‘Goldarnit!’ he exclaimed, staring at me. ‘It’s the damnedest thing I ever heard. You come all this way, right up here to this camp, where you’re not more than fifty miles or so from where your grandfather died, and you say you don’t know the story.’
‘Well, I don’t,’ I said. ‘I came up here because of Briffe.’
‘Because of Briffe, or because Laroche crashed his plane in the same area?’
‘Because of Briffe,’ I said. I was watching his face, wondering whether he, too, had guessed where the plane had crashed. I glanced down at the book again. I had only got about two-thirds through it. ‘Did Dumaine reach Lake of the Lion?’ I asked.
‘Ah, so you know about Lake of the Lion, do you?’
‘Yes, but I don’t know what happened there.’
‘Well, it’s like I told you,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows for sure. Dumaine never got farther than the Ashuanipi.’ He reached over and took the book from me again. ‘Some Indians showed him a lone white man’s camp on the banks of the river, and after that he found two more. But that was all.’ His grizzled head was bent over the book, his stubby, wind-cracked fingers leafing through the earlier pages. ‘The poor devil spent more than a month searching for that lake,’ he murmured. ‘And all the time he should have been getting the hell out of the country.’ He seemed to be trying to check on something in the first few chapters of the book. At length he said, ‘The big freeze-up was on them long before they’d reached Davis Inlet. If it hadn’t been for the half-breeds, he’d never have got out alive.’ He snapped the book shut and replaced it on the shelf beside the photograph. ‘The irony of it was,’ he added, looking at me curiously, ‘there was a woman came to Davis Inlet that year and strolled across half Labrador as though it were no worse than her own Scots moors. She had three trappers with her who knew the country and she covered the same area that Dumaine covered, and she went out by way of the Hamilton and the NorthWest River Post as fit as when she started.’
But I didn’t intend to be side-tracked. “This man who accompanied my grandfather,’ I said. ‘Dumaine talks of him as though he were mad. A mind deranged by the tragedy of what happened, he says. What sent him mad?’ I asked.
He gave a quick shrug and turned away towards the stove.
‘Can’t you give me some idea of what happened?’ I persisted. And when he didn’t answer, I added, ‘At least you roust know what the accusations were. What was he accused of?’
He was leaning down, staring at the red-hot stove, but he turned to me then and said, ‘He was accused of murdering your grandfather.’ And he added quickly, ‘Nothing was proved. Nobody knows what happened. It was just a wild accusation made out of-‘
‘Who made it?’ I asked.
He hesitated, and then said, ‘The woman I was talking about — Ferguson’s young wife, Alexandra.’ He was staring at me with a puzzled frown. ‘You must know that part of it at least. Hell, boy, she was your own grandmother.’ And then, when he realized it was new to me, he shook his head and turned back to the stove. ‘The newspapers got hold of her and printed some pretty wild things. Not that there was anything new in it. There’d been a lot of talk when the poor devil had come out alone raving of gold and a lake with the figure of a lion in rock. He was half out of his mind then, by all accounts.’
‘So it was gold my grandfather was after, was it?’ I was remembering what my mother had said about him.
‘Sure. You don’t imagine a seasoned prospector like Ferguson went into Labrador for the good of his soul, do you?’ He fell silent then, but after a while he said, ‘She must have been a remarkable woman, your grandmother. Didn’t you know her at all?’
I explained how we’d stopped going to the house in Scotland after my mother had found her talking to me in my room that night, and he nodded. ‘Maybe your mother was right. And yet in spite of that you’re here. Queer, isn’t it?’ And then he went back to my grandmother. ‘It would be remarkable even today, you wouldn’t understand, of course — not yet. All you’ve seen of the Labrador is a railway under construction. But you get away from the camps and the grade, the country’s different then — a land to be reckoned with.’
‘In fact, the land God gave to Cain.’ I said it without thinking, repeating Farrow’s words.
He looked at me, a little surprised. ‘Yeah, that’s right. The land God gave to Cain.’ And the way he said it gave a significance to the words that chilled me.
‘Did my grandmother reach Lake of the Lion?’ I asked then.
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘But if she did, she kept damn quiet about it, for there’s no mention of it in the newspaper reports. But she back-tracked their route in and got farther than Dumaine did, or else she got there first, for she came out with a rusted pistol, a sextant and an old map case, all things that had belonged to her husband. She had those photographed, but she never published her diary, though she admitted she’d kept one. I guess she’d have published that all right if she’d found her husband’s last camp. Is the diary still in existence, do you know?’ he asked me.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I’ve seen the pistol and the sextant and the map case. My father had them hanging on the wall of his room. There was part of a paddle, too, and an old fur cap. But I never knew there was a diary.’
‘Too bad,’ he murmured. ‘It would have been interesting to know the basis of her accusations. She was three months up here in the wild and all the time following the route her husband took. I guess those three lonely months gave the iron plenty of time to enter into her soul.’ He went over to the stove and held his hands close to the iron casing, warming them. ‘The strange thing is,’ he said, ‘that Dumaine never mentions her once in that book. And yet the two parties started out from Davis Inlet within a few days of each other, and they were covering the same ground. I wonder whether they ever met?’ he murmured. ‘Even if Dumaine never met her face-to-face, he must have come across traces of her party. And yet he never mentions her. There’s not one reference to Mrs Ferguson in the whole of the book.’
‘That’s hardly surprising,’ I said, ‘considering she’d accused his wife’s brother of murder.’
‘Well, maybe not. But she didn’t put it as bluntly as that, you understand. And there’d been all that talk …’ He was staring down at the stove again. ‘It’s a queer thing,’ he murmured, half to himself. ‘Those two men — I would have thought it would save been the other way about.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I dunno. A question of character, I guess. I’ve thought a lot about it since I been up acre. Take Ferguson.’ He was staring down at the stove. ‘Came over as a kid in an immigrant ship and went out west, Apprenticed to one of the Hudson’s Bay posts. A few years later he was in the Cariboo. I guess that’s where the gold bug got him, for he was all through the Cariboo and then up to Dawson City in the Klondike rush of the middle nineties.’ He shook his head. ‘He must have been real tough.’
‘And the other man?’ I asked.
‘Pierre?’ he said quickly. ‘Pierre was different — a man of the wilderness, a trapper. That’s what makes it so odd.’
He didn’t say anything more and I asked him then how he knew all this. ‘It’s all in Dumaine’s book, is it?’
‘No, of course not. Dumaine was storekeeper in a small town in Ontario. He didn’t understand the wild, so he never bothered to assess the nature of the two men’s personalities. His book is a dull inventory of the day-to-day tribulations of a man whose wife had talked him into a journey that was beyond his capabilities.’
‘Then how do you know about my grandfather?’ I asked.
He looked up at me. ‘Newspaper cuttings chiefly. I had somebody look them up and type them all out for me. There was a lot about it in the Montreal papers, as you can imagine. I’d show them to you, only they’re in my trunk, and that’s up at Two-ninety still.’