Eye Lake (4 page)

An owl's egg, still in the nest

An otter's skull

Five bear's teeth

A small box full of spent shotgun cartridges

A rusty axe head

A fifties-style cartoon picture of two hunters in a snowy woods, with a third hidden behind a tree trying to have a shit. ‘Listen,' says one to the other, ‘I think I heard a buck snort.'

Some beer caps, flattened by passing trains

An old boot

Two ancient snowshoes

There were others too, lots of others. I wish I could remember them. George used to dust them himself every week – he wouldn't let Gracie do it – but you can't dust the inside of your head, even though a kind of dust does seem to fall and settle there over the years, like snow, covering some things but leaving others plain in view.

When George went looking for new exhibits he called it going on expeditions. Gracie had got him a subscription to
National Geographic
for his eighth birthday and he spent plenty of time peering through those yellow-edged magazines. I think he thought he was just like the people who took pictures and wrote in it, exploring and finding things in faraway places. The bush looked different when you were with George: it was never only the bush and it was never empty.

It was a morning early in October – it must have been a Saturday morning because I wasn't in school and Nana hadn't gone to church – that I saw George standing outside our porch. His smile was bigger and more lopsided than usual. He was hopping from foot to foot like a heron. In the kitchen I heard Virgil telling Dad, ‘There's a cat that just got the cream!'

‘What you get?' I asked.

‘Come on, I'll show you.'

I thought we were going to go over the road to his house but instead George carried on towards the river.

‘Quick,' he said. ‘Before Billy comes out.'

We followed the river for about half a mile, past the two old white pines, until we came to a bunch of scrubby willow trees. ‘Down here,' said George, and we scrabbled between them until we got to where the cattails and bulrushes grew and the earth squelched and gave and came up over our ankles. The water had cooled through September and it chilled our toes. Between the rushes there was a line of red, as bright and deep as the turning maples. See, George said, and after a few seconds I could. There was an old canoe lying upside down on the sludge.

‘Whose is that?'

‘I think it's my dad's. I saw him come here last week and use it.'

‘For what?'

‘For his research.'

Mr. McKenzie had been going off into the bush for a few years. Nobody knew where exactly, and they weren't sure why neither – he didn't ever come back with fish or dead animals. Sometimes he went in the evenings after he finished at the school, other times he went for a whole weekend; now that he wasn't working at the school I suppose he went more often. Whenever I asked George why, he said it was for his dad's research, but I never knew what he researched and George never said. He taught geography so I thought maybe it was rocks, like the ones he showed us about in school – the chunks of hematite and granite and amethyst that sat on shelves in his
classroom (we learnt a lot about rocks, because we were sat on one big one – the Shield). Or I thought maybe he was helping Gracie out by trying to find historical stuff for the museum. Everyone else thought he was staking claims: nobody told you what they were doing or where they were going when they did that.

‘We can take it tomorrow for an expedition.'

‘What about your dad?' I asked. I'd always been a bit scared of Mr. McKenzie at school and now everyone was getting a bit scared of him too, because of the fence and the home-schooling and everything.

‘He's in Thunder Bay tomorrow. He won't know.'

George wore a funny hat the next day. It was made of straw and had a wide, flat brim. ‘It's to keep the sun off my eyes,' he told me. But the sun was getting weak by then and staying lower and lower against the horizon. I figured it was the kind of hat he thought the people from
National Geographic
wore.

We set off straight after lunch, carrying fishing rods so everyone would think we were headed for the railway bridge. We fished a lot there when we were kids, casting red and white bobbers out into the middle of the stream and letting them drift and settle in the pools behind the steel pylons, where the water looked stillest. But even there the current would sometimes play tricks, nibbling on our hooks and tugging at the bobbers the same as fish.

It played tricks with the canoe too. I sat in the stern and tried to steer, but the water kept swirling slowly one way and then another until in the end I just let it take us wherever it wanted to. Up ahead in the bow George was trying to paddle, except the paddle was too big for his skinny arms and he was only dipping it in the water, letting it taste the surface like a big tongue. Sometimes he'd make little speeches about what was happening as we went along, as if he were writing in a diary or a piece for the
National Geographic
:

‘Rounding the second bend,' George said, ‘Eli and I passed a stand of poplars and a beaver lodge. The river widened here until it was about fifteen feet wide and the bulrushes grew thickly along its edges. There were animal tracks along the far bank that we couldn't properly identify; Eli suggested moose but I felt sure they were bear. We decided to proceed with extra caution.

‘Our route took us west. All rivers this side of the watershed flow north to the Arctic Sea. Fifty miles east of us, on the other side of the watershed, all rivers flow south to the Atlantic Ocean. Neither Eli or I are exactly sure why this is – Eli commented that water is like a dog and knows where it's supposed to go, but I shall consult my books about this on our return in order to find out a more – how shall I put it – scientific explanation.

‘Some three kilometres into our expedition the river narrowed so much that overhanging spruce boughs began to interfere with my headgear. Eli was having problems keeping our craft in the middle of the channel. Through the trees I could make out signs of recent activity, animal most probably: saplings pushed down on their sides, branches chewed. Beaver? Possibly moose. Possibly bear. I felt it better to keep further out from the shore and informed Eli of this. He said he was doing the best he could and maybe I should navigate if I thought it was so damn easy.

‘After probably six kilometres, maybe more, Eli decided to take a rest. We drifted close to the shore. Eli saw a muskrat but I only saw its tail. Both of us spotted a moose's antler tangled up in the lily pads and I wanted to keep it as an exhibit except the water was too shallow for us to reach it in the canoe. Further in from the shore, past the swampy bits, there was an outcrop of bare rock covered in light green and orange lichen. Nobody had written anything on it like they usually do near town, but that's because nobody from town comes out here.

‘Or so we thought. No more than twenty feet from where he saw the muskrat, Eli found a set of tracks at the edge of the river. These tracks were almost certainly
homo sapiens
– they were
made with boots. We landed the canoe and decided to investigate further, on foot.'

I thought George was going to disappear into the swamp when we got out of the canoe: he went straight through the bog mat and the water slurped right up over his knees. He insisted on going in front of me, pulling himself along from one clump of reeds and grass to the next, and when he got a bit ahead the back of his neck was a little white dot in the green, like a swamp flower.

The tracks were quite new and easy to follow, even though they shouldn't have been there: people from town didn't go in this direction much – there weren't any good fishing lakes nearby or logging roads or anything really. Maybe a hunter or two might come this time of year, looking for moose, or some prospectors, looking for iron ore and gold and any other stuff they hoped might be there. The bush was full of old mining shafts that'd been abandoned and forgotten. Every few years, when people got excited or desperate, mostly desperate, they'd swarm out into the woods and fill it with holes like mosquito bites. ‘Keep one eye on the ground wherever else you got the other one pointed,' is what Virgil always told me.

I kept one eye on the ground and the other on George. He followed the tracks up over an outcrop of rock and into the trees beyond. They were harder to see there, in the beds of moss and pine needles and fallen leaves, so he waited for me.

‘What do you think?' he asked. ‘Which way?'

‘I don't know. I can't see nothing.'

‘After consulting with Eli,' George lectured, ‘I decided to head northwards where there was what looked like a clearing in the trees.'

It was hardly a clearing but you could tell a few trees had been downed: the sun was falling straight through onto the saplings and the moss had shrivelled away. I rooted around until I found some stumps. They'd been sawed, not chewed.

‘Somebody cut this,' I yelled over to George, who was standing on the other side peering into some blueberry bushes.

‘Eli,' he said, and I could barely hear him his voice was so low. ‘Eli, you better come see this.' He wasn't talking in his
National Geographic
voice no more.

When I started walking he hissed: ‘Watch your feet! Watch where you're stepping!'

‘I got one eye on the ground,' I said.

George was looking straight into the teeth of a bear trap. It was one of the real old kind, the ones they weren't supposed to use anymore, and was sitting there beneath a blueberry bush – two big wide-open jaws covered with rusty teeth, waiting for something to step on it and make it smile.

‘I almost stepped on it,' George whispered. You could tell he was thinking about what would've happened if he had. I had a pretty good idea myself. I'd found one in our basement once and Billy had got me to set it, for an experiment, and stick a piece of two-by-four into it. It'd jumped shut on that wood like a starving animal; the teeth went in at least two inches. Dad had taken it to the dump afterwards.

After looking at it for a minute or two George must have got it into his head he wanted it for an exhibit. We could put a stick in it, he said. And so I did, even though I knew what would happen on account of the one in our basement. It went through a whole poplar sapling when it snapped and George looked down at his leg for a second; he was having a second thought or two about keeping it. We were a whole bunch more careful exploring the clearing after that.

Right in the middle of it there was a place where the ground rose up into a big hump, the same shape as earth when it's heaped on a grave. There were only a few tufts of grass growing on top and George thought it might be one of those Indian burial mounds. He got real excited about that, what with all the exhibits that might be inside, and started digging into it there and then
with his hands; they were so white against the dirt they looked like bones already, like we really were digging in a grave. I didn't much feel like doing that myself so I just kicked the sides of it with my boot.

But it was my boot that found it. The first few kicks were against dirt but the third was against something hard and made a hollow noise.

‘What's that?' George said, poking his head up. In his ears it must've sounded like a box of treasure. It wasn't. It was a door.

I never wanted to open that door. There was an inch or so of dirt covering it and I would've been happy enough leaving it there. But beneath the brim of his hat George's eyes were almost popping out of their sockets, as if they couldn't wait and were trying to see right through it. You would've thought we were about to go into a pyramid or something. But in the end it was me who had to pull it open: George wasn't strong enough even though the hinges were well oiled. The air from inside came out cool and clean-smelling, like metal – which wasn't what we'd expected. There were wooden steps going down into where it was dark.

We were both scared. I'm not embarrassed or nothing to admit that. I wouldn't have gone a step further if it'd just been me. But if you liked finding things as much as George did, if you badly wanted to find them, then you had to go places you didn't really want to go, even the ones that scared you. It was part of the deal. George went down the steps first and I followed him.

We couldn't see nothing at first, could only hear our voices go out into the dark space and touch its sides and come back to us. It seemed bigger than it looked from above. And then our eyes got used to it and we could see corners and edges and things beside us. There were tall metal shelves, reaching up above our heads to the ceiling and then stretching away to where we couldn't see; there was the back of a chair and the side of a table, with a piece of paper curling over it; there was a kind of cylinder hanging from the roof
that George banged his head on – it knocked his hat off, swung forwards, and then swung back. He reached up and grabbed it, turning to me, hatless, with his face as white as a moth's wing in the darkness.

‘I think it's a flashlight,' he whispered.