by P W Ross
This camp was the only home Ami had ever known, but it held few fond memories. His mother may have avoided the home for unwed mothers, but never in love with Jean, she came to dread the solitude he so coveted. Ami was fourteen years old and up the tower with his father when Francine packed her bags, hitched a ride on the lake steamer and never looked back on her way to Montreal, still young enough to find another husband. Ami was home schooled and his informal education ended that day. He had still become a voracious reader. He had no ‘last’ memory of her and they never saw or heard of her again.
For the next three years, he and his father were inseparable. Ami thought it out of love, but what else was his father to do? A stoic, Jean was patient and shared with Ami all of his bush lore and knowledge of the water, always impressing upon him the fragility and balance of the landscape, the importance of not ‘taking’ too much. In the summers they left camp for the cabin at the base of Ferguson Mountain and while his father manned the tower, he was free to paddle the lake and roam the forest. The only real gift his mother had given him was the ability to read, and he spent countless hours under an ancient pine or drifting in the canoe, devouring adventure novels and local history — the explorers, natives and the opening of the land.
It was a damp fall day when his morose father informed him they would not be returning to the tower the following summer. The ranger service was to be dismantled. That hunting season Ami accompanied his father, guiding for moose, and they trapped together all winter. His father remained mostly silent, becoming more distant and remote.
Ami retrieved a bottle of Lamb's Navy Rum from the cabin and returned to the dock, sipping thoughtfully from the bottle. Each beaver he trapped now reminded him that it had been Europe's insatiable demand for fur that had precipitated the relentless plundering of the Canadian north.
Five thousand years ago the aboriginal inhabitants had made the Temagami country their homeland, their N'Daki Menan. They were the Teme-Augama Anishnabi, the people of the deep water. They travelled the ‘nastawgan’, a maze of trails and waterways that led them to various hunting and gathering territories. Never more than a few hundred, they hunted and trapped mostly at a subsistence level. All that changed when the French explorer Samuel de Champlain passed through south of the N’Daki Menan and first heard of the ‘Temagamis’. Five millenniums of history, culture and a homeland would be lost in the relative blink of an eye.
It was unthinkable to Ami that it had all started with felt hats. Hats, for Chrissakes! How could a French king start a fashion trend, a goddam fashion trend, and launch a huge and rapacious industry that would endure two and a half centuries, bring the beaver to the brink of extinction and change the history of a continent?
Europeans had learned that the under-fur of the beaver produced absolutely the finest quality of felt, and by the late 1500s, beaver were extinct in Western Europe and decimated in Scandinavia and Russia. They looked to the New World and competed with each other for the allegiance of the native tribes and the raw materials they could provide. Not to be outdone by the French Coureurs des Bois, in 1638, The Hudson's Bay Company planted a post on Temagami Island, then later moved to Bear Island. Ami remembered it well but it had finally closed the year after his mother had abandoned them.
A fur and hide currency of barter was established. One moose equalled two beaver; one beaver was good for three marten, one blanket traded for six pelts. The tale that a rifle cost a stack of pelts the height of the gun was the myth of the unscrupulous trader. One gallon of brandy (well watered) was priced at four pelts. So important was this trade that the HBC slogan was “Pro Pelle Cutem” — to take skins. Locally it came to mean ‘to skin-em’ and the phrase applied to the natives as well as the wildlife. Almost 400 years later, the aboriginal community was fighting back and had learned that the law and the courts were the new weapons of choice. They were the ultimate arbiter of who now got skinned.
Ami trapped only beaver now. Going price at auction was forty-five dollars for a good pelt. Rabbit, muskrat, fox, and marten at half that price were not worth the effort, and for seventy dollars, Jean was not prepared to destroy a lynx. He did however take the occasional large black bear, which were abundant and could fetch two hundred dollars. Unfortunately for the beaver, although the aboriginals credited them with intelligence, they were easily harvested but proved a resilient rodent that had sprung back from declining population many times in the past.
Wearing distinctive square-toed Temagami snowshoes, Ami would circle the frozen ponds of his trap lines, searching for underwater runways between the beaver’s lodge and a winter feed-pile of submerged sticks. It was a simple task to place a spring-loaded Conibear trap in the path of a beaver. Swimming through, the trap would close around it and the beaver drowned.
After that final season of trapping, he had his first taste of living alone when his father left for five days to take pelts down to the auction in North Bay. Ami spent a full two days sprucing up the cabin, cleaning and sorting out the traps, tools and equipment in the tool shed. His father gave him a rare smile for the initiative shown, but there was a change in his manner and deportment, a resolution of some kind, a decision unspoken and a distance in his eyes.
He was sixteen when he awoke to find himself once more alone in the cabin. He had taken to calling his father by his first name, and called out,
“Jean, want me to cook the breakfast?”
Silence ... Ami lay on his back, hands folded across his chest like a corpse in a coffin, gazing at the ceiling beams. He knew this day had been coming. His father was gone.
Jean left a simple note underneath an old blue can that once contained Player’s Navy Cut Tobacco. It held $4750. The cash from under his bunk was the proceeds from the fur auction. In childlike script, the message read:
I have nothing more to give you.
Good luck,
Jean.
Ami could only stare and read it twice, aloud.
“Is that all he could say? ‘Good Luck, Jean!’”
Not, Dad?
Not, Your Father?
Not, Love Jean?
No explanation?
Just... good... fucking... luck?
“Well fuck you too!” he growled through a sneer.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jean Norval’s 18-foot open cedar strip with the 25 Johnson was gone from the dock. Ami knew where he would find it. It was fourteen miles to the tower and with the wind from the north it was a long hard paddle. With every stroke, his anger morphed into grief. From half a mile he could make out the cedar strip bobbing at the dock below the ranger cabin.
Jean had made his final tower climb to the crow’s nest at daybreak just in time to see the sun rise one last time over the eastern shore. The cupola was empty now and he slowly pivoted 360 degrees to take in the lake cutting through the deep green blanket of forest. Towering white pine swayed, their lonely wind-swept tops like sentinels over the canopy. He clambered awkwardly out the window, stood at attention and, crossing his hands over his chest as if to receive a blessing, stepped out into the sky to meet the rockslide four hundred feet below.
Beneath the tower Jeans’ shattered body lay one hundred yards north of the dock, sprawled on jagged rocks a few feet from shore, blood seeping into the lake. Face waxen and body aching, Ami lay down beside his father and wept for the last time. The body was cremated and later Ami returned to the waters under the tower to release the ashes.
Jack Mullens, owner of the local sawmill, took Ami on, not out of pity, but for lack of manpower. He overlooked the section of the application claiming Ami was eighteen. That was over thirty years ago and it had taken Ami that long to finally accept his father had at least partially spoken the truth. He had passed on what he could; the guiding and trapping skills, his love and lore of the bush, but he had never filled the need in a lonely child’s belly for the love and affection of a father for a son. He could not give what he did not have or understand.
To this
day Ami was still angered that Jean had left unsaid his realisation that the life he had come north for would soon be gone. The demise of the ranger service had made it clear to him, and Ami knew he should have seen it sooner. But why had his father abandoned him in this place? They could have found a new frontier; a last outpost, the territories, maybe Alaska. It mattered little now. He clutched the rum bottle and carried it up to the workshop. It was cluttered and difficult to traverse. The diesel generator occupied one corner, tools and implements were scattered everywhere; saws, axes, traps and associated gear, come-alongs, old motors and parts, paddles, oars, paint, oil, grease and everything else that made him self sufficient in that place.
The only bare surface was the workbench with the old cast iron vice bolted at one end. Above the workbench tacked to the wall was a map of the lake and surrounding territories. Carefully outlined in felt pen was the shoreline and land proposed as the new Indian Reserve under the aboriginal land settlement agreement. Also marked were lands of potential for mining, proposed parkland and territory designated for the renewal of ‘sustainable’ logging operations. Ami’s camp, his trap lines and the land he considered his hunting domain lay in the middle of the proposed Indian Reserve. It was land the natives claimed they were ‘taking back’ as rightfully theirs.
Maybe, but not now, he thought as he poured three fingers of rum into a dusty jar and drained half.
At the map, he bitterly whispered,
“Ain’t gonna happen... not on my watch.”
There was still opposition to the deal on many fronts. It was not yet a ‘fait accompli’ and he intended to put his finger on the scales of justice.
Climbing a rickety stepladder, he looked over the rafters and wrestled out the largest trap in the shed. Hell, it was probably the largest trap in these parts — an HBC #6 bear trap. Almost fifty pounds, it was forty-six inches long with a five- inch diameter trigger pan. Gaping jaws had a spread of seventeen inches with one and a half inch teeth, and its spring would compress at 500 pounds. Chained to a sturdy enough tree it would hold any bear on the planet until it bled or froze to death. It would snap a man’s leg like a chicken bone.
Disengaging the tempered spring, he gingerly opened and set the trap, careful to place a 4 by 6 length of wood between the jaws to ensure they didn’t snap shut and remove his hand. Humming an old Quebecois reel, he stroked a large iron file, methodically sharpening every individual tooth inside and out, gritting his teeth against the metallic rasping. Doing so he replayed the highlight reel on the screen of his mind.
The houseboat couple had been easy. He could hear the girl gurgling, “Anthony, Anthony, Anthony.” Remorseless, he had been prepared for a struggle, but their consumption of alcohol, drugs and the sex had conspired against them and they were easy targets for the stun gun. In the spring he had attended the Sportsman’s Show in Toronto, manning a booth for a local outfitter, booking hunters for the fall season. It was there he had made discrete enquires and eventually purchased the ‘Flashlight’ stun gun at a one hundred percent premium. Illegal in Canada, like anything else, they were readily available for the right price.
The fish trap was another story. As a boy, he found it in the water strung to the dock at the abandoned Bodge Lodge down near Baie Jean. It had idled in the back of the shed until resurrected for the watery burial. It was light and he had expected the bodies to bloat up and carry it to the surface with them after a few days. He was as surprised as everyone else when he learned it had been snagged the very next day. It was one in a million, but so was murder on Lake Temagami. Shit happened. Houseboat rentals would cool off for some time.
Jack Alexander, that son of a bitch, trust him to bring it up. Never friends, they were the same age and had known of each other since boyhood. Ami had always envied him his good looks, middle-class upbringing and the fact that he was afforded the luxury of spending summers at Keewaydin, paddling and trekking the bush with his chums. Resent him or not, Ami acknowledged he was a good paddler and in the Summer Water Carnivals at Bear Island, the two of them were always in the finals in the gunnel jumping competition.
Henry Wainright was predictable. There had been no need to scout him. Since his wife died, he had gotten religion and faithfully attended the eleven o’clock Sunday service in the town’s Catholic Church. Enroute he always passed between Widow’s Island and the west shore, making his way south from a chalet in the Northwest Arm. The shot was no more than one hundred yards, not easy, but he had felled many a running moose at that range. Paddling to the east side of the island in darkness, he had pulled the canoe up into the bush out of site and traversed the dense underbrush to a bluff overlooking Henry’s route. His only concern had been the sound of the shot. He used his prize possession, a Belgian made 30-06 semi-automatic Browning.
The magazine “The American Survivor” had provided detailed instructions on how to construct a noise suppressor from materials at any hardware or plumbing store. The basic principles were no different than those of a car muffler. Using PVC pipe and an oil filler as basic components, Ami cobbled together several silencers. After three test firings and some additional tinkering, the results were satisfactory.
Wainright appeared at ten after ten, passing close to the green marker on which Ami had sighted the Redfield scope. He exhaled slowly and squeezed off a solitary round. Henry turned his head toward the shore and the 200-grain projectile struck the back of his head, mushroomed, passed through the nasal cavity, taking the nose and cheekbones with it.
Wainright’s body slumped over the windshield and the boat veered violently ninety degrees west, directly at the shore. It was traveling at thirty-five miles per hour when it hit a rock two feet off shore and reared up like a bucking horse. Henry launched into the air, end over end, making one and a half revolutions before crashing into the cedars. Skewered, his lifeless body hung upside down, suspended over the ground, crimson blood pumping from his splintered skull. Ami didn’t have to see any more. He retrieved the spent casing and put it to his nose to smell the burnt powder, the smell of death. He slipped the shell in his pocket.
Wainright and his cronies in the Temagami Property Association had for years considered the lake to be their own preserve. Claiming to be the ‘voice of the lake’, they were a powerful lobby group sitting on every committee dealing with the land claim and damn near anything else that happened on the lake. In the ‘spirit of compromise’, they had helped broker the land deal with the natives, the municipality and the province. A sardonic grin came to Ami’s lips, knowing that the self-serving ‘voice of the lake’ would be mute for sometime.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rising at dusk, Jack slipped quietly out of bed and Duff trotted behind as he went for his sunrise swim. Fifteen minutes later, dripping, with a towel around his waist, he found Anna leaning back against the kitchen counter, two hands holding a coffee mug to her lips.
Had she watched him swimming naked?
“Jack, I feel sort of... ” she started.
“Don’t say anything,” he cut in. “Happy you’re here and I’m glad you crawled into bed last night. Consider it a ‘sleep-over’. Makes me realise what I’ve been missing. Why don’t you pour me a cup of coffee while I get dressed?”
When he returned, Anna was studying the lake map. She passed him coffee. “Where did they find Henry?”
He pointed to the shore of the Northwest Arm. “Somewhere in here.”
“How far away is that from where you found the couple?”
“Probably something like three miles from the entrance of the arm. Why?”
“Well, considering the size of the lake, that’s pretty close together don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, what’s the context? I haven’t really had time to think about it. They weren’t necessarily killed where Bob and I found them. Could’ve happened anywhere on the lake, but their other boats were seven miles farther north, so I figure it happened somewhere in the Northwest Arm.”
The phone interrupted and they both flinched.
“Take it Jack, I’ll go down and take the tarp off my boat.”
As she passed, she gave him a kiss on the cheek. Her breath was mint-fresh and he wondered if she had brought a toothbrush or borrowed his.
“Alexander?”
“Hello Gene, what can I do for you?”
“Yes, I know, can’t believe it, got a call from Bob last night. Nothing you could do. Where’d you find him?”
“Jesus... Yes, I know it, green marker across from Widow’s Island.”
“No, trust me, it's the same place. It's not marked on the map, it's just what we've taken to calling it.”
“What did Brautigan have to say? Christ, it must have been a mess.”
“No way, why would you want me to do that? What the hell do you think I'm gonna find that trained professionals aren't?”
He listened reluctantly but patiently as Eugene admitted that in the bush, Lavigne and Brautigan were fish out water.
“Agreed, but Will's not available.”
“Okay Gene, I'll do it for the last time but that's the fucking end of it. Look, by the way, you might as well know there's a meeting here tonight. The town's edgy and some folks want to get together and talk.”
“You do? How? Never mind. Dumb question.”