Death on a Foggy Spring Portage, Page 2

  Part 2: Happy Trails to You

  Sometimes a portage starts bad, and just gets worse.

  You’ll know the kind, if you’ve ever done a spring trip that didn’t work out.

  The kind of portage where the leaves underfoot are slippery and you learn a few dance steps that you didn’t know when you started the trip. The kind where you wish you were the one carrying the canoe, so at least the dripping trees wouldn’t drip on your head.

  And the person carrying the canoe wishes he were carrying the pack, because it’s hard to dance in wet leaves with a canoe on your head, and it’s even harder to leap boggy areas without thinking you’re in training to become part of the Olympic Synchronized Canoehead Team.

  And someone in your group has died face down in the World’s Biggest Mudhole.

  The portage to Serpentine Lake was as bad as all of that, and then some, and our little group of six snaked along the soggy path in silence for a while. We should have been talking about Hughie’s death, but there was a strong tension in the air. It was as if we no longer trusted each other.

  The first part of the trail was along the side of a hill. A number of little gullies, probably dry in mosquito season, were soggy with last night’s rain. What remained of the trail was full of ruts and squishy sections and bad angles for walking. Several trees had blown over the trail, some of them undoubtedly from the early morning thunderstorm.

  It was slow going, and the group steadily spread out, with the more sure-footed people passing and moving ahead of those who were cautious. People carrying only packs had an easier time getting over trees and leaping rivulets of water.

  I guessed we weren’t in a good mood. An unexplained death can do that to a group. I figured it would make a good sociological study. But nobody seems to study canoeing groups.

  Eventually, I found myself resting on another wet log, this time beside Peggy. She and Lloyd had started out together, at the first of our column, but she’d fallen behind. I guess it’s easier to leap a creek with a pack than with a canoe, so Lloyd had kept the lead, increasing the distance between them. She’d finally set the canoe down to give herself a rest.

  The pack I was carrying was heavy, and I was ready for a rest, too.

  For a moment I looked up at the trees. A white-throated sparrow called its Sweet Sweet Canada Canada Canada mating song over and over again. The brown leaves of an oak made a sound in the wind, like an anaconda in long grass. The tightness in my chest had increased, and my head throbbed.

  “I think maybe someone killed him.” I said, abruptly. Peggy, a short stocky woman with light brown hair and black-rimmed glasses, turned suddenly. She was normally a quiet person, letting her husband, Lloyd, do the talking.

  Peggy’d remained silent last night at the fire, as Lloyd had taken out his frustration with life on Hughie. Hughie’d been lucky in life. The gods had given him brains and looks. His parents had left him money. Lloyd, on the other hand, had had only struggle, bad luck, and, last night, a half-bottle of whiskey. We’d wondered if there would be a physical conflict, but Hughie had just leaned over and whispered something to Lloyd. Lloyd had abruptly turned quiet and gone to bed.

  “I wondered about that,” she answered. I could see she was thinking back to the time, three hours before, when we’d found Hughie dead in the mudhole.

  “I mean,” I continued, “well, it seems a little strange for him to just wander into all that mud and water. After all -” I turned to look at her “we all looked at that part of the trail the day before. That’s why we made camp, where we did, after all.”

  “It was dark...” Peggy began. It had likely been three or four in the morning when Hughie had packed up his tent and shouldered his canoe and disappeared into the darkness in the middle of a thunderstorm.

  I started to get annoyed. “Several people told me Hughie could have climbed a mountain in the dark, even with a canoe in front of his eyes. And no matter how much he was drinking at the campsite.”

  My bottom end was getting wet again from log-sitting, but I paused another moment. “Who would do it?” I asked Peggy. “Who would want to actually kill Hughie?”

  “Try Angeline, for one,” Peggy said, calmly.

  “Angeline?” That stopped me just as I was adjusting the pack. I couldn’t imagine the blonde killing someone. Even quieter than Peggy, she’d said little around the campfire. Of course, us men have this in-built belief that cute blondes don’t go around killing people. “How well did she know him?”

  “She’s his sister.” Peggy started loading the canoe, lifting one end, and walking under it until she had the yoke on her shoulders. “Or his half-sister, anyway. Among other relationships.” She turned to look out from under the canoe. “If I were her, I’d have killed him a long time ago.” Then she added. “If you were a woman, you’d understand.”

  I wasn’t a woman, and I wasn’t absolutely sure I’d understand, so I said nothing.

  We caught up with the other four people, at the next washout. The rain had turned a ten-meter wide gully into a swamp. You could see where there had been a few logs thrown into a damp section by last year’s portagers, but all that was mostly submerged in mud with a thin layer of water on top of it. It looked as inviting as yesterday’s porridge.

  Going uphill was possible, but difficult because of the steepness of the slope. And downhill the gully quickly joined a permanent swamp. Lloyd was just coming back from a bio-break up behind a white cedar when we got there. I needed to go, too, but thought I’d wait a bit; people never adequately mark where they’ve been, behind such bushes.

  It was about noon. The fog was gone, and sun shone fuzzily through a light layer of clouds. A chilly wind started to move the tops of the trees. I shivered.

  “I think we have a problem,” Cam said, waving a page obviously torn from Bushwhacker. We all turned to look at him. “The wind’s been switching counterclockwise in the last half hour. And look at those clouds.” We did. Patches of dark, low clouds were just starting to lizard their way across the sky. “If this article’s right, we’re in for a storm, fairly soon.”

  I just nodded. I’d had a minor migraine headache since the thunderstorm the night before, and it was getting worse by the minute. Something nasty was sliding its way into the lake country of Ontario. In early spring sudden changes of weather are not a canoeist’s friends.

  “How are we going to get across,” Lloyd asked, looking around at the mud.

  “Someone go get Hughie,” Baker said. Into the appalled silence that followed, he added, “Hey, Hughie and mud sort of go together.”

  Angeline, Cam’s girlfriend, had a better idea. She slid one canoe into the mud and water, then pushed a second one past it. Using all three canoes, we walked carefully across on an improvised pontoon bridge. I came across last, helping drag the canoes to the far side using a couple of ropes.

  By the time I’d got ready to continue, the rest of the group, except for Baker, was disappearing along the trail. He was strapping a paddle to the inside of the canoe with a piece of masking tape.

  I called to Baker as he was about to load the canoe onto his short frame. I needed to ask him a few questions. That’s what friends are for.

  “Do you think,” I asked slowly, “that Hughie might have been killed by someone?”

  Baker laughed. “I didn’t do it! I was watching a movie at the time. I was doing my laundry. Practicing differential calculus. Whatever. Maybe he died because I willed him dead.” He looked up at the fast-moving sky. “But if that’s the case, it sure took long enough.”

  I wasn’t pleased. I’m an antisocial cuss at best, and hadn’t really wanted to come on a group trip in the first place, and Baker had really had to plead for company on this three-day trip. I most certainly didn’t care about feuds between people who should have been enjoying wilderness, not waiting to off each other in the dark.

  I prefer a solitary canoe trip. When I do go with someone else, most of the time I go with Baker.
Way down on my list of choices is a group trip, but I’d never dreamed of ending up on a trip like this one. Last night had been a circus, with Baker needling Hughie and Hughie getting under Lloyd’s skin.

  The alcohol hadn’t helped. I’ve never figured out why drinking and camping seem to go together so easily, but last night’s campfire had been an object lesson in the advantages of sobriety.

  But I had to find out about a few things. I had a feeling attempting to remain in a primordial state of ignorance might get dangerous in the next day or so

  The sky was filled with circling birds and bare trees reached towards a roof of clouds. It seemed to me that I’d come to the church, somewhere south of Bancroft only to find a nest of vipers behind the altar.

  “And why do you seem to dislike Hughie so much?” I glowered at him. “You bugged him last night until I thought he was going to shove you into the lake. I’m surprised he didn’t. Then you’ve acted today like you’re glad he’s dead. Well, I couldn’t stand the arrogant bastard, and I hardly knew him. But I didn’t wish him dead. And I didn’t make jokes about him after he was dead.” Well, only a few, I thought.

  Baker, looking even more like a renegade troll than usual, set the canoe down and sat on it. “You know what I think, Ted ol’ buddy” he said. “I think it’s very, very strange that Hughie drowned in a mudhole. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find out that someone shoved him into it, and sat on him afterwards. I just wish I knew who did it, so I could present a medal to whoever did it.

  “I grew up with Hughie,” Baker said, looking into the woods. “We went to school together.”

  “You had a falling out?” I asked, backing the pack against a maple tree for support.

  Baker laughed again. “We were never friends. We shared a classroom in South Ganaraska Elementary School. He’d corner me at recess and beat the crap out of me. For no particular reason, except it amused him. He was always tough, and strong, and fast, and smart and nasty. But the teachers always liked him. Like I said, smart. I was always getting blamed for things he started.”

  I didn’t say a thing. I’m good at that. Sometimes.

  “He used to take his shoes off and kick me with his sock feet. Didn’t leave marks, that way. I’d give him any money I had and he’d throw it into the woods behind the school. I used to go looking for it on the weekends.”

  ‘Angeline is his sister,” I said. ‘Or so I was told.”

  Baker suddenly shut up, got up, and shouldered the canoe. “Let’s not talk about Angeline,” he said. “You and I are still friends.” Just before he got going, he said, “I hope the last thing he saw was Angeline’s boot coming at him.”

  “You think that was the way it happened?” I pulled on a pair of gloves in the growing chill and started on the trail behind him..

  “Nah,” he yelled from under the canoe. “She probably got her tentmate Cam to do it for her. Or maybe Lloyd was afraid Hughie would tell Peggy about him and his secretary.”

  Who? I wondered. Whose secretary?

  Then Baker stopped again, and turned to me. “You know what I think?” he asked me. “I think Hughie figured the mudhole was a test of his manhood, like he’d trained for, and he was sure he could walk through it in the middle of the night in a thunderstorm with a canoe and a pack on his back. I think he tripped on a tree root and drowned himself. That’s what I think.”

  I might have thought so, too, if Hughie’s Blackberry had been in his shirt pocket when I found him. If that pack strap hadn’t been undone when we hauled him out of the mud.

  But I didn’t say that to Baker.

  We hoofed it along the trail, trying to catch up to the others.

  The sky was covered with scudding clouds, coiling across the sky. The bare spring treetops were singing in the wind. The first few snowflakes came down, and settled on Baker’s moving green canoe. The world was returning to the crypt.

  I felt a cold dread at the pit of my stomach as we hurried to catch up to the others.

  ***