by John Wilson
GHOSTS OF JAMES BAY
GHOSTS OF JAMES BAY
John Wilson
Copyright © John Wilson, 2009
Originally published by Beach Holme Publishing in 2001.
Third printing
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Editor: Michael Carroll
Cover and interior design and production: Jen Hamilton
Cover art by Doug Sandland
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wilson, John (John Alexander), 1951–
Ghosts of James Bay / John Wilson.
ISBN 978-1-55002-827-0
1. Hudson, Henry, d. 1611—Juvenile fiction. I.Title.
PS8595.15834G56 2009 jC813’.54 C2009-900820-3
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For Sue and Allan
ONE
The surface of James Bay in Northern Ontario was cold and calm the morning I disappeared. As the canoe glided along, the glassy water hardly made a sound against its hull. The rocky, tree-lined shore was only a few hundred metres away, but I could barely see it through the shroud of mist rising around me. From a hidden lake over the trees, a solitary loon cried mournfully as it patrolled its territory. The dawn sun, which had lured me out onto the water, was now only a pale disk in the bank of thicker fog rolling toward me.
That fog should have been my warning. I knew the dangers. It was September, Labour Day weekend, and the weather could change quickly and dramatically. A wind could rise from nowhere, creating choppy waves that would swamp the canoe or force me onto the shore. Fog could roll in and make me lose all sense of direction. I might paddle aimlessly for hours as the cold ate at me and hypothermia drew me into its shivering clutches. As soon as I saw the fog, I should have turned back to the camp where my father would be waking up, building a fire, and cooking breakfast.
My name is Al Lister, and this was my dad’s and my last day in camp and my final chance to go out in the canoe. I love canoeing. When I’m out in the wilderness with Dad, I go off in the canoe at every opportunity. On some remote lake I can lose myself in the water, the air, and the coastline drifting by. Sometimes I feel this is what it must have been like hundreds of years ago. I can almost imagine a crew of voyageurs with a load of furs paddling in front of me, or a wildly painted Iroquois raiding party slipping through the trees at my back. Of course, now the voyageurs have powerboats and the Iroquois have all-terrain vehicles, but it’s nice to dream occasionally and the past offers lots of unthreatening possibilities. Then there’s my father.
My dad is strange. It isn’t that I don’t love him or that he doesn’t love me; it’s just that he’s sometimes a difficult person to live with. At times it’s as if he comes from a different planet. Dad is so intense that I sometimes need to get away on my own, and the canoe is ideal for that. And I’m not the only person who needs to escape from Dad occasionally. Mom found him so odd that she eventually had to move us both out last year.
That was tough, having two homes, but it wasn’t unusual among my buddies, and I probably ended up seeing more of both my parents when they started living apart. Maybe they both felt so guilty about the effect their split would have on me that they went overboard whenever it was their turn to see me. They were always taking me out to eat or renting a movie so we could have time together. It got so I couldn’t even look at a burger, and I could have written one of those fat books that give a star rating to every movie ever made.
Anyway, one of the weirdest things Dad ever did happened when he and Mom were still together. Mom had just invited a few friends around. They were talking after dinner, and Dad was silently dreaming.
We were in the loft of our A-frame house, which is where we ate when company came because the best views over the Ottawa Valley were from there. Beside us there was a railing and a five-metre drop to the living area. I was half listening to Mom and her friends discuss the latest movies and books when Dad got up, went over to the railing, and peered into the living room. No one paid much attention; we all knew Dad. The first thing I noticed was the conversation dying around me and people looking over at the railing. I turned just in time to see Dad step over the railing and begin climbing down the wall. He had the funny, almost apologetic half smile on his face that he wore when he was doing something even he realized was a little bizarre. We all moved to the railing to see what was going on.
Dad is a rock climber. On hikes or walks he’s always going off and scaling rock outcrops. For him it’s an intellectual exercise—can he think his way up the challenge presented by a cliff? Dad has taught me and I’ve become pretty good, but I don’t have his fanaticism, and I’ve never attempted a descent of the north face of our living room.
By the time we looked over, Dad was a third of the way down. He was holding on to the base of the railing and had his left foot on some moulding that ran across the wall. I could see his route. He had to get his right foot over and down onto the edge of the brick facing around the fireplace, then it would be easy. The only problem was that it was a long, awkward stretch. To do it he would have to reach first with his right hand and grasp the peg that protruded from the wall at shoulder level about a metre away. The peg had supported a large metal abstract sculpture, which had been taken down because Mom was planning on redecorating the room. It was the only possible handhold on the otherwise smooth wall.
Silently we watched as Dad reached out and grabbed the peg. At full stretch he tested it for strength. It seemed okay; the sculpture was a heavy one. Slowly Dad transferred his weight and stretched down for the foothold. At exactly the point where he had to commit the bulk of his weight to the peg and had no chance of recovering his hold on the railing, the peg came out of the wall. I guess he was heavier than the sculpture. In any case, for a fraction of a second Dad was in an impossible position, defying gravity. Then, with a slightly puzzled expression on his face, he peeled off the wall and fell to the floor.
Even up on the balcony we heard the crack as Dad’s arm snapped beneath him. He had tried to turn on the way down but had only half managed it. For a moment there was silence. Then one of the guests asked, “Are you okay?”
It was a dumb question really—we all knew a bone had broken somewhere—but someone had to ask it. It was only later that I thought it should have been Mom who asked it.
Dumb question or not, as Dad
rolled onto his good side, he replied with his longest sentence of the entire evening: “Yes, but I think I might have broken my arm.”
We took him to the hospital where they put a cast on his arm and sent us home. Mom wasn’t happy. “What on earth did you think you were doing?”
“Climbing down the wall,” he said. One of Dad’s annoying habits is answering a question literally. It used to drive Mom crazy.
“In the middle of a dinner party,” she said in a voice noticeably higher than before, “you decide, out of the blue, to climb down the living-room wall? This is not normal behaviour!”
Dad looked thoughtful for a moment. “I should have tested that peg more and not made assumptions. Assumptions can kill you. It was a good reach, though.”
Mom groaned in hopeless frustration. To her it had been an insane, stupid, dangerous thing to do, and she had been proved right. To Dad it had been an interesting technical problem that had popped into his mind, and the only way to solve it was to do it. He had miscalculated, but that didn’t negate the fact that the underlying exercise was worthwhile. This was the pattern with Mom and Dad for a long time before they split. Sometimes they seemed to inhabit completely different worlds, and I had to live in them both. Often it was difficult.
When I went out in the canoe that morning, I wanted to be on my own for a while and get a bit of peace and quiet before the return to the stresses of school and the city. The floatplane was due in after lunch to begin moving our supplies and Dad’s discoveries back to Matagami and the road south, and I had to help pack up the camp. An hour in the canoe would help me centre myself and make the transition smoother. I didn’t want to cut my last canoe trip short, so I ignored the fog. And I was glad I did. If I had turned around, life would have been simple, comfortable, and safe instead of confused, exhausting, and scary. But then I would never have met Jack and the others, or had the adventure of a lifetime.
The warrior crouched among the trees, watching. The canoe, the largest he had ever seen, sat in the bay. It was held fast by the ice, but lines of open water snaked across the view, indicating that breakup was close. The long sticks that grew from the canoe lay over at an angle. Soon, as the birds returned to the open water, the ice would melt enough for the strangers to put the white wings back on the sticks and the canoe would leave. The white wings were one of the marvels of these people that the warrior did not understand. They allowed the canoe to move through the water on the wind and meant that no one had to paddle such an unwieldy craft.
The strangers were white-skinned— kawaaposit. They had arrived before the last cold and dark and had stayed in camp here since then. They were not good hunters, had not chosen a good campsite, and now they did not look well. One of them had died. But they did have many marvels that the warrior wanted to trade for.
The kawaaposit camp was in the clearing, less than the height of a tall tree in front of the warrior. It was an odd place with a wooden hut built from square trees that the strangers had brought ashore from the canoe. It was much larger, but also much heavier, than the conical teepees of the warrior’s people. Obviously these creatures could not travel anywhere without their huge canoe to carry all their possessions.
Several figures, including the old hair-faced one whom the warrior assumed was the leader, were standing about in the open. This would be the obvious time to meet them, when they could see him approach and would not be startled, yet the warrior hesitated.
It was not that he was frightened; he was a Kenistenoag and afraid of nothing. These were his lands. His people had lived here since time immemorial when they had been placed in the world by the Great Spider. The warrior lived in complete harmony with all the land’s elements. True, life was difficult sometimes when the Manitou was offended and made the game go away or the cold hard or the snow deep, but that was the way the world was. The spirits were everywhere, in the animals, the trees, even in the very earth beneath the warrior’s feet. They were as real as the other people in his band, and how well or badly your life went depended on how you treated them. Permission must be asked of the spirits before a tree was cut or an animal killed and thanks must be given for the bounty they provided. If it was not done, then the spirits would be offended and make life hard for the people.
No, the warrior was not frightened. What made him hesitate was the decision made by his band. Some of the elders felt these strangers were not of this world. Certainly observation of them did suggest they were very odd and seemed to have little or no contact with the spirits. To the warrior this was peculiar, but he felt that if they were not of this world, then they could have no impact upon it and contact with them would not anger the spirits. Others thought, however, that the spirits did not want the people to make contact, and their arguments had won. The pale strangers could be watched, but there was to be no contact.
The warrior felt uncomfortable with the decision. He saw no threat and felt sure that, if he could trade for some of the strangers’ wonders, he could convince his people that trade with them would be to everyone’s benefit. He had to do it. Taking a deep breath and murmuring a prayer to the spirits, the warrior stood and stepped out into the pale spring sunlight.
The first man to spot the warrior standing near the trees dropped the wood he was carrying and ran in terror as if he had glimpsed a Windigo monster. His shouting alerted the others, and soon they formed a semicircle in the clearing, watching the warrior carefully. Two of the men held hatchets and one carried the long stick the warrior had heard make a loud noise and seen kill game. The warrior spread his arms wide to show he held no weapon. The hairy-faced leader stepped forward and copied the gesture. Then he spoke in the strange, halting tongue these people used. The warrior remained silent. He made the gesture for trade. Hairy Face spoke again. Obviously they did not use even the same gestures as the Kenistenoag. Crouching, the warrior picked up three pebbles, two small and one large. He moved the two small ones toward the stranger and the large one before himself. Then, slowly and deliberately, as if he were teaching a young child, he exchanged them.
Hairy Face turned and spoke with his companions. Three of them came forward and handed him knives. A fourth brought a leather sack from inside the hut. Turning back, Hairy Face placed one of the knives on the ground in front of him. He also took several items from the sack and added them to the pile.
The warrior stepped forward. The knife was good. The blade was long, the edge sharp, and the handle fitted comfortably into his fist. He could skin a caribou or fight equally easily with this weapon. He put it back on the ground and turned his attention to the other things. There were a number of small round disks with tiny holes punched through their centres. The warrior could not imagine what their use was, but they would be good ornaments for the women to decorate ceremonial clothing. The last item was round and had a short handle at the bottom. It was shiny and had patterns engraved on it. The warrior picked it up and examined it. The other side was startling. It was clear like water and, like a still pool on a sunny day, it reflected the sky, the trees, and the warrior’s face. Yet, unlike water, it was hard to the touch. These strangers must have magic to be able to capture water this way. What other wonders did they have in the leather bag?
The warrior picked up the items and placed them in his sack. By gestures he indicated he would return to this spot with trade goods after only one sleep. Hairy Face nodded. Then he began making eating gestures with his fingers. Was he asking the warrior to stay and eat with them? The warrior shook his head, turned, and strode into the trees. He had enough to think about already now that he had made contact.
TWO
Dad and I were up on the shores of James Bay digging for buried treasure. Not gold or jewels, but arrowheads, bones, and fragments of pottery. My dad is an archaeologist and spends most of his summers camped beside ancient villages in remote corners of Quebec and Ontario digging into piles of garbage. That’s what archaeologists mostly do—look through what people threw away hundreds of years ago. M
y feeling is that if it was garbage two thousand years ago, it’s still garbage now. After all, there’s a reason people throw stuff away. But Dad doesn’t think like that.
“It’s one of the few windows we have into the lives of people who lived before things were written down,” he often says. “At a campsite in Northern Quebec we can find copper from the Arctic, obsidian from Yellowstone Park, and shells from the New England coast. That’s evidence of a continent-wide trading network in place long before Europeans ever set foot here.”
Okay, I accept that, but it’s still a window onto a garbage tip.
The summer of my morning canoe trip was our second dig on this particular garbage tip, or midden, as Dad called it. I had been there with him the year before, but so had a lot of other people, mostly graduate students, and they got to do all the interesting work. I had been a general dogsbody, carting loads of dirt away and keeping the tools clean. The second summer was different. I was all there was, so I had to do everything, and I had enjoyed it. Just the thought that the next trowel full of dirt might reveal some vital clue was a thrill. Not that we had found much. In fact, my moment of glory had come the year before.
Our camp had been in the same place both years. It was on the shore of James Bay, with the tents in a semicircle facing the water. There was a work tent, a cook tent, sleeping tents, and a large tarpaulin strung between the trees under which we stored tools and equipment. In the centre was a large fire pit where we sometimes cooked or roasted marshmallows on sticks. The northern edge of the camp was marked by a huge rock—a glacial erratic Dad called it. It had been dropped there when the ice sheets melted thousands of years ago, and it was great for climbing. It was almost a cube, about five metres high, and there was only one side I hadn’t managed to climb. It was the side closest to the camp. It was nearly smooth and was dominated by a tricky overhang near the top. I had a lot of bruises from arguing with that overhang.