We thanked the man, and took off for the kelp-bed—where the ribbon of kelp-free water showed perfectly clearly, just as he had said. Across on the other side the Skookumchuck was still roaring furiously and dangerously—while we slipped in easily through the back entrance. Peter and John were still glooming, because we hadn’t gone through where Henry did.
I think it is a mistake to go back to revisit places you have known as a child. They are all changed and shrunken—and you feel lost and lonely. And, I was beginning to suspect—also a mistake to visit a place you knew only from a book. Peter and John were expecting to find this inlet just as they had imagined it—which came to them second hand from what I had imagined. So each of us was going to be disappointed in his own way. A couple of years ago I discovered that Peter thought the government was three men sitting on a green bench. He preferred his version to anything I told him—probably still does for all I know.
I got out the chart and gave Jan the wheel....”Keep to the left, close along the cliff,” I said.
“Why?” she asked, as she turned in closer.
“Jan!” said Peter; “don’t you know that Henry always stuck to his left cliff?”
“There’s the little island where he stopped to think,” I pointed out. The island satisfied all of us—just about what we had all imagined it to be like. There were the twisted juniper at the edge, the stunted pines on the crest, the moss and stone crop above the high water mark. As Henry said, “Just the place for a think.”
One woman editor I sent the story to wrote back to say that “All children don’t like personalized animals”—that she herself found it hard to come to grips with Henry.
She was quite mistaken—it was the other way round. I had always imagined that I was inside Henry. Now that I was in the inlet I found that I was looking at it entirely from Henry’s point of view. If an editor can’t get inside a whale, if called upon—it’s her own loss—she doesn’t have to put it off on the children. Children can imagine anything, and come to grips with it. They have no difficulty whatever in getting inside frogs, rabbits, ducks or anything else—they just take a whale in their stride.
We turned into Narrows Arm, still keeping the cliffs on our left. We could go very close, for there were thirty-five fathoms right off the sheer drop of the cliff. Then the two sides of the arm squeezed together until the cliffs were only about two hundred feet apart. Five-thousand-foot mountains on either side made it seem much narrower. Quite a strong current was swirling through and rushing us along. No wonder Henry thought he had found the way out at this point.
The chart showed the end of the inlet as merging into the Tzoonie River, with four outlets. So I had surmised that it would be shallow with mud flats, and enough fresh water to have a lot of dead jellyfish around—and that was just what we found.
Seagulls were wheeling overhead and screaming at our intrusion. There were lovely, sheer cliffs going up and up and up, in terraces, to over six thousand feet. But boats, like whales, have to think of the water under them. This would be no place to spend the night in—what with mud flats, and the mosquitoes and no-see-ums that the low land behind would breed. So we just took a turn round, with Jan sitting astride the bow as lookout, and got out again as fast as we could...and the seagulls jeered and laughed, and settled down on the water again.
There was a little island in the bay just past the narrows—through which we had to fight our way against the current. But the island was steep-to and there was no anchorage. Anyway, we really wanted to spend the night in Storm Bay—where Henry had dropped in for breakfast. So we ate some hardtack and settled for another two hours.
Storm Bay was not really a very good place to spend the night. It was completely open to the west. The wind that blew down Jervis Inlet in the late afternoon and evening was perfectly likely to follow the mountains on into Sechelt Inlet. We had not been in there before, so we didn’t know what to expect. There were two little islands just inside the entrance to the bay. By putting out a stern anchor, I strung the boat in between and hoped for a quiet night.
The day had been hot, but now the sun had sunk behind the mountains to the north-west and the air was just pleasantly warm. Slowly the lower hills were taking on that violet hue that would deepen into purple at a later hour.
Dinner over, and the bunks made up, we rowed slowly into the end of the bay. From the cool, dark woods behind, the thrushes called and called with their ringing mounting notes. Back of the beach we found a wooden tub that some fisherman or trapper had sunk into the bank to catch a stream of water trickling over the rock and through the ferns. I leant over and shaded my eyes to see if I could see the bottom of the tub. There on the bottom was a little brown lizard....The lizard, and the water smelling of wet barrel staves, moss and balsam, sent me hurtling back through the years—to a similar though larger barrel, on the cliff path on the way down to the beach at Cacouna, on the lower St. Lawrence below Quebec. There, you had to raise yourself on tiptoes on the wet slippery stones, to drink deep of the cold water that welled over the edge of the barrel....Exactly the same smell to the water—wet wood, moss and fern and balsam. And if you shaded your eyes and looked down at the bottom you almost always saw a little lizard—just like the one at the bottom of this tub in Storm Bay—thousands of miles away.
I told the children about the other barrel, when I was a little girl—so they had to smell the water too, and look at the lizard. John was fascinated by the idea that I could ever have been as little as they were....
“Some day, when you are big, you will find another barrel with a smell like this—and a lizard—and it will bring you right back to Storm Bay,” I told them.
Down at Cacouna, as here—the thrushes in the cool woods called and called. Down there, there was another variety as well, that rang down and down—dropping, dropping....
On Sunday mornings, all through the church service in the little white church in the middle of the pine woods—a little church that smelt of scrubbed pine and had hard pine benches to sit on, but little red carpet pads to kneel on—all through the service I listened to the thrushes ringing up—mounting and mounting...ringing down...dropping and dropping...and never heard the service at all.
The water in the bay was quite warm. When it got dark we went in swimming off the boat, so that we could make flying angels. When the water is full of plankton, if you lie on your back and float, and move your arms through the water—first down to your sides, and then up against your head—you make great shining wings.
I climbed back on board with John to watch the other two. Jan started taking big mouthfuls of water and spouting them up in the air—liquid fire that broke and shattered in the air, and fell and splashed. Peter tried it too, but he laughed so much that I had to haul him on board and thump his back—then subdue him with towels.
I finally threatened to pull up the ladder if Jan didn’t come out. “I don’t care if you do,” she said. “I’d like to stay in all night.”
Just then a heron let off a shattering “Caaawk” as it swerved over our heads. That was too much for our angel of the spouts, and she climbed up the ladder in a hurry—all wet and shivering.
It was quiet all night. I woke at times to check. Any bay open to a prevailing wind is always an uneasy anchorage. The constellations were slowly wheeling round the Pole star. They had almost made a semi-circle, the last time I woke—and grey light was showing in the east. Then I pulled my sleeping bag over my head, and really slept.
I was wakened by Peter and John arguing whether there had been any fish left in the bay at all—after Henry dropped in for breakfast. I shoo’d them off in the rowboat to look for some, while I had a swim. Even breakfast didn’t stop the argument. I pulled the chart out and showed them the island where Henry had found the goat.
“Will the goat still be there?” they demanded.
“Probably,” I foolishly said.
Darn Henry anyway! Why on earth had I said that the goat would probably still be t
here. Peter had the binoculars and was watching the island—and John fought him for them every time
Peter took his eyes from them.
I slowed down a little...no use hurrying to meet trouble. Who ever heard of a goat on an island, miles from anywhere—please, oh please, let there be a goat....
“I see it!” shrieked Peter, pointing. I grabbed the glasses from him. There, on the point, was a white goat waiting for us.
I sat down. I felt exactly like Saint Theresa—all weak in the knees. Challenged by a guard when she was smuggling forbidden food to starving prisoners, and asked what she had in her basket—“Roses,” she said. He pulled off the cloth that covered the basket—and it was full of roses.
That silly goat! It was a wonder we ever got any farther at all that day. It did all the silly things that goats do; and said all the silly things that goats say; and stuck to the children like a leech. It was a young billy, and must have been brought up with children. When they came on board to lunch, it stood on the point, bawling....
It was in the middle of the afternoon when, tired of feeling eternally grateful, I tooted my little whistle and started pulling up the anchor. The youngsters did their best to get back quickly—realizing that my patience was at an end—but the goat jumped into the dinghy too, and they couldn’t get him out.
“What will we do?” they wailed, desperate eyes on the anchor. I gave some advice, as well as I could for laughing, and they went on shore again. The goat of course followed. They picked a pile of green leaves for it, and Jan sat beside it while Peter and John got in the dinghy and pushed off a little way. Then, when the goat had a mouthful of green leaves, Jan got a head start—giving a mighty push as she jumped in. Peter pulled on the oars and they were safe. But how that goat bawled, and how the children worried about it!
“How would you like to be a goat, all alone on an island?” demanded Peter. But he didn’t take up my offer to leave him behind to keep the goat company. It is bad enough, sometimes, to be cruising with a boat full of children without being pestered with stray characters out of a book.
It is ten miles from Goat Island up to the end of Salmon Arm, which runs off to the north-east from Sechelt Inlet. We fished for our supper on the way, and caught a five-pound salmon—which relieved the tension caused by the lonely goat. Late in the afternoon we made our way slowly alongside the cliff where Henry had waited for so long. Peter and John showed very little interest—they were still discussing the goat. It was I, in spite of myself, who kept looking for the white vein of quartz and the green copper stain—by which Henry had gauged the rise and fall of the tide while he was waiting for the roar of the falls to stop—thinking it was the roar of the Skookumchuck, and the way out. And it was I who kept expecting, and was disappointed not to find, the old Indian village by the falls—“Old-village-by-the-water-that-never-stops.”
The end of the arm was not quite as I had expected. I had thought there would be one large, roaring waterfall. It roared all right, but at this season there were three smaller ones, spilling over a wide sweep of smooth sandstone terraces. There were the remains of an old shingle mill, and the flume that had carried water down to turn a generator. Big logs stranded on the sandstone slopes showed what a tremendous volume of water must come over the falls at times. We climbed up the dry sandstone and to our surprise found a large lake—the chart had just shown an unexplored blank.
In the morning we rowed across to the other side of the bay, where we could see a small float held out from the cliff by poles. There was a steep trail leading up through the woods, and high up at the lake level we found a small cabin and an elderly man and his wife. They were caretakers for some fishing club—which kept the lakes stocked with trout—fishing for members only. There were two lakes, the second one much bigger than the first. He said he had an old boat tied up on the lake. We could use it if we would like to row up to the next lake and swim.
We rowed up as far as the second lake, which was about three or four miles long and a mile wide. The two lakes lay in a deep cleft between very high mountains, and must have collected all the drainage from their slopes. The boat was too old and waterlogged to row very far.
We drifted along in the shade of the trees, and watched the trout rising to some kind of fly that kept dancing just above the water. I had stooped down to bail the boat again, when I spied a sealed glass jar underneath the “back seat.” I picked it up—it was bottled salmon-eggs! Illegal! That old caretaker! What would the fishing club think of that! What did we have on us that we could be illegal with, too? Peter produced a piece of minnow line from his pocket. Jan had a very small safety pin, and I had a lucky ten cent piece with a hole in it. And John, who at first thought he had nothing at all—cut a stick for us.
The ten cent piece made a good lure, although it twisted the line up a bit. An unripe huckleberry looked like a salmon-egg and was not nearly as smelly as those under the seat. We found that you had to have a very quick technique or else these ten-inch trout either bent the pin or slipped off it.
We stopped at four fish. Then wrapped them in cool green fern. When we got back to the landing, I sent the youngsters back by the sandstone terraces with the fish—while I went back by the cabin to thank them for the boat.
“I could have lent you a line,” he said, “and you could have caught yourselves a mess of trout. We hardly ever see anyone up here, except the members.”
How much more fun we had pirating them!
I insisted on hugging the left cliff on the way out too—although the children insisted that Henry hadn’t. He hadn’t—he had finished with cliffs for life when he found they had only led him to the roar of the falls, instead of to the way out. But this left cliff was two miles distant from the island with the goat. I might, or might not be finished with goats—roses were easier.
So we hugged the left cliff, and that led us into Porpoise Bay, where Sechelt Inlet is separated from the Gulf of Georgia by only fifty yards of nice, soft sand. That was where Timothy, the young grey seagull, had taken Henry to show him the way out.
In the garden at home there is a little grave—with a gravestone. On it is laboriously carved, “Here lies Timothy—dead.” It was supposed to say “dead of a broken wing,” but there wasn’t room, and the stone had been very hard. We had found him in the garden one day—very bright eyes looking at us out of a clump of long grass. He had a broken wing, which someone had evidently tried to fix with a couple of matches and a piece of fishing twine. We tried to fix it again, but he always pecked it off. We called him Timothy, because his toes were pink. But he wouldn’t eat, and after a week—though surrounded by much love—he died. So they had a sorrowful funeral for him—and Peter carved his stone. That was last fall—and Timothy had just naturally wandered into the story of Henry.
Porpoise Bay was very shallow as you got in farther, and the weeds tickled the bottom of the boat, just as they had tickled Henry’s tummy. It was too shallow at that stage of the tide to get into the float; but the children landed and raced across the fifty yards of nice soft sand, to look at the Gulf of Georgia.
I sat in the boat, looking at the nice soft sand. That was where Timothy had stood, his broken wing trailing, looking over his shoulder in a bewildered kind of way, asking, “Henry aren’t you coming too?”
“Poor Timothy,” said John, in his very saddest voice, as he climbed on board. “It was quite a long way, with a broken wing.”
“I carved that gravestone, you know, John,” said Peter.
“I know,” said John, “but he wasn’t only yours.”
“Most of it was just a story,” said Jan, firmly, as she sat down astride the bow. “And Mummy wrote it.”
“I know,” said Peter. “But we all helped; I said ‘Contact,’ you remember.”
“And I said ‘Sparks,’” reminded John.
Bumping heads together may be a good way to produce unusual characters—but not if you ever want to get rid of them again.
THE GATHERIN
G IN
YOU JUST SAID SUDDENLY, “WE’LL PROBABLY LEAVE FOR home tomorrow.” You started off...and you arrived. It wasn’t really quite as simple as that. You probably decided suddenly because the weather was unexpectedly good for the moment and the glass had steadied. Calm, fine weather the last week in September is like a gift—something to be thankful for, but not expected. Nor do you refuse it, for it mightn’t be offered again.
Even if you had decided, the weather never definitely decided what it was going to do until ten or eleven the next morning. Once it had committed itself, it didn’t often change.
But there was always the gulf between us and home. The weather on the home side of the gulf could be quite different from the side we were on. So in spite of it being fine and calm on the mainland side, we would take the binoculars and look across to beyond Texada Island. If you could see a long dark line on the sea extending south—then you knew that it was blowing hard from the west, the whole way down from Johnstone Strait. With our little boat, it would be foolish even to think of starting.
It is a good twelve hours’ run from Secret Cove near Welcome Pass to home. With a favourable tide we have sometimes made it in a day. But usually, we got about two-thirds of the way there and then had to hole up for the night. By the end of September in this latitude it is almost dark by six o’clock.
Once more in sheltered waters, we could start off for the last third of the trip at any time in the morning we liked. But no one had any desire to linger—home was only forty miles away. We, who had not given Little House a thought all summer, were now straining every nerve to complete the journey far faster than our boat could run.
We had come up through these waters at the beginning of June when everything was a fresh pulsing green. The small islets and points had been covered with grass and stone crop, pink sea-thrift and small blue flowers. Everything was going somewhere...towards some fulfilment, and was shouting out all about it. Now, in the last week in September, the hills and points were dry and brown. Green leaves were on the trees, some with a touch of yellow or a shade of pink, but they were stiff and dry and quiet. There was a stillness about everything...it was all spent and finished with—nothing, now, had anything to say at all.
The Curve of Time Page 19
