The Land God Gave to Cain

by Innes, Hammond;

  I ate the whole of that fish, and when I had finished it energy was flowing back into my body so that I no longer felt tired. There was a basin beside Darcy’s bed and a bowl of water steamed on the stove lid. I got up stiffly and had a wash, standing naked over the basin. Bushed or not, the man was closer to the country than anybody else I’d met. I had a shave and then I sat on the bed and broke the blisters on my heels and covered them with adhesive tape I found in the medical kit on the shelf above the bed. There were books there, too, and the photograph of a young Canadian soldier in a battered leather frame.

  My clothes had dried out with the heat of the stove and I put them on. And then I went back to the shelf and the books, wondering whether they would tell me anything about the man. They were mostly technical, but there was Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler, a single leather-bound volume of Shakespeare, the collected poems of Robert Service, several books by Jack London, and then four books that took me right back to the little room where my father had had his radio. They were Labrador, by W. Cabot, two volumes of Outlines of the Geography, Life and Customs of Newfoundland-Labrador by V. Tanner and a small slim book titled Labrador—In Search of the Truth by Henri Dumaine.

  Tanner’s book I knew. I’d often looked at the pictures in those two volumes when I was a kid. And Cabot’s book, too—that had been on my father’s shelves. But Henri Dumaine’s book was new to me and I took it down and opened it, casually leafing through the pages. It was a record of a journey into Labrador, not very well written. I glanced at the fly-leaf. It had been published by a Toronto firm in 1905, and thinking that perhaps it might have a reference to my grandfather’s expedition, I started going carefully through the pages from the beginning.

  I found a reference to it almost immediately, at me foot of page five. He had written: Thus it was on June 15, 1902, that the ship brought me to Davis Inlet and the Hudson’s Bay Post there. I was at the starting point of the Ferguson Expedition at last.…

  I stared at that sentence, hardly able to believe my eyes. Here, in this hut at Camp 263, I had stumbled on a book that could help me. My eyes were devouring the printed words now, and a few lines further on I read: Standing there, looking at the Post, so clean and neat in the cold sunlight, the red shingle roofs of the buildings glistening with the rain that had just passed and the planked walls gleaming in their fresh coat of white paint, I was thinking of Pierre. It was to this place that the poor fellow had returned—alone. I was thinking, too, of my wife, Jacqueline, and of all the hopes she entertained of my present journey. She had been at her brother’s bedside when he died and had listened to the last strange mutterings of a mind deranged by the tragedy of what had happened and by all the terrible harships suffered. I turned my back on the Post then and looked across the water to the hills of Labrador. It was then that I first felt the impact of that lonely country and I stood there in sudden awe of it, for somewhere beyond the black line of that escarpment lay the truth. If I could find it, then maybe I could clear his name of the vile accusations that had so darkened his last hours and contributed so much to his state of mind.

  I turned the pages quickly then, searching for some statement of the accusations, some hint as to what was supposed to have happened to my grandfather. But Henri Dumaine seemed to take it for granted that the reader would know that, for I could find no further reference to it. Page after page was taken up with the rather dreary account of his struggle up the old Indian trail to the Naskopie. He had had two coast half-breeds with him and it was clear that neither he nor they had much idea of bushcraft. Dogged by misfortunes, which were largely of their own making, they had reached Cabot Lake on July 19. They had then gone south across Lake Michikamau and had finally turned west towards the Ashuanipi.

  Here we found a camp of Montagnais Indians waiting for the coming of the caribou and luck was with us for two years ago at this very spot a lone white man had passed them, going towards the great lake of Michikamau. He had a canoe, but his supplies must have been getting low for he had avoided them and they had been scared to go near him for some reason, so that they could tell me little about him except that his clothes were ragged and his feet bound with strips of canvas and he talked to himself as though communing to some unseen spirit. They showed me the place where he had camped beside the river. There were several caribou bones and close by the place where he had built his fire was a little pile of cartridges, the greased wrapping partly disintegrated.

  There was no doubt in my mind then that this was one of the places where my brother-in-law had camped on the way back, and the cartridges so recklessly jettisoned proved that his situation was already desperate. Clearly we were still some distance from the place where death had overtaken Mr. Ferguson and I asked the Indians if they knew of the Lake I sought. I described it to them as Pierre had described it so often in his delirium. But they did not know it, and of course the name that Pierre had given to the Lake meant nothing to them, and so we left them, giving them two packages of tea and a small bag of flour, which was all we could spare of our supplies. And after that we went south, following the Ashuanipi, and searching all the time.…

  The door behind me burst open and I turned to find Darcy standing there. “All set?” he asked impatiently, as though I had kept him waiting. And then he saw the book in my hand. “Oh, so you found that.” He came in and shut the door. “I wondered whether you would.” He took it out of my hand, leafing idly through the pages. “Dull stuff,” he said. “But interesting when you know the country.”

  “Or when you know what happened,” I said.

  “To Ferguson?” He looked at me quickly. “Nobody knows that.”

  “When you know what’s supposed to have happened then,” I corrected myself. “On page five …” I took the book from his hand and pointed to the line referring to “vile accusations.” “What were the accusations?” I asked him. “They were made against the survivor, weren’t they? That was Dumaine’s brother-in-law. It says so there. Who accused him and what did they accuse him of?”

  “Goldarnit!” he exclaimed, staring at me. “It’s the damnedest thing I ever heard. You come all this way, right up here to this camp, where you’re not more than fifty miles or so from where your grandfather died, and you say you don’t know the story.”

  “Well, I don’t,” I said. “I came up here because of Briffe.”

  “Because of Briffe, or because Laroche crashed his plane in the same area?”

  “Because of Briffe,” I said. I was watching his face, wondering whether he, too, had guessed where the plane had crashed. I glanced down at the book again. I had only got about two-thirds through it. “Did Dumaine reach Lake of the Lion?” I asked.

  “Ah, so you know about Lake of the Lion, do you?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know what happened there.”

  “Well, it’s like I told you,” he said. “Nobody knows for sure. Dumaine never got farther than the Ashuanipi.” He reached over and took the book from me again. “Some Indians showed him a lone white man’s camp on the banks of the river, and after that he found two more. But that was all.” His grizzled head was bent over the book, his stubby, wind-cracked fingers leafing through the earlier pages. “The poor devil spent more than a month searching for that lake,” he murmured. “And all the time he should have been getting the hell out of the country.” He seemed to be trying to check on something in the first few chapters of the book. At length he said, “The big freeze-up was on them long before they’d reached Davis Inlet. If it hadn’t been for the half-breeds, he’d never have got out alive.” He snapped the book shut and replaced it on the shelf beside the photograph. “The irony of it was,” he added, looking at me curiously, “there was a woman came to Davis Inlet that year and strolled across half Labrador as though it were no worse than her own Scots moors. She had three trappers with her who knew the country and she covered the same area that Dumaine covered, and she went out by way of the Hamilton and the North-West River Post as fit as when she start
ed.”

  But I didn’t intend to be side-tracked. “This man who accompanied my grandfather,” I said. “Dumaine talks of him as though he were mad. A mind deranged by the tragedy of what happened, he says. What sent him mad?” I asked.

  He gave a quick shrug and turned away towards the stove.

  “Can’t you give me some idea of what happened?” I persisted. And when he didn’t answer, I added, “At least you must know what the accusations were. What was he accused of?”

  He was leaning down, staring at the red-hot stove, but he turned to me then and said, “He was accused of murdering your grandfather.” And he added quickly, “Nothing was proved. Nobody knows what happened. It was just a wild accusation made out of—”

  “Who made it?” I asked.

  He hesitated, and then said, “The woman I was talking about—Ferguson’s young wife, Alexandra.” He was staring at me with a puzzled frown. “You must know that part of it at least. Hell, boy, she was your own grandmother.” And then, when he realised it was new to me, he shook his head and turned back to the stove. “The newspapers got hold of her and printed some pretty wild things. Not that there was anything new in it. There’d been a lot of talk when the poor devil had come out alone raving of gold and a lake with the figure of a lion in rock. He was half out of his mind then, by all accounts.”

  “So it was gold my grandfather was after, was it?” I was remembering what my mother had said about him.

  “Sure. You don’t imagine a seasoned prospector like Ferguson went into Labrador for the good of his soul, do you?” He fell silent then, but after a while he said, “She must have been a remarkable woman, your grandmother. Didn’t you know her at all?”

  I explained how we’d stopped going to the house in Scotland after my mother had found her talking to me in my room that night, and he nodded. “Maybe your mother was right. And yet in spite of that you’re here. Queer, isn’t it?” And then he went back to my grandmother. “It would be remarkable even to-day. You wouldn’t understand, of course—not yet. All you’ve seen of the Labrador is a railway under construction. But you get away from the camps and the grade, the country’s different then—a land to be reckoned with.”

  “In fact, the land God gave to Cain.” I said it without thinking, repeating Farrow’s words.

  He looked at me, a little surprised. “Yeah, that’s right. The land God gave to Cain.” And the way he said it gave a significance to the words that chilled me.

  “Did my grandmother reach Lake of the Lion?” I asked then.

  “God knows,” he said. “But if she did, she kept damn quiet about it, for there’s no mention of it in the newspaper reports. But she back-tracked their route in and got farther than Dumaine did, or else she got there first, for she came out with a rusted pistol, a sextant and an old map case, all things that had belonged to her husband. She had those photographed, but she never published her diary, though she admitted she’d kept one. I guess she’d have published that all right if she’d found her husband’s last camp. Is the diary still in existence, do you know?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I’ve seen the pistol and the sextant and the map case. My father had them hanging on the wall of his room. There was part of a paddle, too, and an old fur cap. But I never knew there was a diary.”

  “Too bad,” he murmured. “It would have been interesting to know the basis of her accusations. She was three months up here in the wild and all the time following the route her husband took. I guess those three lonely months gave the iron plenty of time to enter into her soul.” He went over to the stove and held his hands close to the iron casing, warming them. “The strange thing is,” he said, “that Dumaine never mentions her once in that book. And yet the two parties started out from Davis Inlet within a few days of each other, and they were covering the same ground. I wonder whether they ever met?” he murmured. “Even if Dumaine never met her face-to-face, he must have come across traces of her party. And yet he never mentions her. There’s not one reference to Mrs. Ferguson in the whole of the book.”

  “That’s hardly surprising,” I said, “considering she’d accused his wife’s brother of murder.”

  “Well, maybe not. But she didn’t put it as bluntly as that, you understand. And there’d been all that talk …” He was staring down at the stove again. “It’s a queer thing,” he murmured, half to himself. “Those two men—I would have thought it would have been the other way about.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I dunno. A question of character, I guess. I’ve thought a lot about it since I been up here. Take Ferguson.” He was staring down at the stove. “Came over as a kid in an immigrant ship and went out west, apprenticed to one of the Hudson’s Bay posts. A few years later he was in the Cariboo. I guess that’s where the gold bug got him, for he was all through the Cariboo and then up to Dawson City in the Klondike rush of the middle nineties.” He shook his head. “He must have been real tough.”

  “And the other man?” I asked.

  “Pierre?” he said quickly. “Pierre was different—a man of the wilderness, a trapper. That’s what makes it so odd.”

  He didn’t say anything more and I asked him then how he knew all this. “It’s all in Dumaine’s book, is it?”

  “No, of course not. Dumaine was storekeeper in a small town in Ontario. He didn’t understand the wild, so he never bothered to assess the nature of the two men’s personalities. His book is a dull inventory of the day-to-day tribulations of a man whose wife had talked him into a journey that was beyond his capabilities.”

  “Then how do you know about my grandfather?” I asked.

  He looked up at me. “Newspaper cuttings chiefly. I had somebody look them up and type them all out for me. There was a lot about it in the Montreal papers, as you can imagine. I’d show them to you, only they’re in my trunk, and that’s up at Two-ninety still.”

  “But what made you so interested?” I asked him.

  “Interested?” He looked at me in surprise. “How the hell could I fail to be interested?” His craggy face was suddenly smiling. “You don’t seem to understand. I’m not up here because I like engineering. I don’t even need the dough. I’m fifty-six and I made enough money to keep me the rest of my life.” He turned and reached for his gloves. “No,” he added. “I’m up here because I got bitten by the Labrador.” He laughed softly to himself as he pulled on the gloves. “Yeah, I guess I’m the only man along the whole stretch of line that’s here because he loves it.” He was talking to himself again and I had a sudden feeling that he often talked to himself. But then he looked across at me. “Know anything at all about the Labrador?” he asked me.

  “My father had a lot of books,” I said. “I’ve read some of them.”

  He nodded. “Then you’ll know that all this is virgin country, unmapped and untrodden by white men till the Hollinger outfit got interested in the iron ore deposits up at Burnt Creek. Hell!” he added. “It’s only four thousand years ago that the last Ice Age began to recede. It was all glaciers then. And until floatplanes came into general use for prospecting, only a handful of white men had penetrated into the interior. A few rough maps of the rivers and all the rest blank, a few books like Dumaine’s on journeys made by canoe and on foot—that was all anybody knew about the Labrador. It wasn’t until 1947 that the Government began an aerial survey. And you ask me why I’m interested in the story of the Ferguson Expedition. How the hell could I help being interested, feeling the way I do about the country?” And then he added, almost angrily, “You don’t understand. I guess you never will. Nobody I ever met up here feels the way I do—the lonely, cruel, withdrawn beauty of it. Like the sea or the mountains, the emptiness of it is a challenge that cuts a man down to size. See what I mean?” He stared at me belligerently, as though challenging me to laugh at him. “The aircraft and the railway, they don’t touch the country, never will, I guess. It’s wild here—as wild and lonel
y as any place on earth. Do you believe in God?”

  The abruptness of the question startled me.

  “Well, do you?”

  “I haven’t thought much about it,” I murmured.

  “No. Men don’t till they suddenly discover how big Nature is. You wait till you’re out there in the silence of the trees, and the bitter cold is freezing all the guts out of you. You’ll think about Him then all right, when there’s nothing but the emptiness and the loneliness and the great stillness that remains a stillness in your soul even when the wind is blowing to beat hell.” He laughed a little self-consciously. “Okay,” he said abruptly. “Let’s go.” He strode across to the door and pulled it open. “Mackenzie’s camped up by the trestle. If we’re going to talk to him, we’d better get moving.” His voice was suddenly impatient.

  I followed him out of the hut and climbed into the jeep. “Who’s Mackenzie?” I asked as we drove off.

  “Mackenzie, he’s an Indian—a Montagnais. One of the best of them.” He swung the car on to the camp road. “He acts as guide for the geologists,” he added. “But right now he’s hunting. He may be willing to help you, he may not.”

  “Help me—how?” I asked.

  “Mackenzie’s never seen a lion,” he said. “The word means nothing to him. But he’s seen that lake.” His eyes were suddenly fixed on mine, an ophidian blue that held me rigid. “I take it,” he said, “that you haven’t come all this way to sit on your fanny in a construction camp or to wait around until you’re sent back to Base?” And then his gaze was back on the road again. “Anyway, that’s what I decided whilst I was fishing this morning—that I’d take you to see Mackenzie. I’ve sent him word by one of the Indians that hang around here to wait for us at his camp.”