by Jay Forman
“And he thinks that racism may have played a part in the OPP zeroing in on his grandfather so quickly.”
“Racism?”
“Because of the scalping.”
“The what?”
“I must have forgotten to mention that bit. The dead man was scalped.”
How could someone forget to mention a gruesome detail like that?
“Blaze wonders if maybe the scalping made the OPP officers assume that a First Nations person did it, which is ludicrous! Blaze’s people haven’t scalped anyone in over two centuries. Assuming that they’ve started that up again would be like assuming that Jack’s going to move to Bristol and start up the slave-trading business that some of his ignorant ancestors ran back in the day.”
“I think the fact that it was his gun that shot his wife’s lover may have had more to do with the OPP—”
“Blaze says that the NAPS officer in Webequie doesn’t think his grandfather did it, but the OPP came marching in and took over everything and—”
“What’s NAPS?”
“I haven’t got the foggiest idea, but Blaze will explain it all to you when you talk to him. I gave him your cell number and he’s going to call you tomorrow. He’ll probably call during his lunch period.”
“I’ll be hiking Sleeping Giant all day and don’t know if I’ll have cell reception out there.”
“Then he’ll leave a message and you can call him back.”
“I haven’t decided if I’m going to get involved in this or not.”
“That’s nice. And another thing, before I forget, Blaze doesn’t want Jack to know about this.”
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know about it either, but Blaze not wanting Jack involved didn’t make sense. Jack was going to sponsor him for the next few years when he went to the Ontario College of Art and Design. Without Jack, Blaze wouldn’t be able to afford the tuition or the living expenses. “What’s his problem with Jack?”
“It’s not Jack personally, it’s his business. Both Jack’s company and De Beers have mines near Blaze’s reserve and both companies are making noises about wanting to open second mines. It’s a contentious issue and Blaze says Jack might not be welcomed with open arms if he suddenly showed up in Webequie. Now that I think of it, I wonder if that rock on the ring Jack gave you came from his mine up there? Canadian diamonds are some of the biggest and best in the world and the one on that ring is definitely big. I wish you’d hurry up and move it from your right hand to your left. I don’t know why you’re dithering …”
I wasn’t sure if I’d answer Blaze’s call, but I was more than sure that it was time to end the call with Auntie Em. Her incessant chant of ‘Marry Jack’ was starting to feel like Chinese water torture. She found a way to bring it into every conversation.
Who proposes to someone two days after a first date? Marriage was something to be cautiously and thoughtfully considered. Okay, so we’d been best friends since high school and knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses almost too well, but still. And admittedly our first date hadn’t really been a date; it had been one night of love-making that had definitely changed the nature of our relationship. Changed it so much that two days later Jack whipped out the little velvet box with the big honkin’ ring in it.
It was late in Antwerp, but Jack would probably still be awake and working. Even though I knew he hadn’t been shot I wanted to see him alive and well with my own eyes. I unzipped the inner side compartment in my backpack, pulled out the velvet box, opened it and then slipped the ring on the fourth finger of my right hand. Auntie Em was right. The diamond solitaire was big, really big. And super-sparkly.
I pulled the ring off and slowly slid it down onto the fourth finger of my left hand. It looked brighter there. The fingers on my right hand were still red. The skin on them would probably always look as if it had been melted and smeared, because it had been melted and a lot of it was actually skin that had been grafted on. My left hand hadn’t been burned in the fire. The fire that almost took Jack away from me permanently.
The thought of losing him forever had been terrifying, but the thought of being locked into such an all-encompassing commitment was almost as terrifying. On my left hand the ring looked like a padlock, permanently closing any and all escape routes. I moved it back over to my right hand. It still looked a bit like a padlock, but one that could be quickly removed. The fact that the fingers on my right hand were now slightly thinner than the ones on my left helped bolster that feeling.
I opened my computer and sent a FaceTime request to Jack. Not surprisingly, he answered almost immediately.
“Hey! I was just thinking about you.” Despite the late hour he still looked perfectly groomed; his face clean shaven, his white shirt crisp and unwrinkled; only his tie had been loosened a bit and looked a little sloppy. “Adaya and I are just finishing some paperwork.”
Adaya’s hands slipped into the shot, resting with too much familiarity on Jack’s shoulders, and I instantly wanted to shout ‘Get your hands off him, bitch!’, but bit my tongue. I liked Adaya. She was super-smart and independent and she ran Jack’s professional life better than any executive assistant before her had. But did she have to be so beautiful? She was long and lean, like Jack, so there weren’t any height issues between them. She barely had to wear heels to look him in the eye. I’d need stilts to be able to look him in the eye. And her accent, a mix of Indian and upper-crust British, was too feminine. I wished she was wearing a padlock on her left hand. Her face lowered into the frame and I could see that not a single hair was sticking out of place from her stylish cut. I reached up to feel if my hair had dried since my shower and hoped it looked fairly smooth. I probably should have brushed it before calling Jack.
“Hi, Lee. How are you?” She asked with a great big smile.
“I’m great. You?”
“Busy, as always. I just need Mr Bossy Pants’ signature on one more thing and then I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.”
Great, she had a nickname for him. At least the word ‘boss’ was in that name.
I fluffed my hair with my hands while they bent their heads over whatever papers were on the desk in front of them.
“Thanks, Adaya. Nice work today.”
“Goodnight Jack. See you in the morning,” Adaya said as she walked out of the shot. “Goodnight to you, too, Lee.”
“Nice ring.” Jack smiled his big goofy grin that almost filled the screen and his cheeks pushed his dark-framed glasses up to his eyebrows.
I lowered my hand so that it would be out of camera range.
“How was the drive from Sault Ste. Marie today?”
“Beautiful, but nine hours long. I had to slow down and stop for road repair crews four times.”
“The joys of highway driving in a country that only has two seasons – winter and construction. They’re probably scrambling to get everything done before the ground freezes. Anything interesting happen?”
Not much. I thought you’d been shot and killed at one point, and Stuart may be appealing his convictions … but I didn’t actually say any of those things. “I saw a moose. And I did the zipline at Hawk’s View Canyon.” He didn’t need to know about my sprint up to the top of the canyon, or about me almost being charged with breaking and entering.
“You’re hiking Sleeping Giant tomorrow, right?”
I nodded. “I am so looking forward to spending a day out of my car. I’m getting sick of sitting in it.”
“Isn’t it comfortable? I can buy you a new—”
“Stop there. I don’t want you to buy me a new car. This one’s barely a year old and I haven’t finished paying you back for it. Besides, it’s not the car I’m sick of, it’s sitting stationary for so many long stretches in a row.” A flash of brilliant light reflected off the boulder on my finger. “About this ring …”
“Yes?” He sounded too hopeful.
“Is this one of your diamonds? From the mine near here?”
“It’s one of our
s, but it’s from Dad’s first Canadian mine up in the Northwest Territories. It’s actually the first diamond processed from that mine. Dad had a special ring made for Mum just for it. Why? Would you rather have one from the Winisk mine?”
“No! I was just curious about where it came from, that’s all. How’s your trip going?” I wanted to talk about anything other than the ring and what it stood for.
“Really well. We’re projecting over 900,000 carats out of the Winisk mine this year and 1.5 million out of the Wekweètì mine north of Yellowknife; and we’re starting to get excited about a possible new site, so working out all the contracts over here is vital. It’s been going so well that I might be heading home in a day or two. Feel like some company on your drive across the Prairies?”
Not really. I preferred to go exploring on my own. “Maybe. Let me know when you’re heading back and we’ll see where I am by then. I’ve got a lot of stuff booked for side-trips and—”
“And you prefer to explore solo. Got it. I do miss you, though. How about I just fly in for an overnight visit?”
“Will you buy me dinner?”
“Food’s not what I’m hungry for, but okay if that’s what it’ll take to get you to say yes. You make the reservations, anywhere you want.”
“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of room service. Maybe a tray of strawberries, some freshly whipped cream, a little pot of warm melted chocolate—”
“I like the way you think, Ms Smith!”
“And I like what you’re capable of doing with nibbles, Mr Hughes.”
“I’m going to need a cold shower after this call. Just tell me when and where and I’ll be there with bells on my toes.”
“Bells, huh? That’s a new one.”
“Less messy than honey, too. Mrs Dawson’s probably still scrubbing to get it all out of the grout in my shower at home.”
That made me laugh. And tingle in a very sensual way, too, when I remembered our hour in the shower just before I left on my trip. “I do love you, Jack. You know that, right?”
He nodded. “I know. And you know I’ll wait as long as it takes for you to move that ring over to the other hand.”
The ring stayed on my right hand, but only until the big diamond scraped against the burn scars on my right leg and woke me up. Then it went back into the velvet box.
CHAPTER THREE
I got up early to avoid the lines I’d been warned to expect at the Hoito restaurant. Thunder Bay was home to the largest Finnish population outside of Finland and the Hoito had been serving their famous pancakes from the bottom floor of the Finnish Labour Temple since 1918. Even though there were only three pancakes on my plate they were huge and I could feel the waistband of my jeans grabbing me tighter as I swallowed the last bite. I didn’t mind, though. The pancakes were delicious and I knew I’d burn them off on my hike.
I visited the Terry Fox Monument before heading to the park. Standing there looking up at Terry frozen forever in bronze, with a panoramic view of Thunder Bay and the Sleeping Giant resting in the distance, put my trip in perspective. He’d only been 22 years old when he ran his Marathon of Hope. Like the inscription on the monument said, he ‘inspired an entire generation of Canadians’. He’d run over 5,000 kilometres on one leg before his cancer stopped him just outside of Thunder Bay and he hadn’t complained once. I’d travelled the same journey in a luxury SUV. I had nothing to complain about and I wouldn’t complain again.
Lorne, the superintendent of Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, was waiting for me when I pulled into the parking lot. There were over 100 kilometres of hiking trails in the park, but I was only interested in one trail in particular – the longest one, the Top of the Giant trail. It was going to be an all day, 22-kilometre outdoor adventure and I could hardly wait. Lorne said it would take us about eight hours, but he hadn’t counted on my penchant for exploring everything and everywhere.
It was another beautiful fall day, the air clean and crisp. I needed my sweater when we started, but took it off and tied it around my waist long before reaching the flat top. I had to put it back on when we sat at the edge of the 240-metre sheer cliffs that offered a stunning 360-degree view of Thunder Bay, the Sibley peninsula and Lake Superior. From my pre-trip research I knew that Superior was, by surface area, the largest freshwater lake in the world. What surprised me was that the water was weirdly Caribbean blue. Looking out across it, the US so far away on the other side that I couldn’t see it, it was easy to understand why the lake was often called an inland sea.
Lorne talked the whole time. While I appreciated all the information he was giving me about the trees in the forest, the plants on the ground, the many animal residents –black bears, bobcats, lynxes, moose, white-tailed deer, wolves, the list went on forever – I would have preferred to hear the wind rustling the marigold yellow leaves, the sound of my hiking boots squishing into thick emerald moss, the big waves crashing against the rocky shore. The only man-made noise we heard was the sound of a tractor mower that was doing the final fall trim before snow covered the numerous Nordic ski trails, but as we went higher we left that sound behind.
It was a very different man-made sound that interrupted Lorne telling me about the Legend of Nanabijou while we sat on top of the Giant. Apparently there was excellent cell phone reception up there.
Auntie Em hadn’t simply suggested to Blaze that I’d help him; she’d downright promised him that I would. And hearing the desperation in his voice stirred up too many memories in me. He simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe that someone he loved could do something so horrible.
“Where is Webequie?” Maybe I could just pop up there for a day trip, talk to a few people and then get back on the road west? I wouldn’t be able to solve anything in that amount of time, but at least it would look like I was trying to keep Auntie Em’s promise to him.
“It’s about 600 kilometres north of Thunder Bay.”
Definitely not a one-day round trip. More time stuck in my car. Oh joy. Oops. I mentally kicked myself for letting that complaint slip out and wondered what shape the roads would be in. Road maintenance probably wasn’t a big concern that far away from … away from everywhere. “That would take what … about seven hours to drive?”
“You can’t drive. There aren’t any roads, except in the winter when the lakes freeze over. There’s an ice road then.”
If my empathy for Blaze wasn’t enough of a draw, the thought of being that far off the beaten path was. I’d never been to such a remote place in my own country. And wasn’t I known for finding the unusual? If I went up there I could write about something that most Canadians didn’t even know about, something I only knew about because of Jack. Another government agency, Export Development Canada, would probably love to have me let the world know that Canada produced more diamonds than South Africa and was the third largest diamond-producing country on the planet. “If I go, where would I stay? Is there a hotel?”
“There are a couple of rooms at the Northern, but I think they’re full right now. I talked to Sara and she said you could stay at her house.”
“Sara?”
“Sara Holly. She was my teacher in elementary school. She’s the Berkshire grad who recommended me for the bursary at Berkshire.”
The bursary that Jack had paid for, the Jack who Blaze didn’t want involved in this.
“She doesn’t believe Dodo did it either.”
“Who’s Dodo?”
“My grandfather.”
I watched a hawk swoop down and snatch up a little red squirrel. Life could be brutal sometimes, no matter your species.
“Please, Lee? He’ll die if he’s padlocked into a cage for the rest of his life. The land is his life. He needs to be free to live.”
He just had to use the word ‘padlock’.
“I’ll fly up tomorrow.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Google Earth view on my computer screen hadn’t done justice to the vast boreal expanse of northern Ontario
that was just 700 metres underneath me. Only once in all my travels had I flown over such a large and seemingly uninhabited area. But, as with my flight over the Kimberley in Western Australia, I knew there was life down there – gilled, winged, four-legged and two. I also knew that the human population below me was decreasing exponentially with each kilometre travelled north. Behind me were over 100,000 people in Thunder Bay; ahead of me were less than 1,000 people in Webequie.
Blaze hadn’t been exaggerating when he said there were no roads to Webequie. There weren’t any roads – period. Instead, the landscape was intricately laced with rivers that wound their way up to Hudson Bay and pockmarked by lakes too numerous to count. One grouping of five small lakes reminded me of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. They looked like fingernail scratches on the surface of the earth and must have been made when the glaciers scraped their way south during the Ice Age.
We’d left Thunder Bay with eight passengers inside the single-propeller Cessna Caravan and I began to understand that little planes like ours were the only form of public transit this far north. Two people got off and one person got on when we stopped in Sioux Lookout. Three people got off in some place called Eabametoong. That left just four passengers in the plane for the next leg of the two-hour trip. I was in the single seat under the wing. In one of the double seats across the aisle from me was a wizened old woman who had a brightly coloured scarf over her head that was tightly tied under her chin; her brown face was so chiselled with age that she almost looked as if her head had been shrunken. In the seat behind her sat the man who’d boarded in Sioux Lookout. He was equally old and brown, but less wrinkled. In front of me was a red-haired giant of a man wearing a bright red Roots hoodie sweatshirt.
The carrot-topped giant turned around to talk to me over his headrest. “First time going to Webequie?”
“Yes.”
“Teacher or visiting nurse?”
“Neither. I’m writing a series of travel articles for Tourism Canada.”
