They had taken off at approximately six-thirty on the evening of September 14. They had abandoned part of the stores and one tent and one canoe and cleared out of Disappointment in a hell of a hurry, for the storm was already upon them and the waters of the lake were being kicked up by a twenty-knot wind. Area C2 was about half an hour’s flying time away, but before they had covered half the distance, the cloud base had come down very low with driving sleet and poor visibility.
‘I should have landed whilst I had the chance,’ Laroche said. He wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t looking at anybody. He just sat there, telling what happened in that flat, slightly foreign voice.
He had been forced down until the floats were skimming the tops of the jackpine and he was lake hopping from one expanse of water to the next. ‘At that level things come up very fast. And the lakes take on a different shape. It was only the small ones that I could see as a whole. The rest were just scraps of water, blurred in the sleet and the poor light.’ He thought he might have underestimated the wind strength. Coming up with the advance party the fog and his forced landing had made it impossible for him to memorize the ground. Anyway, it wouldn’t have helped with dusk falling and poor visibility. He flew a compass course, and when he’d flown the estimated time distance, he began to search, flying in widening circles, still held down to tree-top level. He flew like that for almost fifteen minutes with the light fading all the time and no sign of the Attikonak River or any feature that would give him his bearings.
And then the snow came. It came suddenly in a blinding squall that blotted out everything. ‘I had no choice,’ he said. ‘I had been crossing a lake and I did a tight turn and put the nose down.’ He had ripped the floats as he crashed through the trees at the water’s edge and had hit the surface of the lake hard, bounced twice and then smashed into a rock that had suddenly loomed up in front of him. He had hit it with the starboard wing so that the plane had swung round, crashing into it broadside and shattering the fuselage. The impact had flung him head-first against the windshield and he had blacked out.
When he came to, the plane was hah0 in, half out of the water with the rock towering above it. Dazed, he crawled back into the fuselage to find Baird unconscious, pinned there by a piece of metal that had injured his right hand and opened up all one side of his face. ‘Paul was injured, too.’ Laroche’s eyes were half-closed as he talked and I couldn’t doubt that this was how it had happened. His voice and the details carried conviction.
He had done what he could for them, which wasn’t much for there was no wood on the rock with which to make a fire. He was there two days until the storm had passed, and then he hacked one of the floats clear, patched it and ferried the two injured men ashore. He had got a fire going and had rigged up a shelter of branches, and had brought some supplies from the plane. Two days later another storm had come up. The wind had been north-westerly and the following morning the plane had vanished. It had killed the fire, too, and he hadn’t been able to light another because all the matches were soaked and he had lost his lighter, which was the only one they possessed. Baird had died that night; Briffe the following night. After that he had started trekking westward. ‘I knew that as long as I kept going west I must arrive at the line of the railway sooner or later …’ He had kept going for five days and nights with almost no food, and on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth he had reached Mile 273 where a construction gang with a grab crane were working on the grade. ‘I guess that’s all,’ he said, looking at me for the first time. ‘I was lucky to get out alive.’
‘Well, there you are,’ McGovern said, and the finality of his tone made it clear he considered I ought to be satisfied.
‘That trip you made out to the plane,’ I said. ‘Did you bring the radio ashore?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It went down with the aircraft.’
‘And you’re sure Briffe was dead when you left him?’
Laroche looked at me, his eyes wide in his tanned face. And then he glanced quickly at McGovern. It was as though he had turned to him for help. But it was Lands who said, ‘He’s just told you so, hasn’t he?’ His tone was angry. ‘What more do you want?’
And then McGovern said, ‘You’d like to see the bodies, I suppose?’ He was glaring at me.
‘Did you bury them?’ I asked Laroche. I thought if I dug hard enough …
‘For God’s sake!’ Lands said.
‘No,’ Laroche answered me. ‘I didn’t bury them. I guess I didn’t have the energy.’ His voice was flat. And then he added quickly, ‘I tried to locate them afterwards. I flew twice with a pilot out of Menihek. But there are thousands of lakes — literally thousands.’ His voice trailed away.
‘Thousands, yes,’ I said. ‘But only one Lake of the Lion.’ And again I was conscious of a tension in the room. It wasn’t only Laroche, who was staring at me with a shocked expression on his face. It was McGovern, too. ‘What the hell’s the name of the lake matter if he couldn’t locate it again?’ he said angrily.
But I was looking at Laroche. ‘You knew it was Lake of the Lion, didn’t you?’ I was so sure it was important that I pressed the point. ‘That rock in the middle — ‘
‘It was snowing,’ he muttered.
‘When you crashed. But later … Didn’t you see the rock later? It was shaped like a lion, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t notice.’
‘But you’ve read those reports? You know the message my father picked up?’
He nodded.
That transmission of Briffe’s — it was from Lake of the Lion.’
‘You don’t know that,’ McGovern cut in.
‘Then why did he say — Search for narrow lake with a rock shaped like …?’ I demanded. ‘There’s only those two words — a lion — missing.’
‘You’re just guessing,’ McGovern said. ‘And, anyway, your father was simply inventing on the basis of what he knew of the Ferguson Expedition.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ I cried. ‘Those were the last words he wrote before he died.’
‘That doesn’t make them true. He couldn’t have known he was going to die.’
I stared at him, appalled. ‘I tell you, he struggled to his feet to look at that map. Lake of the Lion was marked on that map; his log books, too — they were littered with drawings of lions…’
‘All right,’ McGovern said heavily. ‘Suppose Briffe did send and those were the exact words he transmitted. Do you know where this lake is?’
‘It’s in the Attikonak area,’ I replied. ‘East of the river.’
‘Hell! We know that already. We know to within thirty miles or so where it was Bert crashed, but we still haven’t located the lake. But of course if you know the exact location of this lake you keep talking about… But your father didn’t pin-point it, did he?’
‘No,’ I was still looking at Laroche. He was busy filling his pipe, his head bent.
‘Then it doesn’t help us very much.’ Was there a note of relief in McGovern’s voice? I glanced at him quickly, but the grey, stony eyes told me nothing. ‘As Bert says, there are thousands of lakes out there.’
‘But only one with a rock shaped like a lion,’ I said obstinately.
And then Laroche said quietly, ‘You don’t know what it was like out there.’ It was as though he had been following some train of thought of his own. ‘It was snowing, and later there was fog. And there was so much to do …’ His voice tailed off again as though he didn’t want to think about it.
‘This isn’t getting us anywhere.’ McGovern’s voice was suddenly brisk and business-like. ‘Lake of the Lion is mentioned in Dumaine’s book and in the newspaper reports of — the survivor.’ He had glanced quickly at Laroche. And then he was looking at me again. ‘Your father would have read the name they gave to that lake — their last camp. That was the place where your grandfather died, and as far as I’m concerned it only proves that your father was living in the past.’