‘No.’
‘Does it worry you?’
‘A little,’ I admitted.
‘I understand.’ She touched my arm, a quick gesture of companionship that surprised me. ‘It is so empty, eh?’ And she withdrew her hand and held it to the blaze. ‘My father always said it is the land of the Old Testament.’
‘The Old Testament!’ It seemed odd to compare this frozen country, so full of water, with a land of heat and desert sand, and yet I could see his point, for I suppose he’d never known anything but the North. ‘What was your father like?’ I asked.
She didn’t answer for a moment and I was afraid perhaps that I shouldn’t have asked her that. But then she said, ‘When you are very near to a person, then I think per’aps it is difficult to tell what they are really like. Some men thought him hard.
He drove them.’ And she added with a little smile, ‘He drove me, too. But I didn’t mind.’
She was silent for a moment, staring into the flames as though she could see him there. ‘You would like him, I think,’ she murmured at length. ‘And you would get on together. You have guts, and that always appealed to him.’ She sighed and shook her head sadly. ‘But I don’t think you meet him now; I don’t think he can still be alive.’ She leaned forward and pushed a branch into the fire, watching it flare up. ‘It is a little sad if it is the Lake of the Lion where they crash. There is supposed to be gold there and that was his dream — to strike it rich and have a big mine named after him. It wasn’t the money so much, though we never had any and my mother died when I was a little girl because he could not afford a sanatorium; it was more the need to justify himself. He was a prospector,’ she added. ‘It was in his blood, and, like a gambler, he must always try his luck again — one more expedition, one more attempt to find what he is searching for.’
I nodded. ‘Like my grandfather. Ray says he was like that.’
She turned her head and stared at me, her eyes very wide in the firelight. ‘That was a terrible story,’ she said at last, her voice little more than a whisper, and I knew it wasn’t my grandfather she was thinking of, but Pierre Laroche. ‘But it has nothing to do with my father,’ she declared, her voice trembling with the effort needed to carry conviction. ‘Nothing at all.’
I would have left it at that, but the train of thought had made me curious on one point. ‘You told me your father often talked about Lake of the Lion,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘That and a hidden valley up in the Nahanni River Country and another lake somewhere on the edge of the Barren Lands; places he’d heard about from the old-timers.’ And she added, ‘I tell you, he was a prospector. That was his life, and nothing else mattered.’ She was staring into the fire again. ‘But he was a wonderful man. To see him handling a canoe in the rapids or with a gun, and always round the fire he would be telling stories — strange, unbelievable stories of the Canadian Wild…’ She stopped there and I saw she was crying, the tears welling gently from her eyes. And then abruptly she got to her feet, in one quick, graceful movement, and left me without a word.
I watched her crawl into the tent, and after that I sat alone beside the fire for a long time, staring at the star-filled night and thinking about my grandfather, who had died in this country, and about that indomitable woman, my grandmother, who had followed his trail with vengeance in her heart. The land of the Old Testament; that phrase stuck in my mind, and the frozen stillness that surrounded me seemed suddenly cruel and menacing. And for the first time in my life I thought about death.
I’d no religion to retreat into in the face of that ultimate enemy, no God to support me, nothing. Science had done that for me. Like all the rest of my generation, I hadn’t dared to think too deeply, and as a young engineer my days had been full. I had been content to leave it at that. But here it was different. Here, it seemed, I was faced with the world as it had been in the beginning, when the mind of man first began to grope after a meaning for infinity; and, as Darcy had predicted, I began to think about God.
But in the end the cold drove me to the tent, and I crawled in and lay down in my place beside Darcy. We were on spruce boughs that night and the soft, aromatic smell of them sent me to sleep almost immediately.
When I woke, the stillness was gone, shattered by the crash of waves on the lake shore and the roar of wind in the trees. It was a grey day with a savage wind blowing out of the northwest, and as we started on the portage to the next lake, it began to rain. At first it was no more than a drizzle, a thick curtain of mist driving across the country. But gradually the sky darkened, and soon the rain was sheeting down, slatting against our bodies with a fury that was almost personal.
That portage was the worst we had experienced, the ground strewn with boulders, slippery and unstable. Darcy and I were carrying the canoe, and all the time the wind threatened to take charge of it and tear it out of our hands. We were wet to the skin long before we reached the next stretch of water, and when we stood on its shores, our backs to the rain and our clothes streaming, we were a sorry sight.
It was a small lake expansion, not more than two hundred yards across, yet the surface of it boiled under the lash of the storm and the waves were two feet high and breaking. ‘Will the canoe make it?’ I asked Darcy, and in turning to speak to him, the wind drove solid water into my mouth.
It was Paule who answered me. ‘Of course it will,’ she said. But I could see Darcy didn’t like it. He stood there, wiping his glasses on a sodden handkerchief, staring at the lake and muttering to himself.
We shipped so much water on the crossing that the canoe was half full by the time we reached the other side. And as we stumbled on over the next portage, the country changed again; the timber became thicker, and between the boulder ridges we began to encounter muskeg. At first they were only small patches, which we were able to skirt. But then we came to a big swamp, and though we scouted north and south along its edge, we could see no end to it. There was no alternative then but to cross it, which we succeeded in doing after a long, heartbreaking struggle, in the course of which we were often up to our waists in water.
We came out of it wet and filthy and utterly exhausted, only to be met by more muskeg beyond the next ridge. ‘Did you meet much of this on your way out?’ Darcy asked Laroche as we stood looking at it.
‘You saw the condition I was in.’
‘Yeah.’ Darcy nodded. ‘But how much of it is there, that’s what I’d like to know?’
Laroche hesitated, glancing nervously from one to the other of us as we stood staring at him. ‘We’ll get into better country soon, I guess.’
‘How soon?’ Paule asked.
‘When we’re near the lake. We’ll be on rock then.’
‘Well, how near have we got to get before we’re out of this damned muskeg country?’ Darcy demanded. ‘Two miles from the lake, five, ten?’
‘I don’t know.’ Laroche licked the water from his lips. ‘About five, I guess.’
‘And all the rest is muskeg, is that it? Fifteen miles of it at least.’
Laroche shook his head. ‘I can’t seem to remember very clearly. There was muskeg, I know. But not fifteen miles of it. I’m sure it wasn’t as much as that.’ And then he added, ‘It just bears out what I’ve been saying — we’re still too far south. We should turn north until we strike the route I took coming out.’
‘No, we’ll stick to the map,’ Paule said.
‘But you can’t be certain that lake we crossed last — ‘
‘I am certain.’ Her voice was suddenly shrill again. ‘And you admit yourself that you don’t remember your route very clearly.’
Darcy moved towards the canoe. ‘No good standing here arguing,’ he said. ‘We’ll only get cold.’
Paule and Laroche stood facing each other a moment longer, and then they shouldered their packs and we started down into the muskeg. It stretched ahead of us as far as our eyes could see through the curtain of the rain and we waded on and on through country in which sodden tussocks of cotton grass were the nearest approach to dry land, and never a stretch of open water in which we could use the canoe.