The Land God Gave to Cain (24 page)

“But he'll gossip,” I said.

“Sure he'll gossip. Cooks are like that—same as barbers. And there's a bush telegraph operates along the grade here faster than you can get from one camp to the next. It'll go all up the line from here to Menihek and beyond, and right the way down to Base, until there isn't a soul doesn't know you've come all the way from the Old Country because you believe Briffe's alive. That's why I brought you in here.” And then he got up and thrust his round head forward, his eyes staring at me from behind the glasses. “What are you afraid of? That's the truth you told me, isn't it?”

“Of course it's the truth.”

“Well, then, what have you got to' lose? The more people know your story, the more chance you've got of getting something done. Okay?”

The cook came back with the coffee pot this time. “Help yourselves,” he said. And then he asked, “What happens now? Do they resume the search?”

“No,” I said. “They won't do a thing.”

“But suppose you're right and they're alive.… They going to be left to die, is that it?”

Darcy was looking at me and I knew what he was thinking. I'd come all this way.…” No,” I heard myself say. “No, I'll go in myself if necessary.” But even as I said it, I was thinking it was a forlorn hope. So much time had elapsed since Briffe had made that transmission.

And then I saw Darcy nod his head, as though that was what he had expected me to say. He gulped down the rest of his coffee and said, “We got to be going now, Sid.” He set his mug down on the table. “Mackenzie still camped in the same place?”

“Yeah, same place—up beyond the trestle.”

“Well, thanks for the coffee.” Darcy gripped my arm and as we moved to the door, the cook said, “I wish you luck, Mr. Ferguson.”

It made me feel good to have somebody wish me luck. But then we were outside, and I became conscious again of the desolate emptiness of the country crouched along the steel-grey river. I thought I'd probably need some luck then. “You were the first person to question Laroche, weren't you?” I asked Darcy.

We had reached the trestle and he paused at the foot of a wooden ladder. “Well?”

“If you thought his behaviour odd, why didn't you report it at the time?”

“A man's entitled to a certain oddness of behaviour when he's been through as much as Laroche had,” he said slowly. “He was skin and bone when we stripped his clothes off him and carried him out to the car again. A human skeleton, like something out of a death cell, and covered with sores. There was that head wound, too. How was I to know his brain wasn't injured?”

“All right,” I said. “But you and the cook, you both had the same reaction, didn't you?”

He seemed to consider that. “I'll give you this much,” he said finally. “I went in there this morning to find out whether Sid's reaction had been the same as mine. Needless to say, we didn't talk about it at the time—we were too busy trying to stop Laroche dying on us.” And he started up the ladder.

When I joined him at the top, he added, “You don't have to be half-crazy to be bushed, you know. I'm bushed. And there's a lot of other guys who are what the docs would call bushed. It simply means that you've been withdrawn from the outside world for so long that you don't want to be bothered with it. You just want to be left alone to the freedom of your own little world and let the rest go hang. I guess that's the real reason I didn't do anything about Laroche. That's why I went fishing this morning, to get things straight in my own mind. You were the outside world breaking into my comfortable solitude and I can't say I was pleased to see you.” He gave me a wry little smile and then started out across the timbered top of the trestle. “You're an engineer,” he said, suddenly changing the subject. “This should interest you.” He indicated the girder-like structure with a movement of his hand. “Down in the Rockies the Canadian Pacific are filling in their trestle bridges. The timber lasts about twenty years and now it's too costly to rebuild them. But it's still the quickest way of pushing a railway through virgin territory.”

We reached the other end of the trestle and he paused, looking back. The long curve of the timber stood black and gaunt above the river. “This far north it could last for years,” he said. “Timber don't rot in this country. There's no termites, and no fungi. Queer, isn't it? Up at Burnt Creek they're building houses of raw, unpainted plywood.” As he stood there, his squat, heavily clothed body outlined against the stark light of the Labrador sky, he was looking at the trestle with the appreciation of a man who understood the technical achievement it represented, and at the same time his eyes were drinking in the beauty of it in that setting—and it had a strange, arrogant, man-made beauty. He was a queer mixture, part engineer, part artist, and I wasn't certain that he hadn't a touch of the mystic in him as well.

“Maybe I'll try and paint that sometime,” he murmured. And then abruptly he tore himself away from the scene. “Okay, let's go find Mackenzie.” And he jumped down on to the gravel fill that would carry the steel on to the trestle, and as we scrambled down to the river's edge, the noise of the water came up to meet us, drowning the thump of the pile-driver.

I caught up with him on a grey pebble bank, where the waves set up by the current broke with little slaps, and I asked him how long he'd known that the Indian had found the lake. I had to shout to make myself heard above the sound of the water.

“Couple of weeks, that's all,” he answered. “It was just after Laroche came out. I was talking to Mackenzie about it, telling him the story of the old expedition—and when I mentioned Lake of the Lion, he asked what a lion was. He'd never seen one, of course, so I drew him a picture of a lion's head. He recognised it at once and said he knew the lake. He called it Lake of the Rock With a Strange Face.” Darcy had stopped and was looking intently at the river so that I thought he was considering the fishing on that stretch. But then he said, “I was thinking of going in myself. Next spring with a geologist friend. I'm due some time off. Thought maybe I'd find Ferguson's gold and make my fortune.” He gave a quick laugh and went on across the pebble bank, up into the thick scrub that edged the river.

There was no track here and the going was rough, the undergrowth interspersed with patches of reed. And then the scrub opened out into a small clearing and there was a weather-beaten tent and a canoe and two Indian boys chopping firewood. I stopped then, conscious of an intense awareness. This was the logical outcome of my journey and I knew there was no turning back from it. The stupidity of it! The probable futility of it! I was suddenly appalled. It was as though Labrador were waiting for me.

And then I remembered what Darcy had said. A challenge he had called it. Perhaps that was the way I felt about it, too, for I knew I should go on, even if it killed me. I rediscovered in that moment the fascination in a lost cause that was something deep-buried, a part of my Scots heritage, and realised dimly that I had within me the instincts and the courage that had carried my race through countless generations to the distant corners of the globe. I felt I wasn't alone any more and I walked slowly into the clearing towards the tent where Darcy was already talking to Mackenzie.

“He thinks he could guide you to the lake all right,” Darcy said as I came up. “But he doesn't want to leave now. It's like I said—he's, hunting, and he needs the meat for the winter. Also, it's a bad time of the year for travelling.”

“Yeah, bad time.” The Indian nodded. “Very bad.” He was a small, square man dressed in a deer hide jacket and blue jeans, his feet encased in moccasins. His face was broad and flat and weather-beaten, and yet strangely smooth, as though the winds had not touched it. And because he was beardless he might have been any age.

“How many days do you reckon?” Darcy asked him.

The man shrugged his shoulders. “Very bad land. Water and muskeg. Better you wait for freeze-up,” he added, looking at me. His eyes, no more than slits in the lashless flesh, were dark and remote, with a touch of the Mongol about them.

“Laroche took five days coming out,” Darcy said.

Again a shrug of the shoulders. “Then maybe five days.” His face was impassive, his manner obstinate. “Bad time to go.”

“He's right, of course,” Darcy said, turning to me. “Any moment now you can expect the freeze-up. It's the wrong time.”

“Yeah, wrong time.” The Indian nodded. “You wait for winter, eh? Then you go on snowshoe and water all frozen. Two-three day then.”

I should have been thankful for the chance to back out of it, but instead I said, “Suppose we left to-morrow? It would only be five days.” And I turned to Darcy. “If my father's right, then there's a radio there. We could radio for a plane. Surely the freeze-up won't come in five days?”

“I can't answer that,” he said. “Nor can Mackenzie. It might be early, it might be late.”

“I'll have to chance that,” I said.

He stared at me hard for a moment, and then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Leave it to me. It's the hunting he's worried about. The winter's a long one up here. You take a walk and I'll see what I can do.”

A little reluctantly I strolled off along the bank. The sun had come out, the sky fluffy with cold streamers of wind-blown cloud, and the river ran swift and breaking over the shallows. Occasionally a fish jumped, and down by the solitary tent I could see Darcy and the Indian standing on the dark glacier silt where the canoe lay. They stood close together and sometimes Darcy's hands would move in a gesture of insistence or explanation.

And then at last he turned away and came towards me. “Well?” I asked. “Will he take me?”

“I don't know,” he answered, and his manner was strangely preoccupied. “Maybe he will. But he doesn't like it.”

“Surely the weather can't change as suddenly as all that?” It was quite warm standing there in the sunshine of the clearing.

“I don't think it's the weather that's bothering him,” he said thoughtfully.

“What is it then?” I was impatient to get the thing settled.

“It's the place he doesn't like. That's what it boiled down to in the end. Bad place he called it and kept on talking about spirits.”

“Spirits!” I stared at him. “What sort of spirits?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “He wouldn't say.”

But it was obvious what it was. He'd told him about my grandfather. “If you hadn't told him about the Ferguson Expedition …” I said.

“Then I wouldn't have known he'd found the lake.” He hesitated and then added, “But all I told him was that another expedition had come to grief in that area a long time ago. I told him the leader had died and I described the lake. But that was all.”

“You didn't tell him my grandfather was supposed to have been killed there?”

“No.”

It was odd that he should have reacted like that. “When did he find the lake?” I asked. “Was it recently?”

“No. It was on a hunting trip two winters back, he said.”

I wished then that I knew more about the Montagnais. “Are they superstitious?”

“Who—the Indians?” He shook his head. “Not particularly. And I certainly wouldn't have thought Mackenzie superstitious. I can't understand it,” he added, and his voice sounded puzzled. “Maybe it was just an excuse. They're like that—they don't like to give a direct refusal. Oh, well.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I got work to do, I guess.” And he started back along the river bank. “You're to come and see him to-morrow. He'll talk to his wife and his sons and he'll give you his decision then.”

“That's too late,” I said. Now that we had started back I was remembering that instructions had been issued for me to be sent down to Base.

But he looked back at me and said, “The Company doesn't own Labrador, you know. It's only got concessions here. And once you're clear of the line of the grade …” There was a suggestion of a smile in his eyes. “What I'm saying is that nobody can stop you—if you've really made up your mind to go.”

We returned to the car and all the way back down the Tote Road Darcy talked, giving me the benefit of his experience, all he'd learned of bushcraft in the two years he'd been up in Labrador. I can't remember now a quarter of what he told me; how to get a fire going from reindeer moss when everything was sodden, how to live off the land—the things you could eat, the fish you could catch—and the way the country had been fashioned by the thrust of glacier ice so that I'd never get lost, even with no compass and the sun hidden by leaden skies. I doubt whether I took it all in at the time, for even then I hadn't quite convinced myself that it was real and that the next day I might be out there in the wild with nobody but the Indian for company.

He set me down where the track to the camp led off the Tote Road. “I'll be back in about an hour,” he said. “Then we'll see about kit and decide what's to be done. Somebody ought to go in with you.” He drove off then to have a look at his survey team and I went down towards the camp, wondering whether in the end I'd be able to persuade him to come with me.

A bulldozer climbing the muddied slope out of the camp checked as it drew level with me, and a face like mahogany under a shapeless hat leaned down. “That Ray Darcy just dropped you off?” And when I nodded, he said, “Guess you must be Ferguson then.” The big diesel throbbed against the stillness of the trees. “Somebody's asking for you down at the camp.… Waiting for you at Ray's hut.” The gears crashed and the monstrous piece of machinery lurched forward, ploughing two deep tracks in the mud.

It could only be Lands—Laroche, too, probably. I stood and watched the water seeping into the tracks left by the bulldozer, wondering what I should do. But I'd have to face them sooner or later, and in the end I started slowly down towards the camp, wishing that Darcy were still with me. I wasn't altogether convinced that Lands couldn't stop me if he wanted to. The Company might not own Labrador, but right now they were in possession of it.