by Kirk Landers
This would be a lonely place to die, your last view of the planet limited to the grass and scrub scratching your face as you lay on the ground, a grim sky overhead, damp air pushing the spindly stalks in rustling waves.
Would the wolves find him first, or would it be other scavengers? He had often thought he’d like to leave his body to Quetico’s wolves when his time came. He had heard them many times in his travels in the park, but like many trippers, he’d never seen one in the wild. He had always identified with them somehow. They lived alone when times were good. They dealt with the solitude, fended for themselves. Then they packed up when times were tough. They worked together to take down game too large for them to handle by themselves. They functioned as a team, these solitary creatures, until the seasons let them function alone.
It would be an honor to be consumed by wolves, Pender thought. So much better than rotting away in a box.
* * *
Annette woke to a clear sky and the knowledge that, if the weather held, she had an easy day ahead of her. Not even twenty kilometers to the island, less than twelve miles. A full spectrum of Quetico paddling: big water, a gentle creek, small lakes, short portages, beautiful scenery. An easy day to make good time and enjoy the most beautiful place on earth.
She spent twenty minutes casting a lure into the narrows as dawn broke. She didn’t catch anything, but that was okay with her. She treated herself to another hot breakfast. There was such a thing as too much fish.
She cooked pancakes and shared them with Chaos, knowing he’d burn off the calories easily on this day of many short portages and settling in a base camp with lots of room for running and exploration.
After washing her dishes, she paused for a luxurious moment to sit on the rocks overlooking the water and the island across the narrows. Chaos came to sit beside her, thrusting his head under her arm, making her pet him. She wondered what Pender would think of the dog. He might not like dogs. He might be allergic to them.
She wondered if he would show up. She thought he would. As a young man, he had taken his promises seriously. She wondered again what he would think when he saw her. Would he see the schoolgirl? The wrinkled granny? The loneliness? The lost dreams? Would he pity her? Think of the sexy young women back in Chicago?
Her eyes moistened. How silly to be so gloomy, she thought. It’s lunch with an old friend, not the continuation of a love affair. It will be good to talk to him, to hear his story. What it was like to be a big name in the restaurant business. To live in a million-dollar North Shore estate. To drive exotic cars, hobnob with women in designer clothes, talk to famous chefs.
As her mind wandered, a canoe came into view, coming from the south. When the paddler stopped below her perch, Annette could see he was a park ranger.
“Hello,” he called from below. He was a younger man, not more than thirty, nice looking, with that unassuming air that many men in rural Ontario had.
Annette returned his greeting and waved.
“Have you seen a solo canoeist in the last day or two?” the ranger asked. “Wenonah in Kevlar yellow? Middle-aged white male, maybe older?”
“No,” said Annette. In the back of her mind she wondered what Pender was paddling. Good God! Could he be in trouble with the law?
“Do I need to be concerned?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” said the ranger. “Apparently he harassed some fishermen in the Boundary Waters, then ducked into Quetico. We’re just doing a courtesy check, but I don’t think there’s much chance we’ll see him.”
“What should I do if I see such a person?” Annette asked with a quizzical smile. What indeed?
The ranger shrugged. “I don’t know, really. Probably just avoid him.” He tipped his hat, wished Annette well, then continued north on the big lake. Annette wondered if he would encounter Pender. Pender would probably be paddling on this lake today. He could even be camped on the island across the way, but on the opposite side from her. Or he could be a few kilometers to the north or south. She wondered if he was the culprit they were after. It seemed possible. He’d taken revenge on the canoe racers who dumped him and smacked his boss hard enough to make him cry. He wasn’t someone who rolled with the punches, at least not right now.
She wondered what it would have taken for Pender to harass a couple of fishermen. Christy would wonder if he had turned into a homicidal maniac who attacked people like pit bulls attack dogs, just for the sport of it. But she knew he wasn’t. He wrote with the sensitivity of the young Pender she had known in college, and, while that Pender could drive anyone into a blind snit with his obstinacy, he was a poet and a lover at heart.
She wondered if he’d get apprehended and hauled out by the rangers before he got to their rendezvous. It would be heartbreaking, but somehow she didn’t think it would happen. For all his anger and vulnerability, he had an aura about him. Always had. He always landed on his feet.
She smiled to herself as she began breaking camp. What chance did a Quetico ranger have of nabbing Pender? And even if he did, the ranger would probably like him and forget about the whole thing. This was Canada, after all.
15
Annette luxuriated in another day of calm breezes, this one with partly sunny skies to lift the spirits. She deftly navigated island-studded archipelagos and vast open spaces of water, watched hawks and eagles float on currents high above as they hunted for fish, searched the shallows hoping to glimpse a moose. She reached the southern end of the big lake by noon, entering a bizarre Canadian Shield playground of dozens of islands and dozens more reefs and shoals fanning out around a huge peninsula whose rugged shoreline included countless bays and inlets and points.
She navigated west into a narrowing channel that would eventually become a creek. She stopped at an island to take lunch and give Chaos a chance to run off steam. He charged around the small island for several minutes and then plunged into the water to chase seagulls perched on a rocky outcropping fifty feet away. He sent them squawking into the air and celebrated by plunging back into the water to return to the island. After twenty minutes of madcap running and swimming, he lay beside Annette and panted while she ate.
Annette was deep in thought. She was looking at what seemed like a small lake, a kilometer long, a kilometer wide, but she knew it was a Canadian Shield illusion. When she paddled west, the seeming continuous shore on her right would open to a bay. When she entered the bay, she would see a narrow opening to the west. When she paddled through that opening, she would enter a short channel that led to what seemed like another small lake. That lake would seem to end in a reedy bog, but she would paddle through it to find a tiny, narrow creek that she would follow through a succession of small lakes until she finally portaged into her lake.
The impossibility of navigating this place without a map had always made her wonder how the first people here did it. The First Nation people would have had only crude mapmaking skills and equally crude canoes as they tried to find their way through this archipelago and the many others in Quetico, archipelagos that were deliriously confusing even with a map and compass. How long before they knew this was a creek? What caused someone to figure it out? Why would a hunter or trapper come into this system instead of using the river to the south?
She and Chaos negotiated the creek system without incident. It was still early afternoon when they reached a small lake. Its main body extended west-southwest, ending in a low, narrow inlet that led to a popular portage trail that connected trippers to a chain of lakes that offered beautiful journeys for the fit and adventurous.
But Annette followed the north shore of the small lake into its lesser bay and then to a short, obscure portage that led into her favorite lake, her special place. As she approached the portage take-out, she saw a canoe and a pack on the shore. For a moment, her heart skipped a beat. Could it be Pender? She had a flashing vision of them passing on the portage trail, recognizing each other. Him saying, “Are you . . .?” A smile playing softly on his face as recogni
tion set in. Him pulling off his pack, embracing her in a tender hug, forty years later.
Two men emerged into the portage area, stopping her dream. One waved while the other shrugged on the pack and picked up paddles and disappeared down the portage trail. The waver easily lifted the canoe onto his shoulders and followed.
They were trippers, probably moving on through her lake on their way north. Few people ever stopped on her lake. In fact, few people even passed through it. That was part of what made it so special. That and its walled shoreline, rising steeply in great smears of green forest and earth-hued cliffs from blue water so crystal clear you could see a pike in twenty-foot depths. It also had intimacy. Even though it was a fairly large lake, it was fractured into small parts and dotted with islands, so every place you went, it felt like a small, hidden lake, and every moment seemed coddled and personal.
The trippers were out of sight by the time Annette finished the short portage. She boarded Chaos and floated slowly along a narrow channel through a canyon of granite and jack pines.
At the end of the channel, she paused for a deep breath and took in the sights. She was in a small body of water, maybe a kilometer square, that hid passages to four other bodies of water of equal or larger size. It was her Eden—a place of fused colors and soft light, pure water, and rarified air. Just sitting here was rejuvenating, taking in the air and the colors, sipping water dipped from the lake. It had been that way from the very first time she happened into this lake, on a somber late-September outing into an empty park. It was a time of chill air and changing leaves and a deep quiet as migratory birds began heading south. She had been a young woman in a marital netherworld then. Two young children, a struggling business, a husband almost permanently gone, not interested in northwest Ontario, not interested in the wilderness, only mildly interested in his children and not at all in her.
She knew the marriage was over but didn’t know what to do about it. Her mother drove fourteen hours to come talk to her and stayed for more than a week so Annette could paddle into the wilderness to clear her head.
Much of what she saw on that trip and all that she thought was filtered through a veil of sorrow. She was mourning her children’s loss of a father and her loss of a husband and especially the end of their innocence—a magical time so intense and deep, when they had been so committed to each other, when they would have sacrificed anything for each other, when no matter what they had, it was enough because they were together.
She cried because she knew that kind of love could never happen to her again. She was in a new stage of life. She needed to prepare her daughters for life and somehow preserve their ability to love like that someday, if only for a short time. For she knew now, knew for certain, that love like that doesn’t last. It can’t. It fades or morphs into something else—a different love, and a new one if you’re lucky.
And if you’re not lucky, it just dies and you have to start over again.
Annette had spent a day in the cold rain and a night below freezing just before she paddled into her lake the first time. She had been out for several days, making up her trip as she went along, trying to decide whether or not to move back to the U.S., live with her parents until she got a job. Get the kids into a good school, prepare them for great careers, success, maybe wealth. Atikokan seemed so barren for them, a tiny, hardscrabble town with endless winters, a high school located nearly a hundred miles from the next-closest school.
But something in her gut was holding her back, and she didn’t know what it was until she paddled through that very same canyon a quarter century ago. The day had started cloudy and cold, but as she paddled through the canyon, sunlight seeped through cracks and crevices in the diminishing cloud cover, and when she sat at this very spot in the first bay, the sun poured out of the sky, touching the rocks and the trees and the pristine water with the kind of luminescence ancient painters used for religious art.
And for Annette, it was a religious experience. It was the moment she discovered what she believed in. She believed in this place, its beauty and grandeur, its innocence and solitude. She believed in Canada. She believed this place and her children were the things in life that touched her soul and that her children and this place belonged together.
She camped in an established campsite that first time, but while exploring the lake, she stopped at an island that seemed almost impervious to canoeists, with vertical rock-wall shores rising from the water like the walls of a citadel. The single dent in this natural fortress was a narrow beach of sorts, strewn with boulders and rocks and ending with a sheer rock cliff. The cliff had calved many times over the millennia, each event producing hundreds of boulders, large and small, that the ices and winds and rains and floods of thousands of years had pushed and pummeled all over the lake. What was left was a grotto guarded by a treacherous shoal of boulders extending fifty feet out from the shore.
For no particular reason, Annette decided to lunch there. She eased her canoe through the boulder garden but could only get within ten feet of shore. She secured her boat, then boulder hopped to shore. She picked her way through the rubble to the base of the cliff and saw red-leafed scrub trees in one corner of the grotto and wondered how on earth enough soil could have accumulated there to support leafy growth.
When she was close enough to touch the leaves, she saw another one of Quetico’s miracles. The soil that sustained the scrub trickled down from the heights above, curling around the towering rock facade like a spiral staircase.
Annette ascended the hidden trail to a forested plateau high above the lake, found a stand of old-growth red pines on the southwest shore. There were several places to pitch a tent, and the bluff overlooking the lake was solid rock, perfect for a fire ring. She moved in that afternoon, carefully jumping from boulder to boulder with her packs and canoe.
It was a magnificent perch from which to experience Quetico, like an eagle’s nest, looking down on blue waters and vast forests as far as the eye could see. It was hidden and private. It was secret and personal. She sat on a rock wall fifty feet above the lake that afternoon and let the majesty of the Canadian Shield infuse her body and spirit. She thought this must be what musical people feel in a concert hall when the sounds of Mozart fill the air and overwhelm the soul. She lost all sense of herself that afternoon. There was only the forest and the water and the bogs and hills, the pine-scented breezes, the call of the eagle, the rocks, the vast sky, and the colors. The great silence—she was part of it, and it was her. That was the very time and place where Annette understood that this was not a place she could leave. Quetico was part of her soul. Her children would be educated in the ways of the world, but they would also know about natural things, they would know the wilderness, and they would learn about self-reliance. They could pick up atom splitting and brain surgery somewhere else along the way.
Annette stayed in Atikokan, of course, and got to the lake every year or two after that, always making small improvements in her private campsite. She kept the fire pit out of sight and placed her tent well back in the woods so it wasn’t visible from the lake. She found a better approach to the shore through the boulder garden, one not requiring her to boulder hop with gear.
She never found a single trace of another human being on the island, not even a charred rock. The only other people in the world who knew where it was were her daughters—and now Pender.
As she approached the island, her heart beat harder. She wondered if he was there already, his gear up on the bluff, his tent set up, maybe a pot of water boiling. But when she made shore, there was no trace of him, no footprints, no canoe left on the rocks, no gear in sight. She tried not to be disappointed. It was still early in the day, and who knew where Pender was coming from? But it would have been nice to be greeted by a warm smile from long ago.
* * *
Pender’s spirits were buoyed by the clear morning sky and its promise of fair weather, even though his body ached after a long night sleeping on a lumpy ground in co
ol, damp air. As he grunted and groaned through his morning ministrations, Pender decided that his injury was a ruptured disc, not something dire. He laughed silently at himself: the diagnosis of a great restaurant editor. How could it be wrong? At least his sense of humor was coming back.
He boiled water for coffee as he tore down his tent and packed his gear. He had his coffee and granola as the eastern sky lit up, and was underway minutes later, with miles to go before he would sleep.
As his body warmed and his muscles loosened, he upped his cadence and lengthened his stroke. He would never make it to the island today. It was forty or fifty kilometers away—twenty-five to thirty miles—with fifteen or twenty portages and God knew how many beaver houses and blowdowns to surmount in the creek system he was on. He hoped his body would last for twelve hours of hard paddling and crossing mostly flat, short portages. That would get him to the island by noon tomorrow.
Surely she’d give him a half-day benefit of the doubt. He tried to think of reasons she wouldn’t. Maybe she had to get back for business reasons. Or maybe it would just anger her, him being late, being a warmonger Yankee capitalist and late to boot. But she didn’t seem hostile in their e-mails. In fact, she sounded mellow.
As he paddled and portaged, Pender thought about her e-mails—about how she described her kids, especially the daughter living with her now, and her grandchild. And how easily she wrote about being abandoned by her husband. Pender shook his head as he pulled on the paddle. What a mind fuck. You give up your country to start a new life with this pseudo-idealistic windbag, and he’s gone after one winter. And he’s the first one to go back to the U.S. when amnesty comes, leaving you behind for better money and a younger piece of ass.