Eastern Passage

by Farley Mowat

  Dear Squib:

  Come soon as you like. Stay long as you want. Plenty rum and venison with wild wild women so don’t bring nothing with you. Specially not the Clap! Ha ha ha ha!

  I set off in Lulu Belle, which seemed appropriate since she was of army ancestry and tough enough to be at home in a once-bustling mining and lumbering region even though, to quote Cliff, it was one that had been “pretty near mined out, lumbered off, and generally fucked up.”

  Cliff was not at his garage when I arrived but a mechanic, whom I recognized as a survivor of the regiment’s mortar platoon, obligingly called his boss’s home and got his wife on the phone.

  “Etta Mae says for you to stay put and they’ll come and git you afore you can say shit!”

  A few minutes later, a battered pickup screeched to a halt and out spilled Cliff and his pint-sized wife. He was waving a bottle of rum and she, an empty pint jar.

  “Fill’er up, you old son of a bitch!” roared Cliff as Etta Mae thrust the jar into my hands. “You got catchin’ up to do! They’s a bunch waitin’ for you up to the house right now … and they ain’t whistlin’ Dixie!”

  I tailed the pickup to a nondescript bungalow on the edge of the sprawling little town, then followed the Broads into their front parlour – which was ankle-deep in week-old chicks.

  “Watch your feet, goddamn it!” Cliff bellowed. “You step on one of them puffballs and Etta Mae’ll be up and down your back like a Tiger tank!”

  With this he shoved me into a kitchen full of squalling people (every one of whom seemed to have a glass or mug in hand) and into the arms of a squat, demonic-looking woman who held a glass in each of her hands.

  “Nelly B!” Cliff bawled in my ear. “Watch out for her! Got the kick of a high-octane mule!”

  And, he might have added, the tongue and disposition of an alley cat. Nelly B did not approve of my beard. With a penetrating scream she promptly categorized it as belonging to the “wrong end of a fucking porcupine! Back off! It makes my poor ass ache!”

  I was not prepared for a Bancroft party, which typically began in mid-morning and could continue for several days. Consequently I was much relieved when Cliff steered me out of the milling mob of people and chickens for an introductory tour of the town.

  Our first stop was Bancroft’s sole legal “liquor outlet.” It was owned by the Ontario government but managed by Bogey Alexander, who had been our regimental quartermaster in Italy. Bogey presented me with a 48-ounce bottle of Lemon Hart Demerara Rum and, when I tried to pay for it, barked almost savagely:

  “Bloody well not! Least the fucking government can do for a guy’s been fighting for King and Country the last few years is give him a good bottle of booze when he comes home! Here now, have another! Don’t want the one you got to feel lonely!”

  Cliff and I spent most of that afternoon drifting around town, frequently stopping to share Bogey’s largesse with passers-by. One of these was a police constable who had been a lance corporal in my platoon until part of a foot was blown off by a land mine during the invasion of Sicily. He joined us in the cab of the pickup and helped himself generously to the Lemon Hart.

  “Well, shit a brick, Mister Mowat. I figured you wasn’t worth the powder to blow you to hell when you was our platoon lieutenant … downy-faced kid as didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground! Like to get us all killed, only most of us made it through so I guess I can call you Squib now, eh? Anyhow, you’re no problem now. No sons-a-bitchin’ Jerries gunning for us now. Safe as farts in a sewer now.”

  Safe from German soldiers, but there were other dangers. By the time Cliff got us back to his house, I was so far out of it that Etta Mae made me rest on a cot in the cellar, with a hound bitch nursing a litter of pups under my bed.

  Dawn found me asleep in Lulu Belle, parked squarely in the middle of Bancroft’s main street.

  Although the hour was early, traffic was already heavy; mostly overladen logging trucks whose drivers were not amused to find us blocking the right-of-way. Some steered their behemoths so close to the jeep they set it rocking like a canoe in a tide rip. After a couple of such close encounters, I abandoned Lulu Belle for the relative safety of the Broads’ bungalow, where I found Cliff and Etta Mae breakfasting on rum and coffee, oblivious to the welter of chicks, dogs, and party debris surrounding them.

  I feared there would be repercussions from my road-blocking escapade but Cliff poured me an eye-opener and reassured me.

  “Don’t fret none, Squib. I’m Bancroft’s police commissioner, and you are a guest of this goddamn town. The boys will bring your jeep back to you good as new.”

  Nevertheless, he may have concluded this would be a good time to exchange the urban for a rural milieu and to introduce me to the world of his forefathers – principal amongst whom was Harv Gunter.

  “Harv was my granddaddy on my mother’s side. No more’n five foot six, he was the biggest man ever lived hereabouts. His left eye -’my leetle eye,’ he called it – was a good bit smaller than the other, which give him a look would make you think twice about crossing him. Could lick his weight in wildcats but never had to do much scrapping. All he had to do was squint at a fellow and maybe open and close his two fists, as was as big as hams off a bull moose.

  “Although Harv wasn’t a fellow to throw his weight around, he was as good as king of Wes’makoon, which is what we call most of north Hastings. The Indians as lived here before hell boiled over and the palefaces arrived called it something in their own lingo that sounded like West-al-macaroon, after a big lake in the middle of it. But their name got whittled down, same as the timber as used to cover the country like hair on a bobcat got shaved off.

  “Harv’s granddaddy, Ananias Gunter [Gunther], was a soldier of fortune with a Hessian regiment as helped chase the Yankees south when they invaded Canada round about 1812. After that little ruckus was over, Ananias and some of his buddies figured not to go home to the Old Country in Germany where dukes and earls and suchlike owned pretty much everything, so the British discharged them here and they started making a living.

  “Ananias joined a logging crew working the Ottawa River. Pretty soon he tied up with a spry young Algonquin squaw who took her paleface up the Madawaska to Wes’makoon Lake, where her people lived.

  “Ananias liked the gal, the country, and the folk so much he settled himself down right there. And passed the word to some of his old chums to come and join him. Which some of them did. One was an ex-Limey grenadier named Broad, and he was no slouch at starting a family hisself.…

  “But what the hell! You don’t want to listen to me blowing off about Wes’makoon when you can look it over for yourself. Throw what you need into the back of my truck and we’ll be on our way.”

  We drove south out of Bancroft for half an hour before turning eastward along a dirt road into the hinterland. At first sight, Harv Gunter’s world seemed unprepossessing: lumbered off, burned over, and scarred by mining forays. However, life had not abandoned it. Larch, birch, poplar, and spruce saplings were hard at work masking the destruction and healing the wounds. Innumerable clear little streams, which we gingerly crossed on shaky wooden bridges, were full of trout. The streams invited us to stop and test the palatability of their water mixed with white lightning (moonshine) from a screw-top can labelled Emergency, an integral piece of equipment aboard Cliff’s truck because, as he put it, “you never knows when the devil might come calling.”

  We saw no other people until we reached Gilmour, once a settlement of lumberjacks, now reduced to little more than a dusty crossroads and a weathered general store owned by Lorne McAllister, an ex-Hasty P who had taken a bullet in the belly during the battle to liberate Rome.

  Lorne pronounced our emergency rations to be “near as fucking wicked as I-tie vino,” before sending us on our way with a warning to watch out for a black bear he had raised from a cub but that had now gone off on its own and was making its living catching trout from bridges and culverts along the road. />
  “Crazy bugger thinks he owns them places! Lays with his arse humped up right in the middle of the road, lookin’ down into the water ready to take a swipe at any trout swims close.

  “Best you wait ’til he sees fit to let you by. Been known to take a swipe at a car if you interrupt his fishing. Name is Bert … in case you want to try talkin’ your way past.”

  Beyond Gilmour we were in moraine country where the last great glaciation had deposited a network of sandy eskers and gravel drumlins on the unyielding granite. This had provided hospitable ground for trees, moose, deer, beaver, eagles, and suchlike but the soil was too poor for cultivated crops. Nevertheless, we passed the occasional clearing. Cliff identified these as having once been “farms.”

  As the hot afternoon drew on, we came to an area of ancient bog surrounded by a few hundred acres of something resembling arable soil. Fields had been laboriously carved into its surface and their outlines were still preserved by remnants of snake-rail fences. Nearby was what had once been a village of log and frame houses. The doors and windows of most gaped wide and I saw no living beings, not even a dog, on the deeply rutted street.

  “This here’s what’s left of Gunter,” Cliff explained. “Where them as favoured farming tried their hands. Harv weren’t one of them!”

  He gestured contemptuously out the truck window.

  “Real Gunters, and the Broads and their like, was woodsmen – not plough jockeys! Lived offen the land the way God made her. Did a bit of lumbering, log-driving, and furring enough to get what little cash they needed. And they lived the hell of a lot better, and longer, than them poor damn groundhogs in Gunter trying to raise cattle beasts and garden truck.”

  The road ended a few miles farther on at a small clearing on the southern end of what the map calls Westlemkoon Lake. Cliff drove right to the shore, where a heavy-bodied skiff was moored to a rickety pole wharf. Turning off the truck’s engine, he reached behind him and pulled out a virginal bottle of Demerara rum which he uncorked with his teeth before handing it to me.

  “We’re nearly home, me lad. This here’s the Queen Mary, oldest boat on the lake and queen of them all. She’ll take us the rest of the way. Have a swig.”

  The lake’s southern arm did not seem particularly remarkable to me. Surrounded by low-lying land, the water was shoal, boggy, and full of small brush-covered islands appearing to be nearly awash.

  “Not your tourist country, thanks be!” Cliff commented as he gassed up Queen Mary’s pre-war outboard. “Moose country, and deer and bear. If it’s pretty scenery you wants, you got to go to the north end. But if it’s a full belly, peace of mind, and company as feels the way you do, this here’s as good as pushing through the Pearly Gates!”

  I was curious about our hulking, flat-bottomed, square-ended scow. Cliff explained that she had been built by his father, Will, at the time Queen Mary was newly come to the throne.

  “Will was a dab hand with wood. Give him an axe, a swede saw, and a bowie knife and he could-a built a yacht fit for a queen. He built this one for Harv as he wanted a boat strong enough to haul a moose. Will made him one strong enough to handle an elephant -’cause you never could tell what Harv would bring home.”

  The noisy, smelly, single-cylinder Evinrude churned us northward along a western shore presenting an unbroken green palisade of remarkably large trees, some of which may have predated the tree-killing scourge that devastated the New World after the white man’s coming. We ran for an hour then Cliff put the helm hard over and we headed toward the forest wall. Less than a hundred feet from it, a water-gate seemed to open before us as the forest briefly swallowed the Queen, then spat her out again into a hidden reach stretching far to the westward.

  The sun was gone by now, leaving a flamboyant sky flaming over the inky waters of West Reach. The Queen lumbered on until we were abeam of the perfect cove – a sensuous curve of stippled sandy beach backed by a natural meadow with mixed woodland beyond, the whole protectively shielded by a curving ridge topped by tall white pines.

  Cliff cut the engine and, as we drifted shoreward in the silence of the evening, murmured, “This here’s what we call Ananias. It’s where that young squaw brought her soldier to meet the folks. It’s where he settled down and never after strayed no further than his legs or a canoe could carry him. That big old house up there” – he pointed – “that’s where Harv was born.”

  Harv Gunter’s birthplace was a massive, single-storey log structure perched high enough up under the shoulder of a protecting ridge to have a commanding view of the long reach below it. Built of ten-inch square logs fitted so closely they hardly needed caulking, it was fronted by an elevated porch from which a watcher could keep tabs on any sizeable moving thing for miles around.

  “One time this was an Algonquin village,” Cliff explained. “Back of that meadow is where they buried their people, no matter how far away they had to bring them. Ananias is likely there, though there’s no marker to say as much.”

  “Is Harv Gunter buried there too?”

  Cliff snorted. “Well now, them goody two-shoes in town will tell you he’s under the sod in the churchyard. Some of us thinks different. If there’s a coffin with his name onto it in the churchyard I doubt he’s in it. But let’s get us on up to his house.”

  The split-log front door had no lock nor was it fitted with an inside drawbar. Anyone could enter as readily as we did simply by lifting a latch made from deer antler.

  The spacious living room was strewn with faded, handmade woollen mats and furnished with tables, chairs, and a pair of couches ingeniously constructed of cedar billets. A stone fireplace designed to consume four-foot logs dominated the western wall. Above it hung a battered brass bugle. An ancient seven-day clock ticked noisily from the centre of the mantle. I wondered who kept it wound.

  “Nobody as I knows of” was Cliff’s short response to my query.

  I was surprised there were no trophies of the hunt on the log walls.

  “Harv wouldn’t abide such,” Cliff explained. “Claimed nailing up skins and head bones of wild creatures for decoration wasn’t no better than nailing up the skins or skeletons of people.”

  He paused to fill a mug with rum before adding, “Come out onto the deck. Something I got to do.”

  A gleaming quarter moon was rising as he led the way outside, mug in one hand and the old bugle from above the fireplace in the other. Then, standing silhouetted against the pale sliver of moon, he tossed the drink of rum as far into the darkness as he could, paused a moment, then raised the bugle to his lips and blew a long and vibrant blast across the black waters of the reach.

  Echoes blared back and forth around us, seeming to imbue the now almost invisible world with an unearthly sentience. Cliff lowered the bugle and turned toward me.

  “Payin’ compliments, as the navy fellows say. This here’s Harv’s place, and this here old army bugle belonged to Ananias. Least we can do is pay our compliments to the both of them.”

  My curiosity about the man who had last lived in this house had been mounting all day. I questioned Cliff about him now, but Cliff had become taciturn – or was somewhere else perhaps – and answered shortly or not at all. I did learn that Harv had been born in 1870 or 1871 and that his mother, who was part or largely Algonquian, had died when he was young.

  By 1890 or thereabouts, he had become a skilled “river dancer” on the Madawaska and Ottawa rivers, floating timber to the mills downstream. He had enlisted at the outbreak of the First Great War and was soon sent overseas where he seems to have been a trial to both sides, so successful at killing Germans that he was promoted several times, only to be demoted again because of his disdain for authority. According to Cliff, Harv had been recommended for medals but had never accepted one because he held that “killing a man or a beast amounts to about the same thing. Times, it has to be done, but it ain’t ever nothin’ to brag about.”

  By 1920 he was back in his own country, married and determined never t
o leave again.

  The night grew chilly, but the heat from the birch billets we thrust into the cast-iron cookstove took care of that. A golden glow from the tall glass chimneys of several oil lamps contributed its own warmth as Cliff busied himself frying venison fillets and I pan-baked a bannock, as I had learned to do in the far north.

  I slept in perfect peace that night.

  Next morning, after a swim and a breakfast of cornmeal porridge with canned milk and brown sugar, Cliff took me out on the lake. The Queen bore us sedately northward across broad openings, between rocky islands, and past deeply indented bays through a land whose ravaged forests were labouring in rebirth. Cliff kept the old girl throttled down, explaining, “If I opens her up she don’t go any faster – just pushes half the lake ahead of her and tows the other half behind. Slow and steady is her bestest way.”

  It was the proper way. We disturbed nobody and no thing. Ospreys fishing for their breakfasts hovered near at hand. A pair of ravens laboured out from shore to gawk and mumble derisively. Loons surfaced alongside like tiny submarines emerging from the deeps, and their haunting halloos pierced the blather made by the old Evinrude like knives thrust through butter.

  Air and water were alive but we encountered no other people until Cliff steered the Queen into a labyrinth of serpentine channels and we sighted a low structure snugged into a tiny cove. It was so unobtrusive that at first I mistook it for a beaver house, but it assumed human proportions as we approached. An elderly man sporting a dishevelled shock of white hair stepped out of it, peered at us, then imperiously gestured for us to come ashore.

  We did so to be warmly greeted by eighty-seven-year-old Lawrence Gunter, Harv Gunter’s first cousin. Long a widower, Lawrence lived alone, though he currently was enjoying a visit from his middle-aged daughter, Clary, lithesome, good looking, and hospitable and who had only just paddled back from hauling an illegal gill net set behind the island. She insisted we share a feed of “jumping fresh” lake trout.