Bread

by Stephen Brown

THE CASEBOOK OF GEEZA VERMIES

  As I saw the face of that young girl in the bar I knew instinctively that it would be the last time I’d be able to get easy answers just by looking into peoples’ eyes, as Malika had suggested. Two times now she had helped me out like this, but by the look of the fast fading colours, which were now more like faint, smeared make-up or mere outlines than anything else, I knew that I had very little time left. I was going to have to squeeze what little I could from this final chance.

  Soon after I’d told Elliot that the Professor had already gone he retired to his room visibly shaken. His body has not quite got used to us being up here in the mountains, and learning that Humphries had out-manoeuvred us again sent his system into a mild kind of shock. All this driving and flying isn’t doing either of us a lot of good, especially when we find we’re still chasing our tails whenever we think we are getting somewhere close.

  I think he was telephoning Ollie Donald to tell him we were now in Canada and to give him a brief update - not that we know much more than the fact that he’s here, somewhere. Lucky for us that Canada’s not a big country, eh?

  Having skipped dessert I wandered over to the bar for a few more drinks - I didn’t particularly want them, but I had to find out what I could about this girl with the marks of the Denubari about her eyes - the traces were dwindling and I guessed that if I didn’t get something out of her tonight, we’d be finished; any hopes we may have had of finding Humphries would be dead and buried.

  They’d been slapping back the bubbly since we came in and their party must have started much earlier on because they were wasted and loud. Annoying in the way only really rich kids can be.

  It wasn’t hard to listen in on them. In fact you had no choice. Unless you left the room or were clinically deaf, you just couldn’t help but hear what they were blathering drunkenly about.

  Apparently Banff National Park - which we had entered on our drive up here - was a great place for a sightseeing trip and they were all off down there to Lake Louise, which they described as “really, really, just, kind of like, totally awesome.” Good to see the money spent on their education hadn’t been wasted.

  I had seen loads of leaflets in the foyer earlier on about several key spots in the Lake lands and remember seeing quite a few for a particular site called Lake Louise. The girl’s eyes were by now completely normal, if a little glazed over, so I went to my bed, taking some of the tourist brochures with me. I was sure at that point that Lake Louise was the place to start looking, although why and for what - well, I found that out when we got down there.

  I knocked on Cripplesby’s door at 8.00a.m., and he was already up, dressed and packed. Whether he was getting information from somewhere else or whether he just trusted that I’d have got the answers over night I don’t know, but we went down for a quick blueberry muffin and a large mug of hot chocolate, laced with cinnamon - a favourite of the holidaymakers apparently - before hopping in the car and heading North-west.

  The road took us along pretty much the same route as the Bow River. As it wound its way down the mountains we went up, copying each kink and twist like a big cat at top speed as she closes in on her prey, shadowing its every curve. About twenty five miles later we reached Lake Louise Village just near Kicking Horse Pass, the place from where our hotel in Banff had taken its name.

  An old guy, he was either a prospector or a trapper I think, was crossing the River at a shallow ford so the story goes, back in the days when the White Man was still in the process of stealing the land from the First Nations – that’s what the Canadians call the native tribesmen and women who South of the border would be better known as Native Americans, Amerindians or just Indians.

  Anyway, he had a team of Mules and a couple of Horses as he was making his way North when one of the Horses decided she’d had enough and wanted a drink and a rest. So here we had a situation where the man wanted to go on, but the Horse wanted to stop there. In the ensuing ‘discussion,’ with both sides putting their arguments across in their own particular ways, the man got kicked in the head and was killed instantly, falling stone dead in the middle of the River.

  Not the prettiest or the most romantic of legends, I’ll give you that, but it is fitting for these parts because it helps to remind you that us all-conquering humans will not necessarily win in a battle of Man against Nature, not up here. In fact we will probably lose. Canada is still a very wild and untamed place in many areas and it would be a good idea not to forget that.

  Which of course I promptly did. But hey, I’m lucky. I survived.

  Once we’d parked and found out where we were going, picking up a rough map from a little kiosk in the village, we headed straight off on foot for the Lakes, keen to pick up the scent again. What a spot! Absolutely stunning scenery, large purple Mountains topped with snowy peaks, Forests, Meadows, and Lakes of emerald green - something to do with glacial silt we were told. Fantastic.

  Elliot mentioned that it looked a little like the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, around Invergary. I’ve never been there myself so I couldn’t say, but I am not convinced. Just call it a hunch. There are not many places could look like this.

  So anyway, we’re walking where our feet take us, watching the Eagles circling and soaring overhead, looking for any sort of clue we could find - I was quite hopeful of getting a quick result because this place is absolutely alive with Spirits! They are mainly Nature Spirits, Animals and Plants, but I can also feel what the First Nations would call Ancestors all over the place here. It is so in your face, so noticeable, so... undeniably ‘there’! No wonder the original inhabitants of Turtle Island - as many tribal people still call their continent - are such a holy people. You can’t help it. You draw it in with every breath.

  Out of the corner of my eye in the edges of the thick Pine forest that grew on our side of the Lake I noticed something, the way you do. Not knowing what it was, I started over towards it. Cripplesby reminded me what we had been warned about - the Bears around here are growing bolder with every year - and I held my hand up to stop him from following, just in case there was any danger.

  Creeping stealthily forwards along the rocky shore I made my way towards the tree line, where I came across a small circle of mushrooms, poking their caps up from the dark forest floor. I laughed out loud. Panther Fungus! This was it! I was obviously still too immersed in Africa to fully tune in to my surroundings, so I’d been guided towards these Amanita Pantherina, a hallucinogen native to this part of the world, obviously to help me blend in.

  Christ, I’ve never had this much assistance before! I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not, but there you go. We must be onto something big. Really big.

  After picking a handful and eating them fresh, I walked back to Elliot, saying it had been a false alarm. To eat them straight out of the ground like that was dangerous – really dangerous - but a calculated risk under the circumstances. My reasoning being that if the Spirits were so keen to contact me that they had shown me the door, they were unlikely to bite my head off when I opened it up and went through. Saying that though I did take a much smaller dose than if they’d been dried properly, just to be on the safe side.

  It was now just before ten o’clock in the morning. I suggested that we split up and if either of us found anything out we should head for Louise’s Larder, a bar and cafe back in the village and wait for the other to return. He agreed and took himself off back towards the village to show a picture of Humphries around - he had got it from the sports pages of a Kenyan paper he’d picked up at the airport in Nairobi, at a time when the results of the race were the only news to have come out of Mombassa. His plan as far as I know was basically just to ask around to see if anyone had seen him lately – funny, I hadn’t even thought of that!

  So now I was on my own and I knew that I had two or three hours to kill before the Spirits would come a-calling. I sat for a bit on the stony beach and offered a couple of pinches of tobacco in my Pipe to all the Spirits of the plac
e before having a smoke, taking in the scenery while I waited.

  It was probably only about an hour later that I became drawn towards the woods. I stepped inside the living Forest, every sense on full alert. My nose was taunted and teased by the scents of Plants and Animals mixed in with the deep, damp litter of pine needles which cushioned every footstep.

  Once I’d wandered for a while thousands of tiny Insects began to cluster together and fly in formation before me – the Pantherina had kicked in! They formed directional arrows in mid-air and started pointing me down particular paths, or more often away from the paths altogether. After who knows how long of being guided in this way, a tiny clearing opened up around me and the Insects suddenly disappeared into the air.

  Less than ten yards away, standing propped up against a tree, was a man dressed in the fashion of a hundred years or so ago. His other hand rested upon the shaft of an axe and his huge top hat had been discarded along with his overcoat a few feet away. His head was enormous, much larger proportionally than it should have been, so that his whiskery sideburns were in fact as long and wide as his thighs.

  He looked indifferently towards me, almost as if I were just one more face in a crowd walking past. He seemed passive, neither aggressive nor openly friendly. I must confess that I was taken aback somewhat as I had been expecting any apparition – if it were human - to be an indigenous man or woman, someone from the First Nations. Not a dour and grizzly pale-face.

  After I had greeted him I waited for his response. Then it suddenly dawned on me just how much danger I had put myself in, in my over confidence. Stupid, Geeza, stupid!

  This could be it, I thought. Game over and no one would ever find my body. But despite the dangers and being lost in the middle of the forest I stood calmly and tried not to show any concern. I was completely in the hands of the Spirits now.

  For a while he said nothing, simply stared at me with eyes as big as fists. Then he pushed himself up from the tree and standing upright, he spoke.

  “I can see the fear in your eyes boy. And you’re right to feel it too. Don’t go gettin’ all cocky now, just because you’ve found favour elsewhere.” At that point, with the Panther Fungus working away inside me, Malika suddenly felt a long, long way away. “My name is Elias Abrahams, but people more often call me Klondyke Sal.”

  “I hope I’m pleased to meet you Sal.” I know he’d just told me not to be cocky, but I hoped that by joking I might bolster my own courage a bit. I was getting scared and if I didn’t do something the fear would take hold and that’d be it – I’d be as good as dead. Anyway, other than glaring at me even more sternly than before he ignored my comment.

  When I asked him how he came to be out here he told me “Why shouldn’t I be out here? It’s where I live isn’t it?” He said he’d made his fortune selling firewood to the hordes that had joined the gold rush out West. He had been given his name by the prospectors themselves, as he came to be their salvation in the hard, cold Winters.

  “If I hadn’t chopped all them trees down and carted all that wood out to them, why, every man jack of them would’ve perished. Died a frozen death. You ever seen a man frozed to death boy?”

  “No.”

  “Well it ain’t pretty! Why, I’d rather be stomped on by a Grizzly than suffer all that cold working its way through your body, blackenin’ things and making bits drop off; sapping the life out of you, slow and painful.”

  “Is that how you died?” I asked. Most ghosts love to talk about their own deaths.

  “Nope.”

  “How did you die then?”

  “I was stomped on by a Grizzly; stomped on and mauled up real good! In these very woods. That was years after the Klondyke days though. Years after. I’d made me enough of a fortune and seen all I wanted to see of what gold can do to a man, so I moved back East. Over twenty years of good living I had before that Grizzly got me. Hard, but good. I had a cabin out that aways,” he waved vaguely, “just near the lake.

  “Now, you want to know where he’s headed don’t you?” His abruptness surprised me. Up until then I’d got him down as a rambling old fool.

  “Err…yes please,” I stammered.

  “Well you’re way too far South! You’re going to have to get off of the roads and trails and head up towards Mount Amery. It’s about fifty miles yonder.” He pointed with his axe and said “Nor-nor-west. Look for three small aspens and you’ll find a couple who I’ll warrant your friend’ll find most interesting. From there, well, you’ll just have to start looking afresh I guess. Do what you do best - but damn it, be more careful!” He shouted this last bit and then paused, allowing his chastisement to sink in.

  “Ask for up help here son,” he spread his arms wide and turned slowly around, indicating the forest and the country around him, “and all you have to do is listen - so long as your heart is good. This one that you’re after, mind,” he glared terrifyingly, his eyes becoming two black, bottomless chasms with eerie green lightning flashing below the surfaces, “his heart is blacker than pitch!”

  Thankfully his eyes returned to normal, as I could feel myself being dragged inexorably towards them.

  “You watch your step while you’re here laddie. This is wild country and your lady friend ain’t here, least not so much as she’ll be able to help, if ’n someone takes a dislikin’ to you.” He wagged a finger at me. “You’ll not be so lucky next time if you keep on a-blunderin’ about like you just did.” Then he reached down and donned his topper, neatly folding his coat over an arm. He hefted his axe up onto his shoulder. “Be seein’ you boy,” and then he was off.

  ***