Chapter 13
At the bottom we stopped and caught our breath.
“What the heck were you doing down here?” Kele gasped.
“Young brave leave old medicine man to die of thirst on remote hillside. Sad old story,” Samuel said, hanging onto a tree. He turned to me. “Thought I’d get some water, make myself some spruce tea.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“Samuel looked at me. “You watch Never Cry Wolf one time too many?” He stepped forward, surprisingly agile for a big man, then knelt near the edge of the water. He reached out to a rock that poked up from the shore. Using a round stone, he knocked off a piece and handed it to Kele and me. It was blue-green and crumbly.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s a rock.”
“It’s got special powers?” Kele suggested.
“If I were a white man, I’d call both of you ‘fartheads’,” Samuel said with a huge smile. “This stone is kimberlite.”
A lost memory surfaced through the haze of Pica’s alcohol-soaked apricots. “Diamonds?”
“Got it.” Samuel grinned and pointed to the original rock face. “You can see where someone chipped away at this, then covered it with dirt and pine needles. Makes you think, doesn’t it.”
Kele and I thought. It wasn’t easy, hunched over hanging onto a tree and trying not to slide one foot into the cold lake. I looked around at the lake. It looked like any other tiny lake in this country, with marshy areas around most of the shores, and a deep blue in the middle.
“Are you two guys just going to hang around here, or can we go back up the hill?” Samuel laughed.
At the top, Samuel and I had a couple more apricots, as he settled into the lawn chair, and we all inhaled oxygen to make up for the climb.
“Someone,” I said, “came this way fairly recently. A couple of good rains would have cleaned that rock off.”
“Someone,” Kele noted, “expected to be back here before too long.”
“How did you know it was kimberlite?” I asked Samuel.
“When I was a kid,” Samuel said, “I learned the story of the Peterborough diamond, and when I was hunting, I kept an eye open. ”
“What’s the Peterborough diamond?” Kele asked, putting a few more twigs on the fire.
“Woo, I think I’ve had enough of those apricots,” Samuel said. “All that vitamin C is getting to me.” He reached into his pack and drew out a small leather pouch.
I watched as he got out a few things, some of which I recognized as bones and tobacco.
“Well,” he said slowly, “when I was a kid I wasn’t the genius I was now. I didn’t know a lot of things.” He chuckled and looked out over the lake, then got a kleenex and wiped his glasses.
Myself, I kept looking around in case someone with a rifle was lining up on my head. I noticed that Kele was doing the same.
“Stop worrying, boys,” Samuel said. “There’s evil around here, but it’s still a couple of miles away.” He said with a smile, “Unless someone’s got a really good rifle, we’re probably safe for a bit.” The wind was picking up and it was hard to hear him. From far away came the sound of a motorboat, maybe from Hawk Lake, or maybe from McFriggit Lake.
“Anyway,” he went on,” when they were building the railway from Ottawa to Peterborough in the 1890s, they were using gravel from local gravel pits. Somewhere a few miles east of Peterborough some working guy picked up a good-sized diamond, 33 carats, from the gravel. It wasn’t a good-quality gem, but he sold it to a jeweler in the town.”
“It came from here?” I dodged the smoke from the fire.
“The gravel is stuff the glaciers scraped off this area during the ice age. Most scientists think it didn’t go more than a few dozen miles.” Samuel indicated the little lake below us. “Diamonds usually come from a circular hole in the ground. This lake could be the top of a diamond pipe.”
“What would that mean?” Kele squinted at the lake. The wind was switching to the north, and getting colder.
“A diamond pipe is shaped like a carrot,” Samuel said, “and this would be the top.”
“I meant, what would that mean to the land claim,” Kele corrected.
“Land claim?” I asked.
“We have a land claim in court for this land.” Samuel said.
“Oh,” I said, picturing having to ask someone to canoe the lakes I’d crossed so freely in my life. “How does it look.”
“There wasn’t much hope,” Samuel said, “so it’s been bubbling along on the back burner for a couple of decades.” He waved at the lake. “Even if there are no diamonds in that ore, this would probably kill it for sure. In the excitement, the place’ll be torn up and crawling with prospectors before anyone remembers that we claimed it.”
I nodded. Too often the courts had their eyes on the law and their ears open for whispers from economic powers. I taught economics long enough to know the political realities behind decisions like that.
“Us Indians,” Samuel said, “never did trust things that came from underground. Most of the nastier manitous come from underwater and underground. Bad spirits if you don’t know how to treat them right.”
“Like the one with the Buick,” I said.
“Mishipizheu,” Kele said.
“Darn,” Samuel shook his head. “There are some secrets white guys aren’t supposed to know. And you told him about the Buick….”
“Just slipped out,” Kele laughed.
“Anyway,” I said, “mineral claims have lost a lot of Indian land. That’s for sure.”
Samuel reached for a large piece of fungus from his bag, and set one end to burning. He chanted something I didn’t understand, and inhaled some of the fumes.
“Is your heart pure?” he asked me.
“Nope,” I said. “But I put on clean underwear and socks yesterday morning.”
He laughed long and hard. “Guess that’ll have to do. Here.” He handed me a piece of bone of some sort, looking like it had been partly carved into something I didn’t recognize. Then, with a sigh, he got out of the lawn chair. “Follow me.”
We followed the ridge a bit, then stopped. Small spruce, mostly dead, alternated with thick moss on the ground. “Not enough soil for trees,” Samuel said. “They die if they get a couple of dry years. “Moss survives, though.” He leaned over and pointed to a place where bare rock met moss. “Lift that edge,” he told Kele.
Kele knelt and lifted inch-thick moss, a mixture of gray and green.
I could see a carved figure. “Holy shit!” I said, then wished I’d chosen a better phrase.
“Darn right,” Samuel said, “at least to us, it is.”
“How many drawings are there?” Kele whispered.
“Well,” said Samuel, “I checked a couple of places over there” he pointed behind a clump of tiny spruce - “and over there” - he indicated a place closer to the edge of the hill. “Same story. Lots of pictures.”
Kele put the moss back into place and stood up. “This makes things a bit different.”
“It sure is gonna do interesting things to your land claim,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Samuel. “Yeah.”
I lifted up a piece of moss. “What is it?” I asked, pointing at the drawing etched into the rock surface.
“The stick figure,” Samuel said, “the guy with one eye, is a medicine man, a shaman. The animal beside him is a bear. The lines that connect them are power lines, coming from the bear to the man.”
I grunted.
“You white guys grunt a lot, you know,” Samuel said. “I guess that means you think it’s pretty primitive art. Something like a six-year-old kid might do.”
“Well,” I said. Kele stood up and watched through the trees for something.
“Actually,” Samuel said, “a six-year-old kid could do a lot better, from a representational view.”
“But this isn’t representational?” I said.
“Indian religion teaches us that what we see,” Samu
el waved his arms around, “isn’t the real thing. It’s just God’s stage set.”
“Dreams?” I asked.
“They’re better,” Samuel said. “But when I dream of some woman on the Kettle Point First Nation I can tell you that’s my gonads talking, not the Great Spirit.” He leaned against an oak. “The time the spirits, the manitous, the representatives of God’s power speak to you is in that moment between waking and sleeping. Guess what?” he asked. “You draw what you see there, and it’ll look like this stuff.”
He stretched and walked back to the campfire and his lawn chair. “If you drew a really good bear and a really good man, it’d just show you got fooled by the stage set.” He settled into the lawn chair and poked at the small fire.
I was going to grunt again, but thought the better of it. As a photographer, I’m a little closer to reality in art than whoever scratched those pictures.
“Now, you’re thinking, that picture was a guy sharing power from a bear, or getting power from a bear. Right.”
I nodded.
“It might be that. Or it might be that he saw an eagle and felt some power in the wind, but the bear is his family’s totem and he wanted power to deal with the Grandfather Wind.”
“Then how do you know?”
“You can’t. Ever. If the picture has meaning to you, then you’ll get power from it. If not, it’s just a funny picture.”
“How did you find the pictures?” I asked.
“I was taking a leak while waiting for this young guy to get back, and noticed that someone had been fooling with the moss. So I took a look.”
“You think someone else’s seen them?” Kele ran his fingers through his hair.
“And had a campfire here.” Samuel indicated the fire. “Someone recently had a fire here. I just used the same spot.”
Now I was getting really nervous. “You know,” I mentioned, “It might just be time to get a move on, unless you can deflect bullets.”
“I gotta agree,” Kele said.
“You young guys want to live forever,” Samuel said, but he picked up his pack and his chair. “Somebody going to put this fire out?”
We looked at each other. The top of the hill was dry as desert, and it was a hell of a climb back down to the water and we didn’t have much drinking water in our packs. We could have opened our flies and peed the fire out, but this didn’t seem like a good place for that.
Eventually we managed to stomp the fire cold, and headed west, through the trees.
After a tougher-than-usual clamber I said, “There’s a good reason to kill somebody, back there.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Kele said, looking winded. “Two good reasons, if you want.”
“They go together,” I said. Anybody going to work on a diamond mine would pretty well have to mess up the drawings.”
“The drawings would pretty well mess up any white guy’s claim to the ore for a long time, if not forever,” I said.
“Let’s make a few guesses,” I said. “Whoever made the campfire back there spent the night on the rock, and found both the pictures and the kimberlite outcrop.”
“And spent the next night on the south shore of Thomson Lake, at that campsite,” Kele said.
I looked at Samuel. He just nodded.
I told them how my wife, Aisha, had said, “those two geologists did it.”
“Makes the most sense,” Kele said. “They’d recognize kimberlite right away if they found it, and would realize what the drawings could do to a claim.”
“But I thought they came down by way of Gull Lake and Fox Lake,” I said.
“Maybe you two just assumed that,” Samuel said. “Maybe they lied; they had reason enough.
“Hey,” I said. “Remember when we made the portage from Cedar to Fox Lake? Kele here knew Fox Lake was down a foot or two and we couldn’t launch at the usual point on Fox. But those two didn’t know that. If they’d come that way, they would have.”
“I remember them at the mud flats - we had to wave them on to the portage bypass.”
“So they didn’t come that way.” Kele said.
“And I’m pretty sure they didn’t come the way I came, from Casey Lake. I’d have spotted some marks or footprints on the trail, I think.” Unless, I thought, they walked pretty carefully.
“But they told us they came by way of Fox Lake,” Kele said.
“So they lied,” I said. “First thing to know.”
“We going to sit here all day?” Samuel wanted to know. “Can I build a sweat lodge while you guys are doing some thinking?” He sat on the lawn chair and dug out a Mars bar from his pack.
“One other thing,” I said. “Just thought of it now. Remember when we packed up the tents on Cedar Lake? All the pine needles stuck to the bottom of their tent?”
“And George’s tent too,” Kele noted.
“Right,” I said. “That tent was put onto wet ground. Yet they told me they’d been camped there for the previous two nights.”
“And,” Samuel said.
“And the only rain was the day before. I know, because I was counting on wet weather for pictures.” I stretched and stood up again. “If they’d camped before the rain, the bottom of their tent would have been dry. So they moved that tent to Cedar Lake and put it up a day after they said they did.”
“We can suppose they were on the shore of Thomson Lake the day before.” Kele got up, too.”
“Makes sense. At that campsite we saw today.”
“So George might not have gone off to Thomson Lake fishing.”
Kele stopped. “They told you he went fishing?”
“That’s what they said. Supposedly he took Ned’s rod and promised them some lake trout.”
“George didn’t fish,” Kele said. “He’d let other people hunt and fish, but he was a strict vegetarian and refused to kill any animals or fish himself.”
“I guess those fellows didn’t know that,” I said. “I sure as hell wish one of us brought a cell phone.”
Samuel spoke as he led us across an open stretch of flat rock. “I got one.”
“Geez!” I said. “Let’s call the cops.”
“I think we can talk about that at the canoe,” Samuel said.
“If we get that far,” I said, annoyed.
“If we don’t, we don’t,” Samuel said, laughing. Even hauling the lawn chair, he kept well ahead of us.
---------------------
They were waiting for us, of course.
We came down the faintest semblance of a trail to Red Lake, and there, sitting on Kele’s canoe was Patrick Ireland, smoking a pipe.
I looked around, trying to keep my mind on the thought that the rifle was a single-shot and it takes a while to shoot three people. But Ned was down by the shore, cleaning a string of fish.
Samuel looked at the campfire burning on a flat space well above the shoreline, and the man cleaning fish, and said to Patrick, “We gotta talk.”
Patrick took a puff on his pipe, and said, “We found our rifle. It was under the canoe.” He looked nervous.
We set down our packs. Samuel found a good place for the lawn chair. When he was comfortable, he spoke to Ned and Patrick. “Kimberlite,” he said. “Pictographs.”
“Shit,” said Ned, setting the fish on a rock. Patrick looked even unhappier, if that were possible.
Myself, I was watching the packsacks that lay on the ground. I knew that one of them had a rifle in it, folded up and with maybe twenty rounds in a package.
“Time to talk,” Samuel repeated. “We got lots to talk about, I think.”
“Like what,” Patrick blurted, spilling a bit of burning tobacco on his pants. With a practiced motion he swept the offending matter onto the ground and stepped on it.
“I think it’s going to be a long talk,” Samuel said. “We might be here for a while.”
The thought didn’t comfort me. I was tired from lack of sleep, hungry from lack of food, thirsty from conserving my wate
r supply, achy from the hard ground the night before, and edgy from watching all day for speeding bullets to dodge.
“It’s afternoon,” Kele pointed out, “and it’s three hours to the lodge even if we get a tail wind.”
Like a canoeist ever gets a tail wind. Besides, already there was a stiff north wind and the temperature was falling.
Samuel turned to me. “You might want to phone your wife and tell her you’ll be away another night.” He dug into his pack and came up with the cell phone. “Don’t tell her exactly where you are, just that you’ll be home tomorrow.”
I took the phone and made the call. Middle of the freaking wilderness and some tower somewhere got my signal and put me through. God, I hate/love technology.
“Aisha,” I said, when she answered.
“Late tonight would be fine,” she said. “But otherwise I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t freeze to death on the ground if you do stay over. You and the other guy can take turns keeping a fire going.”
“Fine, thanks,” I said. She’d probably figured out from the lack of panic in my voice that I wasn’t in immediate danger, but she knew I wouldn’t call if I were to be home quite soon. So it would be after dark or tomorrow that I’d show up. She knew I didn’t have a cell phone, so someone else had to be with me. She knew I hadn’t packed for an overnight stay, so keeping a fire going would be necessary. And she watched the weather channel enough to know it would be getting chilly after dark.
“Where are you?” She didn’t sound worried, but she had a set of maps in the house.
“Ah,” I said, watching the others watch me. “Way out in the woods somewhere. No place you could find on the map.”
“It’s like that,” she said. “Want me to call the cops?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“As long as those geologists aren’t around. I told you they’ve been killing people over a lost gold mine or something.”
“Well,” I said, “they’ve got some fish cooking and have to go now. See you tomorrow.”
I wondered if I’d said too much. I’d just told her that I was beside a lake or river, and they all had names, so she could figure out I really did know where I was, and couldn’t say.”
“Sleep with your eyes open,” she advised.
I looked around to see four pairs of eyes watching me. “We should call the lodge,” I suggested. “Otherwise someone’s sure to send in the troops.”
There was a moment of silence, then Ned said, “Good idea.” I handed him the phone.
I don’t know who he got on the phone, but it was obvious that Seth and Pica hadn’t got back yet. Ned assured whomever that we were fine and Patrick and Kele and Samuel and I were happy to spend another night outdoors and we’d be back in the morning.
Before he hung up, Samuel indicated that he wanted the phone. “Marie,” he said. “Samuel here. Yeah, I’ll be back tomorrow. Tell everybody not to worry. Tell Seth, when he gets in, that the stolen rifle’s been found. We’re all okay. There was no problem.”
“You’re on the list of suspects in George’s death,” he told Ned and Patrick. “If I didn’t get on the phone someone might assume you’d killed us all.”
Ned didn’t look happy about it, but what could he do? Samuel made sense.
“Supper?” Ned asked. There was general agreement, so Ned took out some cooking utensils and I curled up on some moss and put my head on my packsack. And went to sleep.
Maybe twenty minutes later, Kele woke me. I came back to the world from wherever I was with Kele handing me a birch-bark plate with fried fish and potatoes on it.
Kele pointed at the potatoes. “Dehydrated. The geobuddies came prepared.”
The food was good. I finished up my water when Kele pointed out that Patrick’s pack had a water-purifier pump in it. Patrick and I went down to the edge of the lake and pumped water through the purifier. He held a collapsible canvas bucket and pointed the end of the hose into a relatively clean area of the water. I pumped, water gurgling as I moved the handle up and down. My arms ached. My knees ached from kneeling. My feet ached from trying not to slip into the lake. But we pumped enough water for all of us for a night.
The sun was getting low above the trees when we had finished a polite but enjoyable dinner. A Canada Jay explored the camp and stole a piece of fish. A family of mergansers made their way along the shore of Red Lake, a string of a dozen smaller mergansers following their parents in a perfect line.
Several leaves fell off the trees, and a flight of Canada geese went overhead, flying north. Canada geese fly the wrong way a lot of time.
The geobuddies had a folding Swede saw, so we gathered a real pile of wood, and prepared for a long night. We even improvised chairs of a sort for everybody but Samuel, so there was no need to kill him for his lawn chair.
The shadows got long, and a stiff north wind picked sparks from the fire and blew them at Samuel and me. But Samuel brought out some tobacco and waved his bag of mysterious things a bit, and the wind stopped dumping so much ash his way. Me, I moved over, and held my breath when the smoke came to visit me.
“Why is there power in petroglyphs?” Ned wanted to know. “They weren’t made by the gods, the manitous, you know.”
Samuel took out a cigar from his pack and lit it. “There’s nothing sacred about pictures. Not the pictures on that rock, and not Michealangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting. They were all done by people.”
Ned started to go on, but Samuel blew out a big cloud of tobacco smoke and continued. “The place, well, that’s different. That’s holy.”
“Why would a place be holy?” Patrick had a hat pulled low over his head and was watching the water. But he’d obviously been paying attention.”
Samuel laughed and blew a perfect smoke ring, but it vanished at once into the breeze. “We haven’t a clue, actually.” He raised a hand. “Let me give you a quick lesson in total illogic.
“You white guys spent a long time studying matter. Solid matter.” Samuel reached down and tapped the local granite. “Then you learned enough to start studying energy. We Indians were out killing moose and sitting in spirit circles. Then, of course, Einstein taught us that….” He held out a hand to us.
“Matter is energy.” Patrick spoke from under his hat.
“Got it.” Samuel smiled. “My physics courses weren’t wasted. Matter is a form of energy. And energy can be manipulated by the mind.”
I spoke up. “Only at the smallest level, and only in the slightest degree.” The sun was behind the highest trees on the hill on the other side of the lake. The temperature dropped some more.
“Ah, my friend,” Samuel chuckled, blowing cigar smoke into the wind. “The human mind can decide something at the subatomic level every now and then.” He leaned forward to the fire. “But God, now. That’s different. Our Great Spirit.” More cigar smoke, and he shook off some ash. “Picture this universe as a creation of the mind of God.” He looked each of us in the eye. “God is energy and he directs energy in strange ways. In ways that aren’t logical.”
“To some rock in the middle of the bush?” Ned seemed skeptical, but he had a lot at stake.
“To some dry land in the Middle East maybe, rather than to a field in Norway? To a cave at Lourdes rather than a peninsula in Wales? To a city in India where they say heaven comes closest to the earth? Who knows the way of God? Our God or your God? Maybe the same God.”
“You’re saying it’s not logical,” Kele said. Patrick had put on a pot of tea and Kele was serving it in birch-bark cups someone had made, probably while I was asleep. It tasted bitter.”
“Like I said,” Samuel said. “Total illogic.” He tossed the cigar stub into the fire. “Look. Picture a bearded prophet named Moses standing on the top of a mountain. God tells him everybody in his tribe has to cut the ends of their dicks off, now and for all generations. Make sense? No way.
“Or maybe everybody’s got to travel to a desert town and throw rocks or somethi
ng. It’s not logical. We Indians figured that out. There’s God-power here and there and you just got to work at where it comes out.”
“What about George?” I asked, but everybody ignored me. My butt hurt and my head hurt from the smoke or the fish or maybe God was mad at me.
Samuel went on. “Some of our holy men figured out that bears have lots of God power but wolves have hardly any. We don’t know why, even if we make up a few good stories about it. Moose, now. Loaded with God power. Deer - they’re weak in it. Most of those hills over there - they’re just hills. But sometimes the power pours out of some hillside for some reason and the holy men mark the spot. You gotta just find these places. Like you find diamonds.”
“Any connection?” I asked.
“Depends on how much of a sense of humor God has,” Samuel said.
I’d often wondered about that. It would have explained a lot. “If the land claim goes through,” I asked, “wouldn’t the, ah, First Nation that owns the land get the money.”
“Well,” Samuel laughed, “it hasn’t worked that way so far. Right now, the mining company owns whatever it can find under the ground.”
“The landowner gets payments, though?” It seemed reasonable to me.
“Tell him,” Samuel said to Kele.
“The mining company pays fees that go to the government,” Kele said.
I looked at Ned. He nodded.
“You don’t get anything?” I was astounded.
“Tailings.”
“But you can stop people from mining on your land?”
“Not bloody likely.”
“A diamond mine isn’t going to do you much good, then.”
“Really screw things up I think. But then, what do I know?” Samuel smiled. He turned back to Ned and Patrick. “Your first diamond mine?”
“There aren’t many around,” Patrick said. “When I was young, they told us that no diamond mine had ever been found in North America.” He tapped his pipe against a rock and poked at the fire with a fresh-stripped spruce branch. “Now they’ve got diamond mines in the Northwest Territories and maybe in Labrador.”
“And here,” Kele said, undoing his braids. “You’ve got one here.”
“Could be,” Ned said. “No way to say for sure at this point. Might be nothing in that ore.” He stood and stretched, looking to the west, where only a rosy glow silhouetted the trees across the lake. “And there’ll be the problem of preserving those petroglyphs.”
“Put them under a glass cover, and charge the Indians a few bucks to take a peek?” Kele asked. “Like down at the provincial park?” We all knew Petroglyphs park. The carvings there had a nice building around them and busloads of tourists.
“Arrangements could be made.”
“And we could shut down the mining machines a few minutes a day out of respect?” Kele went on.
“What about George?” I said.
“George,” Ned said, while Patrick suddenly got up to get more wood for the fire. “George. Poor bastard died in the country he loved.”
“He was murdered,” I said.
“Really,” Samuel said, with a big smile. “I thought he fell out of his canoe.”
My eyes popped. “The coroner thinks he was dead before he hit the water.” I looked around. There was a lot of head movement. “That’s going to affect a few things.”
The wind died and an owl hooted. The temperature dropped a couple of degrees.
And what do you think happened?” Ned asked, breaking the silence.
I hesitated. “One might wonder,” I said, “what would happen if George found out about a set of petroglyphs and a lode of diamond ore. I didn’t know him, but I imagine he’d have been upset at the thought of trucks rumbling through the hills he loved.” I kicked at a rock. “There’d have to be a lot of roads built.”
No one said a blithering word.
“Suppose,” I said, “George came with a group of people not by way of Fox Lake, but across this way. Suppose they found all these things, and were talking about ore sorters and truck roads and maybe a rail line. I can see a fight breaking out, if someone told him about this scene. I can see a fight breaking out if someone asked him to keep quiet about the petroglyphs,” I suggested. “And things can happen.”
No one said a blithering word.
“But if there were a murder charge, details of both the petroglyphs and the kimberlite would come out.”
“He’s quick, for a retired economist,” Kele said.
“I think,” Ned said, “that there’s a lot to lose if a murder charge comes out.” There was a general shuffling around the fire, and the wind picked up again, blowing ashes in my direction. Patrick added a few more twigs, but they burned quickly.
“I’ve seen a lot of accidents in my time,” Samuel said. “People stand up in a canoe, bang their heads, fall out.” He put some more tobacco into his pipe, first holding some to the air then putting it into the fire.
“Sometimes,” he went on, “Your canoe can roll over on top of you, and it’ll hold you underwater.” He shook his head. “Tragic.”
“Hey,” I said. “There were campsites at the petroglyphs and on the south shore of Thomson Lake.”
“Lots of hunters here in the fall,” Samuel said. “Some guys come in just to scout out the country first.” He blew a spiral of smoke into the air. “I used to do that.”
“Someone shot at us!”
“Maybe,” Ned said. “Or maybe someone was shooting at rabbits.”
“Someone put a hole in your canoe.”
“Mighta been that rock we hit, coming across Cedar Lake,” Ned said. “Sometimes you don’t notice these things till later.”
“You said George left to do some fishing.” I was getting hoarse from strain.
Kele leaned forward towards Ned and Patrick. “George didn’t fish. He didn’t believe in it.”
“Well, he did tell us he was taking a trip to see a lake somewhere. We just assumed he took my rod and did some fishing.” Ned scratched his chin. “I liked that fold-up rod. I’d hate to think I lost it myself somewhere.”
And their rifle got lost and found and they just forgot that the Fox Lake portage was unusable and maybe the dew crept under their tent on Cedar Lake and maybe I was nuts.
And maybe I was the only one who thought it mattered if murder had been done. Or that it mattered more than land and diamonds and crazy pictures on rock.
And maybe, if I fell out of a canoe, things would get a lot less dicey. Or maybe two deaths would look even more suspicious. I liked that thought. It mitigated against a wall of depression the size of Hawk Lake and deep as my soul. My head, of course, hurt from any of three hundred causes and I was tired.
So I reached into my pack and brought out Pica’s bag of preserved apricots and passed them around. Kele, of course, refused them, as did Ned. Samuel took two, and I had one. There were still lots left.
Then they talked about the weather and about fishing and even some politics, and laughed a lot. They didn’t talk about good ol’ George and his untimely death. Eventually, Kele told me to take a nap. “I’ll watch out for you,” he said. I didn’t believe him, so it took me at least a minute to drift off.
I woke up a few hours later, cold, and the stars were out, wavering in the wind. The fire was crackling and the lake was getting noisy against its shores.
I yawned and stretched, still tired and achy, and Patrick handed me a mug of tea. I knew that geologists work with cyanide and mercury and things like that, so I thought about other things and drank the tea.
Everybody was watching me.
“Best thing for Ned and Patrick,” I said, “is the rest of us die now and a blasting crew turns them petroglyphs into road work before anybody else sees them.” I got up and leaned over the fire for warmth. “And nobody will find out if they think George died accidentally.” Interesting thing about warming your toes is that your boots start to melt just before your toes get warm.
“Best th
ing for Samuel and Kele,” I continued, “is the rest of us die now and National Geographic does a feature on the petroglyphs. And someone covers up that ore exposure, so nobody finds out about it. And maybe nobody will find out if they think George died accidentally.”
“Might someday need them diamonds,” Samuel said. “Might someday the courts turn over mineral rights to the tribe.”
“Someday and maybe,” I said. “But none of you guys can count on anything if some damn economist spills the beans about petroglyphs and diamond mines.”
“I liked George, Samuel said. “He was a good man. He was one of Kele’s best friends. They canoed and walked a lot of this country together. Kele would do sketches and George would talk about his view of the world.” He puffed on his pipe. “It hurt Kele a lot when he found out George had cancer.”
“It’s true,” Kele said. “He used to tell me how he didn’t want to die in some hospital room with tubes sticking out of him.”
“Luckily,” I said, “he had maybe some wonderful people who were willing to help him die somewhere nice. Just a little sooner than he’d probably planned it.”
“What’s done is done. The past doesn’t change. We’ve got to think about the future.” Patrick spoke up, looking intently at me, then everybody else. Nobody nodded. Especially not me.
“I think,” Ned said, “that the accident story is the most acceptable explanation.”
“But not necessarily the right one.” I poked at a log with my boot. The wind was fondling the coals at the base of the flames, and I figured we might run out of firewood before morning.
“You get to choose right and wrong?”
“Someone has to. We’re not getting much guidance from the stars lately.”
“Maybe they have judges for that. And laws.” I looked into the darkness where invisible trees nudged and wrestled in the night wind. I could hear the topmost branches of the trees whipping, but the firelight had blinded me to the world around.
“And maybe a judge doesn’t know much about this wilderness,” Kele said. “And maybe us Indians haven’t learned to trust judges a lot.”
It was a dark and windy night. Who knew how many feral eyes stared at me from the darkness? I could count four pairs in the firelight, and decided the darkness was starting to look friendly. “There’s a law for we’uns and a law for you’uns,” I said.
There was a bunch blank looks. “Got that from Bonanza,” I said. “Or maybe the Beverly Hillbillies.”
“We’re talking practicalities,” Samuel said. He started a new cigar.
“Let’s talk practicalities,” I said, the caffeine in the tea making me crazy. My body ached in the way a middle-age person’s does, at every point it had touched the cold hard ground in the last 24 hours. A hammer-drill worked at the right-front side of my head. Love them migraines - they move around here and there like buses on a historic tour.
“Let’s talk practicalities,” I continued. They liked that. The practical thing to do would be to kill me, then figure out a deal between themselves. I was the only one that didn’t want anything. I wasn’t even sure I wanted justice. Actually, I wanted to go home. God, I wanted to go home.
“Our policeman friend,” I said, sipping on tea (God, I hate tea - it always tastes like dead weeds to me), “thinks that someone shot at a cop. That promises lots of people in flak jackets walking these hills tomorrow.” I checked my pack. There was no more beef jerky or even tofu. I wouldn’t have shared it, anyway.
“A big bunch of cops wandering these hills isn’t going to do any of you any good. You both need something hidden, and people beating the bushes are going to find things. Including kimberlite and petroglyphs.” I paused, while Patrick lit up another pipe, and Samuel lit up another cigar.
“So you’ve got to get rid of the storm troopers from the Provincial Police,” I said. “That’s first thing.
“Then you’ve got to decide what to do about canoes.”
“Canoes?” Kele asked. He shook his long black hair.
“There is one canoe here at Red Lake,” I said, waving my hand towards the darkness and the sound of waves. “It’s not going to hold all five of us in this wind. And there are two canoes back there” - I pointed back towards Thomson Lake “George’s canoe and,” I indicated Ned, “your canoe. Someone’s going to have to go back the other way.”
Kele, at least, nodded. “Is there anything else?”
“Call it an accident, if you want. But if any more accidents happen, you’re not going to be able to hold back the police. As for the rest, well, that’s not up to me.”
There was a lot of movement in the next while, people shuffling around to keep the fire going and to keep warm without being in the path of the smoke. I nodded off, and the others did, one at a time.
Sometime (I had a watch, but didn’t want to look at it) in the night I was adding wood to the fire, drinking tea, and keeping sparks off the sleepers, when I noticed it was getting light and the wind was getting stronger.
Sometimes I fear the wind. Not the way it’s always against me in the canoe, making me bend forward, making paddling a chore. I expect that. Not even the big wind, the way it raises waves on the lake, making me eye the land lovingly, longingly. I know that wind.
I fear, instead, the more intimate wind in the deep of the night, the way it touches my cup as I sit by the fire. It feels inside the pack by the tree, then with transparent fingers tries the tent, not respecting my property or privacy. It touches my cheeks, riffles the hairs left on my head and pushes smoke into my eyes.
Way deep in the dark of the morning, I’m afraid the wind is after my soul.
Samuel saw me looking at the sky. He was down to a stub of a cigar. “Ready?” he asked, getting up. He tossed the stub of his cigar into the fire.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I answered.
We stood outside the firelight for a few minutes, letting our eyes adjust to the darkness. It half worked.
Then we stumbled down lichen-slippery rocks to the edge of the inky lake. The wind was still making for noisy shores and a whispering in the treetops. Leaves danced around us as we flipped the canoe upright and set it into the water.
I expected some questions from the three back at the campfire, but there wasn’t a sound as we pulled away. The wind caught us, but we straightened out the canoe. Samuel took the front seat. Two old Hawk Lake Lodge lifejackets and our small packs lay between us, getting splashed every time a paddle caught a wave tip.