We returned to the car and all the way back down the Tote Road Darcy talked, giving me the benefit of his experience, all he’d learned of bushcraft in the two years he’d been up in Labrador. I can’t remember now a quarter of what he told me; how to get a fire going from reindeer moss when everything was sodden, how to live off the land — the things you could eat, the fish you could catch — and the way the country had been fashioned by the thrust of glacier ice so that I’d never get lost, even with no compass and the sun hidden by leaden skies. I doubt whether I took it all in at the time, for even then I hadn’t quite convinced myself that it was real and that the next day I might be out there in the wild with nobody but the Indian for company.
He set me down where the track to the camp led off the Tote Road. ‘I’ll be back in about an hour,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll see about kit and decide what’s to be done. Somebody ought to go in with you.’ He drove off then to have a look at his survey team and I went down towards the camp, wondering whether in the end I’d be able to persuade him to come with me.
A bulldozer climbing the muddied slope out of the camp checked as it drew level with me, and a face like mahogany under a shapeless hat leaned down. ‘That Ray Darcy just dropped you off?’ And when I nodded, he said, ‘Guess you must be Ferguson then.’ The big diesel throbbed against the stillness of the trees. ‘Somebody’s asking for you down at the camp… Waiting for you at Ray’s hut.’ The gears crashed and the monstrous piece of machinery lurched forward, ploughing two deep tracks in the mud.
It could only be Lands — Laroche, too, probably. I stood and watched the water seeping into the tracks left by the bulldozer, wondering what I should do. But I’d have to face them sooner or later, and in the end I started slowly down towards the camp, wishing that Darcy were still with me. I wasn’t altogether convinced that Lands couldn’t stop me if he wanted to. The Company might not own Labrador, but right now they were in possession of it.
I hesitated a moment at the door of Darcy’s hut, remembering how Lands had been the last time I’d seen him. But he’d had time now to get used to the idea of my being up here, and with a sudden desire to get it over and done with, I lifted the latch and pushed the door open.
My first thought was that the room was empty. There was nobody standing there, waiting for me, and when I went inside everything was just as I’d left it — the stove roaring, the wash bowl still with dirty water in it and my empty plate beside it, and the cupboard door half-open with Darcy’s clothes hanging there.
And then I saw the rucksack and the heavy boots and the figure lying in Darcy’s bed, the blankets pulled up round the shoulders and the face turned to the wall so that only the black hair showed. I was so convinced it was Laroche that I was on the point of slipping out again. But at that moment the sleeper stirred and turned over. The eyes blinked at me uncertainly from behind their dark lashes.
It wasn’t Laroche. It was Briffe’s daughter. And when she saw me standing there, she threw off the blankets and swung her legs out of bed. ‘I thought perhaps you are gone for the day, so I went to sleep.’ She pushed her hand up through her close-cropped hair in a gesture that reminded me of Laroche.
I was too surprised to say anything for the moment, but just stood there, staring at her. She was dressed in faded green corduroys and a thick bush shirt with a red check, and her face was still flushed with sleep.
‘How did you get here?’ I asked, suddenly finding my voice.
‘By plane — last night,’ she answered. ‘I stopped off at Two-ninety, and from there I hitch a ride in a truck coming south.’
‘South?’ I had forgotten for the moment that there were other camps to the north, a whole string of isolated outposts linked by the thread of the air lift.
‘I am here just after you leave with Ray,’ she added.
Her feet were encased in thick woollen socks. The socks and the heavy boots under the bed had a purposeful look. My gaze shifted to the rucksack. It was the sort of pack a man would take for a week’s hike through mountains. A fishing-rod lay beside it and a rawhide belt with hunting-knife and axe, and flung down on top of it was a thick polo-necked sweater and a leather jacket like the one I’d seen her wearing down at Seven Islands, but older. ‘What made you come here?’ I asked, my mind still on that pile of gear.
‘What else am I to do?’ her tone was impatient. ‘Do you expect me to stay down in Seven Islands when you have gone north up the line?’
‘Then you came here to see me?’
‘But of course.’
And she had come straight here. ‘How did you know where to find me?’
She was staring at me and there was a hardness in her brown eyes that I had never before associated with that colour. ‘If you don’t believe Albert’s story,’ she said, ‘then you must come here. It is the nearest camp to where he came out of the bush. Also Ray Darcy is the man who brought him to the aircraft.’ Her eyes hadn’t moved from my face. They stared at me, wide and unblinking, and I had a sudden uneasy feeling that she could read my thoughts. But it wasn’t only her eyes that unnerved me. There was something about her, a peculiar quality of stillness and tension, as though all of her were coiled up inside her body like a spring. She was half-Indian. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did, and it scared me because I knew nothing about them.
She got to her feet in one swift, almost cat-like movement. “You still think my father is alive, don’t you?’ Her voice had a peculiar flatness, so that I knew she had accepted the fact of my belief. And yet, the way she said it, it was an accusation, as though I were guilty of a terrible heresy.
I knew then that she hated me. She hated me for the choice I was forcing on her, and I couldn’t blame her. She was torn between love of Laroche and love of her father, and it was my presence that had forced those two loyalties into conflict. I had known what it must do to her ever since that meeting with her down at Seven Islands. But it had never occurred to me that she would follow me up the line.
‘You don’t answer,’ she said, frowning.
‘How can I?’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’ I couldn’t possibly be certain he was still alive.
She got my meaning at once. ‘Of course not. But he was alive when — when Albert left him. You’re certain of that, aren’t you? That is why you came north, instead of going back to England.’
Half-Indian or not, her mind was logical enough. She had thought it out and reached the inevitable conclusion. What it had cost her to do that I didn’t dare to think, but the strain was there in her small, tense face. I didn’t say anything, just nodded my head. ‘And now?’ she asked. ‘What are you going to do now?’
I hesitated. But if I were going to do anything more about it, she’d a right to know. ‘There’s a chance we may be able to locate the lake where they crashed,’ I said.
‘Lake of the Lion?’
‘Yes, I’m hoping to start tomorrow.’
‘You!’ Her voice was suddenly incredulous. ‘But you cannot possibly go in by yourself. Besides, Albert has flown in twice by helicopter and each time he has failed to find it.’
I realized then that she hadn’t considered the possibility that he might not want to find it, or if she had, her mind had rejected it. ‘I’m not going in alone,’ I said. And I told her about the Indian and how he’d recognized the lake from Darcy’s drawing of a lion. ‘But I don’t know yet whether he’ll go. He’s worried about the hunting, and he’s scared of the place. He’s going to talk it over with his family and let me know tomorrow.’
‘What is the Indian’s name?’ she asked. ‘I know some of them who hunt up here.’ And when I told her, she seized on it eagerly. ‘Mackenzie! Which Mackenzie? There are so many — a whole tribe.’