Chapter 19
We listened in dead silence for a moment, during which some damned bird started yelling at us and a noisy oak started shaking its leaves in the wind and I wanted to rip the oak out by its roots and beat the bird over the head. But eventually we all heard some words,
“You think it’s Ned and Patrick?” Bob looked around trying to figure out which direction the voices had come from.
“Could be. Sounds like a couple of guys, anyway. It might be hunters, but most of the hunters I know won’t come this far up the hill. There’s not much game on top of it.”
Bob strode over to his tent, and came out with a sheet of camouflage cloth. “I’ll be over there” - he pointed at a jumble of fallen trees and weeds - “toffed up like a bush.” I thought he should take off into the woods, but I could see his logic. Running in the autumn is a noisy business, and he might run right into whoever was coming.
I reached into my pack and handed him the cell phone. He nodded and dialed somebody, then left, talking quietly into the phone. I watched as he settled into the background, and drew the cloth over him. It seemed perfectly obvious to me that he was there under cover, but I knew what camouflage could do if you weren’t looking for it.
A few years ago Aisha and I’d been driving along a road in Colorado. I’d just been watching the fields go by in a high valley outside Aspen. As the car passed a gravel side road, a small movement caught my eye. Abruptly, I saw a soldier, sitting beside the road, not fifty feet from my car, lighting a cigarette. No sooner had he come into focus than so did a whole lot of soldiers, obviously resting after an exercise of some sort.
I mentioned it to Aisha, but she’d never noticed the soldiers, although they had been on her side of the car and hadn’t been trying to hide, just wearing camouflage.
Nonetheless, Bob looked like a lump under camouflage cloth, about as hidden as a submarine on a baseball field.
In a couple of minutes we could hear that the voices were coming over the hill from the south. My old route from McFriggit, I thought, but up the hill.
Patrick Ireland came into sight first, carrying a large pack on his back, a hiking stick in one arm, and a shotgun slung over his shoulder. From the way he walked, the pack was heavy. He still looked like Jesus, except for the shotgun. Ned came into sight from behind a spruce a few seconds later.
I didn’t like the way they didn’t seem surprised to see us there.
“Hi,” Patrick grunted, slinging his pack against a tree. He set the hiking stick against the same tree, and tried to sit down on the lawn chair. At the last second, he realized the shotgun slung over his shoulder would be a problem, so he remained standing, stretching his shoulders and back. “Glad to get that off my back,” he said, smiling.
Ned had a pack almost as large, and somewhat heavier, it seemed. He looked around then slung his pack beside Patrick’s. He eyed the lawn chair, then sat on a log we’d cut. “Been here long?”
“Welcome,” I said.
“Ah,” he said, sitting back on his heels, “a camp out on the rock. Did you know,” he said, touching some exposed rock, “that this ‘rock’ is among the oldest material on the planet? Precambrian, formed where a gabbro-diabase mispickel invaded the Hastings hornblende shist along a felsite dyke.” He pointed along the ridge. “Over there we have a gradual impregnation of the granite boss into the schistosity, and these are associated with actinolite and pistacite, as well as magnetite.” He waved to the north. “A syenite porphyry just beyond the lake and some albitized country rock mark an intrusion of successive pillow lavas and perodotites.” He frowned and looked very, very serious.
I knew what Ned was doing. He was setting us up as a bunch of schoolboys having fun on a campout and himself as the professional-great-white-geologist. It was designed to make the rest of us feel like city-bound amateurs. I mean, what could you say to a spiel like that?
But I knew the trick, and fought back with my professor talk, designed to make the audience feel like intellectual inferiors. I hadn’t totally wasted those years teaching at the university.
“Ah,” I said with a slow, deliberate smile. I didn’t have a pipe to smoke, but I didn’t need one. All I needed was the look that said I should be smoking a pipe and be walking around wearing a tweed jacket and a turtleneck. “Ah, we thank you for the lesson. It enlightens us beyond measure.” A small chuckle, for effect.
“But we must, ah, travel beyond this rock concert,” I waved casually around, “to get to the truth. Let’s just move from the structuralism of geology, in which ore heuristically understood, perhaps capriciously, perhaps in error, to be the metaphysical equivalent of power. This is too structuralist, too Althusserian, to be more than a problematic inaugurate of the human interaction between the tactile and the quasi-eternal. We are, after all, short-term creatures on this ball of rock, eh?
“Humanity created perhaps the inevitable dialectical imbalance of power and result of power, a convergence replete with the hegemony of superidealism that faces us here on this hill. Attaching temporality and structuralism to theoretical objects serves us better, in the long run, than tailings and sawdust, I suspect.” I paused to stare into the trees.
I maintained the look that says, God, I’m superior even in my humbleness, and aren’t you lucky to have run into me.
Actually, I was keeping one eye one Patrick and his shotgun. If he were a sensible man, he’d have done away with both Ned and I somewhere in mid-speech.
“Father sky,” Kele said, and we turned to look at him. He had his arms spread in the general direction of the sun. “Father sky, my heart is sore. The winds have come to ask me questions and I cannot answer them.” He closed his eyes.
“Where have the spirits gone when strangers walk the hills of my ancestors? Where my fathers walked lightly with moccasins, heavy boots crack the forest floor.
“Where have all the old trees are gone, the pines that touched the autumn clouds? No one who lived here could have taken them, only strangers who came, and left, and saw nothing. Nothing.
“We fall in our own autumns like dead leaves, and your winds sing sad songs to us, for there are no children playing here now. I look for laughter and I see only plastic wrappers and a rusting beer can.
“Father sky, there my heart is sore and my eyes are wet with tears. I cry for the land.” he bent his head back and fell to his knees.
Not bad, I thought. Not bad at all.
I was rather hoping that Bob would keep his silence behind his camouflage netting, and he did.
After a moment, we all looked at Patrick Ireland, who was sitting on the lawn chair, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. It looked like Pleistocene geology wasn’t about to enter the lecture circuit here, so I offered, “Chasing the wily rabbit?
Ned looked at me, puzzled.
“Deer and bear seasons aren’t open yet,” I noted. “And duck hunting’s going to be difficult unless you have a boat in one of those packs.”
Kele was edging towards his tarp tent. “Nice lodgings,” Patrick said, “if it doesn’t snow.” But I knew what Kele was doing, keeping our visitors’ eyes on a moving man, and one moving in a potentially threatening direction, rather than letting those eyes rove out around towards Bob’s hiding place.
“We’ve started to document the rock art,” I said. I could see Ned’s eyebrows go up. I added, “We’ve brought a video camera and some still cameras. We’re just waiting for some good light. You should see this” I turned by back on them and started out for the edge of the hill. Don’t look back, I thought. Don’t pretend there’s a choice.
I wondered if they’d leave the packs behind. They must have seen that there were three tents and Samuel’s lawn chair and they must have wondered if another person was in the vicinity. But when I got to the edge of the hill, Kele was behind me and the geobuddies right behind him.
I showed them the most elaborate of the carvings, peeling back the moss and scooping out a bit of dirt. It showed a one-eye
d human figure, wavy lines radiating from his head, and what might have been a snake in one hand. Partly painted over this in red ochre was what looked like a boat or canoe with three distinct masts.
“Interesting,” was Ned’s comment. Patrick walked to the very lip of the hill and looked down towards the tiny round lake. I wondered if he saw it full of currency, like Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. He still had the shotgun over his shoulder. It pointed a small dark hole at the sky, like a symbol of the hole that was the lake below.
After Kele and I had showed them twenty or thirty carvings and a couple more ochre drawings, I stood up, wincing a bit from back pain. “Have you had a lunch, yet?” I asked.
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Ned laughed.
As we walked back, I looked over to where Bob had been hidden. The camouflage covering was gone. So, it seemed, was Bob.
We got the fire going again, and Kele put a frying pan and a water pot onto the rusty grate. Ned and Patrick broke out some sausages, cheese, and sandwiches.
I got my camp stove hissing like a proper snake and heated up a pot of water. When the water started to boil, I poured some over a teabag in my cup, then put broken spaghetti into the rest of the water.
We all sat on the ground at that point, no one wanting to use the lawn chair.
Sometimes you’ve got to wonder where Big Brother is when you need him. Somebody’s got microphones in half the hotel rooms on the planet and spy planes checking out the license plates of cars in Yemen. Where were they when I wanted them? There were two guys across from me that I suspected might have killed a guy. They might or might not have something I didn’t like in those two heavy packs. They had a shotgun, which Patrick had leaned against a tree behind him. And nobody watching us but us.
“I presume that gun is unloaded,” I said, finishing my tea and fishing the strands of spaghetti out of the pot and into a plastic bowl. I added some dried spaghetti sauce and mixed it in. “We always go by the old rule that nobody brings loaded guns into camp.” As if Kele and I had been hunting buddies for years or something.
Ned swallowed what looked like the last of a peanut butter and jam sandwich. “Not loaded,” he said, getting out another sandwich and an apple.
Patrick raised his eyebrows towards Ned, then nodded. “Empty,” he said. He had what seemed to be a salami sandwich. He removed his boots when a bit of sunshine fell across his feet. He seemed perfectly comfortable sitting on the ground, more so than the rest of us. I think Ned had a hip or leg problem, since he shifted a lot. Every few minutes Kele and I tended to stretch whatever part of us was aching.
There was a long silence while we ate. I wondered where Bob was. At best, I figured, he was on the shores of Red Lake, just getting into the canoe.
“Is Samuel here?” Ned asked.
“Pardon,” Kele said. He was eating some reconstituted eggs, mixed with green pepper and pepperoni and fried into an omelet.
Ned pointed at the lawn chair. “That’s his lawn chair, if I remember correctly, and you’ve got an extra tent and sleeping bag.”
“Oh,” Kele said. “Those are Bob’s.”
“He’s not here?”
“Left this morning,” Kele said. “Planning on being back tonight before it gets too dark.”
“Gone hunting?” Ned put the last of his food back into his small pack.
“Express courier,” Kele said. “Taking our pictures back to civilization. Hope to make the front page of The Review tomorrow.” He nodded at me. “Win’s a professional photographer, so we think we might have got some good shots.”
There was a deep silence, broken by Patrick. “I thought you said you were waiting for proper light to take the pictures.”
“More pictures. We’ve got more to take,” I said. “Evening light accents the pictures differently.” A fib. It wouldn’t have taken much to figure the whole angle of the slope would be in the shadow of the hills and trees.
“I think,” said Patrick, “that a drink would go down good right now.” He reached into one of the sacks and brought out a bottle of Bushmills and two cups. He put a good whallop in each cup.
Good God, I thought. He was planning a day hike and he brought a bottle of whiskey? This was going to be a party, just the five of us - four guys and a shotgun - and a bottle of liquor.
“Damn right,” Ned said, taking one cup. “You guys want any?”
Kele declined, but I emptied the tea out of my cup and held it out. I knew it wasn’t a good idea but I’m not much good at social events that include guns and was a bit stressed out. I had the feeling that if my blood pressure got any higher, I’d start spurting blood out of my ears.
We sat and drank a bit. The afternoon wore on a bit. A couple of sparrows investigated us. A couple of long skeins of geese flew over, going somewhere for reasons I didn’t understand. Gravity held me firmly to the rock on this hill and the sparrows flew away for reasons I didn’t understand.
Kele made some more tea and passed around some chocolate chip cookies.
The day was wearing on, so I said, “What do you guys want?”
“Fucked if I know,” said Ned, pouring out the last of the liquor. He seemed as low as a man could be.” He began to rub his neck and forehead.
“Ned,” Patrick said.
“Yeah?”
“I got another bottle.”
“Gonna need it, I think.” Ned turned to me. “I think I want that ore down there. That’s what I think. I think that’s what I want.”
“Why?” asked.
“What do you mean, why?”
“Why do you want the ore?”
“It’s worth millions, maybe.”
“More whiskey for us drunken white guys,” I said, holding out my cup. Patrick came out with a new bottle, chewed the foil cap off, unscrewed the lid, and poured some into the three cups.
“Blood,” I said. “What would you do with the money.”
Ned thought a bit, and answered. “I don’t know.” He got up and got the lawn chair, unfolded it, and sat in it. “Tell Samuel thanks,” he said, straightening one leg slowly. “I grew up a few years in Holtyre,” he said. “You probably haven’t even heard of the place. Up north, between Kirkland Lake and Timmins. Between two of Ontario’s biggest gold-mining areas in those days.
“Holtyre had a gold mine. Not a big one, but enough for a few bars of gold a week. They named the mine after the Hollinger and Mackintyre mines, maybe hoping for good luck. There were maybe fifteen hundred people in the town. A couple of churches. An eight-room school for the French kids and a two-room school for us English-speaking kids. One barber. Three little stores. One gold mine.
“On Friday evenings they’d set up the sixteen-millimeter projector in the town hall and show movies. The adults would sit on folding metal chairs and the kids would sit on the floor at the front. There would be a newsreel before the movie, and usually a cartoon.
“Everybody had wood stoves. For ten dollars the ministry gave you rights to a few acres of bush outside town. The first year we were there dad took us out into the snow and we cut a trunkload of poplar. There wasn’t much else but poplar and tamarack. When he found out that green poplar won’t burn, we went back out and cut tamarack. All that winter we mixed tamarack and poplar in the stove and we got through. My parents would warm bricks in the oven, then wrap them in towels. They put the bricks in our beds, at our feet, because the beds were cold as ice in the winter.
“Dad worked for the county maintaining roads or something. He lost his job when I was in grade four. We stayed there four more years, poor as you can imagine. I wanted desperately to transfer to the French school, where there were other kids as poor as we were, but my parents wouldn’t let me.
“I figured out money real early, and what the world was like when there wasn’t enough of it. It made my parents old.
“Event though I was young, I knew where lots of money was. In the hills, hidden away in lines of rock. So I listened to the kids whose fat
hers were geologists. I read books from the local library about rocks, and had the older guys explain core samples for me.
“I walked a lot of bush in those four years, picking at rocks and looking for pay ore.
“My parents died before I found my gold or tin or lead. Or diamonds. I was in my twenties when my father died, in his car on a winter night. I’d just got a job with one of the bigger mining companies. My mother died in the hospital ten years later to the month. I was out in the bush at the time. I’d got a couple of promotions from some finds I’d made, but nothing I could write a book about.
“I retired after my wife died. But I always wanted to find something they’d name after me. Some hole in the ground with a shaft running into it and money coming out of it.” Ned reached into his packsack and came out with another sandwich. “I met Patrick four years ago, on a beach in Florida, and we’ve been walking the hills for the last couple of summers.
He paused, then continued. “I’ve been worth millions to the mining companies I worked for, but turned down management positions because a desk job is the last thing I want. You ask me what I want? I want wealth. I want fame. I want people, including a ghost or two to say Ned DeVincent finally found a big one. And I never want to be poor again.” He looked away into the trees. “I’ll be back,” he said, and went into the bush a hundred feet to pee.
Kele and Patrick and I shifted around but didn’t say anything for a while. Kele got some more wood for the fire. Patrick leaned against a tree, his eyes closed.
“And what do you want,” I asked.
Patrick opened his eyes to make sure I was talking to him.
“Out,” he said. “Out of this whole thing. Out wandering the hills and watching the clouds go by. Alone. I shouldn’t be here.” He closed his eyes and said nothing more.
“So what do you want,” I asked Ned when he’d settled back into the lawn chair.
He picked up his cup, sipped a bit more whiskey. “I want a story.” He closed his eyes. “I want a story from you before it gets dark. Then I’ll tell you what else I want.”