was mostly silences. We moved our lawn chairs when the wind started blowing smoke on us.

  Eventually, we ran out of beer or maybe got tired of trips into the blackness to pee or maybe had one hot dog too many. Or maybe we just approached some topics that we didn’t want to.

  “Ah, goodnight,” I said, without preamble, and got up. We poured water onto the fire, then want to the tents without saying anything more.

  I crawled into my sleeping bag. I hoped to get to sleep before Phil started snoring, but my bladder had other plans. While I was up, I noticed that there was a fire still at the women’s campsite, and that the wind had died.

  When I got up Phil was sitting in a lawn chair reading a book. He had his sleeping bag draped over him and a bag of granola on his lap. That explained the crunching sounds that had come into my dream as a pair of snakes chewing the bones of my toes. There were gusts of wind and the waving of branches had been angel wings in my dream. It had been exciting stuff.

  I checked the weather. The sun was probably just up, although a heavy overcast made it hard to tell. There was a dew on the ground and the tents and the picnic table. I wandered off to have a pee behind a bush and got my boots covered with morning dew. But I did note that the wind still down; the air was still as a sleeping bird.

  “Going to make breakfast?” I asked.

  “Let’s check to see if the café opens this early,” Phil said. He offered me the granola, which I declined.

  “Can we trust the girls not to sabotage our stuff?” I looked at all the stuff on the picnic table, and at the canoe on the car.

  “They need us to lead them to the money.” Phil got up. “As long as we lock the car and take the map with us, there’s not much point in their doing anything to us.”

  It turned out the café wasn’t open before ten, which was a couple of hours away. And it didn’t matter anyway, since the girl’s campsite was empty. Their car was parked in the official parking lot on the grass, and the kayaks were gone.

  So we cooked up some bacon and eggs but didn’t bother with the awkward task of making toast - just had bagels. By ten to nine we were in the canoe, pushing away from the dock. I let Phil have the stern seat.

  The stern seat’s the power trip seat. You get to steer the canoe and complain about the guy in front not paddling hard enough. Meanwhile, you can slack off and play with your dick for all the guy in front knows. But I still wanted Phil to decide which route to take. He had the (phony) map coordinates, after all.

  Out of the little harbour we passed a couple of boats coming in, but they slowed to keep the wake down and we waved our thanks. The stretch of water between the harbour and Sandy Island was smooth as glass, and the trees along the shore made a perfect reflection. We headed straight out for Sandy Island, as planned.

  Sandy Island’s one of the bigger chunks of land in the bay and provides shelter from west winds. It’s got a bunch of cottages along the shores, and a tiny little lake in the interior. The lake is actually more of a large beaver pond but it’s got a little rock island in the middle. I once sat on the rock just to contemplate the fact that I was on an island in a lake in an island in a lake. No special reason, just liked the thought.

  Maybe Heather would have done a dance to that thought and its irrationality. I’d often heard about dancing as a metaphor for life and love and time and God’s plan for the universe, but somehow it hadn’t struck me until I saw Heather’s dance on the shore.

  As we got close to Sandy Island, the water got shallow and, as required, sandy. We turned and followed the shoreline north, watching for marauding kayaks.

  As we paddled north, Sandy Island curved away from us until we could see other, smaller, islands, and past them, just a glimpse of the entire sweep of Georgian Bay.

  I guess it looked like a painting. The sky was still overcast and the water still as glass except for the tiny V ripples of the canoe and the little whirlpools behind each paddle stroke.

  There was a string of islands between us and Bateau, and we used them as a barrier between us and the open lake.

  One thing about a string of islands: you can’t visually separate islands, points, and bays until you actually get to them. That means someone has to spend a lot of time with his head down looking at the map. I volunteered, but Phil figured I was doing such a good job paddling that I shouldn’t be interrupted.

  Then, about the time we passed the tip of Woodall Island (looked like a good camping spot there) Phil announced, “pirates on the port bow.”

  I looked around. There were two kayaks coming out from between Woodall and Rockcliffe Islands. Right colors, one paddler with long red hair: no doubt we’d been tracked down.

  One big difference between kayaks and canoes is in the waters they’re designed for. A big kayak is a bugger to portage and useless on a winding creek. But out on open water, lake or ocean, it’s in love. A rising swell lifts a kayak and there’s a song in its heart as it goes up, then down for the next wave.

  Different than a couple of people in a canoe thinking about various cameras and metal detectors and bones scattered over the bottom of the freaking bay.

  “Ready the cannons, sir,” I said.

  “We’re short on cannons,” Phil noted.

  “Did you not serve beans for breakfast,” I asked. “I told you, beans for breakfast.”

  Phil made a farting sound with his lips. “Perhaps we could fool them?”

  “Worth a try,” I noted. I considered paddling faster, but a kayak is also a lot faster than a canoe, so there wasn’t much point.

  Keeping the chain of islands between us and the open water, Phil and I paddled on towards Bateau Island. I checked behind us a couple of times; the kayaks were keeping well back.

  We got to the island. And kept going. I’d grown up wanting girls to chase me, so this should have been an answer. It wasn’t.

  We squeezed along the channel between Bateau and a bunch of smaller islands with cottages on them, bumping rocks occasionally until we came out at the north end.

  Ahead lay the open bay, dotted with islands and rocks. At the edge of the horizon, as seen from a guy in the front of the canoe, was the line of open water, almost blending into the clouds. Beyond that, my imagination filled in, nothing but water all the way across Georgian Bay.

  Big bay. Ships go down on it. I stopped paddling, and noticed from the total silence that Phil had done the same.

  Now I want you to know that a canoe is a fine craft for narrow little rivers. You can slide it through channels that aren’t much wider than it is. You can pole it through swamps and when you really, truly, don’t have enough water for it, you can get out and carry it. The birds will sing at you and insects will treasure your passage. Little fish will scurry away and crayfish will crawl under logs and rocks.

  Not this.

  This is water that doesn’t care. This is big water, big sky.

  Should get some interesting pictures, I thought.

  The voyageurs who brought furs from the Rockies back to Montreal followed these shorelines. But they kept close to shore and watched the weather carefully.

  There was a sense of the guts of infinity out there, of answers to questions not asked. Only humans, of all the life in this world, seek new paths. It is a freedom none others have asked for.

  There were currents in the water beneath us, slow and dark and vast, flowing in from the deeps out there among the islands and feeling the shorelines. I looked at a cottage near the tip of the Island. The first aspen leaves were trembling, but the flag on the flagpole beside the white cottage wasn’t moving. Currents in air.

  I looked down into the clear, c
lear water. The light-colored bottom shimmered and the ice-cream-cone shape of a very large channel catfish swam by.

  It gave me a thrill; it always does. A catfish is like a creature from science fiction, living in our waters. The barbels that are attached near its mouth are sensors; a catfish must live in a world of touch-taste-smell for which we have no word and which we cannot imagine.

  Channel catfish are the biggest catfish in Canada; this one probably weighed twelve kilograms; they don’t get much bigger than that here. (Mind you, the blue catfish of the southern Mississippi can get three or four times as large.)

  A catfish that big probably has no enemies. The muskellunge in the bay might be twice as big, but a muskellunge would be hesitant to face the spines; one spine at the top and one on each side. These are strong and nasty; the local aboriginal people saved them for awls.

  In the spring time the male and female spend some time face to face, intertwining their barbels and caressing each other with them. A catfish has no scales, just a skin covered with an antibacterial slime. There’s a lot of surface to touch with those barbels. The catfish take their time touching-tasting-smelling each other, suspended in the deep clear water. Makes most other forms of foreplay look unimaginably crude.

  They won’t reproduce unless they can make a nest somewhere safe and dark. The young ones start off eating insects and water plants, but when they get big they move out and also go after other fish. Unlike most catfish, channel cats like clear water, preferably with a current.

  Its small round eyes looked up at me and the canoe for a moment, then it went on, following some path or current of touch-taste-smell into the dark waters of the bay.

  God knows, Phil had currents and questions and paths in his brain, and mysteries. He always acted like a simpler being than he was. You’d think you had him painted, then discover you had the portrait of a carefully maintained picket fence.

  For that moment, still in the currents of air and water, the catfish below and a couple of seagulls above, we were the center of the universe. It waited for our next move. I thought we should make it boldly, with pride.

  “The dance begins. The ballroom awaits.” Phil put his paddle in the air and contemplated the horizon. I thought of Heather and what dance she’d have for this.

  The water rippled slightly. The flag by the cottage moved in an unfelt wind.

  Currents.

  I leaned into my paddle without comment, and we pointed the canoe east towards the windward shore of Bateau Island. Well behind us, two kayaks followed.

  “Where we going?” I asked. Supposedly I hadn’t made up the code and Phil hadn’t been real specific.

  “We’ll do a circle of the island. After all, this is where Big Paul Stanley got nailed to a tree. Supposedly.”

  “Supposedly,” I agreed. “So what are you going to do, look for the tree?”

  “Ha, ha, chuckle, chuckle,” he said, dryly.

  “Well, then?”

  “Well,” Phil said, “if the Jeannie Rogers went down on some sunker among these islands, and if Big Paul even started to tell them where he ditched the loot from the booze he took to Chicago, then maybe it’s on this island.” He took a deep breath after the long sentence.

  “Is that what the code says?” I knew it wasn’t.

  “Nah, but there’s more than a code to this one.”

  “But if we’re going out further - and isn’t that a possibility - shouldn’t we do it while the water’s calm?”

  “You,” Phil said, “take all the fun out of things.”

  I ignored the cold feeling in my gut and paddled on around the island.

  You know, when you look at a map and see this little thing called an island, it looks pretty small on a map. And when you look at a metal detector and think of packing it in a canoe, it looks pretty big.

  But when you get to someplace like Bateau Island, and realize it’s a mile long and about a quarter of that wide, and it’s forested, you begin to realize that a metal detector fits into any island 580,449,112 times. More or less.

  As we cruised down the west coast of the island, trailing a couple of kayaks a half-mile or so behind us, I kept looking out over the bay. Aisha had been right: the tiny islands out there resembled nothing so much as smooth, weathered bones.

  The water was just starting to get a decent ripple to it when Phil steered us in to shore.

  We slid the canoe up to a smooth slope of pink rock and scrambled out. I tied the canoe securely to a rock: the nearest tree was well back from the shore.

  Then we sat on a rock and looked out over the water. Out past the bobbing kayaks were a few mounds of bare rock that made up places like Hare Island, Dearlove Island, Maple Island, and a bunch of others.

  “Verily, ‘tis kinda pretty out there.” Phil scratched his balls. “Almighty righteous seascape.”

  “Very calm out there.”

  He looked at the map, looked up, pointed. “Cathcart Island? Maple Island?”

  I inspected the map. “Could be,” I assured him.

  “Where Beelzebub and the angels wait to baptize wayward children such as us in silver and gold.”

  It was getting about noon. “I’m hungry,” I said. Looking out there made me hungry.

  “Locusts and honey in the wilderness. Pomegranates and vinegar.” He nodded at the lake, where the kayaks were coming in towards us. “Bathsheba and Jezebel.”

  I got up, not really much sure of the reference. “You’ve been too long from the church,” I said. “The words are beginning to creep out of you like maggots from stale bread.” I hauled some peanut-butter sandwiches from my pack and passed half to Phil. “Fresh yesterday,” I said. “No maggots.”

  We watched the kayaks get closer. A little ways from the shore they stopped paddling, and drifted in. Heather slid her kayak alongside a log at the shoreline, then hopped out. She helped Nancy get out of the other kayak. Exiting a kayak is an awkward process at best.

  “From the wilderness of Zhin,” Phil announced, “from Hazor and Ashdod the uncircumcised Philistines and Geshurites are upon us. May the everlasting light defend us.” The last part was hard to get, since he was chewing a sandwich, and peanut butter tends to stick to the roof of one’s mouth. “A flagon of wine,” he demanded.

  I passed him a water bottle. “Do your own conversion.”

  The kayaks tethered to a solid-looking piece of rock, Heather and Nancy made their way upslope towards us, carrying a plastic bag. “We have peanut-butter sandwiches for lunch,” I said, “and a couple of pieces of sausage.” Real sausages: I meant no phallic references, although Nancy gave me that look that women get.

  “May we join you?” Nancy asked, evenly.

  “The prodigal paddlers are ever welcome.” Phil indicated a space beside us. “We slay the fatted calf for you.” He held out a chunk of sausage.

  It was declined. Instead Nancy unloaded several clear plastic bags from the front of one of the kayaks. Inside these clear plastic bags were clear plastic containers of food. Like someone had ordered from a deli in Cobourg and the delivery truck had shown up.

  There was asparagus. God only knows how many miles that stuff had traveled by the time it got to Ontario in September. She put it in a pot on the nifty propane-powered camp stove she’d brought. Of course, the whole deal was on the ground and awkward to reach, since nobody’d had the sense to bring picnic table.

  Food has the same parameters as the other stuff you bring in a canoe; the more you bring the happier the campsite but the nastier the portages.

  There are lots of good foods made especially for camping. Little bags of dried stuff made by ex-hippie-commune-dropouts in Oregon. They’re great things, but they have an air of being so utterly, unbelievably yuppie that many people I know would sooner bring dried oatmeal and make up something resembling hamster poop. I’m not that proud; I use the packages – but only when I go camping alone.

  You can bring lots of dried things to save weight, and this works fin
e at the campsite. You just boil it in lake water and count on the heat to sterilize the water. This doesn’t work so well for food you nibble on while you’re in transit. The non-dried stuff, such as apples, weigh a ton. And the dried stuff (such as dried apple slices) makes you thirstier, so you need extra water, which weighs a ton.

  I like pasta enough to bring a bag of the stuff. It’s possible to put on a big pot of water. When it’s boiled enough to kill whatever you scooped out of the lake, you pour some into a cup for tea. Then you throw in the pasta. When the pasta is done, you scoop it into a bowl, and add some seasonings. The rest of the hot water is for dishwashing. After that, you can use it to put out the fire before you go to bed.

  Heather seemed into relaxing while Nancy made the food. Maybe she was bone lazy, or maybe she’d learned to keep out of the way of Nancy when food was being prepared.

  Nancy brought out a whole bunch of bags from the hold of the kayaks. Since she knew where it all was, she’d probably done the packing and I was labeling her a type A personality. Type A’s are no good in bed. Actually, I don’t know that, but it seems like a reasonable assumption that anyone with a checklist can’t keep her legs up for any length of time.

  One thing a canoe has over a kayak is storage. Not only is a canoe better shaped to store larger quantities of camp goods, but it’s open. You can throw in large bags and lawn chairs and barbecues and kitchen tables, and as long as it doesn’t upset, you can paddle it.

  A sea kayak has a couple of hatches in it. Anything and everything that you bring has to fit into those two little holes, one at the front and one at the back. If you decide you need your hat and you’ve put it in first, you’ll have to pull into shore and unload all the things that are between you and your hat.

  If you’re a type A (and probably no good in bed), you’ll have had the things you’re likely to need packed last. If you need your hat, you can have the person in the other canoe reach into your hatch and get it for you.

  We watched Nancy prepare a salad. I raised my eyebrows at one point and looked at Heather. She squinted and said, “Lithuanian Mixed Vegetable Salad.” I looked it up later and found out what was in it.

  She mixed a mix of cold pre-cooked vegetables, which included some carrots, beets (yuk), potatoes, and green peas, then added a sauce of sour cream, cayenne, salt and pepper. This all went on top of some chopped lettuce leaves from another bag.

  I suppose it was good (I wasn’t offered any) but personally I like to go camping to get away from the fancy stuff in life. Not, mind you, that I’d object if someone else were to carry in and prepare fancy stuff. I just want to eat easy food and drink liquor and take pictures.

  We ate in silence for a moment or two.

  Now I want you to understand that I’m not really a social-type person. Ideally, I would have been out on that island alone. Sitting on a rock and looking out across the bay and those bare-bone islands with a mixture of joy and sadness, feeling the weight of the sky and the power of the water.

  Phil likes women. But I can understand about his lack of success with them.

  “Phil,” I said, indicating Phil with a pepperoni sausage, “Is after the legendary treasure trove of Big Paul Stanley.” It was a good opener. A fuck of a lot better than anybody else there was likely to come up with. I wished I had some whiskey handy; I wished to be drunk. I wasn’t, so I chose to be direct instead.

  Nobody said anything. Bastards.

  “Nancy here is a descendant of Big Paul and believes she is entitled to the loot.” I actually looked at her; she was watching the treetops. The leaves were flickering steadily. I looked at the water; it was rippling.

  In silence and in shouting you can indulge your fantasies.

  Nurse them, feed them.

  What a screwed-up thing is the human brain.

  There was no shouting. Nancy said, “I work part time in the paper mill with a few hours on the weekends as a waitress.” We shifted on our respective seats and said nothing.

  “The mill’s a hell-hole of a place to work,” Nancy said. “I got a deal where I only work four days a week, usually Monday through Thursday, but sometimes someone else needs a day off and I’ll take their shift. Just the girls, though; most of the guys are assholes or so pussy-whipped by their wives that they just keep away from me.

  “Because I say what I think and I don’t give a shit what people care about it. People complain to the union or to my boss when I tell them what I think of their politics. Christ, it seems like I’m the only intelligent person in this country some times, and I know I’m no genius.

  “I vote for whoever I want. I don’t’ care about parties; they’re all crooks as far as I can see.

  Nobody was going to argue with Nancy. I might have wanted to throw a sleeping bag over her head and tie her down so it all came down to distant mumbling, but I’m too polite a Canadian for that. Do all us over-polite types have such thoughts?

  “Not that anybody complains about me any more. My boss may be a jerk, but he’s scared of the union and I’m pretty good at my job. Production planning assistant, I guess you’d call it. I spend half my time on the phone talking to suppliers and the other half trying to figure out why the paperwork never matches what’s actually sitting on the floor.

  “I used to like my job. I had a boyfriend I thought was a nice guy instead of the moron asshole he turned out to be, and I liked being independent. Then it’s the same old problems again and again, and you figure you’ve died and gone to Hell when Sunday night comes and you know on Monday some problem just comes out and grabs you by the ass.

  “And there’s enough money if you don’t mind living in a closet apartment in someone’s basement and driving a car you can’t trust to get you to Orillia when you want to see something besides Parry Sound.

  “So I work at the Roadside out towards the highway. I sometimes piss off the customers when they try to argue with me and sometimes I piss off the boss when I tell the customer today’s special isn’t any good, but most of the truckers think it’s funny so I haven’t been fired yet.

  “I haven’t run off with any trucker yet, but goddamnit I’m tempted sometimes. If I could get my hands on Big Paul’s money, I’d be out of here so fast this town would just see my dust.”

  There was a silence, followed by the rickety calls of tree frogs.

  “It’s not your money,” I said.

  “Screw you!” Nancy glared. “I don’t care if it’s legally my money or the pope’s or whatever. I’m going to claim it when I get it.”

  “That could be an interesting proposition,” I said. “Have you been looking for it?”

  Heather laughed, softly.

  I asked Heather, “Does that mean that she’s been out here?”

  “Well,” Heather said, “we came out here when we were a lot younger, and looked around, but we didn’t know where to start. So Nancy started doing research, and she’s still looking.”

  “Research?” Phil asked, scratching his nether regions.

  “People have been looking for the money for a long time around here, and almost all the people are guys.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Nancy searched out the guys who searched for the money,” Heather said.

  “Ah,” I said, looking at Phil.

  “So,” said Phil, looking at Nancy, “we’ll share a sleeping bag tonight and by morning you’ll know everything I do?”

  “In your dreams, bucko, in your dreams.” Nancy glared at Phil.

  “No use sleeping with Win, here,” Phil said. “Ever since that unfortunate accident while whittling a wooden golf ball at the nude beach he just hasn’t had much interest in the opposite sex.”

  “Hey!” I said. “That steel prosthesis they put on me works just fine, once I scrape the rust off it.” I leaned towards Nancy, “I’m the only one that knows anything.”

  Nancy pointed to Phil. “Doubt if either of you know anything useful, but I’d put my money on him.”

&n
bsp; “You heard I had a key to the loot.” Phil said. He’d been a treasure-hunter all his life, mostly in his imagination, and I guess “loot” was less likely to infringe on his private world than “money” or “treasure”.

  “Word gets around.” Heather found a comfortable place in a circle of cedar shade, spread her legs and closed her eyes. In cut-off jeans, dark green T-shirt, and bare feet she looked like she belonged on the island. Christ, she looked like she was an island, to someone, somewhere.

  I said nothing, indulging my own fantasies. September can be hard on a man, especially in a cold, cold climate. We all get to September in this country. Sometime about the first week of June summer gets to this country. By the end of July, everybody’s forgotten about snow drifting across the road last February and is complaining about the heat. In late August a quiet desperation sets in. Sometime about the first week in September the temperature drops suddenly and everybody resigns themselves to winter. They just ignore September and October, the two nicest months.

  “It’s a crock of shit,” Phil said, wrapping up the last of the sandwiches and putting it into the day pack. He pointed out into the lake.

  Out there a couple of cabin cruisers headed to some cottage or port, avoiding the rocks and islands closer to us. Beyond that, a ship was coming in. An ocean-going freighter, by the look of her.

  “Old ship,” Nancy said. People hereabouts seemed dedicated to not discussing the only thing they had to discuss. I figured I might just forgive them. After I’d beaten them all to death with a pine log.

  “Going in to Parry Sound, I guess,” Phil said.

  “Maybe it’ll go up on the rocks,” Nancy said.

  “The Loot,” I said. “The Key to the Loot.” My voice capitalized all the nouns.

  “I rename you General Lee Stalinofsky Pistoff,” Heather said, looking at me.

  “Pissed off, who me.” It was getting warm for September. Or maybe it was just me.

  “Fuck the ship,” I said.

  “That’s not nice language,” Phil noted.

  “It is,” I said, “a long swim back to the mainland. That,” I said, “is my canoe. Maybe you can walk to a cottage on this island and get someone to take you back to the marina. You can hitchhike from there.”

  “You’re being an asshole again,” Nancy said.

  Heather smiled and watched the ship disappear behind an island.

  “He never stops,” Phil said. “Besides, if that ship hits an island, there’ll be real loot, maybe thirty or forty dollars worth to salvage.”

  “The HMS Asshole, with General Lee Pistoff in command, is about to depart,” I said to Phil. “Where the hell do you want me to toss your stuff?”

  “I think he wants us to talk about the purpose of the trip,” Phil said.

  Now there are a lot of people who might object to my language, and there may be a few who figure I was involved in some machiavellian plot to get Nancy and Phil closer by giving them a common antagonist, me.

  What a crock. Give me less credit than that.

  “Anyway,” Phil continued, “I got some information, which Win here probably forged, which gives me a clue as to where Big Paul’s loot got stashed.

  “However,” he continued, “if I find it, you gals will probably try to get it anyway, so maybe I should head home and wait for a better time.”

  There’s nothing like using “gals” to undo common bonding.

  “We might be able to deal.” Nancy got out a couple of slices of cheese and some crackers and passed a few to Heather.

  I adore cheese and crackers. I’d have sold my share of the loot at once.

  “Can’t see why,” Phil said. “I can always come back another time.”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  “As soon as Hell freezes over we can walk to these islands,” Phil said.

  “We can supply some information,” Nancy said.

  “Right.” Phil got up and scratched his balls again. Maybe he had wool underwear.

  “You think not?”

  “Anything you know is just stuff I’ve already heard. I’ve done some studying.” Phil packed up the remains of the lunch. “It’s all rumours and hearsay.”

  ”Maybe so,” Nancy said, “but I’ve been following this most of my life and I know a whole bunch of places not to look. Places that have already been checked a dozen times.”

  “I won’t need that information,” Phil said, yawning. “I’ve got better information.”

  I suppose this might have been the time to tell him that I’d faked all that “better information.” But I didn’t.

  I looked at Heather. She was stretched out in the sunlight. I liked the way her red hair spread out on the lichen-covered rocks. I decided to divorce Aisha and marry Heather. I was captain of my canoe; maybe I could do the ceremony myself. And tell Heather and Aisha afterwards.

  “That information’s probably a crock of shit,” Nancy said, looking me straight in the eye. I shuffled nervously, knowing she’d got it right on.

  “Oh, no doubt,” Phil said brightly, “but it’s my personal crock of shit and it’s a beautiful day out in the islands, and I’ve got a good friend and a Classic Fenton Metal Detector and a few days of freedom and a crock-of-shit map, so I’m ahead of the game even if some people won’t leave me alone.”

  “Map,” I thought. “I never gave him a map.” The code I’d made up pointed to a couple of place locations. But I guessed he’d traced these locations on a map. I expected the women to get up and go right then, but they didn’t.

  “We’re faster than you.” Heather spoke for the first time in a while, although she didn’t open her eyes.

  “We can portage our canoe into the woods,” I pointed out. They’d never be able to follow carrying kayaks.

  “Take you a while, with all that stuff you’ve shoved into your canoe.”

  Damn. She had a point there. It would take a lot of trips and I wasn’t about to leave stuff behind for even a moment. Especially not my camera equipment.

  “Aren’t you planning on leaving?” Phil asked. “We’ve reached an impasse, you know, and you’re going to get tired just sitting here.”

  He had a point. I was getting my afternoon middle-aged sleepies and the rocks and logs didn’t seem as uncomfortable as they had a minute before.

  “No problem,” Nancy said. “The day’s young and I could watch the water all day.”

  “Might as well commemorate the event,” Phil said. “Say Win, would you mind getting your camera and taking a few pictures?”

  “Why not?” I got up, creakily, and stumbled down the shore to the canoe. Miserable bastards wouldn’t even let me have a nap. I hate when that happens, because I get crabby. Well, maybe I get downright mean, since I couldn’t really get any crabbier.

  So I got the camera and the tripod and set up on the shore.

  “Take a picture of me and I’ll shove that thing down your throat,” Nancy said. “I took six pictures and she didn’t. But she did turn an interesting shade of color.

  Then I set the camera to take a couple of pictures of Heather, but she ignored me, lying on a swath of pink granite with her eyes closed. I suspected she was asleep, but I wasn’t sure.

  Then I set up the camera to take a wide shot of all of us hanging about the shorelines of life and forests of mystery and vast stretches of future just starting to turn into waves.

  What a bunch of perfectly miserable people we were. The Thirty Thousand Islands are some of the most beautiful in the world. What a bunch of idiots. But I took pictures.

  For the life of me I cannot understand the perversity of a God that would generate such misery as opposite sentient sexes amidst the promise of such joy. Maybe the one because of the other.

  How much of the individual life is spent wandering among its own ruins or trying to catch a dream in a small brass cage. Freedom mocks us like a songbird outside the cells we build.

  I’d have traded Phil and all his prospects for another dance from He
ather on that rocky shore.

  The freighter was gone, out of sight. A motorboat came along the shore, not speeding, coming the way we’d come. It was an aluminum boat, maybe sixteen feet long, with the high prow that big water demands. Powered by a twenty-five or thirty horse motor, I guessed.

  The boat slowed as it got close. The only occupant, a thin, fortyish guy with long hair, waved at us. Phil and Nancy waved back. I wasn’t feeling all that sociable. I guessed he was from one of the cottages, on the way home or just checking us out.

  No, some readers, I haven’t a clue what he was wearing. I know there are some people who like details, but us Naturally Unsociable people really don’t notice these things. Hell, I probably made up most of the what-they-were-wearing details in this story. Somehow, after I made it up, that’s how it got fixed in my memory forever.

  So he was wearing a Blue Jays hat and a green shirt. Presumably pants, too. It was a warm day, as I said, so that was enough.

  “I’m glad we’ve reached an agreeable compromise,” I said. Heather opened one eye and Phil just started carrying the food back to the canoe. Nancy just shook her head.

  Leaving’s such a fine and terrible thing. A whole bunch of your little gray cells get used up learning and remembering stuff, and then you leave it. There’s no Undo menu in life, nor any Return to Last Saved. Sometimes you need one.

  I loaded the camera equipment back into its safe cases and when Phil nodded, we pushed off.

  I didn’t know what Phil had in mind, but he kept us going around the island, following the path of the motorboat. It was like the time I was five and they put me on a carousel. I screamed because I didn’t know the ride stopped eventually.

  Not that the motorboat had gone very far: the boat and its occupant were just sitting in the next small bay. The guy was wearing a Stetson and a polar bear coat. Not.

  Actually, he was fishing, or pretending to. “Catching any?” I shouted. I doubted it: there had once been entire fishing towns scattered along the islands and bays, but that was long in the past. People might catch some, but it was never a lucky place for me.

  He shook his head, then looked away. He was using a red-and-white striped spoon for a lure, dangling it below his boat in three feet of clear water with a pink rock bottom. What do I know about catching fish? But it seemed to me he had more chance of catching the Loch Ness monster than any fish I knew in those waters.

  It occurred to me that people are really stupid about fishing, or maybe he was worried about us looting some cottage and was keeping track of us. There are 45,000 cottages in the area, many of them established before government regulations restricted the putting of a cottage on an island too small for a decent septic system. Give-or-take 40,000 cottages. What do I know?

  “Now what,” I didn’t say because it was so obvious.

  “There are a few things we can do,” Phil said, paddling too fast but trying to keep the canoe more or less aligned with the shore of the island. Desperation comes in so many forms.

  I waited for it.

  “We could camp, and have a fine old day, walking the shores and swimming. Then at night we could make a fire and eventually go to sleep.

  The proper response would be to look at him and raise an eyebrow quizzically, but the blight of canoes and middle age is that tipping is possible and a crick in the neck is probable when you look behind you. I raised my paddle and set it across the canoe, and waited.

  Phil saved me a crick in the neck by spinning the canoe 180 degrees. I couldn’t see him, but I could see the two kayaks out in the deeper waters away from the island. They were well back but obviously still keeping us in sight. That answered one of the questions I hadn’t asked.

  “Those two women,” Phil went on, “will wonder if we’re planning on sneaking away when they’re out of sight, so they’ll have to camp somewhere close enough to keep watch on us.”

  I nodded.

  “At night,” Phil went on, turning the canoe back to its original course, “they’ll have to camp close enough to notice if we sneak away at three in the morning. Given the fact that there’s not that many good campsites, this means that they’ll be camping uncomfortably and be awake all night.”

  “They can take turns sleeping,” I said.

  “They’re women. In a strange or tense situation women stay awake all night.”

  “And then…?” I started paddling again.

  “In a few days they’ll be worn out and go home.”

  “I hope you have a few more plans in your dossier,” I said. “We’re lucky to have a day or two of good weather and you don’t have that many days off your job. I won’t support you, you know. You can’t live in my basement. Aisha won’t bring you tea and peanut butter on toast in the mornings.”

  “Well, there’s plan B,”` Phil said.

  “Go on.”

  “Go on the attack. Run them down. Beat them up. Male brutality. Carnal mayhem.”

  “They can outrun us,” I noted. “Nancy or Heather alone could probably beat the crap of me - they’re at least twenty years younger than us. And,” I added, “we’re not the type.”

  “Gentlemen and wimps?”

  “The meeting is called to order. Official garment is the sheepish grin. Before we go too much further,” I added, still paddling, but with more force, “do you have any other loser notions?”

  “Actually, I have dozens, maybe thousands, but I get the feeling you’re not going to like them much better. But I got one winner.” I felt the canoe swing towards the shore.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nap time for the old guy. The homeland sanity team has issued an extreme crabbiness alert for this area.”

  Sometimes there’s nothing to say. I realized at once he was right.

  Ten minutes later I was lying on my sleeping bag on a patch of dry moss between a couple of flat rock slopes, my sweater as a pillow under my head and a sock over my eyes as an eyeshade. Phil sat ten feet away, looking at maps, an adventure novel by his side. A slight chop to the waves made a suitable background against the shore, and I ignored a couple of noisy blackbirds. I took one last look out into the bay where two kayaks were tied to a small rock island, then drifted off almost at once to sleep.

  I took a couple of minutes waking up, figuring out where I was, and checking things out.

  Phil was gone. The canoe was gone. The kayaks were gone. The aluminum motorboat was drifting offshore.

  I did what any sensible middle-aged marooned man would do. I stretched my sore muscles, walked over to the nearest bush, and had a leak. It felt good.

  Aside from my sleeping gear and a book on submarines I’d been reading before I dozed off, there was nothing to separate me from Robinson Crusoe.

  Well, there was a few cottages visible on other islands, three sailboats way out in the bay, and a note under a rock where Phil had been sitting.

  I read the note. It seemed the sensible thing to do.

  “You snore a lot,” the note read.

  “Be ready to go when I get back,” it added.

  Sounded fine to me. Like I had a lot to do other than sit in the semi-sunlight of the afternoon and read a book on subs. The bastard had my canoe.

  So I tied all the stuff I had into a tight wad, put it all back into the heavy plastic bag it had come in, and waited. I wondered what had happened to my canoe, my camera equipment, the girls, the kayaks.

  The north, as southern Ontarioans like to call it, is a landscape of hills. Not mountains, just hills.

  Once, when the earth was a lot younger and the days a lot shorter and the moon hung a lot larger in the sky, there was a large range of mountains here.

  But that was a billion years or more in the past and the mountains were worn down to nubbins. Worn down, lifted up a few times, and worn again. Strength, broken by strength, and still strong.

  From the air, the nubbins make the landscape look like an abused piece of bubble-wrap. In the hollows are lakes, swamps, or lakes turnin
g into swamps (all lakes fill in eventually). Some of the tops of the hills are bare. For the rest there is only forest.

  When the first guy, Henry Bayfield, came to survey Georgian Bay, he named it after the newly-crowned king, then set out surveying the west shore and the south shore. His bosses back in Britain were most pleased.

  Then his survey slowed. Month after month he spent on the east shore. His bosses became annoyed. What in bloody hell was he doing there?

  Well, as that landscape dipped under the water it left thousands of islands and bays. Poor Bayfield just kept mapping and naming and mapping and naming. He’d got into the British habit of naming geographical features after supporters of the survey, but he ran out of these quick enough.

  So he started using any name he could remember, and even then – those were the days before phone books – the place ended up with names like “12-Mile Bay: and “Go Home Bay.”

  And he didn’t even think of naming most of the smaller islands.

  It was warm, it was late in the afternoon, and I’d just had a nap, so I was in a pretty good mood as I watched the guy in the aluminum boat and wondered just how I was going to slaughter Phil.

  I waved, friendly-like, to the guy in the boat. After a moment, he waved back.

  There was a banging and clanking out in the boat, which are perfectly normal sounds for anybody moving around in an aluminum boat. You have only to scratch your butt in an aluminum fishing boat and it sounds like garbage day on Dundas Street.

  Half the towns in Ontario have a Dundas Street. Turns out, some guy named Dundas surveyed the province. Gave his own name to a lot of streets.

  Then the guy started the motor and turned the boat towards me until he was a hundred yards or so away. Then he stopped the motor. It was entertaining, in its own way. He leaned over the motor and hauled the propeller clear of the water, then got out a large paddle and started paddling in towards me. It was a slow process: oars would have been slower, but he had the wind behind him.

  When he got close enough he tossed me a rope and I tied it around a large rock.

  He stepped onto shore and I waited to see what he had to say. After all, he’d come to see me, so it was his opening move.

  “You guys camping here?” he asked.

  I couldn’t see that it was any of his business, unless he was a cottage owner. Even then, the stretch we were on seemed a long way from any cottage. I was aware that large chunks of islands like this could be owned and not used, but I couldn’t see he had any right to make assumptions. I was here with nothing but a sleeping bag and a book. As far as I could see, I was marooned.

  I’d much have preferred him to have introduced himself, had of conversation about the water or fishing, then worked the questions into the conversation.

  “You catching any?” Us marooned people can be right evasive.

  He didn’t answer my question, as I’d expected. “Most of this shoreline is privately owned,” he noted.”

  I sat down. Standing any length of time is hard on my back, and I wasn’t about to have any more aches for this guy. I’d acquired a few just napping on the rocks and twigs among the moss under my sleeping bag. He was into facts, was he? No problem. “Fish bite better in the evening,” I said.

  Just thought I’d tell you,” he said.

  “Never been much of a fisherman myself,” I lied.

  He must have figured out that he wasn’t getting anywhere with me. He pointed over a ways, south. “People often camp at the end of that bay there. I think it’s privately owned, but nobody seems to mind.”

  “How’s the weather looking?” I asked. As far as I could see, the only advantage to the bay he pointed out was that we could camp in the damp peat moss and feed mosquitoes. It was back from the shore, and we wouldn’t be able to see the water, and if anybody ever camped there, they’re probably still there, stuck in the mud and sucked dry by the bugs.

  He blinked. “Gonna rain tonight,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. Maybe. A little bit. Not much.”

  “Suits me,” I said.

  “Where’s your friend?”

  Now that irked me. I’d just been marooned so Phil just lost his coveted status as the friend of Win Szczedziwoj. And I sure as hell didn’t know where he was. And I sure as hell wasn’t enjoying this conversation. “I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

  “I’m from one of the cottages.” He waved his hand vaguely northward.

  “I reached out my hand. “I’m David Suzuki, famous environmentalist.”

  He didn’t know what to do, but he’d already started to reach out his hand, so he finished the act, but not with any sincerity behind it. “You’re joking.”

  “Aren’t we all?” I asked.

  “Are you guys planning on staying long?”

  “Just long enough to answer questions by you and Cork and every other yokel on these islands?”

  “Cork? You know Cork?”

  I leaned over and winked. “He’s sleeping with the fishes tonight.”

  “Look,” the guy said. “I’m sorry. We seem to have started on the wrong foot. As far as I’m concerned you people can camp anywhere you want. I was just trying to make conversation.”

  Lying bastard. “I’m not the conversational type, I guess,” I said.

  “I just wanted to say these islands can be dangerous. Like for people in a canoe.”

  On the other hand, I thought, what if Phil doesn’t come back. I’d need a ride to the mainland to hunt Phil down and feed his fleshy extensions to the perch. I’m here to find the treasure,” I said.

  That shook him. “Oh. Yeah. Sure. Big Paul’s money.” He stared around. “A lot of people looked for that. I used to look for it in my spare time. That’s it? Just to look for the money? Well, if that’s true, maybe I can help; I can show you places where people have looked, if you have a map.” He looked at my collection of worldly goods. “Your friend’s got the map.”

  “Who’s Cork?”

  “Oh,” he said. “I guess you’ve met him. Nasty fucker, when he’s pissed off. Good to his friends, though.”

  “I bet he doesn’t have many friends.”

  “Two of them, at last count, and he’s both of them. One drunk and one sober. He’s nicer when he’s sober. Look, my name’s Frank. Frank Smith. I was just concerned about your safety. We lose a canoer or two when the wind gets up out here.”

  “Frankly bullshitting,” I thought, would be a closer name. I reached for my wallet and handed him a business card.

  He read it. “Photographer? Rain pictures? Well, you’ll get your chance tomorrow. Could be a steady drizzle.”

  “If my friend, Old Fuckface, comes back with my camera,” I said.

  “You not with those women?”

  “No friends of mine,” I told him.

  “Maybe I can help you guys find a good campsite.” He pointed to the south. “There are some good ones just south of Sandy Island. Lots of flat land and firewood.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll find a good one ourselves, if he ever comes back.”

  “I mean, if you all want to come back next weekend, I can get you a cottage on Bateau. Lot more comfortable than a tent in the rain. I can get you those maps, too.”

  “I’ll be camping without a tent if that canoe doesn’t show up.”

  “You think about it. Got a fireplace and a great view. And a barbecue.”

  It was a nice offer. Assuming I believed him. He was certainly trying his best to get me off this nice little point of land. Not that I’d had any notions about camping here anyway.

  “Great offer,” I said. “But this is my only weekend off.” It was a lie, but he started that process. “Back to the old grind in a couple of days.”

  “You might want to camp on the lee side of the island, eh? Breaks the wind. You can get a lot of wind on this side. Blows tents right over. Some great campsites on the other shore.”

  I doubted it. “Frank” didn’t look like a camping short of person. “You
know,” I said, “maybe we’ll try that. It makes sense.”

  “Ah, okay.” He got up. “Anything I can do for you? Take you to the marina.”

  “Nah,” I said. “George’ll be back eventually. I’ll just wait here and read my book.” I looked up: it was getting late in the afternoon, and starting to chill.

  “Okay. Sure.” He mumbled a few good-byes and pushed off. In a minute he got the motor going and the boat disappeared to the north.

  Twenty-three minutes and seven seconds later, Phil appeared, coming from the south.

  “Hi, Buddy,” Phil said, sliding the canoe against the granite and scraping off a couple of bucks worth of plastic.

  “I’m going to kill you,” I told him, grabbing onto the front of the canoe in a death grip.

  “Thanks.” Phil scrambled out. Actually, at his age, people don’t scramble out of canoes. It’s more like a scrambled egg trying to walk. I didn’t offer him a hand.

  “Hey,” he said. “Help me get this stuff unloaded.

  “Go into the woods,” I said. “Sit behind a tree. If I’m not here when you get back, wait three weeks. If I’m still not back, send me a postcard.”

  Phil began chucking bags and boxes onto the rock. When you’re planning to portage, you travel light and keep everything in bags with handles. But when you’re not planning to portage you take everything but the automatic breadmaker and carry it in shopping bags and cardboard boxes.

  “I don’t want to camp here,” I said, quite clearly and distinctly. “This is not where I want to camp.”

  “The bitch patrol is about fifteen minutes behind me,” Phil said, running with a bunch of bags for the shelter of the nearest swamp cedars.

  I can’t say I liked the idea, but at least I got what he was after, so I tied the canoe and made the dash with a box and a couple of bags. It’s so very easy to reach middle age without losing the silliness of youth.

  Two trips later, the canoe was empty enough that we could haul it, still containing paddles and lifejackets and some bags, over the rock and behind the trees. I ran back to get my sleeping bag and book, and settled in beside Phil, with a green tarp in front of us.

  “Asshole,” I whispered.

  “Keep it down.”

  “Moron,” I added, a little louder, but not much.

  “Here’” Phil said, reaching into a canvas pack. He handed me a Coke and a bottle of Irish Whiskey.

  I took a big sip of one, and a big gulp of the other. He owed me, big time.

  Phil nudged me. The kayaks glided by, a few hundred yards offshore. “We fooled them,” he chuckled.

  I hate people who chuckle. I had another sip and gulp. I hoped he paid big bucks for the whiskey. I had another gulp. It helped.

  The kayaks didn’t disappear, although they got hazier with the whiskey. They circled around and stopped at a rocky little islet well offshore. After a couple of minutes, both women got out and dragged the front of the kayaks up onto the rocks.

  “Now what, shithead,” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, “we can’t just drag our stuff out there like we got caught hiding in the bushes.”

  “I came here,” I said, “to take some pictures. To camp on a nice little scenic island and take some pictures. Of the island. Not of the back of a cedar tree.” I was sitting on something uncomfortable, so I had some more whiskey.

  “You want to go out there?” Phil waved his hand at the water.

  “You think they know we’re here?” I asked, avoiding the question. I finished the whiskey: it was the only thing that kept me from feeling like I was eight years old. That and the pains in my joints. I wiggled, but a cedar branch tried to give me an enema.

  “Not a chance. They just gave up for the night and picked a convenient location.”

  “I don’t want to camp here,” I said, “ and it’s getting late.”

  “I guess we’ll have to cross the island,” Phil said.

  “Up yours, sideways,” I said. I’d have come up with something more scintillating but the whiskey on an empty stomach interfered. Never drink while canoeing; you might miss your own drowning. Never drink while portaging; you get impaled a lot and fall down a lot.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a mile wide,” I said, which was an exaggeration, but considering the interior was probably a mass of tangled trees and potholes, it wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

  “Let me see that map.”

  While Phil studied the map in the long shadows of early evening, I had an energy bar and washed it down with water. I’ve gotten past the point of enjoying those bars, but if you’re hiding on an island behind a cedar tree, they’ll do just fine. At that point I could have eaten a raw turnip and enjoyed it.

  “Where do you think we are?” Phil waved the map.

  I studied the map. “There.”

  “Not a problem,” Phil said. “We can deke over to this little bay here.”

  I looked. It was a lot shorter than crossing the island. My mind still told me to get back out to the nearest water and the hell with the women.

  But I gave in to my stupider instincts, and vowing revenge on Phil, began hauling our stuff over to the little bay on the south end of the island. I must have done something really evil in a previous lifetime to deserve such penance. For a while there was just the thump of log, scrape of rock, tickle of branches.

  An hour later found us in the bay. I was in the back of the canoe and Phil, wearing only underwear and shoes, was towing me, canoe, and goods through a tiny bay filled with rocks, pine snags, and yellow-brown muck.

  And lily pads. Do you know that there re lots of kinds of lily pads? And that most of them have a lot of what looks like sand on them? I leaned over and touched the stuff. It was soft, like miniscule mud balls. I figured it was bug poop, since the pads usually have lots of bugs land on them. I washed a couple of pad surfaces off with a swish of my paddle, but I doubt if I made a positive or negative change to the functioning of the universe.

  Phil made an impossible-to-describe sound and almost tripped on something underwater. He looked like the last time I was in Florida and someone told me about sting rays.

  “Snapping turtles,” I told him, helping steer with a paddle “eat mostly underwater moss. They also like lily-pad roots.”

  Phil grunted as he stepped into a deeper hole.

  “But they will take any flesh that shows up,” I added. “In winter, they breathe through their anuses.”

  “Why do snapping turtles breathe through their anuses?” Phil said, jerking at the canoe.

  “In winter,” I told him, “a snapping turtle settles to the bottom to spend the winter hibernating. Like a frog, a turtle has to absorb enough oxygen from the water to keep herself alive. Unlike a frog,” I said, trying to push a waterlogged tree trunk away from the canoe, “a snapping turtle is so heavily armored that there isn’t enough surface area. So she extends her anus way out and breathes through the skin on that.”

  Phil had got us to water deep enough to float the canoe, so he hauled himself onto a rock and washed the muck out of his shoes and underwear, and off his legs.

  “I notice,” he said, getting back into the canoe, that you finished off that bottle of whiskey. Are you sure you can think straight, let alone paddle straight?”

  “A small bottle, at best,” I said, “and I burned it off hauling our goddamn stuff over those goddamn rocks and goddamn logs and through those goddamn boggy goddamn sections. Do you have any more?” My head was hammering like six miners from INCO were extracting nickel from some interior vein. I’ve really got to stop drinking.

  When I was young my father taught grades one through eight in a one-room school. He got good at it, but after a few years of dropping bombs on Germans in the way, it was of an anticlimax, I suppose.

  He’d drink on Thursday evening, setting out a 24 pack of beer and sitting in his chair in the living room, which was, in that small house, also the TV room. He refused to drink the rest of the
week, so I guess he made up for it on Thursdays. I once asked him why he didn’t drink on Friday evenings, and he said he didn’t want to be hung over on his own time.

  About eight, my mother would join him, and they’d drink and talk for a couple of hours. Sometimes we’d watch TV till after nine, but when my sister and I went to bed they’d still be talking about everything under the sun. Sometime past eleven my mother’d go off to bed and my father would drink another three or four before stumbling after her an hour later. I learned the hard way that after a dozen beer he started to sober up and could beat me in chess, but his coordination didn’t improve.

  Once or twice in all the years I was there some disreputable friend would show up with hard liquor, which my father normally wouldn’t touch. It made him over-the-wall dance on the tables drunk in no time.

  Friday mornings they kids in the school learned not to get on his nerves. He’d been an officer in the war and it showed.

  But I never grew up with a bad image of drinking, and I married a woman who eventually couldn’t drink, so I tended to indulge on camping trips, carefully calculating (so I told myself) when I could drink and either sleep or portage it off before canoeing.

  “You don’t need any more. You need to paddle. It’s going to be dark in an hour.

  “We didn’t pack to portage,” I told him. Remember where I noted that if you’re going out into Georgian Bay, you’re not going to worry about portaging. You can take whatever fits into the canoe.

  “We didn’t plan to portage.”

  “I plan to kill you.”

  “Wait till we camp. You need someone to help you paddle.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Stop there.” I pointed at a place near the shore.

  He steered me over, and I got out. From shore I broke off pieces of wood from a fallen and well-dried oak tree. Damn stuff is tough, but the tree had fallen hard enough to break off a few big branches. I threw the chunks into the canoe. Bugs crawled out of the wood in searching parties.

  “Hard stuff to portage,” Phil said. But he held the canoe against the shore.

  We got out of the bay, which was on the south shore of Bateau Island, and went east, away from the women and their kayaks. If you have a map, you’ll realize this put us back on the east side of the island, where we’d been much earlier that day.

  “Déjà vu,” I said, dumping a couple of codeine tablets and of Pepsi onto my stomach.

  “Worth seeing twice.”

  “Getting late.”

  “Paddle harder.”

  I did. We rounded the northern tip of the island again, facing the open waters of Georgian Bay again. The sun was low over the water, and there was a steady chop to the surface, with a faint underlying swell under that. It was hard to detect the swell, but I felt it in my stomach. Or maybe it was the codeine.

  “Any preferences?” Phil asked me.

  I looked at the map. “South, towards Cachia or Dearlove,” I decided.

  “Not out to Blizard?” An island with an odd spelling.

  “Too far out; too late in the day.”

  He sighed. “You’re right, as usual. But,” he noted, “the wind’s dying, and it doesn’t look that far.

  I don’t know where I acquired a genuine wet noodle backbone. Blizard called and we answered. That sounds good.

  We paddled against a starboard wind and choppy waves for about an hour while the sun moved its lazy way towards the horizon. I felt the vulnerability of the canoe in the open water, but the winds didn’t get any worse and we got into the lee of Blizard Island without mishap.

  The archipelago of four islands was without cottages, and there were several places, marked with blackened fire-pits, where people had camped before. There are organized groups of kayakers that use these islands in summer, so we weren’t involved in ecological terrorism to make a camp and a campfire here.

  I walked about the island. Looking back towards the mainland, I could see the trees on Bateau Island.

  Cork hadn’t improved any since the last time I saw him.

  It was getting late, and Phil had loaded his metal detector into the canoe and paddled it over the narrow space to another, smaller island. “Don’t need you,” he’d told me.

  I’d been just as glad to be alone; I was in one of those moods where company wasn’t really wanted.

  I was sitting by the fire - we’d found a washed-up branch that might burn when it was dried, and I was glad I’d brought the wood in the canoe - when a motorboat came up from the south, around the point, and came to a stop against the slick rock shore.

  It sure looked like the same motorboat as “Frank” had been in, but this time Cork was running it. He was alone.

  I didn’t like the way he didn’t even look at me as he came to the shore.

  He slid the boat against the rock, stepped out carrying a rope, and tied the boat to the nearest big boulder. There weren’t any trees close to the shore - and the few that were near the center of the island were pretty small and bent. I’d just got the camera set up for a couple of evening shots, maybe with the trees and the fire and the sunset. Although it wasn’t working out to be much of a sunset; the clouds just weren’t cooperating.

  I’d been figuring that taking up metal-detecting might be a better bet than photography. You don’t care so much what the lighting’s like with a metal detector.

  And I’d been feeling old. Old and sad. I get that way. Sitting on my Pity Pot, as they say at AA and OA and all them.

  Then Cork came in his boat.

  “What do you want, motherfucker,” I thought, and pictured shoving a burning log into his pants. But I didn’t say any of that, because I’m a nice guy.

  Then again, I didn’t say anything at all, because I may be a nice guy, but I’m not a very sociable one. And I’m also not a big guy.

  “Well, hi,” said Cork.

  As I said, he hadn’t improved any. Too big to be comfortable with, and carrying himself with a smoothness of too many muscles and not enough fat weighing him down.

  He had hair just too long to be civilized, and a moustache that hung down and threatened to make him look like Fu Manchu crossed with a pro sheep molester.

  “Have a seat,” I said, ‘indicating a sharp boulder, as I got the camera on the tripod and snapped a couple of test shots of the nearest shrub.

  “Good camera,” Cork said.

  “Good enough, I guess,” I said.

  “Weather and warning; gonna rain by morning,” Cork said. He was still standing. Cork took a long look around the campsite. “You guys might find it more comfortable on one of the inner islands.”

  “These ones take better pictures.” I seemed to be trying to explain myself to him.

  “I’d like to sit in your chair,” I think,” he said abruptly. “You go there.”

  I hadn’t begun to think of the options available in that statement when he took two large strides, grabbed me by the hair with one hand and slid another hand under my legs. He lifted me up very smoothly and slid the one hand up inside my legs to wrap it around my genitals. I went up, and over, and found myself sitting on the sharp rock I’d pointed out to him.

  I slid off, and looked up from the ground to find him in my lawn chair, watching me. “This,” he said, “ is a lot more comfortable, I think.” He didn’t smile.

  I watched him without comment as he wrapped a hand around the leg of the lawn chair and pressed a dent into it. I guess they don’t make them like they used to. He rummaged through the packsack by the chair and came up with a sandwich wrapped in cellophane. Carefully, he peeled the wrap off and ate the sandwich slowly.

  Then he reached again into the packsack and came up with a few more sandwiches and a couple of chocolate bars. He stuffed one of the bars into a shirt pocket and tossed the rest into the bushes.

  I started to get up. “Don’t,” he said. I didn’t.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I think of these as my islands. Isn’t that weird?” He scratched his long ch
in. “I boat here and I look at them and sometimes I think they’re like my friends. Friends that don’t ask anything of me except to watch out for my propeller.” He looked away. “I know they’re not mine. But I feel protective of them.”

  I was uncomfortable on the rock but the image of me flying superman-like into the trees or the water was just too clear. I didn’t think of a thing to say; my mind was picturing myself hitting Cork with something heavy. Many times.

  “When it gets dark out here,” Cork went on, “I’d like to be more or less alone.” He looked at me. “You know what I mean? Is my meaning clear? Nobody watching my boat and nobody taking pictures of anything. That would annoy me. You wouldn’t like me if I were annoyed. Let’s see your wallet.”

  For a moment, I hesitated, then pointed to the pack my camera equipment was in. I keep my wallet there because it’s uncomfortable in my pocket when I canoe. And it’ll stay dry if the canoe rolls over.

  “Get it for me. Or you could end up with a really sore asshole.”

  I didn’t want to ask how, so I got up and picked up the bag.

  “Bring it to me on your knees.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Do you know how easy it is to wreck a guy’s knees?” Cork smiled broadly. “You just put one thumb under the edge of the kneecap and twist a little. Poor bastard’ll never walk straight again.

  I said nothing. I tossed him the bag.

  “Thanks,” he said and I mixed hate and gratitude into an unhealthy mental stew. He opened the bag, took out the wallet, and inspected the contents, one card at a time. “Photographer?” he asked. “That’s why the camera equipment?” He opened the camera and took out the roll of film, pulling it loose. “Doesn’t look like any pictures of me on there,” he said. “Let’s keep it that way.” He put the camera and wallet carefully back into the case. Then he checked the film. “ASA 400? Good for evening shots, but not for night shots. Good to see that.” He put the case away.

  I stood there like a tree. Or a turkey.

  “My advice is that you guys camp about a mile south of here. But I don’t think you’re intelligent enough. So my other advice is that you have a party here, with a big fire and you don’t take any pictures and you still be here in the morning, so I don’t think you’re snoops of some sort. I really don’t like snoops.

  He yawned. “Missed my afternoon nap, feel like crap. I might be back; I might not.”

  Then without a goodbye he got into the boat, started the motor, and disappeared around the top of the island. When he reappeared between a couple of trees, I took a couple of long shots of him, his boat, and his profile, but the distance was too great and the camera shook too much.

  One thing struck me as he disappeared. He hadn’t done a thing that couldn’t plausibly be denied in front of a third party. His word against mine. Nothing broken, no injuries. Have him charged with throwing my chocolate bars into the bushes.

  Phil got back ten minutes later, his metal detector slung over his shoulder. “Don’t say anything,” he cautioned.

  I handed him a sandwich, a hot slab of pork between a couple of slices of multigrain bread, with sauerkraut and mustard. He took it, so I handed him a beer.

  He dropped into a lawn chair, took a bite of the sandwich, a chug of the beer. Swallowed, coughed.

  “Cork find you?” I asked.

  “Cork? No. Was he the guy in the boat? He waved, but didn’t stop.”

  “You have all the luck.” I made myself a similar sandwich, with more sauerkraut.

  “He was here?”

  “He was here.”

  Phil pondered that through half a sandwich and most of a beer. “What’d he want,” he asked, finally.

  “One of my pictures, autographed.”

  “More likely one of your balls, stomped flat.”

  “You know the guy?”

  “I’ve seen his type.”

  “Stereotyping,” I said. “One of the great evils of our time.”

  “What did you claim to be?”

  “I told him I took pictures in the rain.” I was tempted to have a beer. I thought about it, and giving into temptation seemed like the wisest move. I found a Labatt’s Blue and opened it.

  “You keep drinking like that,” Phil said, reaching for his own beer, “and we’re going to run out of the stuff in a week or so.” He put big slab of pork into the frying pan. “Then we’ll have to get into the harder stuff. If you left any this afternoon.”

  We contemplated the blue velvet sky and the deepening shadows and the scary dark water around us. “Did he believe you?” Phil asked, after a while. He hauled his jacket out of a packsack and tossed me my jacket.

  “Beats me. He wanted us out of the area by sundown. In case I got pictures of something.” I made myself another sandwich. There wasn’t much sauerkraut left, and I offered it to Phil, but he declined, so I finished it up.

  “What do you think?” Phil watched the stars coming out.

  “Smuggling is the obvious reason,” I said. “Something going on after dark that they don’t want people to see. Or to take pictures of. Find anything on that island you went to?”

  “Nothing on that island,” Phil said. “But it was pretty low on my list, anyway.”

  “You have a list?” I had list; a list to the left.

  He was silent a while. More stars came out, then dimmed as high, thin clouds moved in. The forecast had been for increasing cloudiness and probably a gentle rain by morning.

  The fire popped - whatever wood I’d gotten was one of those popping varieties that shoots embers out at you, as if it didn’t want to go quietly into the night as smoke and ash. I handed Phil a cup half full of tequila. He can drink the stuff - I get headaches. So I’d brought a couple of quarts for him.

  “That wasn’t my prime target,” Phil said. I just thought I’d check it out anyway.” He obviously still had good places to go and good prospects to check out, but he hid it well. Very well.

  I passed him a bag of peanuts, and poured myself a slug of high-pulp orange juice, diluted with vodka. It occurred to me that I should have demanded a couple of bottles from Cork. I shoveled in a couple of handfuls of peanuts to complete my healthy snack. I always get hungry when I drink.

  Actually, I’m hungry most of the time. If it weren’t for Aisha I’d be shaped like a blimp and running a used-book store.

  When I was half full of peanuts and vodka, I told Phil about Cork’s visit. I didn’t exaggerate or leave out anything.

  He grunted. “Told, you. I know the type.”

  I just raised my eyebrows. “A bully that’s really a coward and you just have to be tough with him?”

  “You get that crap in school, too?”

  I nodded.

  “I guess there are some bullies that are big and stupid and just have to be taught a lesson,” Phil said, “but there are also genuinely smart and nasty bullies. Kick the crap out of you and make it look like it’s your fault.”

  “Rough childhood?”

  “Whose isn’t, most of the time.” He watched the clouds take over the velvet sky and the world dim. “Had one of those in grade six. Hefty kid named Tommy Berger. Never left a mark on me and always had someone around to say I’d started it by chucking a rock at him if he had to.”

  “I knew a kid like that. Switched schools once just to get away.” Sometimes adulthood wasn’t as bad as it was cracked up to be.

  “I eventually had enough, and adjusted his outlook.”

  I looked up, but said nothing.

  “Ambushed him when he was alone and looking the other way. Broke his leg with a baseball bat.”

  “He knew who did it?”

  “Not then. I figured he’d just take it out on me and some other pushovers as soon as his leg healed.”

  I waited again.

  “As soon as he was out on crutches I walked up behind him again and did the other leg.”

  “I should think his parents or the police would get involv
ed by that point.”

  “Oh the first time he said he tripped. He wanted revenge without anybody knowing. The second time he blamed some high-school kids he couldn’t quite describe. I knew I had him then. He used to walk to school and I’d walk beside him describing things that people did to people. I guess he figured he’d have to kill me or keep away from me and he was smart enough to know you don’t get away with killing people. Besides, in those days I was a little guy and I used to carry a five-inch hatpin.” He looked away. “I explained how easily hidden a hatpin is, and how easily disposed of. And how you can kill at guy just by sliding it in beside his neck and into his heart.”

  “Did you happen to bring a baseball bat?” Every time I thought of Cork, there was a little tremor somewhere in me and I wondered if I’d sleep that night.

  Phil looked at me. “This guy sounds like big-time trouble. If he’s got any sort of smarts, he’ll let you off with a warning. Hell, we’re planning on doing what he wants anyway – staying tight till morning.”

  “And if we run into him again?”

  “If there’s more than one of us, he probably won’t do anything.”

  “What if we meet him alone.”

  “Consider killing him.”

  “Sounds a bit drastic?” I watched the dark waters.

  “I imagine. But consider it as an option. These guys expect people like us to hold back. We’ll get one punch in, then it’ll be his turn. You can’t let that happen.”

  “Found nothing on the island, I guess,” I said, to change the subject. I was afraid he was right.

  “Rocks, trees, a small rattlesnake.”

  “What’s the code say?” I asked.

  “Crock of shit.”

  What could I say. It was true. “Nice-looking crock of shit,” I finally said.

  “Very impressive crock of shit,” Phil agreed. He sighed and kicked at the fire.

  Always have a fire. A fire’s part of our souls and warms our hearts and holds our dreams and comforts. A fire’s warm and changing and dancing and a good one is one you have to poke at or bring firewood to every few minutes. A guy fire is one that throws sparks, so you can cuss it and swat at yourself and keep busy with. Otherwise you start thinking too much. Nothing more dangerous than an out-of-control fire, unless it’s out-of control thinking.

  Pouring myself a final final drink, I paused; I could hear voices out on the water, from toward the mainland. I gestured to Phil, and we stood up and moved back into the shadows.

  Still clutching our drinks and our bags of peanuts, of course.

  The voices got louder. I figured anybody dangerous wouldn’t make so much noise, so I set my food and drink carefully onto a flat rock and got the flashlight from my pack.

  “Hey, don’t shine it in my eyes. I can’t see the bloody rocks,” Nancy said. She was holding the paddle in front of her eyes.

  I shone the light onto the shoreline as the kayaks came in. Heather got out first, Phil steadying her kayak as she clambered out. You don’t get out of a kayak; you clamber out.

  The three of us pulled the kayak onto the island, then went back and did the same for Nancy’s kayak.

  “We,” said Nancy, “are going to camp with you guys.” She opened a hatch on her kayak and started tossing various plastic wrapped stuffs onto the ground.

  I looked at Phil. He raised his eyebrows. I looked at Heather. She laughed, quietly, then opened the hatch of her kayak.

  “We’ve taken the best tent sites,” I noted. I shone the flashlight onto the tents, well apart. The general layout of the floor of most islands is like that of a demolition site, after they’ve blown up the building but before the trucks have made it into a parking lot. Must have a word with those glaciers, sometime.

  “There must be someplace to put a tent.” Nancy was in a nasty mood.

  “That depends,” Phil said, “on how much of an angle you can sleep on, and how close you want to be to Win. He snores,” Phil added. “Like a train with one bad axle going down a thirty-degree grade with its brakes on and running over a pack of hyenas tied to the tracks at the same time.”

  “And,” I said, “Phil’s worse.”

  “Am not. Couldn’t be.”

  “You are,” I said. “I’ve listened to you many times. And I’ve never kept myself awake all night, snoring.”

  “Just how far would we have to put a tent to be able to sleep.” Heather looked skeptically into the darkness.

  “Thirty-five meters from Phil,” I said.

  “That’s an absolute slander,” Phil said, “but forty meters from Win is barely enough, and then only if there’s a thunderstorm and a heavy surf and you’re camped at the end of a busy runway.”

  Nancy got a flashlight and she and Heather walked into the darkness, slowly. While they were gone, Phil and I relieved our bladders behind a nearby cedar, then sat back into our lawn chairs, poured ourselves some cola.

  “What’s up, do you think?” Phil finally said, very quietly.

  “I suspect,” I said, “that those two figured they’d be safer with us than with Cork and his friends loose among these islands at night.”

  “You think Cork met these two?”

  “Seems likely to me. He’s got something going on around here tonight and he’s gonna scout out all the possible trouble.”

  “And those two look scoutable.”

  “Lecher.”

  “Look who’s talking. But I think maybe women have a better sense of people’s personalities than guys do.”

  Phil snorted. “Women are just more easily scared. A couple of million years of interfacing with us guys tends to make women and rabbits cautious.”

  The women came back, swinging the flashlight. “We’ve found a place that’ll do. It’s a little closer than we’d like, but if you two dudes snore too much, we’ll just beat you to death with rocks.”

  “I often thought of that at three in the morning,” Phil said, “in the days I shared a tent with Win, here.”

  “You never shared a tent,” I said. “You and your flatulence took up a tent and a half. I slept with my head out the door.”

  “I’d have preferred your feet out the door,” Phil said. “Or stuck in a bucket of activated charcoal.”

  “Boys have trouble growing up,” Nancy said.

  “Don’t wanna. Won’t let it. Not gonna happen,” Phil said. “Peter Pan forever. Hunt treasure or follow treasure-hunters around till my balls fall off.”

  “You want us to grow up like Cork?” I asked.

  “Cork?” Heather looked puzzled.

  “One of those guys buzzing around in the aluminum boat this evening.”

  “Ah,” said Nancy, turning off her flashlight. “The big guy or the smaller one?”

  “Big guy,” I said. “Evil-looker. And his looks are better than his personality.” I put another branch on the fire. “I talked with both of them today, one at a time. If we’re talking about the same guys.”

  “Probably,” said Heather. “We had a chat with both of them at once.”

  “A friendly chat, I assume,” Phil said. “Although I’ve never met either of them myself.”

  “Nancy could have been more polite, I think,” Heather said, smiling.

  And afterwards they must have thought they’d be more comfortable camping closer to us, I figured, though I didn’t say so.

  Despite his theory about women being more cautious than men, once, long ago, Phil had told me that women were made smarter than men. “It’s true,” he assured me. The female brain is better integrated than that of the male.”

  “Then why,” I wanted to know,” sipping tea at a booth in a Zeller’s cafeteria, “do men run the world.” He started to say something, but I held up a hand. “Men,” I said dominate all political arenas and all corporate head offices.”

  “When the gods-that-be,” Phil answered, “made the female, they were concerned that females would quickly take over the planet.”

  “They’d make slaves
of us men?” I plopped my teabag onto the tabletop. You’ve got to get the teabag out of the teapot if you don’t want your tea too strong, and there’s never a really good place to put it.

  “They’d do the logical thing,” Phil said, “and replace us all with a permanent semen tank and a fancy turkey baster.”

  “They’d still get half boys that way,” I said. The tea was getting cold quickly, since it (and I) was directly under an air-conditioning exhaust.

  “Science could find a way around that.” Phil put pepper into his coffee, drawing the glances of a few refugees from the store. “And if not, there’s always the chick-sorter method.”

  “Who?”

  “Ever seen them sort chicks at a chicken hatchery?” Phil smiled. “Half the hatchlings are males, you know, and they really want females. So they hire a chicken sexer. He divides the chicks into male and female. Then someone takes each little rooster and snaps its neck and drops it into a barrel. Pet food, eventually.” Phil took a drink of his coffee.

  I was lost for a moment in visions of a barrel of pink babies, necks snapped, little penises sticking out. “So why hasn’t that happened?” I asked him. “Does raw testosterone triumph over brains? That’s my theory.”

  “Only in an all-male crowd or one run on male rules,” Phil said. “Humanity’s progress shows that brains and cunning beat testosterone in the long run.”

  “Then….” I’d ogled a waitress bending over to clean up a table. She wasn’t all that attractive; it was mostly pro forma.

  “Asimov and his robots.” Phil had a habit of doing that - tossing out a reference without explanation. Like, if you didn’t know the reference, you were left feeling uncomfortable. It helped explain why Phil often ran short on friends and girlfriends.

  “The laws of robotics.” I contemplated the menu on the blackboard; the peanut butter and toast appealed to me, as usual, but if they turned the air conditioner up any more I might just go for the hot chocolate.

  “The point, as Asimov said, is that you don’t make a car without brakes so you’d never make a robot without a safety mechanism.”

  “Women are like robots?”

  “Like a superior creation, and only that, as I’ve said. The improved model.”

  “And what is the safety mechanism,” I asked. “What keeps women from turning us into catfood?”

  “Well, women have the usual primitive drives such as sex and motherhood,” Phil said, “but they’re genetically programmed to fall in love with and submit to males.”

  “Not the ones I know,” I said.

  “You haven’t tried the secret words.”

  “Ah….” I said.

  “You have just to combine the word ‘love’ with the word ‘always’ or ‘forever’, and see what happens.”

  “You think so?” I asked, skeptically.

  “Works most of the time.” You can see a woman give you a doubtful look, and then like magic the little IQ switches in her brain will start switching off, like HAL in the 2001 movie. Her eyes will lose focus, and she’ll get a strange little smile. After that, she’ll practically collapse into your arms.”

  I’ve often wondered, over the years, just how much truth there was in that. But at the time, I asked for a demo.

  “Could be dangerous, when they come to,” Phil said. “Worse, if they believe you.”

  “Just a theory, then,” I said. I must admit I smirked.

  Phil sighed. “Follow me.” He got up. I got up. He walked over to a table where Jean Thomas was about to sit down with her five-year-old daughter. We knew her enough to speak to her, just. She was really good-looking, which gave her a bad attitude towards most men.

  Phil walked right up to her. She gave him a look like “the doofus parade must be in town”. Of course she didn’t include me in that parade.

  “I believe that love should be forever and ever,” Phil said. “True love is for always.”

  I’ve often wondered, over the years, just how many women never lose hope that there is love that just goes on forever, in spite of their discoveries about marriage and what men are really like.

  I waited for the reaction. Something, for sure, was happening in her brain. She glanced at her daughter, now seated at a table. She looked up, tilted her pretty head, and kneed Phil in the groin.

  A strange and doubtful look passed over Phil’s face then like magic the little IQ switches in his brain started switching off, like HAL in the 2001 movie. His eyes sort of lost focus, and he developed a strange little twisted smile on his face. Then he sort of collapsed into my arms.

  “Oh,” she said. “What have I done?”

  “What did you do, mommy?” asked her daughter.

  “I’ll get you a cinnamon bun,” her mother said to her, and walked away.

  I straightened Phil up to a more or less vertical position, and led him to the door.

  “This,” he said, “is a dangerous and unpredictable world. It is not for the faint-hearted.

  He had a point, even if it was more like a question mark than an exclamation point right then.