Death on a Small, Dark Lake

by Lenny Everson

  Chapter 4

  I woke up dreaming that group of nasty people had taken my canoe and were trying to burn it. In the dream, I was telling them that I needed the canoe to get back to my car, and besides, kevlar doesn't burn. But I couldn't seem to make them understand. They insisted that the canoe was a god and they had to destroy it.

  It wasn't a promising way to greet the day.

  But I woke up, for the usual reasons. Out in the true wilds, huddled in a small nylon tent, there's one thing that wakes the average middle-aged Canadian in the morning.

  Pain.

  My back hurt. My hips hurt. My arms hurt. My bladder was talking to me. I felt like I'd been sleeping on a rock.

  Actually, I had been sleeping on a rock.

  Most of all, my head felt like someone was testing a 3/8 inch Black & Decker cordless drill on me. They'd obviously got past the skull just behind my right ear, and were tunneling merrily and industriously inward.

  I sat up. The pain in my back dropped off a notch, migrating up into my skull.

  I reflected that I was probably in better shape than George, and reached for my medical kit. I dug out two white pills. Each contained 300 milligrams of acetaminophen, 15 milligrams of caffeine, and, most important, eight milligrams of codeine phosphate. All mixed in with microcrystalline cellulose, sodium starch glycolate, and zinc stearate to hold it in pill format.

  They're available in house brands at fifteen bucks for 200 pills at your local pharmacist. Non habit-forming, don't take more than two at a time, six times a day, and very constipating. Available only by prescription in the States, but in Canada, the pharmacist will hand you a bottle if you ask.

  Illegal in any form in some European countries. And generally capable of mitigating the malevolent migrating migraine.

  They also seem to make me cheerful, even beyond the relief from pain, which is only partial at best. I swallowed a fruit bar, because the pills make one's stomach feel a bit nauseated. Then I extracted myself from my sleeping bag like some overweight butterfly.

  With my shoes and jacket on, I unzipped the tent, and shuffled off through the underbrush to have my morning pee behind a spruce. The morning sun, poking through the beeches and maples, turned the stream to gold.

  When I got back to the camp, Belinda was sitting on one of the logs beside the firepit. She had her sleeping bag wrapped around her and was watching the lake. It was cold enough to see her breath above the charred logs of the fireplace.

  The surface of the lake was brass with whirls of mist rising off, like the ghosts of a million snakes reaching for the sunlight. A loon sounded from somewhere in those mists. It was beyond words.

  I sat on the opposite side of the firepit. "You can see the lake better from the rock by the shore."

  She turned, pretty enough that she didn't need to smile. "If I sit here, someone might make a fire."

  "You could make one yourself."

  Then she smiled, because she had something to smile at. "I tried that a couple of times. Guys get edgy when women make fires. They seem to think women shouldn't be messing with matches." She squinted into the sun. "I guess men can't make babies, so fire is the next best thing."

  "I thought maybe we could just get off without a fire this morning," I said. "The sooner we get all this over with the happier I'll be."

  She indicated the tents. "They're in no hurry, I guess."

  She was right, so I hunched myself through the dew-damp woods to get some small branches from a large spruce for kindling. Belinda marched into the woods in the direction of the toilet area.

  There was enough wood that I didn't have to cut anything but the kindling.

  No, we didn't need a fire, I thought, as I knelt to light the match. I never have a morning fire when I camp alone, preferring to cook my food on the little white-gas stove I take with me.

  But a community seems to prefer one, and I was first up, so I made one. Not a big one, like the night before. "Hi, son," I said to the first good flame.

  There's a movement in many parts of the world to go without campfires of any kind. Campfires start forest fires. They use up biomass and slowly clear out the forest around the campsite, as campers steadily cut any usable trees.

  They also leave a human mark on the area, a circle of stones around blackened logs. To the true eco-huggers, no human mark on the landscape is acceptable. That includes the campfire rings.

  When I was young, campers were told to throw their cans into the fire. The cans rusted quicker after that, and blended in with the landscape better.

  Later, that became a no-no. People were told to sink their debris into the lake, where it would go to the bottom. Presumably to sink into the muck forever.

  I think the no-mark freaks are a bunch of crazies who will probably save the planet. In a few years people like me, who were found to have built fires in fire pits on the shores of remote lakes, will be put in the same category as those who hunted the last mammoths to extinction.

  So I got the fire going, and when it was crackling and dancing Belinda and I stared into it. I didn't have a mammoth haunch to roast over the flames.

  "You're probably wondering why I'm hanging out with him," she said abruptly, nodding towards the tent where she and Bob had spent the night. She spoke just above a whisper, and I figured Bob wouldn't pick it up.

  Just as well. I wasn't quite ready to flee screaming across the hills pursued by a jealous switchblade-waving Brit.

  I didn't reply. No, I wasn't wondering, actually. I don't wonder about other people's motivations; in fact I refuse to wonder about them. I somehow feel it's my way of respecting their privacy. I've often wished people would do the same for me.

  I tried staring off across the lake and praying someone else would get up. I looked for a pot or can to accidentally knock over, noisily. I went down to the lake and got a pot of water, which I set on a grate over the fire.

  "It was the danger," she went on. "I wanted to walk with the tiger. Play with the cobra. Run with the crazy lone wolf."

  She looked up and blinked her wonderful eyes at me. "I'm searching, you see. I've been searching for something or someone all my life."

  I suffer from the Teddy Bear syndrome. People, especially women, want to squeeze me. Since most of them don't have the nerve, they often tell me their life stories, instead. A hug would be quicker, at least.

  I said nothing, having a spine like jelly. I didn't really care if she'd been searching for the ideal crunchy peanut butter since she was three.

  "I've never known what it was I was looking for," she went on, still looking at me. I kept looking across the water, as the mists faded. By now I could see three loons in the middle of the lake.

  "But I always figured, I guess, that someone would show me something, and a great big white light would flash, and I'd find a path with my name on it." She turned to watch the fire, and poke at it with a stick.

  "Not him?" I asked.

  "I found out how petty danger can be," she said. "It wasn't the edge of some giant cosmic evil. It turned out to be all insecurity and bluster. Don't get me wrong." She shook her head. "He's dangerous enough. Push him and he'll slice you up. But he'll be doing it because of a bad childhood, not a satanic soul."

  "Must have been quite a contrast with George," I said.

  Her face scrunched up for just a moment and her voice quavered. "George was Mr. Gentle," she said. "That's what I liked about him. He should have been a flower-power kid from the sixties. But I guess he was born a few years too late and a few miles too far north. So he took up a love affair with the lakes and trees around here." She had beautiful, sad eyes. For a moment, I would have followed her anywhere.

  I nodded at the lake. She looked, and knew what I meant. There were some things worth loving.

  "So you tried to tap into a big and gentle love."

  "Yup."

  "Did it work?" I asked; she was going to tell me anyway, short of my grabbing my can
oe and paddling frantically across the lake.

  "Hell yes. I joined his list of things to be loved."

  "So what happened? No great big white light?"

  "No great big white light. Nice person; wrong path."

  "So you didn't come back to ditch Bob for George."

  Her forehead furrowed, as if she'd never understand how someone could ever conceive such a thing. Me, I wondered why she would drag current boyfriend back to the home turf of previous boyfriend. Natural shit disturber, or true innocent, or what?

  "Of course not. George was past history. I figured he would help outfit us because he knew me. Besides, Bob wanted to go out into the wilds, and these are the only wilds I knew." She poked at the fire with a stick, another activity I figured was restricted by law to males. "I don't know why Bob got so uptight."

  "Maybe he sensed you were going to ditch him, too, and didn't know you weren't returning to George."

  A long pause. "Maybe. I've never understood men all that well."

  Myself, I always figured all women should take a night course on the True Nature of Men. But nobody listens to me.

  "You were George's girl for a while?"

  "Almost a year, give or take a bit. That's a long time, for me. He was a good person, whatever his wife might say about him and me."

  "But you didn't love him enough to stay."

  She turned to me. "I don't love, Mr. Szczedziwoj. I won't let myself. We need some more wood on the fire. And somebody has to wake the rest of those putzes up."

  While I was poking at the fire, a crackling sound came from behind me. I turned to see Kele Marten coming through the woods. "Hi, folks," he said without smiling.

  "Been up long?" Belinda asked.

  "Gotta see the sun come up, you know," the artist answered.

  "In the woods?" I asked.

  "From the top of the hill."

  "Worshipping the sun?" I was kidding, and not stopping to think.

  He turned away. "Actually, yeah. Or close enough.”

  I didn't know what to say. Political correctness reaches Cedar Lake on a sunny September morning. Don't get lippy with the natives, I thought. I went to get something to eat from my tent. This campsite seemed to be full of people looking for their gods. I hoped they had more luck than I'd ever had. I thought that Kele had a better chance at the top of a hill than Belinda was likely to get.

  I figured I'd wait till someone found a god, then get its address.

  About this time Bob Tucker appeared yawning and ungodlike at the mouth of his tent, and someone in the other tent began to move around.

  In a few minutes, the rest of the party was gathered around the fire, scratching and muttering and desperately trying to be polite to each other.

  While other people poured themselves coffee, I went over and hauled my gear and sleeping bag out of my tent. Then I folded the tent as tightly as I could, after brushing the usual collection of twigs and pine needles off the bottom.

  Ned DeVincent, the bald geologist, looked at me, then rolled his own tent onto its back to let the morning sun dry the bottom a bit. It had obviously been put down on damp ground. You get a lot of needles stuck to the plastic that way. Kele subsequently took the hint and did the same with George's tent.

  It's one of the best aspects of self-supporting tents; you can roll them over like a half-ball onto their backs.

  The coffee seemed to revive everybody. I can remember when I used to love that morning coffee. But I can't, anymore. The principal cause of migraine headaches is the expansion of arteries in the head. Caffeine actually shrinks the arteries again, so it provides relief from the headache. But after a few hours, the headache comes back, worse than ever.

  I didn't need that. Not with the way my head felt already. I had weak tea.

  We ate cold breakfasts, mostly fruit and granola, without talking about anything of consequence. The National Society for Study of Depressed Group Interaction should have showed up for a case study. It would have got a Nobel Prize for something or other.

  An hour later, we were portaging to Fox Lake, through a grove of maples and oak. Kele had offered to carry my pack again, but I knew the geobuddies were going to make two trips, so I figured I'd not build up any sort of moral debt load.

  "Don't like having the natives carrying the white man's burden? he asked with a quizzical expression, as he swung the heavy aluminum canoe onto his shoulders.

  "Independent," I said. "Don't like owing people favors."

  "Damn,” he said. "But you owe me most of Scarborough for that portage I did yesterday."

  "I'm moving onto the reservation until you pay the fourteen hundred beaver pelts you owe me for the granola this morning."

  "Cold granola," he said. "Eight hundred pelts, max."

  "How's the portage?" I asked, changing the subject before we got into treaties that were good as long as the sun shone and the rivers ran.

  "Fine. I once knew a guy who said there were no portages. There were only goddamn portages. But this one's not bad. One steep section. Five hundred meters, total." He paused to think. "Make that six hundred meters. The water's down on Fox Lake, and you have to carry a bit further."

  I followed him along the portage trail, he carrying everything he came with. I figured he planned to come back for George's stuff.

  I carried my pack. The canoe would be the second trip.

  Now, I'd like to explain that it was a damn fine portage, as portages go. Part of the way was on open rock, in bright sunlight, and part was through a dandy grove of aspens, just starting to turn yellow for the autumn.

  It was awful, especially the beauty. I love the planet and I loved this woodland, but I had slipped suddenly into a black- dog depression deep enough to swallow the Titanic, let alone one retired economist-turned-photographer. It was Eden without the hope of redemption.

  It was sudden, as usual, but not unexpected. I'd been trying to remain in the normal range of human emotions throughout this ordeal, and had been doing pretty good for quite a while.

  So I crashed, sunk through twelve mud-layered strata of depression. That old black dog just loped out of the deep pine forest and snuffed my optimism and cheer down its throat.

  Now I was hauling the goddamn pack over the goddamn portage trail with a bunch of goddamn strangers. On the way to you-know- what kind of lake.

  I trudged steadily along the trail, willing myself into the ground.

  "We could kill them all, I suppose." Kele's voice came cheerfully from right behind me. I stepped aside and let him trudge past me carrying his canoe and pack.

  "Then," he added, "we could make a pact to stay a couple of miles apart at all times." He tilted the canoe back to look at me.

  "Antisocial canoeists of Ontario," he explained, "Charter member."

  "Can I join?" I asked. "As a mascot or something."

  "You're in," he said. "But I want to tell you something; anyone who shows up at the annual meeting is chucked out of the club."

  I laughed, just a bit. It was enough to cheer me up. I could go on. I went on. I could hear Bob and Belinda coming up the trail.

  Not far ahead Kele left the trail and headed into the woods. He paused as I caught up.

  "Gotta go this way," he said.

  "Short cut?" I asked.

  "Remember how I told you the lake's down a couple of feet?" he explained. "This way saves dragging your canoe through a quarter mile of mud."

  It did mean a quarter mile of pushing through some pretty heavy bush and up a rough slope as high as a garage. I could hear Bob's English accent encouraging Belinda.

  When we got to the lake I saw what he meant. The bay leading to the lake by the normal path was a tangled mass of water plants on top of brown shining mud. The creek wandered through it, too small and shallow to canoe. At the other end of the bay, under the yellow portage sign, the geobuddies stood. We waved. They waved, then started back.

  Bob and Belinda were
traveling light, of course, as well as being young. They settled in while I went back for my canoe and Kele went back for George's camping gear. Part way back we met the geobuddies, lugging their canoe and a pack up the rock face.

  "I used enjoy this more when I was younger," Patrick said to me in passing. I knew what he meant. "Can you wait for me," he asked. I glanced at Kele, but he was already disappearing into the trees, on the way back to get George's stuff. It was a distinct pleasure to know someone who really was a loner.

  But I waited for Patrick, anyway.

  He appeared, without Ned, five minutes later. I'd spent the time watching the mushrooms, so the time wasn't a total loss.

  We started back in total silence. Silence on my part. Patrick, of course, gabbled like a chicken at feeding time.