The Mystery of Ireland's Eye

by Shane Peacock

  “Look up there,” said Mom in a quiet voice.

  I started. Then I looked up to where her paddle pointed and saw nothing. Just the dark tops of the trees. She motioned for me to move closer to the shore with her. We eased over and then I saw it.

  Up on the very tip of the tallest tree sat a bird the size of our basset hound. But it didn’t appear nearly as friendly. In fact, it looked evil. It was dark and its big metallic-looking beak was hooked and ugly. The head darted back and forth and the yellow eyes were so large that I could see them even from this far away. We drifted into the shadows next to the shore and heard the waves hitting the rocks. Suddenly the bird left the tree. I almost gasped: its wingspan seemed to be a couple of metres wide! For a few seconds it swooped towards our kayaks, examining us, checking to see if we were edible. Visions of this pterodactyl plucking us out of the water with its gigantic claws passed through my mind. Then it pulled up and ascended, soaring to an incredible height.

  “That’s a baby one,” said Mom.

  It was a bald eagle, the first one I had ever seen. For some reason I had thought they were extinct, or at least close to it, and certainly not living anywhere in Canada. It looked prehistoric to me. The adults I saw soon afterwards, noble with their white heads, were actually not as scary. I never forgot that first young eagle. As I watched him soar I wondered if he could see Ireland’s Eye, and if his parents and their parents had seen it over the centuries as it changed, as people came there and then died, and as they began sadly moving away from their beloved homes. I wondered if he watched over the ghost town and the spirits who still surely lived there.

  Now I was scaring myself. Where did all that stuff come from?

  * * *

  We had planned to stop each night by five or six o’clock, but we were making such good time that we pushed on into the early evening, trying to get to our jumping-off point to the Eye, near the eastern end of Random Island. To our surprise, we made it with ease. Just as the sun was becoming a strange orange glow near the surface of the water, we approached a point that jutted out into the channel and Dad pulled out his plastic-wrapped map and made an announcement.

  “We stop just up here.”

  He motioned to a cove on the far side of the point. We floated forward and slowly a natural harbour came into view. For a few minutes it presented a startling scene. The land was so much lower here, and there were great stretches of long grass like little fields among the rocks. The sight of a wharf sitting nearby, not in perfect shape, but far from decrepit, was almost shocking. A wharf out here in the wilderness—it was almost unbelievable. And that wasn’t all: soon we saw rough paths in the grassland even a broken-down building or two. It dawned on me that I must be seeing my first ghost town.

  We glided silently towards the wharf, holding our paddles up. Mom was still a little worried about me, so she started explaining.

  “This isn’t really a full ghost town. Most of the buildings have been taken away. There are only a few left now and even those are almost levelled. And there’s a shack that people share when they get out here kayaking or boating or fishing. You’ll see some lobster traps, I’m certain.”

  Sure enough, it wasn’t long before one came into view, sitting not far from the wharf. I dreaded seeing a lobster struggling for life inside, but it must have been the wrong season, because the trap was tied down away from the water and it was empty.

  “This is the real spirit of Newfoundland, right here,” said Dad. “You wouldn’t see this back home, unfortunately. Anyone who wants to use that shack can use it. And look up there.”

  I looked up the slight slope along a path that went away from the wharf and saw an old bus, without tires and colourfully painted, sitting well-grounded in a patch of grass among the rocks. It made me laugh.

  “It’s a bus, Dad! How’d they get a bus out here?”

  “Oh, they’ve got their ways. That’s not really a problem for a Newfoundlander. They could put the CN Tower out here if they had to.”

  Now that I’d like to see.

  We landed and started exploring. It was good to get onto my feet again though I felt shaky, as had been the case at every stop. Your legs feel all rubbery and you kind of grope around at first for the land beneath you. But soon I was running, chasing Dad up the path past the two broken-down houses, making our way towards the shack. Mom was headed to the bus, shouting something to Dad about it reminding her of something called the Magical Mystery Tour. Sixties stuff, I guessed. Whenever they talked that sort of code, I knew it was about those old days. They are really eighties people, but they just love the sixties, talk about it all the time, the music, the attitude, how cool it must have been. They even use words and sayings from then. Sometimes I feel like they’re caught in a time capsule.

  The shack was only interesting before you got into it. The door was unlocked, a fact that brought more praise for Newfoundlanders from Dad. But inside it was filthy. You just knew that someone else had been there recently—meaning some time in the past two or three months. And whoever it was hadn’t cleaned up properly. There was a sink with dirty dishes still in it and canned food on shelves and mice running around on the floor, which had food stains on it. The smell nearly made me sick. I stepped outside. Inside, Dad was talking to me.

  “Cool,” he said. “We can get some more grub here.” I think he thought he was in the movies at this point. “Dylan, we’ll just chow down on what we find and leave some for the next guy. That’s the way the world should work.”

  “I’m not eating any of that food!” I shouted from outside.

  “Dylan, don’t be a wimp. This is an opportunity, in this distant corner of the world, to break bread with your fellow human beings. Look, there’s canned seal meat here…well, maybe we’ll pass on….”

  But I just left him there and walked up the path towards the bus. I could hear him still talking to me in the distance. He was really getting it going now. Any bread I was going to break was coming from the frozen stuff we bought at Loblaws before we left. I’ll eat the smoked salmon from the cooler and pretend it’s seal if that’s what he wants.

  When I got to the bus the door was wide open and a stench nearly as bad as in the shack was drifting out. But inside Mom was lying on one of the makeshift bunks.

  “I love you,” she said and smiled at me.

  Gag me.

  By the look on her face I could tell she was feeling very, what do they say, groovy, about this bus. Mom the businesswoman had completely disappeared. The way she was feeling was probably a lot like the way Rhett, the Bomb, and I feel when we’ve got the house to ourselves, TV, laptops, and the whole ball of wax.

  “This reminds me of when your dad and I were young,” she said. “This is true sharing. Imagine how many people have slept here. People come out here to interact with nature and everyone stays in the same place. It’s—”

  “Groovy.”

  “No, I wasn’t going to say that…little Mr. Critic. Come on over here and relax. Throw yourself on a bunk and we’ll talk.”

  But as I looked around I felt something strange engulf me. Suddenly I just wanted to get away. And it wasn’t that I wouldn’t enjoy talking to Mom or being hugged. In fact, a hug and a few words with her wouldn’t have been so bad about now. It was just that this bus and that shack were starting to freak me out. Not just the smell and all the unclean people who had wrapped these blankets around themselves, it was more than that. Ireland’s Eye was sitting out there on the horizon, with its ghost town just waiting for me. I knew it would be unlike anything I had ever seen and now I was within a morning’s paddle. I couldn’t sleep in this place that felt like it belonged to others, or eat off plates that seemed abandoned in the night, as if the people who had been sitting here a short while ago had suddenly evaporated into the Newfoundland mists. Many of the citizens who had lived here were dead now, and on these rocks buildings had once stood
for centuries. Today, we suddenly appear from the city. We walk where their little village used to be. Everything they had is gone.

  There was a presence here and that was the last thing I needed the night before I entered Ireland’s Eye. First there had been living jelly bags with faces and then whale-sized fish and then a pterodactyl, and now this. As I stood looking at Mom, the old Newfoundlander’s warning sounded clearly in my ears. Do not go to Ireland’s Eye. “I’m not sleeping here, Mom.”

  Moments later they found me sitting on the wharf. “Dylan, you shouldn’t be afraid,” said Dad. “There’s nothing here that will hurt you.”

  “I’m not afraid. I just want to sleep in my own tent and eat my own food. That’s all.”

  I could feel them looking at each other.

  That night another dream came, and it was the worst so far. It started out wonderfully. Mom and Dad and I were paddling into Ireland’s Eye. The water was calm and even warm when it touched our hands. When we came into the harbour the village was bright and colourful and, miraculously, the streets were filled with people. They were running towards the wharf to greet us and the bells were ringing in the church. But as we approached, something made me look down into the water, and there was the old Newfoundlander coming after me. I shook my head and looked again, expecting to see a red-faced jellyfish. But it was the old man, all right. He shot out of the water like a whale, grabbed the side of my kayak, and flipped it over. Then he jerked me from my cockpit, the spray skirt snapping off like a top from a jar, and started pulling me down into the depths. I kept fighting him and I would wiggle away and get back up to the surface. I screamed to my mom and dad as I hit the air, but they didn’t hear me. I saw them moving slowly and calmly towards the wharf. Up came the old man again, grasping my leg and hauling me back underwater. I struggled with everything I had, broke away again and swam to the surface. This time my parents were getting out at the wharf, smiling and shaking hands with people. That was when the old man took me down for the final time. The last thing I remember before I screamed was my grandfather’s corpse lying on the bottom of the ocean. It was the first time he had ever been dead in any of my dreams.

  “Dylan!” said Mom. “Wake up! You’re all right! We’re here!”

  I stopped screaming and sat up. Dad tried to smile at me. Mom looked grim. Outside, the whales, the eagles, and the ocean were deathly silent.

  6

  The Magical Island

  All the way through the trip to the Eye the next morning, through the calm first part, the heightening waves, the near-catastrophes, I kept telling myself it was all worthwhile, that what I would see out there would be unforgettable.

  The water had been so calm at the beginning and looked so quiet out to the horizon that Mom didn’t even question whether or not we should go forward. She watched me carefully but could see that I had forgotten my nightmare and was happy and excited. I put on my dry suit, clipped on my life jacket, and pulled my spray skirt over the watertight cockpit without even a thought of fear.

  But just a couple hundred metres out from the shore, even before the waves began to grow, fear came to us in a big way.

  Dad and I were paddling close to each other and Mom was a good distance away. We were talking, probably about the Leafs or the Jays, when suddenly he stopped in mid-sentence. I could tell that something was scaring him, and scaring him mightily, but he didn’t want to say anything.

  “What’s wrong, Dad?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Dad, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”

  He paused for a moment, as if trying to make a decision, and then spoke quietly. I could tell he didn’t want Mom to hear.

  “Don’t look down.”

  Of course, I immediately lowered my head. I didn’t see anything, just the water, or what appeared to be the water, though it seemed a slightly darker colour than usual.

  “It’s just water, Dad.”

  “No, it’s not, Dylan.”

  I peered down again. This time I saw it. An eye twice the size of the minke’s was looking at me, and its stare was paralyzing.

  “Stay calm,” Dad whispered.

  “What is it?”

  “A fin.”

  Fin whales make minkes look like minnows. Imagine a fish the size of a Greyhound bus. Then imagine that bus floating a couple of kayak-lengths beneath you in a kilometre of water. He was so immense that I hadn’t even noticed him at first. He was the water all around us.

  For the next five minutes he watched us and we moved forward silently. When Mom smiled over at us, we smiled back. The fin was investigating us, what sort of little insignificant fish we were. And we were hoping he liked us.

  It seemed that at any moment he could decide to do us in. We knew whales weren’t given to that sort of thing, but the unblinking stare of that clear dark eye frightened us down to the bottom of our dry suits. It was as though he was escorting us out into a world we knew nothing about. After a while, he blinked, as if to say, “Just thought I’d check you out, intruders,” and began to drop into the depths. For a few moments we could see him fading beneath us, the eye still staring up. But then he rolled over and vanished, a soundless, magical beast, so ghostlike that the water around us remained undisturbed, as if he had never existed. The only evidence was our pounding hearts.

  * * *

  Moments later the waves began to pick up.

  We could see them sweeping across the water in front of us, building out of nowhere as the wind got stronger. Soon it seemed they were growing by the minute, rising like foothills, their peaks nearly a metre high. And then they grew even higher. Before we knew it, an ocean storm had us in its grip, attacking us with expanding two-metre waves. We couldn’t go back, but going forward seemed terrifying. The storm was all around us, coming from Ireland’s Eye and flying towards Random Island. I knew we were in extreme danger. But what lay ahead meant too much to me to give up. I clenched my jaw tightly and crashed forward.

  The next hour was the most frightening of my life. The giant waves, the moments of desperation, the conference with Mom and Dad in the cove of the small island where we decided we had no choice but to make a run for it, the gale force strength of the ocean wind as we approached the entrance to Ireland’s Eye—all went by in a blur. I gripped my paddle like it was the only thing in the world that was keeping me alive and fixed my gaze straight ahead.

  That first sighting of the Eye, the moment when it suddenly went from a shadow to something real, was awesome. It seemed to come up suddenly in the rain and wind to my left, like a magical creature hiding itself until you could see the whites of its eyes. Crashing forward, I glanced up at the rocky shoreline and saw the caribou standing there in the wind, staring out at us. For a second I was amazed that there was actually life on this mysterious island. But I also remember thinking that we might never get near it.

  Somewhere behind me, I knew my mother’s mind was locked on me, fearing for me and desperately wanting to help, even as she frantically tried to survive herself. I knew she must be consumed by the greatest and most desperate guilt she had ever felt, asking herself what in the world she had been thinking when she agreed to take me along on this unpredictable journey.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Dad churning up beside me. “Don’t look at me!” he yelled. “Keep looking straight ahead!” He didn’t sound guilty at all. He was intense and on the job with his son in a perilous adventure. In a weird way, I thought, he loves this. He is anxious for me, he is ready to sacrifice whatever he has to for me, but he loves this.

  “We are going to turn left and head towards the island!” he shouted. “That’s where the town was! That’s where we can land! Mom’s going in first, then you, and I’ll bring up the rear!”

  Suddenly Mom darted in front of me and led the way. She didn’t even look in my direction. Her jaw was set tightly, her expression grim.
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br />   We began turning. In seconds the entrance to the island loomed before us like an escape hatch out of the raging ocean. But at that instant, as if on command from some sort of power stronger than any of us, the storm’s anger became awesome. It seemed to be telling us to keep away from the island, warning us to leave it be. The waves turned into mountains so high I could no longer see anything, not Mom or Dad or even Ireland’s Eye. A force that felt like a hurricane picked me up and lifted me high into the air. I twisted sideways, my kayak almost above me, desperately out of control. That was when I felt myself going down.

  * * *

  I thought that was it, game over. I was about to drown at the entrance to Ireland’s Eye. Mom had been right: the trip was too much for a kid. Perhaps what had been pulling me towards this magical island was death itself.

  But somewhere up in the air, in that split second that seemed to take hours, I heard my grandfather’s voice. It was calm. He told me to get a grip on myself, to think of what I had to do, that I was capable of more than I imagined. He told me to twist the opposite way from the way I was going, and then to let my body go loose. Stiffness would kill me. It struck me that Dad had taught me to react exactly like this during an emergency, but fear had made me forget it. I twisted, I righted myself, I landed, and didn’t fight the landing, loosening my body and allowing the kayak to sit flat in the waves.

  Then something miraculous happened. The next wave picked me up and shot me forward with great power. But it felt like a friendly push and when I landed everything was calm. I was in the huge old harbour of Ireland’s Eye and the world was strangely serene. Mom was ahead of me, floating on still water, her face filled with a smile. Behind me Dad came shooting out of the waves, landing, just like me, in the calm embrace of Ireland’s Eye harbour. He was staring backward.