The Land God Gave to Cain

by Innes, Hammond;

  I didn’t hesitate then, but followed him, not caring any longer how cold the water was or how deep. Paule was here, and Darcy would be with her. I shouldn’t be alone with him any more.

  Fortunately there was a gravel bottom to the lake expansion, for long before I reached the middle I was feeling the tug of the current, and all the time the water got deeper until it covered my genitals and was reaching up to my stomach, freezing all the guts out of me. At the deepest it reached to my lower ribs and my boots were just touching bottom. I saw Laroche scramble out and climb the rocks that fringed the shore. But there was no sign of the others and he didn’t call again. And when I came up out of the water I found him alone, standing over the burned embers of a fire, staring at the thin wisp of blue smoke that curled up from it. “You saw them,” I gasped. “Where are they?”

  He shook his head and his face was deathly pale. “No, I didn’t see them.”

  “But you called out to Paule.”

  “I saw the smoke. I thought maybe …” He shook his head wearily. “They’re ahead of us.” His teeth were chattering and the bitter frustration he seemed to feel made his voice sound hollow. He pushed back the hood of his parka and ran a trembling hand up over his head. “I didn’t think they could possibly get here ahead of us.” He was almost crying. At any rate, there were tears in his eyes and his whole body shook as though with ague.

  “But how do you know?” I cried. “If you didn’t see them …”

  “The fire,” he said.

  I stared down at it then, seeing it suddenly as the footprint in the sand, the proof that there were other humans besides ourselves in this desolate wilderness. And I knew that he must be right, because there was nobody within five days’ march of us, except Paule and Darcy.

  By then my own teeth were chattering and I could feel my clothes stiffening as they froze. A numbness was creeping through my body. But I didn’t care. That wisp of smoke meant that Paule and Darcy had stood here on this lake shore and dried themselves at this fire less than an hour ago. The knowledge that they were so close comforted me. “I’ll get the fire going again,” I said. “Give me the axe.”

  But he shook his head. “No. No, I got to get on. I got to catch up with them before they reach the lake.”

  He was looking now at the trees ahead of him, searching for the marks he’d made. “But we must have a fire,” I said. “We’ve got to dry our clothes.”

  He shook his head again, impatiently, as he moved in amongst the trees, his body still shaking with the cold. And then he found what he was looking for, and he started forward.

  “Laroche! Come back!” I almost screamed his name. “You damned crazy fool!” I shouted after him. “You’ll die of cold if you don’t get dry.”

  He didn’t stop, but went straight on, half-running, and though I shouted at him again and again, he took no notice. There was nothing for it then, but to follow him. I knew it was crazy. We were soaked to the waist and the temperature was way below freezing. But I’d no alternative.

  I thought I’d catch him up in a moment, for he was in a far worse state than I was. I thought that as soon as he’d got over the first shock of his surprise and began to weaken, I could persuade him to stop and get a fire lit. But in fact I was only just able to keep him in sight. He seemed suddenly possessed of a demoniacal energy. The timber was sparse here and he was running, not caring that the ground was rocky and treacherously strewn with moss-covered boulders. Twice I saw him fall, but each time he scrambled to his feet and plunged on at the same frantic pace.

  We went on like that for a long time, until I, too, was so exhausted I could barely stagger, and then suddenly the ground fell away and through the bare poles of the trees I caught a glimpse of water. A moment later I stumbled out of the timber on to an outcrop, and there was the rock, crouched like a lion in the middle of the lake.

  I stopped then and stared at it, hardly able to believe my eyes. I had reached Lake of the Lion, and the sight of it gave me a sudden chill feeling of despair, for it was a black, sombre place. The lake itself had a white rime of ice round its edge, and all the length of the long, narrow cleft, its surface had the dull, leaden look of water beginning to freeze over. The Lion Rock stood in the very centre of it, the blackness of it emphasised by the ice that ringed it round.

  “Paule!” Laroche’s despairing cry came up to me through the trees, and it had the lost quality of the damned in it. “Paule! Wait! Please, Paule!”

  He was running down the steep-timbered slope towards the lake, and beyond his bobbing figure I caught the glint of metal. It was the Beaver floatplane, and it wasn’t sunk after all. It lay with its wings sprawled along the ice at the water’s edge. And to the right of it, two figures stood against the black bulk of some up-ended rocks that formed a platform overlooking the lake, a repetition at a lower level of the outcrop on which I stood. They were standing quite still, and like me they were staring down at the plane.

  “Paule!” That cry, so full of fear and despair, rose crazily up to me again, and as though the cry had galvanised the two figures into action, one of them detached itself from the other and went scrambling down towards the lake and the half-sunken aircraft. It was Paule. And then Darcy started after her, and he was calling to her, a cry of warning.

  No doubt he thought Laroche, in his demented state, might be dangerous. It was my own immediate thought, for the Beaver floatplane was evidence that he’d lied, and I left the outcrop and went racing down the slope, shouting to her to stay with Darcy.

  It’s a wonder I didn’t break my neck on that hillside, for it was a tangle of roots and I went down it regardless of the fact that I was dead weary and all my muscles uncontrollable through weakness. But I was unencumbered by any pack and I reached the lake shore only a little behind Darcy, who had stopped and was standing with a shocked look on his face. And beyond him, Paule had stopped, too, and so had Laroche—the three of them quite still like a tableau.

  They were all of them staring at something down along the lake shore, and as I passed Darcy, I saw it, too; a body lying crumpled in the snow, with the torn canvas of a tent forlornly draped from its slanting pole. I checked then, and I, too, stood momentarily frozen into immobility, for beside the body were two rusted steel containers, and from one of them the thin line of an aerial swept up to the trees that fringed the lake.

  So my father had been right. That was my first thought, and I went slowly forward, past Laroche past Paule—until I stood looking down at the pitiful remains of the man I’d come so far to find. He lay on his side, a stiff-frozen bundle of ragged clothing, and his thin, starved face was turned upwards, staring with sightless eyes at the Labrador skies. One hand still clutched the phone mike of the transmitter; the other, wrapped in a filthy, bloodstained bandage, lay by the handle of the generator. My only thought then was that he had never given up; right to the very end he had been trying to get through, and he had died without knowing he had succeeded. Across all those thousands of miles he had made contact with my father, a disembodied voice on the ether crying for help. And my father had met that call with a superhuman effort that had been his death. And now I had failed him.

  Behind me I heard Paule echo my thoughts in a whisper so hoarse that I barely recognised her voice. “Mon Dieu!” she breathed. “We are too late.”

  “Yes,” I murmured. “We’re too late.” And then I looked up at the Lion Rock standing there in the middle of the lake. At least I had reached Lake of the Lion. I had done what my grandmother had tried to do—what my father would doubtless have done in the end, if he hadn’t been so badly injured in the war. I had reached James Finlay Ferguson’s last camp. That at least was something.

  I looked down at Briffe’s body again and my eyes, blurred with exhaustion, seemed to see it as that other body that had lain here beside this lake for more than fifty years, and I remembered what Laroche had said: a heap of bones—and a hole drilled in the skull. At least Briffe hadn’t died like that, but still a
shudder ran through me, for the drawn and sunken features told of a slower death, and close behind me Paule whispered, “He killed him, didn’t he?”

  I turned then and saw her standing, staring down at her father with a blank look of misery and despair on her face. I didn’t say anything, for she knew the truth now; the body and the transmitter were evidence enough. And then slowly, almost woodenly—like a puppet on a string—she turned and faced Laroche. “You killed him!” The whisper of her words carried down the lake’s edge, so clear in the frozen stillness that she might have shouted the accusation aloud, and her face as she said it was contorted with horror. “You left him here to die—alone.”

  Alone! That one word conjured a vision of what Briffe’s end had been. I think Laroche saw it, too, for his face was quite white, and though he tried to speak, he couldn’t get the words out. And then Paule repeated her accusation in a rising crescendo of sound that bubbled out of her throat as a scream of loathing and horror. “You killed him! You left him here to die.…” Her throat closed on the words and she turned away from him and went stumbling blindly up through the trees like an animal searching for some dark corner in which to hide.

  If Laroche had let her go, it might have been all right; but he couldn’t. “Paule—for God’s sake!” he cried. And before Darcy or I could do anything to stop him, he had started after her. And he was up with her in a second, for she was sobbing so wildly, so hysterically that she tottered rather than ran up the slope. He reached out and caught hold of her arm. “Paule—you’ve got to listen to me.” He jerked her round, and then his hand fell from her elbow and he stepped back as though at a blow for her eyes blazed with hatred and her white face had a trapped look, full of bewilderment and fear.

  “Paule!” He held out his hand to her in a pleading gesture. But in the same instant, she cried, “Don’t touch me. If you touch me, I’ll—”

  “Paule, you’ve got to listen to me.”

  I heard her cry, “No. Keep away from me.” It was said as he reached out and gripped hold of her again, and in the same instant she made a quick movement of her arm, there was the glitter of steel, and then she was stabbing at him with that thin-bladed Indian knife, stabbing at him again and again, screaming something at him in French, or it may have been Indian, until finally his knees sagged under him and he sank groaning to the ground at her feet. He looked up at her then, and for a moment they stared at each other, and then he suddenly collapsed and lay still, and she was left standing, staring with a dazed expression at the knife in her hand. She stared at the reddened blade and a drop of blood gathered on the point and fell like a piece of red confetti on to the trampled snow.

  Suddenly she flung the knife from her and with a sobbing intake of breath, fell on to the snow beside him. “Darling!” She had seized hold of his head and was staring down into his face, which was paper-white and blooodless under the stubble. “Mon Dieu!” She looked up then and searched about her blindly as though for aid, and finally her eyes lighted on Darcy and myself, still standing there, helpless spectators of the tragedy. “I think I’ve killed him,” she said in a toneless voice. “Would one of you see, please.” And as Darcy went and knelt beside Laroche’s body, she laid the head down and stood up, suddenly quite composed. “I am going to—see to my father now,” she said, and she went slowly down through the trees towards the half-sunken aircraft and the sandy beach below the rocks that had been Briffe’s last camping place, moving slowly like a girl walking in her sleep.

  I went over to Darcy then, my knees trembling and weak with the shock of what had happened. “Is he—dead?”

  Darcy didn’t reply. He had laid Laroche’s body out on the snow and was unzipping his parka.

  “It all happened so quickly,” I murmured.

  He nodded. “Things like that always do.”

  “I was thinking about Briffe and what had happened here.”

  He had undone Laroche’s parka and the sweater underneath was all soaked in blood, sodden patches that ran into one another, dark red against the dirty white of the wool. He cut it away with his knife, deftly exposing the white flesh beneath the bush shirt and the sweat-grimed vest, as though he were skinning an animal. And when he had the whole chest exposed, with the half-dozen knife wounds gaping red and slowly welling blood, he put his head down and listened to the heart. And then he nodded slowly like a doctor whose diagnosis has been proved correct. “Where’s that girl gone?” he demanded, looking up at me.

  “She’s gone to see to her father.”

  “Well, she can’t do anything for him. Fetch her back here. I want a big fire built, and hot water and bandages.”

  “He’s alive then?”

  “Yeah—just. I guess the thickness of the parka saved him.” He looked quickly about him. “Build the fire over there in the shelter of those rocks where Briffe had his camp. And tell Paule to find something clean for bandages.” Darcy slipped his axe from his belt. “Here, take this. I want a big fire, and I want it kept going. Now get moving.” And as I left him, I heard him say, “This is a hell of a thing to have happened.” And I knew he was wondering how we were to get out with a wounded man.

  I went back through the trees and down over the rocks to the little beach where Paule knelt on the gravel beside the frozen body of her father. I remember I was surprised to see how small a man he was, and though death had smoothed some of the wrinkles from the weather-beaten skin, the face was the face of an old and bitter man. Starvation had shrunk the flesh of the cheeks and stretched the skin tight across the bones, so that the features looked shrivelled and only the grizzled beard had any virility left in it. His body, with the lower half still encased in his sleeping-bag, was sprinkled with a light dusting of snow. There was snow on the radio set, too, and all the simple necessities with which he had endeavoured to support life lay scattered around him, half-buried in a white, frozen crust.

  I told Paule what she had to do, but she didn’t seem to take it in. “He’s dead,” she murmured. “My father’s dead.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. But there’s nothing you can do for him now.”

  “We were too late.” She said it in the same dull, flat voice, and though she wasn’t crying, she seemed utterly dazed. “If only I had done something about it when that first report of a transmission came through. Look! He was trying to get through to me. And I agreed with them,” she murmured brokenly. “I agreed that the search should be called off.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said.

  “It was my fault. I should have known.” She gazed dully round her at the snow-covered camp site. “There’s no sign of a fire,” she said. “He hadn’t even a fire to keep him warm. Oh, God!” she breathed. And then she was staring up at me, her eyes wide in the pallor of her face. “Why did Albert do it?” she cried. “Why did he leave him here? And then to say he was dead!” Speaking of Laroche seemed to remind her of what she’d done. “Have I killed him?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “He’s still alive. But we’ve got to get a fire going and some bandages.” And then, because she was looking down at the corpse of her father again, lost to everything but her own misery, I caught hold of her arm and dragged her roughly to her feet. “Pull yourself together, Paule,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do here.”

  “No—nothing.” And she seemed suddenly to collapse inside. “It’s all so terrible,” she cried, and she began to sob, wildly and uncontrollably.

  I shook her violently, but she didn’t stop, and because I didn’t know what else to do, I left her there and went up into the trees and began to hack down branches, building them into a great pile in the shelter of the rocks. And after a while Darcy came and helped me. “I’ve patched him up as best I can,” he said.

  “Will he live?” I asked.

  “How the hell do I know?” he growled. “Will any of us live, if it comes to that?” And he set a match to some dry twigs he’d gathered and nursed the little flicker of flame to life, kneeli
ng in the snow and blowing on it gently till the branches of the jackpine steamed and finally smouldered into a crackling flame.

  It was only then that I looked round to see what had happened to Paule. She had left her father and was kneeling beside Laroche in nothing but her bush shirt. She had used her parka and her sweater to cover him and keep him warm, and the sight of her there reminded me of what she had said to me when we were alone beside that camp fire. She had half-killed the man, yet she still loved him. Whatever he had done, she still loved him, and the knowledge brought a lump to my throat, for it was such a terrible twist of fate.

  As soon as the fire was blazing, we carried Laroche down to it and laid him on a bed of pine branches and dried moss close against the rocks so that the heat of the fire would be reflected to form a pocket of warmth. At least he wouldn’t die of shock through exposure to cold. But when I said this to Darcy, he gave me a hard, calculating look. “That’s a matter we’ve got to decide to-night,” he said in an odd voice.

  “How do you mean?”

  He glanced round quickly to see that Paule wasn’t listening. “We can’t carry him back and we’ve food for only one day. That’s all Paule and I brought with us. If we stay here with him, we all die.”

  “There’s the radio,” I said.

  “Yeah?” He gave a sceptical grunt. “It’d need a skilled operator to get that thing working. It’s been out in the open for days. Even when it was under cover, Briffe only managed to get that one message through.” And he added, “The chances of being able to raise anyone on that set are about as remote as the chances of a plane happening to fly over and see us here. Still …” He hesitated. “It’s a pity Paule didn’t do the job properly whilst she was about it.” And with that he turned abruptly away and went over to where Paule was searching in the snow beside her father’s body.

  She straightened up just as he reached her, and she had a rusted tin box in her hand. “I found it,” she said. “I knew it must be here, because of that bandage round my father’s hand.”