He stared at the word Engineer. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘On whose instructions was the pass made out?’
‘Mr Staffen’s.’
‘Well, I won’t be able to get Mr Staffen at this time of night. They pack up at six.’
‘Is there room for me on this flight up to One-three-four?’
‘Yeah, there’s room all right.’
‘Then can’t you just alter the flight pass? Look!’ I said. ‘I’m not taking a plane down to Montreal. That’s certain. Why would I want to leave when I’ve only just arrived?’
He laughed. ‘You got something there.’
‘And just when I’ve got the job I came to get. Besides, Mr Staffen said I was to get up there right away. He’s short of engineers.’
‘Sure. They’re having to move them about all the time.’ He looked at me and I Saw he was making up his mind and said nothing more. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I reckon it’s a mistake, like you said. After all, I guess you’re old enough to know where you’re supposed to be going.’ And he chuckled to himself as he put a line through Montreal on the pass, wrote in One-three-four and altered the despatch sheet. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You’re on the list now. Lucky you found out in time or you’d have been back in the Old Country before you knew where you were.’ And he laughed again, good-humouredly, so that I hoped he wouldn’t get into too much trouble for altering the pass.
But I didn’t have time to think about that, for I was hustled back to the plane. The port motor started up as we ran across the apron and I was hauled aboard through the cold backwash of air from the turning propeller. My suitcase was tossed up to me and, as I grabbed it, I saw a man come out of the despatch office and stand there, hesitating, staring at the plane. The headlights of a truck swinging in at the gates caught him in their blaze and I recognized Laroche. The starboard motor came to life with a roar and at the sound of it he began to run out on to the tarmac. ‘Mind yourself!’ A hand pushed me back and the door was swung to with a crash, and after that I could see nothing but the dim-lit interior of the fuselage with the freight heaped down the centre and the construction men seated in two lines on either side of it.
There was still time for the plane to be stopped. If Laroche had checked with the despatcher and told him I was really bound for Montreal… The engines suddenly roared in unison and the plane began to move, swinging in a wide turn towards the runway-end. And then we were moving faster, the fuselage bumping and shaking as the wheels trundled over the rough ground.
I squeezed myself in between two men on the seat-line opposite the door and sat with my hands gripped round my knees, waiting. Nobody was talking. The noise of the engines made it impossible and there was that sense of strain that always seems to precede take-off.
The plane turned at the runway-end. Only a few seconds now. I held my knees tight as first one engine and then the other was run up; and then suddenly both engines were roaring and the fuselage shuddered and rattled. The brakes were released. The plane began to move. And in a moment we were airborne and the nerves and muscles of my body slowly relaxed.
It was only then that I had time to realize what I’d done. I was on my way into Labrador.
CHAPTER TWO
We climbed for what seemed a long time and it grew steadily colder. I put my coat on, but it hardly made any difference. The plane was a relic of the war, the parachute jumping wire still stretched down the centre of the fuselage, and a bitter draught of air blew in through the battered edges of the badly-fitting door. The dim lighting gave to the faces of the men flanked along the fuselage a ghostly, disembodied look. They were types effaces that I’d never seen before, faces that seemed symbolic of the world into which I was flying — old and weather-beaten, and some that were young and dissolute, a mixture of racial characteristics that included Chinese and African.
The battering of the engine noise dropped to a steady roar as the plane flattened out. The cold was intense. ‘We’ll be going up the Moisie River now,’ the man next to me said. He was a small squat man with the broad, flat features of an Indian. ‘Been up here before?’ I shook my head. ‘I work on the line two winters now — all through the Moisie Gorge and up to the height of land.’ There was pride in the way he said it.
‘How long before we get to One-three-four?’ I asked him.
‘One hour, I think.’ And he added, ‘Once I do it by canoe, all up the Moisie and across to the Ashuanipi. Six weeks. Now, one hour.’ He nodded and relapsed into silence, and I sat there, feeling a little scared as we roared on through the night into Labrador.
I had some idea of the country. I’d read about it in my father’s books. I knew it was virtually unexplored, a blank on the map which only four thousand years ago had been covered by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. And I got no comfort from the men around me. They were all a part of an organization that I was outside. And their hard-bitten, dim-lit features, their clothes, everything about them, only served to emphasize the grimness of the country into which I was being flown.
I was unprepared, inexperienced, and yet I think the thing that worried me most was that Laroche would have radioed ahead and that I should be stopped at One-three-four and sent down by the next plane.
But gradually the intense cold numbed all thought, and when the chill ache of my body had so deadened my mind that I didn’t care any longer, the sound of the engines died away, and a moment later we touched down.
We scrambled out into another world — a world where the ground was hard with frost and a few shacks stood against a starlit background of jackpines. Away to the left a solitary huddle of lights illuminated a line of heavy wagons. There was the sound of machinery, too. But the sound seemed small and insubstantial against the overwhelming solitude, and overhead the northern lights draped a weird and ghostly curtain across the sky, a curtain that wavered and constantly changed its shape with a fascination that was beyond the reach of explanation.
I stood for moment staring up at it, enthralled by the beauty of it, and at the same time awed. And all about me I was conscious of the iron-hard harshness of the North, the sense of a wild, untamed country, not yet touched by man.
Stiff-jointed and cold we moved in a body to the wood-frame huts that were the airstrip buildings, crowding into the despatch office where the warmth from the diesel heater was like a furnace. Names were called, the despatcher issuing instructions in a harsh, quick voice that switched from English to French and back again as though they were the same language. The men began filing out to a waiting truck. ‘Ferguson.’
The sound of my name came as a shock to me and I moved forward uncertainly.
‘You’re Ferguson, are you? Message for you.’ The despatcher held it out to me. ‘Came in by radio half an hour back.’
My first thought was that this would be from Lands, that I wouldn’t get any farther than this camp. And then I saw the name Laroche at the end of it. Urgent we have talk. Am taking night supply train. E.T.A. 0800. Do not leave before I have seen ‘you. Laroche.
Staring at that message, the only thought in my mind was that he hadn’t stopped me. Why? It would have been easy for him to persuade the base despatcher to have them hold me here. Instead, he was coming after me, wanting to have a talk to me. Had I forced his hand? Did this mean …? And then I was conscious of an unmistakably Lancashire voice saying, ‘Has Ferguson checked in on that flight, Sid?’
‘He’s right here,’ the despatcher answered, and I looked up to find a short, rather tired-looking man standing in the doorway to an inner office. He wore a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up and he had a green eye-shade on his head, and over his shoulder I caught a glimpse of radio equipment. ‘You got the message all right then?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I got the message, thanks.’
‘You a friend of Laroche?’ I didn’t know quite how to answer that, but fortunately he didn’t wait for a reply, but added, ‘You’re English, aren’t you?’