Eastern Passage (19 page)

“Harv stopped a while and looked around at all them people listening, before he adds, ‘So now then,
Mister
Eaton, how the hell do
you
like
them
apples?’ With that he picks up his paddle and leads the whole kit and caboodle of us back down the lake.

“I don’t know as them two ever spoke a word to each other after. But that weren’t the end of it. Before the Big War one of Eaton’s sons took to bringing his family to stay at the castle summertimes. His wife were the real snotty kind who was raisin’ their son Georgie to figure he weren’t part of the common herd.

“There was still a few lunges [muskellunge, giant members of the pike family] in the lake them times and Georgies daddy was desperate anxious to catch one. When he found out Harv knowed where some was, he come down to Ananias in his big mahogany speedboat and soft-talked Harv into taking him and Georgie to troll for one some time soon.

“Harv brought the
Queen Mary
up to the castle’s dock. He was always fussy about stowing a boat. It had to be done just right. He
saw to it every bit of gear was put aboard just so, then put the people to their seats.

“Young George – he might-a been ten or twelve – was the last on the dock. Harv looks up at him standing there and says, pretty mild for him, ‘What you waiting for? Damn it, Georgie, git into the boat and sit down nice and quiet ‘longside your daddy.’

“Georgie just stood there a bit and then
he
says, ‘You ain’t supposed to call me Georgie.
You
’re supposed to call me
Master
George.’

“You could’a heard Harv’s answer down to the south end of the lake.

“ ‘GIT YOURSELF INTO THE BOAT BEFORE I CALLS YOU SHIT FOR SHORT!’

“Georgie git, and pretty smart about it – but I never heard as Harv had any dealings with the Eatons after.”

The day was getting old before we left Lawrence and Clary. Cliff was ready to head for home but even though I knew the Eaton “castle” had mysteriously burned to the ground during the war years, I thought I’d like a look at it and at the north end.

Cliff was not encouraging.

“You won’t like it. Different place up there. But we’ll go a ways.”

We had gone less than a mile farther when we were confronted by a garish, pink-painted cottage perched high on an island from which most of the trees had been cut to provide an all-round view. The cottage and its triple-width boathouse were tightly shuttered and at the end of a floating dock was a sign writ large enough to be read from hundreds of yards away.

“Who the devil is W.P.A.?” I asked.

“Wes’makoon Protective Association,” Cliff snarled, and went on to explain that since the end of the war a flood of strangers from “out front” had followed the Eatons and built summer places around the northern shore of the lake. Now, he told me profanely “the fuckers” were taking steps to ensure that all the inhabitants, old and new, were properly regulated.

“They asks us to their meetings, and sometimes we goes and listens to their foolishness. But we sure and hell don’t join their association, and we don’t pay no heed to the rules they make, ’less it suits us, which it don’t often.

“When they gets too uppity … well, then it seems like water worms bores holes in the hulls of their fancy speedboats; molasses gets into their gas tanks; and their new-fangled floating docks come apart even when there ain’t no storms. And then,” he added with relish, “the bears – leastwise I supposes it’s the bears – makes themselves comfortable in them shiny boxes they calls houses. Like them over there.”

Cliff was pointing to a whole street of summer cottages coming into view along a piece of shoreline whose trees and bushes had mostly been removed to make room for neat little suburban enclaves.

W.P.A. signs were ubiquitous, but were not the only proclamations of a new regime. As the
Queen Mary
opened the northern arm of the lake I was able to read, from a distance of at least a mile away, glaring letters painted on a granite outcrop:

Cliff slowed the outboard to a mutter. “Seen enough?” he asked.

I surrendered. The
Queen
turned about, but Cliff was not through with me yet. Halfway home, he steered to the foot of a high cliff on the eastern shore, near the top of which the remains of a tiny cabin clung like a limpet. This had been one of Harv’s favourite “hides,”
from which he could spot deer many miles away along the shore or crossing on the ice. We climbed to Harv’s lookout – to find that new people had taken possession.

A garish red-and-yellow signboard told us this was now

and a small sign next to it warned

The remains of Harv’s deliberately inconspicuous little shelter had been lavishly decorated with chrome-plated junk from wrecked cars. A sign nailed across the one window (now broken) read:

But the humourless pièce de résistance was a nearby boulder upon which was painted in glossy black letters:

under which someone had added with a marker pen:

During that first visit to Ananias, I spent most of my time in Cliff’s company but one day he provided me with a ten-foot birchbark
canoe that had once been Harv’s favourite, a blanket, a grub box, fishing tackle, and basic camping gear and sent me off to paddle up an obscure little creek whose headwaters lay in a vast area of bog and muskeg called Black Swamp.

“Black Swamp,” Cliff explained, “was Harv’s special bailiwick – where the biggest bears and the most deer hung out. You could live like a king in there if you knowed a thing or two. I reckon you might know enough to stay alive, Squib, and you might
learn
something if you keep your eyes peeled and your ears clean.

“Might be you’ll hear old Jo belling back in there somewhere. Jo was the best of Harv’s hounds. He went missing soon after Harv flew the coop.

“Tell you the kind of hound he was – one time he had a sore foot so Harv left him behind when he was going hunting and Jo got real huffy and went off on his own. Harv went up the lake to that little tilt we was at on the cliff. He had the field glasses he’d took from a dead Jerry at the Somme when he was over there in the First War. Looking around, he sees a rumpus on the far shore of the lake so he puts the glasses to it and sees a big buck jumping around on the beach. It had lopsided antlers, but what caught Harv’s eye was Jo – right up onto that buck’s back, looking like he was stuck to it.

“How he got up there nobody’ll ever know – maybe the buck got itself mired and he jumped it – but it was desperate to get shed of him. Couldn’t shake him off so it took to the water and struck out for the other side, which was near a mile away.

“Harv watched the whole business. Said by the time they got over to his side the buck was pretty well played out and the dog half-drowned. As the buck staggered up the bank, Jo slid off and just laid there on the beach like a sack of moose shit. Harv said he could-a taken a long shot at the deer but didn’t ’cause the buck was standing right over the dog. Then it seemed like Jo and the deer kind of sniffed noses and both of them shook theirselves and
away they went – the buck into the bush and Jo along the shore, heading south.

“Jo was already home when Harv got back, and none the worse though he was still favouring his sore paw.

“Harv seen that same buck three or four times afterwards but never took a shot at him. Said he figured Jo wouldn’t have like it if he had.”

Harv’s old canoe, a delicate little wisp of a thing that slipped through the water as easily as a loon, ghosted along so silently a muskrat snoozing on the bank failed to waken until I was so close it literally fell into the water in surprise. As I ascended the tea-coloured stream, I saw and heard many of its denizens going about their businesses. All of them, with the exception of the dozing muskrat, seemed unperturbed by my intrusion. On one stretch of quiet water, a sleek black otter accompanied me so closely I could have touched him with my paddle. When he eventually submerged, he did so without a ripple, leaving me feeling both elevated and humbled, as I might have been by a meeting with some primordial water spirit.

When the stream curved around the shoulder of a still-forested ridge, I went ashore and climbed it, hopeful of a view ahead and of perhaps hearing the distant belling of a spirit hound. Instead, I met a ghostlike marten who flickered at me disdainfully for an instant before vanishing up the bole of a towering white pine, which, with a few score of its fellows, had somehow escaped the timber butchers.

I camped that night on a sand spit just where the stream entered a balsam swamp. I made a small fire, filled my belly with brook trout caught ten minutes earlier, spread my blanket beneath the overturned canoe, and drifted off in a blue haze of wood smoke, balsam perfume, and the night music of frogs, an owl, and running water.

The first thing Cliff wanted to know when I returned to Ananias was whether I had come across any trace of Jo.

“Awful queer the way that dog disappeared. Was too damned smart to get hisself lost. Come from a line of dogs could find their way around better than birds.

“One time Jo’s granddaddy – the first Jo –
did
go missing up around Gin Lake. Couple of months went by and still no sign of him so we figured he must be dead and gone. Then one October two years later a float plane landed on West Reach and taxied right in to our dock.

“When the door opened the first damn thing out was a dog. Come out like shot from a gun and jumped all over Harv ’til the old man pretty near fell off the dock.

“Two fellows got out and told us their story. Said they was lawyers from Kingston going north on a moose hunt. Said that two years previous they’d been hunting moose up near Gin Lake and come on a wolf snare with a dog caught into it by its hind leg … what was
left
of a dog, because it was nigh starved to death.

“Their guide was fixing to put it out of its misery but they liked the look of it and the long and short of it was they took it back to Kingston with them and got it fixed up good as new. And they was real happy when it turned out to be the best hunting hound they’d ever laid eyes on.

“The fall I’m talking about they’d rented a plane to fly them to Kaminiskeg Lake after deer, and they’d brought that dog along. The plane was flying high up crossing our lake when all of a sudden the dog like to took a fit, howling and yelling and jumping around ’til they feared he’d wreck the plane. Couldn’t do nothing with him, so the pilot took the plane down and landed her.

“They was so mad they was just going to dump the dog and take right off again, but when they saw him and Harv crawling all over each other, they slowed up, and when we told them this was old Jo come home, they changed their minds. Couldn’t believe he could be so smart!

“Didn’t want to leave him then. But when they tried to get him back into the plane, Harv offered to go get his gun.

“ ‘You fellows try to fly away with my dog and you’re going to fly straight to hell,’ he tells them.

“They left without Jo but on good terms with Harv, and next fall both come back and stayed at Ananias, and Jo and Harv took them hunting, and they got two prime bucks.”

Although Harv did not hunt for “sport” (as the euphemism goes), he could and would kill any wild thing if its death contributed materially to the essential well-being of him and his family. On the other hand, should he encounter a wounded or crippled wild creature, even of a desired kind, he would sometimes bring it home alive and one of the children would be appointed its guardian. If it recovered, it would be returned to its own world.

“Harv was specially soft on beavers,” Cliff recalled. “One winter he come on a young beaver with its front feet froze into a poacher’s trap. He brought it back to Ananias, and the girls nursed it back to health even though both front feet rotted off.

“When spring come Harv turned it loose, but damned if it would go away. So he made a kind of lodge for it under the dock. It swum right into it and lived there four or five years and got along good enough to get itself a mate and a brood of kits every year.

“Many’s the time I’d be out there fishing and old Two Foot or one of his bunch from under the dock would come alongside as if just to pass the time of day. They never slapped their tails. It was like they knew damn well that’d scare the fish away.”

One day Cliff took me to visit the beaver dam at the mouth of Coburn Creek, which runs into the head of West Reach. It was a colossal structure at least a hundred and fifty feet long and up to ten feet high on the downstream side. The pond behind it was backed by a grassy muskeg containing one of the finest moose pastures in the country.

Cliff told me how one spring a mighty storm caused such a heavy runoff that the dam overflowed and threatened to collapse. For two days and nights the owners beavered to save it – then along came another heavy downpour.

“One way or t’other most of us hereabouts had a stake in that dam,” Cliff explained. “Deer, bear, foxes, wolves, and plenty others used it for a bridge. Without it they’d have had to swim West Reach or plough through swamp for miles and miles. Our folk used it from the time they first come. It was wide enough to carry a wagon, and when I was a younker there was still a cart track across it. The moose needed the dam too because, though we et a good few of them, a good many more would have starved in hard winters without the swamp pasture beyond the dam.”

Harv, who had been keeping an anxious eye on the threatened dam, concluded the beavers could no longer deal with the problem unassisted so he rowed back to Ananias and rousted out the entire human population – four grown men, half a dozen youths and children, and as many girls and women – armed them with axes, crosscut saws, and spades, and led them in skiffs and canoes to the aid of the beleaguered beaver.