Eastern Passage

by Farley Mowat

  Over his first tin plate heaped high with fried trout, Cliff proposed a toast to his uncle Harv.

  “Old bugger surely liked his drop,” Cliff remembered fondly as he raised his mug. “Weren’t a heavy drinker, but always partial to a nip. Drank to be sociable, you could say. One time I asked him if he’d ever turned down a drink. He give me a sour look like I’d asked a damn fool question, and says, ‘Well, goddamn it, yes I did. Twice. Once I wasn’t asked … and once I wasn’t there.’ ”

  Lawrence laughed as he poured himself another shot and told us of a nearby cove whose flat, limestone shore held a number of barrel-shaped holes drilled by boulders whirled around and around by the downpour from a long-vanished waterfall.

  “Some of them rocks as made the holes still lays at the bottom of them so much as six feet down. Indians have a story about that. Say the holes was made by a giant stone-pecker bird lookin’ for rock worms big around as a man’s arm. Say it was a sacred place, and most white folks got the notion and steered clear of it.

  “All except Harv … ’cause that’s where he used to make his shine!”

  Lawrence paused to fill his cup, which he raised in salute to his vanished cousin.

  “Best goddamn shine ever hit this country! And he made enough of it could pretty near have floated a run of logs.

  “Only a scramble of people ever knowed this was where Harv kept his pot and his still. He’d cook his mash right in them big holes in the rock, and he kept his still in the biggest one. When she was runnin’ there’d be this little feather of steam comin’ out the hole.

  “Harv’s secret never got out. We kept it right close in the family, and the Indians was into it with us. But the shine got out right enough. It was drunk down in Belleville and Kingston and even so far away as Ottawa. My gawd, she was good stuff!”

  Many tales were told that day, and Harv Gunter was the subject of most of them.

  Clary recalled how he had taught her to hunt bear.

  “When I turned ten, he took me out on his trapline. After he was satisfied I could keep up, handle dogs, and shoot pretty straight, he took me bear huntin’.

  “Harv never killed but one a year – always a young boar in its prime. Wouldn’t never kill sows or cubs nor let any of us do it. Nor he wouldn’t kill a bear two years runnin’ in the same part of the country. Used to tell us, ‘Give the bears a fair shake and they’ll do likewise,’ was what he said.

  “Fall of the year when I was twelve, he took me way to hell and gone back into the country by canoe to get a bear to fill the winter fat barrel. We looked over five or six afore he found the one he wanted – a roly-poly so fat he looked like a big black sausage. Harv dropped him with a shot to the head from his old .44.40.

  “Our canoe was not too far away and downhill from where we was so Harv figured to carry Mister Bear down there to skin him out and cut him up on the beach, where everythin’ was handy. He was a pretty heavy lift but we strung him upside down from a tamarack pole and off we went with one of us on each end of the pole and Harv leadin’ the way.

  “Trouble was … the damn bear weren’t dead! The bullet had creased his skull and knocked him arse over tea kettle but on the way down he started comin’ ’round and chompin’ his jaws no more’n an arm’s length from the seat of Harv’s trousers.

  “Course I yelled for Harv to stop and shoot the bear again, but we was into a patch of deadfall timber from an old fire and it was heavy goin’ and Harv was hot and mad and wouldn’t stop.

  “ ‘Don’t you fret,’ he yells over his shoulder. ‘Bugger ain’t et me yet, and we ain’t stoppin’ ’cause there’s an axe at the beach so there’s no need to waste another bullet.’

  “We hustled on with the both of us right out at the ends of the pole and it bendin’ near double. The bear gettin’ more and more uppity, and me yellin’ at Harv to stop and shoot it, and him yellin’ back, ‘Don’t you fret! We ain’t et yet!’

  “We hit the beach at the run, and when we dropped the pole Harv went for the axe and swung on the bear. Took him four or five whacks to kill it dead, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t say he was sorry while he was at it. Not to me! To the bear!

  “ ‘I has to finish you off the hard way, young feller,’ he says kind of sorrowful,’ ‘cause I’m not so good a shot as I used to be.’ ”

  Harv Gunter seldom apologized to anyone about anything. After we had all had a little noontime nap and refreshed ourselves with black tea, Lawrence told the story of how Harv had dealt with the first people from “out front” who had the temerity to settle by the lake.

  “That were late in the twenties. They’d been a few strangers come to Wes’makoon afore that, mostly hunters or prospectors or the like, but they was fly-by-nights as never stayed for long. Then one of the high-and-mighty Eaton crowd from Toronto got wind of Wes’makoon and come for a look-see at the north end aboard a buckboard on a logging trail – the only road into the lake in those times.

  “The fellow liked what he saw so much he decided to build himself a hunting and fishing lodge. He did her up proper! Built a castle of logs and timber grand enough for a prince, which was his style ’cause he owned a department store in Toronto half as big as the whole of Bancroft and had a mail-order business selling everything from ready-cut, build-your-own house kits to fancy women’s knickers. Sent out catalogues thick as the Bible of all the stuff they had for sale right across the country. Every family round about had the latest Eaton’s catalogue to study over and order out of, and an old one out in the backhouse where it could be put to good use – except the shiny pages which weren’t no damn good for nothing.

  “Anyways, Eaton built his big place on a point at the north end. He was the lord of creation there for certain … but Harv Gunter was still number one on the lake and the country all around and seemed like the Eaton fellow was smart enough to understand that. Sometimes he’d invite Harv into the sawdust castle, as we called it, and give him a drink, though his lordship never touched the stuff hisself. And sometimes Harv, who never liked to be beholden, would guide the Eatons and their guests fishing where the big ones was … sort of tit for tat, you might call it.

  “Well now, one time his lordship sent a message down to Ananias saying as he wanted five canoes at the Eaton dock at 9:00 a.m. sharp next morning to take a party of important guests out fishing. Harv warn’t none too pleased because it sounded too much like an order, and that put his back up. Anyways, he only had two canoes at Ananias and ’twas too late to get more without he’d have to chase all over the lake to find some, so he settled for two canoes and three rowing skiffs.

  “We set off with them early enough next morning, but a stiff headwind blew up and slowed us down so we never got to the castle ’til a little after nine. We was tied up there and waiting while one of Eaton’s flunkeys went up to the big house to git his master, who come back down with his crowd of bigwigs and all their fishing gear.

  “Eaton comes to the edge of the dock and there he stops and gives Harv, who was in one of the canoes, a look black as thunder.

  “ ‘Mis-tur-Gun-ter!’ he says slow and cold, but loud, ‘I believe I ordered five canoes … for nine o’clock. I only see two and it’s twenty minutes past the hour.… Can’t you read, Mister Gunter?’

  “I was surprised Harv didn’t blow his top, but he just got to his feet real slow, put his hands on his hips steady as a rock, and says as smooth as silk, ‘Well now, Mister Eaton, I can read good enough out of your goddamn catalogues to pick an order and mail it off. But what happens then Mister Eaton? I waits and I waits, and maybe someday a parcel comes … and when I opens her I finds some goddamn thing I never ordered, don’t want, and can’t use, along with a piece of paper with printing onto it as says, SUBSTITUTED!’

  “Harv stopped a while and looked around at all them people listening, before he adds, ‘So now then, Mister Eaton, how the hell do you like them apples?’ With that he picks up his paddle and leads the whole kit and caboodle of us back down the
lake.

  “I don’t know as them two ever spoke a word to each other after. But that weren’t the end of it. Before the Big War one of Eaton’s sons took to bringing his family to stay at the castle summertimes. His wife were the real snotty kind who was raisin’ their son Georgie to figure he weren’t part of the common herd.

  “There was still a few lunges [muskellunge, giant members of the pike family] in the lake them times and Georgies daddy was desperate anxious to catch one. When he found out Harv knowed where some was, he come down to Ananias in his big mahogany speedboat and soft-talked Harv into taking him and Georgie to troll for one some time soon.

  “Harv brought the Queen Mary up to the castle’s dock. He was always fussy about stowing a boat. It had to be done just right. He saw to it every bit of gear was put aboard just so, then put the people to their seats.

  “Young George – he might-a been ten or twelve – was the last on the dock. Harv looks up at him standing there and says, pretty mild for him, ‘What you waiting for? Damn it, Georgie, git into the boat and sit down nice and quiet ‘longside your daddy.’

  “Georgie just stood there a bit and then he says, ‘You ain’t supposed to call me Georgie. You ’re supposed to call me Master George.’

  “You could’a heard Harv’s answer down to the south end of the lake.

  “ ‘GIT YOURSELF INTO THE BOAT BEFORE I CALLS YOU SHIT FOR SHORT!’

  “Georgie git, and pretty smart about it – but I never heard as Harv had any dealings with the Eatons after.”

  The day was getting old before we left Lawrence and Clary. Cliff was ready to head for home but even though I knew the Eaton “castle” had mysteriously burned to the ground during the war years, I thought I’d like a look at it and at the north end.

  Cliff was not encouraging.

  “You won’t like it. Different place up there. But we’ll go a ways.”

  We had gone less than a mile farther when we were confronted by a garish, pink-painted cottage perched high on an island from which most of the trees had been cut to provide an all-round view. The cottage and its triple-width boathouse were tightly shuttered and at the end of a floating dock was a sign writ large enough to be read from hundreds of yards away.

  WARNING

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  KEEP OFF

  BY ORDER

  W.P.A.

  “Who the devil is W.P.A.?” I asked.

  “Wes’makoon Protective Association,” Cliff snarled, and went on to explain that since the end of the war a flood of strangers from “out front” had followed the Eatons and built summer places around the northern shore of the lake. Now, he told me profanely “the fuckers” were taking steps to ensure that all the inhabitants, old and new, were properly regulated.

  “They asks us to their meetings, and sometimes we goes and listens to their foolishness. But we sure and hell don’t join their association, and we don’t pay no heed to the rules they make, ’less it suits us, which it don’t often.

  “When they gets too uppity … well, then it seems like water worms bores holes in the hulls of their fancy speedboats; molasses gets into their gas tanks; and their new-fangled floating docks come apart even when there ain’t no storms. And then,” he added with relish, “the bears – leastwise I supposes it’s the bears – makes themselves comfortable in them shiny boxes they calls houses. Like them over there.”

  Cliff was pointing to a whole street of summer cottages coming into view along a piece of shoreline whose trees and bushes had mostly been removed to make room for neat little suburban enclaves.

  W.P.A. signs were ubiquitous, but were not the only proclamations of a new regime. As the Queen Mary opened the northern arm of the lake I was able to read, from a distance of at least a mile away, glaring letters painted on a granite outcrop:

  W BLAKE PITTSBURGH USA

  Cliff slowed the outboard to a mutter. “Seen enough?” he asked.

  I surrendered. The Queen turned about, but Cliff was not through with me yet. Halfway home, he steered to the foot of a high cliff on the eastern shore, near the top of which the remains of a tiny cabin clung like a limpet. This had been one of Harv’s favourite “hides,” from which he could spot deer many miles away along the shore or crossing on the ice. We climbed to Harv’s lookout – to find that new people had taken possession.

  A garish red-and-yellow signboard told us this was now

  PIKES PEAK*

  and a small sign next to it warned

  DONT PISS INTO THE WIND.

  The remains of Harv’s deliberately inconspicuous little shelter had been lavishly decorated with chrome-plated junk from wrecked cars. A sign nailed across the one window (now broken) read:

  LIQUOR ONLY SERVED TO MINERS.

  But the humourless pièce de résistance was a nearby boulder upon which was painted in glossy black letters:

  BLARNEY STONE

  under which someone had added with a marker pen:

  KISS MY ASS.

  During that first visit to Ananias, I spent most of my time in Cliff’s company but one day he provided me with a ten-foot birchbark canoe that had once been Harv’s favourite, a blanket, a grub box, fishing tackle, and basic camping gear and sent me off to paddle up an obscure little creek whose headwaters lay in a vast area of bog and muskeg called Black Swamp.

  “Black Swamp,” Cliff explained, “was Harv’s special bailiwick – where the biggest bears and the most deer hung out. You could live like a king in there if you knowed a thing or two. I reckon you might know enough to stay alive, Squib, and you might learn something if you keep your eyes peeled and your ears clean.

  “Might be you’ll hear old Jo belling back in there somewhere. Jo was the best of Harv’s hounds. He went missing soon after Harv flew the coop.

  “Tell you the kind of hound he was – one time he had a sore foot so Harv left him behind when he was going hunting and Jo got real huffy and went off on his own. Harv went up the lake to that little tilt we was at on the cliff. He had the field glasses he’d took from a dead Jerry at the Somme when he was over there in the First War. Looking around, he sees a rumpus on the far shore of the lake so he puts the glasses to it and sees a big buck jumping around on the beach. It had lopsided antlers, but what caught Harv’s eye was Jo – right up onto that buck’s back, looking like he was stuck to it.

  “How he got up there nobody’ll ever know – maybe the buck got itself mired and he jumped it – but it was desperate to get shed of him. Couldn’t shake him off so it took to the water and struck out for the other side, which was near a mile away.

  “Harv watched the whole business. Said by the time they got over to his side the buck was pretty well played out and the dog half-drowned. As the buck staggered up the bank, Jo slid off and just laid there on the beach like a sack of moose shit. Harv said he could-a taken a long shot at the deer but didn’t ’cause the buck was standing right over the dog. Then it seemed like Jo and the deer kind of sniffed noses and both of them shook theirselves and away they went – the buck into the bush and Jo along the shore, heading south.

  “Jo was already home when Harv got back, and none the worse though he was still favouring his sore paw.

  “Harv seen that same buck three or four times afterwards but never took a shot at him. Said he figured Jo wouldn’t have like it if he had.”

  Harv’s old canoe, a delicate little wisp of a thing that slipped through the water as easily as a loon, ghosted along so silently a muskrat snoozing on the bank failed to waken until I was so close it literally fell into the water in surprise. As I ascended the tea-coloured stream, I saw and heard many of its denizens going about their businesses. All of them, with the exception of the dozing muskrat, seemed unperturbed by my intrusion. On one stretch of quiet water, a sleek black otter accompanied me so closely I could have touched him with my paddle. When he eventually submerged, he did so without a ripple, leaving me feeling both elevated and humbled, as I might have been by a meeting with some primordial
water spirit.

  When the stream curved around the shoulder of a still-forested ridge, I went ashore and climbed it, hopeful of a view ahead and of perhaps hearing the distant belling of a spirit hound. Instead, I met a ghostlike marten who flickered at me disdainfully for an instant before vanishing up the bole of a towering white pine, which, with a few score of its fellows, had somehow escaped the timber butchers.

  I camped that night on a sand spit just where the stream entered a balsam swamp. I made a small fire, filled my belly with brook trout caught ten minutes earlier, spread my blanket beneath the overturned canoe, and drifted off in a blue haze of wood smoke, balsam perfume, and the night music of frogs, an owl, and running water.

  The first thing Cliff wanted to know when I returned to Ananias was whether I had come across any trace of Jo.

  “Awful queer the way that dog disappeared. Was too damned smart to get hisself lost. Come from a line of dogs could find their way around better than birds.

  “One time Jo’s granddaddy – the first Jo – did go missing up around Gin Lake. Couple of months went by and still no sign of him so we figured he must be dead and gone. Then one October two years later a float plane landed on West Reach and taxied right in to our dock.

  “When the door opened the first damn thing out was a dog. Come out like shot from a gun and jumped all over Harv ’til the old man pretty near fell off the dock.

  “Two fellows got out and told us their story. Said they was lawyers from Kingston going north on a moose hunt. Said that two years previous they’d been hunting moose up near Gin Lake and come on a wolf snare with a dog caught into it by its hind leg … what was left of a dog, because it was nigh starved to death.

  “Their guide was fixing to put it out of its misery but they liked the look of it and the long and short of it was they took it back to Kingston with them and got it fixed up good as new. And they was real happy when it turned out to be the best hunting hound they’d ever laid eyes on.