Eleven Huskies, page 15
Once she was able to suppress thoughts about what might be happening to Peter back at the invisible shore behind them, the next inescapable thought was about Sullivan. Was he not a prime suspect in the dog poisoning and possibly even the murders? In rearranging the duffle bags to make some room for her, the muzzle of a rifle had been revealed. This did not seem to faze Sullivan at all, and he made no moves to conceal it again. She didn’t know anything about guns, so she had no idea whether this was likely to be the missing German one, or whether you could even tell from the muzzle alone. She considered that most backwoods types probably carried rifles with them, but still, it was unnerving. Kevin had seen it too. They exchanged glances and he gave the slightest nod in Laura’s direction. She felt better knowing her police officer brother was in the canoe with her, but still, the whole scenario felt ridiculously sketchy. Between this, and leaving Peter behind, and the surreal flight of the canoe through the endless grey, the whole thing was like an out-of-body experience.
But Laura prided herself on her practicality. Bring this back to earth, she thought. The least I can do is try to get some information.
“Mr. Sullivan,” she said finally, after at least 20 minutes of silence had elapsed.
“Marty.”
“Marty, Peter mentioned to me that you had other dogs. You must be worried about them. Who’s looking after them?”
“Did I tell him that? Oh, I suppose I must have,” he laughed. “I can’t get used to the idea that they’re gone.”
“Gone? I’m so sorry. How did they die?”
“Two died a while ago. Old age, I guess. But Comet was young. Happened just a couple weeks ago. Just dead one morning. I think he was poisoned.” Laura suppressed a gasp. She wondered whether Kevin heard.
“That’s awful. How? By who? Do you know?”
“I don’t, but I have my suspicions.” The joviality had gone from his voice, replaced by something halfway between sadness and bitterness.
“Have you talked to the police?”
Sullivan snorted. “They don’t even care about John’s dogs and he’s a big wheel, so I can hardly expect them to listen to me.”
“That might not be fair,” Laura said, as gently as she could. “They’re very busy, but they do care. I don’t know whether you’re aware, but my brother is an RCMP officer.” She reasoned that it didn’t hurt for Sullivan to know that. She was surprised, though, by his expression of sympathy for John’s dogs. This didn’t match the mental picture she had been assembling.
“No offense, Officer!” Marty shouted to Kevin at the bow.
“None taken!” Kevin shouted back. “I’m in civvy mode anyway. On vacation!”
Laura smiled to herself. Peter had told her about Kevin’s drunken speech of never turning off his cop brain. She knew that about him anyway. Even when they were teenagers, he was always good at making everyone believe he was a harmless joker and even a bit dim, all the while carefully taking mental notes and surprising her later with his observations of other people or situations she assumed he had been oblivious to.
“Some vacation!” Marty said. “Was Mephistopheles your travel agent?” Ho ho ho.
“Ha! My brother-in-law organized it, so close enough!” Kevin shouted.
“Hey! That’s not very nice,” Laura interjected, but joined in the laughter of the other two. He wondered whether Kevin was trying to get Sullivan to lower his guard.
“The good doctor doesn’t seem very satanic. And anyone who loves dogs is all right in my books,” Sullivan said.
“Cute pup you’ve got there,” Kevin said. “Were you taking her to Parsons Lake to train her or something?”
“Sorta. I was showing her parts of my trapline. Only trap in the winter, of course, but I felt like getting out for an overnight paddle and couldn’t leave her behind anyway.”
“Overnight paddle into a firestorm,” Kevin said. Laura marvelled at his ability to pitch his tone perfectly so the statement sounded innocently bemused rather than incredulous, as it would have sounded if she had said the same thing. Or downright suspicious if Peter had done so.
“Yeah, go figure, eh? It looked small and far off to the northeast when we started.”
They lapsed into silence. Nothing around them had changed. It was still a world that consisted only of smoke and water. The canoe had continued to move with supernatural speed, so Laura was surprised they hadn’t reached the lodge yet. She wasn’t nearly as good as Peter with dead reckoning and mentally calculating time and distance, but in recalling the paddle out the day before, and the relatively greater speed, it seemed odd. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and checked to see if the GPS, or anything else useful, was working, but it wasn’t. She looked around for the position of the sun, but there wasn’t even a slightly brighter patch in the grey. The entire sky was uniformly pearlescent with an eerie and diffuse faint glow.
The two paddlers powered the canoe ever forward, Sullivan in the stern making occasional slight course corrections, based on what, Laura had no idea. She wondered what Kevin was thinking, and she wondered how Peter was doing. She petted Pippin, bent down to his ear, and murmured, “Do you know where we are?”
He wagged his tail and licked her cheek.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Peter considered that his wife and dog had just been paddled off by an armed potential murderer. But Kevin was with them, and whatever differences they might have, Peter had confidence in his brother-in-law’s ability to handle himself. An overweight part-time trapper, part-time guide Santa Claus lookalike would be no match for a highly trained and seasoned officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And Sullivan wasn’t at the top of Peter’s suspect list anyway; there were too many improbabilities at play. So he allowed the anxiety to wash through him and dissipate. This felt good.
He was also pleased with himself that he no longer felt afraid of the fire. It would be pointless. Fear’s evolutionary purpose was to promote caution when caution was warranted. It was to prevent people from endangering themselves. That was all perfectly sensible, but he knew it would be foolish to walk into the burning forest; he didn’t have to also feel that. He supposed all emotions had reasonable historical underpinnings that had served humans well in the distant past before the prefrontal cortex fully evolved, but at this point they just got in the way and clouded thought to frequent detriment. For example, standing out here, now shoulder-deep in the lake with searing blasts of hot air reaching him, would prompt fear in most people, but he knew the probability of actually being burned in this situation was low, so why bother feeling afraid? And even if you did feel afraid, what useful action could that prompt? Swimming? That would be counterproductive as it would actually have a significantly higher probability of resulting in death.
They had both been quiet since the canoe left. Peter thought this would be a good opportunity to connect with Stuart one on one, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. And he then got caught up in his musings about the futility of emotion. Also, Stuart seemed preoccupied with thoughts of his own, so he didn’t want to intrude.
“I remember when I was a boy,” Stuart suddenly said, startling Peter, “my grandparents lived near the lagoon, east of Lagos. We spent many of our school holidays there. My grandfather would take my sisters and me fishing in the lagoon. We had to wade out and then stand there very still with our long bamboo fishing poles. The water was warmer than this and the bottom was muddier, but this reminds me of that.” Stuart paused and smiled at Peter. “It reminds me especially because the farmers nearby would burn debris, sugarcane stalks I think it was. It smelled different, but sometimes it was very smoky too, like this.” Then he asked Peter, “And do you know what else here reminds me of that time?”
Peter pictured the brilliant equatorial sun, and tall palms, and smiling children, and silvery bright tropical fish flopping in wicker baskets. He couldn’t imagine what might be similar to here. “No, what else?”
“The fire is making it so hot here now! It is always this hot in Nigeria! There it is like living next to a fire every day!” Stuart laughed loudly, almost losing his footing as he did so. Peter laughed too, reaching over to steady him. “That is why I like it so much in Gimli,” Stuart went on. “It is rarely so hot. But sometimes I do still like a little bit of the heat, just for a short time, for the reminder of my childhood. Those were good times.”
“That does sound nice, fishing with your grandfather. I don’t have anything from my childhood to compare to this situation or to your memory. We went on a lot of camping trips, but we never went fishing and, now that I think of it, rarely spent time at a beach or in the water. My parents liked the mountains, and we all liked to read. That’s mostly what I remember. All of us — my mom and dad and brother and me — huddled around a lantern in a big canvas tent, each lost in their own book.”
“That sounds nice, Peter. I dreamed of camping in Canada when I was a boy, which is a strange dream for a Nigerian boy. Most dreamed of becoming soccer stars in Europe. But I read that book Laura was talking about, Forest Heart Kingdom. Our English teacher was actually Icelandic.”
“That’s so bizarre!”
“In my experience, Peter, it is generally a bizarre world. But that is what I like about it so much.”
Peter had just opened his mouth to agree when a sudden gust of wind showered them with sparks and embers. This had happened before, but this time the fusillade was so intense that Peter sucked in a deep breath and dove under the water. He heard Stuart do the same. Peter opened his eyes under water and, to his astonishment, saw baseball-sized chunks of burning wood hitting the surface. His vision was blurred, both from the water and the injury, making it an especially dreamlike sight — something from another state of consciousness, from another world and life entirely. The thwacking noise of the wood hitting water seemed to be coming from all around him and accentuated this feeling. He was only able to hold his breath 30 seconds, although it felt like ten minutes, so he was quickly back at the surface, gasping, ash-flecked water streaming off his face. Embers were still in the air, but the worst of it seemed to have passed. Stuart emerged a few seconds later.
They looked at each other, wide-eyed, and shook their heads.
“How long do you think it will be before the boat comes?” asked Stuart.
“There are a few variables, but yesterday we took about an hour to cross the lake to the portage, which is a similar distance. But they have a strong wind behind them, and two strong paddlers motivated to go fast, so I expect they’ll be at the lodge in half that time. If they don’t get lost in all that smoke. Then allow for ten or fifteen minutes to find John, talk to him, and for a motorboat to be made ready, assuming one is available, and ten minutes for it to cross and find us. So, an hour or slightly less.”
Stuart nodded and looked at his watch, a fancy-looking analogue one, evidently waterproof and shockproof. “It has been an hour now since they left.”
Peter was astonished. He didn’t wear a watch on this trip, but he always had such a good sense of time. It felt like much less time had passed. The lack of visual cues and the absence of any activity, other then the quick dive just now, had distorted his perception.
“We’ll hear it before we see it,” Peter said before realizing how unnecessary the words were. He applied some more ointment to his eyes. They still burned, but perhaps a little less. And the world was still a gauzy, filmy smear, but that seemed to suit the circumstances.
* * *
The two of them stood out there for another hour, occasionally trading stories from their past, but mostly quietly peering into the smoke and straining to listen for anything other than the crackle and rumble and whoosh of the forest fire behind them. Once they heard an engine sound, but it quickly became clear that it was in the air and far to the north, likely a water bomber, Peter thought. And twice more they had to dive under to avoid being pelted with grenades of red-hot charcoal. This also had the advantage of washing off some of the campfire smell that had saturated Peter’s hair and skin. His nostrils stung. He doubted he would be able to smell anything other than charred pine and birch for a long time to come.
“I hear something,” Stuart said after an especially long period of silence.
Peter listened carefully. He heard it too. “Yes, you’re right! It’s coming from the south, though, not from the direction of the lodge.”
The sound grew louder. Soon a dark shape was visible through the smoke. It was definitely a boat.
Peter and Stuart began to wave their arms above their heads frantically and shout, “Over here!” even though the boat was following the shore and would practically run into them unless it made a sudden deviation out onto the lake.
As it approached, Peter could make out two smudgy figures, one of whom eventually resolved itself to be Evan, the chef at the lodge, unmistakable, even to Peter’s degraded vision, with his elongated earlobes and spiky hair. The other appeared to be one of the Indigenous fishing guides, whom Peter hadn’t been introduced to yet.
They cut the engine and drifted up to Peter and Stuart. Peter was surprised by how anxious they looked. He expected expressions of delight and relief.
“Where are the others?” Evan asked.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“What do you mean? Didn’t Laura and Kevin send you?” Peter tried to quell a bubble of panic rapidly expanding in his stomach.
“No,” Evan responded, looking confused. “Did you just have one canoe left and you couldn’t all fit, so they went without you?”
“We lost both our canoes, but when we got here, Marty Sullivan was here. He offered to take two of us, plus Pippin, to the lodge, and then a boat would get sent back for us.”
“Marty? Sullivan? Really?”
“Yes. But how did you guys end up coming here?”
“John was worried when he saw how much the fire had grown overnight. The MWS put out a bulletin that pretty much everywhere you guys were planning to paddle was burning badly. He sent us to search along the west shore in case you showed up there and needed help.”
“Thank you, thank you so much,” Stuart said, extending his hand to shake Evan and the other man’s hands.
“OK, let’s find a good spot to come in closer to shore, and then we can load you guys and get you back to the lodge. This is Jacob, by the way.” The other man smiled, waved, and said, “Hi!”
“Can we look for Laura and Kevin first, though?” Peter asked as he waded alongside the boat on the way to the widest part of the beach.
Evan glanced out to the lake and then looked back at Peter, his face grim. “In this smoke, Dr. Bannerman? It would be like looking for a flea in a fog bank. Sullivan’s really experienced, so even if he misses the lodge crossing the lake, he’ll know how to follow the shore to find it. It just might take a while in these conditions.”
That made sense to Peter. He was grateful for the rational explanation. “Is there any fire near the lodge?” he asked as he climbed aboard.
“Yeah, just this morning there’s a fresh one just off the road to the main dock. Most of the rest of the staff are out trying to fight it. John would like to evacuate, but the float planes can’t land in this smoke.”
“Do you know how they’re doing over at the First Nation?”
“I talked to my uncle . . .” Jacob answered.
“Lawrence!” Peter said.
“Yes, and he said they’re hanging in. They cut a firebreak and the wind change helped them but it’s still really dicey.” He paused to hand out life jackets. “And Friendly Bear is toast.”
“Toast? As in burnt down?”
Jacob revved up the outboard motor just then, so Evan shouted, “To the ground!”
“Wow! Anyone hurt?”
“Not that I know. They evacuated to DLFN.”
Stuart was sitting on the bench beside Peter, both of them facing backwards to be out of the spray as the bow slammed across the waves. He leaned over toward Peter so he wouldn’t have to shout as loud. “Where is Friendly Bear?”
Peter pointed back the way they were coming from. “That way. Just inside the southwest arm of Dragonfly.”
“Makes sense.” Stuart nodded.
“Sort of. But that means it’s a massive fire. By water it’s not far, but by land it’s done a lot of jumping.”
“Or new fires starting?”
“Yes, that might be more likely.”
They lapsed into silence because it was too difficult to talk over the high-decibel drone of the engine and the sound of the boat rhythmically smacking the water like an aluminum fist trying to subdue the unruly lake. Even though it hurt his eyes, Peter kept scanning the blurred horizon on both sides, occasionally peering ahead, shielding his eyes with his hand against the spray. He knew it was silly to expect to see the canoe, but it felt even sillier not to try.
* * *
