Eastern Passage (18 page)

The sun was gone by now, leaving a flamboyant sky flaming over the inky waters of West Reach. The
Queen
lumbered on until we were abeam of the perfect cove – a sensuous curve of stippled sandy beach backed by a natural meadow with mixed woodland beyond, the whole protectively shielded by a curving ridge topped by tall white pines.

Cliff cut the engine and, as we drifted shoreward in the silence of the evening, murmured, “This here’s what we call Ananias. It’s where that young squaw brought her soldier to meet the folks. It’s where he settled down and never after strayed no further than his legs or a canoe could carry him. That big old house up there” – he pointed – “that’s where Harv was born.”

Harv Gunter’s birthplace was a massive, single-storey log structure perched high enough up under the shoulder of a protecting ridge to have a commanding view of the long reach below it. Built of ten-inch square logs fitted so closely they hardly needed caulking, it was fronted by an elevated porch from which a watcher could keep tabs on any sizeable moving thing for miles around.

“One time this was an Algonquin village,” Cliff explained. “Back of that meadow is where they buried their people, no matter how far away they had to bring them. Ananias is likely there, though there’s no marker to say as much.”

“Is Harv Gunter buried there too?”

Cliff snorted. “Well now, them goody two-shoes in town will tell you he’s under the sod in the churchyard. Some of us thinks different. If there’s a coffin with his name onto it in the churchyard I doubt he’s in it. But let’s get us on up to his house.”

The split-log front door had no lock nor was it fitted with an inside drawbar. Anyone could enter as readily as we did simply by lifting a latch made from deer antler.

The spacious living room was strewn with faded, handmade woollen mats and furnished with tables, chairs, and a pair of couches ingeniously constructed of cedar billets. A stone fireplace designed to consume four-foot logs dominated the western wall. Above it hung a battered brass bugle. An ancient seven-day clock ticked noisily from the centre of the mantle. I wondered who kept it wound.

“Nobody as I knows of” was Cliff’s short response to my query.

I was surprised there were no trophies of the hunt on the log walls.

“Harv wouldn’t abide such,” Cliff explained. “Claimed nailing up skins and head bones of wild creatures for decoration wasn’t no better than nailing up the skins or skeletons of people.”

He paused to fill a mug with rum before adding, “Come out onto the deck. Something I got to do.”

A gleaming quarter moon was rising as he led the way outside, mug in one hand and the old bugle from above the fireplace in the other. Then, standing silhouetted against the pale sliver of moon, he tossed the drink of rum as far into the darkness as he could, paused a moment, then raised the bugle to his lips and blew a long and vibrant blast across the black waters of the reach.

Echoes blared back and forth around us, seeming to imbue the now almost invisible world with an unearthly sentience. Cliff lowered the bugle and turned toward me.

“Payin’ compliments, as the navy fellows say. This here’s Harv’s place, and this here old army bugle belonged to Ananias. Least we can do is pay
our
compliments to the both of them.”

My curiosity about the man who had last lived in this house had been mounting all day. I questioned Cliff about him now, but Cliff had become taciturn – or was somewhere else perhaps – and answered shortly or not at all. I did learn that Harv had been born in 1870 or 1871 and that his mother, who was part or largely Algonquian, had died when he was young.

By 1890 or thereabouts, he had become a skilled “river dancer” on the Madawaska and Ottawa rivers, floating timber to the mills downstream. He had enlisted at the outbreak of the First Great War and was soon sent overseas where he seems to have been a trial to both sides, so successful at killing Germans that he was promoted several times, only to be demoted again because of his disdain for authority. According to Cliff, Harv had been recommended for medals but had never accepted one because he held that “killing a man or a beast amounts to about the same thing. Times, it
has
to be done, but it ain’t ever nothin’ to brag about.”

By 1920 he was back in his own country, married and determined never to leave again.

The night grew chilly, but the heat from the birch billets we thrust into the cast-iron cookstove took care of that. A golden glow from the tall glass chimneys of several oil lamps contributed its own warmth as Cliff busied himself frying venison fillets and I pan-baked a bannock, as I had learned to do in the far north.

I slept in perfect peace that night.

Next morning, after a swim and a breakfast of cornmeal porridge with canned milk and brown sugar, Cliff took me out on the lake. The
Queen
bore us sedately northward across broad openings, between rocky islands, and past deeply indented bays through a land whose ravaged forests were labouring in rebirth. Cliff kept the old girl throttled down, explaining, “If I opens her up she don’t go any faster – just pushes half the lake ahead of her and tows the other half behind. Slow and steady is her bestest way.”

It was the proper way. We disturbed nobody and no thing. Ospreys fishing for
their
breakfasts hovered near at hand. A pair of ravens laboured out from shore to gawk and mumble derisively. Loons surfaced alongside like tiny submarines emerging from the deeps, and their haunting halloos pierced the blather made by the old Evinrude like knives thrust through butter.

Air and water were alive but we encountered no other people until Cliff steered the
Queen
into a labyrinth of serpentine channels and we sighted a low structure snugged into a tiny cove. It was so unobtrusive that at first I mistook it for a beaver house, but it assumed human proportions as we approached. An elderly man sporting a dishevelled shock of white hair stepped out of it, peered at us, then imperiously gestured for us to come ashore.

We did so to be warmly greeted by eighty-seven-year-old Lawrence Gunter, Harv Gunter’s first cousin. Long a widower, Lawrence lived alone, though he currently was enjoying a visit from his middle-aged daughter, Clary, lithesome, good looking, and hospitable and who had only just paddled back from hauling an illegal gill net set behind the island. She insisted we share a feed of “jumping fresh” lake trout.

Over his first tin plate heaped high with fried trout, Cliff proposed a toast to his uncle Harv.

“Old bugger surely liked his drop,” Cliff remembered fondly as he raised his mug. “Weren’t a
heavy
drinker, but always partial to a nip. Drank to be sociable, you could say. One time I asked him if he’d ever turned down a drink. He give me a sour look like I’d asked a damn fool question, and says, ‘Well, goddamn it, yes I did. Twice. Once I wasn’t asked … and once I wasn’t there.’ ”

Lawrence laughed as he poured himself another shot and told us of a nearby cove whose flat, limestone shore held a number of barrel-shaped holes drilled by boulders whirled around and around by the downpour from a long-vanished waterfall.

“Some of them rocks as made the holes still lays at the bottom of them so much as six feet down. Indians have a story about that. Say the holes was made by a giant stone-pecker bird lookin’ for rock worms big around as a man’s arm. Say it was a sacred place, and most white folks got the notion and steered clear of it.

“All except Harv … ’cause that’s where he used to make his shine!”

Lawrence paused to fill his cup, which he raised in salute to his vanished cousin.

“Best goddamn shine ever hit this country! And he made enough of it could pretty near have floated a run of logs.

“Only a scramble of people ever knowed this was where Harv kept his pot and his still. He’d cook his mash right in them big holes in the rock, and he kept his still in the biggest one. When she was runnin’ there’d be this little feather of steam comin’ out the hole.

“Harv’s secret never got out. We kept it right close in the family, and the Indians was into it with us. But the
shine
got out right enough. It was drunk down in Belleville and Kingston and even so far away as Ottawa. My gawd, she
was
good stuff!”

Many tales were told that day, and Harv Gunter was the subject of most of them.

Clary recalled how he had taught her to hunt bear.

“When I turned ten, he took me out on his trapline. After he was satisfied I could keep up, handle dogs, and shoot pretty straight, he took me bear huntin’.

“Harv never killed but one a year – always a young boar in its prime. Wouldn’t never kill sows or cubs nor let any of us do it. Nor he wouldn’t kill a bear two years runnin’ in the same part of the country. Used to tell us, ‘Give the bears a fair shake and they’ll do likewise,’ was what he said.

“Fall of the year when I was twelve, he took me way to hell and gone back into the country by canoe to get a bear to fill the winter fat barrel. We looked over five or six afore he found the one he wanted – a roly-poly so fat he looked like a big black sausage. Harv dropped him with a shot to the head from his old .44.40.

“Our canoe was not too far away and downhill from where we was so Harv figured to carry Mister Bear down there to skin him out and cut him up on the beach, where everythin’ was handy. He was a pretty heavy lift but we strung him upside down from a tamarack
pole and off we went with one of us on each end of the pole and Harv leadin’ the way.

“Trouble was … the damn bear weren’t dead! The bullet had creased his skull and knocked him arse over tea kettle but on the way down he started comin’ ’round and chompin’ his jaws no more’n an arm’s length from the seat of Harv’s trousers.

“Course I yelled for Harv to stop and shoot the bear again, but we was into a patch of deadfall timber from an old fire and it was heavy goin’ and Harv was hot and mad and wouldn’t stop.

“ ‘Don’t you fret,’ he yells over his shoulder. ‘Bugger ain’t et me yet, and we ain’t stoppin’ ’cause there’s an axe at the beach so there’s no need to waste another bullet.’

“We hustled on with the both of us right out at the ends of the pole and it bendin’ near double. The bear gettin’ more and more uppity, and me yellin’ at Harv to stop and shoot it, and him yellin’ back, ‘Don’t you fret! We ain’t et yet!’

“We hit the beach at the run, and when we dropped the pole Harv went for the axe and swung on the bear. Took him four or five whacks to kill it dead, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t say he was sorry while he was at it. Not to
me!
To the
bear!

“ ‘I has to finish you off the hard way, young feller,’ he says kind of sorrowful,’ ‘cause I’m not so good a shot as I used to be.’ ”

Harv Gunter seldom apologized to anyone about anything. After we had all had a little noontime nap and refreshed ourselves with black tea, Lawrence told the story of how Harv had dealt with the first people from “out front” who had the temerity to settle by the lake.

“That were late in the twenties. They’d been a few strangers come to Wes’makoon afore that, mostly hunters or prospectors or the like, but they was fly-by-nights as never stayed for long. Then one of the high-and-mighty Eaton crowd from Toronto got wind of Wes’makoon
and come for a look-see at the north end aboard a buckboard on a logging trail – the only road into the lake in those times.

“The fellow liked what he saw so much he decided to build himself a hunting and fishing lodge. He did her up proper! Built a castle of logs and timber grand enough for a prince, which was his style ’cause he owned a department store in Toronto half as big as the whole of Bancroft and had a mail-order business selling everything from ready-cut, build-your-own house kits to fancy women’s knickers. Sent out catalogues thick as the Bible of all the stuff they had for sale right across the country. Every family round about had the latest Eaton’s catalogue to study over and order out of, and an old one out in the backhouse where it could be put to good use – except the shiny pages which weren’t no damn good for nothing.

“Anyways, Eaton built his big place on a point at the north end. He was the lord of creation there for certain … but Harv Gunter was still number one on the lake and the country all around and seemed like the Eaton fellow was smart enough to understand that. Sometimes he’d invite Harv into the sawdust castle, as we called it, and give him a drink, though his lordship never touched the stuff hisself. And sometimes Harv, who never liked to be beholden, would guide the Eatons and their guests fishing where the big ones was … sort of tit for tat, you might call it.

“Well now, one time his lordship sent a message down to Ananias saying as he wanted five canoes at the Eaton dock at 9:00 a.m. sharp next morning to take a party of important guests out fishing. Harv warn’t none too pleased because it sounded too much like an order, and that put his back up. Anyways, he only had two canoes at Ananias and ’twas too late to get more without he’d have to chase all over the lake to find some, so he settled for two canoes and three rowing skiffs.

“We set off with them early enough next morning, but a stiff headwind blew up and slowed us down so we never got to the castle
’til a little after nine. We was tied up there and waiting while one of Eaton’s flunkeys went up to the big house to git his master, who come back down with his crowd of bigwigs and all their fishing gear.

“Eaton comes to the edge of the dock and there he stops and gives Harv, who was in one of the canoes, a look black as thunder.

“ ‘Mis-tur-Gun-ter!’ he says slow and cold, but loud, ‘I believe I ordered
five canoes
 … 
for nine o’clock
. I only see two and it’s twenty minutes past the hour.… Can’t you
read
, Mister Gunter?’

“I was surprised Harv didn’t blow his top, but he just got to his feet real slow, put his hands on his hips steady as a rock, and says as smooth as silk, ‘Well now,
Mister
Eaton, I can read good enough out of your goddamn catalogues to pick an order and mail it off. But what happens then Mister Eaton? I waits and I waits, and maybe someday a parcel comes … and when I opens her I finds some goddamn thing I never ordered, don’t want, and can’t use, along with a piece of paper with printing onto it as says, SUBSTITUTED!’