The effect, so far as I was concerned, was bewildering. A section of completed grade, scraped smooth as a road, would suddenly end in piled heaps of gravel or drop away into the quagmire of an uncompleted fill. The half-finished cuts were full of rock from the day’s blasting, and the whole line of the grade was littered with heavy machines that were a death trap in the dark.
Somewhere around midnight the wind died away and everything was preternaturally still — a stillness that had a quality of hostility about it. And then it began to snow, a gentle floating down of large flakes that were wet and clinging. The darkness around me slowly changed to a ghostly white, and once again a completed section of grade petered out and I was stumbling through ridged heaps of sand, keeping by instinct rather than sight to the open swathe that had been bulldozed through the jackpine.
It was shortly after this that the ground abruptly dropped away from me, and I slithered down into the mud of a gulley, where the corrugated metal sheets of a half-completed conduit stood like the whitened bones of a huge whale. It was muskeg here and I knew it was hopeless to try and cross it in the dark. Weary and cold, I paused for a spell, and then I retraced my steps to an opening I had seen in the white wall of the jackpine, and when I found it, I abandoned the grade, dully conscious that I was on some sort of track.
But the track was little better than the grade. The ground became soft under my feet as I descended into the same shallow depression that had called for a conduit in the grade construction. Patches of water showed dark against the snow, and as I splashed through them, I could hear the soft crunch of the paper-thin layer of ice that had already formed on the surface. And then it was mud, thick and heavy and black, with deep ruts in it where bulldozers had wallowed through.
But the ground under the mud was frozen hard, and when I was through the worst of it and the ruts still continued, I knew I had found a section of the old Tote Road. Gradually the surface hardened as the ground rose again, the ruts disappeared and the country became more open, the trees stunted. I had difficulty in keeping to the track then and twice within a matter of minutes I found myself blundering through thick scrub, and the snow shaken from the branches of the trees soaked me to the skin. I was very tired by then, my senses dulled. The handle of my suitcase was like the cold edge of a piece of steel cutting into my stiffened fingers, and the boots that were too big for me had raised blisters that burned with the pain of frostbite.
When I lost the track again, I gave it up and made a bed of pine branches and lay down to wait for dawn. I would go on then, I told myself-when I was rested and could see. The sweat was cold on my body, but I didn’t care because of the relief I felt at just lying there, making no effort.
The snow fell softly, but it didn’t seem cold any more and the stillness was overwhelming. In all the world there was no sound, so that I thought I could hear the flakes falling.
I hadn’t intended to sleep, but once I had relaxed I suppose there was nothing to keep me awake. The snow whispered, and I lay drifting in a white, dark world until consciousness began to slide away from my numbed brain.
Maybe I heard the car and that’s what woke me. Or perhaps it was the gleam of the headlights. I opened my eyes suddenly to find myself staring up at a jackpine floodlit like a Christmas tree, and a voice said, ‘I guess you must be Ferguson.’
I sat up then, still dazed with cold and sleep, not quite sure where I was. But then I saw the track and the trees all covered with snow and the man standing over me, black against the lights. He was short and broad, with a gnome-like body, swollen by the padding of his parka, and my first thought was that this wasn’t either Lands or Laroche. This was a man I’d never seen before. His face was square and craggy, the colour of mahogany, and the snow clung white to tufted eyebrows as he leaned forward, peering down at me through rimless glasses.
‘A fine dance you’ve led me,’ he growled, and he reached down and dragged me to my feet. ‘I bin all along the grade as far as Head of Steel searching for you. Came back by the Tote Road, just in case.’
I mumbled my thanks. My limbs were so stiff with cold I could hardly stand. Numbness deadened the pain of my blistered feet. ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing hold of my suitcase. ‘There’s a heater in the jeep. It’ll hurt like hell, but you’ll soon thaw out.’
It was a jeep station wagon, a battered wreck of a car with one mudguard torn off and the bodywork all plastered with mud and snow. He helped me in and a moment later we were bumping and slithering between the trees that lined the track, and the heater was roaring a hot blast that was agony to my frozen limbs. His face showed square and leathery in the reflected glare of the headlights. He wasn’t a young man and the peaked khaki cap was strangely decorated with a cluster of gaudy flies. ‘You were searching for me, were you?’ I asked. And when he nodded, I knew that Lands must have contacted him. ‘You’re Mr Darcy then,’ I said.
‘Ray Darcy,’ he grunted, not taking his eyes off the road. He was driving fast, the car slithering on the bends that rushed towards us in a blaze of white. ‘Bill reckoned I’d find you around Mile Two-fifty.’
‘You saw him then?’ I asked.
‘Sure I did.’
‘And Laroche? Was he there?’
‘Laroche?’ He glanced at me quickly. ‘No, I didn’t see Laroche.’
‘But he was up there, wasn’t he? He was at Head of Steel?’
‘So they told me.’ And he added, ‘You just relax now and get some sleep. Guess you’re pretty near all in.’
But this was the man I’d trekked through the night to see. Circumstances had brought us together, and I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity, tired though I was. ‘Did Lands tell you why I was here?’ I asked him. ‘Did he tell you about the transmission my father picked up?’
‘Yeah. He told me.’
‘And I suppose he told you I was crazy to think Briffe might be still alive.’
‘No. He didn’t exactly say that.’
‘Then what did he say?’ I asked.
Again that quick sidelong glance. ‘He said you were James Finlay Ferguson’s grandson, for one thing.’ He dragged the car through the mud of a long S bend. ‘And that to my way of thinking,’ he added, ‘is about as strange as the idea that Briffe should have been able to transmit a message.’
‘What’s so strange about it?’ I asked. Why did it always come back to the Ferguson Expedition? ‘It’s just a coincidence.’ The warmth of the heater was making me drowsy.
‘Damned queer coincidence.’ He said it almost savagely.
‘It explains my father’s interest in Briffe’s party.’
‘Sure. But it doesn’t explain you.’
I didn’t know what he meant by that, and I was too sleepy to ask. I could hardly keep my eyes open. My mind groped back to the Ferguson Expedition. If I could just find out what had happened. ‘Perkins said you knew more about Labrador than anybody else on the line.’ My voice sounded thick and blurred. ‘That’s why I came north … to find you and ask …’
‘You go to sleep,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk later.’
My eyes were closed, waves of tiredness engulfing me. But then we went into a skid and I was jerked back to consciousness as he pulled the car out of it. ‘You do know what happened, don’t you?’ I said thickly. ‘I must know what happened to my grandfather.’
‘I’ve read it up, if that’s what you mean.’ He turned his head and looked at me. ‘You mean to say you really don’t know the story of that expedition?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘That’s the reason I wanted to contact you — that and the fact that you brought Laroche out.’
He stared at me. ‘Goddammit!’ he said. ‘If that isn’t the queerest thing about the whole business.’