Chapter 18
“This is not the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. But it must be close.” Bob threw another pack into his canoe. “I need my head felt.”
“Win said the same thing,”
“And I was right,” I said. “My only hope is that we’ll stay far apart, since we’re all basically loners. Or so it seems.”
We were taking two canoes. Kele and I were in one canoe, a large but relatively lightweight one I’d rented. Bob insisted on going alone. He took most of the gear we figured we’d need, tents, sleeping gear, and food. As far as I knew, none of us had a gun. I’d tried to borrow one, a shotgun, but nobody would lend me one, not in this country with its gun laws. Then Aisha found out and I figured it would be safer without a gun.
But I hoped that Kele had one. Bob probably had only his knife. I figured he wouldn’t be long without one, and that he’d got a dandy at the hardware store somewhere. But I didn’t figure he’d faced many guns in the rabbit warrens of Manchester, so a knife didn’t comfort me at all.
What can I say? We took the short route through Red Lake and the Portage From Hell. We took turns carrying the canoes and the goods and the stuff we probably wouldn’t need and the stuff we probably needed more of. We marked the best routes as we found them, so Samuel’s people could follow, using red ribbon on the tree trunks.
I’ve done stupid things before, but I usually didn’t know until I was in the middle of them.
But it was warm. The light rain ceased as we started the portage, then a south wind came up as we headed south on Red Lake, so, as usual, we paddled upwind. Bob, with the tubbier canoe and most of the camping gear, did surprisingly well in keeping up with Kele and me.
What’s to be gained by wandering in the wilderness with people you barely know? Beats me. I couldn’t see any benefit to myself from the expedition, and I guess I showed it at first in my attitude. Oh, I was helpful enough, and made a few funny jokes. But my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to be back in Aisha’s arms, watching TV and eating toast and peanut butter.
That lasted till we got out on the water. The sun came out and a warm south wind made the autumn leaves dance. Somehow, the whole thing seemed…. right.
Bob was unusually cheerful. I guess he needed something to do. Kele was, well, efficient, like he’d finally found his opportunity to get the approval of the right half of his ancestors.
Not that we were any more than guys on an adventure. We hadn’t the slightest evidence that Ned and Patrick or anyone else was going to do anything to anything. When we left the lodge we were the only ones on the water, and there was no sign in the parking lot of any car that they might drive.
Nonetheless, we left our women (not that Bob, as far as I could tell, had a woman to leave anymore) and loaded up canoes and paddled off into the wilderness like the lost boys returning to neverland.
Unshaven (I have a beard because I can’t stand shaving) and wearing an assembly of light jackets and hats, we arrived at the south end of Red Lake, scouted it for signs of activity, and disembarked. On the flat space near the portage, Samuel’s lawn chair stood, folded up, against a small maple with intensely-scarlet leaves. The ashes of the all-night fire were wet with the recent rains.
I snapped off a lone milkweed plant along the shore, then blew its seeds into the air. A stray air current lifted some into the trees. I’d started my trip with a plan, and had started every part of this last week with a plan, and now here I was, supposedly by plan again. But I wondered how much I was like the milkweed seed, drifting in unseen currents.
We left the canoes up away from the shore, upside down, with the paddles and lifejackets under them. Shouldering the packs, we started up. I’ve been camping with people who like people, groups of guys that like each other and really get off on doing guy things. That, I can’t stand, and it makes me utterly and devastatingly depressed.
But Bob and Kele were loners, like me. They had an instinctive sense of respect for the private mental and physical spaces around each of us, defending their own and taking care not to intrude on anybody else’s. Many opinions were offered, but responses were never requested, except for the necessities of the trip - “Can you carry that pack, or should I take it?” Even questions like, “Isn’t that tree pretty?” imposes on another person, and were not asked. Rather, Bob looked at the bright maple, said “Spot on,” and turned away to pick up a pack.
So we went up the hill, packs on our backs and camp goods under our arms.
We’d carry the stuff a ways, then go back for more stuff. Westerners aren’t particularly good at living without “stuff” nor willing to go without comfort.
We’d dumped the last load onto a flattish area at the site, and were just starting to unpack when the phone rang. Three guys looked at each other, looked at the packs, then Bob handed me my small pack. “Phone’s for you, I think.”
I dug into the pack, pulled out the phone, and inspected it. Taped to the cover were the words in Aisha’s handwriting, “Unfold, then press ON then SPEED then 2”. I did.
“Glad you figured it out,” Aisha’s voice came through the tiny speaker. “Anybody shot you yet?”
“Nobody’s shot me yet,” I said, letting the others in on the conversation as much as I could. “We’ve just arrived.”
“First things first,” she said. “See if you can find a petroglyph that hasn’t been found yet.”
I walked over to the mossy area, waving the others to come. “Want to find a drawing that hasn’t been found before.” I reached down and lifted a piece of moss. Nothing.
“Got one here,” Bob said.
“Bob found one,” I told the phone.
“Check it,” Aisha said.
“For what?”
“To make sure it wasn’t made last week,” she said. “We’ve got to be sure of that.”
“She wants to make sure it’s not a fake,” to told the others. I put the phone into my shirt pocket and leaned over to inspect the rock. The phone fell out, and I put it back into my pocket. It fell out again, so I handed it to Kele. “Hello,” he said into the mouthpiece. “This is Win’s secretary. Mr. Szczedziwoj is busy at the moment, but your call is appreciated.”
I picked at the moss. I inspected the drawing under it. I reached for the phone. “Hi,” I said.
“Have you got a good grip on the phone this time?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” I said. “The wind is light, the oak leaves are waving at me, and there’s a blue patch in the sky.”
“And the carvings?”
“The carvings, as far as I can tell, are genuine. The moss on the one I’m looking at was stuck to a picture of something or other. And there’s a corner of the carving exposed, and it’s got lichen on it.” Both of us knew that lichen takes decades to grow.
“Well, then, that’s one question down. I’ve called a reporter at The Review.”
“You’ve called a reporter?” I looked up. Kele and Bob stared at me.
“Yup. Told them about the petroglyphs and that there would be a sit-in at the site.”
“Someone will be coming out here? What about Samuel and his group?”
“Samuel, it appears, is having trouble getting a vast mob of people. Seems he’s on a minority side in a long-standing political debate back on the rez. Even those who like him are hesitant to actually stand up and say so. But he might get a few people. Just not right away.”
“So as far as the paper knows, there are three guys out here camped on a rock painting, probably drinking beer and thinking they’ve discovered the meaning of life?”
“That’s about it. I think the paper’s planning on waiting till you come out and sending down a cub reporter to interview you, if she gets her car going.”
“No helicopter?”
“Nope.”
“No United Nations delegations?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Shit.”
“Hang in there. I’ve got a couple of plans
to raise the profile of this thing to new heights.”
“Now what if nobody shows up with dynamite?” I walked in circles.
“Count yourself lucky. You guys made that up anyway. Take lots of pictures.”
Then Kele phoned Samuel. While they talked, Bob and I scrambled down the hillside. I showed him the green rock outcropping.
“You’re sure this is kimberlite?” Bob asked.
“I can’t tell one rock from another, but Ned’s a geologist, and he seems to think so. Close enough to be dangerous, I guess.”
“And there’s no way to have a go at it and still ‘ave the Indian carvings ‘ome and dry?” Bob looked up the hill, then out across the small, swamp-ringed lake.
“Far as I understand, you’d have to pump the lake out, and bring in heavy equipment. That would mean a substantial road. Then you’d have to build a road to haul the ore out, unless you wanted to build a sorting plant right here. Not that I know much about it - that’s just the impression I got.”
Bob found himself an uncomfortable seat on a rock. “I wonder ‘ow much it’s worth?”
“Aisha says millions just on speculation. Lots more if there actually are diamonds in the ore.”
“When do we start skragging each other over it?” Bob kicked at a piece of deadwood. It broke loose and he tumbled down, just saving himself a dunking by grabbing onto a cedar.
“Aren’t we supposed to dig out a few pounds of jewels first?” I’d seen the movie.
“Not nowadays. We’re all in an ‘urry.”
“Well, who gets to go first?”
“Not me. I don’t want to do that portage alone.” Bob started back up the hill.
Kele had most of the camping stuff spread out when we got back up.
“We can expect a stampede of redskins on pinto ponies?” I asked.
“Samuel thinks he’s got three guys. But they won’t be able to start till next week.”
“Could be a long week.” Bob turned away to shuffle his feet. But he didn’t sound overly bothered. “We’ll marking each other’s cars after a few days, no danger.”
“Maybe we’ll be lucky and someone will blow us all to sawdust in a couple of days.”
“I suppose there’s that to look forward to. I’m going to put my tent up now. I’ll make some tea later.” I felt it best to announce what I was going to do. It’s best. Otherwise, everybody’s running on a different agenda, and is convinced the others are stupid, lazy slackers, when all they’re trying to do is make supper before putting the tent up or something.
Actually, we all put up small tents. Kele’s was just a plastic tarp strung over a line tied to two trees. That made sense - there’d be no bugs out at this time of year.
Tents used in Canadian canoeing must be bug-proof. About the time the weather warms up enough, even in this southern part of Canada, the bugs come out. About the time the first leaves appear on the bushes, in the middle of May, the blackflies hatch out of their creekbed homes.
These look like very tiny houseflies. In other parts of the world, they spread river blindness and other parasitic diseases. In Canada, they seem to be disease-free, unless you count being driven nuts as a disease. They go for the eyes, ears, and wrists as their first choice. I guess those are the weak areas on a moose or something, and they’re programmed to start there. For every biting female, there are eight males waiting around for sex.
The effect of blackflies is of a cloud of tiny black dots in front of your face, and bugs crawling into your neck and wrist areas and biting. They take tiny little bites out of you. Aisha finds a blackfly bite itches for a week, but they don’t’ affect me much. Insect repellent helps quite a bit, and people in desperate times wear bug-proof clothes and a net over the head. I hate the nets: it makes the world outside seem like something seen through an aging TV screen.
Some biologists think blackflies are the reason the caribou of the Northwest Territories migrate to the woodlands in the summer and American tourists stay out of Canada in June.
In June the mosquitoes, first of several varieties, hatch from the standing water, puddles, and swamps. Lately a few have been carrying something called the West Nile virus, but generally, like the blackflies, they’re just a nuisance. Unlike blackflies, they can stick their bloodsucking tubes through light clothing.
By the first of July the blackflies are mostly gone in this part of the world, and there are few mosquitoes. This leaves only the horseflies, mooseflies, deerflies, and no-see-ums to bother you. The deerflies are a nuisance in August, when the others are mostly gone. The deerflies circle you, seemingly endlessly, while you walk in open areas. Then, when you’re not looking, one will pounce, looking for the underside of an elbow or knee, or the back of your head. They take chunks out of your skin.
In the fall, however, the bugs are pretty well gone here. Further north, bug season lasts until the freeze-up. There, you can be bitten while getting snow in your hair.
So I was admiring Kele’s simple tarp, and wishing I’d thought to do the same.
We lit a fire on a stretch of bare rock, and discussed priorities while we took turns cooking supper. I used a camp stove, a lightweight white-gas unit that hissed out a hot flame, with a cast-iron Paavo-pan. Kele and Bob heated a couple of pots over an open fire.
Then we spent a couple of hours gathering enough wood for the fire for the night.
Autumn can be such a fine season, if it’s not too cold. But darkness comes soon, and the evenings can be long. There are hours to put in between dusk and the sensible time to go to sleep, and not a lot to do in those hours. If you’ve got some talkers and some listeners, you can have a talkfest. But none of us were big talkers, and there was no booze out, so the night went pretty slowly.
The dusk came in as I ate my steak and mushrooms. I always take something frozen for the first night’s meal. By the time I get to the evening meal, it’s usually thawed, and I know the following meals will be made from dried packages and local water, so I enjoy it that much more.
Kele and Bob had dried food, and I think they envied me my he-man steak.
We took the food and sat on the rock by the edge of the hill. The shadows were long and the sky turning violet as we sat in silence and watched. A trio of turkey vultures circled the landscape for a few moments, staying below the rim of the hill, and coming quite close to us on the turn.
I saw lilac colors in the northern sky as the darkness increased, and my mind went back to lilac bushes I’d played in when I was young. Then, suddenly, there were too many years gone and too few to go, and I wanted to be home holding my wife. Or maybe I could use a bottle of Skyy vodka and a Pepsi mixer and the hell with all my tomorrows, hangovers and all. What the hell was I doing out in the bush at my age, I wondered, running away from old age? I looked at Kele and Bob and would have killed them for their youth, if I could have found a way to take it.
Where were all the years of teaching economics at the university? The students had forgotten most of it, and the rest had changed. Now I camped beside remote little lakes while the rain beat on my tent and denied the reasons I was there.
What was I doing here with these kids, I thought. I should be at home in a rocking chair with a blanket and a good book.
“Gonna get chilly tonight,” Kele said.
“If you think I’m coming over to snog you, you’d better think again,” Bob said.
“Maybe I can find a lonesome bear or something.”
“Put out salt. You can end up with a bed full of porcupines.”
“Would be friendlier that some girls I’ve snuggled up to.”
From sundown till sometime just after nine we sat around the fire making small talk. There were no stars and only a fuzzy glow where the moon hid behind clouds. I wanted a drink about as much as I wanted oxygen at that point, but nobody had brought any booze, so we contemplated our silences and the various bird sounds in the trees.
At nine Bob and I went to our respective tents, while Kele took Bob?
??s watch with the luminous dial and took first watch.
I’d like to say that we approached this as a military operation or something, but that wouldn’t be true. We approached it like boys guarding a treehouse. With only the smallest likelihood that anybody would actually come to the campsite, and an even smaller likelihood that anyone would try it by night, standing watches seemed a bit foolish. But we all, I think, felt better about it with someone on guard. For my part, I figured I wouldn’t sleep as well without someone awake out there.
Even then, it took me forever to get to sleep. I could hear Kele moving around from time to time, and the creak of the lawn chair. I could also hear Bob snoring in his tent. Even with the pad under me, there were too many rocks and twigs to be comfortable.
I guess I fell asleep not long before Kele woke me. He passed me the watch and I saw that it was almost one in the morning. “You snore any louder,” he told me, “and nobody’ll need dynamite. This hill will just slide into the lake.”
I sat in the lawn chair by the fire for the next three hours, wrapped in my sleeping bag for warmth. There were no stars, and if there were any night sounds, the snapping of the burning wood drowned them out. No spirits came out of the hill, and no bears came to make me into supper. I made instant hot chocolate using hot water from the pot hanging over the fire and I read a book about a woman trying to cross the Australian desert with a camel. Bob continued to snore, but Kele either didn’t snore or didn’t get to sleep.
I could have spent the time thinking, but I’ve found that’s not a good idea at night. Things tend to look dismal and impossible in the small hours of the morning. At night, I’m a different person on a different planet. I have no doubt that Columbus and Neil Armstrong both woke up in the night thinking, “Changed my mind; let’s go home.” But the book was pretty good. Certainly convinced me to avoid Australia.
Around four in the morning the first stars came out from behind the clouds. I poked the fire and sparks rose up into the air, and some hung there for a second or two, indistinguishable from the star overhead. I saw a bright moving star and thought for a moment it was a spark. Then I realized it was probably the space station.
You could look out the space station windows, I thought, and see the lights of Toronto and maybe Burleigh Falls if you had a good set of binoculars. But nobody there was likely to see our tiny fire in the dark area that marked the Kawarthas. I shivered, and pushed a couple of logs further into the center of the fire.
I woke up Bob and took myself to bed. I must have gone to sleep almost at once.
I woke up when the sun came up, and joined the others around the campfire, getting out an apple to keep from getting hungry. There was a morning chill that went through the light coats we wore. I had a thick sweater underneath, but still had to warm my fingers by the flames to keep them from hurting.
We got out a video camera and a couple of small automatic-focus cameras and began taking pictures of the petroglyphs. One of us would peel back enough moss to expose a carving, and another would take the best photo he knew how. We did this at first light because the drawings were incised into the rock and the low sun gave the best shadows to accent the lines.
We took turns with each of the cameras, making sure that each of us starred in a few photos, in case the newspaper wanted a human-interest photo. We also took close-ups of the individual carvings.
Afterwards, we made breakfast, with coffee for the other two and tea for me. I made instant oatmeal with added dried berries and raisins on my camp stove. The other two fried sausages and eggs in a frying pan on a rusty grate over the fire. The wind shifted a lot so there was a lot of coughing and dancing around during the process.
As the sun came up, we set our sleeping bags to air out, and went to sit on the rock and look out over the lake.
“We’re going to have to draw straws,” Kele said.
Bob took out his knife and began to whittle another snake out of a piece of wood. “What’s that when it’s ‘ome?”
“The object of this exercise,” Kele went on, “is to make sure nobody can just get rid of the carvings.” He looked around. We nodded. “Well,” he said, “we’ve got to get those pictures out to a safe place.”
“Meaning?” Bob whittled a scale into the branch. He was getting better, but had a long way to go.
“Meaning,” I said, “that it would be best for one of us to take the videotape and the film cassettes and get them the heck out of this area. Like maybe to the lodge.”
Bob nodded. “I can see that.”
“Get the pictures developed, get the video copied to VHS format, then spread copies around. The papers would be interested, as well as that fellow at the university.” Kele watched a flock of mallards land in the lake.
“On the other hand,” I said, “we could get rid of the pictures, make some stakes, and stake a claim on the lake.”
“And all become right millionaires,” Bob said.
“I could be the richest Indian in Canada,” Kele said, “after I killed you guys off.”
“I thought it was always the Indians that got the stick.”
“Not any more. Seen the movies lately? It’s usually a Brit that gets it.”
“And I get left out of the whole thing,” I said. “Maybe I can kill both of you.”
“If I were a betting man,” Kele said, “I wouldn’t put my bet on you, old fart.”
“Old age and treachery,” I said.
“Outnumbered,” Kele said. “Back to the basics. One of us has to run the film out to civilization. I’m an Indian, and have limited knowledge of civilization.”
“I’m from Manchester,” Bob said, still whittling, “and that’s not ‘alf far from civilization.”
“I taught economics at the university,” I said. “Got you both beat.”
“Time to draw straws,” Kele said.
Kele cut some straws from the thin grass that grew in the hollows. I drew the short straw, which meant I had the responsibility of setting up the draw for the next stage, to determine who would handle the final draw. Bob drew the short straw, which meant he had to cut some straws for the final draw.
By that time, it was coffee break, so we postponed the draw for a while. We talked and put away the sleeping bags that had been airing, and got some campfire wood.
Then we drew straws. Bob held out three in his hand. I drew one, and Kele drew one, and when we were done, we compared them. The one left in Bob’s hand was the short one.
“Shit,” he said. He looked around. “Should I take my bloody camping gear?”
“You might want to leave it, if you’re coming back.”
“I’d like that. I can be back by in quicksticks, if I ‘op it.” Bob stuck his carving into the branch of a tree.
We packed up the dozen film canisters and the single one-hour videotape into a sealed plastic bag and stuffed it into the middle of a daypack.
“I do ‘ope I don’t run into anyone,” Bob said.
“Depends on which way they come.” I pointed west. If they come the way we did, you’ll meet them on the way back. If they come either by way of Cedar or McFriggit, you’ll miss them.”
We shuffled around a bit, and Bob said, “Well….” and Kele said, “Wait! Someone’s coming.”
“You’re sure.”
“Unless the squirrels have taken to cussing in English when they trip on a rock.”