The Land God gave to Cain

CHAPTER ONE

I woke to the shrill of the alarm clock in that dead hour before the dawn and knew that this was the day and that there was no aiming back. The light snapped on and I opened my eyes to see Darcy bent over the stove in his long woollen underpants. ‘Is it still snowing?’ I asked him, reluctant to leave the warmth of the blankets.

‘I guess so.’ He struck a match and flames licked out of the top of the stove. ‘You’d best get moving. Breakfast’s in quarter of an hour.’

We washed and shaved and then went down through the white desert of the camp. Paule Briffe was already in the diner and the lights blazing on the empty tables made the place look vast. Laroche came in shortly afterwards. ‘Even if they’d let us have the helicopter,’ he said, ‘Len couldn’t have flown in this weather.’ It was still blowing hard and the snow was the same mist of drifting, powdery crystals.

We ate in silence, joined by the driver of the truck we’d been allocated, each of us wrapped in our private thoughts. And then we loaded the truck and left, and the wretched little oasis of the camp was swallowed up by the blizzard before we’d even reached the Tote Road.

The truck bringing the canoe down from Camp 290 was due at the rendezvous at 0700 hours. But when we finally got there, more than two hours late because of the drifts, and there was no sign of it, we knew it had failed to get through.

There was nothing for it then but to sit in the cookhouse hut, drinking Sid’s coffee and waiting. We didn’t talk much and there was an atmosphere of strain, for Paule and Laroche were like two strangers, united only in their hostility to me, which they scarcely bothered to conceal. This, I realized, was something I should have to learn to live with.

‘I don’t think we should wait any more,’ Paule said finally. ‘The lakes will be freezing over and in this cold per’aps it is better without the canoe.’ Her small, peaked face was pale and the edge to her voice revealed her impatience.

‘There’s the tent,’ Darcy reminded her. ‘The sleeping-bags, too. We can’t leave without those.’

She nodded and went back to plucking at the frayed edges of her parka. And then she slipped her hunting-knife out of its sheath and began trimming the threads. It was an Indian knife with a carved handle and a long, slender blade worn thin by constant whetting. It wasn’t the sort of blade you’d expect a girl to have, and to see it in her small, capable hands sent a cold shiver through me, for its thinness was the thinness of constant use, a reminder that the North was her element. She finished trimming the edges, and after that she sat staring dully at nothing, the knife still in her hands, her fingers toying with the bright steel of the blade, and I couldn’t help thinking that I was now in a land where there was no law as I understood it, where justice was something to be meted out on the spot, and I looked across at Laroche and saw that he, too, was watching her play with that knife.

It was shortly after eleven that the truck finally rolled in. We transferred the canoe and the tightly rolled bundle of tent and sleeping-bags to our own vehicle and went back down the Tote Road, to the point where Laroche had crossed it on his trek out. And then we started into the bush, carrying the big canoe as well as our loads.

For a few paces the sound of the truck’s engine stayed with us, but then it was lost in the noise of the wind, and when I looked back, the Tote Road had disappeared and there was nothing but the jackpines drooping under their load of snow. We were alone then, just the four of us, with all Labrador stretched out ahead, and not a living soul between us and the coast, almost three hundred miles away.

We camped that night on the pebble shores of a lake no bigger than a mountain tarn. The blizzard had blown itself out and in the dusk, under the frosty stars, the trees had a Yuletide stillness, their whitened branches mirrored in the steel-grey water, and all round the edge of the lake was a crusting of new-formed ice that became a pale, almost luminous ring as darkness fell.

It had been a bad day — the late start and then heavy going through deep snow with several bad patches of muskeg. We had only been able to use the canoe twice, and that on short stretches of water. The rest of the time we had carried it. We were wet and dirty and tired, and we hadn’t even reached the first lake marked on Mackenzie’s map. We were now amongst the dozens of little lakes that Laroche and I had flown over so easily and so quickly in the helicopter the previous afternoon.

Darcy fished till the fire was blazing and the coffee made, and he came back empty-handed. Too cold for them, I guess.’ He flung his rod down and held his hands to the blaze, his wet feet amongst the embers. ‘Goldarnit! I could have done with a nice salmon.’ He grinned at us ruefully and I found my mouth watering at the memory of the pink-fleshed ouananish I had eaten the previous day. Instead, we had to be content with a mixture of dehydrated soup and potatoes mixed with bacon and beans. After that there was more coffee, black and strong and sweet, and we sat, smoking, the mugs cupped in our hands.

‘Feel better?’ Darcy’s hand dropped on to my knee, gripping it in a friendly gesture.

I nodded. My shoulders still ached and the rawness remained where the straps of the pack had rubbed; the blisters on my heels were throbbing, too. But the bone-weary feeling of exhaustion had gone and my body was relaxed. ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

‘Feel you got the Labrador licked, eh?’ He stared at me hard, smiling, but not with his eyes. ‘My guess is we’ve done no more’n five miles as the crow flies — one-tenth of the least possible distance. One-twentieth if you count the trek out as well.’

‘Is that meant to boost our morale?’ Laroche said.

Darcy turned his head and looked across the firelight at him. ‘I just figured he’d better know the score, that’s all.’ And then he added with a grim smile, “There’s one consolation. As we eat into our supplies, the packs’ll get lighter.’

It was a warning. We were starting very late in the year and whilst he’d fished, he’d been considering our chances. They were all three of them thinking about it, and because I knew what was in their minds, I found it necessary to justify myself. ‘If it’s tough for us,’ I blurted out, ‘It’s a lot tougher for Paule’s father.’

They stared at me, frozen into silence by my words. And then, with a quick movement, Paule picked up the cooking pot and went down to the lake to wash it. Darcy got to his feet, too. ‘Okay,’ he said gruffly. ‘Just so long as you’re sure.’ And he picked up his axe and went into the timber to cut more wood.

Laroche hadn’t stirred. He was staring into the fire and the flames, flickering on his high cheekbones, give to the skin a ruddy, coppery glow that made him look half Indian. His head was bare and the wound was a black shadow across his skull. ‘You shouldn’t have said that.’ He spoke in a tone of mild reproach.

‘About her father? Why not?’ I said. ‘She knows perfectly well-‘

‘Just don’t talk about it, that’s all I’m asking.’ He stared at me across the glowing circle of the embers. ‘It only raises her hopes if you talk like that.’ His eyes dropped to the fire again, and after a moment he murmured, ‘You see, for her there isn’t any hope — either way.’ He said it quietly, almost sadly. And then, as though speaking to himself, he added, ‘He’ll be dead anyway by now.’ And the way he said it, I knew it was what he was hoping.

‘But he wasn’t when you left him, was he?’ The words were out before I could stop myself.

But he didn’t seem to notice, or else he didn’t care whether •I knew or not. He sat, staring down at the embers, lost in •thought, and I wished I could see into his mind. What had happened after the crash? What in God’s name had induced him to say Briffe was dead when he wasn’t? And then I was thinking of his grandfather and what had happened at that lake before, and my gaze fastened on that ugly gash. His head was bent slightly forward and the wound looked livid in the firelight. He would be marked by it for life. Like Cain, I thought suddenly.

As though conscious of that thought in my mind, he suddenly raised his head and looked at me. For a moment I had the impression he was about to tell me something. But he hesitated, and finally his lips tightened into a thin line and he got abruptly to his feet and walked away.

I was alone by the fire then. Yet my mind still retained a picture of him sitting there with his head bent to the blaze, and the certainty that he wasn’t any saner than his grandfather had been took hold of me again. It was a terrifying thought and I tried to put it out of my mind. But once there it seemed to take root. And later, when the four of us huddled together for warmth inside the tent, I became convinced of it, for what other possible explanation could there be?

I remember telling myself that it wasn’t his fault. He had been badly injured. But insanity is something of which we all have a primitive dread, and though I could pity him, I was still appalled at his presence among us, sleeping peacefully on the far side of the tent. It seemed so much worse out there in the bush, for we were shut in on ourselves, entirely dependent on each other. No doubt I was affected by the unnatural quiet that surrounded us. There wasn’t a sound except for Darcy snoring gently beside me, and the cold that came up from the hard ground and seeped in through the thin walls of the tent prevented me from sleeping.

It seemed different in the morning. We were up at first light, busy rebuilding the fire and cooking breakfast. It was a raw morning, a thick mist lying over the water, which was lightly filmed with ice. Seeing the methodical way Laroche went about the job of striking and folding the tent, it was difficult to believe that he wasn’t normal. And yet the very normality of his behaviour only served to increase my uneasiness, and the frightening thing was that there was nothing I could do about it. I could only watch him and hope that the strain, as we neared our objective, wouldn’t drive him beyond the edge of sanity again.

‘What are you thinking?’

I turned to find Paule standing behind me. ‘Nothing,’ I said quickly. She was the last person with whom I could share my fears. Darcy, yes -1 would have to talk to him about it some time when we were alone. But not Paule — not yet.

She frowned. ‘Then perhaps you will help me load the canoe.’

The canoe proved its worth that day. We crossed three lakes in it during the early morning, with only short portages between, and just after ten we reached the long, narrow stretch of water that we’d identified from the helicopter as the first of the lakes marked on the map.

We crossed it diagonally, picked up the old Indian trail and in no time at all, it seemed, we had reached the second of Mackenzie’s lakes. But after that the country changed and became featureless. There were no longer rock outcrops, and the lakes weren’t buried in deep-scored clefts, but lay in flat alluvial country, so that water and land were intermingled with little change of level. We kept due east as far as possible, but there was nothing to guide us, and the fact that we’d flown over it didn’t help, for it was here that the snowstorm had overtaken us.

The going was good, however, the portages short and mostly easy. As a result I was never alone with Darcy all that morning. In or out of the canoe, we were all together in a tight little bunch. And the only rest we had was when we were paddling. We ate our lunch of chocolate, biscuits and cheese on the march, not stopping, and the extraordinary thing was that it was the girl who set the pace.

Darcy, of course, was much older than the rest of us, and as the day progressed and the portages became longer and more difficult, the pace began to tell on him. It told on Laroche, too; the skin of his face became tight-drawn and all the spring went out of his stride. More and more often he stopped to look at the map, but whenever Paule asked him whether he recognized anything, he only shook his head. And when the next lake — the one with the pebble bank — failed to materialize after ten miles of good going, she began to get worried.

I was up in front with her now, for my body had adjusted itself to the conditions of travel and though the blisters on my heels still troubled me, I had begun to get into my stride. We didn’t talk much, for she was preoccupied with our direction and I was looking about me at the country, even enjoying it, for it had an austere beauty of its own.

And then we came to a small lake and had to wait for Darcy and Laroche, who were bringing up the canoe. ‘How much farther to the lake where you landed the helicopter?’ She stood there, staring at the flat surface of the water with a worried frown, and when I said I didn’t know, she dropped her load and stretched herself out on the coarse silt of the beach. ‘Well, anyway, it’s nice here.’ She closed her eyes in an attempt to relax. The sun had come out, and though it was already low over the trees behind us, there was no wind and it was almost warm. ‘If only there were a hill,’ she murmured. ‘We could get a view of the country if there were a hill. As it is we shall have to waste time scouting for this lake.’ After that she was silent for so long that I thought she had fallen asleep. But then she suddenly sat up. ‘You’re sure it is Lake of the Lion where they crashed?’ she demanded.

The suddenness of the question took me by surprise. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s quite clear from the message — ‘

‘I know.’ She made an impatient gesture with her hand. ‘But Albert has never admitted it is Lake of the Lion. He never saw any resemblance to a lion in the rock he hit. And now he says Mackenzie’s map is taking us too far south. He wants us to go farther north.’

I knew then that Laroche was going to try and turn us away from the Lake, and I asked, ‘How does he know we’re too far south?’

‘Because he has recognized nothing. If it is Lake of the Lion and the map is correct, then all day we must have been passing through the same country he came through on his trek out, but he does not recognize it. The other night, after you have made the attempt in the helicopter, he warned me he thought the direction wrong. Now he is convinced of it.’ She frowned down at the pebble she had picked up and then tossed it into the water. ‘I don’t know what is best to do — to follow the map or turn north until we find something that he recognizes.’

There was a movement in the jackpine behind us and Laroche and Darcy emerged, bent under the cumbersome load of the canoe. ‘We must stick to the map,’ I told her urgently. And because she still looked doubtful, I repeated it. ‘If we abandon the map now and turn north …’ I had been going to say that we’d never find her father then, but that meant trying to explain to her why Laroche should want to turn us away from Lake of the Lion, and I let it go at that.

She had got to her feet. ‘Did you see anything you recognized on that portage, Albert?’ Her voice was devoid of any hope, and when he shook his head, she said, ‘Not even that big outcrop?’

‘I told you before, my route was north of the one Mackenzie drew you.’ He was tired and his voice sounded petulant. ‘And now we’re even south of that.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We’ve come a long way from the Indian trail and the last lake we identified. We should have reached the next one by now, the one where we landed yesterday.’

‘But you said it was snowing and the visibility was bad. How can you possibly be certain that we’re south of our course?’

‘Because we’re getting pushed south all the time.’ He said it wearily, and then he turned to Darcy. ‘What do you think, Ray?’ And Darcy nodded. ‘It’s like Bert says,’ he told Paule. ‘It’s the way the darned country’s built. It’s edging us south all the time, particularly on the portages.’

pebble he called it. I’m sure this is the lake he meant. Even the shape of it is the same.’

Laroche still said nothing and I turned to Darcy. ‘How far have we come today?’

He considered for a moment. ‘All of twenty miles, I guess. Maybe more.’

‘Then we’re about halfway.’

‘If it’s fifty miles altogether, yes.’

And we were in the same sort of country, flat, with the alluvial debris of the Ice Age. I glanced at Laroche, for it had occurred to me that perhaps this was really the lake Mackenzie had meant and not the one where we’d landed. He must have guessed what was in my mind, for he said, ‘There isn’t much to choose between this and the lake where we landed yesterday.’ He began to fold the map. ‘Either of them would fit a map like this.’

Paule frowned. ‘Let me have another look at it. Mackenzie is usually very accurate.’

But he had already risen to his feet. ‘However much you look at it,’ he said, ‘you’ll never be certain whether it’s this lake or the other.’ And he put the map back in the breast pocket of his parka.

She stood up and faced him then. ‘But I want to look at it again,’ she said obstinately.

‘You can look at it later,’ he answered, moving away from her, down towards the canoe. ‘If we’re going to cross before dark, we’d better get moving.’

Whether she had suddenly become suspicious, I don’t know. It was a fact — and I had been conscious of it for some time — that Laroche had never once let the map out of his hands since we started. Maybe it was just that she was tired and in a petulant mood. At any rate, she ran after him and caught hold of his arm. ‘Albert. Give it to me. It’s my map.’ And when he told her it was quite safe in his pocket, she repeated, ‘It’s my map. I want it.’ Her voice was suddenly quite shrill.

‘For heaven’s sake, Paule.’ He shrugged her hand off. ‘Just because you’re not certain this is the right lake — ‘

‘I am certain.’

‘Then what do you want the map for?’

‘Because it’s mine.’ She grabbed hold of his parka. ‘Give it to me. Please.’ She was almost sobbing.

It would have been childish, except that it suddenly brought the tension between them out into the open. I remember the shocked expression on Darcy’s face. He knew it was serious and he moved in quickly. ‘Steady, Paule.’ He caught hold of her arm none too gently and pulled her away. ‘The map’s okay and we’ve got to get across. A lake of the size of this could hold us up for days if it came on to blow.’

She hesitated, staring at Laroche as though she wanted to tear the map out of his pocket. And then abruptly the violence of her mood vanished. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘You are right; we must hurry.’ And she gave Darcy a quick smile and went quietly down to the canoe.

The temperature had fallen quite sharply and it was cold out on the water. We paddled in silence and the only sound was the dip-dip of the paddle blades and the whisper of water along the skin of the canoe. All the world seemed hushed with the gathering dusk and so still that the endless blacks and greys had the static quality of a photographic print.

And then, from beyond the pebble bank, came the call of a goose, so clear and perfect in the stillness that it took my breath away. We saw them as we glided round the end of the bank, four birds like white galleons swimming in line astern, and Darcy reached for his gun. He fired as they spread their wings; three birds thrashed the water and became airborne, the fourth keeled over and lay on its side. And when we’d pulled it into the canoe, the quiet returned, so that it was difficult to believe it had ever been disturbed by the shot and the frenzied beat of wings.

Darkness was falling when we reached the farther shore and we went straight into camp on a little promontory of stunted trees. Whilst Paule plucked and cleaned the goose, we got a roaring fire going, and in no time at all the bird, neatly skewered with slivers of wood, was hanging from a cross-pole supported by two forked stakes and turning slowly before the blaze, the frying-pan set below it to catch the fat. The sight and smell of that roasting bird was something out of this world in that remote wilderness. We sat round the fire, drinking coffee and talking, and eyeing it with the eager anticipation of children at a feast. The affair of the map seemed to have been entirely forgotten.

It takes a long time to roast a goose in front of a fire, but at last the juices ran at the prick of a knife and we cut it down and fell on it ravenously, burning our fingers with the hot fat. Paule used the same little thin-bladed Indian knife that she must have used at countless camp fires, and the sight of the worn steel winking red in the firelight reminded me that it was her father who had done the hunting then. But I was too absorbed in the flavour of that goose to worry about what she might be feeling. It was only afterwards, when my stomach was full, that I noticed the tense, withdrawn look on her face and became conscious of Laroche’s moody silence.

After such a meal they should have been relaxed, like Darcy. But they sat so still and tense that it was impossible not to be aware of the atmosphere of tension between them. And if this were really the lake Mackenzie had meant, then tomorrow or the next day we’d be at the Lake of the Lion. Time was running out, and when Darcy got up and strolled off into the darkness of the timber, I followed him. ‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ I said when we were out of earshot of the camp.

He stopped and waited for me to say what I had to say, standing quite still, his bulky figure in silhouette against the glimmer of the water. ‘It’s about Laroche,’ I said. But it was difficult to put my fear into words, and when I tried, he stopped me almost immediately. ‘Now, listen, Ian. You got to forget he’s the grandson of Pierre Laroche. I told you that before. What happened at that lake between your grandfather and his is nothing whatever to do with the present.’

‘I think it is,’ I said. And then, in a rush, I poured out all my fears, not giving him time to interrupt me. And when at last I had finished, he stood there, staring at me in silence with the starlight gleaming frostily on his glasses. ‘You realize what you’re saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you believe that? You think he tried to kill them?’ His breath hung like steam in the night air. ‘Good God!’ he breathed, and after that he was silent a long time, thinking it out. ‘He seems sane enough,’ he murmured half to himself. ‘It was Paule I was beginning to worry about.’ And then his hand gripped hold of my arm and he said, ‘Why have you told me this? What do you expect me to do about it?’ His voice sounded angry and bewildered.

‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘There’s nothing either of us can do about it, except watch him.’

‘Hell! There must be some other explanation.’

‘What other explanation can there be?’ I demanded impatiently. ‘It’s the only possible explanation — the only one that fits all the facts.’

He let go my arm then. ‘It’s bad enough having you along with us, believing a thing like that. But if it’s true…’ His voice was suddenly an old man’s voice, tired and angry.

‘If it isn’t true,’ I said, ‘why do you think he’s always trying to get us to turn north? He daren’t let us reach Lake of the Lion. He daren’t even face the sight of it himself. Anyway,’ I added, ‘I’ve warned you.’

‘Yeah.’ He stood for a moment longer with the sky behind him full of stars and the northern lights weaving a luminous pattern in the night. ‘Okay,’ he said wearily. ‘Let’s go back now. It’s cold out here.’ And he started towards the fire which showed a red glow through the sticks of the trees. ‘You haven’t said anything to Paule about this, I hope?’

‘No.’

‘Well, don’t,’ he said.

But back at the fire I wondered whether she hadn’t guessed it already, for they were sitting there just as we’d left them, sitting quite still and not talking, and I could feel the tension between them. Darcy noticed it, too. ‘It’s late,’ he said gruffly, and as though glad to be released by the sound of his voice, they got up at once and followed him to the tent.

I threw some branches on to the embers of the fire and watched the crackling flare as the needles caught. It was so peaceful, so unbelievably peaceful. And beyond the leap of the flames lay the immensity of Labrador, all still and frozen in the night. I sat down, cross-legged in front of the fire, and lit a cigarette, and let the stillness seep into me. It gave me a strange sense of peace, for it was the stillness of space and great solitude, a stillness that matched the stars and the northern lights. This, I thought, was the beginning of Creation, this utter, frozen stillness, and the fire felt to me then the way it must have felt to the first man who’d experienced it — the warmth of something accomplished in a cold, primitive land.

There was a movement behind me, the snap of a twig, and I turned my head to find Paule there. ‘You should come to bed,’ she said. ‘If you sit here, you will be tired in the morning.’

I nodded. ‘It was the night,’ I said. ‘It’s so still.’

‘And there is so much sky — all the stars. I know.’ She seemed to understand my mood, for she came and sat beside me. ‘You have never been in country like this before?’

‘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.

We went into camp early that day on a little stretch of gravel where a few morose-looking jackpine grew. It looked no more than an island in that sea of muskeg, but it was a relief just to stand on something firm, and we were too wet and exhausted to care that we’d only covered a few miles. We managed to get a fire going, but though it enabled us to cook some sort of a meal, there was no real heat to it and the smoke blackened our faces and made our eyes sore. The rain was still teeming down when we crawled into the tent and lay there steaming in our sodden clothing.

All night the wind beat at the tent. Twice we had to go out and weight the walls down with stones, and in the morning it was still blowing. But the rain had stopped and we saw then that our island was, in fact, a long spit of gravel running out from the shores of a lake that was bigger than any we had so far encountered. It was fortunate that the rain had stopped, for we were on the lee shore and in poor visibility we might have attempted the crossing, which would have been disastrous. There was a big sea running out in the centre, and there was nothing for it but to camp there on the shore and wait for the wind to drop.

It was here that we lost the map. Laroche had placed the damp sheet of paper on a rock to dry in the wind, and he’d weighted it down with a stone. At least, that was what he said, and certainly the stone was still there. But the map was gone, and though we searched all along the gravel beach, we couldn’t find it. ‘I guess it must have blown into the water,’ Darcy said, and Laroche nodded. ‘I didn’t realize the wind was so strong here,’ he murmured, not looking at any of us.

Paule stared at him for a moment, and then she turned quickly away, got a notebook out of her pack and set to work to redraw the map from memory. But though we all checked it with her on the basis of what each of us remembered of the original, we knew we could never place the same reliance on it. Our only hope was that we should recognize the river when we came to it. The river had been the last thing marked by Mackenzie on the map, with the falls a guiding mark only a few miles from Lake of the Lion. But, as Darcy pointed out, rivers in Labrador are apt to be lost in lake expansions, and often the current is so slight as to make the lake unidentifiable as part of a river system.

We were pinned there on the shore of that lake until dusk, when the wind suddenly dropped and the temperature with it. We crossed at once on a compass bearing in almost complete darkness. It was the worst crossing we’d had, for though the waves were no longer breaking, they were still big, and the movement was so violent that we were in imminent danger of capsizing, and the water rolled green over the sides of the canoe, so that we had to bale continuously. And when we reached the other side, it took us a long time to get a fire going.

We were all of us at a low ebb that night, and as we sat in the smoke of the fire, cooking our meal, the tension that had been building up all day between Paule and Laroche suddenly exploded. We had been arguing about the lake we had just crossed. It was too big for the Indian to have ignored it when drawing the map, and we were all of us quite sure that this wasn’t the next lake he’d marked, the one he’d called Burnt Tree Lake. There were no burnt trees here. ‘Maybe I was wrong,’ Paule murmured unhappily. ‘Maybe we should have searched for the lake where you land in the helicopter.’ She looked across at Darcy. ‘I guess I was tired.’

‘We were all tired,’ he said.

She turned to Laroche then. ‘Are you sure you don’t remember this lake when you are trekking out? It is so big — ‘

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘It’s so big it would have meant a detour of several miles.’

‘But you may have forgotten it. You were injured and — ‘

‘Mon Dieu! I’d no canoe. Do you think I’d have forgotten about a lake the size of this?’

‘No. No, I suppose not. But then you have recognized nothing — nothing at all.’ There was a note of exasperation in her voice.

‘I’ve told you before,’ he said irritably, ‘I was much farther north.’

‘But not when we started. We started from the same point where Ray picked you up. Yet you recognize nothing.’

‘Why should I?’ he cried angrily. ‘I was at the end of five days with no shelter and little food. I was in no state to remember the country.’

‘But you remember the muskeg.’

‘Sure. But I was fresher then, and it doesn’t mean it was the same muskeg.’

‘Muskeg’s much the same any part of this country,’ Darcy said soothingly.

But she was looking at Laroche. ‘If only you hadn’t lost the map,’ she said furiously. ‘Now we can never be certain…’

‘Well, I lost it, and that’s that. I’m sorry.’ He waved the smoke away from his face. ‘But I don’t see what difference it makes. We couldn’t identify the last lake for certain and we can’t identify this one. The map was only a rough one, far too rough to follow in this sort of country.’ And he added, ‘I still say we should turn north and try and pick up my route out.’

His insistence annoyed me, but as I opened my mouth to make some comment, I caught Darcy’s eye and he shook his head urgently. I hesitated, afraid that by constant repetition he’d convince her. But when she didn’t say anything, I returned to the condition of my feet. I had taken off my boots and was. attending to my blisters, which had become a suppurating mess under my wet socks. But then she said, ‘Why are you so insistent that we go north, Albert?’ Something in the quietness of her voice made me look up, and after that I forgot about my blisters, for she was staring at him through the smoke and there was a frightened look in her eyes. ‘You never wanted us to follow the map, did you?’

‘I was never convinced we’d crashed at Lake of the Lion,’ he answered her.

‘Then why did you lose the map?’ It was such a sudden direct accusation that I stared at her aghast.

‘It was an accident, I tell you.’ His eyes darted from her to Darcy. And then he was staring at me and his face had the wild, trapped look that I’d seen that night at Camp 134; I thought then that if she persisted in her questions, she’d drive him over the edge, and I began to put on my boots.

‘Very well. It was an accident.’ Her voice trembled. ‘But why did you refuse to let me have it? It was my map. Why did you insist on keeping it yourself?’ And then, before I could stop her, she cried out, ‘What are you afraid of, Albert? You don’t want us to get to Lake of the Lion. No, don’t deny it, please. I have been feeling this for some time. You are afraid of something. What is it?’

I had got my boots on then and all my muscles were tense, for I didn’t know what he’d do. But all he said was, ‘You must think what you like, Paule.’ And he got up wearily and went off into the trees. Darcy glanced quickly at me, and then he got up and went after him.

I was alone with Paule then. She was sitting quite still as though her body were frozen rigid. But at length she turned to me and said, ‘What happened there, Ian? Please. Tell me what happened.’ Her face looked ghastly in the firelight and there were tears in her eyes. And when I didn’t say anything, she caught hold of my arm. ‘I must know what happened,’ she insisted. ‘Please.’ And then with sudden violence: ‘Don’t you understand — I love him. I love him, and I can’t help him if I don’t know.’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ I said awkwardly. What else could I say? I couldn’t tell her my fears.

‘But something happened. Something terrible happened out there after they crashed. I can feel it.’ Her voice was distraught and she was trembling.

Darcy came back then and she let go of my arm. ‘I guess we’re all pretty tired,’ he said heavily. ‘Time we turned in.’ Laroche came back, too, and asked for more coffee, and Paule gave it to him. The moment of crisis was over. But later, as we were going into the tent, Darcy stopped me. ‘I think,’ he whispered in my ear, ‘that we should see to it those two aren’t left alone again.’

I nodded. ‘It’s only twenty miles now,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow or the day after we should know the truth — if the going’s good.’

‘I hope you’re right.’ He had turned his head towards me and his craggy, weather-beaten face was set in deep lines. ‘I sure hope you’re right,’ he reiterated. ‘Because my guess is that right now we’re lost.’ And then he added, ‘If we have to go casting about in search of this lake, then our bellies are going to feel the pinch. The last two days we’ve got no fish. The only game we’ve had is that goose. Just remember that when it conies to a decision whether to go on or turn back.’

It was cold that night, so cold that I lay shivering on the edge of sleep, and when Laroche stirred and sat up, my eyes were instantly open. There must have been a moon, for the inside of the tent was quite light and I could see him staring at me. And then he crawled quietly out through the flap. I was on the point of following him, but then I realized it was only nature that had called him because of the cold, and a moment later he was back and had lain down in his place on the other side of the tent.

I suppose I slept after that, for the next thing I knew it was morning and Darcy was coaxing the fire into a blaze, and when I crawled out, it was to find the world frozen into stillness and all the lake-shore rimmed with new ice. ‘And how are you today?’ Darcy said.

‘Fine,’ I replied, and it was true; I did feel fine. The air was.so clean and fresh it seemed to sparkle.

‘A dandy morning like this, we should make good progress.’ He put the coffee on, humming tunelessly to himself. And when the others emerged, they, too, seemed affected by the frozen stillness that surrounded our camp. After being battered by the wind for two days, it had a quality of peace about it that was balm to our frayed nerves, and all the tension of the previous night seemed to have vanished away.

The sky turned to palest blue, and as we started out, the sun rose. And it wasn’t only the weather that had improved; it was the country too. We seemed to have left the muskeg behind. Ahead of us, it was all gravel, flat as a pan and full of water; small featureless lakes that ran into one another or were separated only by short portages.

By midday we had covered well over ten miles and all along the horizon there was a black, jagged line of hills. They were only small hills, little more than rock outcrops, but they marked the rim of the gravel pan; and when Darcy asked Laroche whether he remembered this stretch of country, he nodded. But though he stood for a long time looking at the line of little hills, he didn’t seem able to recall any particular feature. ‘All I remember is that I came out of the rock into this flat country and the going was easier for a time.’ His voice sounded flat and tired in the windless cold.

‘But can’t you see something you recognize?’ Paule asked.

He shook his head.

‘I don’t understand,’ she cried, and the note of exasperation was back in her voice. ‘Surely you must have marked the spot where you came out into the flat country here.’

‘You seem to forget I was injured,’ he said sharply. ‘Just to keep going was about all I could manage.’

‘But you knew you would have to go back and look for my father. You knew it was important to have some landmark to guide you.’

‘I tell you I was too ill and exhausted to care.’

She was about to make some comment, but Darcy stopped her. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Bert’s already told us we’ll be within about five miles of the lake when we get back into rock country. And if Mackenzie’s map was accurate, then the river runs right across our line of march. When we reach it, we’ve only got to scout along it till we find the falls, and then we’re almost there. That shouldn’t be difficult.’ And he picked up his end of the canoe again and we started forward.

Two hours later we reached the hills. They were covered with dense growth of conifer, and as we started in, we lost the wide Labrador skies, and the going became rough and difficult. It was all rock outcrops, most of them so steep that there was no question of keeping to a compass course, and we went into camp early at the first lake we came upon.

It was a sombre little stretch of water, and though Darcy and Paule both fished it all the time Laroche and I were making camp, they had no luck, and we went to bed very conscious that if we didn’t find Lake of the Lion within the next two days we should be forced to turn back for lack of supplies. There was some talk of abandoning the canoe at this stage, but I don’t remember what was decided because I fell asleep in the middle of the discussion.

I had meant to stay awake, for now that we were so close to our objective, I was afraid Laroche might make some desperate attempt to stop us. But though I was too tired to fend off sleep, my senses must have remained alert, for I woke suddenly in the early hours to the certainty that something was wrong and saw that Laroche was no longer in his place beside Paule. I could hear him moving about outside, and for a moment I thought the cold had driven him out as it had the previous night. But his movements were different, and when he didn’t immediately return, I leaned forward and peered out through the flap of the tent.

I could see him quite clearly in the moonlight. He was standing over the embers of the fire, shouldering his way into his pack. I opened my mouth to ask him what he was doing, but my voice seemed suddenly to have deserted me. I watched him pick up his axe and fit it into his belt, and then he was gone from my line of vision and I heard his boots on the rocks of the lake shore. The sound gradually faded. I scrambled out of the tent then to see his tall figure moving like a ghost in the moonlight down the far end of the lake.

He was heading south — south, not north — and without stopping to think, I laced up my boots and went after him, moving quickly through the timber. I emerged at the far end of the lake, and from the shelter of the trees watched him climb to the top of a bare outcrop of rock that stood at its southern end. He stood a moment on the very summit of the outcrop, a lone, black, figure against the moon’s light, gazing back at our camp and then all round him, as though to get his bearings. Finally he turned and disappeared from sight.

I found my voice then and called to him as I scrambled after him up the steep rock slope of the outcrop. I shouted his name all the time I was climbing, and when I reached the top I hesitated. Clouds were beginning to cover the moon. But I could hear him ploughing his way down through the timber on the far side, and a streak of grey light in the east told me that it would soon be dawn. Without thinking what the clouds might mean in that country, I plunged after him, suddenly determined that he shouldn’t escape us, that I’d catch up with him and confront him with the truth, whatever the risk.

It was a stupid thing to do, for I’d no compass, no food, no equipment, nothing but what I was wearing, and the conifer growth was so thick that I could only follow him by ear. This meant pausing every so often to listen and, as a result, he gradually drew away from me, until I lost the sound of his movement entirely. I didn’t know what to do then, and I stopped, undecided, in a small clearing. It was almost daylight, the sky was heavy and overcast and a light sprinkle of snow falling, and suddenly I realized that I didn’t know my way back. Travelling by sound only I had lost all sense of direction.

I had a moment of sheer panic then and stood screaming Laroche’s name at the top of my voice. And then, because there was nothing else I could do, I plunged forward again in the desperate hope of catching up with him. Luck was with me, for not more than a hundred yards farther on I came suddenly out of the timber on to the shores of a small lake, and there was Laroche, skirting the far end of it. I could only just see him, for it was snowing heavily now. ‘Laroche!’ I yelled. ‘Laroche!’

He stopped abruptly and turned, and then he stood staring back at me in silence. ‘Laroche! Wait!’ I called. He was on the very edge of visibility and I knew, as I started towards him, that he’d only to turn and dive into the bush and I should have lost him for ever.

But instead of trying to escape, he stood quite still, waiting for me. It was only when I was a few yards from him that I saw the dull blade-gleam of the axe gripped in his hand, and I halted with my heart in my mouth, for I’d no weapon with which to defend myself.

CHAPTER TWO.

That bleak little lake with the snow falling softly — it might have been the lake where he’d tried to kill the others. My knees were trembling as I stood there, facing him; there was only a few yards between us and I thought that this was how it had been before, when he’d had the brainstorm, with him standing so still and the axe gripped in his hand, and all my body was tense, waiting for the attack.

But instead, his gaze went past me, down along the edge of the lake. ‘Where are the others?’ he asked. ‘Are they following, too?’

I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak.

His dark eyes came back to me. ‘Just you — alone?’ And when I nodded, he seemed to relax. ‘I guess you saw me leave the camp, eh?’ He swore softly to himself, using the Canuk word ‘Tabernac!’

‘I thought I’d slipped away without any of you seeing.’ And then he added, ‘Well, you’d better go back to them now.’

It was my chance to escape. I started to edge away from him, and then I stopped. ‘But I don’t know …’ The words died in my throat, for I didn’t dare admit that I was lost. Once he knew that… My body was suddenly still with fear, a fear that was greater than any fear of him.

‘Try and persuade Paule and Ray to wait there for me,’ he went on, his voice still reasonable, his gaze fixed now on the far end of the lake. ‘I’ll be about two days,’ he added.

I stared at him, puzzled by his manner. He seemed so sane. And yet… ‘Where are you going?’ I demanded.

‘That’s my business,’ he answered sharply.

And then, suddenly reckless, because anything was better than being left to die of cold and starvation: ‘You ran out on — 231 him when he was still alive, scared at what had happened. Isn’t that the truth?’

He was staring at me, his dark eyes wide in their shadowed sockets. And then suddenly his gaze shifted to the ground. ‘You’re so damned logical, aren’t you?’ It was said without any trace of hostility. And then he murmured, ‘Well, it’s true — in a way. I was scared. I was certain Baird was dead, and there seemed nothing else …’ His voice trailed away as though at some ghastly recollection. And after a moment, he lifted his head and looked straight at me again. ‘If I told you history had repeated itself there at that lake, then you’d think I’d gone mad, wouldn’t you?’

‘How do you mean?’ My throat was suddenly dry.

He stared at me a moment longer and then he shook his head. ‘No, it’s no good,’ he murmured. ‘I guess you can only see it the one way. I knew what you were thinking that first day at Seven Islands. Mon Dieu!’ His voice was no more than a whisper. ‘Why did it have to be you? Queer, isn’t it?’ he gave a little, nervous laugh. ‘If I told you…’ But he stopped there and shook his head again. ‘No, you’d twist it round in your mind. But I’ll tell you this much — that Indian was right. It’s a bad place.’

‘Then it was Lake of the Lion?’

‘Sure it was Lake of the Lion.’ He was still looking at me and his lips were drawn back from the even line of his teeth in that same wry little smile. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The place where my grandfather killed yours.’ And he added, ‘The body’s still there. A heap of bones — that’s all that’s left of James Finlay Ferguson, and there’s a hole drilled in the skull where the bullet struck him. In the back of the skull. Pierre Laroche must have come up behind him and shot him in cold blood. The forehead’s splintered.’ His eyes stared at me unblinkingly a moment, and then: ‘It’s not a pretty thing,’ he muttered, ‘to discover that your grandfather is a murderer.’ His tone was suddenly bitter.

The fascination that old tragedy had for him, his bitterness — if I had needed to be convinced, this would have convinced me. It was the sight of my grandfather’s remains, the evidence of his own grandfather’s guilt, that had unhinged his mind. ‘And what happened — afterwards?’ I heard myself ask, and my voice shook slightly. ‘What happened then between you and Briffe?’

But he shook his head. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I’m not telling you that. Or what happened to Baird.’ He hesitated, and then he added, ‘But you can come and see it for yourself, if you want to.’

‘You mean now?’

He nodded.

‘You’re going to Lake of the Lion?’

‘But of course.’ He said it impatiently. ‘Where else did you think I was going?’

And I stared at him, the skin crawling on my scalp. It was incredible — quite horrible. He was going back to the scene of the tragedy. Why? To gloat? Or was it the murderer’s subconscious fascination for his crime? Whatever it was, I knew now he was mad and my voice trembled as I said, ‘But you’re going south.’ Fact — anything to keep him to facts.

‘South — yes.’ He nodded. ‘I have to pick up my route out.’

‘But you told us that was to the north.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What does it matter what I told you?’ And then he added, ‘If you come with me, you can see for yourself what happened to Baird. Then maybe you’ll believe me.’

But I knew I could never believe anything he said, now or in the future, for his mind seemed so confused. Perhaps, to him there was no truth any more. ‘You said Baird was injured in the crash,’ I whispered. ‘You told me they were both injured in the crash.’

But he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nobody was injured in the crash.’ And then he suddenly smiled with that touch of boyish charm that I had found so frightening before. ‘You mustn’t think, because I told you they were injured in the crash, that it was so. I had to tell you that, because I didn’t want you to pursue your inquiries.’ It was said with such an appalling candour that I felt almost sick. And then he said. ‘Well, are you going to come on with me or are you going back to join the others?’

I hesitated — not because I’d any choice, but because I was so horrified at the thought of going on alone with him. My only hope was that Darcy and Paule, by following the Indian’s instructions, would reach Lake of the Lion before us. If I were to be the only witness to what had really happened there … ‘Are you sure you can find the lake?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. ‘In the early stages I was very careful to memorize my route and even blazed some of the trees.’

‘But if you’re prepared to let me come with you, why not the others — why didn’t you tell them you could guide us in? Damn it!’ I cried. ‘You flew in with the helicopter twice. If you’d memorized your route out, why in God’s name couldn’t you find the lake then?’

He shook his head and the smile on his lips had become oddly secretive. ‘I could have found it,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want anybody to know.’

‘But Paule — ‘

‘Least of all Paule,’ he said harshly, the smile suddenly wiped from his face. And he added, still in the same harsh voice, ‘I guess you’d better come with me anyway. If you go back you’ll talk, and the one person who must never know what happened there is Paule.’

It surprised me that in his state of mind he should still care what Paule thought, and I took the opportunity to point out that she’d be worried about him. ‘They’ll wonder what’s happened to us,’ I said.

But he shook his head. ‘I left a note. They’ll guess you’re with me.’ And he added, ‘I hope to God she does what I asked and stays at the camp.’ He made a gesture with the axe. ‘Okay, let’s get going. You lead the way.’ And he stood back to let me pass.

I barely hesitated, for if he once knew that I was lost, then it would be so much simpler for him to abandon me here. Nevertheless, as I went past him the muscles of my shoulders contracted in anticipation of a blow, even though my intelligence told me that he was now determined to take me to Lake of the Lion and that anyway, if he intended to kill me before we got there, he would have plenty of opportunity. From now on we would live as close as it is possible for two human beings to live, for we’d no tent, nothing but our own warmth to protect us from the cold.

We left the lake behind and the timber closed round us again, and after that I was conscious all that time of the sound of the axe close behind me as he blazed the trail for the return journey — but whether for his return or for mine I didn’t then know, and because of that the chip and bite of the axe on wood had a hollow, mocking sound in the silence of the falling snow.

And then suddenly the timber fell away before us and I stood looking out over the same flat country that we’d come through the previous day. But now it was all white with the vastness of the sky a dirty curtain of lazily drifting snow. My first thought was that I had been right after all in thinking he was running out on us. ‘You’re going back,’ I said. ‘You’re not going to try and reach the lake.’

But he shook his head. ‘Pas du tout.” He smiled at me almost cheerfully. ‘I’ve come back here to pick up my landmark.’

However, it was impossible to pick out anything, for it was snowing harder than ever, and we remained in the shelter of the trees and lit a fire to keep ourselves warm. Later, when the snow eased up, we went out along a ridge of sand as far as the first lake, and from there Laroche was able to identify his mark, a lone rock outcrop topped by three ragged-looking firs.

Then began a nightmare journey that lasted two whole days. No sooner had we started back into the rock country than it came on to snow again. And even when it finally ceased some time in the late afternoon, the going remained heavy and tiring, an unending struggle through deep, wet snow with every branch unloading its sodden burden on us. The temperature fell steadily, and with the disappearance of the clouds, it dropped below freezing, so that the snow formed a crust through which we broke at every step. And all the time our progress was further slowed by the need for Laroche to search back and forth for the trail he had blazed. In the conditions in which he had marked it, there would have been no difficulty in following it, but now with the trees all blotched and weighted down with snow, it was a wonder we were able to keep to it at all.

We went into camp at dusk in a little clearing full of snow-covered rocks, and I swear if we’d had a tent, we’d have been too tired to put it up. It was as much as we could do to cut wood for a fire, and when it was lit in an angle of the rocks that would reflect the heat, we lay down in the wet snow and fell into a stupor as we shared a little of the food Laroche had brought with him.

I shall not easily forget that night. The cold was intense. At first the fire kept it at bay. But it melted the snow, so that we lay in a pool of water with the sharp edges of rocks sticking into our flesh. And later, as the fire died down, the cold crept in, numbing our bodies and turning the water into solid ice.

In these conditions it was impossible to sleep; I simply lay in a dazed world of half-consciousness, chilled to the bone and tired beyond belief, with no vestige of hope in my heart. Denied the blessed balm of sleep, there was no escape from the fact that the only warmth I had was to lie close against the body of a man I knew to be a murderer. This, and the circumstances of our journey — not to mention the conditions — would, I truly believe, have driven me to a state bordering on madness if it hadn’t been for the fact that in that pitiless country I discovered, or perhaps I should say rediscovered, something deep-buried within me that was akin to belief in the Almighty. I do not intend to dwell on this. The conversion of the unbelieving and the unthinking into an acceptance of God is of great moment only to those who have experienced it, and that I should have done so is not much to my credit, being due more to my wretched circumstances than to any innate piety, for by then I was convinced I was going to die — if not by the hand of Laroche, then by the country. Only one of us could leave Lake of the Lion alive, and if it was to be me, then I did not know the way back to the others and I had no hope of getting out of the country on my own.

Accepting, therefore, the certainty of death, my mind dwelt again on what that step meant, and in the frozen quiet of that night I came to terms with it and made my peace with God, so that before the first dawn-light made grey ghosts of the trees, I had reached a strange state of calm that was somehow in tune with the country.

Our breakfast that morning was one biscuit apiece and a small square of chocolate. That Laroche had taken so little from the general store of our supplies was in itself somewhat surprising, but I don’t think I considered it at the time — nor the fact that he was willing to share it with me. In country as bleak and inhuman as Labrador you take it for granted that the essentials of life, things like food and warmth, are shared between you, regardless of the future; and because of that, even if I had been in a condition to think about it, I do not believe I should have reached any other conclusion than the one I had.

As it was, the pitiful inadequacy of our breakfast did little to comfort us after the wretchedness of the night, and though we built up the fire and got some warmth back into our bones, we were both of us in a wretched state as we started out that morning. Laroche, in particular; he seemed suddenly to have come to the end of his strength. His face was flushed and his eyes unnaturally bright, and there was a slackness in his muscles that made his movements clumsy, so that he was inclined to stumble. But when I asked him whether he was all right, he pulled his stooped body instantly erect and assured me he was. ‘I’m stiff, that’s all,’ he said. ‘It’s the cold.’ And after that I didn’t comment again on his condition, for I knew by his manner and the tone of his voice that he’d resented it, and I was afraid, as I had been from the time I had caught up with him, of precipitating a showdown.

The cold that morning was very severe. The sky, when we glimpsed it through the trees, was grey with it like a canopy of frozen lead, and the land itself was held immobile in an iron grip. Because of this, the snow was hard and the going easier.

We skirted two frost-rimmed lakes, following all the time the trail Laroche had blazed on the way out, and shortly after ten we came to a big expanse of water, curved like a bow, with the ends lost in the trees that stood thick along its banks. That was when I suggested turning back. It was going to take us a long time to skirt that lake and I felt that if we didn’t turn back now, neither of us would get out alive. ‘It’s the only sensible thing to do,’ I urged. ‘Turn back now, before it’s too late.’

‘Listen!’ He was staring northwards, his head cocked on one side. ‘Do you hear?’

But all I could hear was the whisper of a chill wind in the trees.

‘Sounds like the falls,’ he said. ‘The water here is a lake expansion of the river Mackenzie marked on his map.’ He sank down on to his hands and knees and bent his ear close to the water. ‘Yeah, it’s falls all right.’ And he got to his feet, and stood staring along the shore. ‘I guess there’s more water now than when I crossed here before.’ It seemed to worry him. ‘I didn’t hear the falls then.’

‘What’s it matter?’ I asked. ‘We certainly can’t cross a river where there are falls.’ And then, because I was too exhausted to care any more, I said, ‘I’m turning back now.’

I thought that would precipitate a showdown, but all he said was, ‘You do as you like. It’s only two miles from here, and I got to hurry in case …’ But I didn’t hear the rest, for he was already wading into the water.

I couldn’t believe it for a moment. He didn’t seem to care whether I stayed with him or not. The water was already over his knees. He called to me over his shoulder then. ‘If you’re coming with me, better hurry. I shan’t wait for you.’ And he waded straight on into the lake.

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.

Behind me I heard Paule echo my thoughts in a whisper so hoarse that I barely recognized her voice. ‘Man Dieu!’ she breathed. ‘We are too late.’

‘Yes,’ I murmured. ‘We’re too late.’ And then I looked up at the Lion Rock standing there in the middle of the lake. At least I had reached Lake of the Lion. I had done what my grandmother had tried to do — what my father would doubtless have done in the end, if he hadn’t been so badly injured in the war. I had reached James Finlay Ferguson’s last camp. That at least was something.

I looked down at Briffe’s body again and my eyes, blurred with exhaustion, seemed to see it as that other body that had lain here beside this lake for more than fifty years, and I remembered what Laroche had said: a heap of bones — and a hole drilled in the skull. At least Briffe hadn’t died like that, but still a shudder ran through me, for the drawn and sunken features told of a slower death, and close behind me Paule whispered, ‘He killed him, didn’t he?’

I turned then and saw her standing, staring down at her father with a blank look of misery and despair on her face. I didn’t say anything, for she knew the truth now; the body and the transmitter were evidence enough. And then slowly, almost woodenly — like a puppet on a string — she turned and faced Laroche. ‘You killed him!’ The whisper of her words carried down the lake’s edge, so clear in the frozen stillness that she might have shouted the accusation aloud, and her face as she said it was contorted with horror. ‘You left him here to die — alone.’

Alone! That one word conjured a vision of what Briffe’s end had been. I think Laroche saw it, too, for his face was quite white, and though he tried to speak, he couldn’t get the words out. And then Paule repeated her accusation in a rising crescendo of sound that bubbled out of her throat as a scream of loathing and horror. ‘You killed him! You left him here to die …’ Her throat closed on the words and she turned away from him and went stumbling blindly up through the trees like an animal searching for some dark corner in which to hide.

If Laroche had let her go, it might have been all right; but he couldn’t. ‘Paule — for God’s sake!’ he cried. And before Darcy or I could do anything to stop him, he had started after her. And he was up with her in a second, for she was sobbing so wildly, so hysterically that she tottered rather than ran up the slope. He reached out and caught hold of her arm. ‘Paule — you’ve got to listen to me.’ He jerked her round, and then his hand fell from her elbow and he stepped back as though at a blow for her eyes blazed with hatred and her white face had a trapped look, full of bewilderment and fear.

‘Paule!’ He held out his hand to her in a pleading gesture. But in the same instant, she cried, ‘Don’t touch me. If you touch me, I’ll-‘

‘Paule, you’ve got to listen to me.’

I heard her cry, ‘No. Keep away from me.’ It was said as he reached out and gripped hold of her again, and in the same instant she made a quick movement of her arm, there was the glitter of steel, and then she was stabbing at him with that thin-bladed Indian knife, stabbing at him again and again, screaming something at him in French, or it may have been Indian, until finally his knees sagged under him and he sank groaning to the ground at her feet. He looked up at her then, and for a moment they stared at each other, and then he suddenly collapsed and lay still, and she was left standing, staring with a dazed expression at the knife in her hand. She stared at the reddened blade and a drop of blood gathered on the point and fell like a piece of red confetti on to the trampled snow.

Suddenly she flung the knife from her and with a sobbing intake of breath, fell on to the snow beside him. ‘Darling!’ She had seized hold of his head and was staring down into his face, which was paper-white and bloodless under the stubble. ‘Mon Dieu!’ She looked up then and searched about her blindly as though for aid, and finally her eyes lighted on Darcy and myself, still standing there, helpless spectators of the tragedy.

“I think I’ve killed him,’ she said in a toneless voice. ‘Would one of you see, please.’ And as Darcy went and knelt beside Laroche’s body, she laid the head down and stood up, suddenly quite composed. ‘I am going to — see to my father dow,’ she said, and she went slowly down through the trees towards the half-sunken aircraft and the sandy beach below the rocks that had been Briffe’s last camping place, moving slowly like a girl walking in her sleep.

I went over to Darcy then, my knees trembling and weak with the shock of what had happened. ‘Is he — dead?’

Darcy didn’t reply. He had laid Laroche’s body out on the snow and was unzipping his parka.

‘It all happened so quickly,’ I murmured.

He nodded. ‘Things like that always do.’

‘I was thinking about Briffe and what had happened here.’

He had undone Laroche’s parka and the sweater underneath was all soaked in blood, sodden patches that ran into one another, dark red against the dirty white of the wool. He cut it away with his knife, deftly exposing the white flesh beneath the bush shirt and the sweat-grimed vest, as though he were skinning an animal. And when he had the whole chest exposed, with the half-dozen knife wounds gaping red and slowly welling blood, he put his head down and listened to the heart. And then he nodded slowly like a doctor whose diagnosis has been proved correct. ‘Where’s that girl gone?’ he demanded, looking up at me.

‘She’s gone to see to her father.’

‘Well, she can’t do anything for him. Fetch her back here. I want a big fire built, and hot water and bandages.’

‘He’s alive then?’

‘Yeah — just. I guess the thickness of the parka saved him.’ He looked quickly about him. ‘Build the fire over there in the shelter of those rocks where Briffe had his camp. And tell Paule to find something clean for bandages.’ Darcy slipped his axe from his belt. ‘Here, take this. I want a big fire, and I want it kept going. Now get moving.’ And as I left him, I heard him say, ‘This is a hell of a thing to have happened.’ And I knew he was wondering how we were to get out with a wounded man.

I went back through the trees and down over the rocks to the little beach where Paule knelt on the gravel beside the frozen body of her father. I remember I was surprised to see how small a man he was, and though death had smoothed some of the wrinkles from the weather-beaten skin, the face was the face of an old and bitter man. Starvation had shrunk the flesh of the cheeks and stretched the skin tight across the bones, so that the features looked shrivelled and only the grizzled beard had any virility left in it. His body, with the lower half still encased in his sleeping-bag, was sprinkled with a light dusting of snow. There was snow on the radio set, too, and all the simple necessities with which he had endeavoured to support life lay scattered around him, half-buried in a white-frozen crust.

I told Paule what she had to do, but she didn’t seem to take it in. ‘He’s dead,’ she murmured. ‘My father’s dead.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. But there’s nothing you can do for him now.’

‘We were too late.’ She said it in the same dull, flat voice, and though she wasn’t crying, she seemed utterly dazed. ‘If only I had done something about it when that first report of a transmission came through. Look! He was trying to get through to me. And I agreed with them,’ she murmured brokenly. ‘I agreed that the search should be called off.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I said.

‘It was my fault. I should have known.’ She gazed dully round her at the snow-covered camp site. “There’s no sign of a fire,’ she said. ‘He hadn’t even a fire to keep him warm. Oh, God!’ she breathed. And then she was staring up at me, her eyes wide in the pallor of her face. ‘Why did Albert do it?’ she cried. ‘Why did he leave him here? And then to say he was dead!’ Speaking of Laroche seemed to remind her of what she’d done. ‘Have I killed him?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s still alive. But we’ve got to get a fire going and some bandages.’ And then, because she was looking down at the corpse of her father again, lost to everything but her own misery, I caught hold of her arm and dragged her roughly to her feet. ‘Pull yourself together, Paule,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing you can do here.’

‘No — nothing.’ And she seemed suddenly to collapse inside. ‘It’s all so terrible,’ she cried, and she began to sob, wildly and uncontrollably.

I shook her violently, but she didn’t stop, and because I didn’t know what else to do, I left her there and went up into the trees and began to hack down branches, building them into a great pile in the shelter of the rocks. And after a while Darcy came and helped me. ‘I’ve patched him up as best I can,’ he said.

‘Will he live?’ I asked.

‘How the hell do I know?’ he growled. ‘Will any of us live, if it comes to that?’ And he set a match to some dry twigs he’d gathered and nursed the little flicker of flame to life, kneeling in the snow and blowing on it gently till the branches of the jackpine steamed and finally smouldered into a crackling flame.

It was only then that I looked round to see what had happened to Paule. She had left her father and was kneeling beside Laroche in nothing but her bush shut. She had used her parka and her sweater to cover him and keep him warm, and the sight of her there reminded me of what she had said to me when we were alone beside that camp fire. She had half-killed the man, yet she still loved him. Whatever he had done, she still loved him, and the knowledge brought a lump to my throat, for it was such a terrible twist of fate.

As soon as the fire was blazing, we carried Laroche down to it and laid him on a bed of pine branches and dried moss close against the rocks so that the heat of the fire would be reflected to form a pocket of warmth. At least he wouldn’t die of shock through exposure to cold. But when I said this to Darcy, he gave me a hard, calculating look. ‘That’s a matter we’ve got to decide tonight,’ he said in an odd voice.

‘How do you mean?’

He glanced round quickly to see that Paule wasn’t listening. ‘We can’t carry him back and we’ve food for only one day. That’s all Paule and I brought with us. If we stay here with him, we all die.’

‘There’s the radio,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’ He gave a sceptical grunt. ‘It’d need a skilled operator to get that thing working. It’s been out in the open for days. Even when it was under cover, Briffe only managed to get that one message through.’ And he added, ‘The chances of being able to raise anyone on that set are about as remote as the chances of a plane happening to fly over and see us here. Still …’ He hesitated. ‘It’s a pity Paule didn’t do the job properly whilst she was about it.’ And with that he turned abruptly away and went over to where Paule was searching in the snow beside her father’s body.

She straightened up just as he reached her, and she had a rusted tin box in her hand. ‘I found it,’ she said. ‘I knew it must be here, because of that bandage round my father’s hand.’

It was the first-aid box she’d found, and though all the bandages had gone from it and the morphia had been used, there was still some lint and gauze left and a bottle of antiseptic. With these, and strips torn from a clean vest, she bandaged wounds, whilst Darcy and I brought the radio set up close to the fire. I cranked the handle of the generator, whilst he kept his fingers on the leads, but there was no sign of life. ‘It’s the damp,’ I said.

‘Sure it’s the damp.’

‘It’ll be all right when it’s had time to dry out.’

‘Think so?’ He stared at me. ‘It’ll dry outside. But it’s the inside we got to dry. Shut up in that tin box the works will just steam like they were in the tropics. Course, if you happen to have a screwdriver on you so that we can open it up — ?’

‘No, I haven’t got a screwdriver,” I said.

He laughed. ‘I didn’t think you had.’ He peered morosely at the generator. ‘Looks to me like it needs a whole work bench full of tools the condition it’s got into; certainly we’d need a spanner for those nuts.’

‘Isn’t that water ready yet?’ Paule asked.

Darcy lifted the lid of the smoke-blackened kettle he’d filled with snow and hung over the fire. ‘Just coming up,’ he said.

‘If we could find an old tin or something -1 want to get him warm.’ She had got Laroche’s boots off and was pulling her own down sleeping-bag up over his legs.

Darcy got to his feet. ‘I’ll see what I can find. There’ll be something around here that we can use.’

‘I was on the point of following him, but Paule stopped me. ‘Help me lift him, please.’

Between us we got Laroche into the sleeping-bag, and when it was done, she sat back on her haunches and stared at the white, bloodless face. ‘Ian — what are we to do?’ She was suddenly looking at me, her small face set in a tragic mask. ‘I couldn’t help myself,’ she murmured. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’

There was nothing I could say that would help her and I turned away and stared into the hot heart of the fire. We had warmth at least — so long as we had the energy to cut wood and keep the fire going. But it wouldn’t last. She knew that. Gradually we’d weaken through lack of food the way her father had and then the end would come in a blizzard of snow or in the cold of the night. I thought of Dumaine then and what he’d gone through. But he’d got out in the end and so had Pierre Laroche. There wasn’t much chance for us. ‘Maybe we’ll get the radio working,’ I said.

But she didn’t believe that either and she squatted there, quite still, watching Darcy picking over the pitiful remains of her father’s last camp like a tramp going over a refuse heap. ‘I shall stay here,’ she said at last in a small, tight voice. ‘Whatever happens I shall stay with him.’

‘Even though he left your father to die?’ I didn’t look at her as I said that.

‘Yes — even though he killed him,’ she breathed. ‘There is nothing else for me now.’ And after a moment she asked, ‘Do you think you and Ray could get back to the Tote Road — just the two of you?’

‘We could try.’ And I knew as I said it that I’d accepted the fact that she wouldn’t be coming with us.

‘If you started at dawn tomorrow… Per’aps, if the weather is good, you will make it in less time.’ But she said it without conviction. She was thinking of the muskeg and the weight of the canoe which we should have to carry if we were to cross those open stretches of water. ‘You must help him as much as you can.’ Her hand touched mine. ‘Ray is very tired, though he tries to hide it. He is not a young man like you, Ian.’ And she added, ‘I am not thinking of myself, or of Albert. For us, this is the end. But I would like to be sure that you two will get out alive. The knowledge that you will both be safe will make it — easier for me.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

She gave my hand a little squeeze. ‘I wish my father had known you.’ She smiled, a barely perceptible movement of the lips that left her eyes still empty. She let go my hand then and went to her pack and took out a small tin of Bovril and a metal flask.

She was mixing the hot drink in her own tin mug when Darcy returned. ‘This do you?’ he said, and placed a rusted oil can beside her. She nodded and then she was bending over Laroche, lifting his head and trying to force a little of the hot liquid between his teeth.

Darcy dropped wearily on to the ground beside me. ‘He buried Baird a little way back amongst the rocks,’ he said quietly, leaning his head close to mine. ‘I just seen the grave.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘Over there.’ He nodded towards the edge of the beach where boulders were piled against the rock of the shore. ‘I guess he was too weak to dig a hole, or else the ground was frozen. He just heaped some rocks over the body and tied two sticks together to form a cross.’ He hesitated, and then he opened his hand to show a piece of stone the size of a pigeon’s egg lying in the palm. It was grey with grit, but where he’d rubbed it clean there was a dull gold gleam to it. ‘Know what that is?’

I opened my mouth to answer him, but the word seemed to stick in my throat, for this surely was evidence of the cause of that old tragedy. And then I was suddenly remembering that first meeting with Laroche, when McGovern had been so taken aback by my certainty that the plane had crashed at Lake of the Lion. ‘I found that oil can on top of the grave. It had been filled with these — like some pagan offering to the dead.’ Darcy’s voice trembled slightly, but whether it was anger or fear I wasn’t certain. ‘Feel the weight of it,’ he said, and dropped it into my hand.

The cold touch of that fragment made me shiver, and I turned without thinking to stare out across the dark surface of the lake to the towering mass of the Lion Rock. In my mind I saw the rusted can on the grave more vividly than if I had discovered it there for myself, and I knew then that the Indian had been right. I hated this place and should always hate it.

‘I can’t get him to swallow any of it,’ Paule said. She had laid Laroche’s head back on the pillow of her sweater and was squatting there, disconsolate, with the steaming mug in her hand.

‘Then drink it yourself,’ Darcy said harshly. And he added under his breath: ‘The bastard deserves to die anyway.’

She heard him and the shock of his words seemed to stun her.

He took the fragment from my hand and passed it to her. ‘After all the years you’ve spent prospecting, I guess you know more about minerals than I do,’ he said. Tell me what that is.’

She stared at the fragment as it lay in her hand, and then a look came into her eyes that I knew was fear. She was reacting to it the way I had. ‘It’s gold,’ she said in a small, tight voice.

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought it was.’ And he told her how he had found it.

She turned her head slowly and stared towards the boulder-strewn edge of the lake. ‘Oh, no,’ she whispered. And then she was staring at us, and the fear that had suddenly taken hold of her was there in her eyes and in the trembling of the hand that held the nugget. ‘Oh, no,’ she said again, and she got slowly to her feet and went down to the water’s edge, her body stooped as she searched along the frozen margin.

In a few moments she came back with four small nuggets, which she dropped into my lap. ‘It’s true then,’ she whispered. ‘This place is a…’ Her voice died away and she suddenly burst into tears.

‘What’s true?’ Darcy scrambled to his feet. ‘What’s the matter, Paule? What’s got into you?’ He had his arm round her shoulders, trying to comfort her. ‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘We’re all frightened,’ he said soothingly. And because she was sobbing uncontrollably, he shook her quite roughly. ‘Pull yourself together, girl,’ he said gruffly. ‘We’re in enough trouble as it is without you going crazy just because we’ve discovered gold.’ He pulled her hands away from her eyes. ‘Is that what’s upset you — that your father found what he’d been looking for all his life, and when he’d found it, it wasn’t any good to him?’

‘It’s not the gold,’ she cried desperately.

“Then what is it?’

‘Nothing. Nothing.’ Her voice was quite wild, and she broke away from him suddenly and went stumbling blindly down towards her father’s body.

‘What the devil’s got into her?’ Darcy was staring after her.

I shook my head, for a sudden, terrible thought had crossed my mind, and I didn’t dare put it into words. ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered, and I watched her as she stood staring down at her father. She was there a long time, and then she came slowly back and sat down beside Laroche, gazing down at his ashen face, and though she didn’t say a word, I could feel the turmoil of doubt in her mind.

‘You all right, Paule?’ Darcy was watching her anxiously.

She nodded dumbly, her face wet with tears. ‘If only he were conscious,’ she murmured at length, and her hand went up to Laroche’s head, touching the place where the hair was growing up over the wound. ‘If he could just speak.’

‘It’s better perhaps that he can’t.’

She turned and looked at him then. ‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered.

‘Don’t I?’ Darcy’s voice was thick with the anger he was trying to hide. ‘This place is a gold mine, and that’s explanation enough for me. Ian was right.’

‘Ian?’

‘Yeah. He said all along Bert had gone crazy.’

Her gaze went back to Laroche, and then she said to me in a voice so quiet that I barely heard her, ‘Do you still believe that?’ And I knew she was remembering what she had said to me that night beside the camp fire when it had been so still.

‘Just try to forget about it,’ Darcy told her gently. ‘He did what his grandfather did — and for the same reason. You’ve just got to accept it, that’s all there is to it.’

But she shook her head. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said again. And then she turned her stricken gaze on me. ‘Tell me the truth Ian,’ she pleaded. Tell me what happened.’ And when I didn’t say anything, couldn’t even meet the desperate pleading of her eyes, she cried, ‘For God’s sake, I must know the truth.’ Her voice had risen to a note of hysteria and Darcy gripped hold of my arm. ‘Better leave her alone for a while,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘She’s tired and she’s overwrought.’

I wasn’t certain whether to leave her alone or not, but she was staring down at Laroche again and in the end I went with Darcy, for I knew there was nothing I could do to help her. ‘Where did he bury Baird?’ I asked him.

‘Over there.’ He nodded to a group of rocks halfway between the camp site and the sunken aircraft. And when I started towards it, he called to me to wait. ‘Give me a hand and we’ll take Briffe’s body up there and bury it beside him.’

But I was already moving down along the lake shore. ‘Later,’ I said. I had to see that grave. I had to be certain what had happened now. But when I reached the place it told me nothing. The grave was just a mound of rocks the length of a man, covered with grey silt. Two jackpine branches tied with wire served as a cross. ‘I wonder when he died,’ I said as Darcy joined me.

‘Does it matter?’

‘I don’t know,’ I murmured. ‘But Laroche was convinced he was dead when he left him. I’m quite certain of that.’

‘Well, he was probably killed in the crash.’

But I shook my head. ‘No. Nobody was even injured when the plane crashed. Laroche admitted that to me.’ I was thinking of that oil can full of nuggets. It was Briffe who had placed that there. ‘I–I think we ought to have a look at the body,’ I said.

‘Good God! Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ I murmured uncertainly. ‘It might tell us something.’ I didn’t dare tell him what I expected to find, but much as I disliked the thought of disturbing the grave I knew suddenly that I had to see for myself how Baird had died, and I went down on my knees and began pulling the silt and boulders away with my hands.

‘Goddammit!’ Darcy’s hand seized hold of my shoulder. ‘What’s got into you? Can’t you let the man rest in peace?’

‘Uncovering him won’t do him any harm now,’ I said, tearing myself free of his hand. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ I added almost savagely to cover my own nervousness, for I didn’t like it any more than he did. But there was no other way I could discover what had happened, and for Paule’s sake I had to discover that.

My urgency must have communicated itself to Darcy, for he didn’t try to stop me after that, and in the end he got down beside me and helped to shift the pile of stones. And when we had finally uncovered the upper part of the body, we stayed for a long time on our knees without moving or saying anything, for the whole side of the man’s face had been laid bare.

‘An axe did that,’ Darcy said at length, and I nodded. But though it was what I’d feared, I hadn’t been prepared for such a ghastly wound. The right ear was gone completely and the cheek had been laid open to the bone, so that the teeth showed white through the curled and vitiated flesh. And yet it hadn’t killed him outright, for pieces of gauze still adhered to the wound, where it had been bandaged, and the face, like Briffe’s, was hollowed out by privation and suffering. The beard was still black, almost luxuriant in growth, so that he looked like the wax image of some crucified apostle.

‘That settles it,’ Darcy said thickly. ‘I’ve made up my mind. We start back tomorrow, and we leave him here.’ He meant Laroche, of course, but he couldn’t bring himself to mention his name, and I wondered whether to tell him what was in my mind. ‘Well, say something, can’t you?’ he cried angrily. ‘Do you think I’m wrong to leave a man to die — a man who could do a thing like this?’

I had uncovered Baird’s right hand then, the wrist all shattered and a gritty bandage covering the wound where some fingers were missing. And below the hand was the top of a canvas bag. ‘Paule won’t go,’ I said, and I wrenched the bag out from under the stones that covered it. It was an ordinary canvas tool bag and it was full of those dull-grey pebbles that were so heavy and metallic to the touch. The body itself was less terrible to me then than the sight of that canvas bag, and as I stared at it, appalled, I heard Darcy, behind me, say, ‘How do you know she won’t go?’ And I knew he hadn’t understood its significance.

‘She told me — just now. She’s staying with Laroche.’ I said it impatiently, for my mind was on that bag full of nuggets so carefully buried with the body — like a sacrificial offering. And there was that tin can full of them that Darcy had found on the grave. The man who had buried Baird had given to the dead all the wealth he’d picked up; a gesture of abnegation, a madman’s attempt to purchase absolution? ‘My God!’ I thought to myself. The irony of it, to want it all for himself and then to die alone in the midst of it!

Darcy plucked at my arm. ‘I’ll go and talk to her,’ he said.

‘It won’t do any good.’

‘No? Then I’ll bring her here. You think she’ll want to stay with the man when she’s seen what he’s done?’ He had got to his feet.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You can’t show her this.’ I glanced down at the dead man’s face and then at the bloodied hand, remembering suddenly that Briffe’s hand had been injured, too. ‘And if you did,’ I said, ‘she still wouldn’t change her mind.’ I looked up at him then. ‘Laroche didn’t do this,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It was Briffe who went berserk.’

‘Briffe?’ He stared at me as though I’d gone crazy.

I nodded, for now that I’d said it, I knew it was true; I could see how it all fitted in — the wound on Laroche’s head, his decision to trek out on his own. And no wonder he’d been convinced that Baird was dead. How could he have expected any man to live with his head cut open like that? And then his determination that nobody should find the place, that the search should be abandoned and Briffe given up for dead. He’d been prepared to go to almost any lengths to save Paule from the truth.

But even when I’d explained all this to Darcy, he didn’t seem to grasp it. ‘I just can’t believe it,’ he muttered.

‘Then what about this?’ I said and thrust the canvas bag at him. ‘And the can full of them you found on the grave. It was Briffe who buried Baird, not Laroche.’ And I added, ‘You know the sort of man he was — you said it to Paule just now. He’d spent all his life prospecting, and this was one of the places he’d always wanted to find. She told me so herself the other night. Well,’ I said, ‘he found it.’ And in my mind I could picture the scene as it must have been when the three of them stood on the lake shore here and Briffe held that first nugget of gold in his hand.

‘I still can’t believe it — her own father.’

‘If we ever get out alive,’ I said, remembering now that first day in Labrador, ‘you go and talk to McGovern. I think he knows what really happened. I think Laroche told him.’

He was silent a long time then. Finally, he said, ‘Well, see you don’t let Paule have any idea what’s in your mind. It’d just about kill her.’ And when I didn’t answer, he seized my elbow in an urgent grip. ‘Do you hear me, Ian? You may be right. You may not. But Laroche is going to die here anyway. She mustn’t know.’

‘She knows already,’ I told him. ‘She knew the instant you handed her the nugget.’

He looked at me a moment, and then he nodded. ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ he murmured unhappily, and he crossed himself. ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ he breathed. And as I started to cover Baird’s body again, he said, ‘We’ll have to bury him — up here beside Baird.’ And then he added, with sudden decision, ‘But we leave in the morning. You understand? Whatever Paule decides, we leave in the morning. We got to.’