Chapter 10
Sometimes you need someone basically unflappable. Seth, at least, was. He got out a small notebook from his daypack, and started asking questions.
"When did this happen?"
The Geobuddies both started talking at once, then Patrick fell silent, and Ned took over. "We found it like this when we got back."
"From?"
"We went to the lake, the one where George was killed."
"Without your canoe."
"We decided to scout the path first." Ned waved at the forest in a vague way.
While Seth was taking notes, I glanced around. Patrick was shuffling his feet and looking at the woods. Pica caught my eye and winked, then rolled her eyes upward.
It suddenly became a very funny thing. Here I was, in the middle of nowhere, a policeman taking notes over the body of a canoe, and someone out in the bush with a rifle, probably sighting in on my head as I stood there. I winked back at Pica.
No doubt about it, I was still the prime suspect. A guy dies a violent death on a small dark lake, and some other guy (me) shows up with the wallet of the deceased, claiming he accidentally snagged the body.
But what about Ned and Patrick? They’d hired George and had been with him before his death. Maybe they’d had a nasty little argument, and things got out of hand. It happens.
Then there was Bob, our British tourist. He’d threatened George and was known to be short-tempered and occasionally violent. And he’d been in the area, although not close enough to make him a better suspect than me.
And Kele - he was sleeping with George’s wife, at least according to Pica. That could lead to a confrontation, or just to a quick resolution of someone’s problems.
As for Pica - nah. She may have claimed to be a psychopath, but I didn’t really feel psychopaths ever admitted it. She was just weird, nothing more.
Besides - who had the rifle?
Pica was right about one thing. In the ground, in the water, in the trees, there was a constant battle as living things stalked and killed and ate each other. The forest was a battle that made Stalingrad look minor. I figured if people would just stop talking I could hear the tiny screams and the gnawing sounds.
I shivered, then decided to return to my previous view of the wilderness as something of an Eden. Denial. I liked that.
Then, somehow, I got the feeling that I was missing something, but I didn’t know what it was. I looked at the policeman taking notes, and the two geobuddies inspecting the hole in the canoe. I began to think that God was playing chess and Seth had been dropped, like a random pawn into the wrong game.
No, I thought, not a pawn. Maybe a castle, high walls and straight lines, and belonging in his own corner.
I turned, to find Pica looking at me, solemnly. “If I had a wish,” she said, I would wish you a good space, your own space, out in the wildest of the wild.” She thought a bit. “A little lake, maybe only a beaver pond, with evening coming on and your tent set up, and a loon or two. And a light rain, of course.” She smiled. “I know about your photography.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just blinked a few times.
Pica leaned over and whispered, “If you want to add a wild and naked woman to your next few pictures, just let me know.” Then she smiled. “But of course, you’ve got your own places to go and things that just have to get done.”
But she knew darned well that nothing I did actually had to get done, except maybe dying someday. I gave her my biggest smile, and said, “If I change my photography, I’ll give you a call.”
“It’s a wide and lonesome planet,” Pica said, “and some nights you’ll want to sleep with your hand on a warm breast instead of your cold camera.” She looked over to the others. Seth was coming back towards us.
“Done?” I asked the policeman.
“Oh, yes.” He folded up the notepad and put it into his pocket.
“What are they going to do about their canoe?” I could see the hole in it was about the size of a baseball.
“They think they can patch it with a piece of birch bark and some pine tar.” The cop sounded skeptical.
“It can be done,” I said. “What were they doing here, anyway?” They’d obviously left even earlier than we had.
“Said they were coming back to try to figure out things themselves. Said their knowledge of the backwoods might be an asset.” He got the pack, paddles, and lifejackets. “Maybe figured a city cop wouldn’t know much.” He grunted. “Trip on a tree root or something.” Looking at Pica, “are you ready to go, young woman?”
“Sure am.” She looked at me, put her arms behind her head and stretched. “Shall we get this canoe on the move?”
I didn’t reply, just grabbed the forward end of the canoe and put it onto my shoulders. I wanted to take the front end so I didn’t have to watch her while we walked. My male imagination was already going into fantasy mode. Young enough, I thought, to be my daughter.
Pica and I led the way, carrying the canoe, with Seth following with the pack.
With only a couple of wrong turns, I led the way to Thomson Lake, making it there in reasonable time.
It was as quiet and dark as I’d remembered it. We sat the canoe down on the shore.
“This is it?” The policeman’s question seemed redundant to me, but, like he said, he was a city boy.
I pointed out the direction I’d come from, and the area where I’d caught George.
“Might as well have a look.”
“Guess so.” I slid the canoe into the water. “You coming?” I asked Pica.
“I’ll just sit here and swat deerflies,” Pica said.
“Okay.” The big cop looked a bit disappointed.
We went out on the lake. I showed him approximately where I’d done everything. He nodded a lot and took notes. He surveyed the water, eyeing the trees, the lily pads, the little afternoon waves. We had sandwiches and snacks that we’d brought with us.
We found George’s canoe on the downwind side of the lake, overturned. It was dark green, and only a couple of inches of it were above water. Until you got quite close, it looked like another mudbar among the water weeds.
We rolled it over, and Seth held it while I leaned over and scooped most of the water from it using my required-by-law bailing bucket. Then we tied it to the back of my canoe and paddled into open water.
“What,” he said, “do you think are the odds of you actually snagging George’s body.”
I could see his back, but not his expression.
“Given,” I said, “that we have a few acres of lake, a body that has to be at the right place and the right depth, a tiny hook.” I paused, then went on. “The chance that on a lake normally deserted virtually the whole year, two men should cross it on the same day and one should find the other on the end of a hook?”
“When a person drowns,” he said, “we sometimes drag the lake with lots of boats. Lots of really big grappling hooks. And most of the time they don’t come up with a body on a patch of water smaller than this. After dragging the damn place half the day and most of the night.”
“And I got it the first time, with a half-inch hook.”
He didn’t reply. I watched his back.
“Makes you wonder,” I observed.
“What are the odds?” he asked. He nodded out at the lake. “A lake this size. Probably never had a body in it before. Body would come up in a day or two.”
“One in a gazillion?” I offered.
“That was my thought.”
“Then again,” I noted, “I was fishing the downwind end of the lake, just at the drop-off point. Any suspended object would drift with the lake currents until it got to this end, then just sit there for a while.”
He seemed to ponder this. “What’s that do to the odds?”
“One in a million, maybe. You going to read me my rights? Or does the hanging come first.”
“You planning on rolling the boat? Maybe standing on my head till I quit annoying you?”
“There are some people I know who might think so.”
“I can understand that.”
“There was the incident with your neighbour’s dog...”
A knot formed in my stomach. A decade or so before, I’d been found in my neighbour’s back yard with a baseball bat, trying to catch a noisy dog. A good lawyer had convinced the judge that, having gone almost three days without sleep, I wasn’t really aware of what I’d been doing. There’d been a lot of stress at the time. But it was in the records.
“No doubt.”
“Some might say you have a history of violent action. Especially against things you don’t like.”
“So I might get off with manslaughter if I claimed I killed the guy thinking he was an angry bear or something.”
“Just saying what other people might say. They might say you don’t always remember things you just did.”
“I still didn’t do it, you know.”
He sighed. “One in a million, you claim.”
“First guy I ever caught, so I can’t be sure.”
“I don’t really like this lake,” he said. “Let’s get back to shore.”
“Worried I might try to down you?”
“More worried about that missing rifle.”
“You got a point there.” I leaned into the paddle.
Now I’ve got to say that I’m a loner a lot of the time. I’ve made my way through this life as best I could, not always making the best choices, but at least the ones that seemed best to me at the time.
I get annoyed at people who step into my space and don’t care, because I like my space and I try not to step into other people’s personal space.
Aside from that one incident, which, as I said, was at a bad time in my life, I’ve had little to do with the law.
I’ve never intentionally harmed anyone. Or none that I can remember.
When we got to the shore, Seth got out of the canoe, then helped me out of the canoe. We dragged George’s canoe onshore.
Seth inspected George’s canoe but didn’t seem to find anything. He turned to me and shrugged. There were no handcuffs in his hands.
There was also no sign of Pica.
However, a man was sitting at the base of a tree, whittling something with a honking big knife.
‘Hi,” he said.
“Hi, Kele,” I replied, looking around.
“Lost something?”
“Pica. She was here when we launched the canoe.”
“Pica’s not here?” Seth looked around, then at Kele.
“What,” I asked, “is the difference between a friggin canoe expedition and a friggin French bedroom farce?”
“Beats me,” Kele answered. “What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know either, in this case,” I yelled.
“Calm down,” Seth said. He turned to Kele. “Which way did you come?”
“The back way, over the hills.” He pointed to the west end of the lake.
“Then maybe she went back over the portage. I’ll go see if I can find her.” The cop stomped off towards Cedar Lake.
“Over the hills?” I asked.
Kele nodded.
“Aren’t you Indians just supposed to grunt or something, if you’re being uncommunicative?” I asked, sitting beside him. “Do I have to get into the firewater?”
“You brought some?”
“No.”
“Just as well. Nothing worse than a drunken whiteskin.”
“Amen to that.”
“There are three ways to get to this lake,” Kele said.
I raised my eyebrows. I can be pretty uncommunicative, if I want. Most of the time, that’s exactly what I want.
“First,” he went on, “is the portage from Cedar Lake. Your cop friend’s busy checking every bush on it for signs of his girlfriend.”
“His girlfriend?”
“You didn’t know?” Kele observed me for a moment. “I guess you couldn’t, could you? Oh, yes, the nice policeman spends more than his due time making sure Hawk Lake Lodge is safe and secure. Especially on Wednesday evenings, after his shift’s over. Not that I know what Pica sees in him.”
“I thought they didn’t hardly know each other,” I said.
“An Oscar to both of them, I guess. They know each other really well, if you get my drift. Anyway, the other way here is the way you came, assuming you’re not lying about that, from McFriggit Lake, just before you killed George.” He looked at me. “You’d have to be pretty nutso to come that way, and nutso people kill other people.”
“We tried to get in from Fox Lake,” I started to say.
“Interesting,” he said. “Why would you do that.”
“To see if Bob could have done it when Belinda wasn’t looking.”
“And I bet you didn’t get too far. It’s rough country in there.”
“You got it, Redskin. So what’s the third way in?”
“Red Lake.”
I got out the map. “Even more nutso.” There’s rough country between the end of Red Lake and Thomson Lake.”
“But no swamps. And if you get on top of this hill, there’s a lot of bare rock. Not bad walking, in parts.”
I pondered. “But you didn’t carry a canoe all that way.”
“That,” he said, “would be rough. It would be nice to have someone to help you carry stuff if you really wanted to go there.”
“A guide?”
“Someone who know the country pretty well would come in handy.”
I got up. It was getting late and you can sit on a rock only so long. “George?”
“He knew every bit of this area.” Kele got up, too. “We might want to make a fire.” He indicated the sun. “It’s getting late. And the cop might not find Pica.”
“Where the heck would she go?”
“She’s a wood sprite. She comes and goes in the woods like you wouldn’t believe. If she doesn’t want to be found, she won’t be.”
We had the fire going when Seth got back.
“A fire?” he asked.
“Pica?” I asked.
“No sign of her between here and watzit - Cedar Lake.” The cop leaned against a tree.
“Lawn chairs,” Kele observed.
“No sign of the geobuddies?” I asked.
“Not them or their holey canoe,” Seth said. “I guess they got it fixed.”
“Lawn chairs,” Kele repeated.
“Any chance Pica went with them?” I stretched and walked around. Seth shrugged.
“The lightweight, aluminum lawn chair,” Kele said quietly, “is the second most important invention in back country travel.”
“After…?”
“The canoe, of course. First you paddle, then you gotta have a place to sit.”
“He’s got a point,” Seth observed, looking around for someplace to sit down. “Why the fire? And where could Pica have gone?”
He did have a point about lawn chairs. Out in the bush there is wonder and loveliness and wildness and danger and peace and calm, but damn near no comfortable place to sit. You can walk across swamps and rocks and beaver dams, and you can sleep on pine needles or even rocks. But sitting is a pain most of the time. Rocks are covered with moss and are never flat and never in the right place. Logs would be nice to sit on, but most of them are either half-decayed or part of a forty-foot tree. The ground is damp. You can warm yourself in front of a fire and get crotch rot at the same time.
I once hauled a lawn chair camping, and God, it was great. Sitting on it, I mean. Not hauling it. Someday I’ll invent a lawn chair that’s really light and will fold up enough to be worth portaging. I tried once. Spent a lot of time in the basement, but didn’t end up with something that was safe enough to sit on.
Once or twice I’ve come to a campsite where someone’s left a lawn chair, and I always felt guilty about enjoying it so much.
While I’m at it, I might as wel
l say that comfort in camping is one of my goals. As the guy said, “I don’t go to the wilderness to rough it. I go to smooth it; things are rough enough in the city." I’d be more than happy if a helicopter dropped a cabin every night where I chose to camp. Then left.
I have sought my freedom wherever I could, in this short life. I am barred and locked and chained by seasons and fragile flesh and my own ignorance and the collective insanity of my society. Out in the woods, I never think, “this is great”. I think, “this is how it should be.” That’s all.
“We’ve got to have a fire, because we’ll be spending the night here,” I explained.
“We can’t make it back to the lodge?” Seth wanted to know.
“Can’t leave Pica, for one thing,” Kele said.
“Yeah.”
I was glad it was a warm September. I’d planned to be back at the lodge about dark, and hadn’t brought any warm clothing, let alone tents and sleeping bags. I knew Seth hadn’t brought anything for overnight, and Pica’s pack hadn’t looked big enough to carry more than a lunch.
So we stood around and mumbled male things around the fire for a couple of hours, then Kele got a fold-up saw out of his packsack and we all went off to find enough firewood to last the night.
As with any area that hasn’t been overrun with humans, there was lots of dry deadwood, even if most of it came in the form of branches too big to break. We took turns sawing them into six-foot lengths. With wood that long, you put one end into the fire, then push it in as it burns.
Finally, we cut one maple (please forgive us) and propped it between a couple of trees. If a person were careful, he could sit on the maple and lean his back against a tree.
Seth and I had brought more food than a day trip would have required, but it was still going to be a thin time before we got back to the lodge. Seth asked me about foraging off the land. Far as I knew, I pointed out, the only real food was acorns from the white oak trees up on the hill.
“They’re edible?” Seth asked.
“Shell them and boil them in many changes of water, till most of the tannic acid’s gone, and you can eat them. Takes a while, though.”
Kele passed around some commercial energy bars. I hoped he had brought lots.
We leaned against our various trees, and ate much of what was left of our food and watched the sun get lower and every now and then called out to the woods, “Pica!” The sound bounced off the cliff at the far end of the lake, but there was no response, except just after the sun had gone behind the cliff, there was a splash in the water, a buzzing sound in the tree branches overhead, and then the echo of three rifle shots.
I looked around for the other two. They were hiding behind trees, just like me. Seth had drawn a small automatic pistol from his shoulder holster.
“I don’t feel popular anymore,” Kele said. “I think that was a rifle.”
“A twenty-two,” Seth said. “Maybe the one that got stolen from Ned and Patrick’s canoe.”
We waited, and it got dark. Kele said, “Someone better add some wood to the fire, before it goes out.”
There was no answer from Seth, or me so Kele said a few unkind things and went to the fire. He pushed in a bunch of logs and sat down against a tree. “You guys planning on spending the night crouched behind your trees?”
I had to admit the idea seemed pretty good to me. But Seth put his gun away, and sat beside Kele, so I joined them, wondering if I’d be aware if I suddenly became, like, dead.
“Not much chance of anybody hitting anything in the dark,” I said. But I didn’t know, really.
“Not with a twenty-two, not at that range,” Seth said, getting up to get more wood from the pile.
“Maybe they got closer,” I said, hoping for someone to contradict me.
“Doubt it,” Kele said. “Just too uncomfortable running through the woods in the dark.”
“Don’t you feel like shooting back?” I asked Seth.
“Can’t hit anything at this range with a rifle. Let alone a pistol,” he said. “So there’s no point in letting whoever it is know I’ve got one.”
I had to concede the point. We might need that element of surprise, I figured.
“Can we sneak up on the guy?” Kele asked. “Not me,” he added, “I haven’t improved my skills since the other night.”
“Might as well eat, then,” I said. I dug into my pack and came up with my bag of sandwiches. Somehow I hadn’t managed to finish them. I offered them around, but Seth hesitated, which made Kele ask, “What are they?”
“Tofu and zucchini sandwiches,” Seth said.
“Good memory,” I noted, biting into one.
“Some things you don’t forget.”
“Isn’t tofu a bit squishy?” Kele asked.
“Aisha cuts it into slices and dehydrates them a bit,” I said. “I got her one of those food dehydrators for Christmas.”
“Why?” Kele asked.
“I was hoping she’d make some beef jerky.” I mumbled.
“Jerky?” Seth asked.
I took out the bag that Aisha didn’t know about and traded my store-bought jerky with the others. I got a can of Pepsi from Kele and a roast beef sandwich from Seth. I figured the tofu and zucchini sandwiches could keep till morning.
“Wish we had some of those pickled mandarins Pica had,” I said.
There were a couple of grunts of agreement.
“Where the hell did Pica get to?” Seth said, abruptly.
“And who’s shooting at us?” Kele added.
“Maybe she went off with Ned and Patrick,” I said. “The geobuddies. After all, we came in from the lake and Kele here came in from the west, so she must have gone east, towards Cedar Lake. And,” I added, “those two were there, patching their canoe.”
“Why would she do that,” Seth asked.
“She’s Pica,” Kele said, “she does whatever she wants to do. You ought to know that.”
“We still don’t know,” I said, “who broke the geobuddies canoe and stole their rifle.”
“Or who’s shooting at us,” Kele said. “Or why?” He seemed to have a large supply of those energy bars, and a big bottle of bottled water. As well as a nice warm jacket.
“Well,” said Seth, “we’re not shooting at us, so that leaves Ned and Patrick.”
“But their rifle was stolen,” I noted.
“So they said,” Seth said, putting a log a bit further into the fire, and taking a drink of Pepsi.
“And someone broke their canoe.”
“So they said,” Seth said again.
“Or it could be Bob,” I said. “There’s not that many people roaming these hills. And nobody’s seen him since last night.”
“But why would anyone shoot at us?” Kele wanted to know.
“From that distance?” Seth got up to get more wood. “Probably just to scare us off.”
“Like they don’t want us to go to the west,” I said.
“Guess what,” I said. “I have no plans to go to the west when the sun comes up.” I turned to Kele. “You didn’t see anyone on that hill? You came from that way.”
“So he claims,” Seth said.
“I didn’t see anybody up there,” Kele said. “But there’s a lot of room to hide up that way.”
“It could be,” Seth said, that Ned and Patrick are out gunning for us for some reason. Or that Pica found the rifle. Or that Bob stole the rifle. Or that either or both of you killed George or one or both of you is in cahoots with either Bob or Ned or Patrick. Or Pica or all of them, or any combination thereof.” He paused for a bite of a sandwich. “That someone is trying to keep us from finding out something. Or trying to keep us away from the hill. Or shooting at us for no particular reason. Maybe George died for no particular reason.”
Or,” he added, “maybe one of us killed George and someone out there is out for vengeance.”
“You even suspect Pica?” Kele asked. “I’d think you knew her better than that.
/> “I know her,” Seth said, “well enough to know that almost anything’s possible with that woman.”
Somewhere an owl hooted. Or maybe, I thought, some commando force was sneaking up on us, ready to slit all our throats before we could even stand up. Or maybe the loon call on the lake was a secret signal.
Have you ever thought how much uncertainty there is in this world? Or is it mostly when that most dangerous of killers, the human being, is on the loose?
I have wandered through a lot of beautiful hemlock groves and slugged through mud-clinging swamp. At what I charge for my pictures, I’m almost getting up to the legal minimum wage in income for my art.
God, what a human being will do to feel free for a few days. Those of us who haven’t a clue what they really mean by freedom, out there hauling canoes through the bush.
I’d have told you that my freest freedom was getting away from people. And here I was, once again, sitting around a campfire with people I barely knew. Only this time, guys with guns were all over the frigging woods.
“I gather that you know Pica fairly well,” I said. “Almost as well as Kele, here, knows George’s wife.”
There was a long pause in the conversation. I got up and got some more wood for the fire, then tried to get myself comfortable on the log. My guestimate was that, if I fell asleep, I’d fall sideways onto the log, then backwards into a small pine. But I was getting sleepy.
“I can see why George tried to kill you,” Kele said. “Say Seth, can I borrow your gun for a couple of seconds.”
“I get the first shot,” Seth said, looking at me.
“When I was young, or at least much younger, I was a believer,” Seth said. “I believed that there was order in this universe. I believed God kept it that way. I had good grades, a nifty girlfriend, and most of my future planned out.”
“And then.”
“It all went to hell. I found out the planet was breaking all my rules. And most of the people were breaking them too. Even the machines wouldn’t give me change. The cars didn’t stop at the corners to let me cross.”
“Ran over your foot.” Kele shifted and a few leaves dropped from the tree, from out of the dark into the firelight, dead, dead, dead, onto the impersonal forest floor, breaking no rules at all.
“Only people break the rules,” I said, as the fire flared with new wood.
“What?”
“It’s overcast,” I noted. “No moon; not even stars.”
“How’s Sally Aden, in a bed?” Seth asked.
“How’s Pica, in the back of a cruiser?” Kele asked.
“I hope there’s a warm front coming in,” I said. “Might rain, though. What do you think?” An owl hooted. “Maybe it’s calling your name,” I said to Kele.
“Actually, Sally is just fine in bed,” Kele said. “Not especially adventurous, but happy most of the time. It’s darn nice to have a genuinely happy person in your arms. When she laughs, her tits jiggle so nicely. So, about Pica.”
“Like having a harem, and you pick one in the dark and spend all night trying to figure out which one you’re making love to,” Seth said. “Did you kill George for his wife?”
“There’s three ways you can approach the wilderness,” I said. “You can be an observer, a predator, or you can be prey.” A loon laughed in the dark on the lake. The owl hooted again. A night bug crawled across my hand. Pica remained out there, somewhere in the dark.
“No need to,” Kele said. “George knew all about us. He approved, actually. Strange, you think, don’t you.”
“Why the hell would he approve of somebody sleeping with his wife?” Seth was sounding tired.
“Most people,” I said, “are observers. Painters, like Kele, or photographers, like me. Or just walkers and lookers. And it’s all just like a big TV screen to them. But when you’re a hunter, the whole wilderness is completely different. You see it through a different side of your personality. You process it through a different part of your brain.”
“They’d reached an arrangement,” Kele said, sounding like the only one of us still wide awake. “He’d had a girlfriend on the side for a couple of years, and Sally had me. She owned the lodge, but he knew how to run it. If they broke up, they’d have lost the lodge and they’d both have been miserable.” He paused to kick the fire into a rising cloud of sparks. Seth and I moved our legs out of the way. “And in the last year, he couldn’t do anything in bed anyway. He had cancer, you know.”
“No,” said Seth. “I didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t show much.”
I was thinking about Kele and the bugs, the dragonfly he’d gently blown off his hand, and the ant he’d crushed in the canoe. He’d said, at the time, “The ant was headed for death. All that was ahead of it was a few hours of suffering as it tried to find its way back to its nest. I don’t mind death. But nothing should suffer.”
I remembered how he’d said those things when I first met him. And I wondered if he’d put George into the same category as the ant. If he’d decided to spare his friend a few months of suffering. If George had wanted to die out somewhere in the landscape he loved.
It was just a thought, of course.
“He didn’t tell you?”
“We only talked couple of times,” the cop said.
“He didn’t seem to mind about you and Pica.” Kele got a couple of energy bars out of his bag and passed them around.
“He had a heart-to-heart talk with me, and he had a serious talk with Pica, but I don’t suppose it made much difference to either of us. Talking to Pica is like talking to the wind, and I was a little too involved with my own problems.”
This was news to me. Maybe Seth, the cop, had had a fight with George and had gone running through the woods for miles and miles and found him at this little lake and killed him. And maybe a bloody fucking werewolf had come out of the hillside and killed George. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be somewhere else. Somewhere alone and away from these oversexed maniacs who somehow surrounded me out here away the hell and gone out in the goddamn bush. And it was real late and I was real tired and when I get tired I hate everybody and if George had shown up dead or alive I’d probably have beat him with a paddle on the spot.
Why did I think George had been beat with a paddle?
“Once,” I said, “I went on a camping expedition with nothing but chocolate bars. I was young then. I figured all I needed for the three-day trip was energy. I figured I’d catch up on nutrition when I got back.” Then, before they could reveal any more about the continuing serial, “Sex at Hawk Lake Lodge” (In every bed! In every car that stops there! Behind every hemlock bush!), I went on, “Took me years to work up an appetite for chocolate bars again.”
Unfortunately, I ran out of brainpower at that time.
“Why Pica?” Kele tossed the energy bar wrapper into the fire. It formed an agonized little face in the coals and vanished.
“Her choice.” Seth paused. “She seemed like the reincarnation of my first girlfriend, and my wife left me for a while after the trouble in Toronto, so I was pretty lonely out here.” Seth dug some bags of peanuts out of his pack and passed them around. “Are you a real Indian, yet?”
How far does one have to go into the forest to get away from junk food? I closed my eyes and pondered this. Eventually I found my face in a small pine. I seemed to be clutching it.
For a moment I thought I’d been shot, but eventually my foggy brain figured out that I’d fallen sideways onto the log, then backwards into the pine, as I’d thought would happen. I missed the part where Kele told us whether he was a real Indian or not, I guess.
“Look,” Kele said, “we’ll take turns standing guard. You two have a piss, then go to sleep for a couple of hours.”
“Do you think we need guarding?” I asked.
“No but if you don’t have someone on guard, you probably won’t sleep. Besides, the person awake can keep the fire going and put out any embers that land on the other guys while they’re sleeping.”
Sounded good to me. Ten minutes later I was curled up on rocks and twigs and wet soil and dry soil and with a backpack for a pillow and Seth on the other side of the fire. It wasn’t very comfortable, so I must have stayed awake for over a minute.
Death on a Small, Dark Lake Page 11
