The Land God Gave to Cain

by Innes, Hammond;

  But she didn’t let him finish. “Do you think I will leave Albert to die here alone?” she cried, staring at him, white-faced and determined. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly—not now.” And then she added softly, “I love him, Ray. I love him and I shall always love him, and I shan’t leave him. So don’t ask me again—please.” She was past tears, past any show of emotion. She stated it flatly, and I saw that even Darcy accepted her decision as irrevocable. “You and Ian—you leave in the morning. Try to get through. I will keep the fire going as long as I can. If you have good luck, then per’aps you get a plane out to us in time.”

  Darcy shook his head slowly. “There’s ice forming on the lake already. In a few days it’ll be impossible for a floatplane to land here. And it’ll be too thin for a ski landing.”

  “Then per’aps you get the helicopter.”

  “Yeah, maybe the helicopter could make it, though there’s not much room.” He eyed the narrow beach doubtfully. And then he said, “We’re just going to bury your father, Paule. Maybe you’d like to be there.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then her hand went slowly up to the little gold chain at her neck. “No,” she said in a small, dry voice. “Bury him, please. And I will say a prayer for him here—with Albert.” There was a little crucifix attached to the chain and she pulled it out of her shirt and held it, tight-clutched, in her hand.

  Darcy hesitated. But when he saw she intended to stay there, he put more wood on the fire and then said to me, “Okay, let’s get it over with, and then we’ll have some food and decide what we’re going to do.” I followed him back to the place where we’d left Briffe’s body, and as he stood over it, staring down at the emaciated face, he said, “I guess you’re right. She knows.”

  He didn’t say anything more and we carried the body along the shore and laid it out beside Baird’s grave. Then we covered it with stones and the black silt from the beach. It was a slow business, for we’d no tools but our hands. And when we’d finished, Darcy got his axe and cut two branches and fixed them over the grave in the form of a cross. “May God be merciful to you and may you rest in peace.” He crossed himself, standing at the foot of the grave, and I murmured, “Amen.”

  “Well, that’s that, I guess,” he said, and turned abruptly away. “How much food you and Bert got?”

  “I don’t think we’ve any.”

  “Hmm. We got a little coffee, some chocolate and raisins, a few biscuits and some cheese. Hungry?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He nodded. “So’m I—Goddamned famished. But we sip a little coffee, and that’s all. The rest we leave for Paule. Agreed?”

  I nodded, though my mouth was running at the thought of food and there was a dull ache in my belly. “You’ve decided to leave them here then?”

  “What the hell else can I do?” he demanded angrily. “She won’t leave, I know that now. And another thing,” he added. “If we do manage to get out, we don’t tell anybody what we know. They were dead, just like Bert said. Okay?” He had stopped and was looking at me, waiting for my answer.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good.” He patted my arm. “It’s a hard thing for you to have to do, considering what it was that brought you out here. But I think you owe it to Bert. He risked a lot to keep that thing a secret—and he’ll be dead before we’ve any chance of getting him out.”

  When we got back to the fire, we found Paule lying beside Laroche, her head buried in her arms, sobbing convulsively. Darcy stood for a moment, looking down at her. “Poor kid!” he murmured. But he didn’t go to her. Instead, he got the empty kettle and started down to the lake to fill it. “Leave her,” he said as he passed me. “Just leave her, boy. She’ll be better for a good cry.” And to my astonishment I saw there were tears running down his cheeks.

  Whilst he was seeing to the coffee, I went down to where the remains of Briffe’s tent lay and searched about in the snow for the tools that must have been in that empty tool bag. There is no point in giving a list of the things I found there; there were his personal belongings, and Baird’s, too—clothes, instruments, some empty tins that had contained emergency rations, an alarm clock of all things. They had salvaged what they could from the plane. Lying there, scattered about in the snow, rusted and wet and gritty to the touch, it was a pitifully inadequate assortment with which to stand the siege of approaching winter in this bleak spot. I found the axe, too. It lay bedded in the ice at the water’s edge, its blade all pitted with rust, but whether he’d just dropped it there or whether he’d tried to fling it into the lake I didn’t know.

  The tools were scattered about under the snow near where we had found him, and as I retrieved them, I kept on finding nuggets. They were obviously nuggets he’d collected, for there was an empty flour bag that still contained a few and a tin mug full of them. The sight of them sickened me. I could picture him searching frenziedly along the lake edge, with Baird lying in a pool of blood and Laroche fled into the timber on the start of his long trek out, and I couldn’t help wondering how he’d felt when the gold lust had left him and sanity had returned. He’d thrown the little useless hoards away in disgust; that much was obvious, for they were strewn all about the camp site. But how had he felt? Had he thought at all about the future and what his daughter’s reaction would be, as he crouched over the set, hour after hour, trying to make contact with the outside world?

  I collected the tools and went slowly back with them to the fire. By then Darcy had made the coffee and we drank it black and scalding hot, and it put new life into us, so that even Paule seemed almost herself again, though she didn’t talk and her face still looked unnaturally pale. She ate what Darcy put before her, but automatically, as though the function of eating were something divorced from reality, so that I was surprised when she said, “Aren’t you hungry? You’re not eating.”

  Darcy shook his head, avoiding her eyes. “We got work to do,” he said awkwardly, and he gulped down the rest of his coffee and got to his feet, glancing at his watch. “There’s about two hours of daylight left. We’ll leave you with as much wood as we can cut in that time.” He picked up his axe and with a nod to me started up the rocks into the timber.

  I hesitated. I wanted to get to work on the generator. But I couldn’t help remembering that message from Briffe. No fire. Situation desperate. The radio probably wouldn’t work, anyway. Wood seemed more important, and I retrieved Laroche’s axe and followed Darcy up into the timber.

  It was desperately hard work. We were tired before we started—tired and hungry. Paule helped us for a time, dragging the branches down to the edge of the timber and tipping them over the rocks. But then Laroche cried out, and after that she stayed with him, refilling the oil can with hot water to keep him warm and trying to get him to swallow hot Bovril and brandy.

  He hadn’t regained consciousness. He was still in a coma, but delirious now, and every time I approached the fire I could hear him babbling.

  Sometimes he’d cry out, “Paule! Paule!” as though he were trying to make her listen. At those times he was back at the point where she’d struck at him with the knife. At other times he’d be talking to Briffe or wandering on an endless trek through Labrador. It was just an incoherent jumble of words, with now and then a name cried out—Paule’s or Briffe’s, my own once—and then as often as not he’d struggle in a feeble attempt to take the action dictated by the wanderings of his mind. And the horrible thing was that, though none of it made sense in a literal way, knowing what we did, it was impossible not to understand that his mind was trying to unburden itself of a secret too long bottled up.

  And Paule sat there with his head on her lap, stroking his brow and murmuring to him as she tried to soothe him, her face all the time set in a frozen mask of wretchedness and despair.

  The light went early, fading into a sleet storm that chilled us and covered everything with a fresh, powdery white dust. We went back to the fire then, and when I had recovered a little a
nd my body was no longer ice-cold with the sweat of exhaustion, I tried the generator again. But though the casing was hot to the touch, it was still damp inside. At any rate, cranking the handle produced no sign of life. By the light of the fire and to the intermittent babblings of Laroche’s delirium, I set to work to dismantle the thing.

  It took me more than an hour, for the nuts were all seized solid with rust. But in the end I got the casing off and with a handkerchief wiped the brushes clean. Fortunately the sleet had passed and after leaving it to toast beside the fire for a time and checking the leads and scratching at the terminals with the blade of a knife, I reassembled it. And then, with Darcy cranking the handle, I held the two points close together. When they were almost touching a small spark flickered into being. It wasn’t much of a spark, but it was there nevertheless, and when I held the two leads gripped in my hand, the shock was sufficient to make me jump.

  “Think it’s enough to work the set?” Darcy asked, after he’d held the leads whilst I cranked.

  “God knows,” I said. It wouldn’t be much of a signal. “Anyway, the set’s probably out of action by now.” It was over two weeks since Briffe had made that transmission.

  However, we coupled it up, re-rigged the aerial, and after cleaning the rust from the terminal, I slipped the headphones on, switched the set to receive and, with Darcy cranking, went slowly round the dial. But I could hear nothing, not even a crackle or the slightest murmur of any static. I checked carefully over the set, trying to remember everything that fool of an operator at Camp 263 had told me. But as far as I could see I’d done everything I should. But when we tried again there was still nothing.

  “It could be the jack of the earphones,” Darcy suggested. “Suppose we give it a clean.”

  But I shook my head. “We could clean the jack, but we’d never clean the socket. Once we disturb the phone-jack we’re done.” I switched over to send then. It was long past the time I’d agreed with Perkins, but there was no harm in trying. The transmission might work, even if the reception didn’t. “Crank her up again,” I said. And then I put the mouthpiece to my lips. “CQ-CQ-CQ,” I called, with the tuning dial set at the net frequency. “This is Ferguson calling from Lake of the Lion. Any 75-metre phone station. Come in, please. Come in Over.” I flicked the switch to receive. But there wasn’t a sound.

  I tried again and went on trying. And when Darcy was tired of cranking, he tried, whilst I operated the generator. But we got no response, and when we were both exhausted, we gave it up. “I told you the Godammed thing wouldn’t work,” Darcy said.

  “Okay,” I said wearily. “If you knew, why did you bother to go on cranking.” I was tired and angry.

  “You’d got the generator going. I thought you might get the set going, too.”

  “Well, I haven’t.” And because I thought this was probably our only hope, I added, “We’ll try again in the morning.”

  “There’ll be no time in the morning. We’re leaving at first light.”

  “You can leave if you want to,” I said. “I’m not going till after seven-thirty.”

  “That’ll lose us an hour and a half, and we can’t afford—”

  “I tell you I’m not leaving until seven-thirty,” I said obstinately. “I told Perkins seven to seven-thirty. He’ll be listening in for us then. Ledder, too, probably.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” he said angrily. “You know there isn’t a hope in hell of your raising them. The set’s out of action, and that’s all there is to it. Briffe only managed to make it work once.”

  “Briffe started with a set that was waterlogged. He had to crank the thing himself, and he was exhausted and his hand was injured. If he could get it to work, then so can we.”

  “I think Ian is right,” Paule said suddenly. “Per’aps my father only get the transmission side of it to work. But I think you should try, even if it means delaying your departure.”

  “That hour and a half could make all the difference,” Darcy growled. And then he was looking at me, and the firelight on his glasses gave his eyes a baleful look. “Try, if you must. I don’t know anything about radio, but I’d say the set was useless after being out in the weather all this time.”

  So it was agreed and we heaped more wood on the fire and went to sleep. And every few hours during the night one of us would get up and replenish the fire, so that the hours of sleep alternated between intense heat and intense cold, and all through that endless night I seemed to hear Laroche’s voice as in a nightmare.

  At last daylight crept back into the sombre cleft of the lake. The Lion Rock lifted its black profile from the mist that lay like a white smoke over the water, and I went stiffly back to the radio set, checking and rechecking it in the forlorn hope that, by the mere fact of fussing over it, the damned thing would work.

  We had our coffee and just before seven o’clock I squatted down in front of that malignant, rusted box, put the earphones on and switched the set to send. And as Darcy cranked I began my fruitless monologue: “CQ-CQ-CQ. Ferguson calling Perkins. Calling Ledder. Camp 134—Can you hear me? Goose Bay? Any 75-metre phone station. Come in, please. Anybody, come in. Over.” Sometimes I called “Mayday!” which I knew to be a distress call. Sometimes just Perkins, or Camp 134. But whenever I said “Over” and switched across to receive, there was absolute silence, Nothing. An infinity of nothing, so that I knew the thread was broken, the contact non-existent. And yet I kept on trying. And when Darcy was tired, I handed over to him and he tried with the same result. And at seven twenty-five, in desperation, I began describing our position—the river, the falls, the bearing and distance from the place where we’d crossed.

  And then it was seven-thirty and I put the mouthpiece back in its place. “Well, we tried anyway,” I said. Darcy nodded. He made no comment, but began quietly collecting his things together. Paule had disappeared into the timber. Laroche was asleep, no longer delirious. “What chance do you think we’ve got?” I said.

  “Of getting back?” Darcy asked.

  “Of getting back in time,” I said.

  He hesitated, staring down at Laroche. “We’re in God’s hands,” he muttered. “But he’ll be dead for sure.” And he turned to me and said abruptly, “You afraid of death?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He nodded. “No, I guess none of us knows that till we’re faced with it. I only faced it once before, like this. I was scared all right then. Maybe not this time. I’m getting old.” He reached down for his pack, which was barely half full. “All set?” And then he looked up as Paule came hurrying back to us. Her face had a white, frozen look of horror on it and her eyes were wide as though she’d seen a ghost. “What is it?” Darcy asked.

  “Up there by that outcrop.” She pointed a trembling hand towards a huddle of rocks that stood amongst the trees. And she sat down suddenly as though her knees had given way beneath her. “Where did you bury him?” she asked.

  “I told you, down there where we found Baird’s grave,” Darcy said.

  “Of course. It was silly of me, but I thought for a moment—” A shudder ran through her. And then she was staring at me with her eyes wide, and almost involuntarily, as though she had willed it, I started up over the rocks.

  I don’t think I was surprised at what I found under that rock outcrop. I think I had known the instant she looked at me that I was being sent to pay my respects to the mortal remains of my grandfather. He lay close under the largest of the rocks, in a sort of gulley—a skeleton, nothing more. No vestige of clothing remained; just a pile of bones, grey with age and weather. Only the cage of the ribs was still intact. The head lay beside it, quite detached from it, smiling a bare-boned, tooth-filled smile at the Labrador sky, and the bone of the forehead was all shattered and broken open as Laroche had said. I turned it over, and there at the base of the skull was the neat-drilled hole where the bullet had entered, and I thought of the pistol that hung in my father’s room. Had my grandmother found that pistol at one
of Pierre Laroche’s camp sites—was it the very pistol that had fired the bullet into this poor, bare skull? I stooped and stared in fascination, and then I heard Darcy behind me. “Funny thing,” he murmured, peering down at it over my shoulder, “I’d almost forgotten about that earlier expedition.”

  “I suppose it is my grandfather?” I said.

  “Well, it isn’t an Indian, that’s for sure. You only got to look at the shape of the skull. No,” he added, “it’s James Finlay Ferguson all right, and there’s not much doubt what happened.”

  “No.” I was thinking of the man we’d buried the previous day, and I looked at Darcy and then past him, down to the sombre lake and the black rock standing crouched in the middle of it. “No wonder the Indian was scared of the place.”

  He nodded. “It’s a bad place all right. And this isn’t going to make it any easier for Paule.”

  “Well, we can cover it up,” I said. “And she needn’t come up here.”

  “Sure. But how would you like to be left here alone with the body of the man you love dead by your own hand and those two graves by the shore there and this lying up here? Nothing but tragedy in this place. And she’s part Indian remember.”

  “Laroche may not die,” I murmured. But I wasn’t any happier about it than he was.

  “He may not die to-day or to-morrow. But he’ll be dead before we get out, and she’ll be alone then. There won’t be much incentive for her to go on living after that.” And then he said almost angrily, “Well, come on, we got to get going.”

  We covered the bones with handfuls of wet earth and then went back down to the fire. “We’re going now, Paule,” Darcy said.

  She was crouched over Laroche and she didn’t look up. “He’s conscious now,” she said gently. And when I went nearer, I saw that his eyes were open. A flicker of recognition showed in them as I came into his line of vision, and his throat moved convulsively, as though he were trying to say something, but no words came. “Don’t try to talk,” she whispered urgently. “You must save your strength.” And then she got suddenly to her feet and stood facing us. “You’ve—covered it up?”