Death on a Small, Dark Lake

  Chapter 2

  When I'd recovered my senses enough to get my jaw closed before too many mosquitoes got in there, I managed to look at the stranger and say, "No. I just found him. I mean I found his body, that's all."

  There was something strange about all this. The canopy of dark hemlock far overhead, the rows of trunks rising like pillars around us, and beams of yellow sunlight tinged with green cutting the air and patterning the brown forest floor.... I felt for a moment like I'd been caught doing something unmentionable in a corner of the church.

  The stranger stood, looking down at me, for what seemed like an eternity, then set his light backpack on the ground, walked to his aluminum canoe and kicked it solidly, adding another dent to the side. He turned and sat on the canoe.

  "Where'd you find him?" The stranger was in his late twenties, I figured, slim, maybe a couple of inches taller than me. The long, dark braids and brown eyes meant he was probably native, maybe from the Ojibway reservation to the south. He wore a black leather jacket, a fluorescent green shirt, and black jeans.

  "Snagged him while I was fishing. There's a little lake back there," I answered. "Did you know him?"

  "Drowned, then?" asked the other.

  "Yup." I was beginning to get annoyed. "Who are you, anyway." "Then I repeated, "Did you know him."

  "I knew him. Who are you?"

  "Younger guys gotta go first." I made that rule up on the spot.

  The stranger smiled a bit. "Kele Marten."

  That sat me up. "The painter?" Kele nodded, and I added, "I have your painting of the turkey vultures over Hawk Lake - the one with the man in the canoe watching them." I suddenly realized that the man in the painting resembled George Aden.

  "I wondered who bought that one. They said it was a photographer. I thought it was strange that a photographer would buy a painting. You?"

  I got up and held out my hand. As Kele took it, I said, "Win Szczedziwoj. Rain pictures."

  A light dawned in Kele's eyes. "We've got a print of yours at the lodge, in the dining room. A canoe in the rain, with the paddle floating away."

  "Poplar Lake, about six years ago," I filled in.

  "Did the paddle really float away?"

  "It did," I said. "After I took the picture I had to use my hat to paddle the canoe to get it."

  We two artists stood in silence, looking at the trees. "Are you sure it's George," Kele asked.

  I handed him the wallet, still soaking. Kele extracted the driver's license, and said, "That's him. Now what do we do?"

  "Well, I thought I'd get out of here, and call the police. Let them handle it."

  Kele looked away through the trees, then said, "Good idea."

  "I've got to go back for my canoe," I pointed out. "Do you want to come?"

  "Not unless you need help. Us Injuns aren't big on dead people."

  Neither was I, when it came to that. Leaving Kele Marten sitting beside his pack, I started back to get my canoe on the lake where the Dead Guy - he still wasn't George, to me - where the Dead Guy floated.

  My canoe, while tippy, had at least been built very light, and I could handle it myself, even in dense bush. At least most of the time.

  It was just as well Kele didn't come back; he might have offered to help carry it. But having someone else help carry your canoe is worse than doing it yourself, unless the canoe is too large for one person. For one thing, the portage yoke, which fits on your shoulders, is in the center of the canoe. If you have one person at each end of the canoe, neither has a yoke, both people alternate between holding the canoe up with aching arms, and letting it rest on their heads.

  As well, two portagers don't walk at the same pace. Maybe they would, over flat ground, but a portage trail isn't normally flat. While the guy in the front is accelerating down a mound, the guy in the back is slowing to climb it. When the guy in the front is slowing to step over a rock, the guy in the back is trying to make a giant step over a patch of wet ground. The canoe tends to shift back and forwards, banging a pair of heads at random intervals.

  Finally, a man carrying a canoe alone normally tilts the canoe up at the front, so he can see where he is going. With two people carrying the canoe, this isn't possible; the canoe rides level. This means the fellow at the front can't see very well and often runs into branches, bringing the canoe to a sudden stop. The portagers then come to a stop a half step later.

  On the way to get the canoe, and all the way back to the hemlock grove where Marten waited, I worked up a number of puzzling questions in my mind.

  Why, for example, was the painter here in the first place? This was well off the regular canoe route. I'd seen no sign of sketching materials, but these could have been in Kele's pack.

  And how did he know about George being dead?

  When I broke through to the open hemlock woods again, canoe on my back, Kele was sitting against the aluminum canoe, smoking a pipe. He merely nodded when I showed up. I tried to read his face, but it was absolutely blank. He didn't appear to be the type to blither on about his feelings. I can understand that, since I'm the same way myself, but it doesn't lead to a lot of information being bandied about. He didn't ask me why I was wet; I didn't ask him how he came to be in this woods.

  "How far to Cedar Lake?" I asked, dropping the canoe and taking the opportunity to flatten a couple of deerflies that had been cutting small circular holes in my neck.

  "Twenty minutes, one way. You want to do it all in one trip?"

  "I'm not that young, anymore," I told him. "One trip for the pack, then I go back for the canoe."

  "Could you do it with my pack?" Kele indicated his lighter packsack. He’d obviously packed for a day trip only.

  "If the trail's not too rough."

  "A lot of open rock. You didn’t come this way?”

  “Up from McFriggit,” I said, pointing to the south. “Across by way of Casey Lake.”

  “That’s one tough way to come. The route to Cedar should be easy after that.”

  "I'll try it. You think you can carry that canoe and my pack at the same time?" I remembered the days when I might have been able to do it.

  "No problem," said Kele, getting to his feet. "Young buck. Heap strong."

  We set off generally eastward with Kele in the lead, his heavy aluminum canoe resting on two paddles, which had been strapped to the canoe to act as a yoke, the traditional method of carrying a canoe. I carried my lighter canoe using a padded yoke I'd made for my own shoulders. I always think of people who use the paddles for a yoke as masochists.

  Kele, of course, carried my heavy pack as well.

  Something over half an hour later, Cedar Lake appeared through a row of birches as a patch of blue in the early evening sunlight. We dropped the canoes gratefully onto the shore, scaring a host of dragonflies into darting flight, and earning the melodious screams of a red-winged blackbird, whose late-season nest was in the cattails of a nearby bay.

  It had been a couple of years since I’d been to Cedar Lake. It was still a pretty place, even if I didn’t appreciate it right then. We loaded the packs into our canoes and pushed into the lake.

  We followed the shoreline, rock and trees, northwards.

  In one lily-pad-rimmed bay, we paused again, artists both, to measure the worth of the sky, lake, and trees in our eyes, framing the scene automatically. A bright blue dragonfly landed on Kele's hand. He watched it for a moment, then shook it gently back into the air. The sun was behind us. Tell me, I thought, why you were on that portage trail and why you knew Aden was dead. But I didn’t ask, and so got no answer.

  As the canoes drifted apart, he reached forward and crushed an ant with the tip of his paddle.

  Ants always get into a canoe. Every time the boat rests on the ground, a few ants climb aboard. You just have to hope that they don’t wander up your leg, panic under your pants, and bite you in the crotch.

  “You treat dragonflies a lot better than ants,” I pointed out. r />
  Kele Marten, landscape artist, looked me in the eyes. “The ant was headed for death. All that was ahead of it was a few hours of suffering as it tried to find its way back to its nest. I don’t mind death. But nothing should suffer.”

  “Light and dark,” Kele said as we got into the lake. From my canoe, I gave him a puzzled look.

  “The shore on that side,” - he indicated the western shore, where we’d come from - “it’s a dark shore.” It was, too. Lined with the pines that made the corpse lake so gloomy.

  “The shore on the other side is bright.” I noticed he didn’t like long sentences. But he had a point. The eastern shore was made of rolling rock hills scattered with sumacs and odd bunches of trees. The bare rock, a pinkish-grey color, brightened the shoreline. This was a shore that a man could climb and have something to see from the top. It beckoned; it had possibilities. I could have climbed those hills, low though they were. I could well have climbed them and let possibilities and skylines take the place of what lay behind me.

  I nodded. "Which way’s the next portage to the lodge?" I wanted to know. The lodge was now the logical place to report to. I was tired from the portage, and still under a feeling of oppression from the day's events. My clothes were mostly dry, although a lingering dampness from my pants had chafed the insides of my thighs during the portage. Kele pointed across the lake.

  My mood lightened a bit with the paddle across the lake. Cedar Lake had several rocky islands, and the inevitable pair of loons paddled and dove ahead of the canoes. In the distance, above the cliffs, clouds were building into thunderheads.

  Besides, there were probably no Dead Guys down there scaring the fish.

  Our canoes rounded a small headland with the slap of waves noisy against the aluminum canoe in the lead. Ahead I spotted the triangular orange sign that marked the start of the portage out of Cedar Lake.

  A pale green tent stood near the portage; above it, the sign for an official campsite. Smoke from a campfire drifted through the trees.

  As we beached the canoes, a red-faced man in a green shirt and green pants started down a rough bank to meet us. "Hi!" he called. I just waved.

  I waited for Kele to drag his canoe up onto the shore, then edged my own canoe closer. Being in a tippier canoe, I had to edge closer to the shore before getting out. By the time I was on shore, and dragging the canoe up over a couple of rocks and a slippery log, the red-faced man had arrived, and was standing close. He was a bit taller than myself, with a ruddy complexion and small, round glasses. I handed him a pack. The man looked a bit taken back, but took the pack, and set it out of the way.

  I glanced over at Kele, who was once again sitting on his canoe, smoking a pipe.

  "Can I help you?" I said.

  The stranger blurted, "We've lost our guide. Have you seen him?"

  I looked at Kele, who said nothing. I turned to the other, and asked, "George Aden?"

  The man seemed taken aback. "You know him?"

  “I found him. He's dead."

  There was a long pause. The man looked back up the hill where his partner waited at the tent. "Patrick!" he yelled. "Come here. He turned to me and held out his hand. "I'm Ned DeVincent. This is awful." His partner had arrived down the slope, kicking out a rock and a couple of dead oak branches. "This is my friend, Patrick Ireland." Ireland looked a lot like Jesus, aged a bit from too long on some cross.

  I shook both their hands; it seemed the thing to do. Patrick seemed a bit stunned. "How?" he said, then "Where?"

  A little lake, just to the west of this one. Seems to have drowned." I hated long explanations, and I had the feeling I'd have to do this one a lot in the next while.

  “Thomson Lake,” Kele spoke up. We looked at him in unison. “The lake George drowned in.” He went back to his pipe.

  Patrick and Ned looked at each other, then Ned said, "He's been gone for two days now. We didn't know what to do."

  I heard a voice beside me; I turned to see Kele now standing next to me.

  "One thing we can do," said Kele,” is make camp." Three pairs of eyes turned again to the artist. "It's only an hour till dark," he continued, "and I really don't like portaging in the dark.

  I had to agree. I really wanted to get this whole thing behind me, but a dead body is in no hurry to get anywhere, and while I'd done a portage in the dark more than once, I had no desire ever to do it again.

  "There's room for a tent beside us, if you don't mind a couple of guys who snore," Ned said.

  "I guess we'll take it, then." Kele and I hauled our packs up the slope. There was indeed room for at least one more tent just up the slope a bit. The site was at an angle, but better than some I’d put up my tent on.

  I looked at Kele. It was obvious from the size of his pack that the painter had carried only a day pack, with no tent, supper, or sleeping bag. "You're welcome to share my tent," I told him. "I snore, too, and the tent's small, but we can squeeze in."

  Kele hesitated. Then Patrick Ireland spoke up. "I guess you could use George's tent. If it doesn't bother you."

  "Dead guys bother me a lot, but I've slept in that tent many times. Even used that sleeping bag when George lent it to me." Abruptly, Kele became silent, looked out over the lake, then turned to put his pack against a tree by the tent.

  My small hemisphere tent went up quickly. There was a patch of crushed weeds and the ground had dried from the previous day's rain. I stuffed the sleeping bag into the tent, unrolled the self-inflating mattress, and opened the pack. It had been a long day, and I was getting hungry.

  As I got my cooking materials out, I looked at the others. Kele had his head in the green tent George Aden would never need again. Patrick and Ned were sitting by the fire, on a cut log, talking quietly.

  I took it all with a stoic sense of endurance. This picture-taking weekend into the remote lakes had turned into this crowded campsite, filled with people I didn't know.

  There were other campsites on the lake, I knew. While the Ministry of Natural Resources - or whatever the last change of government calls it now - hadn't spent a great deal on the canoe route, it had at least marked the portages and cleared and marked a few campsites.

  Most of the canoe traffic in Ontario seems to go to Algonquin Park, a couple of hours to the north. Campsites there are well maintained and the park rangers try their best to keep people from camping anywhere else in the park. People know about Algonquin. You have to make reservations for a campsite in summer in Algonquin.

  I examined this lake as the shadows got longer. It’s part of the rest of the province. There are enough lakes, close enough together, to make a canoe route, but not enough for anyone to make a park out of them. Hunters come in here in the fall, to hunt deer, bear, and ducks. A couple of the lakes are even big enough for a floatplane to bring in bass fishermen in the summer, when the wind is right.

  And someone from the ministry has prepared a little brochure on North Kawartha Canoe Routes. The line of lakes makes a canoe route from Hawk Lake to McFriggit Lake. The ministry keeps the portage signs in place, and clears and marks a dozen or so campsites. People used to steal the portage signs for souvenirs, until the ministry took to using about six hundred staples on each sign.

  Unlike the campsites in Provincial Parks, there are no toilet facilities in these parks. In Algonquin, there is a "box" located in the woods behind the campsite. To use it, you raise a lid to reveal a wooden seat over a pit toilet. The raised lid provides a semblance of privacy.

  It gives you a good view of the woods, too. You can watch the squirrels overhead and the people at the campsite and the loons on the lake, if the place is so situated.

  Not that you ever do. A man using one of these is generally in a hurry. The place is a round hole with spider webs into which he dangles some of his more valuable bodily parts. Everybody runs a stick around first, to clear the webs, but everyone also suspects this just makes the spiders annoyed. Those are the Algonquin toilets.

>   Not on these campsites in the Kawartha Lakes. Here, you wander in the woods until you find some place where a scattering of tissue paper from previous campers declares a suitable place. Just watch where you step.

  You’re supposed to bury your shit, but it would take fifteen minutes with an axe just to get a hole big enough to put it in, if you didn’t break the axe on a rock first. The ground is a twisted mass of intertwined roots, covered with leaves and pine needles. And the best places are habitat for great quantities of mosquitoes.

  The best you can do is cover the biologicals with leaves. Caring people take the tissue paper out with them, so at least the place looks wild again.

  The fact that the ministry marks and clears campsites on these lakes is no small matter. The country around is so rough that finding a place to camp can be difficult at best. My first campsite, on Casey Lake, had taken me an hour to decide upon. Even then, it was spongy, and tilted, and a little too close to a swamp for comfort.

  The rest of the lakeshore had been a tumble of rocks and fallen trees, hopeless for a tent.

  No one who is experienced with the Canadian wilderness brings a tent that needs pegs. Getting a peg into the ground is too much of an unlikely miracle; either the peg shatters on a rock, or it slides loosely into soggy moss - and comes out just as easily.

  My first tent was a triangular orange thing that used pegs. I remember one summer trip in Algonquin, years ago. After trying to get the pegs into the ground, I tied some guy ropes to twigs, and put rocks on the others. In the night, of course, a thunderstorm blew the whole thing over, so I spent the rest of the night wrapped in a wet tent, breathing through a rip in the nylon.

  I was hungry by this point. I hadn't had lunch at the other lake, catching Dead Guys instead of perch or bass, and my stomach was growling. It was getting on toward seven.

  So I took my pot and food and went over to the fire. Ned and Patrick had got it going again, and a rusty grate perched between the rocks that enclosed the flames. A grate is real handy for cooking food, which is why so many people bring their own, usually racks from old refrigerators or stoves. Then they leave them at the campsite, blackened and rusty in the morning.

  "Hey Kele," I called, "I've got enough for two, if you don't mind rice."

  "You're sure?" He hesitated.

  "I'll be cutting this trip short, anyway," I said. "Anything you eat I won't have to carry back."

  Now there are campers who bring gourmet food on a canoe trip. They bake muffins and fry carefully dried morsels in cast-iron skillets along with eggs and vegetables. I'm not one of those.

  My basic meal is instant rice, with fresh fish, and a bit of hot sauce or soy sauce. Here's how you do it:

  First, you put a pot of lake water over the fire. When it's boiling, add instant rice in bags. You can buy these at the supermarket. After five minutes you fish out the bags and dump the rice onto your plate - which was, a minute ago, the lid to the pot. Add sauce from a plastic bottle or package, stir, and eat.

  Of course it's awful. But it's quick, light, and healthy. It also gives a person a great incentive for catching bass or perch, or for finding wild blueberries, in August. And it really makes you appreciate civilization when you get out of the woods.

  Most of all, it’s virtually decision-free and quick. You can do it in the dark, or when it’s just starting to rain.

  The rest of the water in the pot? It's now sterile, and you can use it for tea, instant soup, or washing up. You can let it cool, and pour it into your canteen, for tomorrow’s water (if you don’t mind slightly flavored water).

  While Kele Marten and I ate in silence, Ned DeVincent and Patrick Ireland brought another pot over. They were cooking special dried backpackers' meals. Aisha (The Wife) says these are too expensive for what they give you. I also find them a little bland and oversalted. If I get too much salt in my meal, or too much wheat I'll wake up the next morning with the impression someone with a 3/8-inch drill is operating on my skull, just under my left ear.

  Now I want you to understand, I really wanted to know why Kele was heading for a meeting in a small, remote lake. And why he'd asked me if Aden was dead. And how these two guys at this campsite could lose a guide and not know where he’d gone. They’d obviously had some camping experience.

  But I wanted, even more, to pretend they didn’t exist. Any of them.

  We sat on the rocks by the fire and stared across the lakes. Ned and Patrick also put on a pot to heat, which surprised me, since I'd assumed they'd eaten. After all, the fire had been almost down to ashes, but still going, when we'd arrived.

  They cooked up a chili meal from one of the commercial packets, supplemented with dried fruits.

  As the shadows got longer, I turned to Patrick and asked him, "When did your guide leave?"

  But it was Ned who answered. "The day before yesterday. He left in the morning. Said he wanted to look at a little lake he hadn't seen in years. Took my fold-up fishing rod. Said he might bring us back a couple of lake trout." He looked at Patrick. "We've been waiting for him since then."

  Patrick said, "That's right. We were planning on going back to the lodge tomorrow if he didn't show up." He looked as depressed as a human could get, taking his hat off his bald head and staring into it.

  "What do we do now?" Ned asked, looking around at the other three. We were gathered around the fire like cavemen, huddled against the coming dark, our backs to the unknown portage from which George Aden would never return. Three of us were middle aged, and aware of every day.

  Mind you, if I have to go, falling out of my canoe would be one of my chosen ways. But not yet. Not yet at all.

  I turned and indicated Kele with a wave of my plastic spoon. "This," I said, "is Kele Marten, famous artist. I just met him, on the portage to whatever lake that was George died in. I don't know the name of the lake. It's a half-mile west of here."

  Kele scooped the last of the Szczedziwoj Feast into his mouth. “It’s called Thomson Lake, as I mentioned before.” Little as that was, it seemed enough for him. Three pairs of eyes kept on him, waiting like malamutes for the next scrap.

  Eventually, he figured the silence out and continued, “Was going to meet George there.” Then, “I heard the owl call my name.” He pointed at me. "He's a photographer. Takes pictures in the rain. He found George. I never got to see the body." He was not the king of long explanations, I could tell.

  "Snagged his leg with a number 1 Blue Fox." I looked around. "That's a spinner. I was fishing."

  "What do we do now?" Ned DeVincent repeated his question.

  "I figured on going back to the marina on McFriggit Lake and reporting it," I said. "Then I met Kele, here, and we figured we'd go back up to Hawk Lake and call the police."

  "I think that's reasonable," Ned said.

  Once more, four non-communicative males stared into the fire and wondered about things. Men things. Like how Kele knew he was supposed to meet George there, when they'd left days apart. Or why these guys felt they needed a guide on a canoe route that high-school kids regularly took with only a photocopied map.

  The sun had gone down, and dusk had turned the lake surface into a silver mirror. The trees on the far shore were turning to silhouettes, and the first star was out.

  Kele abruptly stood up. "I hear somebody!"

  I listened. Yes, there were voices. "At another campsite?" I asked. The map put out by the ministry showed three other sites on Cedar Lake

  "They're all empty." Ned looked at Patrick. "We paddled around the lake looking for some sign this afternoon."

  We all stood up together. It was obvious there was someone coming south along the portage trail from Fox Lake. Fox is the next lake on the route to Hawk Lake. The portage was 800 meters: a fairly long one.

  There was a man's voice, and a woman's one. The glint of a flashlight.

  I suspected whoever was coming would be having trouble; you can't carry a canoe and shine a flashlight very well. And
setting up a tent in the dark is no fun. I got my flashlight from my pack and started up the trail to meet them. Kele and Ned followed, Ned carrying a larger flashlight.

  We met them not far into the woods. They were standing on a stretch of flat rock looking for the trail when we got there. The man looked to be in his early twenties, the woman a couple of years younger. She was obviously leading, since she had the flashlight. Both were obviously tired, although the woman smiled when she shone the light on us.

  "Hello there," she said brightly, "Is this the way to the lake?" I assured her it was. She was carrying a large pack, while her partner had both a canoe and a slightly smaller pack on his back.

  They followed us to the edge of the water, where the man eased the canoe off his shoulders and placed it beside the other canoes. Then both of them got their packs off their shoulders.

  "Thank you for your help," the woman said. "I'm Belinda Lalonde. This is Bob Tucker. Which to way the nearest campsite on this lake?"

  "Put a sock in it," her companion said, angrily, shaking the map out. "I'll find one. Just pass me the torch." He had an accent a lot like like John Lennon's, so I assumed he came from the same part of Olde England.

  I looked out at the lake, black on black. The trees made a sawtooth silhouette horizon. The sky was a field of diamonds on purple, but the rest was just undifferentiated ebony. I've crossed lakes in the dark and made camp, and I feel sorry for anyone who tries it.

  "You can put up a tent beside ours," I said. "There's enough room, if it isn't too big." She looked at him. Before he could reply, she said, "We'll do that. Thank you."

  He said nothing, just took his pack and scrambled up the slope to the camp. I reached down to take her pack. It was large, but not as heavy as its size would indicate; probably it contained the sleeping bags and tent.

  She took it back from me. "I'd better take this. Bob's pretty good most of the time, but when it comes to me, well... he doesn't like other guys showing too much interest, if you get my drift." She slung the pack over one shoulder. "The guy at the lodge was flirting with me the other day. I thought Bob was going to kill him." Her green eyes reflected the campfire light.

  I stopped her. "What guy was that?"

  "You know. The owner’s husband. George. I just hope he's not there when we get back."