She was staring at me. ‘It must be terrible for you — to have discovered what happened. For both of us,’ she murmured. And then, pulling herself together, her voice suddenly clear and practicaclass="underline" ‘You’ll go fast, won’t you — as fast as you can.’ It wasn’t a question, but a statement. And when Darcy nodded, too affected to speak, she went to him and gripped hold of his hand. ‘God bless you, Ray,’ she said. ‘I’ll pray that you get through in time.’
‘We’ll do our best, Paule. You know that.’
‘Yes. I know that.’. She stared at him a moment, and I knew what was in her mind; she was thinking she’d never see him again. And then she leaned suddenly forward and kissed him. ‘God help us!’ she whispered.
‘He will,’ he assured her.
She turned to me then and held out her hand. And when I gripped it, I couldn’t help myself — I said, ‘I’m sorry, Paule. It would have been better for you if I’d never come to Canada.’
But she shook her head. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said softly. ‘We both wanted the same thing — the truth; and that cannot be hidden for ever.’ She kissed me then. ‘Goodbye, Ian. I’m glad I met you.’ And then she turned back to Laroche, who all the time had been staring at us with his eyes wide open. And as we picked up our things and turned to go, he struggled up on to one elbow. ‘Good luck!’ I didn’t hear the words, but only read them through the movement of his lips. And then he fell back and Paule was bending over him.
‘Okay,’ Darcy said thickly. ‘Let’s get going.’
We left them then, going straight along the narrow beach, past the two graves and the half-submerged aircraft, and up through the timber, the way we’d come. The knife with which Paule had attacked Laroche still lay where she’d thrown it, and I picked it up and slipped it into my pack. Why, I don’t know, unless it was that I didn’t want her to find it lying there to remind her of what had happened.
Neither of us looked back, and in a little while we’d climbed the slope above the lake and the wretched place was gone, hidden from view by the timber. It was a bright, clear day, but by the time we’d crossed the river at the lake expansion, the wind had risen and was blowing half a gale, with ragged wisps of cloud tearing across the cold blue of the sky.
We were travelling light and we didn’t spare ourselves, for our need of food was urgent.
An hour before nightfall we were back at the lake where Laroche and I had left them, and there was the canoe and the tent and my pack and all the things they’d abandoned to make that final dash to Lake of the Lion. It all looked just as I had left it, except that everything was covered with snow and only the two of us now.
Darcy collapsed as soon as we reached the camp. He had let me set the pace, and it had been too much for him. And as I cut the wood and got the fire going, I wondered how we’d make out from there on, with the canoe to carry, as well as the food and the tent and all our gear. But he revived as soon as he’d got some hot coffee inside him, and by the time he’d fed, he seemed as full of life as ever, even managing to crack a few jokes.
As soon as we had fed, we turned in. It was the last night of any comfort, for in the morning we decided to abandon the tent; in fact, everything except food to last the two of us three days, one cooking utensil, our down sleeping-bags and a change of socks and underwear. We ate a huge breakfast, shovelling all the food we could into ourselves, and then we started up through the jackpine with the canoe and our packs on our shoulders.
It took us six hours to get clear of the timber and back down into the open country of gravel and water, and by then Darcy was stumbling with exhaustion. But he refused to stop, and we went on until we reached the first of the lakes and could launch the canoe. His face was the colour of putty and his breath wheezed in his throat. And still we went on without a pause, heading well to the south of west in the hopes of avoiding the worst of the muskeg. The wind dropped and it began to snow. Night caught us still in the open and we lay in our sleeping-bags on a gravel ridge with the canoe on top of us.
It was a grey-white world in the morning — grey skies, grey water, white ridges. And on the lake ahead of us a dozen or more geese sat and called to each other in a little patch of open water they’d made in the new-formed ice. But we’d left the gun behind. We’d nothing but the fishing-rod, and we’d no time to fish.
There is no point in my describing that terrible journey in detail. I doubt, in any case, whether I could, for as we struggled on my mind as well as my body became frozen into numbness, dazed with exhaustion. How Darcy kept going, I don’t know. It was sheer will-power, for his body gave out before mine did, and as my own energy diminished, my admiration for him increased. He never complained, never gave up hope. He just kept going doggedly on to the limit of endurance and beyond. It was this more than anything else that enabled me to keep going, for the cold was frightful and we ran out of food long before we reached the Tote Road and the line of the grade.
We were cursed with bad luck. The weather, for one thing. The freeze-up caught us and ice formed so thick that in the end we couldn’t use the canoe. The compass, too, led us astray. It was probably a deposit of iron ore. At any rate, the result was that we didn’t go far enough south and got into a worse area of muskeg than the one we’d come through on the way in. We were caught in it all one night, and when we finally made it to open water, still carrying the canoe, we found the ice too thick to paddle across and too thin to bear our weight.
A week later and we’d have been able to walk across the top of the muskeg and over all the lakes. As it was, we just had to abandon the canoe and struggle round the lakes on foot. And all the time we were thinking of Paule back there at Lake of the Lion. Twice we thought we heard aircraft away to the south, flying low. On the first occasion, we were quite convinced of it. It was on the second day — the only still day we had — and we were sure they must be searching for us. But we were in thick timber at the time, and anyway the sound was a long way off. ‘I guess it’s just one of the air lift boys got a little off course,’ Darcy said when the sound had dwindled without coming near us. The second time was several days later. I can’t remember which day. I’d lost count by then. It sounded like a helicopter, but we couldn’t be sure. We were so dazed with cold and exhaustion and lack of food that we couldn’t trust ourselves not to have imagined it.
We were eight days on that journey, and the last two days I doubt whether we made more than half a dozen miles. We were both suffering from frostbite then, and fifty yards or so was all we could do without pausing to recover our strength. By then we hadn’t eaten anything for three days, and our feet were so frozen and painful that we had difficulty in moving at all.
We reached the Tote Road on the evening of the eighth day only to find it choked with drifts. Nothing had been down it for several days, so that we were forced to spend another night in the open. And in the morning Darcy couldn’t go on. He’d come to the end of his strength, and he lay there, staring at me out of his red-rimmed eyes, his cracked and blackened lips drawn back from the teeth and his beard all frozen stiff with ice. He looked much like Briffe had looked when we’d found him. ‘Can you make it?’ he asked, and the words came out through his teeth without any movement of the lips.
I didn’t answer, because to answer required an effort, and, anyway, I didn’t know whether I could. All I wanted to do was to go on lying there in the snow beside him, to abandon myself to the dream world that my mind was already groping towards, a lotus-land of perpetual sun and hot food where the warm planks of an imaginary boat bore me gently towards a horizon of infinite ease, without effort, without discomfort. ‘You’ve got to make it,’ he croaked at me urgently, and I knew it was Paule he was thinking of, not himself, and I crawled slowly to my feet.