I had moved automatically to the water’s edge and there I hesitated. I could so easily leave him now and go up to those falls and wait for Paule and Darcy; I was sure that Paule, at any rate, would push on as far as the river. But it took more nerve than I possessed to deliberately abandon the company of another human and blaze a lone trail through that sort of country. Moreover, now that I was so near to my objective, I found it exercising an increasing fascination, so that though I had been offered a means of escape, I couldn’t bring myself to take it.
I stepped into the water then and the cold shock of it made me catch my breath at the same moment that Laroche shouted something, so that I didn’t hear what he said. I thought for a moment he was in difficulties for he was now waist deep in the water. But he hadn’t been pulled off his feet by the current. In fact, he was standing stock still, staring at the farther bank. He cupped his hands and shouted again. ‘Paule! Paule!’ The name wandered down along the jackpine fringe, a dwindling ghost of a sound swallowed by the empty vastness of sky and water. ‘Paule!’ And then he went plunging forward, driving his body through the water with a sudden, desperate energy.
I didn’t hesitate then, but followed him, not caring any longer how cold the water was or how deep. Paule was here and Darcy would be with her. I shouldn’t be alone with him any more.
Fortunately there was a gravel bottom to the lake expansion, for long before I reached the middle I was feeling the tug of the current, and all the time the water got deeper until it covered my genitals and was reaching up to my stomach, freezing all the guts out of me. At the deepest it reached to my lower ribs and my boots were just touching bottom. I saw Laroche scramble out and climb the rocks that fringed the shore. But there was no sign of the others and he didn’t call again. And when I came up out of the water I found him alone, standing over the burned embers of a fire, staring at the thin wisp of blue smoke that curled up from it. ‘You saw them,’ I gasped. ‘Where are they?’
He shook his head and his face was deathly pale. ‘No, I didn’t see them.’
‘But you called out to Paule.’
‘I saw the smoke. I thought maybe …’ He shook his head wearily. ‘They’re ahead of us.’ His teeth were chattering and the bitter frustration he seemed to feel made his voice sound hollow. He pushed back the hood of his parka and ran a trembling hand up over his head. ‘I didn’t think they could possibly get here ahead of us.’ He was almost crying. At any rate, there were tears in his eyes and his whole body shook as though with ague.
‘But how do you know?’ I cried. ‘If you didn’t see them …’
‘The fire,’ he said.
I stared down at it then, seeing it suddenly as the footprint in the sand, the proof that there were other humans besides ourselves in this desolate wilderness. And I knew that he must be right, because there was nobody within five days’ march of us, except Paule and Darcy.
By then my own teeth were chattering and I could feel my clothes stiffening as they froze. A numbness was creeping through my body. But I didn’t care. That wisp of smoke meant that Paule and Darcy had stood here on this lake shore and dried themselves at this fire less than an hour ago. The knowledge that they were so close comforted me. ‘I’ll get the fire going again,’ I said. ‘Give me the axe.’
But he shook his head. ‘No. No, I got to get on. I got to catch up with them before they reach the lake.’
He was looking now at the trees ahead of him, searching for the marks he’d made. ‘But we must have a fire,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to dry our clothes.’
He shook his head again, impatiently, as he moved in amongst the trees, his body still shaking with the cold. And then he found what he was looking for, and he started forward.
‘Laroche! Come back!’ I almost screamed his name. ‘You damned crazy fool!’ I shouted after him. ‘You’ll die of cold if you don’t get dry.’
He didn’t stop, but went straight on, half-running, and though I shouted at him again and again, he took no notice. There was nothing for it then, but to follow him. I knew it was crazy. We were soaked to the waist and the temperature was way below freezing. But I’d no alternative.
I thought I’d catch him up in a moment, for he was in a far worse state than I was. I thought that as soon as he’d got over the first shock of his surprise and began to weaken, I could persuade him to stop and get a fire lit. But in fact I was only just able to keep him in sight. He seemed suddenly possessed of a demoniacal energy. The timber was sparse here and he was running, not caring that the ground was rocky and treacherously strewn with moss-covered boulders. Twice I saw him fall, but each time he scrambled to his feet and plunged on at the same frantic pace.
We went on like that for a long time, until I, too, was so exhausted I could barely stagger, and then suddenly the ground fell away and through the bare poles of the trees I caught a glimpse of water. A moment later I stumbled out of the timber on to an outcrop, and there was the rock, crouched like a lion in the middle of the lake.
I stopped then and stared at it, hardly able to believe my eyes. I had reached Lake of the Lion, and the sight of it gave me a sudden chill feeling of despair, for it was a black, sombre place. The lake itself had a white rime of ice round its edge, and all the length of the long, narrow cleft, its surface had the dull, leaden look of water beginning to freeze over. The Lion Rock stood in the very centre of it, the blackness of it emphasized by the ice that ringed it round.
‘Paule!’ Laroche’s despairing cry came up to me through the trees, and it had the lost quality of the damned in it. ‘Paule! Wait! Please, Paule!’
He was running down the steep-timbered slope towards the lake, and beyond his bobbing figure I caught the glint of metal. It was the Beaver floatplane, and it wasn’t sunk after all. It lay with its wings sprawled along the ice at the water’s edge. And to the right of it, two figures stood against the black bulk of some up-ended rocks that formed a platform overlooking the lake, a repetition at a lower level of the outcrop on which I stood. They were standing quite still, and like me they were staring down at the plane.
‘Paule!’ That cry, so full of fear and despair, rose crazily up to me again, and as though the cry had galvanized the two figures into action, one of them detached itself from the other and went scrambling down towards the lake and the half-sunken aircraft. It was Paule. And then Darcy started after her, and he was calling to her, a cry of warning.
No doubt he thought Laroche, in his demented state, might be dangerous. It was my own immediate thought, for the Beaver floatplane was evidence that he’d lied, and I left the outcrop and went racing down the slope, shouting to her to stay with Darcy.
It’s a wonder I didn’t break my neck on that hillside, for it was a tangle of roots and I went down it regardless of the fact that I was dead weary and all my muscles uncontrollable through weakness. But I was unencumbered by any pack and I reached the lake shore only a little behind Darcy, who had stopped and was standing with a shocked look on his face. And beyond him, Paule had stopped, too, and so had Laroche — the three of them quite still like a tableau.
They were all of them staring at something down along the lake shore, and as I passed Darcy, I saw it, too; a body lying crumpled in the snow, with the torn canvas of a tent forlornly draped from its slanting pole. I checked then, and I, too, stood momentarily frozen into immobility, for beside the body were two rusted steel containers, and from one of them the thin line of an aerial swept up to the trees that fringed the lake.
So my father had been right. That was my first thought, and I went slowly forward, past Laroche, past Paule — until I stood looking down at the pitiful remains of the man I’d come so far to find. He lay on his side, a stiff-frozen bundle of ragged clothing, and his thin, starved face was turned upwards, staring with sightless eyes at the Labrador skies. One hand still clutched the phone mike of the transmitter; the other, wrapped in a filthy, bloodstained bandage, lay by the handle of the generator. My only thought then was that he had never given up; right to the very end he had been trying to get through, and he had died without knowing he had succeeded. Across all those thousands of miles he had made contact with my father, a disembodied voice on the ether crying for help. And my father had met that call with a superhuman effort that had been his death. And now I had failed him.