The Land God gave to Cain

CHAPTER THREE

For the first mile or two I was swept forward on a tide of exhilaration — the sense of speed, the illusion of power. I felt that nothing could stop me from reaching Lake of the Lion and finding Briffe still alive, and I drove the speeder full out, the wheel flanges screaming on the curves and the virgin country streaming past on either side.

But the mood didn’t last. My fingers stiffened with cold where the gloves were worn, my feet became deadened lumps inside the chill casing of my boots and the wind on my face was a biting blast. I hit a bad patch, where the track had recently been ballasted and the steel was half buried in gravel, and I had to throttle down. I became conscious of the country then, the difficulties that faced me; Lands would phone Head of Steel and the whole organization would be against me.

I must have passed dozens of telegraph poles lying beside the track before it dawned on me that the linesmen hadn’t yet reached this section of the track. Lands couldn’t phone them. He’d have to get another speeder and come after me. I opened the throttle wide again, and as I did so there came the crack of a rifle and I ducked my head. But when I looked back over my shoulder, the track behind me was empty.

I thought maybe it was a stone then, thrown up from the track. But the rifle cracked again, unmistakable this time, and suddenly I could hear wild human cries above the noise of the engine. They came from away to my left where a lake glimmered like pewter through a screen of trees. There was a canoe there and an Indian stood in the bows, a rifle to his shoulder, and close inshore a head and antlers thrust towards the shallows. There was a crashing in the undergrowth and the caribou broke cover a hundred yards ahead of me. It hesitated a moment, pawing at the steel of the track, and then with a quick terrified leap it was across and had vanished into the bush on the other side.

I didn’t catch sight of the Indians again, for the track went into a long bend. There were levelling stakes beside the track here and in the stretch beyond I found the engineers who had put them there. They stood in a little group round their speeder, which had been lifted clear of the track, and as I rattled past them one of them shouted what sounded like ‘Attention?

He was a French Canadian with a round fur cap like a Russian and before I had worked out that it was a shout of warning I was into the next bend. It was ballast again and the speeder bucked violently as the gravel flew, and through the rattle of the stones came the lost hoot of an owl. And then I was round the bend, clear of the gravel, and there was something on the line ahead. I slammed on the brake as the weird owl-hoot sounded again, louder and clearer, suddenly unmistakable.

Before the speeder had jerked to a halt I could see the yellow paintwork of the locomotive, could feel the rails trembling under me. There was no hope of getting the speeder off the track in time, not by myself. I did the only thing I could and flung the gear lever into reverse, opening the throttle wide and tearing back down the track, round the bend to where the little knot of engineers stood waiting.

The instant I stopped they crowded round, the lifting bars were pulled out and then they dragged it clear just as the train came rumbling round the curve. The hooter wailed again, loud as a trumpet note between the enclosing walls of the jackpine, and then the heavy locomotive was on top of us, sliding by at walking pace with a smell of hot engine oil and a slow piston-beat of power. The driver leaned out and shouted down: ‘You want to commit suicide, just jump in the muskeg. Don’t pick on me.’ He spat into the slush at my feet and went back to the controls. The beat increased with a roar like a power station and the diesel gathered way again, clanking a long line of empty rail flats. And behind the flats came two wooden coaches with men looking down at us incuriously from the windows.

That was when I saw Laroche again. He was in the second coach and for an instant our eyes met. I saw him jump to his feet, and then the coach was past. The caboose followed and as it rattled by Laroche swung himself out of the coach doorway. I thought for a moment he was going to jump. But the train was light, gathering speed quickly. He hung there for a moment and then he thought better of it and disappeared into the coach again.

I watched the train as it dwindled down the track and the only thought in my mind then was that the way was clear for me to get to Camp 263. Laroche was behind me now, and Lands, too, and as long as I kept ahead of them there’d be nobody who knew me at Head of Steel. I turned to the engineers and asked them to get my speeder back on the track.

The French Canadian with the fur cap was looking at me curiously. ‘Why don’t you check when you enter this section?’ he asked.

‘I was in a hurry,’ I said, my voice a little unsteady because I was feeling badly shaken now.

‘You might have killed yourself.’

‘I was in a hurry,’ I repeated. ‘I still am.’

‘Sure. So is everybody else. But Mr Lands won’t thank you if you wreck his speeder.’

I thought he was going to ask me why I was riding it then, but after staring at me a moment, he turned to his men and told them to get the speeder back on the track. ‘That’s the trouble with this outfit,’ he grumbled. ‘Too much dam’ hurry.’

Three miles farther on I was stopped by a ballast gang. Their gas cars had been dumped beside the track to let the supply train through, but the track-lifting and ballast-tamping machines were already back at work on the track and there was nothing for it but to abandon my speeder and continue on foot. Head of Steel, they told me, was two miles up the line.

It was all new grade here, a long fill that ran out across a muskeg swamp. The line sagged in shallow waves where the muskeg sucked at the gravel embankment and the ties were covered with fresh ballast. It was hard walking, and the wind had swung into the north, so that it cut through my borrowed clothing and chilled the sweat on my body. Out across the marsh, where the black line of the scrub joined the iron-grey sky, I caught a glimpse of hills that were long-backed and bare, as though ground down to the bone by ice.

It seemed a long time that I trudged across that desolate area of swamp, but at last I reached the shallow gravel rim that enclosed it, and round a bend I came on a gang of men working with drills and machine-operated spanners, bolting the rails together and driving spikes. The detached chassis and wheels of dismantled rail transporters lay beside the track, and up ahead were more men and machines, and beyond them the steel-laying train. Everywhere about me now there was a sense of movement, of drive and thrust and effort, so that Labrador seemed suddenly crowded and full of life. The track, laid on the bare gravel without ballast, like toy rails in a sandpit, had a newness about it that showed that it hadn’t been there yesterday, and walking beside it, through all these gangs of men, I felt conspicuous.

But they took no notice of me, though as I went by them, my gaze fixed self-consciously on the steel or the machines they operated, I felt that each one of them must know I’d no right to be there. I wondered who was in charge at Head of Steel and what Laroche had told him.

It was better when I reached the train itself. There were no gangs working there, just the wagons full of ties and plates and bolts which men threw out beside the track each time the train moved forward. The train was in a steep cut and I was forced to walk close beside it, so that when I reached the bunkhouse section I was conscious of men lounging in the open doorways of the coaches, staring down at me. But nobody stopped me, and I went up past the engine and the rail transporters until at last I could see the steel-laying crane swinging with a length of rail. A whistle blew and the crane swung back, its claw empty.

The train hooted and then moved forward a few yards. Another length of track had been laid.

There was something so fascinating about the rhythmic thrusting of this train into the unknown that for the moment I forgot everything else and climbed halfway up the side of the cut to watch it. Each time, before the train had stopped, the crane was already swinging, another length of steel balanced in its claw grip. A man stood signalling with his hands to the crane-driver and shouting instructions to the steel-laying gang, and as the rail came down on to the grade, they seized hold of it, thrusting it into place on the ties and spiking it there with the balanced swing of sledge hammers.

This was Head of Steel and I stood and watched with a sort of awe. And then I saw the bare grade stretched out ahead, naked except for the few ties laid at regular intervals, and my gaze lifted to the black line of the jackpine. The yellow slash of the bulldozed grade ran into it and was abruptly swallowed.

I don’t know what I had expected at Head of Steel. Obviously there could be no railway beyond this point. But I had travelled more than a hundred miles of the line, feeling close to the steel all the time, so that in a sense I had felt it to be an integral part of Labrador. And now, suddenly, it ended.

Until that moment I don’t think I had faced up to the reality of what I had set out to do. Lake of the Lion was somewhere to the north-east — fifty, at most a hundred miles. But looking at the slender line of the grade and the desolate emptiness of the country ahead, it might have been on another continent, so remote did it seem. Even to reach Darcy at Camp 263 appeared suddenly as a journey into the unknown.

‘Hey you!’ A man stood looking up at me from beside the Burro crane, his scarlet bush shirt a splash of colour in the gathering dusk. ‘Yeah, you. What the hell do you think you’re doing up there — watching a rodeo or somep’n?’

His voice and the way he stood there suggested authority, and I scrambled quickly down, conscious that he was watching me. ‘If you’re not working, just keep clear of the steel-laying,’ he shouted. ‘How many times I got to tell you guys?’

He was still watching me as I reached the track, and I turned my back on him and hurried down the train. Maybe it was imagination, but I felt I had aroused his curiosity and that he’d come after me and question me, if I didn’t get away from there.

Maybe he would have done, but at that moment the train hooted — a different note this time, long and summoning. A whistle blew. A voice near me called out ‘Chow.’ And then the steel-laying gang were coming down the cut, walking with the slack drag of men whose muscles are suddenly relaxed. I was swept up in the movement and went with the tide down past the rail transporters and the locomotive to the bunkhouse coaches. There were other gangs coming up from the rear of the train, all converging on the diner. I waited my turn and clambered up, relieved to feel that I was no longer alone, but one of a crowd. Besides, I was hungry. If I was going up beyond Head of Steel, then it would be better to go after dark when nobody would see me, and with a full belly.

The lights were on inside the diner, and there was warmth and the smell of food. Nobody spoke to me as I pushed my way to a vacant place at the trestle table, and I didn’t speak to them but just reached out for whatever I wanted. There was soup, steak with fried egg and potatoes and cabbage, canned fruit and cream, a mountainous heap of food to be shovelled in and washed down with tea and coffee. And when I’d finished I cadged a cigarette off the little Italian next to me and sat over my mug of coffee, smoking and listening to the sudden hubbub of conversation. I felt tired and relaxed now, and I wanted to sleep instead of going out into the cold again.

There was a sudden cessation of sound from the end of the diner and through the smoke haze I saw the man in the scarlet bush shirt standing in the doorway. The boss of the steel-laying gang was with him and they were looking down the length of the table.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked the Italian.

‘The guy in the red shirt?’ he asked. ‘You don’t-a-know?’ He seemed puzzled. ‘That’s Dave Shelton. He’s in charge at Head of Steel.’

I glanced quickly at the doorway again. The two men were still standing there and Shelton was looking straight at me. He turned and asked the other man a question and I saw the gang foreman shake his head.

‘You wanna keep clear of him,’ the Italian was saying. ‘He drive all-a time. Last week he bust a man’s jaw because he tell him he drive-a the men too hard.’

Shelton glanced in my direction again, and then the two of them were pushing their way down the diner, and I knew I was trapped there, for there was nothing I could do, nowhere I could go, and I sat, staring at my mug, waiting.

‘You work here?’ The voice was right behind me, and when I didn’t answer, a hand gripped my shoulder and swung me round. ‘I’m talking to you.’ He was standing right over me, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, with a sort of thrusting violence that I’d only once met before, in an Irish navvy. ‘You’re the guy I saw gawping at the steel-laying gang, aren’t you?’

The men round me had stopped talking so that I was at the centre of a little oasis of silence.

‘Well, do you work here or don’t you?’

‘No,’ I said.

Then what are you doing in this diner?’

‘Having a meal,’ I said, and a ripple of laughter ran down the table. The line of his mouth hardened, for it wasn’t the most helpful reply I could have made, and in an effort to appease him, I added quickly, ‘I’m an engineer. It was supper time when I got here, and I just followed the others — ‘

‘Where’s your card?’ he demanded.

‘My card?’

‘Your card of employment as an engineer on the line. You haven’t got one, have you?’ He was smiling now, suddenly sure of himself. ‘What’s your name?’ And when I didn’t answer, he said, ‘It’s Ferguson, isn’t it?’

I nodded, knowing it was no use trying to deny it.

‘Thought so.’ And he added, ‘What do you think you’re playing at, pretending you’re an engineer? Alex Staffen’s mad as hell about it.’

‘I am an engineer,’ I said.

‘Okay, you’re an engineer. But not on this railroad.’ His hand fastened on my shoulder again and he dragged me to my feet. ‘Come on. Let’s get going, feller. I’ve instructions to send you back to Base just as fast as I can.’ He jerked his head for me to follow him and led the way towards the door.

There was nothing I could do but follow him down the diner, feeling rather like a criminal with the gang foreman close behind me. Once outside, away from all the men, I could probably get him to listen to my explanation. But I didn’t see what good it would do. Staffen had set the machinery of the organization in motion to get me returned to Base, and unless I could make this man Shelton understand the urgency of the matter, he’d stick to his instructions. He’d have to.

Halfway down the diner he stopped abruptly. ‘Your speeder still on the track, Joe?’ he asked one of the men.

He was a big fellow with a broken nose who looked as though he’d been a heavyweight boxer. ‘Sorry, Mr Shelton,’ he said. ‘I cleared it just before — ‘

‘Well, get it back op the track right away. You’re taking this guy down to Two-twenty-four.’

‘Okay, Mr Shelton.’ The man scrambled to his feet, not bothering to finish his coffee.

‘He’ll have to wait till we’ve dumped the empty steel wagons,’ the foreman said. ‘The train’ll be backing up to clear the cut any minute now.’

‘Well, see if you can get your speeder on the track and parked down the line before they start. Otherwise, you won’t get started for an hour or more.’

‘Okay, Mr Shelton.’ The man headed for the door and pushed his way through the group gathered about the swill bin. Shelton stopped to have a word with one or two of the other men seated at the table, and by the time he reached the door the men were leaving the diner in a steady stream.

‘Could I have a word with you in private?’ I asked. ‘It’s important.’

He was pushing his way through the men, but he stopped then. ‘What’s it about?’

‘I had a reason for coming up here,’ I said. ‘If I could explain to you …’

‘You explain to Alex Staffen. I got other things to worry about.’

‘It’s a matter of life and death,’ I said urgently.

‘So’s this railroad. I’m laving steel and winter’s coming on.’ He forced his way through the doorway. ‘People like you,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘are a Goddamned nuisance.’

I didn’t have another chance to make him listen to me. We were out on the platform now, and as we reached the door to the track a voice called up, ‘That you, Dave?’ The earth of the cut was yellow in the lights of the train and there were men moving about below us, dark shapes with here and there the glow of a cigarette. ‘They want you on the radio,’ the voice added. ‘It’s urgent.’

‘Hell!’ Shelton said. ‘Who is it?’

‘They didn’t say. But it’s Two-two-four and they’re asking for the figure for track laid today and a schedule of shifts worked…’

‘Okay, I’ll come.’

‘Sounds like the General Manager’s there,’ the foreman said. ‘He was due at Two-two-four today, wasn’t he, Dave?’

That’s right. And one of the directors, too. I guess they’re going to turn the heat on again.’ And he added, ‘Christ Almighty! We’re laying more than one and a half miles a day already. What more do they expect?’

‘I guess two miles would sound better in their ears,’ the foreman muttered dryly.

Two miles! Yeah, that’d be sweet music. But the men can’t lay it that fast.’

‘You could try paying them a bonus.’

‘It’s not me. It’s the Company. Still, with the freeze-up due …’ Shelton hesitated. ‘Yeah, well, maybe it’s an idea.’ He turned to me. ‘You wait here in the diner. And you better wait with him, Pat,’ he told the foreman. And he jumped out and disappeared up the track.

The men were streaming out of the diner now and the gang foreman and I stood back to let them pass. I wondered whether it was worth trying to explain to him about Briffe being alive, but one glance at his wooden features told me it wouldn’t be any good. He hadn’t the authority to help me, anyway.

In fact, at that moment I think I had lost the will to do anything more. Now that instructions about me had been sent up from Base, there didn’t seem any point. The whole organization had probably been alerted, and in that case there was nothing I could do. And yet I would like to have talked with Darcy. Perkins had said he knew more about Labrador than anyone else on the line, and there were things I wanted to know, things that perhaps he could have told me.

‘Go on back to the diner,’ the foreman said. ‘It’ll be warmer in there.’ The stream of men had thinned and he pushed me forward. I checked to let two men come out, and as they reached the exit door, a voice from the track called up, ‘Take this, will you?’ One of them reached down, grabbed hold of a suitcase and dropped it on the platform almost at my feet.

I don’t know what made me bend down and look at it — something about its shape maybe or perhaps subconsciously I had recognized the voice. At any rate, I did, and then I just stood there, staring at it stupidly. It was my own suitcase, the one I’d left in the bunkhouse train ten miles down the line when I’d jumped Lands’ speeder.

And then I heard Lands’ voice, outside on the track. ‘Okay, but we can’t do that till we’ve seen Dave. Anyway I want to get a radio message through to Two-sixty-three. My guess is …’ The rest was drowned in a prolonged hoot from the locomotive. And when it ceased abruptly I heard somebody say, ‘Why bring Darcy into it?’ And Lands answered impatiently, ‘Because they’re all construction men up there. They got a target on that grade. Ray’s the only guy with a vehicle who’s got the time I didn’t hear any more and I guessed he’d turned away. Peering out, I could see his padded bulk moving off up the train. There was somebody with him, but I couldn’t see who it was for he was in the shadows, close under the next coach.

‘What are you up to?’ The foreman’s hand gripped my arm.

‘Nothing,’ I said. I was wondering whether it was Laroche I’d seen in the shadow there.

‘Well, come on into the diner.’

I hesitated. ‘That was Lands,’ I said.

‘Bill Lands?’ He had let go of my arm. ‘Well, what if it was? You know him?’

I nodded. I was thinking that I’d nothing to lose. If I went to Lands now, of my own accord, maybe he’d listen to me. I might even convince him there was a chance Briffe was still alive. At least the responsibility would be his then. I’d have done all I could. And if Laroche were there, then perhaps Lands would see for himself that the man was half out of his mind. ‘I’d like a word with Lands,’ I said.

The foreman looked at me with a puzzled frown. He hadn’t expected that and he said, ‘Does he know you’re up here?’

‘Yes,’ I said. And I added, ‘I came up on his speeder.’

That seemed to impress him. ‘Well, you’ll have to wait till Dave Shelton gets back. Ask him.’ And he added, ‘You a newspaper man?’

‘No.’ And because I felt that it would do no harm for him to know why I was here, I said, ‘I came up the line on account of that plane that crashed. You remember?’

He nodded. ‘Sure I remember.’

I had aroused his curiosity now, and I said, ‘Well, Briffe’s still alive.’

‘Still alive?’ He stared at me. ‘How the hell could he be? They searched for a week and then the pilot came out with the news that the other two were dead. I heard all about it from Darcy, when he was down here a few days back, and he said the guy was lucky to be alive.’

‘Well, Briffe may be alive, too,’ I said.

‘Briffe? You crazy?’

I saw the look of absolute disbelief in his eyes and I knew it was no good. They were all convinced Briffe was dead — this man, Lands, all of them. Shelton would be the same. And Darcy. What about Darcy? He’d been with Laroche for an hour — all the way up to Two-ninety. Would Darcy think I was crazy, too? ‘I’d like to talk to Lands,’ I said again, but without much hope.

And then the locomotive hooted again, two short blasts. ‘You’ll have to wait,’ the foreman said. ‘We’re gonna back up clear of the cut now.’

There was a clash of buffers and the coach jerked into motion, the yellow sides of the cut sliding past the open door. It came to me in a flash then that this was my chance. If I were going to contact Darcy, I’d have to make the attempt now. But I hesitated, wondering whether it was worth it. And then I looked down at my suitcase, resting there right at my feet. I think it was the suitcase that decided me. Unless Lands or Laroche had removed them, it contained my father’s log books. At least I’d have those to show Darcy, and I felt suddenly that I was meant to go on, that that was why the suitcase was there. It was a sign.

I suppose that sounds absurd, but that was the way I felt about it.

The clatter of the wheels over the rail joints was speeding up, the sides of the cut slipping by faster, and I reached for the suitcase. ‘What are you doing with that?’ The foreman’s voice was suspicious.

‘It happens to be my suitcase,’ I said. I saw the look of surprise on his face, and then I jumped. It was a standing jump, but I put all the spring of my leg muscles into it, and it carried me on to the side of the cut where the ground was softer. I hit it with my body slack, my shoulder down, the way I’d been taught in the Army during National Service, and though it knocked the breath out of my body and I rolled over twice, I wasn’t hurt.

As I scrambled to my feet, I saw the foreman leaning out of the coach door, shouting at me. But he didn’t jump. He’d left it too late. The locomotive went by me with a roar, and in the light from the cab I found my suitcase. The rail transporters followed, finally the Burro crane, and after that the track was clear and it was suddenly dark.

I stood quite still for a moment, listening. But all I could hear was the rumble of the train as it ran back out of the cut. No voices came to me out of the night, no glimmer of a cigarette showed in the darkness ahead. All that seething crowd of men seemed to have been spirited away, leaving a black, empty void through which a cold wind blew. But at least it meant I could keep to the track, and I followed it north, breaking into a run as soon as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness.

Behind me the sound of the train faded and died, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, it was stationary on the track, a dull glow of light that glinted on the rails. Torches flickered and I thought I heard shouts. But it was half a mile away at least, and I knew I was clear of them.

A few minutes later I reached the end of steel. It was just the empty grade then, no track to guide me, and I stopped running. Behind me the lights of the train had vanished, hidden by the bend of the cut, and with their disappearance the black emptiness of Labrador closed round me. The only sound now was that of the wind whispering dryly through the trees.

The night was overcast, but it didn’t matter — not then. The grade rolled out ahead of me, flat like a road and just visible as a pale blur in the surrounding darkness. But it didn’t last. It was like that for a mile, maybe two, and then the surface became rougher. There were ruts and soft patches, and a little later I blundered into a heap of fresh-piled gravel.

After that the going was bad. Several times I strayed from the track into the bulldozed roots of trees piled at its edge. And once the ground dropped from under me and I fell a dozen feet or more to fetch up against the half-buried shovel of a grab crane.

I was more careful after that, moving slower. And then I came to another section of completed grade and for about a mile the going was easier again. But it didn’t last.

It was not much more than twenty miles from Head of Steel to Camp 263, but to understand what the going was like, particularly at night in those conditions, I should perhaps explain the general method of grade construction employed by the contractors. It was not a continuing thrust into Labrador as was the case with the steel laying, but a series of isolated operations, spreading north and south and ultimately linking up.

In the initial stages of the project a pilot road — known as the Tote Road — had been constructed all the way from the base at Seven Islands to the iron ore deposits in the neighbourhood of Knob Lake almost 400 miles to the north. This road, which was little more than a track bulldozed out of the bush, followed the general line of the proposed grade, and though it paralleled it in many places, its course was far from straight, since it followed the line of least resistance offered by the country. It was up this road that the heavy equipment had advanced — the drag cranes, grab cranes, bulldozers, tumbleb-ugs, scrapers, ‘mule’ trucks and fuel tankers.

At the same time that the Tote Road was being constructed, engineers, flown in by floatplane and operating from small tented camps, surveyed and marked out the line of the railway. Airstrips constructed at strategic intervals were then built, and from these focal points construction camps, supplied largely by air lift, were established and gangs of men deployed to build the grade, section by section.

At the time I started north from Head of Steel the overall plan was to push the steel as far as Menihek Dam, at Mile 329, before winter brought work to a virtual standstill. This dam was a shallow one constructed almost entirely from air-lifted supplies where the waters of the ninety-mile Ashuanipi Lake ran into the great Hamilton River. All it needed now was the generators to make it operational, and the whole weight of the contractors’ organization, backed by some hundreds of pieces of heavy equipment, was concentrated on this stretch of the grade.

The effect, so far as I was concerned, was bewildering. A section of completed grade, scraped smooth as a road, would suddenly end in piled heaps of gravel or drop away into the quagmire of an uncompleted fill. The half-finished cuts were full of rock from the day’s blasting, and the whole line of the grade was littered with heavy machines that were a death trap in the dark.

Somewhere around midnight the wind died away and everything was preternaturally still — a stillness that had a quality of hostility about it. And then it began to snow, a gentle floating down of large flakes that were wet and clinging. The darkness around me slowly changed to a ghostly white, and once again a completed section of grade petered out and I was stumbling through ridged heaps of sand, keeping by instinct rather than sight to the open swathe that had been bulldozed through the jackpine.

It was shortly after this that the ground abruptly dropped away from me, and I slithered down into the mud of a gulley, where the corrugated metal sheets of a half-completed conduit stood like the whitened bones of a huge whale. It was muskeg here and I knew it was hopeless to try and cross it in the dark. Weary and cold, I paused for a spell, and then I retraced my steps to an opening I had seen in the white wall of the jackpine, and when I found it, I abandoned the grade, dully conscious that I was on some sort of track.

But the track was little better than the grade. The ground became soft under my feet as I descended into the same shallow depression that had called for a conduit in the grade construction. Patches of water showed dark against the snow, and as I splashed through them, I could hear the soft crunch of the paper-thin layer of ice that had already formed on the surface. And then it was mud, thick and heavy and black, with deep ruts in it where bulldozers had wallowed through.

But the ground under the mud was frozen hard, and when I was through the worst of it and the ruts still continued, I knew I had found a section of the old Tote Road. Gradually the surface hardened as the ground rose again, the ruts disappeared and the country became more open, the trees stunted. I had difficulty in keeping to the track then and twice within a matter of minutes I found myself blundering through thick scrub, and the snow shaken from the branches of the trees soaked me to the skin. I was very tired by then, my senses dulled. The handle of my suitcase was like the cold edge of a piece of steel cutting into my stiffened fingers, and the boots that were too big for me had raised blisters that burned with the pain of frostbite.

When I lost the track again, I gave it up and made a bed of pine branches and lay down to wait for dawn. I would go on then, I told myself-when I was rested and could see. The sweat was cold on my body, but I didn’t care because of the relief I felt at just lying there, making no effort.

The snow fell softly, but it didn’t seem cold any more and the stillness was overwhelming. In all the world there was no sound, so that I thought I could hear the flakes falling.

I hadn’t intended to sleep, but once I had relaxed I suppose there was nothing to keep me awake. The snow whispered, and I lay drifting in a white, dark world until consciousness began to slide away from my numbed brain.

Maybe I heard the car and that’s what woke me. Or perhaps it was the gleam of the headlights. I opened my eyes suddenly to find myself staring up at a jackpine floodlit like a Christmas tree, and a voice said, ‘I guess you must be Ferguson.’

I sat up then, still dazed with cold and sleep, not quite sure where I was. But then I saw the track and the trees all covered with snow and the man standing over me, black against the lights. He was short and broad, with a gnome-like body, swollen by the padding of his parka, and my first thought was that this wasn’t either Lands or Laroche. This was a man I’d never seen before. His face was square and craggy, the colour of mahogany, and the snow clung white to tufted eyebrows as he leaned forward, peering down at me through rimless glasses.

‘A fine dance you’ve led me,’ he growled, and he reached down and dragged me to my feet. ‘I bin all along the grade as far as Head of Steel searching for you. Came back by the Tote Road, just in case.’

I mumbled my thanks. My limbs were so stiff with cold I could hardly stand. Numbness deadened the pain of my blistered feet. ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing hold of my suitcase. ‘There’s a heater in the jeep. It’ll hurt like hell, but you’ll soon thaw out.’

It was a jeep station wagon, a battered wreck of a car with one mudguard torn off and the bodywork all plastered with mud and snow. He helped me in and a moment later we were bumping and slithering between the trees that lined the track, and the heater was roaring a hot blast that was agony to my frozen limbs. His face showed square and leathery in the reflected glare of the headlights. He wasn’t a young man and the peaked khaki cap was strangely decorated with a cluster of gaudy flies. ‘You were searching for me, were you?’ I asked. And when he nodded, I knew that Lands must have contacted him. ‘You’re Mr Darcy then,’ I said.

‘Ray Darcy,’ he grunted, not taking his eyes off the road. He was driving fast, the car slithering on the bends that rushed towards us in a blaze of white. ‘Bill reckoned I’d find you around Mile Two-fifty.’

‘You saw him then?’ I asked.

‘Sure I did.’

‘And Laroche? Was he there?’

‘Laroche?’ He glanced at me quickly. ‘No, I didn’t see Laroche.’

‘But he was up there, wasn’t he? He was at Head of Steel?’

‘So they told me.’ And he added, ‘You just relax now and get some sleep. Guess you’re pretty near all in.’

But this was the man I’d trekked through the night to see. Circumstances had brought us together, and I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity, tired though I was. ‘Did Lands tell you why I was here?’ I asked him. ‘Did he tell you about the transmission my father picked up?’

‘Yeah. He told me.’

‘And I suppose he told you I was crazy to think Briffe might be still alive.’

‘No. He didn’t exactly say that.’

‘Then what did he say?’ I asked.

Again that quick sidelong glance. ‘He said you were James Finlay Ferguson’s grandson, for one thing.’ He dragged the car through the mud of a long S bend. ‘And that to my way of thinking,’ he added, ‘is about as strange as the idea that Briffe should have been able to transmit a message.’

‘What’s so strange about it?’ I asked. Why did it always come back to the Ferguson Expedition? ‘It’s just a coincidence.’ The warmth of the heater was making me drowsy.

‘Damned queer coincidence.’ He said it almost savagely.

‘It explains my father’s interest in Briffe’s party.’

‘Sure. But it doesn’t explain you.’

I didn’t know what he meant by that, and I was too sleepy to ask. I could hardly keep my eyes open. My mind groped back to the Ferguson Expedition. If I could just find out what had happened. ‘Perkins said you knew more about Labrador than anybody else on the line.’ My voice sounded thick and blurred. ‘That’s why I came north … to find you and ask …’

‘You go to sleep,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk later.’

My eyes were closed, waves of tiredness engulfing me. But then we went into a skid and I was jerked back to consciousness as he pulled the car out of it. ‘You do know what happened, don’t you?’ I said thickly. ‘I must know what happened to my grandfather.’

‘I’ve read it up, if that’s what you mean.’ He turned his head and looked at me. ‘You mean to say you really don’t know the story of that expedition?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘That’s the reason I wanted to contact you — that and the fact that you brought Laroche out.’

He stared at me. ‘Goddammit!’ he said. ‘If that isn’t the queerest thing about the whole business.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You not knowing.’ He was still staring at me and we hit the edge of the road so that snow-laden branches slashed against the cracked windscreen. He pulled the car back on to the track and said, ‘Now you just relax. Plenty of time to talk later.’

‘But what did happen?’ I asked.

‘I said relax. We’ll talk about it later.’ And then he added, ‘I got to think.’ It was said to himself, not to me. And when I tried to question him further, he turned on me angrily and said, ‘You’re not in a fit state to talk now. And nor am 1.1 been up all night chasing after you and I’m tired. Now go to sleep.’

‘But-‘

‘Go to sleep,’ he almost shouted at me. ‘Goddammit! How do you expect me to drive with you asking questions all the time?’ And then in a gentler voice, ‘Take my advice and sleep whilst you can. I’ll talk when I’m ready to — not before. Okay?’

I nodded, not sure what he meant. I was too tired to argue anyway. I’d come a long way and I’d found the man I thought could help me. My eyes closed of their own accord and consciousness slid away from me. I was adrift then in a sea of ruts, rocking and swaying to the steady roar of the engine. And when I opened my eyes again, dawn was breaking and we were running down into a hutted camp.

‘Two-sixty-three,’ Darcy said, seeing that I was awake.

The place looked raw and desolate in the cold morning light, the wooden buildings standing bleak and black against the snow. It was a new camp built on a slope above the grade, the site only recently bulldozed out of the bush. Great piles of sawn logs stood outside every hut and all round the edge of the camp was a slash of lopped branches and uprooted trees.

We bumped over rough ground and drew up outside a hut that was set a little apart. ‘I’m usually better organized than this,’ Darcy said as he scooped up an armful of logs and pushed open the door. ‘But I only been here a few weeks.’ He went over to the iron stove at the back and fed logs into it.

He only had part of the hut, a small bare room with two iron beds, some shelves full of books, several lockers and a cupboard built of three-ply. It reminded me of an army hut and the mud on the floor showed what the ground outside would be like when the snow melted. A big refrigerator, gleaming new, stood incongruously against one wall. The room looked drab and cheerless in the dim light that filtered through the dirty windows, but it was warm and the flames that licked out of the top of the stove as he opened the ash door flickered on the bare wood walls to give it an illusion of cosiness. There were several pictures, too; oil paintings of Labrador — a river scene, all black and greys, a study of jackpines in the snow, and one of a little group of men round a camp fire that looked so lonely and desolate that it reminded me of Briffe. ‘Yours?’ I asked. He turned and saw I was looking at the picture of the camp fire. ‘Yeah. All my own work.’ And he added, ‘Just daubs.’ But I knew he didn’t mean that, for he was staring at the picture with a self-critical intenseness. He was serious about this and he said slowly, ‘I guess that’s the best I ever did. Like it?’

‘I don’t know much about it,’ I murmured awkwardly. ‘It looks cold and lost — ‘

‘It’s meant to.’ He said it almost harshly. And then he replaced the lid of the stove with a clang. ‘Okay, now you get your wet clothes off and hit the sack. You can have that bed.’ He nodded to the one that wasn’t made up. ‘Sorry I can’t give you a shot of liquor, but liquor ain’t allowed up the line. Too many alcoholics up here. Anyway, you’ll be okay. All you need is warmth and sleep.’

Steam was rising from my clothes. I sat down on the bed. I felt suddenly very tired — too tired to take off my clothes or do anything but just sit there. ‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ I said and my voice sounded blurred.

‘Later,’ he answered.

‘No, now,’ I said with an effort. ‘Laroche will be here later. Lands, too. If I don’t talk to you now, it’ll be too late.’

‘I’ve told you before, and now I’m telling you again — I’ll talk to you when I’m ready, and not before. Okay?’ And he turned abruptly away from me and went to the corner beyond the stove. ‘You don’t have to worry about Laroche or anybody else,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Not for several hours yet.

There’s no airstrip here; they’ll have to come by jeep, and they won’t start till after breakfast.’ He came back with a pair of long rubber boots. ‘You just get your clothes off and turn in. You’re dead beat.’ He reached across me to the shelf above the bed and took down a green tin box. ‘Go on, get some sleep, I’ll be back in an hour or so.’

He was moving towards the door and I jumped to my feet. ‘Where are you going?’ I cried.

‘Fishing.’ He had turned and was staring at me curiously.

It didn’t seem possible he could be going fishing, not after being up all night. I don’t know why, but I’d come so far to see him I’d somehow taken it for granted he was on my side, and now I suddenly wasn’t sure. There was a radio somewhere in the camp. He could talk to Lands at Head of Steel, probably Staffen down at Base. ‘What instructions did they give you about me?’ I asked him.

He reached out to a rack on the wall and took down a fishing-rod swaddled in a green canvas case, and then he came back across the room towards me. ‘See here, young fellow,’ he said. ‘If I say I’m going fishing, I’m going fishing. Understand?’ His voice shook and his eyes glared at me from behind the rimless glasses. ‘Don’t ever try doubting my word. I don’t like it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured. ‘It was just that I thought…’

‘You thought I was going to report to Lands, is that it?’ He was still glaring at me. ‘Well, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m going fishing. Okay?’

I nodded and subsided on to the bed. ‘It seemed so odd,’ I murmured.

‘Odd?’ His tone was still belligerent. ‘What’s odd about going fishing?’

‘I don’t know,’ I muttered, trying to think of something that would pacify him. ‘I should have thought you’d need some sleep, too.’

‘I’m not a kid,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t need a lot of sleep. And fishing helps me to think,’ he added. He smiled then and the gust of anger that had shaken him seemed suddenly swept aside. ‘You’re not a fisherman, are you?’

I shook my head.

‘Then you wouldn’t know. It’s like painting — it helps. You need things like that up here.’ He stared at me for a moment. ‘There’s a lot of things you don’t know yet,’ he said gently. ‘About the way life is in a Godforsaken country like Labrador. I been two years up here.’ He shook his head, as though at some folly of his own. ‘I came up here for a month’s fishing, a sort of convalescence, and I ain’t been outside since — not even down to Seven Islands. That’s a long time.’ He turned away. ‘Christ! It’s a long time.’ He was staring out of the window, at the camp and the country beyond it. ‘It does things to you.’ And then, after a moment, he looked at me again, smiling. ‘Such as making you quick to take offence when a young fool doubts your word.’ And he added brusquely, ‘Now you get some sleep. And don’t worry about what I’m up to. I’m just going down the grade as far as the river, and with any luck I’ll come back with a ouananish, maybe some lake trout. Okay?’

I nodded. ‘I just wanted you to hear what I had to say before you did anything.’

‘Sure. I understand. But there’s plenty of time.’ He went to the door and pulled it open. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours or so.’ And then he was gone, the door shut behind him. But though he was no longer there, something of his personality still lingered in the bare room.

I sat there for a long time, wondering about him. But gradually weariness overcame me, and I stripped off my clothes and climbed into the bed. The blankets were rough and warm against my skin. I didn’t care that they were musty with the smell of dirt. I didn’t care about anything then. I was satisfied that I’d found somebody who felt about Labrador the way my father had, and though he was strange and I was a little scared of him, I knew he would help me — and I closed my eyes and went to sleep with a picture in my mind of a tough little man, knee-deep in a cold river, fishing with long, practised casts.

I woke to find him standing over me, and the sun was shining in through the window. ‘Do you like salmon?’ he said.

I sat up. ‘Salmon?’

‘Sure. I brought you some salmon. Land-locked salmon. The Montagnais call them ouananish.’ He pulled up a chair and set a big dish down on it and a knife and fork and a hunk of bread. ‘Caught two. The boys and I had one. You got most of the other. Strictly against camp rules. No fish to be cooked. Give you tape worm if they’re not properly cooked. You ever had tape worm?’

‘No.’

‘You’re lucky. You feed like a horse, but it’s the worm feeding, not you, so you just go on getting thinner.’ He was searching in a desk in the corner and he came up with a sheet of graph paper. There was the sound of voices and the scrape of boots in the other half of the hut beyond the partition. ‘Lucy!’ he shouted. ‘You boys ready yet?’

‘Oui, out. All okay, Ray.’

‘I got to get the boys started on levelling up a new section of the grade,’ he said, turning to me. ‘I’ll be about an hour. After that we’ll go north as far as the trestle. Maybe I’ll fish a bit whilst you tell me your story.’ The eyes glinted at me from behind their glasses. Then we’ll see. Maybe we’ll go and have a word with Mackenzie.’

And with that he turned and went out. The door closed and after a moment I began to eat my first ouananish. It was close-fleshed and pink, and there was a lot of it. And whilst I ate I was thinking about Darcy again — about his painting and his mania for fishing. Crazy Darcy that young engineer had called him. Two years without a break was certainly a long time, long enough to drive a man round the bend. I remembered something Lands had said and wondered whether Darcy was what they called ‘bushed’.

I ate the whole of that fish, and when I had finished it energy was flowing back into my body so that I no longer felt tired. There was a basin beside Darcy’s bed and a bowl of water steamed on the stove lid. I got up stiffly and had a wash, standing naked over the basin. Bushed or not, the man was closer to the country than anybody else I’d met. I had a shave and then I sat on the bed and broke the blisters on my heels and covered them with adhesive tape I found in the medical kit on the shelf above the bed. There were books there, too, and the photograph of a young Canadian soldier in a battered leather frame.

My clothes had dried out with the heat of the stove and I put them on. And then I went back to the shelf and the books, wondering whether they would tell me anything about the man. They were mostly technical, but there was Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler, a single leather-bound volume of Shakespeare, the collected poems of Robert Service, several books by Jack London, and then four books that took me right back to the little room where my father had had his radio. They were Labrador, by W. Cabot, two volumes of Outlines of the Geography, Life and Customs of Newfoundland-Labrador by V. Tanner and a small slim book titled Labrador — In Search of the Truth by Henri Dumaine.

Tanner’s book I knew. I’d often looked at the pictures in those two volumes when I was a kid. And Cabot’s book, too — that had been on my father’s shelves. But Henri Dumaine’s book was new to me and I took it down and opened it, casually leafing through the pages. It was a record of a journey into Labrador, not very well written. I glanced at the fly-leaf. It had been published by a Toronto firm in 1905, and thinking that perhaps it might have a reference to my grandfather’s expedition, I started going carefully through the pages from the beginning.

I found a reference to it almost immediately, at the foot of page five. He had written: Thus it was on June 15,1902, that the ship brought me to Davis Inlet and the Hudson’s Bay Post there. I was at the starting point of the Ferguson Expedition at last…

I stared at the sentence, hardly able to believe my eyes. Here, in this hut at Camp 263,1 had stumbled on a book that could help me. My eyes were devouring the printed words now, and a few lines further on I read: Standing there, looking at the Post, so clean and neat in the cold sunlight, the red shingle roofs of the buildings glistening with the rain that had just passed and the planked walls gleaming in their fresh coat of white paint, I was thinking of Pierre. It was to this place that the poor fellow had returned-alone. I was thinking, too, of my wife, Jacqueline, and of all the hopes she entertained of my present journey. She had been at her brother’s bedside when he died and had listened to the last strange mutterings of a mind deranged by the tragedy of what had happened and by all the terrible hardships suffered. I turned my back on the Post then and looked across the water to the hills of Labrador. It was then that I first felt the impact of that lonely country and I stood there in sudden awe of it, for somewhere beyond the black line of that escarpment lay the truth. If I could find it, then maybe I could clear his name of the vile accusations that had so darkened his last hours and contributed so much to his state of mind.

I turned the pages quickly then, searching for some statement of the accusations, some hint as to what was supposed to have happened to my grandfather. But Henri Dumaine seemed to take it for granted that the reader would know that, for I could find no further reference to it. Page after page was taken up with the rather dreary account of his struggle up the Old Indian trail to the Naskopie. He had had two coast half-breeds with him and it was clear that neither he nor they had much idea of bushcraft. Dogged by misfortunes, which were largely of their own making, they had reached Cabot Lake on July 19. They had then gone south across Lake Michikamau and had finally turned west towards the Ashuanipi.

Here we found a camp of Montagnais Indians waiting for the coming of the caribou and luck was with us for two years ago at this Very spot a lone white man had passed them, going towards the great lake of Michikamau. He had a canoe, but his supplies must have been getting low for he had avoided them and they had been scared to go near him for some reason, so that they could tell me little about him except that his clothes were ragged and his feet bound with strips of canvas and he talked to himself as though communing to some unseen spirit. They showed me the place where he had camped beside the river. There were several caribou bones and close by the place where he had built his fire was a little pile of cartridges, the greased wrapping partly disintegrated.

There was no doubt in my mind then that this was one of the places where my brother-in-law had camped on the way back, and the cartridges so recklessly jettisoned proved that his situation was already desperate. Clearly we were still some distance from the place where death had overtaken Mr Ferguson and I asked the Indians if they knew of the Lake I sought. I described it to them as Pierre had described it so often in his delirium. But they did not know it, and of course the name that Pierre had given to the Lake meant nothing to them, and so we left them, giving them two packages of tea and a small bag of flour, which was all we could spare of our supplies. And after that we went south, following the Ashuanipi, and searching all the time…

The door behind me burst open and I turned to find Darcy standing there. ‘All set?’ he asked impatiently, as though I had kept him waiting. And then he saw the book in my hand. ‘Oh, so you found that.’ He came in and shut the door. ‘I wondered whether you would.’ He took it out of my hand, leafing idly through the pages. ‘Dull stuff,’ he said. ‘But interesting when you know the country.’

‘Or when you know what happened,’ I said.

To Ferguson?’ He looked at me quickly. ‘Nobody knows that.’

‘When you know what’s supposed to have happened then,’ I corrected myself. ‘On page five …’ I took the book from his hand and pointed to the line referring to ‘vile accusations’. ‘What were the accusations?’ I asked him. ‘They were made against the survivor, weren’t they? That was Dumaine’s brother-in-law. It says so there. Who accused him and what did they accuse him of?’

‘Goldarnit!’ he exclaimed, staring at me. ‘It’s the damnedest thing I ever heard. You come all this way, right up here to this camp, where you’re not more than fifty miles or so from where your grandfather died, and you say you don’t know the story.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ I said. ‘I came up here because of Briffe.’

‘Because of Briffe, or because Laroche crashed his plane in the same area?’

‘Because of Briffe,’ I said. I was watching his face, wondering whether he, too, had guessed where the plane had crashed. I glanced down at the book again. I had only got about two-thirds through it. ‘Did Dumaine reach Lake of the Lion?’ I asked.

‘Ah, so you know about Lake of the Lion, do you?’

‘Yes, but I don’t know what happened there.’

‘Well, it’s like I told you,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows for sure. Dumaine never got farther than the Ashuanipi.’ He reached over and took the book from me again. ‘Some Indians showed him a lone white man’s camp on the banks of the river, and after that he found two more. But that was all.’ His grizzled head was bent over the book, his stubby, wind-cracked fingers leafing through the earlier pages. ‘The poor devil spent more than a month searching for that lake,’ he murmured. ‘And all the time he should have been getting the hell out of the country.’ He seemed to be trying to check on something in the first few chapters of the book. At length he said, ‘The big freeze-up was on them long before they’d reached Davis Inlet. If it hadn’t been for the half-breeds, he’d never have got out alive.’ He snapped the book shut and replaced it on the shelf beside the photograph. ‘The irony of it was,’ he added, looking at me curiously, ‘there was a woman came to Davis Inlet that year and strolled across half Labrador as though it were no worse than her own Scots moors. She had three trappers with her who knew the country and she covered the same area that Dumaine covered, and she went out by way of the Hamilton and the NorthWest River Post as fit as when she started.’

But I didn’t intend to be side-tracked. “This man who accompanied my grandfather,’ I said. ‘Dumaine talks of him as though he were mad. A mind deranged by the tragedy of what happened, he says. What sent him mad?’ I asked.

He gave a quick shrug and turned away towards the stove.

‘Can’t you give me some idea of what happened?’ I persisted. And when he didn’t answer, I added, ‘At least you roust know what the accusations were. What was he accused of?’

He was leaning down, staring at the red-hot stove, but he turned to me then and said, ‘He was accused of murdering your grandfather.’ And he added quickly, ‘Nothing was proved. Nobody knows what happened. It was just a wild accusation made out of-‘

‘Who made it?’ I asked.

He hesitated, and then said, ‘The woman I was talking about — Ferguson’s young wife, Alexandra.’ He was staring at me with a puzzled frown. ‘You must know that part of it at least. Hell, boy, she was your own grandmother.’ And then, when he realized it was new to me, he shook his head and turned back to the stove. ‘The newspapers got hold of her and printed some pretty wild things. Not that there was anything new in it. There’d been a lot of talk when the poor devil had come out alone raving of gold and a lake with the figure of a lion in rock. He was half out of his mind then, by all accounts.’

‘So it was gold my grandfather was after, was it?’ I was remembering what my mother had said about him.

‘Sure. You don’t imagine a seasoned prospector like Ferguson went into Labrador for the good of his soul, do you?’ He fell silent then, but after a while he said, ‘She must have been a remarkable woman, your grandmother. Didn’t you know her at all?’

I explained how we’d stopped going to the house in Scotland after my mother had found her talking to me in my room that night, and he nodded. ‘Maybe your mother was right. And yet in spite of that you’re here. Queer, isn’t it?’ And then he went back to my grandmother. ‘It would be remarkable even today, you wouldn’t understand, of course — not yet. All you’ve seen of the Labrador is a railway under construction. But you get away from the camps and the grade, the country’s different then — a land to be reckoned with.’

‘In fact, the land God gave to Cain.’ I said it without thinking, repeating Farrow’s words.

He looked at me, a little surprised. ‘Yeah, that’s right. The land God gave to Cain.’ And the way he said it gave a significance to the words that chilled me.

‘Did my grandmother reach Lake of the Lion?’ I asked then.

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘But if she did, she kept damn quiet about it, for there’s no mention of it in the newspaper reports. But she back-tracked their route in and got farther than Dumaine did, or else she got there first, for she came out with a rusted pistol, a sextant and an old map case, all things that had belonged to her husband. She had those photographed, but she never published her diary, though she admitted she’d kept one. I guess she’d have published that all right if she’d found her husband’s last camp. Is the diary still in existence, do you know?’ he asked me.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I’ve seen the pistol and the sextant and the map case. My father had them hanging on the wall of his room. There was part of a paddle, too, and an old fur cap. But I never knew there was a diary.’

‘Too bad,’ he murmured. ‘It would have been interesting to know the basis of her accusations. She was three months up here in the wild and all the time following the route her husband took. I guess those three lonely months gave the iron plenty of time to enter into her soul.’ He went over to the stove and held his hands close to the iron casing, warming them. ‘The strange thing is,’ he said, ‘that Dumaine never mentions her once in that book. And yet the two parties started out from Davis Inlet within a few days of each other, and they were covering the same ground. I wonder whether they ever met?’ he murmured. ‘Even if Dumaine never met her face-to-face, he must have come across traces of her party. And yet he never mentions her. There’s not one reference to Mrs Ferguson in the whole of the book.’

‘That’s hardly surprising,’ I said, ‘considering she’d accused his wife’s brother of murder.’

‘Well, maybe not. But she didn’t put it as bluntly as that, you understand. And there’d been all that talk …’ He was staring down at the stove again. ‘It’s a queer thing,’ he murmured, half to himself. ‘Those two men — I would have thought it would save been the other way about.’

‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I dunno. A question of character, I guess. I’ve thought a lot about it since I been up acre. Take Ferguson.’ He was staring down at the stove. ‘Came over as a kid in an immigrant ship and went out west, Apprenticed to one of the Hudson’s Bay posts. A few years later he was in the Cariboo. I guess that’s where the gold bug got him, for he was all through the Cariboo and then up to Dawson City in the Klondike rush of the middle nineties.’ He shook his head. ‘He must have been real tough.’

‘And the other man?’ I asked.

‘Pierre?’ he said quickly. ‘Pierre was different — a man of the wilderness, a trapper. That’s what makes it so odd.’

He didn’t say anything more and I asked him then how he knew all this. ‘It’s all in Dumaine’s book, is it?’

‘No, of course not. Dumaine was storekeeper in a small town in Ontario. He didn’t understand the wild, so he never bothered to assess the nature of the two men’s personalities. His book is a dull inventory of the day-to-day tribulations of a man whose wife had talked him into a journey that was beyond his capabilities.’

‘Then how do you know about my grandfather?’ I asked.

He looked up at me. ‘Newspaper cuttings chiefly. I had somebody look them up and type them all out for me. There was a lot about it in the Montreal papers, as you can imagine. I’d show them to you, only they’re in my trunk, and that’s up at Two-ninety still.’

‘But what made you so interested?’ I asked him.

‘Interested?’ He looked at me in surprise. ‘How the hell could I fail to be interested?’ His craggy face was suddenly smiling. ‘You don’t seem to understand. I’m not up here because I like engineering. I don’t even need the dough. I’m fifty-six and I made enough money to keep me the rest of my life.’ He turned and reached for his gloves. ‘No,’ he added. ‘I’m up here because I got bitten by the Labrador.’ He laughed softly to himself as he pulled on the gloves. ‘Yeah, I guess I’m the only man along the whole stretch of line that’s here because he loves it.’ He was talking to himself again and I had a sudden feeling that he often talked to himself. But then he looked across at me. ‘Know anything at all about the Labrador?’ he asked me.

‘My father had a lot of books,’ I said. ‘I’ve read some of them.’

He nodded. Then you’ll know that all this is virgin country, unmapped and untrodden by white men till the Hollinger outfit got interested in the iron ore deposits up at Burnt Creek. Hell!’ he added. ‘It’s only four thousand years ago that the last Ice Age began to recede. It was all glaciers then. And until floatplanes came into general use for prospecting, only a handful of white men had penetrated into the interior. A few rough maps of the rivers and all the rest blank, a few books like Dumaine’s on journeys made by canoe and on foot — that was all anybody knew about the Labrador. It wasn’t until 1947 that the Government began an aerial survey. And you ask me why I’m interested in the story of the Ferguson Expedition. How the hell could I help being interested, feeling the way I do about the country?’ And then he added, almost angrily, ‘You don’t understand. I guess you never will. Nobody I ever met up here feels the way I do — the lonely, cruel, withdrawn beauty of it. Like the sea or the mountains, the emptiness of it is a challenge that cuts a man down to size. See what I mean?’ He stared at me belligerently, as though challenging me to laugh at him. ‘The aircraft and the railway, they don’t touch the country, never will, I guess. It’s wild here — as wild and lonely as any place on earth. Do you believe in God?’

The abruptness of the question startled me.

‘Well, do you?’

‘I haven’t thought much about it,’ I murmured.

‘No. Men don’t till they suddenly discover how big Nature is. You wait till you’re out there in the silence of the trees, and the bitter cold is freezing all the guts out of you. You’ll think about Him then all right, when there’s nothing but the emptiness and the loneliness and the great stillness that remains a stillness in your soul even when the wind is blowing to beat hell.’ He laughed a little self-consciously. ‘Okay,’ he said abruptly. ‘Let’s go.’ He strode across to the door and pulled it open. ‘Mackenzie’s camped up by the trestle. If we’re going to talk to him, we’d better get moving.’ His voice was suddenly impatient.

I followed him out of the hut and climbed into the jeep. “Who’s Mackenzie?’ I asked as we drove off.

‘Mackenzie, he’s an Indian — a Montagnais. One of the best of them.’ He swung the car on to the camp road. ‘He acts as guide for the geologists,’ he added. ‘But right now he’s hunting. He may be willing to help you, he may not.’

‘Help me — how?’ I asked.

‘Mackenzie’s never seen a lion,’ he said. ‘The word means nothing to him. But he’s seen that lake.’ His eyes were suddenly fixed on mine, an ophidian blue that held me rigid. ‘I take it,’ he said, ‘that you haven’t come all this way to sit on your fanny in a construction camp or to wait around until you’re sent back to Base?’ And then his gaze was back on the road again. ‘Anyway, that’s what I decided whilst I was fishing this morning — that I’d take you to see Mackenzie. I’ve sent him word by one of the Indians that hang around here to wait for us at his camp.’