No Return (A Lee Smith Mystery Book 2)

by Jay Forman

  I turned my head and immediately stopped marching when I saw the lit joint between his fingers. “Are you serious?”

  “Never more so.” He exhaled a plume of smoke. “You want some?”

  “No!” All I wanted to do was get back to the gathering camp, get a ride over to Webequie and call Jack. And I definitely didn’t want to be high when I talked to him.

  “Your choice.” He walked more slowly as the weed worked its calming magic. “I’m a cook”, he said apropos of nothing. “I did that for a few years, working for Suncor at the oil sands in Fort McMurray.” He took another toke. “But I became collateral damage when the bottom fell out of oil prices, so I decided to come home.”

  “You were lucky to get out before the fire.”

  “Don’t I know it. A couple of my friends lost everything, but they’re okay and that’s all that really matters.”

  “Do the mining companies around here need cooks?”

  “Yeah, but they won’t hire me. They won’t hire anybody who hasn’t finished high school.”

  “Why didn’t you finish?”

  “That’s a long story. You don’t want to hear it.”

  “Yes, I do. Seriously. I’m interested.”

  He took another long toke and stared at me without blinking, almost as if he was trying to see if there was any sincerity in my answer. “There’s never been a high school here. All of the elders and a lot of Dad’s generation were forced to go to the residential schools. You know what those were, right?”

  I nodded and almost felt a blush of shame. I wasn’t responsible for the residential school disaster, but I was a white Canadian – part of the race that took First Nations children from their homes at an early age and put them in schools where they were beaten, starved, raped and sometimes killed. They were completely cut off from everything they’d ever known or loved. They weren’t even allowed to speak in their own language. They were supposed to learn how to be white. The only thing they learned was how to hate the white man.

  “They grew up not trusting white man’s schooling, so they didn’t push for it here. Even when it did come up, your governments couldn’t agree on who should pay for it. Education is run by the provincial governments, but the federal government is responsible for the reserves. When I was a kid the school barely went to grade ten. The only option I had, if I wanted to finish high school, was to move down to Thunder Bay for the last few grades. I wasn’t ready to move away when I was fifteen, so I stayed here until it got really ugly between me and Dad.”

  “And now? Can the kids finish high school here?”

  “Sort of. The school still doesn’t have any teachers or classrooms dedicated to high school. Some kids do move to Thunder Bay. Others take Wahsa courses, but only the really motivated ones.”

  “Wahsa?”

  “Long-distance courses. There’s a teacher at the school who oversees the Wahsa kids, but there aren’t many of them. It’s hard to buy into a system that’s so completely screwed over your parents and grandparents. At the same time, though, some kids can now see possibilities with the mining companies, if the governments ever manage to get their acts together. Kids my age never had those possibilities, so there really wasn’t any point in finishing high school. Wahsa can take five years to complete, though, and teenagers aren’t known for their patience.”

  “That’s so completely unfair to the kids. It wouldn’t cost the government that much to send a couple of teachers up here. I’ve seen your school; it’s got the room for a couple of high school classrooms.”

  “Yup.” He took another toke and held his breath for a long, long time. “But your governments still can’t agree on who should pay for it.”

  “They’re not my governments; they’re our governments.”

  “You work for them. I don’t.”

  “Not by choice, trust me. I needed the money from this contract to pay my property taxes.”

  He finished the joint just as we came up to the winter hunt shed. It turned out that the shed was closer to the south end of the peninsula than it was to the gathering camp. Maybe Arthur would have had the time to kill Ross?

  The door to the shed had been closed and it wasn’t until I was a good 20 yards further down the pathway that I realised that Joshua was no longer walking with me. I turned around when I heard the creak of him opening the shed door.

  “Where are you going?” He called out to me.

  “The gathering camp? To get a ride back to Webequie?” Where else could I have been going? It wasn’t as if there were any other options. There was one path, going in one direction and ending in one place.

  “I don’t think you want to do that.” He disappeared inside the shed.

  That’s exactly what I wanted to do and I wanted to do it quickly because the sun was setting, pulling the temperature down with it. Joshua’s unexpected detour into the shed wasn’t improving my mood any. “Where are you going?” I said when I got back to the shed.

  “In here to get supplies.” He was standing at the back of the shed, pulling a big rubber storage box off one of the lower shelves.

  “Supplies for what?” Maybe he had a stash of munchies in that bin?

  “For us to camp out tonight.”

  The pot he’d just smoked must have been really strong because he was hallucinating if he thought I was going to camp out overnight in the middle of the woods when there was a perfectly good avenue of escape just under an hour away from us. “I don’t want to camp out. I want to go back to Webequie.”

  “Your choice,” he said for the second time as he rummaged through the bin he’d just opened. “But you’d better start running.”

  “Why?” I stepped into the shed and looked at some of the traps that were piled up on the shelves and hanging on one wall. Lying in the corner were four traps that were bigger than the others. They looked like medieval torture devices.

  “Because there’s not much daylight left.”

  “So?” I wasn’t scared of being in the woods at night. I did it all the time at home.

  “So … you won’t be able to see who’s crossing the path or in the woods watching you.”

  I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the dropping temperature. “You mean like someone from the gathering camp?”

  He stood up, holding a cast-iron frying pan in one hand. “I mean like a black bear, maybe even a mother with cubs. They’re fattening themselves up for the winter right now and the food scraps at the gathering camp always bring them out at night.”

  I instantly pictured the old woman at the campfire tossing the head and guts of the walleye I’d cleaned into the bush. Given the amount of food waste that had to have been left lying around the camp I could see how it might look like a veritable buffet to a black bear gearing up for winter hibernation. “But what about the people who camp out? I saw the tents—”

  “They’re not alone. There’s safety in numbers. And most of them have guns. You don’t.” He handed me the frying pan and then scooped a large bundle of dark brown animal fur off of another shelf.

  This could not be happening!

  But it was happening. I wasn’t going back to Webequie. I wouldn’t be able to call Jack. And that would only make him angrier. I was going to spend the night with a man I barely knew in a forest populated by hungry bears.

  “Can’t we signal the people at the gathering camp somehow to let them know we’re in trouble out here?”

  “How would you suggest we do that? Remember, I violated your boating regulations by not having a sound signalling device in the boat. We’d just call that a whistle, but I’ll use your words to keep it easier for you to understand.”

  “There has to be something we can do. What about smoke signals?”

  “Smoke signals? I can’t believe you went there. Wow.” He shook his head and pushed the fur bundle at me. “Take this.”

  It was surprisingly light for its size and the short fur was just about the softest thing I’d ever felt. I wasn’t
a raging fur activist, I understood that it served a useful purpose in northern climates, but I didn’t own any fur clothing and couldn’t see myself ever buying any … but, damn, the bundle I was holding was so soft that the urge to curl up in it was almost irresistible.

  Joshua went back and took one more thing out of the storage bin before putting the lid back on it. There was just enough light left for me to read ‘Remington .303 on the box in his hand. He reached up and lifted a fishing pole and then a rifle down from the top shelf. As he pushed a clip into the gun another realisation hit me. I was going to spend the night in the woods with an armed man who was high.

  “Let’s go.” He grabbed an axe from the shelf closest to the door just before closing it.

  I hugged the fur bundle tightly like a security blanket as I followed him back down the pathway to where we’d left the canoe.

  ****

  Neither of us spoke as we set up camp and I think Joshua was impressed by the fact that I already knew what to do. When he started making a fire circle with rocks he’d gathered in the woods, I went to look for dried twigs for kindling. He used the axe to chop off some boughs from a thick balsam fir, laying them on the ground to make a natural mattress. While he scattered dried leaves in the rock circle he’d made and broke up some of the larger twigs I’d found, I used the axe to chop down a short dead birch tree I’d spotted near our camp. The cracking sound of the wood splitting reverberated off the rocks on the other side of the bay and bounced back across the water to us.

  I felt at home. The sounds and smells reminded me so much of the day I’d spent splitting a couple of cords of wood before I started my trip. “Won’t people be worried about us when we don’t show up in Webequie tonight?”

  “They’ll think we decided to stay the night at the gathering camp.”

  And the people at the gathering camp would think that we’d gone back to Webequie. It was far too easy for people to disappear in Canada’s north. Like Mary’s mother. Like Bernice. “If Bernice is so unhappy in Webequie why doesn’t she just leave? She doesn’t need a man to take her away.” I sat cross-legged by the fire, leaning in as close as was safe to feel the growing warmth.

  “She’s scared of going missing.”

  “She’s missing now.”

  “Not that kind of missing. And she’ll show up eventually. She knows these woods. She’s safe here. But in the south? That’s dangerous territory for First Nations women.”

  “Is the crime-rate that bad in Thunder Bay?” I shook my water bottle and realised that it was empty.

  “I don’t know. It wouldn’t matter where she went, she’d still be scared.” He stood up and took my water bottle from me, then went to the shore and filled it.

  “I thought you said the water isn’t safe?”

  “We’re upriver from the moo plant here.”

  “The what?”

  He took a long drink before handing the bottle back to me. “That’s what we call the sewage treatment plant in Webequie. Moo means shit.”

  “Why not just call it the poo plant then?”

  “Poo’s not an Oji-Cree word.” He opened one of his packages of beef jerky and offered me a strip.

  I declined his offer. I hated everything about beef jerky – the texture and especially the taste – and I was still full from all the fish I’d eaten at the gathering camp. “Why would Bernice be so scared of being in the south? Because she doesn’t know it well?”

  “Because she knows about it too well. You really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you.”

  “No.”

  “Almost a thousand First Nations women have gone missing or been murdered in Canada and the amitigoshi don’t seem to care.”

  I’d heard a few news stories about missing First Nations women, but I hadn’t paid that much attention to them. It wasn’t that I hadn’t cared; more that I hadn’t taken the time to stop and really listen. “Aren’t the police looking into it?”

  “They say they are, but if that many white women were disappearing I think they’d be looking a lot harder.”

  I was taking the time to listen now. And I cared. “Is that what happened to Mary’s mother?”

  He nodded. “They were living in Thunder Bay. Gabriella didn’t come home one night.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “About a year ago. Marvin stuck around in Thunder Bay for as long as he could, but Mary was having a hard time without her mother and he needed someone to watch her during the day so he came home. Whenever they find a body, Elba flies down to see if it’s Gabriella.”

  “Was she coming back from doing that when she was on my flight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think the police took the easy way out by taking Arthur away? That they didn’t look hard enough when they were up here to investigate Ross’ death?”

  “Maybe. They sure didn’t waste any time focusing on Dad, but I can see why. He’s got a history of violence in his past. It’s just … despite all the issues I’ve had with him, I don’t think he did it.”

  “Who else would have wanted Ross dead?”

  A startlingly loud crack shot through the air and made me flinch. It wasn’t an air pocket exploding inside a burning log – it was a gunshot. And it was followed by several more gunshots, some of them so close together that it made me wonder if someone was firing an automatic weapon.

  “Who’s shooting like that? And what are they shooting at?” And I’d thought bears were the only thing I had to worry about!

  The sound of raucous males laughing loudly made its way across the water to us and echoed off the rocks to the east. Then there was another quick rat-a-tat-tat burst that almost sounded like automatic gunfire.

  Joshua’s arm moved in the shadows of the flames and he slowly pulled his rifle closer. “It’s the Texans. I’m going to have to deal with that tomorrow but for now …” He stood up and I watched his outline in the firelight as he walked down to the shore.

  I heard the double click of the lever action when he chambered a round. He fired one shot up high into the air over the water. Even though my ears were ringing from the bang, I heard the clink of the shell casing bouncing on the rock slab at his feet. He quickly chambered another round and fired it up into the air, too.

  “Holy shit! There’s somebody firing back out there!” A man shouted from somewhere in the darkness of the woods on the southern shore of the bay.

  “What the hell is going on, Joshua?” I tried to whisper, but even to my ears it sounded more like a barely muted screech.

  He didn’t say anything. He just raised his right hand and held it up like a stop sign.

  The silence was painfully loud. The wind had died down and the river was flat, no longer splashing against the rocks. A branch snapped somewhere behind me and I instantly spun my head around, but couldn’t see anything in the darkness.

  “I think they got the message.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Come here.”

  I didn’t want to move. I was less of a target when sitting on the ground. But I was curious, too. And the shooting had stopped.

  The darkness wasn’t as pitch black once the fire was behind me. My eyes adjusted quickly and I was able to make out the outline of the tops of the trees against the star-filled sky.

  “See there?” Joshua pointed south across the bay.

  I tried to follow the line that his finger was pointing in, but couldn’t see anything. “No. What am I looking for?”

  “Lights. Through the trees.”

  I squinted, but still couldn’t see anything. Then I remembered my camera. I ran back to the fire and grabbed it. Only when I’d gone to full zoom could I make out a couple of lights a good distance away from us in the southern woods. “What’s down there?”

  “My lodge.”

  This man was full of surprises. “Care to explain that some more?”

  “I saved up some money when I was in Fort McMurray. I used it to build a hun
ting lodge. Tourists come up to experience the Canadian wilderness, to fish and hunt game. We’ve got a group of Texans in there now.”

  “Aren’t automatic weapons illegal in Canada?”

  “So’s pot, for now. Our new PM, Justin, says he’s going to change that. I don’t care what they bring. They brought an awful lot of guns. Maybe they’re just blowing off steam? I’m not so sure that was an automatic, though. If it was, I’ll deal with it. I won’t let them use a weapon like that to hunt. I don’t care how much they pay me for their trophy heads and skins.”

  “But you’re not over there to stop them. They can shoot whatever they want.” And if they were willing to shoot wildly just to blow off steam, could they have accidentally shot Ross? That didn’t explain why his body had been moved, though. Or the scalping.

  “I’ve got people there. I hired a couple of friends from the reserve to be guides, but they’re probably asleep by now.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  No, it didn’t. It was dark, the day was over. That’s all I needed to know. It was very freeing to be so disconnected from civilization. “What do they hunt for?”

  “Deer and moose mainly. These guys paid extra to hunt bear.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “If you get all the right licences and permits from your Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, which I did. It’s included in the package price. People, especially Americans, will pay a lot of money to come up here.”

  “What do they do with what they kill?”

  “They can’t take the fish back across the border to eat, so they either catch and release, eat it here or, if they catch a big one, we get it mounted for them. One of these guys caught a 30 pound northern pike last week. We’ve already shipped it down to Thunder Bay for mounting.”

  “They’ve been here a week?”

  “Yeah, they booked in for two weeks.”

  “So they were here when Ross was killed?”

  “Yeah, but they wouldn’t have had any reason to kill him.”

  So far no one, except for Arthur, had a reason to kill Ross and everyone felt that Arthur hadn’t been the killer – but Ross had still been killed by someone.