Death on a Small, Dark Lake

Death on a Small, Dark Lake

  By Lenny Everson

  rev 1

  Copyright Lenny Everson 2011

  This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.

  Cover design by Lenny Everson

  ****

  Chapter 1

 

  At first, I thought I'd snagged a log.

  Oh, I had no problems with that. If I’m going to drop a fishing line into an isolated Ontario lake, I've got to expect to catch a few dead trees and maybe lose a few lures and say a few words that children shouldn’t hear.

  "Gol darn it all to heck," I said politely. Or words to that effect.

  Isolated lake? We're talking Ontario granite-edge tree-lined body of water. The bottom is full of rocks and trees and bits and pieces of trees and bits and pieces of rocks. If I’m not using a surface lure for bass, odds are I’ll catch a branch or a trunk down in the dark holes, assuming I miss the rocks, of course. It’s a great country for rocks.

  I had a small spinner on the other end of the line, with a lead weight to get it down quickly, hoping for perch even at mid-day. It was lunch time, there were fish down there, and it was time we got together.

  "You," I said to the mysterious waters, "had better be a log. I want no rocks." Like I had a choice. I pulled.

  But the line wasn’t coming in to me. It disappeared into those dark waters and stubbornly stayed there.

  Wedging the small fishing rod between my knees, I started paddling toward the point where my line disappeared into the water. There was a light breeze, and the canoe slid sideways and around, spinning on its axis.

  The key in a situation like this is to keep the line tight enough to see where it goes, without drifting away from the snag point and having the line snap. Or letting the fishing rod leap out from between your knees and do a backflip into the water.

  Ideally, it takes four hands: one to hold the fishing rod, one to reel in the line as you get closer, and two to paddle the canoe. You can paddle a canoe with one hand, but it isn't easy, especially when the wind wants to push the canoe one way, the paddling wants to turn the canoe another way, and the snag is in yet a third direction. It would be a good question on a physics exam, if you wanted to drive the class mad.

  I didn’t want to drive anybody mad. Not even me. I mentioned to the canoe (politely, of course) that it might be better to cooperate.

  I was all alone on a truly isolated lake, drifting under a September afternoon sun, and losing a lure wasn't going to make much difference to an experience like that. I smiled. With me, it’s hard to tell. Aisha (The Wife) says she watches for crinkles around the eyes. Otherwise, I look the same in all moods.

  When there is only one person in the canoe, it’s generally best to alternate paddling and reeling in the line. I did. The canoe drifted and rotated, and slowly got closer to the place where my snagged line entered another realm.

  I didn't want to lose the spinner if I could help it. Not only was it one of my favorites, but I disliked leaving the glittery objects of civilization in this wild area, even on the bottom of the lake.

  So I swirled water with my paddle and pulled on the line, and eventually got the canoe more or less over the snag. More or less is all you get in a canoe. A few quick jerks on the line didn't free it, so I reeled in as much line as I could, and reached down and grabbed the line.

  Pulling the line tight, just below its breaking point, I waited. Either the line would start to come up, or it wouldn't. If nothing happened, I'd have to break the monofilament with a quick, definite pull.

  The canoe spun slowly in the September afternoon breeze as I waited.

  There are two particular joys in a canoe. One is the responsiveness of the vessel. A canoe never stops being a part of the wind and the water as much as a part of the human intent, through the extension of a paddle. Only when the human mind learns to understand the air and water movements will the paddle move the canoe in the right direction.

  It's a wild religion, this canoeing, where you have to build winds and water into your desires.

  Mind you, some people just paddle like crazy and get there anyway.

  The other joy of a canoe lies in the places it can go. A snake is made long and thin, to go where other creatures cannot. A canoe is made to go where other boats don't go.

  You may curse the weight as you lug it on your shoulders, but on your shoulders, it will snake its way through dense brush and up steep hillsides. And the moment you break through to the water, to the blue sun-lit shimmer of water, you have begun another portion of a ride you know you were meant to take.

  Your canoe slides over shallow weeds and old logs, between the branches of a fallen spruce, and gently pushes through bulrushes to open water. It’s like getting to heaven.

  I’d portaged so far in, I figured I’d have to start back out just to reach the middle of nowhere. Only way to live.

  I was pleased when the line began to come slowly up to me. It had been an outside chance, and it had worked out.

  I knew how much deep-sunken wood seems reluctant to see daylight, so I watched the landscape as I put loops of fishing line in front of me, in the canoe.

  Picture this: I was near one end of a small lake. Most of the shore was a line of trees and rocks, with willow bush and half-sunken logs at the water line, and pines behind. At the other end of the lake, a slant of pink granite made a small cliff, looking hot in the sunlight, like a stone-giant's toe cooling its bunion in a dark-rimmed footbath.

  I could paddle around a lake like this in half an hour without hurrying much. Aside from a lily-pad-choked bay or two, I could also see the entire lake from the canoe. There were no signs of humanity at all.

  It is said, somewhere, that there are some twenty million lakes in Canada. Most of them look very much like this one did. Take a picture of one, and you've got a picture of them all, with minor differences. This one was a tad darker than the average, with more dark pine on the edges and less exposed rock.

  Twenty million lakes. The ones near Toronto or Ottawa are lined with cottages. As you go further north, the cottages get fewer.

  Millions of lakes in the far north bear not the slightest trace of people.

  But even within a short drive of the farms and factories of the heartland of Ontario, there are lakes too small to attract cottages and roads. I was on one of these.

  I'd found it on the map, small and nameless, and not on any canoe route. I'd come to look at it, maybe take a couple of pictures, nothing more. It had taken me some rough portaging to get here, but I was enjoying the September solitude.

  Above me, a couple of clouds drifted by, pondering whether or not to become thunderheads somewhere downwind. A trio of turkey vultures swung lazily above the rock cliff. The rest was a deep blue that might have gone on forever.

  It wasn’t silent. The late-season cicadas in the trees made sounds like tiny circular saws cutting off branches. Squirrels made chattering noises somewhere along shore. And there was a steady background eeeeee of thousands of crickets.

  I spotted the white glitter of the spinner as it rose slowly to within a couple of feet of the surface. You can see about an arm's length into the water, when the light's on it.

  I leaned forward a bit more, to try to grab the lure itself, then paused, peering into the water.

  I could see a boot, rising towards the water surface. Then the lure, firmly snagged in a pair of jeans below the boot. A sock, folded towards the boot. A bit of white skin between the sock and the end of the pant leg. A dark mass disappearing into the dark water.

  The mind refu
ses, at first, to accept something like this. It stops, entirely, at the "say, what?" stage, while it tries to process the data in a reasonable way.

  Eventually, it decides, there is only one reasonable interpretation.

  I knew I had a corpse on my line.

  I found this particularly disturbing, once I had started breathing again and I was sure my heart was still keeping my own middle-aged body going. Because there weren't supposed to be any people on this lake. Alive or dead. That had been part of the point of the trip.

  Away from people. Away from humanity and progress and economics and computer-controlled toaster ovens. Out to the small lakes, off the regular canoe routes, where a retired economics professor could find something closer to elemental nature. Away from people, especially.

  But there was this body, dangling gently on the end of ten-pound- test monofilament line, connected to a five-foot fold-up fishing rod at one end and held by a treble hook to Win Szczedziwoj, would- be escapee from society for a few days.

  Once the obligatory nausea had receded a bit, my first feeling was of anger and of inadequacy. I'd always felt a pang of annoyance when I tracked down another lake that I thought would be mine alone for a day, only to meet other people there.

  But living people came and went. They went; I went. In a matter of minutes both parties could be on their way somewhere else. Living people didn't hang, mute and accusing, like the corpse of Jacob Marley, on the end of one's line, waiting for you to do something.

  My brain, fully capable of explaining abstract economic theory to undergraduates, was having trouble deciding what to do with this thing.

  I took a heavy breath, and looked around the lake again.

  It had changed a bit in the warm September afternoon. The darkness of the shores seemed a bit more pronounced, and the shores seemed more clogged with old tree trunks than most lakes.

  I decided I preferred lakes with more bare rock along the shore. More places where the sunlight could grow a few blueberries. More white birch in the forest mix, and a lot less of silent, dark pine.

  I didn't know the name of this lake - the topographical map didn't always name lakes this small - but I didn't like it any more. It was full of corpses.

  One corpse, maybe, but it filled the little lake and made it dark.

  For a moment, I thought about cutting the line. I hated this dead thing that had come into my life and ruined my expedition to wilderness. I owed it nothing.

  But that was obviously and totally out of the question. I had to report this to whomever one reported dead people to, and things would be a lot simpler if I could tell those people where the body was. Other than just somewhere at the bottom of this small, dark lake.

  That left the problem of how to remain attached to this dead thing. The fishing line was close to its breaking point, so there was no hope of towing the body to shore with it. The strain would snap the line at once.

  I leaned back, grabbing the yellow polypropylene rope coiled behind me. One end was attached to the end of the canoe; the problem was to get the other end around the leg.

  It quickly became obvious, even to an economist, that I would have to grab the leg. For one thing, the line could snap at any moment, as the wind was picking up and the canoe beginning to rotate around the line. For another, there was just no reasonable way to get a line around the leg without hauling at least the foot out of the water.

  Nor could I hope to use the rod to raise even the dead man's foot above water to attach the rope. Not with the thin fishing line I was using. I'd have to grab the leg with my hand, in spite of my reluctance to do so.

  Easier said than done, in a canoe. Canoes range from fairly stable, in a canoeish fashion, to downright malevolent. This canoe was an ultralight model with a greater tendency to roll than I would have preferred. I'd had it built specially light, but hadn't known much about canoe shapes. So I'd casually asked for a "Peterborough" style. Peterborough was a nice place, once famous for canoes.

  A big mistake, I eventually learned. Round-bottomed, it could roll over quite easily. I'd got used to it, but I never trusted it.

  And I had no desire to find myself swimming with that cold dead thing.

  So there I was, in a tippy blue canoe in a small and remote lake on a September afternoon. The canoe held all my camping equipment and photography case, and I, dressed in jeans, a red plaid shirt, and a dark green Tilley hat, was leaning forward to see what could be done about my catch of the day.

  I knelt against the bottom of the canoe, and slowly pulled the line closer. Then I leaned forward, draping myself over the canoe portage yoke ahead of me, trying to keep my weight as low in the canoe as I could. I stuck my arm over the side, my hand slowly feeling its way down the fishing line until it got close to the lure. I grabbed a handful of cold, wet, sock, and pulled it close to the canoe.

  When the foot appeared above the gunnel of the canoe, the canoe began to tremble, as I tried to keep it from turning over. I needed two hands for this, one to hold the leg and one to throw the loop of line. Both hands needed to reach over the same side of the canoe. I wished I had a free hand to shove my camping gear to the other side, to balance.

  With one hand, I held the entire foot out of the water. With the other, I slipped the rope over the foot, and over my line, lure and all.

  Above me, the trio of turkey vultures circled in the warm afternoon sunshine.

  There is a suddenness to the whole thing that is puzzling at first. Above you, there is a silver sky. In that sky, a long dark cloud waits. Below you there is a dark coldness. For some reason, your lungs refuse to work.

  Your mind abruptly figures the whole thing out, and you claw your way to the surface, gasping as your head gets back into the element it was designed for.

  Now I was angry. My exploration, my time away from the obligations and rules and procedures of my society had just been terminated. I was now under obligations to people I had never met and probably wouldn't like if I did meet. Worse yet, I was swimming with a corpse. My foot kept pushing against it and it kept bobbing back at me on the end of the rope and getting between me and the surface. Any minute I'd get snagged by my own lure, and be mated with the dead guy.

  My head broke the surface thinking of the corpse in the unkindest of terms. I remembered, vaguely, a line in "The Cremation of Sam McGee" about hating a corpse.

  I rolled the canoe upright and swam to shore, dragging it behind me. It was slow; the canoe was dragging a submerged dead guy and was full of water. But it wasn't a big lake, and I hadn't been too far from a reasonable landing point.

  My feet touched a cold, muddy bottom, and sank into the black debris of the Canadian forest on the lake bottom. I scrambled through the arrowhead plants, through the willow underbrush, over some slippery smooth rocks, and into the pines at the shore.

  I hauled the canoe over the rocks, scraping blue paint, until I could turn it over, and empty it.

  Then I hauled it onto the shore, and reached for the rope attached to the corpse of someone I didn’t know.

  The rope came in until the body was a dark shape floating among the green arrowhead plants that had once formed the staple diet of the natives. Win Szczedziwoj (that’s Chehgeevoy, more or less), former economist and present-day photographer-in-the-rain and finder-of-small-lost-lakes sat down, dripping, on a log, and tried to still his mind.

  The universe we inhabit is full of boundaries. There is night and day. There is air and water. There is life and death. The corpse at the end of the rope had crossed at least one boundary I didn't like to think about.

  A canoeist traveling through remote country is skirting the edge of the boundary between civilized life and the seemingly random layout of the wilderness. One twist of an ankle on a portage, and you're there until someone finds you. One bad move on the water, and you cross the boundary into the world of fish. And maybe the final boundary, like this person obviously had.

  I removed my soaking shir
t and pants, took off my socks and shoes, and laid them on a rock in the sunlight. I tied the corpse-rope to a branch, and took the canoe back onto the lake, paddling with an old branch.

  I found my paddle, then collected my camera case, the packsack with my camping equipment, and the miscellaneous material I'd brought with me. This included my lifejacket.

  Odd items, such as my fishing rod and bailing bucket, were somewhere on the bottom of the lake.

  Then I circled the lake, finally finding a dark canvas-and-cedar canoe, filled to the gunwales with water, barely visible among the lily pads on the far shore. There was no sign of any other equipment from the Dead Guy.

  My circuit of the lake done, I returned to the Dead Guy and contemplated my options. While I thought, I spread out my map to dry. I'd fished it, a standard topographical, out of the lake. I knew I should have kept it in a plastic case, as I should have been wearing my lifejacket. Maybe next time.

  I knew that, by rights, I ought to see if the fellow had a wallet with identification, but I was reluctant to approach the dark shape still out among the shore weeds. Behind me, in the woods, birds sang and the cicadas continued their buzzsaw noises in the treetops. A couple of mosquitoes settled on my back, where I couldn't reach them, and began probing into my skin. A trio of deerflies began their persistent circling around my head, waiting for a chance at my neck.

  Out on the lake, the afternoon wind had picked up, making diamonds of the wavetops. Three loons, probably a mated pair with this year's chick, were dark marks on the surface near the small granite cliff. A crow appeared and disappeared in the forest by a small boulder-studded bay. A red-tailed hawk circled slowly, very high above the lake.

  A few puffy cumulus clouds drifted in the blue September sky. One of them obscured the sun for a moment.

  God, I hated this lake.

  I looked at the Thing in the lake, the thing that said I had just acquired a long string of unpleasant things to do.

  I realized that what bothered me most was that the thing on the end of the rope was a drowned canoeist of remote lakes. Aisha always worried about her husband on my remote lakes. It would be too hard to find me if anything happened to me. I always assured her that I'd be careful, but accidents could happen. I could too easily have been inhabiting the bottom of this dark lake myself.

  Abruptly, I got up from the rock, waded into the lake, and grabbed the yellow rope. Pulling the Dead Guy in a bit I reached into the hip pocket, and, after a struggle, removed a soggy wallet. Further out, I could see a mass of long blond hair. I rolled the corpse over, and the pale face appeared. The corpse had a blond beard as well, shorter than my gray one, and not as curly. Two half-opened eyes stared from the pale face.

  I waded ashore, my feet again getting muddy from the black ooze. On the rock, I opened the wallet. There was about twenty dollars, a couple of credit cards, and, finally, a driver's license.

  George Aden was a tall, blonde, yellow-bearded male of forty- one, currently residing at Hawk Lake Lodge, on Hawk Lake. Or at least, he had been, up till the time he took up residence under the surface of a small, dark lake.

  The map was still wet, but usable. I found Hawk Lake to the north; presumably the "marina" marked at the west end of the lake was the lodge.

  The normal and obvious way out was via Cedar Lake, to the east; it was on the canoe route from Hawk to McFriggit Lake.

  Going back to McFriggit the way I had come would be shorter, but I remembered the struggle through swamp and dense brush between these and this lake and had no desire to repeat the experience. It would be faster to find a way to Cedar, then decide whether to go north to Hawk Lake, or south to McFriggit.

  Even though this former Aden fellow was from Hawk Lake, I would have preferred to phone the police from McFriggit, where my car was.

  That left the problem of what to do with Aden's earthly remains.

  I decided that there was no way I would haul George over the portages, so he'd just have to remain here.

  Underwater, I decided. If I hauled the body onto the shore, the ants and crows and maybe foxes would start to work on it. In the lake, that left only the snapping turtles. And they probably couldn't eat more than a few external parts in the next day or two. Anyway, George’s external parts were surplus now, whatever they once related to.

  Once back in the canoe, I explored the shoreline nearest to Cedar Lake, looking for a good portage route.

  There was one obvious choice, and the grassy shore held the remains of an old wooden dinghy. Years ago, hunters had probably left the boat here.

  I packed everything I could onto the pack frame, then eyeballed my canoe. My impulse had been to take the canoe and the packs at the same time, but I’ve always considered that the methodology of nut cases. I decided to leave the canoe for a second trip.

  Much of the portage was through dense brush, but at one point I came into an old-growth hemlock forest. Hemlocks tend to kill everything under them, so the effect of a grove is that of a cathedral, with a multitude of pillars holding a green ceiling far above.

  I was leaning my pack against a tree trunk when a figure carrying a canoe came up a small hill and into view. Without pausing, the man walked up to the tree I was resting against, rolled the canoe onto the ground, and looked me in the eye.

  "So George is dead," the stranger said. "Did you kill him?"