The Land God Gave to Cain

by Innes, Hammond;

  IV

  What exactly I’d expected from Darcy I don’t know, but it came as a shock to me to find him taking it for granted that I’d want to pursue my objective to its logical conclusion. And as we bumped across the iron-hard ruts, up out of the camp on to the Tote Road, I began to consider the problems it raised, for I couldn’t just walk off into the bush with this Indian. I’d need stores, equipment, things that only the construction camp could provide. I started to explain this to Darcy, but all he said was, “We’ll discuss that when we’ve seen Mackenzie. He may not want to leave the hunting. Winter’s coming on and the hunting’s important.”

  We were headed north and after a while he said, “I suppose you realise you’ve caused near-panic down at the Base. They’ve never had anybody gate-crash the line before and one of the directors is on a tour of inspection. There’ve been messages flying back and forth about you all night. If I weren’t something of a rebel in this outfit,” he added with a quick grin, “I’d have had nothing to do with you.”

  I didn’t say anything and he went on, “But since I’ve got myself involved, I guess it’s time I had all the facts. Bill gave me the gist of them, but now I’d like to have the whole story from you.”

  Once again I found myself explaining about my father’s death and that last radio message. But this time it was different. This time I was explaining it to someone who could understand how my father had felt. He listened without saying a word, driving all the time with a furious concentration, his foot hard down on the accelerator. It was beginning to thaw, the snow falling in great clods from the jackpine branches and the track turning to slush, so that the jeep slithered wildly on the bends, spraying the mud up in black sheets from the wheels.

  I was still talking when the trees thinned and we came out on to the banks of a river, and there was the trestle, a girder-like structure built of great pine baulks, striding across the grey stone flats of the river to the thump of a pile-driver. He stopped by a little group of huts that huddled close under the towering network of the trestle and cut the engine, sitting listening to me, his gloved hands still gripping the wheel.

  And when I had finished, he didn’t say anything or ask any questions, but just sat there, quite silent, staring out across the river. At length he nodded his head as though he had made up his mind about something. “Okay,” he said, opening his side door and getting out. “Let’s go scrounge some coffee.” And he took me across to the farthest hut where a wisp of smoke trailed from an iron chimney. “The last time I was here,” he said, “was when I brought Laroche out.” He kicked open the wooden door and went in. “Come in and shut the door. The bull-cook here’s a touchy bastard, but he makes darn good blueberry pie.” This in a loud, bantering voice.

  The hut was warm, the benches and table scrubbed white, and there was a homely smell of baking. A sour-looking man with a pot-belly came out of the cookhouse. “Saw you drive up,” he whispered hoarsely, dumping two mugs of steaming black coffee on the table. “Help yourselves.” He pushed the canned milk and a bowl of sugar towards us.

  “Where’s the pie, Sid?” Darcy asked.

  “You want pie as well?”

  “Sure we want pie.”

  The cook wiped his hands down his aproned thighs, a gesture that somehow expressed pleasure. And when he had gone back into the cookhouse, Darcy said, “Sid’s quite a character. Been in Labrador almost as long as I have—and for the same reason.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  But he shook his head, his eyes smiling at me over the top of his mug as he gulped noisily at his coffee. And then I asked him about Laroche. “You say you stopped here on your way up to Two-ninety?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I thought he could do with some hot coffee. And I wanted blankets, too. His clothes were soaked.” The cook came back with the blueberry pie and Darcy said, “Remember the last time I was through here, Sid?”

  “Sure do.” The cook’s eyes were suddenly alive. “You had that pilot with you, and he sat right there where you’re sitting now with that look in his eyes and muttering to himself all the time. And then he went off to sleep, just like that.”

  “He was in a bad way.”

  “Sure was. More like a corpse than anything else.”

  “It was the warmth sent him to sleep,” Darcy said. “He hadn’t been warm since he’d crashed.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what it was. But I reckoned you’d have a corpse on your hands by the time you got him to the aircraft.” The cook hesitated. “I ain’t seen you since then.”

  “No, I been busy.” Darcy stared at the cook a moment and then said, “What’s on your mind, Sid?”

  “Nothing. I been thinking, that’s all.” And he looked at Darcy with a puzzled frown. “It was his eyes. Remember how they kept darting all round the place, never focusing on anything, as though he were scared out of his wits. And every now and then he’d mutter something. Do you reckon he was bushed?” And when Darcy didn’t say anything, the cook added, “I only seen a man bushed once. That was in the early days down at One-thirty-four.”

  “Mario?” Darcy said.

  “Yeah, Mario—that Italian cook. He moved his eyes the same way Laroche did, and he had that same scared look as though he expected to be murdered in his bunk. Queer guy, Mario.” He shook his head. “Always muttering to himself. Remember? You were there.” Darcy nodded. “And then running out naked into the bush that night; and all those crazy things he wrote in the snow—like I want to die’ and ‘Don’t follow me. Leave me alone.’ As though he was being persecuted.”

  “Well, he was.” Darcy cut the blueberry pie and passed a thick wedge of it across to me. “Those Germans,” he added with his mouth full. “They played hell with the poor bastard. Good cook, too.”

  “Sure he was. And then they got another wop for cook and they tried playing hell with him. Remember how he fixed them?” The cook was suddenly laughing. “So you make-a the fool of me, he told them. You wanna have fun at my expense. How you like-a the soup to-day, eh? Is okay? Well, I urinate in that soup, and every time you make-a the fool of me, I urinate in the soup. That’s what he told them, wasn’t it? And never another peep out of them.” His laughter died away and he fell suddenly silent. And then he came back to the subject of Laroche. “You’d think when a guy’s left two men dead in the bush he’d want to tell somebody about it soon as he was picked up. But he wouldn’t talk about it, would he?”

  “He was pretty badly injured,” Darcy said.

  “Sure he was. But even so—you’d think he’d want to get it off his mind, wouldn’t you? I know I would. I’d have been worried sick about it all the time I was trekking out.” He nodded his head as though to emphasise the point. “But you had to try and dig it out of him. What happened, you asked him. What about Briffe and the other guy? But all he said was Dead. Just like that. Dead—both of them. And when you asked him how it happened, he just shook his head, his eyes darting all round the room. Wouldn’t say another word.”

  So Laroche hadn’t been normal even then. “You think he was bushed, do you?” I asked. “Or was it because of his injury?”

  The cook’s beady eyes were suddenly suspicious. “You’re a newcomer, aren’t you?” I think he’d forgotten I was there. “An engineer?” he asked Darcy.

  But instead of saying Yes and leaving it at that, Darcy said, “Ferguson’s up here because he believes Briffe may still be alive.”

  “Is that so?” The cook regarded me with new interest. “You think maybe Laroche made a mistake, saying they were both dead?”

  And then, to my surprise, Darcy began explaining to the man the circumstances that had brought me out from England.

  “Hadn’t we better get moving?” I interrupted him. I was annoyed. It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d repeat what I’d told him.

  “What’s the hurry?” he said. “Nobody will look for you here.” And the cook, sensing the tension between us, said, “You like some more cawfee?”


  “Sure we’ll have some more coffee,” Darcy said. And when the man had gone out, he turned to me. “If you think you can keep the reason you’re up here a secret, you’re dam’ mistaken. Anyway, what’s the point?”

  “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 a
ge.

  “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.”