The Land God Gave to Cain (31 page)

I would have left it at that, but the train of thought had made me curious on one point. “You told me your father often talked about Lake of the Lion,” I said.

She nodded. “That and a hidden valley up in the Nahanni River Country and another lake somewhere on the edge of the Barren Lands; places he'd heard about from the old-timers.” And she added, “I tell you, he was a prospector. That was his life, and nothing else mattered.” She was staring into the fire again. “But he was a wonderful man. To see him handling a canoe in the rapids or with a gun, and always round the fire he would be telling stories—strange, unbelievable stories of the Canadian wild.…” She stopped there and I saw she was crying, the tears welling gently from her eyes. And then abruptly she got to her feet, in one quick, graceful movement, and left me without a word.

I watched her crawl into the tent, and after that I sat alone beside the fire for a long time, staring at the star-filled night and thinking about my grandfather, who had died in this country, and about that indomitable woman, my grandmother, who had followed his trail with vengeance in her heart.
The land of the Old Testament;
that phrase stuck in my mind, and the frozen stillness that surrounded me seemed suddenly cruel and menacing. And for the first time in my life I thought about death.

I'd no religion to retreat into in the face of that ultimate enemy, no God to support me, nothing. Science had done that for me. Like all the rest of my generation, I hadn't dared to think too deeply, and as a young engineer my days had been full. I had been content to leave it at that. But here it was different. Here, it seemed, I was faced with the world as it had been in the beginning, when the mind of man first began to grope after a meaning for infinity; and, as Darcy had predicted, I began to think about God.

But in the end the cold drove me to the tent, and I crawled in and lay down in my place beside Darcy. We were on spruce boughs that night and the soft, aromatic smell of them sent me to sleep almost immediately.

When I woke, the stillness was gone, shattered by the crash of waves on the lake shore and the roar of wind in the trees. It was a grey day with a savage wind blowing out of the north-west, and as we started on the portage to the next lake, it began to rain. At first it was no more than a drizzle, a thick curtain of mist driving across the country. But gradually the sky darkened, and soon the rain was sheeting down, slatting against our bodies with a fury that was almost personal.

That portage was the worst we had experienced, the ground strewn with boulders, slippery and unstable. Darcy and I were carrying the canoe, and all the time the wind threatened to take charge of it and tear it out of our hands. We were wet to the skin long before we reached the next stretch of water, and when we stood on its shores, our backs to the rain and our clothes streaming, we were a sorry sight.

It was a small lake expansion, not more than two hundred yards across, yet the surface of it boiled under the lash of the storm and the waves were two feet high and breaking. “Will the canoe make it?” I asked Darcy, and in turning to speak to him, the wind drove solid water into my mouth.

It was Paule who answered me. “Of course it will,” she said. But I could see Darcy didn't like it. He stood there, wiping his glasses on a sodden handkerchief, staring at the lake and muttering to himself.

We shipped so much water on the crossing that the canoe was half full by the time we reached the other side. And as we stumbled on over the next portage, the country changed again; the timber became thicker, and between the boulder ridges we began to encounter muskeg. At first they were only small patches, which we were able to skirt. But then we came to a big swamp, and though we scouted north and south along its edge, we could see no end to it. There was no alternative then but to cross it, which we succeeded in doing after a long, heart-breaking struggle, in the course of which we were often up to our waists in water.

We came out of it wet and filthy and utterly exhausted, only to be met by more muskeg beyond the next ridge. “Did you meet much of this on your way out?” Darcy asked Laroche as we stood looking at it.

“You saw the condition I was in.”

“Yeah.” Darcy nodded. “But how much of it is there, that's what I'd like to know?”

Laroche hesitated, glancing nervously from one to the other of us as we stood staring at him. “We'll get into better country soon, I guess.”

“How soon?” Paule asked.

“When we're near the lake. We'll be on rock then.”

“Well, how near have we got to get before we're out of this damned muskeg country?” Darcy demanded. “Two miles from the lake, five, ten?”

“I don't know.” Laroche licked the water from his lips. “About five, I guess.”

“And all the rest is muskeg, is that it? Fifteen miles of it at least.”

Laroche shook his head. “I can't seem to remember very clearly. There was muskeg, I know. But not fifteen miles of it. I'm sure it wasn't as much as that.” And then he added, “It just bears out what I've been saying—we're still too far south. We should turn north until we strike the route I took coming out.”

“No, we'll stick to the map,” Paule said.

“But you can't be certain that lake we crossed last night—”

“I am certain.” Her voice was suddenly shrill again. “And you admit yourself that you don't remember your route very clearly.”

Darcy moved towards the canoe. “No good standing here arguing,” he said. “We'll only get cold.”

Paule and Laroche stood facing each other a moment longer, and then they shouldered their packs and we started down into the muskeg. It stretched ahead of us as far as our eyes could see through the curtain of the rain and we waded on and on through country in which sodden tussocks of cotton grass were the nearest approach to dry land, and never a stretch of open water in which we could use the canoe.

We went into camp early that day on a little stretch of gravel where a few morose-looking jackpine grew. It looked no more than an island in that sea of muskeg, but it was a relief just to stand on something firm, and we were too wet and exhausted to care that we'd only covered a few miles. We managed to get a fire going, but though it enabled us to cook some sort of a meal, there was no real heat to it and the smoke blackened our faces and made our eyes sore. The rain was still teeming down when we crawled into the tent and lay there steaming in our sodden clothing.

All night the wind beat at the tent. Twice we had to go out and weight the walls down with stones, and in the morning it was still blowing. But the rain had stopped and we saw then that our island was, in fact, a long spit of gravel running out from the shores of a lake that was bigger than any we had so far encountered. It was fortunate that the rain had stopped, for we were on the lee shore and in poor visibility we might have attempted the crossing, which would have been disastrous. There was a big sea running out in the centre, and there was nothing for it but to camp there on the shore and wait for the wind to drop.

It was here that we lost the map. Laroche had placed the damp sheet of paper on a rock to dry in the wind, and he'd weighted it down with a stone. At least, that was what he said, and certainly the stone was still there. But the map was gone, and though we searched all along the gravel beach, we couldn't find it. “I guess it must have blown into the water,” Darcy said, and Laroche nodded. “I didn't realise the wind was so strong here,” he murmured, not looking at any of us.

Paule stared at him for a moment, and then she turned quickly away, got a notebook out of her pack and set to work to redraw the map from memory. But though we all checked it with her on the basis of what each of us remembered of the original, we knew we could never place the same reliance on it. Our only hope was that we should recognise the river when we came to it. The river had been the last thing marked by Mackenzie on the map, with the falls a guiding mark only a few miles from Lake of the Lion. But, as Darcy pointed out, rivers in Labrador are apt to be lost in lake expansions, and often the current is so slight as to make the lake unidentifiable as part of a river system.

We were pinned there on the shore of that lake until dusk, when the wind suddenly dropped and the temperature with it. We crossed at once on a compass bearing in almost complete darkness. It was the worst crossing we'd had, for though the waves were no longer breaking, they were still big, and the movement was so violent that we were in imminent danger of capsizing, and the water rolled green over the sides of the canoe, so that we had to bale continuously. And when we reached the other side, it took us a long time to get a fire going.

We were all of us at a low ebb that night, and as we sat in the smoke of the fire, cooking our meal, the tension that had been building up all day between Paule and Laroche suddenly exploded. We had been arguing about the lake we had just crossed. It was too big for the Indian to have ignored it when drawing the map, and we were all of us quite sure that this wasn't the next lake he'd marked, the one he'd called Burnt Tree Lake. There were no burnt trees here. “Maybe I was wrong,” Paule murmured unhappily. “Maybe we should have searched for the lake where you land in the helicopter.” She looked across at Darcy. “I guess I was tired.”

“We were all tired,” he said.

She turned to Laroche then. “Are you sure you don't remember this lake when you are trekking out? It is so big—”

“Exactly,” he said. “It's so big it would have meant a detour of several miles.”

“But you may have forgotten it. You were injured and—”

“
Mon Dieu!
I'd no canoe. Do you think I'd have forgotten about a lake the size of this?”

“No. No, I suppose not. But then you have recognised nothing—nothing at all.” There was a note of exasperation in her voice.

“I've told you before,” he said irritably, “I was much farther north.”

“But not when we started. We started from the same point where Ray picked you up. Yet you recognised nothing.”

“Why should I?” he cried angrily. “I was at the end of five days with no shelter and little food. I was in no state to remember the country.”

“But you remembered the muskeg.”

“Sure. But I was fresher then, and it doesn't mean it was the same muskeg.”

“Muskeg's much the same any part of this country,” Darcy said soothingly.

But she was looking at Laroche. “If only you hadn't lost the map,” she said furiously. “Now we can never be certain …”

“Well, I lost it, and that's that. I'm sorry.” He waved the smoke away from his face. “But I don't see what difference it makes. We couldn't identify the last lake for certain and we can't identify this one. The map was only a rough one, far too rough to follow in this sort of country.” And he added, “I still say we should turn north and try and pick up my route out.”

His insistence annoyed me, but as I opened my mouth to make some comment, I caught Darcy's eye and he shook his head urgently. I hesitated, afraid that by constant repetition he'd convince her. But when she didn't say anything, I returned to the condition of my feet. I had taken off my boots and was attending to my blisters, which had become a suppurating mess under my wet socks. But then she said, “Why are you so insistent that we go north, Albert?” Something in the quietness of her voice made me look up, and after that I forgot about my blisters, for she was staring at him through the smoke and there was a frightened look in her eyes. “You never wanted us to follow the map, did you?”

“I was never convinced we'd crashed at Lake of the Lion,” he answered her.

“Then why did you lose the map?” It was such a sudden direct accusation that I stared at her aghast.

“It was an accident, I tell you.” His eyes darted from her to Darcy. And then he was staring at me and his face had the wild, trapped look that I'd seen that night at Camp 134; I thought then that if she persisted in her questions, she'd drive him over the edge, and I began to put on my boots.

“Very well. It was an accident.” Her voice trembled, “But why did you refuse to let me have it? It was my map. Why did you insist on keeping it yourself?” And then, before I could stop her, she cried out, “What are you afraid of, Albert? You don't want us to get to Lake of the Lion. No, don't deny it, please. I have been feeling this for some time. You are afraid of something. What is it?”

I had got my boots on then and all my muscles were tense, for I didn't know what he'd do. But all he said was, “You must think what you like, Paule.” And he got up wearily and went off into the trees. Darcy glanced quickly at me, and then he got up and went after him.

I was alone with Paule then. She was sitting quite still as though her body were frozen rigid. But at length she turned to me and said, “What happened there, Ian? Please. Tell me what happened.” Her face looked ghastly in the firelight and there were tears in her eyes. And when I didn't say anything, she caught hold of my arm. “I must know what happened,” she insisted. “Please.” And then with sudden violence: “Don't you understand—I love him. I love him, and I can't help him if I don't know.”

“I don't know what happened,” I said awkwardly. What else could I say? I couldn't tell her my fears.

“But something happened. Something terrible happened out there after they crashed. I can feel it.” Her voice was distraught and she was trembling.

Darcy came back then and she let go of my arm. “I guess we're all pretty tired,” he said heavily. “Time we turned in.” Laroche came back, too, and asked for more coffee, and Paule gave it to him. The moment of crisis was over. But later, as we were going into the tent, Darcy stopped me. “I think,” he whispered in my ear,” that we should see to it those two aren't left alone again.”