Eleven Huskies, page 12
“Sorry, Kev, I just wanted to point this out — have you guys noticed that the breeze has suddenly died?”
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Laura said.
“I hope the wind does not change direction when it resumes,” Stuart said. “At home, when the southwesterly wet trades suddenly stop, there will be a pause, and then the northeasterly harmattan will begin. It is a strong, hot wind. Dusty. Sometimes terrible. But that is Africa.”
They all scanned the skies, looking for clues, but other than the emergence of the first stars, the fading light from the departed sun in the northwest, and an unnerving faint orange glow in the northeast, there was nothing to see.
“So, as I was saying,” Kevin resumed, with a touch of impatience.
Peter interrupted him again. “Actually, Kevin, let’s maybe pick up where we left off tomorrow morning. With the wind stopped and the sun down, the mosquitoes are going to be on us right away. We’d better get into our tents.”
“You make it sound like the zombie apocalypse is coming,” Kevin said. He cupped his hand to first one ear and then the other, each time leaning in that direction. “Nope. Not hearing the shuffling of rotting feet or the spine-tingling call of ‘brains, brains, brains.’ Besides, aren’t we going to have a campfire? Make s’mores? Sing politically incorrect campfire songs? Tell zombie stories?”
“Kevin,” Laura said, adopting her stern older sister voice, “number one: a campfire when everything is crispy dry and there’s a fire so close that we can see the smoke is stupid and” — she cleared her throat dramatically — “totally illegal.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot.” Kevin sounded genuinely sheepish.
“And number two: Peter is never wrong about the mosquitoes. It’s eerie, like he can read their teensy tiny, eensy weensy two-hundred-neuron minds.” Laura put her arm around Peter, who was sitting directly beside her, hugged him to herself, and gave him a peck on the cheek.
“Actually two hundred thousand neurons, or even a little more,” Peter said.
“Of course you would know that,” Kevin said.
“I think he is right,” Stuart said. “I do not mean about the size of a mosquito’s brain, although I have no doubt he is right about that too as evil does require some space, but about them coming. Listen again, everyone. Be very still.”
Peter smiled. There it was — the unmistakable Evening Song of the North. At first almost imperceptible, it was now building rapidly. The sound came from all directions. It was an unvarying, extremely high-pitched whine. Almost electronic sounding. He estimated they had five minutes to get into their tents before becoming coated in blood-sucking insects.
“Oh shit,” Kevin said and sprang to his feet.
They had had the foresight to completely clean up the cooking area and haul the food high up into a tree right after supper, so all there was to do now was to empty their bladders, brush their teeth, and dive into their tents. Kevin skipped brushing his teeth. Laura and Peter rushed through theirs, leaving Stuart as the last one outside.
Peter and Laura heard him say “Oh my” several times, accompanied by the sounds of skin being slapped repeatedly, and then the sound of the other tent’s zipper opening quickly and Stuart tumbling in.
They spent the next ten minutes hunting mosquitoes that had snuck in with them, squishing them against the inside of the tent, sometimes leaving gory little splotches of red. Wherever a headlamp beam shone on the wall of the tent it silhouetted dozens of mosquitoes outside hurling themselves at the nylon, enraged and ravenous and highly frustrated.
“This is insane,” Laura muttered. “Remind me again why we’re canoeing in the middle of the summer?”
“It’s the only time everyone could get off, and it’s not always this bad. But you’re right, spring and fall are much better.”
“Ha! There! Got you, you little bastard.” Laura hissed in triumph as she killed another mosquito. “I do believe that’s the last one.”
“Hope so. But back to ‘why now,’ you also have to remember it’s only around dusk and sometimes dawn that it’s really bad. During the day, so long as you stay out of the bush, it’s usually OK. And middle of the night is fine too if you need to pee or something.”
“Good, because I didn’t bring a wide-mouth bottle.”
“A wide-mouth bottle?” Peter asked, and then immediately regretted it as he suddenly understood her meaning. “Oh, gross.”
“Ha! You think that’s gross, Mr. I’ll-just-take-a-leak-behind-the-truck?”
“That’s different.”
“Uh-huh . . .”
* * *
Peter was awoken during the night by a noise outside the tent. Laura was still asleep. At first, he thought it came from Kevin and Stuart’s tent, but once he oriented himself, he realized the sound had come from the opposite direction. It sounded like a grunt. He strained to listen, but now there was only silence, punctuated by slow, quiet breaths from Laura.
Then it happened again. Definitely a grunt. Not loud, but distinctive.
Human? Animal? Marty Sullivan? A bear? Peter had no idea. He also had no idea what he should do. The smart thing was to stay in the tent and wait until whatever it was went away or gave more clues regarding its identity.
But Peter’s bladder felt close to bursting. It probably wasn’t that full, but it was also impossible to ignore. And he figured the odds that the grunter was actually dangerous were low. There was no reason whatsoever for Marty Sullivan to be on this island in the middle of the night with hostile intent. It made no sense.
And if it was a bear, Peter could easily scare it away. He remembered a large stick lying near the tent. Wave the stick. Make noise. Scare the bear away. Pee. Be a hero.
Classic win-win.
But the shape Peter saw when he crept quietly out of the tent was human. A bearded human.
Sullivan.
Then the shape shifted slightly.
It was Kevin.
Peter felt the tension leaving him like the air out of a party balloon. The tension was quickly replaced with anger. What was Kevin doing stalking around the tents in the middle of the night, grunting!
Kevin heard Peter approach and turned to wave at him.
“What the blazes are you doing up now? And why the grunting?”
Kevin chuckled. “If you really must know, all that whisky loosened my bowels. I was taking a dump.” Kevin paused and adjusted where he was sitting on the granite. “I would avoid that patch of bush if I were you,” he added quietly, waving to a spot off to their right.
“Oh, sorry. I guess I’m feeling a little jumpy. And you’re . . . not done yet? That why you’re still up?”
“No, I just wanted to look at this.” Kevin pointed up at the sky where the Milky Way stretched like a shawl of diamonds from the southeast to the southwest. Peter nodded and gradually turned his head to take in the whole sky. The northeast corner was obscured by smoke, but the remainder had a crystalline clarity that made Peter feel like a wondering child.
“Let me show you something, Kev,” he whispered.
“Yeah, sure.”
“We’re going to take the canoe out. You’ll love it.”
A few minutes later they were paddling noiselessly toward the middle of the lake. The air was absolutely still and neutral in temperature, neither warm nor cool. The water was obsidian, perfectly black, perfectly flat, perfectly reflective as if polished continuously.
“Stop paddling,” Peter whispered.
Neither of them needed to say anything more. They were drifting through outer space. Stars above and stars below. All was silence and beauty and wonder.
Chapter Seventeen
Pippin barked.
The bark entered Peter’s dream. He had been dreaming about a cat the size of a brontosaurus roaming the streets of Winnipeg. Pippin suddenly appeared at Portage and Main to stop Dino-Kitty from chasing cars like they were mice. He crouched down in front of it, made hard eye contact with it, and barked.
Then Pippin barked again, louder.
Peter woke up to find himself tangled in his half-zipped sleeping bag, completely muddled as to where he was and what was going on. The tent’s pale green nylon glowed in the soft pre-dawn light.
Pippin had been sleeping at their feet, but now he was standing, alternating barking at Peter and Laura and staring out the screen of the tent’s door, nostrils flaring.
Laura woke up now too. “Wha . . . ?” she said, rubbing her eyes, hair-tousled.
“I don’t know. Pippin smells something.”
“I smell it too,” Laura said. “It’s smoke.”
Peter was out of the tent in seconds, closely followed by Pippin and Laura. Stuart and Kevin had just emerged from their tent and were standing in their underwear, staring at the blood-red sun rising behind a curtain of smoke that was now considerably closer than it had been the night before. A steady hot wind was blowing out of the northeast.
“The fire jumped Shankie,” Kevin said, his voice even and flat.
“And jumped Bredin,” Laura said. She was beside Peter now. “It looks like it’s just over that ridge now.”
“The wind changed,” Stuart said. “It is a good thing Pippin woke us all up.”
“Shit,” Kevin said.
“The portage is probably OK still,” Peter said, pointing south in the direction they had come from the day before. “We’d better pack up and go pronto. If the wind changes even a little, we could become trapped here.”
Kevin ducked into his tent and re-emerged a few seconds later holding his Garmin satellite transponder. “I’m going to send Todd a text to tell him we’re OK and are headed out.” After fiddling with the device for a moment he said, “Looks like they sent out an alert an hour ago. I had it turned off to save battery. Sorry, guys.”
“Doesn’t matter, Kev, we’re good,” Peter said. “But we need to move. Now.”
* * *
Whereas it had taken a banter- and laughter-filled hour to set up camp, the four of them took it down in ten terse minutes, shuttling gear back and forth to the canoes at a jogging pace, casting glances to the northeast. Pippin sat patiently on the granite shelf, watching the smoke thicken and the occasional tongue of flame shoot into the sky beyond the crest that divided Parsons Lake from Bredin Lake. The wind was picking up. The smell of smoke had become pervasive.
Peter briefly thought about coffee but dismissed the idea. It would be his first morning in a long, long time without at least a little bit of caffeine, but he reasoned that he had enough adrenaline on board to compensate for the time being. And if Kevin was giving up breakfast — Kevin never gave up breakfast — Peter could give up caffeine for one morning.
Once they were on the water they fell into a powerful paddling rhythm, the canoes rocking side to side slightly with each of Kevin’s and Peter’s strokes, the two of them being the strongest paddlers.
“I wonder about Sullivan,” Laura said as they came in sight of where the man had landed the day before. The ridge he had climbed was now choked with smoke. Fingers of flame shot up from behind it.
“Gosh, yeah, I hadn’t thought of him,” Peter said. “That whole area looks like it’s burning now. I hope he has some sort of signalling device.”
“Did he seem like the type?”
“No, not really.” Peter turned to face Kevin and Stuart’s canoe, which was beside them and slightly ahead. “Hey, Kev!” he shouted. “Maybe you should alert Todd that we spotted Sullivan here yesterday!”
“Good point!” Kevin shouted back as he leaned into a couple powerful strokes. “Either to arrange a rescue,” he panted. “Or an arrest! Maybe the fire didn’t jump two lakes! Maybe someone set it!”
Peter hadn’t considered that. It made sense. He hated it when someone else thought of something clever before he did, especially when in retrospect it was obvious. He was about to shout back that he was thinking the same thing when he noticed something.
Smoke was also rising from near the portage.
* * *
They were at the portage in 15 minutes. The smoke was now so thick that the path leading back to Dragonfly disappeared into it behind the first set of trees. It reminded Peter of that dense fog last spring, only this time with a hot wind and the overwhelming smell of burning pine.
“I think the smoke’s just blowing in from beyond the ridge. I don’t think it’s actually burning here,” Kevin said as he jumped out of his canoe and helped Stuart drag it onto the shore.
“Are you sure?” Peter asked.
“I just said, ‘I think,’ not ‘I know.’”
“No need to get testy.”
“Stop it, you guys.” Laura wrinkled her nose at the smoke and squinted into the forest. “Let’s figure this out. With this wind, the smoke is going to arrive before the fire does, and there wasn’t any smoke here half an hour ago, so Kevin’s probably right.”
“But perhaps a new fire began here from an ember blown by that wind,” Stuart said, standing beside Laura, also squinting into the smoke-choked woods.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Peter said. “But we can’t just stand here either. If the fire isn’t on the portage trail yet, it soon will be. We could backtrack a little and find a place to camp on the southwest shore in the hope that the fire won’t reach there, but under these conditions that’s a faint hope. It would only buy us a few hours.”
Kevin held up his Garmin and pointed at a red button on the side. “Should I press it?” His face was flushed, and he was breathing hard.
“I don’t know, Kevin,” Laura said. “Isn’t the emergency button meant for life-and-death situations? I thought it automatically triggers a rescue mission. I mean, do we really need that yet?”
Kevin took a couple of deep breaths and nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. Don’t know what came over me. I, of all people, should know not to abuse an emergency response system. Given how effing huge this fire is, there have got to be people in much dicier situations than us.”
Stuart put his arm around Kevin’s shoulder and winked at the others. “But you so wanted to be rescued by a cute SAR Tech with a brush cut, bulging biceps, and a come-hither twinkle in his eyes. I am so sorry you will not have that opportunity.”
Kevin looked at his feet and let out a couple stagey sobs. Then he looked up and hardened his face. “OK, folks. Here’s what we’re going to do.” Peter had seen this sudden transformation before: Kevin the impetuous Viking or the rollicking ham, to Corporal Gudmundurson, the confident, in-charge, and in-control Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer. “The canoes are the most important items to get across, and we need to be able to move as fast and light as possible, so take two minutes to repack your most vital gear into small daypacks. The tents, sleeping bags, stove, and most of the food will have to stay behind. If the trail isn’t too bad and the situation stabilizes, we can run back to grab that stuff . . .”
“My brand new five-hundred-dollar MEC tent,” Peter interrupted, sounding mournful.
“Doesn’t do you much good if you’re a pile of ash and bones,” Kevin replied. “There’s no way to know what the situation is over on Dragonfly, so we have to be ready to hit the water on the other side fast. Put the stuff we’re leaving behind out on those rocks, as far away from the trees as possible.” Kevin pointed to an outcropping protruding into the lake beside the portage. “When this is all done, we can come back for your brand new five-hundred-dollar MEC tent, and the rest of the stuff, if we can’t zip back and retrieve it after taking the canoes across.”
“And grab a T-shirt from your packs and soak it with water,” Laura said. “We can put them over our faces if the smoke gets too thick or we encounter any flames.”
Peter was astonished by the suggestion that they might walk through flames. “Surely, we turn around if there is actual fire?”
“I think it depends, right, Kevin? If it’s a small fire and it looks clear beyond, we should try to push through,” Laura said.
“Yes, I agree,” Kevin said. “It’ll be a judgment call. But let’s not waste time debating what those judgment calls might be. Let’s just be ready for anything.”
Stuart was already dunking a shirt in the lake.
“Do you want to text Todd again?” Peter asked as he rooted through his pack for essentials.
“Good plan. We won’t be able to get a satellite signal in the trees. But typing on this thing is stupidly hard, so I’ll just tell him the basics. No time to peck out an explanation about Sullivan.”
* * *
Minutes later they were ready to go. As on the island earlier that morning, Pippin sat at attention, staring to the northeast, where the fire was most active. He let out a woof just as they were getting ready to pick up the canoes. Pippin had at least a dozen different bark tones, probably more. Each meant something different. This was the “I see, hear, or smell something you should pay attention to” bark.
Peter glanced toward him and immediately saw what Pippin had barked at. “Fire’s crowning!”
The other three swivelled to look. Not more than five hundred metres away, across on the eastern shore of the lake, balls of flame leapt from treetop to treetop, causing each successive tree to ignite like a roman candle.
“Oh my,” Stuart said.
“Christ on a stick,” Kevin breathed, and then, in full voice, called out, “OK! New plan! We’re only taking one canoe, the seventeen-footer. It’s got a twelve-hundred-pound capacity, so we’ll be fine. Pete, you and me on the canoe. Stuart, you’ve got the paddles. Laura, you’ve got the emergency gear and Pippin.”
