River Odyssey (4 page)

“Hi, Seaweed. Want some breakfast?”

As twilight faded into darkness we sailed out of Notre Dame Bay and headed north to sail around the Northern Peninsula into the Strait of Belle Isle. The sub plowed through the waves like a small whale. I sat at the controls, drank my tea and read Sheba’s book. I was surprised to discover that Jacques Cartier had sailed this way. His first voyage, in 1534, had taken him across the Atlantic in only twenty days. That was incredible. He had only a sailing ship. He had only the wind. How could he do it in twenty days? It had taken us a week and a half to cross the Atlantic a year ago, and we had a powerful diesel engine, although we had stopped in the Azores along the way. Cartier would have been at the mercy of the winds. The winds at sea were like monsters that were always changing their minds. They might blow you straight for a day or so, spin you around and around like a bug in a tea cup, then blow you back to where you came from. His third voyage took three months. That seemed more realistic but must have been awful. And why would he bother to sail all the way around Newfoundland and down the Strait of Belle Isle anyway? That didn’t make sense. Oh … he never knew there was open water between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. It hadn’t been discovered yet. I read that on the next page. Cartier was looking for a shortcut to China, and he thought he was close. Boy was
he
wrong.

He must have been pretty tough though. People in those days believed in sea monsters. They drew them on their maps. Some believed you could sail right over the edge of the world and fall into nothingness! How scary was that?

It was a very short night. The sun was up and on our backs long before we entered the Strait of Belle Isle. I tried to keep an equal distance between the Northern Peninsula and the coast of Labrador as we turned to port and headed southwest. I didn’t want anyone to spot us with their telescopes. There were lots of people it seemed to me, with nothing better to do than stare at sea all day with a telescope. And if they spotted something, especially a submarine, they just couldn’t get on the phone fast enough. No need to tell everyone where we were sailing, I figured. Perhaps if we stayed out of sight long enough people would forget we were still around. Then we could explore more freely.

Radar showed a vessel ahead of us in the strait. I poked my head out of the portal and saw a ship. I didn’t even need binoculars. She was huge! I could see traces of her wake still. Wow! I wondered if she were going to Montreal. Could such a ship sail up the river? Cartier’s first ship was only fifty feet long. That was two and a half times longer than the sub. And it carried thirty men! Next to the ship ahead of us Cartier’s ship would have looked like a minnow beside a whale.

She would know by radar that we were behind her, following her, though she would never have been able to see us. I wanted to close the distance. I wanted to take a closer look at her, but she was sailing at a very decent speed, almost twenty knots. That was impressive. We could only catch her if we stayed on the surface with the engine cranked all the way up, and that would take a few hours. Submerged we didn’t stand a chance. What would they think if we snuck up behind her? Would they report a submarine to the coastguard? If they did, we could dive and disappear. That’s what submarines were good at—disappearing. I decided to stay on the surface and close our distance to a few miles. I really wanted to take a closer look at her. I didn’t know why but I had a funny feeling about this ship.

WE FOLLOWED THE
freighter into the mouth of the St. Lawrence. She was stacked with containers, one on top of another like blocks in a pyramid, and for some reason reminded me of the Incredible Hulk. If the wind picked up, I was sure she was going to topple over. I thought maybe she was going to continue south towards New Brunswick, or Prince Edward Island, but as soon as she passed Cape Whittle she made a sharp turn to starboard. It looked strangely like a last minute decision. I had a sudden thought, too, that maybe I could just
say
we had sailed to Montreal, and not really go. We could sail around the Maritimes, maybe visit Sable Island again and see the ponies this time. Of course I would never do that—lie to Sheba and Ziegfried. But thinking about it made me realize just how much I didn’t want to go to Montreal. As the sun dropped behind the hills of Quebec, I turned to starboard and followed the hulking freighter into the mouth of the river.

The St. Lawrence is not the longest river in the world. The Nile is. And the Amazon is the biggest river in the world by volume. It is bigger than all the next eight largest rivers combined. It is so powerful that, two hundred miles from its mouth, out at sea, you can still taste fresh water. I read that in Sheba’s book,
Rivers of the World.
But the St. Lawrence does have something that’s the biggest in the world: its mouth.

The mouth of the river is so big it never felt as though we were leaving the sea at all. And when I reached down and scooped a mouthful of water to taste, it was just as salty as the sea. It didn’t seem that the river was pouring into the sea so much as the sea was pouring into the river. And it was, all the way to Montreal.

I carried Hollie up so we could stand in the portal and feel the wind in our faces. He raised his nose and sniffed. He could smell land. The whiskers of his eyebrows were growing over his eyes, making him blink.

“Hollie. I have to cut your eyebrows.”

He looked up at me as if he were trying to make up his mind.

“I do. You’re starting to look like an old man.”

Actually, he looked more like a seal. He was such a sea dog.

Anticosti Island lay straight ahead. I figured we could reach it by midnight, though I had been up twenty-four hours already. Usually we’d be sleeping now, and it was not our habit to ride on the surface in broad daylight. But we were in the mouth of a river, not the open Atlantic. Surely we wouldn’t run into coastguard ships here?

I watched the radar closely. Radar is like magic. It is an electronic, all-seeing eye for ten miles. If there were a tin can in the water ten miles away we might pick it up on radar. But if there were a thousand steel-hulled ships eleven miles away, we wouldn’t even know they were there. The moment they sailed into that magical ten-mile diameter, however, they would show up as blinking green dots on our radar screen. The hulking freighter was four miles ahead and she glowed like a fat bug on the screen.

I closed our distance to three miles, then two, then one-and-a-half. That was close enough. Even from a mile and a half away the wake of the ship flattened the waves in front of the sub. I stood in the portal with the binoculars and scanned her stern. The containers were stacked tightly like a wall of giant, gray-brown Lego. It amazed me that such a monstrosity could even float, yet here she was cutting twenty knots through the water. And then, I saw something weird.

Out of the corner of one of the highest containers crawled three men. They emerged as if from a hole in a wall. They shielded their eyes from the sun and staggered as they reached for places to cling to the back of the container. Stowaways! I wished I could have seen them more clearly. They seemed pretty weak and shaky and one of them almost fell overboard, but the others grabbed him in time. He was lucky. It would have been a deadly fall. Then, just as suddenly as they appeared, they disappeared. For a second it crossed my mind that they might be ghosts, but just for a second. It was more likely they had crawled back inside the hole they had come out of. Things have a way of distorting through binoculars from a distance. One of the men scrambled out again but an arm reached out, grabbed him and pulled him back in. They were definitely not ghosts.

I heard the radar beep and two lights jumped onto the screen. Two vessels were coming from the south and were moving fast. Judging from their speed they must have been speedboats. I stood at the screen for a moment and watched as the radar sweep tracked their progress. They were coming directly for the freighter and were travelling at least forty knots. At that speed it would take them less than ten minutes to reach their goal. It was time for us to leave.

Curiosity killed the cat, my grandmother used to say. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to know who was coming so fast before we submerged. They had to be speedboats; that much I knew. Nothing else could travel so fast on the surface except hydrofoils, and there were no hydrofoils in the Maritimes that I had ever heard of. Perhaps they were recreational speedboats. But why would they intercept a freighter? Had they picked her up on radar and were just curious, like me? No, that didn’t make sense. They must have known there were stowaways on board. But how could they know that? Had the stowaways been spotted in the Strait of Belle Isle? I bet that was it. I bet the people with telescopes pointed out at sea, who made a hobby of watching passing ships to see where they were coming from and what they were carrying, had spotted them and alerted the authorities. If I could see them from a-mile-and-a-half away through binoculars, someone with a powerful telescope would have no trouble spotting them from shore. That must have been it. That made sense.

But I still wanted to know who was coming, so I strapped on the harness, climbed on top of the portal, stood up and stared through the binoculars. Two dark spots appeared on the horizon from the south. They were spraying water behind them with their powerful engines and were shimmering in the distance. I scanned the back of the freighter where I had seen the stowaways. Maybe there was a crack in one corner of one of the containers, I couldn’t tell for sure. I scanned the water again. The speedboats were coming so fast. They obviously carried radar, so they would know that we were here also. What would they think of that? What would they think when we disappeared, as we were about to? It was possible they were carrying sonar, but they couldn’t search for us with sonar while they were moving so fast and making so much noise. When we disappeared from their radar they would probably just scratch their heads.

I turned the binoculars towards the freighter again. Why did she suddenly seem bigger than before? I climbed inside and looked at the radar. We were only half a mile away! She had been slowing down all the time and I hadn’t noticed because I was so busy watching the speedboats. I climbed out and looked at them again. They were completely black, not recreational boaters at all. They were just a couple of minutes away now. The freighter was slowing down and was probably going to stop. Who had the authority to stop a freighter at full sail? Well, the coastguard, of course, or the navy. In fact, the whole situation was starting to have the feel of a military exercise at sea. I remembered stumbling into one on our maiden voyage. It was time to get the heck out of here.

I pulled off the harness. But just as I was about to climb inside and dive, one of the stowaways crawled out of the container again and started trying to climb down towards the deck of the ship. It was a desperate attempt. It would have been difficult for anyone but he was clearly not strong enough to do it. He seemed barely able to stand up. I was pretty sure he was going to fall. Why was he trying so hard to escape? Did they know that the ship was being intercepted and were trying to avoid getting caught? Were they carrying some sort of short-wave radio and were picking up reports that they had been spotted? He wouldn’t survive if he jumped. That much I knew. And if he did survive the jump, he could never swim to land. It was too far.

We had to leave
now
and yet… I couldn’t. What if he jumped before the speedboats arrived? What if he fell? He would die. How could I leave knowing that?

So, I stayed. I cranked up the engine full blast and closed the distance. What if the stowaway jumped while the speedboats were tying up on the port side of the freighter? I couldn’t sail away and let him drown. Nor could I stand by and watch. I had to sail closer.

And so I did. It’s funny the things that go through your mind at times like this. As I sailed in under the shadow of the gargantuan ship and watched the stowaway cling to one end of a container like a monkey too tired to climb any more, I thought of the people I knew who would do exactly what I was doing right now. I knew without hesitation that Ziegfried would do exactly the same; he would risk getting caught before he would think of saving himself. Sheba would also. It would never cross her mind to think of anyone but the poor stowaway in danger. Then I thought of my grandfather and grandmother, and I felt certain that they, too, for all their old-fashioned ways and criticism of my decisions, would put the life of the stowaway ahead of their own, because that’s the sort of people they were. And I felt very grateful to have been raised by such people.

But then I thought of my father and I had to wonder. I wondered if maybe that was what my grandfather had been hinting at when he said he was not like me. Was that it? Was my father the sort of person to put himself first, and was that why he had left when I was born? It seemed a fair question but of course I couldn’t answer it now. Maybe in another week I could.

What I was most afraid of happening was exactly what did happen. One of the speedboats came to the port side of the ship; the other swung around to the stern, spotted us and raced over. How I wanted to submerge and disappear. How I wished we could. But every time I thought we might, the stowaway slipped a little and almost fell. It was agonizing watching him. And now, it was too late. The speedboat was upon us. Three officers were on board it. One had crawled out onto the bow with a cable and hook in his hand. Before I could do or explain anything, he jumped onto the hull of the sub, reached down and snapped the hook onto a handle on the side. My heart sank. We had been captured.