 
Death on a Rocky Little Island

By _Lenny Everson_

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Copyright Lenny Everson 2011

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****

Phil was a close friend, but now we sort of avoid each other. Maybe he can go screw himself, because I've done all I can. But it didn't start that way.

***

Of course I lied to Phil. The son-of-bitch deserved it, after all.

Hey, a lie isn't always bad. Some lies are designed to help people through bad times. Some lies - like Santa Claus and the provincial lottery - are merely part of people's dreams.

I've never figured out whether dreams are the best or the worst lies.

So I made a special lie to Phil. Just enough to make his eyes light up and his heart skip a beat or two.

But, I swear to you, I don't think anyone could have seen the crude line of fate that connected that elaborate and comic lie to a dead guy on a rocky little island, a couple of weeks later and a few hundred miles away.

This is a book about lies, as you've probably figured out by now. At least partly, anyway.

It's also about islands, so I have to explain about me and Phil and canoes and islands before I get too much further.

This book took a lot of writing and remembering and thinking, so I thank you for reading it. But I suspect that, a year down the way all you'll remember of it is that snapping turtles breathe through their anuses in winter, and you'll not be able to remember where you got that information, or whether it's true or not.

Islands figure pretty big in this story, so I'll start with them. Then I'll get on to my elaborate con job, and Phil, and how we ended up in a canoe in waters designed for ocean freighters.

First thing to get straight is that islands weren't the death of Phil – that is, it wasn't Phil who died – so I'm spared that thought in long nights. It was someone else who died a snake-sucking death on a rocky little island. Someone else took that heart-stopping leap into eternity, the leap that's always climbing the inside of our skulls like a little black gecko lizard.

But the dead person comes later, too. You'll just have to wait for that.

Okay. Islands.

I like islands. When I was a little kid, we lived in the Muskokas for a year, where my parents taught in one-room schools.

The Muskokas are a set of lakes that have been the playground of Ontario for a hundred years or more. Like any place else, they have a number of year-round residents, and kids that need to be taught. My father, in a bout of restlessness, found jobs for both himself and for my mother.

My mother taught in a schoolroom in the village we lived in. The locals had converted a town meeting hall into two rooms; half became the elementary school, and the other half became our home for the year. It was post-war, the baby boom had caught the country by surprise, and there was a desperate shortage of classrooms and teachers.

That summer, on the weekends, dad would pile the family into a fourteen-foot plywood boat he'd built in spring, and buzz out across Lake of Bays. The noise of the air-cooled three-horse outboard made conversation difficult, so we'd watch the cottages and seagulls and the other boats disappear into our wake.

I'd watch every island as it came up, then turn to watch it go by.

Sometimes that summer, or late into the fall, seeing the longing in my face, dad would stop at some uninhabited little island and let us out. After the first couple, I was the only one that wanted out. The family would wait in the boat while I "explored" the island.

And sometimes all I did was go to the far side and sit in the shrubbery and pretend I was all alone. Like I'd anchored my sloop in the lagoon and the ruins of civilization were just behind some palms.

Those islands were pretty small; any island in the Muskokas big enough to have a cottage on it usually did.

I didn't know then, and I don't now, why I had such a fascination with islands. Maybe it was just that an isolated little boy needed an isolated little place to sit on. And watch the clouds drift by.

Now I'm older. I stand on shores and watch islands in the sunset, riding the lake like worlds just out of reach.

I still like to be alone a lot. It's the way I am. I dream of being alone as the sun goes down and the silences and darkness come sliding in among the trees like a mottled velvet anaconda, swallowing the day.

It had been months since I'd watched the evening come down in solitude. I was getting antsy. That has to be taken into account.

Win Szczedziwoj, rainy-day photographer (that's me), was real desperate. I hadn't developed a tic in my cheek yet, but it was getting close. That's pronounced "Cheh - Gee - Voy", although adding an "sh" at the front makes it more accurate. The "Win" is for "Winter". Don't ask.

So I had a hunger for some isolated little island in the rain, swept by wind and pounded by the waves and home to an isolated little photographer pounded by his own winds and rains.

And wondering if his little red tent will blow down at three in the morning. Stay tuned.

Aisha, my wife, thinks I'm a nut case.

But she says that hitting the singles bars at her age would only get her another nut case, and she'd hate to start training a man to rub her back properly all over again. So she figures she's stuck with some guy who periodically disappears into the wilderness with a camera and a canoe.

Maybe Aisha should learn from Phil. About how to be demented, anyway. She's hopelessly sane. I've tried for years to set a bad example, but it hasn't taken.

I told Aisha I wanted to go paddle out into Georgian Bay to take pictures on a little island during a storm.

Now I want you to know that I'm giving this as straight as I can, but my first attempt to record it was just a list of things I did and Aisha read it through and said it was going to be dull because it was too short.

So I've added in a lot of my thoughts and reconstructed the dialog as much as I could, checking it where I could. Some of it I've only half remembered. Actually a lot of it I've only half remembered, but I think I got the speech patterns of the various people involved more or less as they spoke, so it's probably closer to reality than most people would credit, especially since I've gone back over it a couple of times.

A couple of the people might deny some of it, but I remember better than they do. Or maybe it's just that the guy writing the book can tell his own lies in his own way.

Anyway, Aisha was tending a window box full of green growing things. "Georgian Bay's pretty big, isn't it?" she asked, picking fluff off her sweater.

I allowed that it was a pretty big blob of water.

"Bigger, say, than the state of Massachusetts?"

"Maybe, but we're Canadians, eh?" I laughed. "What do we care about Massachusetts?" Can't say I didn't try.

"So, bigger than the entire province of Prince Edward Island?"

"Well, yes. I suppose. Maybe. But what isn't?" My nose suddenly got itchy and I rubbed it.

"How many miles of wind out there?" She'd been in a canoe before. She knew that wind builds up over a flat expanse of water. The waves build up, too. After about three miles of wind, a small canoe should watch out. After seven miles of wind, even a large heavy and stable canoe will be surfing.

"Don't know. Maybe sixty or seventy."

"And how long is your canoe? Seventeen feet?" She knew I would take Gypsy, the larger canoe.

"Yeh."

"Doesn't look like a good ratio, to me." There was a pause. "How long a stretch of water does it take to make waves that make you scared shitless?"

"Two, maybe three." I've always been a wimp.

"And what's so interesting about these islands?" Aisha had made her point on the first issue. She turned to watering the plants in the bay window.

I explained that these islands were smooth rock with gnarly pines on them, and that people often saw this as genuinely picturesque.

"Smooth rock?"

"Photographically interesting rock."

"Twisted, weathered pines?"

I nodded.

She made a point of contemplating the basil she was growing in the window box. Aisha had a pasta passion you had to experience to believe. "And just how do these rocks get smooth and these pines get all weathered?"

I contemplated the basil, too. "Watch for slugs," I advised. I know nothing about growing anything green, but I wanted a break to think. Unfortunately, it didn't work.

"You can go, if you really want to," she said, poking at a leaf that had the bravery to look pale. "But I'd prefer you had someone else along."

"So they can tell you where to find my smooth, weathered bones?"

"Something like that." She put down the watering can and folded her arms.

I sighed, for effect. "Okay, I'll get someone to go with me. So we can drown together."

She examined the marjoram. Now Aisha knew and I knew that two people in a canoe aren't any safer than one, in theory. And I'm a wimp and Aisha knows it. But I tend to get optimistic some times, and get myself in trouble, speaking in a canoe sense. If I have someone with me, however, I usually tend to be more cautious.

So I agreed. I would pay a photographic visit to some islands, and take some pictures during a storm. I would paddle out to these islands from the mainland in a canoe.

You seldom get perfect days for canoeing, so I reserved in my mind the option to cancel, depending on the canoeing Factors of Misery.

There are four factors of misery in canoeing; wind, rain, bugs, and cold. Wind's a factor because 99 9/9 of the time it's against you when you're canoeing. You can count on it. And if it's blowing hard enough, you'd best stay home, unless you're on one of those short-trip-into-the-bush-and-get-drunk expeditions. I don't knock them – they're quite worth while at times and I think the government should subsidize them.

Rain is the second factor, simply because it makes you cold. Even on a hot day, you get cold. Sitting in your tent watching the rain drip off the trees – well, I've done it, but you have be really desperate to get away. And drinking in the rain just makes you morose.

Bugs arrive in the spring with the first blooming of the choke-cherry bushes. The blackflies come out then. The mosquitoes follow in June. By August you're down to the deer flies and the horse flies and a couple of unidentified species, but they're a minor nuisance. In June the bugs can be a torment, so you plan trips that keep you in windy areas with short portages – something you can run down, carrying a canoe, if necessary.

There are people who enjoy cold-weather canoeing, and it has its advantages, if you dress right. But cold weather means cold water beneath you, so you want to do your canoeing on a calm, sunny day.

At my age, I can still put up with two of the four canoeing factors of misery, if they're not too extreme.

It was mid-September, and the bugs were mostly gone. And I'd like a day of rain, because that's what I do, take pictures in the rain. So I was watching for wind and cold.

And if the factors were in my favor, I would get someone to go with me, just like I promised Aisha.

But who? Abe would go. He'd go, just to get away from the wife and kids, but his oldest son had a soccer tournament that weekend. I know that, because his kid has a soccer tournament every damn weekend. I don't think the kid plays any regular games any more, just goes to tournaments. And Abe's wife doesn't drive.

Talk to Abe and all I'd get is a desperate look, a mumbled excuse, and an attempt to be cheerful about it. "Maybe later this summer." he'd say.

The cheerfulness would be the worst part. It was the most painful cheerfulness you could find this side of the cancer ward at the local hospital.

Now if you're talking real cheerfulness, you're talking Johnny G. Sure. Johnny might go. He can paddle, and he's always cheerful.

But Johnny's not someone I'd like to canoe with. Johnny swims like a dolphin. Four hours in a pool are nothing to him. Which would be great, but he has no fear of water.

He's liable to think a squall coming in from offshore is "interesting" and want to go out for a look. And if the canoe were to roll under mountainous waves of cold water? He'd chuckle and say, "Hey! Let's swim back." God knows, he might make it, surfing all the way to shore.

And me walking along the bottom, hanging onto my photography stuff. Sure, Johnny.

One thing I've learned; as you get older you get to divide your friends into two groups, those you do things with, and those you used to do things with.

The ones you can do things with are slotted into their tiny little portions of life, with interlocking obligations to spouse, family, work, and a whole bunch of silly-ass things they've thought up themselves, like watching sports on television.

To get any companions in adventure, a man has to put up with some curious friends, and half the time agree to reciprocate by pretending to be interested in whatever juvenile joys and toys those friends have.

Toys are fine. But by the time a guy has got to what is quaintly called "middle age" most men have abandoned any dreams they had, in favor of family and work and mowing the lawn.

The rest have cherished and protected their dreams and fantasies as they grow older. They've learned to hide them, but it gets them through a long day at work. And it's better then thinking about their arteries hardening.

Not that any man at my age ever stops thinking about that for more than a millisecond. It makes every dream that much more vital.

Toys, joys, and dreams. They come as a package deal with any man over forty. If I was going to have someone paddle me out to a barren island in a spring rainstorm, I would inevitably have to pay for it.

"I'd prefer you didn't go with anybody stupid or crazy," Aisha said. When I raised a finger, she added, "but most of your friends fall into that category anyway. Besides, who else would go with you?"

"I was thinking of Phil," I said. Now my head was itchy and I scratched it.

"Good choice. He fits both of the categories at once. Besides, you owe him one or two."

I owed Phil more than one or two. He was famous for his practical jokes. I'd tried to get him back but didn't have quite the knack. One time for example, we'd agreed to meet for a fishing trip on Lake Scugog. He emailed me instructions that I was to "stop at the Master Bait shop on South Street and get some of their special 8-inch worms." When I tried to ask for directions (there is no bait shop there) I came within a hair of ending up in the town jail for the night. Then, of course, there was the incident with the painted goat, which I won't go into.

"A good one, if only for the painted goat," Aisha suggested.

Now I like Phil, let's get that straight. Even when I can't stand him, I still like him.

Like Aisha says, Phil's actually crazy in a lot of ways. He's also the sanest crazy person I know. Just ask him. He says that to be a male human animal in this corner of the galaxy, you've either got to drink seriously or be crazy.

Certain other genders (no names mentioned) get the feeling that being a man is a piece of cake of the Sara Lee instant rising variety. I prefer Phil's vision of the male universe. In the Phil cosmos, a man retains his sanity by cultivating a garden with three varieties of mental flowers growing.

The first flower is blue, Phil says. It's for childish games and toys he refuses to put away. You can see these as immaturity. Or you can see them as continuity.

The second, according to Phil, is white, for a hard edge of facts. Men love facts, whether it be the truth about UFO abductions or the number of elephants it takes to tow a battleship.

The last is red, for fictions carefully guarded as fact, treasured as true, as believed as baloney. But denied only to closest friends, with a big smile.

Phil cultivated all these in his mind's garden; he said he they were essential to a definition of a man. They were certainly essential to any understanding of Phil.

Okay, okay. I know you want to find out about the dead guy, and not ramble around forever in this shit about men. But what happens all happens in due course, and if you want the summary, go get a back issue of the Globe and Mail on microfiche and read all about it. If you want the whole story, read on, but you're going to have to take it as I tell it. I think it's more interesting that way, but what do I know.

\---------------------------------------

About them fictions. They're actually lies, but "fictions" sounds better

Okay, they're lies.

I lied to Phil because he needed a good lie. He knows that lies are essential to a man's manliness. So it was no problem lying to Phil. Besides Phil does enough of it himself. Lying to Phil, that is.

If that isn't making sense, someone's lying to someone right now, and I thought I could get away with it.

Anyway, that's why I like Phil; he's definitely demented. He abuses, molests, treasures, and fondles his lies. They charm him; they torment him. Especially lies about islands.

Phil sees islands as places where somebody, somewhere, might have buried a pile of loot. Instant wealth. An island represents a very practical matter of getting very rich very quickly.

I can see him in my mind, on the shore, his tall, knobby frame leaning forward towards the water, his eyes fixed on an island. Over his shoulder he's slung a metal detector, and on his head is a wide floppy hat.

He's spent his fifty years dreaming of getting rich, and hasn't given up yet. So I conned him with an island.

But first, I had to get Phil out in a canoe in Georgian Bay. I hadn't a clue how.

So first, I went to see Dwayne. Dwayne knows stuff. Actually, Dwayne, you see, knows everything.

He knows how to skin a deer and fly a plane (though he hasn't actually done either of these things himself) and is a storehouse of miscellaneous facts like Canadians eat more pickles and make more phone calls per capita than anybody else in the world.

And none of it has ever done him enough good to matter. I guess that's because he's either too logical or not logical enough, I don't know which.

A fellow will advise him to buy shares in Acme Products, and he'll say, "Acme! Their products suck and the management's looting the company and they haven't done anything but lose money for years." Then he'll buy shares in Betta Products, which make "good stuff that's the wave of the future."

Eventually Acme will take over Betta, but only after Betta's gone bankrupt and the shares are worthless. And he never figures it out, even later.

Not that I should talk. I'm a former economics prof who never made the right investments, either, and I should know better.

Dwayne's a big guy, to say the least. He's a few inches taller than me and a hundred pounds heavier. He's thickly bearded and has a love of flannel plaid shirts and work pants that make him look like the bad guy in a movie about people lost in the woods.

If I had that great a mass-to-surface ratio, I'd have an electric fan strapped to my back and go around in a thong, but Dwayne never seems to get hot.

When I phoned him, he invited me into his apartment, ten floors up, with a good view of the Zellers parking lot and a new housing division. He was into blue plaid with jeans, so I knew he was in a good mood. He's usually in a good mood, anyway although he complains a lot.

"Tea?" he asked. I nodded, although most teas taste like dead weeds in water to me. But at least I wouldn't finish it too quickly, which I have a tendency to do to most beverages.

"So what can I do for you," Dwayne said, when we'd passed the small talk and actually had cups of tea in front of us on his Arborite table. The table has dozens of burn marks, because he often solders circuits there. It also had a hard hat, which seemed odd, since Dwayne had an office job. He put a carton of milk between us like a Great Wall of Skepticism.

Let me tell you about Dwayne's apartment. Dwayne collects things. He's got things stashed around the apartment in bundles and shelves. He's got whatever anyone might need somewhere in his apartment, in the storage area in the basement, or in a barn that he and another guy rent.

I visited the barn, once. It was like finding a lost treasureland of the non-valuable, a collection of that stuff that inhabits the gray netherworld between stuff that's valuable enough to sell and stuff that should be left out in front of the house on Monday for the big green city truck to haul to it's newest methane mountain and covered up with dirt.

The whole barn should have been covered with pumice, so some day some archeologist might dig it all up and say, "What the fuck did they need that stuff for?" I wandered around the barn for an hour and found a whole wagonload of stuff that I'd needed in the last year and stuff that I might very well need in the next year. I'd escaped, jogging out of there before I got infected with some sort of accumulating infection and started my own barn.

What he can't keep in the barn, he keeps in his apartment. One wonders how many girls Dwayne's brought back to his place, only to have their first thoughts be, "I gotta get a new phone number, quick."

And he likes it all visible, so things get stacked on the floor, which means it's visible if you don't count stuff piled on top of it or the dust that collects in places that are just too hard to clean.

"I want to go canoeing," I said. "Out on the 30,000 islands in Georgian Bay."

He gave me a thumbs-down. "Can't come," he said. "Got some sort of a date. That day, whatever day it is. Guy out Stony Creek way has something to sell. An almost complete set of women's curling trading cards. I got a chick. She's interested in going with me."

Now, I doubted that. Dwayne's love life is always rocky, and lately it had been a real dry spell. He's a real guy sort of guy, and finds it as hard to understand women as women find it hard to understand him.

But I wouldn't have wanted to take him canoeing, anyway, unless I got a lot bigger canoe. And he learned to like camping. And learned when to stop talking.

But his assumption that I came for information was accurate, anyway. Not that it was a hard guess, since even guys tended to tap into his knowledge. He resented it at times, till he realized that was all the company he was likely to get most of the time.

"Darn," I said, as sadly as I could. "You're always easy to talk to." I added more sugar and milk to the tea. "I guess I'll have to try for someone else. Aisha doesn't want me to go alone. Got any ideas?"

I tried to categorize the stuff closest to the table while Dwayne ruminated a while on mutual acquaintances, with a tendency to dwell on those of the opposite gender. "Take Patty, he said. "She'd be a great little companion on a trip. Unless she got sunburned nipples out in the canoe. You'll have to put some lotion on them. If she forgets." He looked at me earnestly, leaning forward. "There's flat rock. And lots of sunshine out there, you know. Great place for suntanning. I've always wondered if she has an overall tan. I bet she does. She's the type. Outdoorsy, you know. And cuter'n a spaniel puppy." He winked at me. "And she's not speaking to that idiot boyfriend now. So I hear."

"Or," he went on, "there's Alma Hetcher. Good old Alma. She's on the plump side. But you've got a big canoe. And she seems so eager. I imagine you could get her to do anything you wanted. Just ask. As well," he added, "as paddling your canoe. And carrying a packsack or two. Great little snuggler, I bet. 'Specially on a rainy night. Get a double sleeping bag. Lots of room to move around in, and you're set."

I let him go on a while: an active fantasy life is pretty well essential in Dwayne's case, most of the time. Either of those two girls would have made better travelling companions than anybody I was likely to come up with, but much as Aisha might accuse me, half seriously, of "canoeing" with other women, if it ever really happened she'd know it within a day somehow, and the consequences wouldn't bear imagining. I got a small shudder down my spine just not imagining them.

Sometime in there a small black-and-white cat came quietly and nervously out of the bedroom.

"Where'd you get a cat?" I asked.

Dwayne glanced around, his face reddening, as he whispered "Shit," and reached for the phone.

"Well, I thought of Phil as a backup plan."

"Phil?" Dwayne shook a shaggy head. "I guess if you're stuck he'd do."

I scratched my chin. "First I've got to think of a way to get him interested in canoeing out there. Know of any treasure buried out on one of those islands?"

"There's one," Dwayne said, to my surprise. "I'll get a map." He rose from the table.

The phone rang. Halfway across the kitchen Dwayne looked from the phone to the table, with a tiny hesitation. It was enough.

The cat was on his head before Dwayne could reach either the phone or the hard hat. The cat yowled, and Dwayne yowled, and they headed as a package for the bathroom.

I picked up the phone. It was someone I didn't know, and I told the person that Dwayne, unfortunately, wasn't available at the moment. I offered to take a number, but the other party hung up. From the bathroom I could hear the sound of the shower.

In a moment the cat ran out, soaking wet, and vanished back into the bedroom.

Dwayne came out, a towel wrapped around his head, his shirt dripping.

"Bleeding much?" I asked.

"A bit. The first time it happened I tried to pull the cat off. That wasn't a good idea. Or so the people at the clinic said."

"You could wear the hard hat all the time."

"I find it uncomfortable. Anyway most of the time I can get it on before Jinny gets to me."

"This happen a lot?"

"Every time the phone rings," Dwayne said. "I don't know why."

"The cat could be put outdoors." The apartment was eight floors up and had no balcony.

Dwayne grinned. "Haven't I thought of it often enough. But it's not my cat. Jenny left it here for me to take care of. I guess its her new boyfriend's. Allergic to cats."

I remembered that Jenny had been a former girlfriend: obviously she still thought of Dwayne as a convenience of sorts. "Jinny's the cat. Jenny's the girl?"

"You remember Jenny. The one with the spiky hairdo." He loosened his collar.

Jenny was one of Dwayne's big passions. She tended to come back and live with him between her episodes with other boyfriends. She always returned with some story about what a bastard her now-ex boyfriend had been and how great Dwayne looked in comparison. Dwayne seemed to believe it. Personally I'd have sent her and her cat out for a walk to Havana. To each his own, I guess.

"You understand, then. About the cat."

"Sure." I took a sip of the tepid tea. It was like something from a puddle in the driveway on a July afternoon, but without the chewy bits."You were looking for a map?"

Dwayne disconnected the phone cord. "Right. Right." He got a road map of Ontario and spread it out on the table. "First thing you have to understand," he said, "is about the money. It was made during prohibition."

"Prohibition?" I asked.

"1919 to the end of 1933" he said. "The Americans voted down alcohol. And us Canadians smuggled the stuff by the gigagallons across the lakes. Hundreds of millions of bucks flowed into Canada." He looked at me. "You don't insist on pirate treasure or anything, do you?"

"No, no. Phil is happy with any sort of buried money. He's not fussy."

"Thought so." Dwayne removed the towel and inspected the cuts in a hand mirror. Downstairs a dog started barking. Dwayne pressed a button under the table, and the barking turned to a couple of yelps and stopped. "Well, I might have some buried money up in those islands."

"I never heard of any smuggling up that way."

"Most people haven't," Dwayne told me. "Almost all the smuggling was across Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. And across the Detroit River. Maybe eighty percent of the stuff getting into the States came across around Windsor. Into Detroit."

"Makes sense to me," I said. "For one thing, the US is only a mile or so across the Detroit River."

Dwayne nodded. "A lot of boats crossed that river. There was even a rumour of a pipe. People said it was laid across the bottom of the river to pump whiskey over."

"Why didn't Canada vote prohibition in," I asked. "Were we more sensible, or just a bunch of lushes?"

"Oh, we did. Canada had given women the vote in 1917. Then just like the states, Canada went dry. Ontario voted in a Methodist preacher as premier and the next thing you know there wasn't a legal place to get a drink north of Mexico. Except Quebec, of course."

"Except for medicinal purposes," I guessed.

"One doctor wrote over two hundred prescriptions in one day. After that before they doctors to writing 30 a month."

"So how do the Thirty Thousand Islands fit into this?" Dwayne is capable of infinite digression and I wanted to get him back on track.

He smiled an all-knowing smile, as though I was asking him about one of the things only he knew. He's got enough of those things, stored in his head so maybe Id tapped into one of them. We come," he said, "to the strange case of the freighter, Jeannie Rogers." He poured some hot water into the leftover tea in my cup and dropped a tea bag onto the mix.

"We have, late in the game, a guy named Big Paul Stanley. At least that's what the newspapers called him at the time."

The tea could have tasted worse, but only if the cup were also used as a cat-litter scoop. Maybe it was his way of making sure guests didn't stay. I nodded.

"Big Paul Stanley had a plan, it seems. From what little we know of the story, and most of what I tell you is speculation and probably fiction anyway." He sipped his own tea, then added some diet ginger ale to the mix and put it into the microwave for a few seconds.

"Big Paul Stanley decided to ship a freighter-load ─ the Jeannie Rogers being the freighter - of Canadian Whiskey straight to Chicago." Dwayne scratched himself a couple of times on the head. I wondered if the cat had given him fleas as well as scratches.

I had cats and dogs, one after another, when I was young, and if I were living by myself in a cabin in the woods I'd have one or two of each, just to chase the squirrels and welcome me home.

But Aisha can't keep up with a dog, and I'm away too much to be a companion to one. And I found that dogs aren't all that much fun if you don't have one yourself. My brother-in-law's got two. They howl and bark when I show up, then spend their time watching me to see if I'll do something that requires tearing my leg off. Or maybe I'm sitting in one of their ten favorite chairs or I might have something to feed them.

If the constant staring doesn't get me (and it does) I have only to turn my head and one of them's got its head in my crotch, wet nose against my balls, for reasons known only to dogs. I drive into the yard pretty fast and leave pretty fast, but haven't run over one yet. Not that I'll stop trying.

Cats are different from dogs. I've often wondered if some artist with an intergalactic government grant from an alien spaceship created them once, decided they were the ultimate in organic parasites, and departed for Regulus, smiling happily. There are about twenty different physical varieties and about three personality characteristics to cover all the cats on the planet. Here's an animal that not only could be duplicated by animatronics, but be. A solar-powered three-button cat would have all the charm of the current organic ones, but wouldn't have to have its litter changed. I love cats. Sure I do. Aisha has three. All of them watch me warily, and have since the misunderstanding with the chain saw.

"By this time the States was shipping us raw industrial alcohol. There was no prohibition against making industrial alcohol. And the Canadians were adding colour and flavor. And shipping it back as quality aged Canadian whiskey."

"Chicago," I pointed out, "is a lot further from the Canadian border than, say, Buffalo."

"Ain't it ever!" Dwayne put one foot on a chair and leaned over the table. "But all the middle men and all the cops were along the areas close to the border. What if you could get a load into the heart of the States and past Capone and all his men? You could make about five times the profit on each case."

"I thought Al Capone's headquarters was Chicago. At least it was when I watched the movies," I said, going to the sink and pouring the tea into the fuzzy drain. "I should think that would be dangerous." I searched his unlit refrigerator and found a can of Pepsi. I held it up.

He nodded. "Oh, for sure. You wouldn't want to try to do it twice. You could buy a sailboat today and ship a load of drugs into the country as a freelance. But someone would be waiting for you on the second trip." Dwayne reconnected the telephone ─ I didn't ask why - and put on the hard hat.

"But," Dwayne continued," the feds got Capone in '31. For tax evasion. Now in Detroit there were a bunch of well-organized gangs. But in Chicago Capone was the only game in town. So they gave him eight years in Alcatraz. At that point the city was a wide-open power struggle. A person had a chance to bring in a lot of booze. Or at least before the next big shot started taking his share. Especially since the police were finally starting to close down the Detroit corridor."

"So this boat...."

"The Jeannie Rogers. He shipped twenty-eight or thirty boxcars worth of Quebec whiskey across Algonquin. Used the logging trains. loaded the boat at a place called Depot Harbour." Dwayne began a rapid walk around the kitchen.

I knew Depot Harbour. There's nothing but concrete ruins there now. It had been a scenic ghost town for a few decades before some local kids torched the whole place.

It started with the logging of the province of its stands of white pine. One of the motivations for the industrial revolution was the fact that Europe finally used up the last of its wood and began mining coal and making houses out of brick.

Then Britain discovered just how much pine there was in Ontario and began cutting and shipping it back home as fast as they could cut it.

At one point some enterprising businessmen, having cut all the easy stands, decided to build a railroad from the Algonquin area to Georgian Bay. The locals at Parry Sound, which had a great natural harbor, rubbed their hands and raised their land prices in anticipation.

The businessmen decided to extend the railway onto Parry Island, without stopping in the town of Parry Sound. There was the difficulty that Parry Island was part of an Ojibway First Nation, or reservation as it was called then. But the Canadian government had set up the reservations with a number of conditions, including the right of government to use any of the land for roads and railways. So they chopped out enough land for a town, harbor, and railway terminus, and the businessmen got it on a ninety-nine year lease.

Long after the place was abandoned and overgrown with weed and sumac, the Ojibway took the matter to court and got their land back. Good for them.

"Then Big Paul Stanley," Dwayne went on, slowly, "loaded the Jeannie Rogers and set sail for Chicago."

I finished the Pepsi. It had somehow managed to go flat inside the can. "And?"

"The story is that the Jeannie Rogers went down on some sunker. Out among those islands you want to canoe, but over a week later, presumably on the way back. Big Paul Stanley showed up in Parry Sound one May morning. A bunch of people with bad reputations picked him up the minute he stepped out of the lifeboat."

"So he sold the booze," I said, "and presumably got off the ship with the proceeds."

"That's where the locals begin their fairy tales," Dwayne said. "According to the locals a crew of baddies took him back out to the islands in a hired boat. For reasons unknown. Also according to the locals, his body was found nailed to a tree trunk a week later on Bateau Island."

"Ah," I said, comprehension dawning. "The baddies thought the money was hidden out there."

"That's the story. They say that Big Paul Stanley died without saying where it was hidden. A lot of locals did a lot of fishing around those islands for years after that. But I never heard of anyone finding the money."

"Well, then," I said. "We can assume that Big Paul hid the money after the ship went down, and that he died without telling the bad guys where it was, and the locals haven't found it."

"What a crock of shit," Dwayne said.

"What a crock of shit," I agreed.

"Like, the whole story was probably made up to start with." My host leaned back in his chair and scratched his ankle. "And if some really mean boys took me out into the island and offered to mediate the finding of the money, if there was any, I'd tell them." My ankles started to get itchy, too, so I scratched them.

"And if I were a local boy and I found a pile of loot, I'd make sure nobody, even my friends, ever found out about it."

"Revenue Canada," Dwayne said.

"And the historical societies," I added. "They have a tendency to confiscate stuff you find."

"But that won't matter to Phil." Dwayne tapped the side of his head.

"Sure won't," I agreed.

"So you've just got to point Phil to the correct island," Dwayne said. Somewhere a door banged, and a dog started barking. Phil reached under the table, and the barking turned to a yelp and stopped. "Hamilton," said Dwayne. "A bookstore on Patrick Street, not too far up the hill. You can get old books there."

"Something about prohibition?" I was puzzled and wondered if I'd picked up fleas, because my ankles kept getting itchier.

"Think about it. You've just hidden a million or two in American money or gold... Yes, gold, that's better. And you're surrounded by islands that all look the same. What do you do?" He squinted at me.

"Ahhhh..."

"You write the location in code, of course! In a book you took off the ship."

"We're talking like ten-year-olds," I said.

"Eight-year-olds," Dwayne said. "Ten-year-olds are a lot more sophisticated nowadays. They're into video games. And planning how to get laid as soon as they hit puberty."

"Whatever. Eight-year-old boys, then." "I don't believe it," I added.

"You will when you want to. Phil wants to, so he'll believe."

He had a point. I got up to leave. "What's the button?" I asked.

"Who?"

"The button under the table."

"Oh that!" Dwayne walked over to a broom closet and opened the door. "My latest experiment." He kicked at a box on the floor. "The great dog debarker."

I knelt and squinted. "What does it do?"

Dwayne shut the door. "It's a set of high-power high-frequency speakers. Hooked up to a frequency generator. The delightful Ms Albertson in the apartment below has a Jack Russell terrier."

"They allow dogs in this apartment?"

"Not dogs or cats, actually. But at least my cat doesn't bark each time someone slams a door somewhere."

"You could tell the superintendent."

"He knows. He could hardly miss it, since he visits her for afternoon tea. At least a couple of times a week. When his wife's out shopping."

"So what does this do."

"When I press the button, the dog gets a blast of sound. High-frequency sound, at about a hundred watts. At a frequency too high for humans to hear."

"Jeez," I said. "Doesn't the cat go crazy? And jump on your head?"

"Doesn't seem to bother her much. She hisses, and ignores it." Dwayne smiled. "But nobody in this part of the building gets birds at their feeder any more. Anyway, it's just temporary Until the damn dog learns to stop barking. Or goes deaf."

"And the super doesn't know about it."

Dwayne tapped the side of his nose. "Let's not tell him. He's not that bright. He's been up here a couple of times. To find out why the plaster's been falling off Albertson's ceiling, but everybody assures him I don't pound on the floor or anything. To he can't figure it out. Anyway, it gives him an excuse to visit her. Which could come in handy if his wife comes home early some afternoon."

"Patrick Street," I reminded him.

"In Hamilton. I forget the name of the bookstore, but you'll find it. The guy there will know, if he hasn't got stuck in the shelves and died."

Actually, I think Dwayne came up with the name of the bookstore from a book marker. Anyway, I found the place.

Love lower Hamilton. It's a maze of one-way streets that'll get you anywhere but where you want to go. Should call the place, "Can't Get There From Here." Once or twice in my life I've gone down a street the wrong way, backing up to confuse people, just to get to the street I needed to get to.

From the secondhand book dealer, a fat guy who could barely squeeze through the narrow aisles of his store, I got a book.

"Look," I told the fat guy. "I want a book that a rumrunner in the twenties might have found useful. It doesn't have to be in good condition, and I don't want to pay too much."

He looked at me. It was obviously his job to decide whether or not I deserved a book. He had lots of books in his store that he didn't particularly care for, but what the heck, you've got to make a living.

I figured he had quite a few books that he thought were worthwhile, would be happy to sell these, a compliment to his purchasing savvy and the taste of the buyer. And he had a few that should go, like an old dog in the pound, to a good home, and nowhere else.

"I have a number of books from that era..." he began.

"I'm going to tear it up a bit," I threw in.

A heavy sigh. A burp. Some people value old books. But book dealers get a lot of stuff whose sole reason for existence is that it's old. Not valuable, not in good condition, just old.

He bumbled off among the shelves, hoisting his pants up a couple of inches. I followed.

He bent over. It wasn't easy or pretty. He came up with _A Mariner's Guide to the Great Lakes_. The spine was gone, and the pages were yellow at the edges, like someone had left the book on a deck too long.

It was dated 1942, but with the inside cover and date page torn off so it could be much older. Perfect. He said it was eight bucks. I liked that, too. Sometimes God smiles on villains like me.

"You going to write in it?" he asked, wheezing his bulk onto a strong wooden stool. I wondered if one day he'd eat one cheeseburger too many, sit on that stool, and have to have it extracted by a muscle-bound proctologist.

"Why do you ask?" I hesitated.

"Even if you age the ink," he said, "they can use radiation-marking to find out."

"I'm dealing with an amateur," I said, firmly. "He wants to believe."

The guy scratched one of his chins. "Get some Waterman's black, number one-eleven. Bake the page for two days in an oven set at about 150." He looked at me. "Got it?"

"Thank you," I said.

"Will I read about it in the newspapers?" he asked, leaning forward.

I thought about the storms on Georgian Bay, and said, "I sure hope not."

Maybe he did read about some of it in the newspapers. But nobody read about all of it.

I got a book on codes from the library. It was like being a kid, for a while. I wrote up a nice little code. I got some Waterman's black, number one-eleven and wrote the code with my left hand. Then I tried to figure how to bake the page for two days in an oven set at about 150. Eventually I got Dwayne to do it. I didn't want to have to explain it to Aisha.

When it was done, it looked good to me.

Summer in Ontario. Everybody was having yard sales, and even in Phil's old Neighborhood people were madly selling things to each other. I love yard sales; because as long as there's a yard sale, there's hope. Not that I'm sure what I'm hoping for.

I had a word with one of his neighbours, and slipped her a couple of bills.

Phil phoned me the Wednesday after.

"I've got it," he said. I slid my ear away from the phone. Sometimes it's better to rest the receiver against my cheek and let my molars act as a buffer.

"Just what?" I yelled back,"have you got? The bubonic plague?" He dropped his voice a couple of hundred decibels and I slipped the phone back towards my ear. "I've found money."

"Small bills, I hope, and unmarked," I said.

"I don't know, yet. We've got to go get it."

"We've got to go get it?" I was acting as puzzled as I could. I figured out he must have broken the code in three days. Not bad. "We?"

"Look," he said. "Can we meet at your place or my place soon?"

Well Aisha had left me the job of getting a companion for my trip. But I was running the whole money scam without telling her. If you have to ask why, you haven't been married long enough. So my house was out.

And Phil's been on his own since his wife took off with his brother five years ago to Alberta, and his house has degenerated into the worst possible place for a man to visit. He's become a neat freak. It's not a matter of taking my shoes off outside the front door; I get the feeling that he went out after my last visit and brushed my footprints off the concrete walkway to the house. I've seen him rub the postman's fingerprints off the brass mailbox.

I felt guilty exhaling in his place, and as for the occasional male fart - well, you get the idea. So I suggested the grungiest bar in town. Phil likes his bars low-level, and he was happy to accept.

We met at Billy's Place, an establishment without any redeeming virtue except that the beer was cheap. When I got to the door just after two there were two cars and a Honda motorcycle in the parking lot. I recognized Phil's green Chev Malibu, polished to perfection. It was about ten years old, and the polish was the most valuable part of the car. His wife took the good car when she left.

The bar was tucked into the underarm corner of a small shopping plaza. It had been a bar and a laundromat, and now was both, filled with sad-eyed humorless men who either didn't have wives or needed to get away from their wives.

Some places survive just because of their surroundings. There were a couple of closed stores on the plaza, including a large one that had held a Zehrs. With the plaza suffering, the owners would be happy to give generous terms to the bar. Which meant the place could survive on its clientele of old guys trying to make two glasses of draft last all day.

There was a raised area at one end. It had obviously held bands on weekends, but, to judge by the chairs stored there, music had been a long time away from the place. If you don't count some FM country station crackling quietly. And I don't. There had once been a grill behind the counter, but I thought a bag of Lay's salt-and-vinegar chips would be a better bet.

Phil was there, at a table and looking as though he'd been sleeping under a bridge, so I bought a couple of glasses of Labatt's Blue on tap and brought them to the table.

Phil likes to try to blend in sometimes to some new environment. He's been kicked out of a couple of temples and churches for being a fake rabbi, priest, or whatever, so I guess he was doing his bit here.

He had on dirty jeans, a pair of running shoes with a hole in one side, a once-fancy shirt with grease stains around the neck, and a Blue Jays hat that was old before they won the Series.

"You think it's all genuine?" I asked, setting the beer down. The table and the chairs rocked, but not in the same directions.

Phil spread a map onto the table, and let the beer glasses add rings to it. I was glad to see he was using an enlarged and laminated copy of the annotated map from the navigation book: I like maps, even copies. "Probably a crock of shit," he said, watching the bubbles rise in the glass of beer.

"You're such a skeptic."

"On the other hand," he said, "it could be genuine." He added some salt to the beer in the Canadian way. A galaxy of bubbles rose to the top. All the old "beer parlours" in Canada had little glass salt shakers on the table, for pouring salt into beer. The salt in the shaker usually had a few grains of rice to keep the salt loose. People did this to keep the salt from clumping before the salt companies started adding iodine to the salt for health reasons. But beer joints are old-fashioned and some still have the rice in the salt.

"I phoned the historical society in Parry Sound, he added."

"Oh," I said casually, draining my second glass. "And what did they say? Aside from a request to send money."

"'They' is Mrs. Donna Parson, for the most part, and she is a mainstay of the local library and she knew all about the Jeannie Rogers."

"That's the boat that went down?" I waved for another glass of beer but the bartender was watching something mind-squeezing on TV. I got up and got a refill at the bar, after clearing my throat a lot. So much for a tip for the bartender.

A lumpy-cheeked man with a T-shirt that read "Isaiah 58 Ministries" looked sadly at me. He had a cup of tea in white-knuckled hands front of him, and I wondered if his presence in the place would generate a flow of psychic or moral electricity that would incinerate us all. I considered braining him with a chair and chucking him into the street, then wondered why such a thought had entered my head.

"At least," Phil said, "they confirmed that part of the story, as a local legend. But they'd never heard of the money or a map."

"You asked all that?" I raised my eyebrows as high as they could go. "Aren't you tipping off the locals?"

"Let's suppose the map's a phony," Phil said. "The problem with that is there's no logical reason anyone would produce it. Ergo ipso facto quad es demonstato it must be genuine." He checked the bottom of his shoes for some reason.

"Probably a crock," I said. "There's no reason to produce the map, even for the guy who supposedly hid the money on the island."

"When can we leave?" Phil asked, looking me straight in the left eye.

"Whoa there," I said. "Why would I want to go out in the middle of Georgian Bay? I don't even have anything bigger than a canoe." I took a big sip of beer.

"A canoe's what we want. We'll be roaming around in water too shallow for anything else. And you can bring your camera. Besides, it's at the edge of Georgian Bay, not in the middle."

"A couple of hours of a good west wind and it'll be hard to tell the difference."

"Lots of islands to hide behind. And half the time the place is dead calm, especially in the morning."

"I like the idea of the islands," I said. "I like the idea of getting a few pictures in the rain of those islands."

Let me explain here. I retired early from a position, if you can call it that, at Peterborough University as an economics professor. Economics is called "the dismal science", and I don't know if that had much to do with the bouts of depression and migraines I had before I left. Maybe it was the snake-pit of politics at the place.

Anyway, I took up photography, an economically unwise pursuit, specializing in pictures of water in rainstorms. Big pictures, sold as limited prints, mostly to businesses. A lot of the businesses are in Arizona and Utah and places like that. I don't make much. Actually, I lose on a per-hour basis.

But I couldn't buy the soul satisfaction I get in the rain in a place where I'm all alone. I've always felt that maybe, far away from my normal world, in a rain, there may be unknown creatures walking around, but they won't include the black dog of depression that hunts me too often amid the shops and cafes.

Maybe that's why Phil likes such grungy bars. No matter how bad you feel, odds are the guy at the next table feels worse.

Across the room, a man who somehow looked like a middle-aged trucker put his elbows on the table, then laid his head in his hands covering his eyes. He was alone at his table. The bartender, who must have been just old enough to hold the job, brought him, unasked, a small glass of liquor. I thought of a few lines:

The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,  
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

What was I doing there while birds were singing outside.

The world comes around, I thought, and it goes around, and there's enough misery for all of us. Some people are miserable without reason, and some people, like Phil, have had enough trouble to reasonably spend their last years hunched over a bottle of forget-it-all and still manage to smile. I have my ups and downs, but I've never had the reasons Phil had. I watched the guy who looked like a trucker and thanked my lucky stars.

In spite of Omar Khayyam, I thought, the tavern isn't always the answer to life. I remembered a cartoon where a world-weary working man announces to his wife at the end of a day, "Hey, I heard a spot of good news today - we shall pass this way but once!"

You used to find a lot more people in taverns but the entire province has a smoking ban in public places and now people sit in their cars and smoke, and half the time it doesn't seem worth shuffling inside and outside for a beer and a smoke. Some of the local taverns tried putting up sheltered patios outside for smokers, but if a patio's got enough windbreak to actually break the Canadian winds, the local council deems it "inside" and rules out smoking there.

Sometimes a beer and a tavern are good for me. Sometimes they're not. I could feel the black dog inside my heart stirring. I'm a lucky man in many ways, I thought. I guess it's time to go find an island.

"Gotta die somewhere," I told Phil. "Might as well be out on an island. When do we leave?"

"Great," Phil smiled. "I thought you'd feel that way. He brought up a rolled map from his backpack. "Enlarged and laminated," he said. "One copy for me and one for you." He spread one copy onto the table, bottom my way, and set the beer glasses on top of it." The tabletop changed from chipped gray to blue, green, and white.

I felt better. Just looking at maps of islands makes me feel better. Or lakes, which are islands in the landscape.

It was three in the afternoon and there should have been nobody in the place but losers, but two women came in. Both were maybe in their mid-thirties, which made them just a bit old for us by the Martin Standard. The Martin Standard says that to find the age of a man's ideal spouse, use the formula: half the man's age plus 5.

One was a blonde and one was a redhead, which seems like an ideal combination. The redhead was medium height and wore some kind of shirt and jeans. The blonde was taller and wore some kind of a shirt or blouse and jeans. At least I imagine they did; I never remember what people are wearing unless they're wearing something really strange or nothing at all, and these were wearing clothes, except perhaps in Phil's imagination.

They adjusted their eyes to the dimness, then tentatively headed across the room. "Nice map," one commented, as they passed our table. I wondered if she was the trucker's daughter, come to take him home to his dying wife, mortgaged house, and AIDS-riddled son. If so, she committed an additional mortal sin by ignoring him.

"Thanks," I said, doing a quick ogle. Phil looked like he was about to throw himself onto the map to keep the contents secret, but couldn't figure a way to do it.

The two women settled at a table near the wall, and waited for the bartender to get their order. He did, after a couple of minutes, and I went back to looking at the map with Phil.

"Just where are we going?" I asked.

"You really need to know? Exactly? Now?"

"I need to take out a full-page ad in the paper," I said.

"Don't get sarcastic. Did you see the way those women looked at the map? I don't trust anybody with this."

"I presume," I said, "that you'll have to kill me if you find anything."

"Only if I get a tailwind all the way back. Okay." Phil lowered his voice and pointed out a general area of islands. "Somewhere in these islands here, most likely."

"You don't know for sure?"

"I've got some descriptions and coordinates, but I doubt if the guy that made them really knew exactly where he was."

"You think?" I was watching the women. The redhead was looking around like she didn't customarily come into such establishments, especially in the early afternoon. The other one seemed rather confident. Not lesbians, I thought, as if I would know, but they didn't seem that comfortable with each other, sipping on a beer. From glasses, for heaven's sake. They reminded me of matrons who had wandered into a strip club just to see what men were going on about all the time. Or maybe me in a French restaurant, aware that I was permitted, but not sure what to do after that.

"If the story's correct," Phil said, "the ship went down in a storm and nobody never got back to collect the loot." He gazed at me intently. "At night, in a storm, they'd be burying loot in a maze of islands most of which look the same.

"I don't believe he was a local, so he probably took an educated guess."

"Or it's all a crock of shit," I said.

"Likely all a crock of shit," Phil agreed. His eyes glazed over and he went far away from me and the bar. I let him go; since his wife left him, he needed a few escapes.

The trucker, if that's what he was, had left the room. He'd been replaced by a trio with a deck of cards and a cat in a plastic cat carrier, three middle-aged guys with east coast accents putting in time.

"You're just going because you want to humour me," Phil said abruptly.

"Goddamn right. Who else is going to humour you?"

"There's nothing out there."

"Wind, waves, rocks, and grief," I said.

"Drowned bodies."

"Bleached bones."

"Unpaid bills."

"You talked me into it," I said. "Now when do we go?"

"What's today - Tuesday? How about Monday?"

"You got no work anymore?" I knew about the government contracts for editing that kept him going.

"I'll make a four-day space for next week." He drained the glass and rolled up the map, moving glassware as required. He wrapped the map with an elastic band, and handed me my copy.

"I'll get my list and phone you." Without specific lists for all my activities, I'd forget too many essentials. Absent-minded professor to the core.

***

The sign that faced the world from above the café door said "Jimmy's", but it made me kind of wonder if Jimmy himself hadn't passed on a long time ago.

I looked quickly up and down the street. I saw nobody I knew, but that wasn't surprising: at two in the afternoon there wasn't a person using the sidewalk other than me. Victoria street is four lanes wide these days, and not especially friendly to walkers. A very intermittent stream of cars and trucks came by. Again, there was nobody I recognized, so I stepped into the café and let the door close behind me.

It looked like someone had tried to start a convenience counter at the front a couple of generations ago, but had given up, leaving plywood panels and glass covered with old ads and posters.

The rest of the place looked better. I had a clear choice of sitting in a booth at the window facing the street, taking a stool at the lunch counter, or going around to a dim back room with a half-dozen tables. I chose a booth by the window, because I like watching traffic go by for reasons I can't explain, and I like bright places rather than dim places.

Besides, who would see me in the window of Jimmy's? Once there had been grimy brick factories across the road and probably a steady lunch trade for the café. Not any more. The long row of factories that had once crouched, dark and grimy, between Victoria Street and the railway tracks was recently gone, bulldozed like last summer's weeds and hauled away, mysteriously, somewhere.

Each table contained a stainless-steel tissue dispenser, a glass sugar container and glass salt and pepper shakers with battered aluminum lids.

There was something of the exotic, about it. Like spies meeting in old Berlin or continental lovers on the left bank. It depressed the hell out of me.

I don't function well in the midst of conflicting emotions and uncertainties. I find they're like stray dogs, their faces showing no trace before they bite you or lift their heads for a pat. Or just try to hump your leg.

Oh, I'm wary of a lot of things in this modern age: the fast-food restaurants I usually choose, the laugh tracks on television comedy reruns when it's four in the morning and I can't sleep because the stars are too bright outside or not bright enough. The assurances of financial analysts, the solidity of pavement, the face that looks back from the mirror at five in the morning before I decide to get back into bed and hope I don't wake Aisha.

Nobody annoys me as much as I annoy myself, the antihero of my imagination, the coward of my intentions, the little furry ball curled too often into my recliner because it's not right to crawl under a log without explanation. I am too joyless in the midst of a world somebody made into a garden, too hesitant when adventure is offered.

Too faithful to be eager, too imaginative to be calm, I waited in a coffee shop for some sort of future.

I watched the traffic go by. The Old Guy at the counter, who may or may not have been Jimmy (he looked as old as the place) washed dishes. The sink, like most of the working area, was stainless steel and would outlast both me and Jimmy's. As he finished each dish and cup he placed it on a shelf above the black griddle and the deep fryer.

Where was "Heather", I wondered. And why was she so insistent that no-one see us together? Not that I objected to a secret meeting: I'd have a hard time explaining to my friends why I was meeting another girl, or woman, or whatever.

She'd phoned me the previous afternoon, after I'd got back from the pub. She wouldn't give me her name, but insisted I meet her someplace to talk. "Someplace out of the way, to talk about Big Paul's lost money."

And, she insisted, I wasn't to tell anybody, especially my friend with the map.

"Who shall I look for?" I asked.

"Name's Heather. Redhead." She hung up.

What's a man to do? I justified myself by telling myself that I'd started the whole process and had to follow through. I briefly imagined having a mad passionate quickie on the arborite tables with a redhead, all these old guys having coronaries among the fried eggs and bacon, then did the wise thing, and told Aisha everything from the start.

She just laughed and advised me that if I was going to have an affair in a café, to do it on a sturdy table and not to kick the salt and pepper shakers onto the floor.

Across the road a new strip mall with a no-name gas station, an adult video store, a convenience store probably run by hard-working Koreans, a pizza place, a laundromat, and an engineering office, Chang & Van der Veeren Engineering. Two vans and a truck sat lonely at the adjoining Hertz place, with "rent me" signs in the windows.

Cars and trucks passed regularly but the sidewalks stayed empty, like they were there only in case someone's truck broke down and the driver was forced to actually walk..

I grabbed a paper from a pile and tried to read. The counters as well as the table in my booth had been painted cream-coloured at one time, but had worn in the busy patches down to the original fake-pecan arborite. There was nothing but news in the paper.

No-one came through the door and eventually the Old Guy noticed me. He apologized and took my order for fries and tea. I usually order tea specifically because I don't like it. It makes me look social to sip something instead of wolfing it down.

I really wish I'd invented stainless steel. My tea came in a stainless steel pitcher with a tiny stainless steel cup of milk. The stuff just keeps going.

Still nobody. I looked down the street past the family Fitness Super Club, brand-spanking new, down the street. I was pretty sure people who used the fitness club wouldn't be having an after-exercise plate of chips at Jimmy's.

The door opened and a woman entered. Suddenly I remembered her as one of the two women in the tavern.

I was still wondering if this was the mysterious "Heather" and was still holding the stainless steel sugar dispenser in the air when she walked up to the table and said, "Let's get away from the window in case somebody sees us."

What could I say? I took my tea and fries and followed her. I thought she'd opt for the dim back room, but she settled onto one of the dozen stools at the counter. I looked around: we were the only two customers in the café.

"You're Heather?" I asked.

She picked up a couple of my fries, put some ketchup on them, and said. "That's me. You gotta like green and blue if you come to this place."

I had to agree. The walls had been painted a light hospital green a long time ago, as well as a lot of other things, probably more to use up the paint than to colour-coordinate the place. The stool and booth seats had been re-covered in a nice sea-blue vinyl much more recently. I canoe: green and blue don't bother me.

An old but immaculate Hamilton-Beach milkshake maker almost matched the green. Almost, but not quite.

"But a charitable place," I said, pointing out a crowded shelf where a glass container almost overflowed with "pop can tabs for the supply of wheel chairs for the handicapped."

"You must like chips," she said, still avoiding the point of our meeting.

"I should have had the chili," I said, "It's highly recommended by cartoon characters." I pointed where, on the top shelf a colourful set of eleven panels advertised specials using hand-drawn replicas of famous cartoon characters. A voice balloon from Sylvester the cat adverted "delicious piping hot home-made chili-con-carne and toast, coffee extra". Some character in the panel, probably Tweety chipped in "it's swell" but an old egg crate hid the exact identity of this figure.

I turned around. The Old Guy was stirring a big pot in an alcove; no doubt the famous chili. After a moment he came out and took Heather's order for a coffee.

Let me describe Heather. She was just cute enough to be worth looking at, just sexy enough to make you turn your head without quite knowing why. Some women have that aura in them; she was one.

I'd guess she was in her early thirties, somewhere around young enough to be my daughter if I'd got started early. Maybe five-six, red hair and a few freckles.

Did I mention the red hair? Aisha claims I have fantasies about redheads, which seems a reasonable thing to do, if you ask me. Okay, she had hair like a campfire at night and eyes like the lakes after a storm and the evening light falls on it.

Now in most of this book I've just got to lie about what people were wearing because I really don't notice, but I had long enough waiting for Heather to get to the point that I actually remember what she was wearing.

She wore a white blouse with a light blue summer jacket, and blue slacks. The colors didn't get along with the décor at Jimmy's but I guess there wasn't much she could do about it by then.

The guy who did the cooking brought Heather a small pot of tea and a plate of toast with some peanut butter packets on the side.

"Hm," she noted. "This isn't what I ordered."

"That often happens here," I said. "I attribute it to a vortex of primeval chaos trapped for years behind the stove."

"It'll do," she said, grinning. She poured tea from the silver pot, letting the spillage run into the saucer. "Ever have one of these teapots that didn't spill? she asked.

"Not yet, but it's a lifelong goal."

"Do you think I'm cute?" she asked me, putting peanut butter on a piece of toast. She turned her head down and sideways and looked up at me.

"Actually," I answered, "you deviate from fashion of the day only marginally. I imagine you would like larger breasts and smaller hips." I regarded her face. "Possible a slightly smaller nose."

"Not bad," she said, "but you didn't answer the question.

"You make my heart skip every seventh beat." It was true, but I hadn't wanted to say it. I put my hand on my heart. "If you'd been in my high-school algebra class I'd have switched schools just so I could pass grade 11." That wasn't quite true, but it was close enough.

"Will that be a problem?"

"Absolutely," I said. "You'll will just have to understand if I don't say anything comprehensible to you."

"I can deal with that," Heather said. "You know why I'm here? Why I wanted to talk to you?"

"I assumed that the universe, which works in funny ways, had figured out how to get a chuckle out of old Win again."

"You look on the unfolding of the universe and see laughter somewhere?" She finished the other toast and peanut butter, which was a shame, since peanut butter on hot toast is one of my cardinal sins and I'd been lusting after it since it got to the table.

"The world's a stage, and we're here for the show. We just don't know it, but someone, somewhere, is laughing themselves silly. Like people laugh at babies."

"If babies were smarter, they'd put on a really good show."

"Why did you and that other woman follow Phil and I to the bar?"

"Currents of the world," she said. "Sometimes you just have to follow them. Paddle to keep off the rocks but follow the currents. Your friend Phil phoned the Parry Sound Historical Society. Donna Parson's Nancy's cousin. She keeps track of inquiries about the Jeannie Rogers and the lost money. She's a curious type and the whole thing's a minor comedy in the society."

"And this Nancy is the other woman in the bar?"

"Nancy Barnes is the granddaughter of Big Paul Stanley." Heather leaned forward. "She thinks she has a claim to the money if it's ever found."

"Not legally," I imagine.

Heather laughed. "She sometimes has a problem coordinating her own views of right and wrong with the legal version,"

"And you drove all the way down here to find us?"

"It was a nice day for a drive. Phil's neighbor said he went off with you. Your wife said you were at that bar. When Nancy saw the map on your table she figured all her suspicions were right on."

"Can't lie my way out of this one, I guess," I said. "Do you find me handsome?"

"In the way that north wind and moonlight on the forest floor and the sound of chipmunks in the woodpile and birch trees in spring are handsome."

Strange that she should mention birches. I've been a fan of trees all my life but lately I've become a fan of birches.

When I was young, I admired the lone pine and the maple out solitary in the field. But lately.... Lately I like the way a birch lives with others on a sunny hillside.

Maybe I've been too much to myself in this life, making walls.

Maybe I like the way birches grow after fires. After a forest fire has taken the big trees, birches spring up among the ashes, and ten years later there'll be squirrels in the autumn sunlight, playing among the old burned stumps and the falling yellow leaves.

"Eh?" I said, coming back. "I'm as natural as moosepoop in the woods, am I?"

"And you know that's only the skin of what I said."

"Does Nancy expect us to lead her to Big Paul's money?"

"Your friend seemed to have something more than just speculation, but we don't know for sure."

"Personally, it's been nice to see you, and I do wish that everybody but my wife had seen us together – at my age a guy can use all the idle speculation he can get – but I really can't see any point in telling you anything Phil knows or I know. Not when we can have it all without you."

"Nancy knows every story and most of the rumors about the money. She's got a reasonable idea what's been searched and what's not been searched out there. Could save you some time."

I nodded. "You sound logical, but this isn't a logical venture, and I don't really care about the money, whether it exists or not."

"Nancy does. Doesn't Phil?"

I pondered that. "He says he does. He acts like he does. But this is an adventure right now, and maybe he'll look you up if nothing works out this time."

"Cooperation would spoil the 'adventure' as you call it?"

I looked shocked. "Of course! Little boys can't have an adventure and allow girls in on it too. Even if the little boys are wearing older-guy suits." I glared. "You know that!"

She laughed, and the guy showed up with a plate of toast and peanut butter. He looked at the empty plate beside Heather, looked puzzled, then handed it to me. I thanked him and put the peanut butter on both slices at once.

"It'll be a quest," she said.

I raised my eyebrows, chewing toast.

"To paddle into the west, where the moon and the sun and the stars go after they've watched us in our little boats. To take part in the dance of the wind and the water and the leaves on every tree. To find whatever adventure awaits us." She sat back, smiling.

"We don't intend to go with you. Not when you two are there. Some other time." I didn't figure they could follow us anyway, or even know when we were there.

"The weather's going to be good for the next few days," she said. "A bit of light rain for one morning, which will suit you if you take the cameras."

"Cameras?" I hadn't told her.

"A dangerous world of lurking data bits. I googled your name."

"May you have good weather whenever you are there," I said. "We'll leave messages stapled to the northmost tree on each island, so you'll know where we've been."

"Gotcha," she said, picking up her purse.

***

There are lots of different ways to pack for a canoe trip.

Some people start by imaging themselves paddling. "Canoe," they write onto a list, "and paddles." They squint then add "lifejackets and safety equipment."

Myself, I've been more than happy to be know in my previous world as an absent-minded professor. I make lists, or I'll forget things.

First on my list is the canoe section. Canoe, paddles, lifejackets, bailer, whistle, rope. I was much younger the first time I got to the water and discovered I'd forgotten the paddles. It was a short trip so Nils and I paddled with branches we found along the shore. We toured a little lake while some guy on shore kept up yelling at us because he thought he owned the whole lake.

In my younger days, too, I used to carry an extra paddle. Somewhere on a portage trail I realized I'd carried one for over twenty years and never needed it. You realize these things on a portage trail because humans have only two hands and if you have three paddles, you'll try to carry two in one hand. That doesn't work. The thrice-damned things insist on trying to separate from each other and forming a giant bush-snagging "X". Since then I've never carried a spare, just a bit of duct tape. I figure I can splint something from a branch if one paddle breaks.

Ontario requires a lifejacket for every person in a boat. A small boat, such as a canoe, must carry a bailing bucket of some sort, a forty-foot length of rope, and a whistle. I use an old plastic windshield- washer can as a bailing bucket. I've cut the top off it and stuffed the yellow polypropylene rope and the whistle inside.

I also stuff in a big sponge. A canoe is always picking up water in quantities too small for a bailing bucket. Much of this comes from drippings from the paddle as you change paddling sides. More comes from spray off the front guy's paddle on windy days, because the guy in the front is always an idiot when there are waves, clipping wavetops with the tip of his paddle.

And you get water when you step into the canoe if you've had your boots in water.

Next is a waterproof bag with a compass, and a map in it. Take a Global Positioning System (GPS) gizmo if you think you'll need one. I haven't yet, at least when I actually had one with me, but if I'm ever being devoured by a bear on a portage trail I'll be able to figure out where my bones will lie within couple of hundred yards of longitude and latitude.

Besides, the number of useful gizmos is a fairly accurate indicator of one's masculinity. You get five points for every useful gizmo, and lose three for every useless gizmo. You'll end up with a few bruises when you try to define which is which on a canoe trip.

It's like keeping stuff in the back of the car. All the things you wish you'd taken balance the collection of odds you've moved a couple of hundred thousand kilometers without using.

I always take a jacket because it gets chilly most nights and it's probably going to rain. Especially if I set out to take some of my someday-famous pictures in the rain. Add waterproof gloves to that list. Water's always running up and down a paddle and wet hands on a cold day do not make for a happy paddler.

An emergency kit always sounded like a good idea, so I have a plastic bag with bandages and matches.

I stuff a lot of my goods in a nylon bag. At the campsite I empty the bag then stuff my lifejacket into it. That gives me a lumpy, awkwardly-shaped pillow, but a pillow nonetheless.

I'm with the people who need something to sleep on. Conventional air mattresses are nice, but heavy. Yuppies and wise men like me take self-inflating mattresses. These have only a couple of centimeters of sponge, and the shorter ones are just long enough for the area between your shoulders and your hips. But that's usually enough to keep you from feeling the small stones and twigs and wiggly things you're sleeping on.

They make two shapes of sleeping bags. One is called the mummy shape and it tapers to your feet. It's supposed to retain heat better, but personally I think you'd have to be dead a couple of thousand years to like one of the things. I take a rectangular bag, with enough room to roll over in, and enough room to reach down and scratch a mosquito bite without looking like Harry Houdini trying to get out of a strait jacket underwater.

I had a tent once that was really light. It was also really small. The one time I tried to roll over to put the lumpy ground parts on the other hip, I pulled the tent poles out and ended up further downhill, wrapped in orange nylon, with tent-peg ropes tied all around the whole assembly. Since then I've opted for a slightly larger tent One in which I can sit up to check that it's three-twelve in the morning and I'm still awake or put on my shoes to take another pee break.

I used to carry a small hatchet, figuring it would come in handy for chopping wood, pounding in tent pegs, and bopping hungry bears on the head if they clawed their way through the nylon tent. However, there are few places in my camping areas to pound pegs, the campfire wood is usually dead and dry and the hatchet blade just bounces off it. And if a bear claws its way through my tent, I'll try boring it to death with a first-year supply-side economics lecture.

A flashlight. Now there's one thing you think you can do without. You can go to sleep when it gets dark and get up when it's light and in between you'll not need a flashlight. If you have to take a leak in the middle of the night, you need to get just far enough away from the tent to check the wind conditions and pick a direction.

Take a flashlight anyway. They're cheap and light nowadays. You'll need one to find the headache pills in your packsack because you had too many hot dogs and too much booze before going to bed. You'll also need one to find those mosquitoes that somehow got into the tent and haven't the sense to know you'd happily let them feed if they'd just stop circling your ear. And, of course, you need one to shine into the woods in the middle of the night, sighting down it like a pistol, looking for the eyeball reflections of whatever mutant grizzly or psycho moose is making all those awful noises just outside your tent. Having a chipmunk flee the light beam will get you back to sleep.

Matches. For the sake of all that's holy in this planet, check that you have matches or a lighter. You can, I understand, rub sticks together and make a fire. I saw tom Hanks do it in a movie, so I know it can be done. But it'll be raining lightly when you try, and your life will run out before you succeed and you'll have to get rid of all the uncooked food before you go home or else Aisha will laugh herself silly and remind you every time you go camping after that.

Rope. Always take lots of rope. It'll make you feel like a cowboy even if you seldom use it.

There's an old saying I just made up; the more stuff you take the happier your campsite and the worse your portages. You can work out the ratio of portages to camp time and decide whether to take or leave a lot of things, but I'd like you to know that humankind reached civilization in two major steps, the invention of fire and the creation of the lawn chair.

Anyway, as I was saying, there are lots of ways to decide what to take. Making lists has got me through many eternities in meetings and economics classes. Yes, it's possible to teach economics and do a canoe list at the same time.

And every canoe trip has a different list.

The problem is the portages. The more you take with you, the happier you are at the campsite. The more you take with you, the unhappier you are on a portage, especially a long portage.

So you have to balance what you'd like at the camp with the length and severity of the portages on the way there.

If you're going to camp a few days you might want that cast-iron Paavo-pan to fry fish in. If there's a 900-meter portage over a cliff on the way there, you might not want to take more than a light aluminum pot.

Anyway, if you're going out into Georgian Bay, like Phil and I were, you're not going to worry about portaging. You can take whatever fits into the canoe.

Keeping in mind, of course, waves and wind.

A heavy canoe, loaded with wonderful artifacts of civilization destined for a campsite, is sometimes an advantage in wind. It sits lower, for one thing, so a side wind hits you less. On the other hand, a heavy canoe isn't as nimble on a turn. There's always the time when the guy in the front yells, "HOLY SHIT! Turn right!" and you know there's a big wave coming in from around an island or from some damn power boat.

That's when it's better to have a lighter canoe.

And there's the waves. You get wind, a few waves, and spray starts coming into your canoe. The lower your canoe is, loaded with, say, an icebox full of beer and steaks and a propane barbecue, the more spray you get.

You get spray, and the canoe sets lower (water is heavy stuff). With the canoe lower, you start getting tips of waves coming into your canoe for a visit. This settles you, barbecue and all, even lower, and bigger waves slop into your canoe.

Next thing you know, the only things above water are the heads of you and your co-paddler, from the chin up.

By the time you've added in contingency materials like rain gear and six-days-of-storm-stranded-on-an-island stuff, you've got enough to fill five canoes.

You've got to have some sort of rain gear, even if it's only a plastic coat.

A saw is handy, and lighter than an ax for getting wood to make fire. A lot of the dead branches available are too solid to chop. So a folding saw works, and if it's the assemble type, you can look masculine and nifty by getting it together in less than half and hour.

If you're worried about dampness, something that'll start your fire reasonably quickly. Those white things that they use to start charcoal barbecues usually work, and they're light and small.

Rope. You never have enough rope. Oh, I already mentioned rope.

You don't need a fork. Eleanor of Aquitaine is supposed to have invented these things back in the thirteenth century, but if you've got a knife (everybody needs a belt knife to look tough and outdoorsy) and a big plastic spoon, you'll be able to eat just fine.

A plastic cup and a bowl. Forget a plate; what you can't eat out of a bowl your body doesn't need.

Modern campers always have a tiny little camping stove and some extra fuel. It means you don't have to have a campfire to cook, and can save the local firewood until your campfire at night.

A pot, and a lid. A frypan, if you're going to fry things or have hopes of actually catching fish. Some sort of egg lifter to lift the fried things out.

A pot scrubber. You can usually get away with a copper scrubber and not need soap, and that's a better idea, ecologically.

Paper towels. A roll, or a few, folded up.

Spare underclothes, if you're the sensitive type.

A bit of loose tobacco, purchased from a tobacco store. You leave this on the shore to make the spirits happy.

A poop scoop. You'll want to bury your fecal trademarks in the ground, for esthetic, if not for ecological reasons. Unless you bring it all back with you. Some people do, and there are a lot of places in the Ontario woods where the ground between the various rocks are a tangle of roots almost impossible to dig into.

I find it useful to take variety of plastic bags, right up to garbage-bag size. They weigh almost nothing and can keep things dry at the campsite. And if the bears actually do eat you, the people who find you will be able to carry what's left home without getting little half-digested and gory pieces of you all over them.

Make sure everybody has a whistle. The sound carries further than a shout, and if somebody in you camp gets lost while looking for firewood or a better place to piss, you can know exactly where that person is, and avoid them for a day or so.

A couple of bottles of Pepsi are among the things I cherish on a canoe trip. It tastes better than Coke, but has more sugar so you won't want it for daily living. On a camping trip, on the other hand, especially on the way home when you're really tired and crabby, it can really pick you up. Mind you, nobody else seems to agree with me on this item.

Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? There's just no end of stuff that would make a campsite happier. You could take fishing equipment, since you'll be surrounded by water. You could take binoculars to identify birds or locate portage signs at the other end of the lake.

You could take a tarp. You'd use a big one with the rope to make a shelter if it rains all day. Or you could stretch a small one over the stuff in your canoe if it rains while you're out on the water.

Endless, ain't it?

At the end of the season, in November usually, when you go to put it all away, there's a sadness for the things you didn't use and the things you did use. One by one you put your stuff onto basement shelves. Beside the things you left from last year that you could really have used on one trip or another.

I suppose you could tow four canoes like a train of pack animals, but people might laugh.

Those that weren't jealous for not figuring it out themselves.

A canoe trip is always full of compromises in safety and comfort.

So I keep a Master List, and check off the items I'll take when I go canoeing, depending on where I go, the probable conditions, and who I go canoeing with.

With some people, you can save space and weight by sharing a tent.

Some people I don't want to share a tent with. Like people who snore, and people who eat beans for breakfast and fart all night. And people who like to talk about guns and motorcycles and work/school till three in the morning.

And, of course, there are always people who don't want to share a tent with me.

Phil and I planned to take separate tents. One of us fell into one or more of the above categories, you see.

I selected a small tent, bought at a yard sale a few years ago, but one that didn't require pegs. There's not many places on the islands in Georgian Bay where you can pound in a peg. You can use rocks to hold down the pegs, but it can take a lot of rocks, and the pegs tend to sneak out of the rock pile in the middle of a windstorm in the darkest hours of the morning.

The Drive

By seven we were north of Toronto on the 400 and leaving that city behind. I was driving - the general agreement was that I would drive and Phil would buy me lunch. We'd split on the gas.

Aisha never trusted my driving until I had one nasty accident. She always figured that nobody drives properly until they've had at least one accident, one moment when you've done everything possible for a drive to do and you come to realize that gravity and momentum are in control, not you.

And she figures the roads are full of maniacs and drunks.

I know I was lucky two times in a row.

Phil would like to drive and he's got better reflexes than I have but Aisha figured he hadn't had his accident yet and I figure if the car gets in an accident, I want to be the one who's responsible.

Aisha doesn't drive any more, of course. I think she consigns herself to whatever gods protect atheists and lets it go at that

A lot of guys on the 400 north from Toronto shouldn't drive either.

"Lunch?" Phil asked, after a long silence. We didn't talk much on the way canoeing: maybe we were practicing for the Great Silence of the Lake.

"For sure." I was hungry, but Phil was going to buy lunch. I tried to do a calculation on how much a driving effort was worth, in terms of lunch, and came up with a Pepsi, a burger, and fries.

We found the Northlander a couple of kilometers after the Moon River turnoff, and parked beside a Winnebago. There was a sign outside that said, among other things, "iced coffee" and Phil always likes that stuff.

When a Younger Person with lots of tattoos and some facial iron came to our table, Phil ordered the iced coffee. She looked puzzled. "I don't think we serve iced coffee," she said. "Wait a minute; I'll check with Tashiklyn. The two girls communed behind the counter and shook their heads and looked in our direction and talked some more. When she returned the Younger Person said, "We don't serve iced coffee. We can make you some cold cappucino with an ice cube. It's from a mix." Her face wrinkled.

In his younger days, Phil might have contemplated dragging her outside and pointing out the line on the large wooden sign that listed iced coffee right under "espresso" and before "waffles" in letter two hands high, but he's mellowed.

He ordered a Coke and fries for me, and a hamburger and a regular coffee for himself. And a cinnamon bun. He's nuts on cinnamon buns, but has never found a perfect one. It's like a grail quest for him.

My home was now a couple of hundred kilometers behind me and I was into travel mode. Travel mode is the scent of sadness that's lost to the fear that you'll end up someday in some hospital bed regretting that you didn't make this trip.

I've traveled a lot, and most of the time nobody watching me could imagine that I was enjoying the process. But years of experience taught me that the regret of not having made a trip always outweighed the nervousness and paranoia that accompanied me on the trip itself. Your travel book of photographs will keep you going when you get old and one of your biggest regrets will be that you didn't do it more.

Phil had taken a bite of the cinnamon bun and was inspecting it.

"Not meet your standards?" Like it would, ever.

"A cinnamon bun is a spiral, like our galaxy," Phil said. "The bun part is the gravitation and the white icing is the light from a million stars."

I looked at the bun. "That dark stuff – the cinnamon – that's intragalactic dust?"

"That stuff is not cinnamon. I don't know what it is. I think we've finally found the missing dark matter of the universe. Maybe we'll get a Nobel prize."

Ten minutes later, the girls came in. Heather raised her eyebrows at me as they sat. Nancy stood for a moment, legs wide apart and looking casually around like a gunfighter coming into the Deadwood saloon.

"I have bad news," I said, with a mouthful of meal and s slug of Pepsi attempting to flush it down towards my stomach.

"Those two? They look like good news to me."

I choked up a piece of hamburger and snorted a couple of milliliters of Pepsi up my nose, backwards. It hurt.

"You shouldn't do that," Phil said. "It's a waste of good food, to start with. And it's not going to impress those chicks even when you get good at it." He shook his head in puzzlement. Haven't I seen them somewhere before?"

The girls took a table by one of the windows. Outside, the couple from the Winnebago finally managed to get their act together enough to get out and stand in silence by the door. I guess they were telepathically trying to figure out what to order before they entered.

"The redhead," I said, "is the great-granddaughter of Big Paul Stanley. The other one is just a friend. You saw them in the bar where you gave me a copy of the map."

Phil looked at them. Phil looked at me. Back at them. Back at me.

"I guess they're following us," I said.

"How do you know who they are?" Phil said. He calmly turned so he couldn't see the window, and continued with his fries.

I told him about Heather and our intimate rendezvous in Jimmy's Café.

"Just when did you plan on telling me this little detail?" Phil picked up a fry. He dipped it into the ketchup. Finally, he twisted one end off, laid it on the table, and squished it with his thumb. It spread out in a pool of ketchup. Then he ate the rest of the fry. He did this with three of them before I thought up a reply.

Not that I was worried: I knew Phil to be all bluff; he wouldn't hurt a fly. Well, maybe a fly, but nothing more sentient than a mouse.

"Out on the lake. I didn't figure they were actually serious about it."

"I think you might be wrong about that." Phil slowly impaled a fry on a fork, then added ketchup where the tine met the potato. "But why wait?"

"It seemed like the sort of thing that would make for a chuckle over a campfire. After we were alone on the lake." I closed my eyes tight for a moment.

"I'm not so sure we'll be alone on those islands."

"Well," I pointed out, "they're kind of cute."

"Tell that to Jane," Phil said. He looked at me, "or Aisha."

I winced. "They came from Parry Sound to talk to us. Now they're just probably on their way back home and we just happened to pick the same place to have lunch."

"They came in. They looked our way. They didn't seem surprised." He raised his eyebrows. "You got any more surprises for me?"

"Hey!" I said. "It was your phone call to the Parry Sound library that got them onto our case, eh? Don't give all the guilt trip to me."

He nodded. "Do we sabotage their car?"

I thought it over. "I wouldn't mind letting the air out of one tire, maybe."

We walked to the front to pay. At the counter, Phil said, "Whoops, I forgot my jacket on the chair." He got his jacket and returned, passing the table the girls sat at. His elbow knocked a cup on their table, spilling coffee. We continued out the door. One of the girls said something but I can't remember what it was. Maybe my mind blocked it out.

I honestly believe we'd have let the air out of a tire on their car if we'd known which car was theirs. There was a car with two ocean kayaks on it, and another with a canoe. And if the pump attendant hadn't been idly watching us all the way.

So we drove north, watching the mirror and the woods go by and the scenery. Well, the woods, at least. You don't get to see much water, even though the highway crosses over the Severn and the Moon rivers, and Go Home Bay and.... You see the sons-of-bitches that inhabit the accountant's offices have convinced the highway designers that it's a lot cheaper to put up plain concrete walls as sides to every bridge you cross. And the goddamn lawyers have convinced the designers that these blank monstrosities are safer than the old metal designs. The old designs were built so you could see through them.

Aisha and I always look upstream or downstream when we cross water on a bridge. You can see our heads swivel and give every creek and bay a rating on its natural beauty and its potential canoeability.

Not any more. All you see is featureless concrete when you cross a river in a car. Maybe the people higher up, in trucks and SUVs get a view, but not us car people. We get a view of some bureaucrat's esthetic soul: bland, blank, and gray.

The bigger the highway, the worse it gets. As you drive along Highway 401 just east of Kitchener, you cross the Speed River. There are little riffle rapids and poplars along the milkweed shores. There are the tumbled trunks of old willows where the tornado came through a few years ago.

But you won't see any of this. Not even a brief glimpse of running water. Not a half second view of the old willows. No little reminder that Eden wasn't six lanes of clock-driven highway.

No, the powers that govern road construction in Ontario have put those slabs of concrete along the sides of the bridge over the Speed. Flat, soul-sucking slabs of concrete as hard as the people who confine not only our cars, but our vision, to the highway.

It's epidemic. We did cross the Severn. I remember how you used to be able look to the east and see the last lock in the canal? The pleasure boats like a gathering of wildflowers at the marina, the waters tumbling over the dam, coming off a land that was too old for imagining when the first dinosaurs were made. The last lock seemed an end and a beginning for people who loved water.

Or did you look to the west, out where the waters broadened into Georgian Bay? The wave-tops sparkling like God's dance floor, and the islands spread out in a vision that would be hard to find in any other country on this planet. They sang to you! It was a painting that said, "Forget the silly computers and the piles of brick. Out here are weekends of real life."

You can't see those things any more. The days of old iron railings are past. The bloodless, iconoclastic ghouls have put in a fancy new bridge. It is lined with those mind-washing slabs of concrete. For the people in the cars, the bay is gone — gone with all its reeds turning with the wind, with the rock, and the waters leaping free of the dam. The motorists get a good view of the concrete, though. A really fine view.

Oh, I have no doubt the slabs are cheaper than the welded railings on the old bridge. You just set 'em down and they're there. Graceless, inhuman and dead, part of an artistic famine from some low-bidding pavement-tamper somewhere. Oh, and safer than the old bridge, I bet. The drivers can keep their minds on the cars ahead of them, and the passengers on their mortgages, without distractions. What car isn't more likely to be saved from the running waters by that formless wall of white?

Not, mind you, that I've seen a lot of the old steel railings torn away by careering cars and trucks in the time I've driven around this province. Come to think of it, I haven't seen any.

Highway 401 denies the Credit, that little river that every angler in Ontario has heard of. There's a half-second thrill in crossing that river, and I can't help but think that a view would help a few people get through the day in some office north of Toronto. Fat chance for visions of trout waters, though. They've painted out our fishing glimpse with a concrete brush. All we get are the tops of the trees along the river.

Oh, what a Protestant country we must be to ban the tempting views of paradise.

By the time we'd turned down the road to Parry Island, I was wishing I'd never thought the damn trip up. I felt like a kid who'd volunteered for a spelling bee until he heard the words on the list.

I get that way a lot. Things seem brighter and more promising the further away they are in time and space. An excursion to take a picture of a remote waterfall along the Ottawa seems wonderful, when I think of it, in the middle of February.

By June, when the falls are green and the world's dry enough to get to a waterfall, I'm down a few quarts on my enthusiasm level. But I pack up and go anyway, especially if I told someone else I was going to.

By the time I'm on the expressway, the whole thing seems kind of stupid. The closer I get to the waterfall, the dumber an idea it seems. Somewhere along the highway I'm ready to turn around, but that seems even stupider.

By the time I'm most of the way there, the whole idea seems insane and I'm ready to pull the car over, put up the tent and go back the next day, thinking up some excuse.

Generally, it's only the total inability to make up an excuse that keeps me going at that point.

By the time I've parked the car and started hiking in, the waterfall has become my mortal enemy. I get there, and my mood lightens. I've actually carried out a plan I made so many months ago. There's a certain unavoidable satisfaction in that.

As I head homeward, the whole sequence repeats itself, but in reverse. By the time I've got home, I'll have decided that the trip was, if not the greatest thing in the world, at least worthwhile.

So it was as we made the turn onto Parry Island. I was in deep gloom. Why was I going to risk my neck out on Georgian Bay? I could get pictures standing on shore. Why was I going to spend a few days with Phil? Like most guys he had a set list of phrases and jokes and attitudes, and like most guys, these were extremely limited, so they got used a lot. Too much. Most guys were good for a day's companionship, then they started to get annoying.

I eyed Phil distastefully as we crossed the bridge.

Parry Island is mostly First Nations territory. The only bridge to the island used to be a railway swing bridge, so it's narrow (but very strong, I'll give it that – and you can see up and down the channel all you want). The bridge has a little shack in the middle, where someone swings the bridge when a sailboat goes through. Sometimes, the same guy also collects a toll to get onto the island.

Once across the bridge, I pulled over to the side of the road, and waited.

"Problems?" Phil asked.

Just in my soul, I thought at him. "Just taking a break," I told him.

"We can take a break at Depot Harbour," Phil answered. "It's just down the road. Besides, I'd like to get there before the pussy posse gets here."

I gave him a couple of raised eyebrows and drove along the road, took the turn, and followed bad dirt road to the water. Several weed-covered brick walls remained, and an old steam shovel.

"It used to be a genuine ghost town," Phil told me, but I already knew that. But I let him rattle on, hoping he'd blow off a bit of conversation so maybe he'd be more of a silent partner out on the water.

There were no ghosts in the daytime, so the souls of the people who operated the harbour, loading lumber from the forests onto ships didn't show up. There was one family picnicking, and us. Phil did the entire history of the place.

Probably, I was just warming him up, but I hadn't brought a roll of gag-grade duct tape with me, so I let him go on. Which he did. At length. I listened to him carefully. Not.

You know, that fad about adding "not" after a sentence to reverse the meaning came and went sometime in the late 1990s? You'd say, "Freezing rain is my favorite type of weather. Not." The "not always followed after just a little extended pause.

There were, maybe a few million people amused to discover it, and maybe a half billion people really happy to see it go.

Me, well, I always liked it, except maybe when it got overused. But I saved it for further use. At least it kept people from jumping on anything you said, just in case you added "not" about the time they got their teeth apart to say something.

Actually I've learned that the same word and the same use was a fad in 1790's Britain. I guess it's due to come back into style in 2190, give or take a bit.

Maybe I'm not a great conversationalist, because I don't like to listen to people and I don't like to talk much.

If I didn't do so many silly-ass, downright stupid, entertaining things in life, I'd have no friends at all, I figure. People who need a clown in their lives come to me.

Anyway, where was I. Parking the car at the edge of Depot Harbour. In the grass, not in the road, with its deep ruts. But first I made Phil get out and check that there were no broken bottles or nails for me to run over.

For years it was the place where trainloads of lumber came from the interior to be loaded onto ships. Then for a few years it was a picturesque, decaying ghost town.

Then, of course, someone tossed a match, and now it's a few stone walls and a few rusting bits of machinery, and a place where the locals throw beer bottles against the aforementioned stone walls and condoms onto the ground in among the weeds.

"Follow me," Phil said. He asked me to open the trunk, and dug out his metal detector from under the piles of camping equipment.

"Coming?" he asked, pushing through tall weeds.

What could I do? I grabbed my red hat and followed, collecting a few burrs from this year's crop on my pant legs.

Avoiding the broken beer bottles and dodging boards with nails sticking up, we made our way into the concrete ruins of what might have been a mining office, or maybe a very sturdy house, it was hard to tell. Let's just say it was house-shaped, with windows. There was a partial roof of rusted steel beams and rusted steel sheeting.

The interior was filled with sumacs, some of them twenty feet tall. The sumac branches, and those of a couple of aspens, came out the windows. "Stand in the window," Phil said. I did. I looked at Phil, who was leaning against a wall, then looked out the window, where I saw Heather's car come around a grove of cedars, then stop.

"They see you?"

"I think so."

"Great. Now duck down, and give me your jacket."

"Who?" I asked, ducking.

"Your jacket."

What the heck; I gave him my jacket. He used it, and his own jacket, to completely cover the detector. "Now," he said, "we're going out the back way."

I followed him, head down, around a few bushes and over to a larger set of ruins. When we got there, Phil straightened up, and strolled casually back to the road.

"Seen enough?" he asked.

"What? Sure. I can always come back later if I want to see any more." I liked ruins when I was younger.

Phil and I made our way over to the car. "Don't look at them," He said, so I ignored the other car. He threw the metal detector into the trunk and handed me back my jacket.

"What was that all about?" I asked when I'd got the car back onto the main dirt road.

"Just laying down a false trail." At my raised eyebrows, he went on. "Now they'll wonder if maybe there isn't something important hidden in the old building."

"The first one."

"Yeah.

"What good will that do?"

"Well," Phil said, "It might not do any good at all. But there might be sometime, somewhere, when they lose track of us and can't decide whether to turn left or right."

"And?"

"And one of them might say, "Hell, we've lost them; lets go back and see what they were after at the ruins."

"You think so?"

"Could happen. Maybe they'll decide we'll eventually show up at the ruins anyway." He smiled at me. "Could happen. At least we know how close they're following, now."

The road wound through aspen and maple, with the odd small house at the edge. I looked into the rear-view mirror; through the dust I could see the front of Heather's car. "Pretty close, that's what I'd say," I noted. "They're eating a lot of dust right now."

"Well, I guess they've got a legal right. Say, you want to pull over and I'll take a leak."

"Now?"

"Whenever convenient."

Phil does impress me, sometimes. I think, "impress" is the word. Another kilometer or so along I found a grassy flat area beside the road. I slowed and gently drove until the car was mostly off the road. "I checked the rear-view mirror again. "I guess they're going to wait," I said.

"They've gotta," Phil said, unbuckling his seatbelt. "They don't know whether we're going to launch from Oak Point or Rose Point." He got out, unzipped, and pissed against the back tire of my car, looking at the treetops and whistling.

As we got back onto the road, I asked. "What, my tire needed cleaning? You were a dog in a past existence?"

Phil just looked at the road ahead.

"You wanted to show them how long your dick is?"

"By Jove," Phil smiled. "I think he's got it."

"Did you ever wonder why you have so much trouble getting girlfriends?" Actually, he didn't seem to have many problems in that area. Keeping them – that was a different proposition. Let me advise all lonely men that being tall, dark, handsome, charming, and rich is s good way to get girlfriends. But if most or all of them haven't been working so well for you, then try being really, really bizarre. There's a subgroup of women on this planet who are attracted to bizarre men.

I suspect these women feel constrained by social conventions and react by seeking the bizarre. Or maybe they're just nuts, I don't know. Maybe I should write a book, _Hanging with the Filberts: Women Who Like Crazy Dudes_. Aisha could endorse it.

Phil broke into my thoughts, the bastard. "Those girls – ah, women – behind us have a perfect right to drive wherever they want and a perfect right to paddle their kayaks wherever they want. Until we can prove they're harassing us, there's nothing legal we can do.

"However," he went on, putting his hands behind his head, "I intend to mislead and discourage them as much as possible. Now you're thinking," Phil smiled, "that having a piss isn't going to bother them. And, logically, it won't."

I kept driving. A pickup truck passed us, kicking up a spatter of gravel.

"But there are things," Phil said, "that aren't logical." He looked at me. "Men, to start with. And men's tendency toward illogical, uncivilized behavior towards women."

"You're talking like a baboon."

"Right," Phil said. "I'm trying to trigger a raw primeval fear of male uncivilized aggression. It could be argued that the entire history of civilization is mostly an attempt to keep the male gender from exercising his natural primitive behaviour."

"And," I said, "we're heading away from civilization."

"That always makes women nervous."

"And the fact that we're about as wimpy and over-civilized as it is possible to make a male has nothing to do with it?"

"Like they know us?"

"They're still following us."

Phil looked into the visor mirror. "But not quite as close. Maybe sometime that little bit of extra distance will be all we need."

"Maybe sometime they'll revert to primitive femalehood and feed your dick to the lake trout. Become known as the Bobbiting Boaters of the Bay." I made the turn to Oak Point. The other car dropped back until it had disappeared around a corner.

"If they had closed the gap between the cars I'd be worried, but they dropped back, and that tells me my dick is probably safe for now."

"For now."

"For now."

The road ended at the marina. A two-story building held a few boats still stored for the season. A dozen more were tied up at the set of large private docks and two smaller boats were moored to the outside of the public dock.

I parked under a tree on the grass while Phil went in to pay and make arrangements for camping and parking.

The marina was in a narrow sheltered inlet. Out past the tree branches waving in the wind there were rows of whitecaps in the open bay, and a distant sound of rock and water meeting somewhere. The inlet was calm, with little lines of small leftover waves walking into it from the bay.

I watched in the mirror as Heather's car rolled up behind mine, then past and up to the store parking lot.

Phil came out of the store and walked like he was stepping out into the street with a .45 strapped to his hip to meet the last bad guy in the town. I made a note to ask him if he had an extra Y chromosome somewhere. He walked up to my window without looking at the other car.

"Got us a couple of night's camping. They've got a campground here," he said.

"Not going to try to outrun the bad guys?"

He nodded towards the lake. "The water's full of canoe-hunting waves this afternoon. A kayak would have fun out there, but us canoeists might just want to wait for a quieter time."

"Gotta agree with that one, I said, relieved. I like water, but I'm like a guy that likes snakes; I recognize that there are good ones and bad ones. That was bad water out there, bad for canoes. The pounding noise from the shore reminded me of a pack of wolves in a cage, chawing at the steel bars and eyeing my muscle tissue.

Campsite 27 was one of the better ones; Phil must have done some fancy talking at the store. There was a picnic table that was more or less together and a firepit. Someone had dragged part of a dead limb up, but I could see there was going to be a need for some purchased firewood.

There was also space enough for the car and two tents, and then some. Private campgrounds tend to be crowded, so this looked pretty good.

"Set up the tents and then go into town?" Phil asked?

"Town?" Parry Sound was more than half an hour away.

"The snack bar," Phil said, grinning. "It's as close as you get out here."

\-------------

"You're Win?" she said. Outside the café a dog barked and some guy tried ordering his family around in a small cabin cruiser.

I sat on a wooden chair by a wooden table eating a hamburger and fries. Nothing like a teenage meal to boost a person's spirits. I looked around for Phil, but remembered he was still back at the campsite.

It was a day as no other. We had come to the borderland where the dark forest stopped against the water, and out there were hundreds of islands. Islands no bigger than a house, but full of mystery and promise.

The wind sang in the treetops of secrets we might find or never find but our lives would never go on the same. There was a lift to the air at the end of our known world, and the only thing that could make it better would be a young woman with dark hair and dark eyes smoldering like a campfire about to burst into flame.

She was a cute chick, but she was not a happy chick.

"Most of the time."

She sat down. "You're an asshole," she said, looking evenly at me.

"You have fine tits," I said, "but your legs are short. What's your name?"

"Your friend is the shit that comes out of an asshole."

"Windy today," I said. "Your hair's a mess. And you're not all that good at metaphors. Probably time you changed your tampon."

"It's dangerous water out there."

I nodded at the plate in front of me, then stuffed a bunch of fries in my mouth, letting a few hang out and one drop to the table. "Is that a threat?" I asked, very slowly. You can still speak clearly with a mouthful of French fries if you take it slowly and open your mouth real wide. Of course I lost a couple more half-chewed chips.

She was getting less happy by the moment. I wasn't going to win the conciliator's annual award at this rate. I added a bite of hamburg to the half chewed chips in my mouth and decided to continue winning her heart. But I shifted sideways in case she decided to boot one of my tenderer areas. "I feel safe enough," I added, but with a mouthful like that, the "f" was a tough act and the "s" wasn't much easier. Ketchup dripped down my chin, but I managed not to spray onion chunks all the way across the table.

She blinked a couple of times, then got up and left.

I swallowed my food and wiped my mouth with a paper napkin. I looked around. The Guy In The Kitchen Area was looking out the serving window. He was laughing silently. "You're scaring away the customers!" he choked out.

"Geez," I said. "Now I'll have to eat twice as much." I stuffed a bunch more chips in my mouth.

He laughed again. "You guys got a problem with those women."

"The usual stuff," I said. "Canoers and kayakers; the eternal conflict."

"You going to a cottage?" he asked.

"Pictures. I'm planning on taking a few pictures of the islands. You make good hamburgers."

"Frozen patties," he said, "but we like to get the best onions and tomatoes we can. A couple of cottagers bring them in from Hamilton. And a local woman makes a special chili relish for us." He hesitated. "Careful what you take pictures of out there."

"Trees," I said, "and water and rock."

"That should be okay," he said. "Just remember that some people are shy of cameras out there."

"I'll remember that." I hadn't a clue what he meant. The islands had a number of cottages on them. In the old days you could put a cottage almost anywhere, but nowadays the government requirements are a lot stricter, to control sewage pollution.

The family from the cabin cruiser came in. The father wasn't ordering people around any more. It didn't look like they were talking to him, anyway. I wondered if the rest of the family was ready to walk home. It would be a long walk.

Another guy came in. He stopped in the doorway, looked around carefully, then stepped up to the serving window. He was one of those big guys who commanded service at once just because of his size. He looked like someone who routinely wrestled moose to the ground.

"Hi, Cork," The Guy In The Kitchen Area said, "What can I get you?"

"Tomato soup, please, and a toasted cheese. And coffee in a cup would perk me up. All to go, don'tcha know" Cork was wearing jeans, a brown plaid shirt, and good moose-wrestling boots. He walked over, surprisingly light on his feet, and sat down at the table next to me. I was just finishing up my fries and tea.

There is a quickness, a lithness about some men that reminds you of cat. A cat in a man's clothing, if you will. It's in the way they move, a fraction of a second faster in everything they do, like an athlete. It's in the way the eye misses nothing, like a bird of prey watching from a tree.

It's in the movement of backbone and the turn of wrist, in the placement of feet and the sweep of an eye. You think it's an attitude, and it's only partly his attitude, and he smiles like he's being your friend because he doesn't rip off your ear in a too-quick movement and eat it.

Klutzes like me resent the gift of animalness given to such guys. We resent the fact that we have to be nice unless there's a cop at the next table. We're jealous of the women that are attracted to these men, that bed that calls them to danger instead of shelter.

We really resent guys like this if they're also smart. I could tell by the eyes and the turn of the head that this Cork guy had some sort of smarts. Hell, he might have a higher IQ than I did. A man that you treated with care, however casually you disguised it. I'd known the guy almost thirty-eight seconds, and I'd like to have seen his head on a sharpened stick.

"Out to do some canoeing?" he asked. "I don't recall seeing you around here before, not in this store." The Kitchen Guy delivered a foam coffee cup and bowl to his table, as well as a sandwich wrapped in plastic.

"Gonna steal canoes," I said, putting some vinegar onto the last fry. I looked him sincerely in the eye. "People in the cottages, they always got extras and nobody ever ties them down. Me and three other guys go out and get maybe twenty or thirty canoes and string them in a long line and bring them back to the shore."

Cork raised his eyebrows.

"Burn 'em," I said. "Big bonfire. Secret society. Summer equinox. Eat fish eyeballs on a stick." I scratched my head. "The fiberglass canoes, they don't burn worth a shit, but the plastic ones make up for it." "Watch for the smoke at midnight," I added as he got up.

I suppose I could have given him my card with the "nature photography" bit on it, but I didn't see that it was any of his business. I smiled.

"Meat," Cork said, smiling back. "Fish food out there. Nobody knows what happens when the wind gets up. Police find the bodies a-floating into the shore and they're so decomposed that nobody finds out that they've been fucked and screwed with and interesting things have been shoved up their assholes. Just meat to the fish and just meat to the police. Canoers from down south.:

I set my last fry on the table, set the sugar container on it, and squashed it.

Cork got up to get his take-out meal. "There is no summer equinox," he said as the door closed behind him.

"Big guy," I remarked to the Guy From the Kitchen. I felt like some boots with steel toes had just gotten off my feet.

The Guy From the Kitchen watched Cork get into a pickup truck in the parking lot. "He's a guy you gotta watch," he said. "I went to school with him, and there were bigger guys, but none quite as....."

"A bully?" I asked. I'd been pushed around at school, too.

"Not really. He just sorta got his way whenever he wanted something. Like, some bigger kid would push one of Cork's followers around, and then one day, he wouldn't." The Guy From the Kitchen shook his head. "Then one day the bigger kid would start avoiding Cork. And he'd never get near him again. Sometimes Cork would go up to the guy and suggest he do some silly thing like put his hand on his own head, and the guy always would. Nobody ever really knew why, but us kids always made up the stupidest stories."

"But nobody got hurt?"

"There were always people getting hurt, and once one kid just disappeared. They found him drowned in the river. A lot of people knew that he'd stood up to Cork, but nobody ever proved a thing." He shook his head again. "Maybe it was all just rumors."

"But you believed it." I got up.

"Listen. Cork spends a lot of time around town with some people I wouldn't invite to a dog fight, and he's been spending a lot of time out in the islands. He just makes me nervous. Always has. Somehow, every time his name comes up, people start talking blood and bone." The Guy From the Kitchen bent his head and looked at me over his glasses. "I wouldn't miss him, if he never came in again."

When I got back to the camp, Phil had something cooking in a pot. The little stove was sitting on the picnic table. I could see that Phil had set up both tents.

"You're a good slave," I said, "or a good wife."

"Probably live a lot longer than you will after whatever you ate at the café."

"The hamburgers are good."

"I've cooked up some chili. Want any?"

"I'm pretty full now."

"That's okay, I only made enough for myself. I was just being polite. Phil turned the stove down to simmer as I settled into a lawn chair. We didn't have plans to take the lawn chairs in the canoe, but I was glad we'd brought them. Always make room in the car for lawn chairs; a hard rule in life. Phil tasted the mix.

"There's lots of beans in that mix?" I asked.

"Can't make healthy chili without beans."

"Glad we got two tents."

"You're always too tense."

"I just hope my tent's upwind from yours." I contemplated the wind that still shook the leaves above our heads. At least the wind kept the bugs down.

"Going to get me a beer?" Phil turned the stove off. "Last chance to get some award-winning chili."

"I'd want to see that award first. It's probably from the ordnance division of the Canadian army." Actually, I knew that Phil made perfectly wonderful chili. A bit on the hot side, but still great stuff. But I have a thing about stuffing myself full of junk food in between Aisha's healthy cooking and the camp food I'd be eating for a few days. I got Phil a beer from the trunk of the car. We'd brought genuine booze for the trip, but, like the lawn chairs, we'd included beer "for emergencies". Of course, we got to define what constituted an emergency.

"Thanks," he said. "You can have one, too, if you want."

I'd already opened one. "Thanks a lot. Especially since I bought the beer."

"You're welcome." Phil poured the chili into a plastic bowl, took a couple of slices of bread from a loaf, and started eating. Actually, it looked good.

"I met Nancy Barnes at the café." I told him.

"And now you're engaged." Phil washed down some chili with a swig of beer.

"I wouldn't go that far. She might let us live if we turn around right now."

"She said that."

"We didn't actually converse much," I said. "But I can read the look in a woman's eyes."

"Was the other one there?"

"Heather? Nope. I guess they didn't think it would take two of them to handle me."

"I should have been there. I love it when you get nasty towards women. It's a wonder your family ever reproduced."

"There was another guy, somebody named 'Cork', who was asking where we were going."

"You drew him a map, of course."

"I told him we're canoe thieves."

"Might have better prospects."

"Any of that chili left?" I asked him.

"I saved you some. But I didn't know you liked it."

"I just want to be able to fart back at four in the morning if required."

The sun was getting low and the wind died, so some mosquitoes came out and jabbed us here and there. "You think this "Cork' guy is just being curious?" I asked.

"There aren't many people up this way, just the locals and the cottagers and the kayakers," Phil said, working on another beer. "The locals talk about each other and the cottagers try to stay mysterious 'cause they want to get away from everything. The kayakers come in groups, usually as part of a tour."

"We're anomalies," I suggested.

"They're bound to be curious, you know."

"In case....?"

"In case we're canoe thieves!" Phil laughed.

Afterwards, Phil heated some water for dishes, and I wandered off to look at the shore. The road for the campsite was a pair of dirt tire ruts, with a hump of grass in the middle. It meandered around among campsites, some good and used a lot, others barely used and deep in weeds. Most of the picnic tables needed repair.

"I'm here to talk some sense into you," a voice said, startling me.

I'd been sitting on a log on the shore, watching the sun prepare to set and contemplating the wind in my lack of hair and the way the waves rolled in. "Jesus Christ Almighty!" I said. "I didn't see you coming." I've always been a Master of Stating the Obvious. Not that I actually got up from my log. A rocky shore has a limited number of comfortable places to sit and, as far as I could see, I had the only one for quite a ways.

"You," Heather said, "are a master of stating the obvious. Glad you didn't have a heart attack, anyway."

"I'm not so sure Nancy would feel that way."

"Well, I gather that if you had a heart attack and pitched face-first into the water she'd stand on your head for a while to make sure." She smiled brightly.

"I win friends everywhere I go."

"Hence the name, or nickname, obviously. Although I suspect it's short for 'Winter' or something like that."

I looked up, startled. Mine wasn't a name anyone ever guessed. "Winston" was the most common guess, and many times I'd let it ride rather than trying to explain why my parents named me "Winter".

"Ah," she said. "Not a common name, but a good one."

"I never thought so."

"There's a lot of winter in your soul."

"And there I always try to be Mr. Sunshine."

"And that's why."

Maybe it was. "Nancy know you're down here consorting with the enemy?"

"She's busy making supper and muttering to herself about some guy she should have diced up at the café." Heather walked down to the water's edge, the toes of her hiking shoes just out of the splashing of the waves.

"She's a hard-hearted woman."

"She has a wildness in her, and doesn't know what to do with it."

"You look into people's hearts and souls?"

"I live there."

"Seems like time for an eviction notice."

"I was there before they were."

"Welcome to the Wonderful Mystical Planet," I said. "Deep revelations fifty cents."

She laughed. "Tell it to the wind. If the wind makes any sense to you, tell it to the water.

"Might make more sense."

"Than me?"

"Yup." I chucked a rock into the waves. The sun reached towards the horizon like a groundhog heading for safety.

"Do you know why the wind comes?"

"Basic meteorology. High pressure systems. Low pressure systems. Nothing mystical." She was starting to annoy me.

"You can predict every little gust?"

"Nope. Can't. Basic chaos theory." I started to get up.

"You believe you know and yet you believe in a universe in chaos. Doesn't that bother you?"

"That's what the whiskey's for." I got up.

"That's what the dance is for." She began an elaborate dance on a flat rock.

I sat down. It was a good dance, for a woman with her clothes on.

Eventually the sun was completely down. I finally left her dancing where land met water and night met day and the chaos of a universe abutted a woman dancing on a rock.

Phil had a fire going and a couple of hot-dogs cooking on sticks. He had them propped up with rocks so he could stare at the fire and drink beer at the same time.

"Out watching the sun go down?" he asked.

"I did. It did."

"Hot dog and a beer?"

"Damn fine idea."

He opened me a beer and wrapped a cold bun around a rather-overdone wiener. Outside the range of the fire the world was dark and chaotic. The wind whipped the tops of the poplar trees and we edged up closer to the fire. We talked guy talk, which was mostly silences. We moved our lawn chairs when the wind started blowing smoke on us.

Eventually, we ran out of beer or maybe got tired of trips into the blackness to pee or maybe had one hot dog too many. Or maybe we just approached some topics that we didn't want to.

"Ah, goodnight," I said, without preamble, and got up. We poured water onto the fire, then want to the tents without saying anything more.

I crawled into my sleeping bag. I hoped to get to sleep before Phil started snoring, but my bladder had other plans. While I was up, I noticed that there was a fire still at the women's campsite, and that the wind had died.

When I got up Phil was sitting in a lawn chair reading a book. He had his sleeping bag draped over him and a bag of granola on his lap. That explained the crunching sounds that had come into my dream as a pair of snakes chewing the bones of my toes. There were gusts of wind and the waving of branches had been angel wings in my dream. It had been exciting stuff.

I checked the weather. The sun was probably just up, although a heavy overcast made it hard to tell. There was a dew on the ground and the tents and the picnic table. I wandered off to have a pee behind a bush and got my boots covered with morning dew. But I did note that the wind still down; the air was still as a sleeping bird.

"Going to make breakfast?" I asked.

"Let's check to see if the café opens this early," Phil said. He offered me the granola, which I declined.

"Can we trust the girls not to sabotage our stuff?" I looked at all the stuff on the picnic table, and at the canoe on the car.

"They need us to lead them to the money." Phil got up. "As long as we lock the car and take the map with us, there's not much point in their doing anything to us."

It turned out the café wasn't open before ten, which was a couple of hours away. And it didn't matter anyway, since the girl's campsite was empty. Their car was parked in the official parking lot on the grass, and the kayaks were gone.

So we cooked up some bacon and eggs but didn't bother with the awkward task of making toast - just had bagels. By ten to nine we were in the canoe, pushing away from the dock. I let Phil have the stern seat.

The stern seat's the power trip seat. You get to steer the canoe and complain about the guy in front not paddling hard enough. Meanwhile, you can slack off and play with your dick for all the guy in front knows. But I still wanted Phil to decide which route to take. He had the (phony) map coordinates, after all.

Out of the little harbour we passed a couple of boats coming in, but they slowed to keep the wake down and we waved our thanks. The stretch of water between the harbour and Sandy Island was smooth as glass, and the trees along the shore made a perfect reflection. We headed straight out for Sandy Island, as planned.

Sandy Island's one of the bigger chunks of land in the bay and provides shelter from west winds. It's got a bunch of cottages along the shores, and a tiny little lake in the interior. The lake is actually more of a large beaver pond but it's got a little rock island in the middle. I once sat on the rock just to contemplate the fact that I was on an island in a lake in an island in a lake. No special reason, just liked the thought.

Maybe Heather would have done a dance to that thought and its irrationality. I'd often heard about dancing as a metaphor for life and love and time and God's plan for the universe, but somehow it hadn't struck me until I saw Heather's dance on the shore.

As we got close to Sandy Island, the water got shallow and, as required, sandy. We turned and followed the shoreline north, watching for marauding kayaks.

As we paddled north, Sandy Island curved away from us until we could see other, smaller, islands, and past them, just a glimpse of the entire sweep of Georgian Bay.

I guess it looked like a painting. The sky was still overcast and the water still as glass except for the tiny V ripples of the canoe and the little whirlpools behind each paddle stroke.

There was a string of islands between us and Bateau, and we used them as a barrier between us and the open lake.

One thing about a string of islands: you can't visually separate islands, points, and bays until you actually get to them. That means someone has to spend a lot of time with his head down looking at the map. I volunteered, but Phil figured I was doing such a good job paddling that I shouldn't be interrupted.

Then, about the time we passed the tip of Woodall Island (looked like a good camping spot there) Phil announced, "pirates on the port bow."

I looked around. There were two kayaks coming out from between Woodall and Rockcliffe Islands. Right colors, one paddler with long red hair: no doubt we'd been tracked down.

One big difference between kayaks and canoes is in the waters they're designed for. A big kayak is a bugger to portage and useless on a winding creek. But out on open water, lake or ocean, it's in love. A rising swell lifts a kayak and there's a song in its heart as it goes up, then down for the next wave.

Different than a couple of people in a canoe thinking about various cameras and metal detectors and bones scattered over the bottom of the freaking bay.

"Ready the cannons, sir," I said.

"We're short on cannons," Phil noted.

"Did you not serve beans for breakfast," I asked. "I told you, beans for breakfast."

Phil made a farting sound with his lips. "Perhaps we could fool them?"

"Worth a try," I noted. I considered paddling faster, but a kayak is also a lot faster than a canoe, so there wasn't much point.

Keeping the chain of islands between us and the open water, Phil and I paddled on towards Bateau Island. I checked behind us a couple of times; the kayaks were keeping well back.

We got to the island. And kept going. I'd grown up wanting girls to chase me, so this should have been an answer. It wasn't.

We squeezed along the channel between Bateau and a bunch of smaller islands with cottages on them, bumping rocks occasionally until we came out at the north end.

Ahead lay the open bay, dotted with islands and rocks. At the edge of the horizon, as seen from a guy in the front of the canoe, was the line of open water, almost blending into the clouds. Beyond that, my imagination filled in, nothing but water all the way across Georgian Bay.

Big bay. Ships go down on it. I stopped paddling, and noticed from the total silence that Phil had done the same.

Now I want you to know that a canoe is a fine craft for narrow little rivers. You can slide it through channels that aren't much wider than it is. You can pole it through swamps and when you really, truly, don't have enough water for it, you can get out and carry it. The birds will sing at you and insects will treasure your passage. Little fish will scurry away and crayfish will crawl under logs and rocks.

Not this.

This is water that doesn't care. This is big water, big sky.

Should get some interesting pictures, I thought.

The voyageurs who brought furs from the Rockies back to Montreal followed these shorelines. But they kept close to shore and watched the weather carefully.

There was a sense of the guts of infinity out there, of answers to questions not asked. Only humans, of all the life in this world, seek new paths. It is a freedom none others have asked for.

There were currents in the water beneath us, slow and dark and vast, flowing in from the deeps out there among the islands and feeling the shorelines. I looked at a cottage near the tip of the Island. The first aspen leaves were trembling, but the flag on the flagpole beside the white cottage wasn't moving. Currents in air.

I looked down into the clear, clear water. The light-colored bottom shimmered and the ice-cream-cone shape of a very large channel catfish swam by.

It gave me a thrill; it always does. A catfish is like a creature from science fiction, living in our waters. The barbels that are attached near its mouth are sensors; a catfish must live in a world of touch-taste-smell for which we have no word and which we cannot imagine.

Channel catfish are the biggest catfish in Canada; this one probably weighed twelve kilograms; they don't get much bigger than that here. (Mind you, the blue catfish of the southern Mississippi can get three or four times as large.)

A catfish that big probably has no enemies. The muskellunge in the bay might be twice as big, but a muskellunge would be hesitant to face the spines; one spine at the top and one on each side. These are strong and nasty; the local aboriginal people saved them for awls.

In the spring time the male and female spend some time face to face, intertwining their barbels and caressing each other with them. A catfish has no scales, just a skin covered with an antibacterial slime. There's a lot of surface to touch with those barbels. The catfish take their time touching-tasting-smelling each other, suspended in the deep clear water. Makes most other forms of foreplay look unimaginably crude.

They won't reproduce unless they can make a nest somewhere safe and dark. The young ones start off eating insects and water plants, but when they get big they move out and also go after other fish. Unlike most catfish, channel cats like clear water, preferably with a current.

Its small round eyes looked up at me and the canoe for a moment, then it went on, following some path or current of touch-taste-smell into the dark waters of the bay.

God knows, Phil had currents and questions and paths in his brain, and mysteries. He always acted like a simpler being than he was. You'd think you had him painted, then discover you had the portrait of a carefully maintained picket fence.

For that moment, still in the currents of air and water, the catfish below and a couple of seagulls above, we were the center of the universe. It waited for our next move. I thought we should make it boldly, with pride.

"The dance begins. The ballroom awaits." Phil put his paddle in the air and contemplated the horizon. I thought of Heather and what dance she'd have for this.

The water rippled slightly. The flag by the cottage moved in an unfelt wind.

Currents.

I leaned into my paddle without comment, and we pointed the canoe east towards the windward shore of Bateau Island. Well behind us, two kayaks followed.

"Where we going?" I asked. Supposedly I hadn't made up the code and Phil hadn't been real specific.

"We'll do a circle of the island. After all, this is where Big Paul Stanley got nailed to a tree. Supposedly."

"Supposedly," I agreed. "So what are you going to do, look for the tree?"

"Ha, ha, chuckle, chuckle," he said, dryly.

"Well, then?"

"Well," Phil said, "if the Jeannie Rogers went down on some sunker among these islands, and if Big Paul even started to tell them where he ditched the loot from the booze he took to Chicago, then maybe it's on this island." He took a deep breath after the long sentence.

"Is that what the code says?" I knew it wasn't.

"Nah, but there's more than a code to this one."

"But if we're going out further - and isn't that a possibility - shouldn't we do it while the water's calm?"

"You," Phil said, "take all the fun out of things."

I ignored the cold feeling in my gut and paddled on around the island.

You know, when you look at a map and see this little thing called an island, it looks pretty small on a map. And when you look at a metal detector and think of packing it in a canoe, it looks pretty big.

But when you get to someplace like Bateau Island, and realize it's a mile long and about a quarter of that wide, and it's forested, you begin to realize that a metal detector fits into any island 580,449,112 times. More or less.

As we cruised down the west coast of the island, trailing a couple of kayaks a half-mile or so behind us, I kept looking out over the bay. Aisha had been right: the tiny islands out there resembled nothing so much as smooth, weathered bones.

The water was just starting to get a decent ripple to it when Phil steered us in to shore.

We slid the canoe up to a smooth slope of pink rock and scrambled out. I tied the canoe securely to a rock: the nearest tree was well back from the shore.

Then we sat on a rock and looked out over the water. Out past the bobbing kayaks were a few mounds of bare rock that made up places like Hare Island, Dearlove Island, Maple Island, and a bunch of others.

"Verily, 'tis kinda pretty out there." Phil scratched his balls. "Almighty righteous seascape."

"Very calm out there."

He looked at the map, looked up, pointed. "Cathcart Island? Maple Island?"

I inspected the map. "Could be," I assured him.

"Where Beelzebub and the angels wait to baptize wayward children such as us in silver and gold."

It was getting about noon. "I'm hungry," I said. Looking out there made me hungry.

"Locusts and honey in the wilderness. Pomegranates and vinegar." He nodded at the lake, where the kayaks were coming in towards us. "Bathsheba and Jezebel."

I got up, not really much sure of the reference. "You've been too long from the church," I said. "The words are beginning to creep out of you like maggots from stale bread." I hauled some peanut-butter sandwiches from my pack and passed half to Phil. "Fresh yesterday," I said. "No maggots."

We watched the kayaks get closer. A little ways from the shore they stopped paddling, and drifted in. Heather slid her kayak alongside a log at the shoreline, then hopped out. She helped Nancy get out of the other kayak. Exiting a kayak is an awkward process at best.

"From the wilderness of Zhin," Phil announced, "from Hazor and Ashdod the uncircumcised Philistines and Geshurites are upon us. May the everlasting light defend us." The last part was hard to get, since he was chewing a sandwich, and peanut butter tends to stick to the roof of one's mouth. "A flagon of wine," he demanded.

I passed him a water bottle. "Do your own conversion."

The kayaks tethered to a solid-looking piece of rock, Heather and Nancy made their way upslope towards us, carrying a plastic bag. "We have peanut-butter sandwiches for lunch," I said, "and a couple of pieces of sausage." Real sausages: I meant no phallic references, although Nancy gave me that look that women get.

"May we join you?" Nancy asked, evenly.

"The prodigal paddlers are ever welcome." Phil indicated a space beside us. "We slay the fatted calf for you." He held out a chunk of sausage.

It was declined. Instead Nancy unloaded several clear plastic bags from the front of one of the kayaks. Inside these clear plastic bags were clear plastic containers of food. Like someone had ordered from a deli in Cobourg and the delivery truck had shown up.

There was asparagus. God only knows how many miles that stuff had traveled by the time it got to Ontario in September. She put it in a pot on the nifty propane-powered camp stove she'd brought. Of course, the whole deal was on the ground and awkward to reach, since nobody'd had the sense to bring picnic table.

Food has the same parameters as the other stuff you bring in a canoe; the more you bring the happier the campsite but the nastier the portages.

There are lots of good foods made especially for camping. Little bags of dried stuff made by ex-hippie-commune-dropouts in Oregon. They're great things, but they have an air of being so utterly, unbelievably yuppie that many people I know would sooner bring dried oatmeal and make up something resembling hamster poop. I'm not that proud; I use the packages – but only when I go camping alone.

You can bring lots of dried things to save weight, and this works fine at the campsite. You just boil it in lake water and count on the heat to sterilize the water. This doesn't work so well for food you nibble on while you're in transit. The non-dried stuff, such as apples, weigh a ton. And the dried stuff (such as dried apple slices) makes you thirstier, so you need extra water, which weighs a ton.

I like pasta enough to bring a bag of the stuff. It's possible to put on a big pot of water. When it's boiled enough to kill whatever you scooped out of the lake, you pour some into a cup for tea. Then you throw in the pasta. When the pasta is done, you scoop it into a bowl, and add some seasonings. The rest of the hot water is for dishwashing. After that, you can use it to put out the fire before you go to bed.

Heather seemed into relaxing while Nancy made the food. Maybe she was bone lazy, or maybe she'd learned to keep out of the way of Nancy when food was being prepared.

Nancy brought out a whole bunch of bags from the hold of the kayaks. Since she knew where it all was, she'd probably done the packing and I was labeling her a type A personality. Type A's are no good in bed. Actually, I don't know that, but it seems like a reasonable assumption that anyone with a checklist can't keep her legs up for any length of time.

One thing a canoe has over a kayak is storage. Not only is a canoe better shaped to store larger quantities of camp goods, but it's open. You can throw in large bags and lawn chairs and barbecues and kitchen tables, and as long as it doesn't upset, you can paddle it.

A sea kayak has a couple of hatches in it. Anything and everything that you bring has to fit into those two little holes, one at the front and one at the back. If you decide you need your hat and you've put it in first, you'll have to pull into shore and unload all the things that are between you and your hat.

If you're a type A (and probably no good in bed), you'll have had the things you're likely to need packed last. If you need your hat, you can have the person in the other canoe reach into your hatch and get it for you.

We watched Nancy prepare a salad. I raised my eyebrows at one point and looked at Heather. She squinted and said, "Lithuanian Mixed Vegetable Salad." I looked it up later and found out what was in it.

She mixed a mix of cold pre-cooked vegetables, which included some carrots, beets (yuk), potatoes, and green peas, then added a sauce of sour cream, cayenne, salt and pepper. This all went on top of some chopped lettuce leaves from another bag.

I suppose it was good (I wasn't offered any) but personally I like to go camping to get away from the fancy stuff in life. Not, mind you, that I'd object if someone else were to carry in and prepare fancy stuff. I just want to eat easy food and drink liquor and take pictures.

We ate in silence for a moment or two.

Now I want you to understand that I'm not really a social-type person. Ideally, I would have been out on that island alone. Sitting on a rock and looking out across the bay and those bare-bone islands with a mixture of joy and sadness, feeling the weight of the sky and the power of the water.

Phil likes women. But I can understand about his lack of success with them.

"Phil," I said, indicating Phil with a pepperoni sausage, "Is after the legendary treasure trove of Big Paul Stanley." It was a good opener. A fuck of a lot better than anybody else there was likely to come up with. I wished I had some whiskey handy; I wished to be drunk. I wasn't, so I chose to be direct instead.

Nobody said anything. Bastards.

"Nancy here is a descendant of Big Paul and believes she is entitled to the loot." I actually looked at her; she was watching the treetops. The leaves were flickering steadily. I looked at the water; it was rippling.

In silence and in shouting you can indulge your fantasies.

Nurse them, feed them.

What a screwed-up thing is the human brain.

There was no shouting. Nancy said, "I work part time in the paper mill with a few hours on the weekends as a waitress." We shifted on our respective seats and said nothing.

"The mill's a hell-hole of a place to work," Nancy said. "I got a deal where I only work four days a week, usually Monday through Thursday, but sometimes someone else needs a day off and I'll take their shift. Just the girls, though; most of the guys are assholes or so pussy-whipped by their wives that they just keep away from me.

"Because I say what I think and I don't give a shit what people care about it. People complain to the union or to my boss when I tell them what I think of their politics. Christ, it seems like I'm the only intelligent person in this country some times, and I know I'm no genius.

"I vote for whoever I want. I don't' care about parties; they're all crooks as far as I can see.

Nobody was going to argue with Nancy. I might have wanted to throw a sleeping bag over her head and tie her down so it all came down to distant mumbling, but I'm too polite a Canadian for that. Do all us over-polite types have such thoughts?

"Not that anybody complains about me any more. My boss may be a jerk, but he's scared of the union and I'm pretty good at my job. Production planning assistant, I guess you'd call it. I spend half my time on the phone talking to suppliers and the other half trying to figure out why the paperwork never matches what's actually sitting on the floor.

"I used to like my job. I had a boyfriend I thought was a nice guy instead of the moron asshole he turned out to be, and I liked being independent. Then it's the same old problems again and again, and you figure you've died and gone to Hell when Sunday night comes and you know on Monday some problem just comes out and grabs you by the ass.

"And there's enough money if you don't mind living in a closet apartment in someone's basement and driving a car you can't trust to get you to Orillia when you want to see something besides Parry Sound.

"So I work at the Roadside out towards the highway. I sometimes piss off the customers when they try to argue with me and sometimes I piss off the boss when I tell the customer today's special isn't any good, but most of the truckers think it's funny so I haven't been fired yet.

"I haven't run off with any trucker yet, but goddamnit I'm tempted sometimes. If I could get my hands on Big Paul's money, I'd be out of here so fast this town would just see my dust."

There was a silence, followed by the rickety calls of tree frogs.

"It's not your money," I said.

"Screw you!" Nancy glared. "I don't care if it's legally my money or the pope's or whatever. I'm going to claim it when I get it."

"That could be an interesting proposition," I said. "Have you been looking for it?"

Heather laughed, softly.

I asked Heather, "Does that mean that she's been out here?"

"Well," Heather said, "we came out here when we were a lot younger, and looked around, but we didn't know where to start. So Nancy started doing research, and she's still looking."

"Research?" Phil asked, scratching his nether regions.

"People have been looking for the money for a long time around here, and almost all the people are guys."

I raised my eyebrows.

"Nancy searched out the guys who searched for the money," Heather said.

"Ah," I said, looking at Phil.

"So," said Phil, looking at Nancy, "we'll share a sleeping bag tonight and by morning you'll know everything I do?"

"In your dreams, bucko, in your dreams." Nancy glared at Phil.

"No use sleeping with Win, here," Phil said. "Ever since that unfortunate accident while whittling a wooden golf ball at the nude beach he just hasn't had much interest in the opposite sex."

"Hey!" I said. "That steel prosthesis they put on me works just fine, once I scrape the rust off it." I leaned towards Nancy, "I'm the only one that knows anything."

Nancy pointed to Phil. "Doubt if either of you know anything useful, but I'd put my money on him."

"You heard I had a key to the loot." Phil said. He'd been a treasure-hunter all his life, mostly in his imagination, and I guess "loot" was less likely to infringe on his private world than "money" or "treasure".

"Word gets around." Heather found a comfortable place in a circle of cedar shade, spread her legs and closed her eyes. In cut-off jeans, dark green T-shirt, and bare feet she looked like she belonged on the island. Christ, she looked like she was an island, to someone, somewhere.

I said nothing, indulging my own fantasies. September can be hard on a man, especially in a cold, cold climate. We all get to September in this country. Sometime about the first week of June summer gets to this country. By the end of July, everybody's forgotten about snow drifting across the road last February and is complaining about the heat. In late August a quiet desperation sets in. Sometime about the first week in September the temperature drops suddenly and everybody resigns themselves to winter. They just ignore September and October, the two nicest months.

"It's a crock of shit," Phil said, wrapping up the last of the sandwiches and putting it into the day pack. He pointed out into the lake.

Out there a couple of cabin cruisers headed to some cottage or port, avoiding the rocks and islands closer to us. Beyond that, a ship was coming in. An ocean-going freighter, by the look of her.

"Old ship," Nancy said. People hereabouts seemed dedicated to not discussing the only thing they had to discuss. I figured I might just forgive them. After I'd beaten them all to death with a pine log.

"Going in to Parry Sound, I guess," Phil said.

"Maybe it'll go up on the rocks," Nancy said.

"The Loot," I said. "The Key to the Loot." My voice capitalized all the nouns.

"I rename you General Lee Stalinofsky Pistoff," Heather said, looking at me.

"Pissed off, who me." It was getting warm for September. Or maybe it was just me.

"Fuck the ship," I said.

"That's not nice language," Phil noted.

"It is," I said, "a long swim back to the mainland. That," I said, "is my canoe. Maybe you can walk to a cottage on this island and get someone to take you back to the marina. You can hitchhike from there."

"You're being an asshole again," Nancy said.

Heather smiled and watched the ship disappear behind an island.

"He never stops," Phil said. "Besides, if that ship hits an island, there'll be real loot, maybe thirty or forty dollars worth to salvage."

"The HMS Asshole, with General Lee Pistoff in command, is about to depart," I said to Phil. "Where the hell do you want me to toss your stuff?"

"I think he wants us to talk about the purpose of the trip," Phil said.

Now there are a lot of people who might object to my language, and there may be a few who figure I was involved in some machiavellian plot to get Nancy and Phil closer by giving them a common antagonist, me.

What a crock. Give me less credit than that.

"Anyway," Phil continued, "I got some information, which Win here probably forged, which gives me a clue as to where Big Paul's loot got stashed.

"However," he continued, "if I find it, you gals will probably try to get it anyway, so maybe I should head home and wait for a better time."

There's nothing like using "gals" to undo common bonding.

"We might be able to deal." Nancy got out a couple of slices of cheese and some crackers and passed a few to Heather.

I adore cheese and crackers. I'd have sold my share of the loot at once.

"Can't see why," Phil said. "I can always come back another time."

"Fifty-fifty."

"As soon as Hell freezes over we can walk to these islands," Phil said.

"We can supply some information," Nancy said.

"Right." Phil got up and scratched his balls again. Maybe he had wool underwear.

"You think not?"

"Anything you know is just stuff I've already heard. I've done some studying." Phil packed up the remains of the lunch. "It's all rumours and hearsay."

"Maybe so," Nancy said, "but I've been following this most of my life and I know a whole bunch of places _not_ to look. Places that have already been checked a dozen times."

"I won't need that information," Phil said, yawning. "I've got better information."

I suppose this might have been the time to tell him that I'd faked all that "better information." But I didn't.

I looked at Heather. She was stretched out in the sunlight. I liked the way her red hair spread out on the lichen-covered rocks. I decided to divorce Aisha and marry Heather. I was captain of my canoe; maybe I could do the ceremony myself. And tell Heather and Aisha afterwards.

"That information's probably a crock of shit," Nancy said, looking me straight in the eye. I shuffled nervously, knowing she'd got it right on.

"Oh, no doubt," Phil said brightly, "but it's my personal crock of shit and it's a beautiful day out in the islands, and I've got a good friend and a Classic Fenton Metal Detector and a few days of freedom and a crock-of-shit map, so I'm ahead of the game even if some people won't leave me alone."

"Map," I thought. "I never gave him a map." The code I'd made up pointed to a couple of place locations. But I guessed he'd traced these locations on a map. I expected the women to get up and go right then, but they didn't.

"We're faster than you." Heather spoke for the first time in a while, although she didn't open her eyes.

"We can portage our canoe into the woods," I pointed out. They'd never be able to follow carrying kayaks.

"Take you a while, with all that stuff you've shoved into your canoe."

Damn. She had a point there. It would take a lot of trips and I wasn't about to leave stuff behind for even a moment. Especially not my camera equipment.

"Aren't you planning on leaving?" Phil asked. "We've reached an impasse, you know, and you're going to get tired just sitting here."

He had a point. I was getting my afternoon middle-aged sleepies and the rocks and logs didn't seem as uncomfortable as they had a minute before.

"No problem," Nancy said. "The day's young and I could watch the water all day."

"Might as well commemorate the event," Phil said. "Say Win, would you mind getting your camera and taking a few pictures?"

"Why not?" I got up, creakily, and stumbled down the shore to the canoe. Miserable bastards wouldn't even let me have a nap. I hate when that happens, because I get crabby. Well, maybe I get downright mean, since I couldn't really get any crabbier.

So I got the camera and the tripod and set up on the shore.

"Take a picture of me and I'll shove that thing down your throat," Nancy said. "I took six pictures and she didn't. But she did turn an interesting shade of color.

Then I set the camera to take a couple of pictures of Heather, but she ignored me, lying on a swath of pink granite with her eyes closed. I suspected she was asleep, but I wasn't sure.

Then I set up the camera to take a wide shot of all of us hanging about the shorelines of life and forests of mystery and vast stretches of future just starting to turn into waves.

What a bunch of perfectly miserable people we were. The Thirty Thousand Islands are some of the most beautiful in the world. What a bunch of idiots. But I took pictures.

For the life of me I cannot understand the perversity of a God that would generate such misery as opposite sentient sexes amidst the promise of such joy. Maybe the one because of the other.

How much of the individual life is spent wandering among its own ruins or trying to catch a dream in a small brass cage. Freedom mocks us like a songbird outside the cells we build.

I'd have traded Phil and all his prospects for another dance from Heather on that rocky shore.

The freighter was gone, out of sight. A motorboat came along the shore, not speeding, coming the way we'd come. It was an aluminum boat, maybe sixteen feet long, with the high prow that big water demands. Powered by a twenty-five or thirty horse motor, I guessed.

The boat slowed as it got close. The only occupant, a thin, fortyish guy with long hair, waved at us. Phil and Nancy waved back. I wasn't feeling all that sociable. I guessed he was from one of the cottages, on the way home or just checking us out.

No, some readers, I haven't a clue what he was wearing. I know there are some people who like details, but us Naturally Unsociable people really don't notice these things. Hell, I probably made up most of the what-they-were-wearing details in this story. Somehow, after I made it up, that's how it got fixed in my memory forever.

So he was wearing a Blue Jays hat and a green shirt. Presumably pants, too. It was a warm day, as I said, so that was enough.

"I'm glad we've reached an agreeable compromise," I said. Heather opened one eye and Phil just started carrying the food back to the canoe. Nancy just shook her head.

Leaving's such a fine and terrible thing. A whole bunch of your little gray cells get used up learning and remembering stuff, and then you leave it. There's no Undo menu in life, nor any Return to Last Saved. Sometimes you need one.

I loaded the camera equipment back into its safe cases and when Phil nodded, we pushed off.

I didn't know what Phil had in mind, but he kept us going around the island, following the path of the motorboat. It was like the time I was five and they put me on a carousel. I screamed because I didn't know the ride stopped eventually.

Not that the motorboat had gone very far: the boat and its occupant were just sitting in the next small bay. The guy was wearing a Stetson and a polar bear coat. Not.

Actually, he was fishing, or pretending to. "Catching any?" I shouted. I doubted it: there had once been entire fishing towns scattered along the islands and bays, but that was long in the past. People might catch some, but it was never a lucky place for me.

He shook his head, then looked away. He was using a red-and-white striped spoon for a lure, dangling it below his boat in three feet of clear water with a pink rock bottom. What do I know about catching fish? But it seemed to me he had more chance of catching the Loch Ness monster than any fish I knew in those waters.

It occurred to me that people are really stupid about fishing, or maybe he was worried about us looting some cottage and was keeping track of us. There are 45,000 cottages in the area, many of them established before government regulations restricted the putting of a cottage on an island too small for a decent septic system. Give-or-take 40,000 cottages. What do I know?

"Now what," I didn't say because it was so obvious.

"There are a few things we can do," Phil said, paddling too fast but trying to keep the canoe more or less aligned with the shore of the island. Desperation comes in so many forms.

I waited for it.

"We could camp, and have a fine old day, walking the shores and swimming. Then at night we could make a fire and eventually go to sleep.

The proper response would be to look at him and raise an eyebrow quizzically, but the blight of canoes and middle age is that tipping is possible and a crick in the neck is probable when you look behind you. I raised my paddle and set it across the canoe, and waited.

Phil saved me a crick in the neck by spinning the canoe 180 degrees. I couldn't see him, but I could see the two kayaks out in the deeper waters away from the island. They were well back but obviously still keeping us in sight. That answered one of the questions I hadn't asked.

"Those two women," Phil went on, "will wonder if we're planning on sneaking away when they're out of sight, so they'll have to camp somewhere close enough to keep watch on us."

I nodded.

"At night," Phil went on, turning the canoe back to its original course, "they'll have to camp close enough to notice if we sneak away at three in the morning. Given the fact that there's not that many good campsites, this means that they'll be camping uncomfortably and be awake all night."

"They can take turns sleeping," I said.

"They're women. In a strange or tense situation women stay awake all night."

"And then...?" I started paddling again.

"In a few days they'll be worn out and go home."

"I hope you have a few more plans in your dossier," I said. "We're lucky to have a day or two of good weather and you don't have that many days off your job. I won't support you, you know. You can't live in my basement. Aisha won't bring you tea and peanut butter on toast in the mornings."

"Well, there's plan B,"` Phil said.

"Go on."

"Go on the attack. Run them down. Beat them up. Male brutality. Carnal mayhem."

"They can outrun us," I noted. "Nancy or Heather alone could probably beat the crap of me - they're at least twenty years younger than us. And," I added, "we're not the type."

"Gentlemen and wimps?"

"The meeting is called to order. Official garment is the sheepish grin. Before we go too much further," I added, still paddling, but with more force, "do you have any other loser notions?"

"Actually, I have dozens, maybe thousands, but I get the feeling you're not going to like them much better. But I got one winner." I felt the canoe swing towards the shore.

"What's that?"

"Nap time for the old guy. The homeland sanity team has issued an extreme crabbiness alert for this area."

Sometimes there's nothing to say. I realized at once he was right.

Ten minutes later I was lying on my sleeping bag on a patch of dry moss between a couple of flat rock slopes, my sweater as a pillow under my head and a sock over my eyes as an eyeshade. Phil sat ten feet away, looking at maps, an adventure novel by his side. A slight chop to the waves made a suitable background against the shore, and I ignored a couple of noisy blackbirds. I took one last look out into the bay where two kayaks were tied to a small rock island, then drifted off almost at once to sleep.

I took a couple of minutes waking up, figuring out where I was, and checking things out.

Phil was gone. The canoe was gone. The kayaks were gone. The aluminum motorboat was drifting offshore.

I did what any sensible middle-aged marooned man would do. I stretched my sore muscles, walked over to the nearest bush, and had a leak. It felt good.

Aside from my sleeping gear and a book on submarines I'd been reading before I dozed off, there was nothing to separate me from Robinson Crusoe.

Well, there was a few cottages visible on other islands, three sailboats way out in the bay, and a note under a rock where Phil had been sitting.

I read the note. It seemed the sensible thing to do.

"You snore a lot," the note read.

"Be ready to go when I get back," it added.

Sounded fine to me. Like I had a lot to do other than sit in the semi-sunlight of the afternoon and read a book on subs. The bastard had my canoe.

So I tied all the stuff I had into a tight wad, put it all back into the heavy plastic bag it had come in, and waited. I wondered what had happened to my canoe, my camera equipment, the girls, the kayaks.

The north, as southern Ontarioans like to call it, is a landscape of hills. Not mountains, just hills.

Once, when the earth was a lot younger and the days a lot shorter and the moon hung a lot larger in the sky, there was a large range of mountains here.

But that was a billion years or more in the past and the mountains were worn down to nubbins. Worn down, lifted up a few times, and worn again. Strength, broken by strength, and still strong.

From the air, the nubbins make the landscape look like an abused piece of bubble-wrap. In the hollows are lakes, swamps, or lakes turning into swamps (all lakes fill in eventually). Some of the tops of the hills are bare. For the rest there is only forest.

When the first guy, Henry Bayfield, came to survey Georgian Bay, he named it after the newly-crowned king, then set out surveying the west shore and the south shore. His bosses back in Britain were most pleased.

Then his survey slowed. Month after month he spent on the east shore. His bosses became annoyed. What in bloody hell was he _doing_ there?

Well, as that landscape dipped under the water it left thousands of islands and bays. Poor Bayfield just kept mapping and naming and mapping and naming. He'd got into the British habit of naming geographical features after supporters of the survey, but he ran out of these quick enough.

So he started using any name he could remember, and even then – those were the days before phone books – the place ended up with names like "12-Mile Bay: and "Go Home Bay."

And he didn't even think of naming most of the smaller islands.

It was warm, it was late in the afternoon, and I'd just had a nap, so I was in a pretty good mood as I watched the guy in the aluminum boat and wondered just how I was going to slaughter Phil.

I waved, friendly-like, to the guy in the boat. After a moment, he waved back.

There was a banging and clanking out in the boat, which are perfectly normal sounds for anybody moving around in an aluminum boat. You have only to scratch your butt in an aluminum fishing boat and it sounds like garbage day on Dundas Street.

Half the towns in Ontario have a Dundas Street. Turns out, some guy named Dundas surveyed the province. Gave his own name to a lot of streets.

Then the guy started the motor and turned the boat towards me until he was a hundred yards or so away. Then he stopped the motor. It was entertaining, in its own way. He leaned over the motor and hauled the propeller clear of the water, then got out a large paddle and started paddling in towards me. It was a slow process: oars would have been slower, but he had the wind behind him.

When he got close enough he tossed me a rope and I tied it around a large rock.

He stepped onto shore and I waited to see what he had to say. After all, he'd come to see me, so it was his opening move.

"You guys camping here?" he asked.

I couldn't see that it was any of his business, unless he was a cottage owner. Even then, the stretch we were on seemed a long way from any cottage. I was aware that large chunks of islands like this could be owned and not used, but I couldn't see he had any right to make assumptions. I was here with nothing but a sleeping bag and a book. As far as I could see, I was marooned.

I'd much have preferred him to have introduced himself, had of conversation about the water or fishing, then worked the questions into the conversation.

"You catching any?" Us marooned people can be right evasive.

He didn't answer my question, as I'd expected. "Most of this shoreline is privately owned," he noted."

I sat down. Standing any length of time is hard on my back, and I wasn't about to have any more aches for this guy. I'd acquired a few just napping on the rocks and twigs among the moss under my sleeping bag. He was into facts, was he? No problem. "Fish bite better in the evening," I said.

Just thought I'd tell you," he said.

"Never been much of a fisherman myself," I lied.

He must have figured out that he wasn't getting anywhere with me. He pointed over a ways, south. "People often camp at the end of that bay there. I think it's privately owned, but nobody seems to mind."

"How's the weather looking?" I asked. As far as I could see, the only advantage to the bay he pointed out was that we could camp in the damp peat moss and feed mosquitoes. It was back from the shore, and we wouldn't be able to see the water, and if anybody ever camped there, they're probably still there, stuck in the mud and sucked dry by the bugs.

He blinked. "Gonna rain tonight," I said.

"Ah, yes. Maybe. A little bit. Not much."

"Suits me," I said.

"Where's your friend?"

Now that irked me. I'd just been marooned so Phil just lost his coveted status as the friend of Win Szczedziwoj. And I sure as hell didn't know where he was. And I sure as hell wasn't enjoying this conversation. "I didn't catch your name," I said.

"I'm from one of the cottages." He waved his hand vaguely northward.

"I reached out my hand. "I'm David Suzuki, famous environmentalist."

He didn't know what to do, but he'd already started to reach out his hand, so he finished the act, but not with any sincerity behind it. "You're joking."

"Aren't we all?" I asked.

"Are you guys planning on staying long?"

"Just long enough to answer questions by you and Cork and every other yokel on these islands?"

"Cork? You know Cork?"

I leaned over and winked. "He's sleeping with the fishes tonight."

"Look," the guy said. "I'm sorry. We seem to have started on the wrong foot. As far as I'm concerned you people can camp anywhere you want. I was just trying to make conversation."

Lying bastard. "I'm not the conversational type, I guess," I said.

"I just wanted to say these islands can be dangerous. Like for people in a canoe."

On the other hand, I thought, what if Phil doesn't come back. I'd need a ride to the mainland to hunt Phil down and feed his fleshy extensions to the perch. I'm here to find the treasure," I said.

That shook him. "Oh. Yeah. Sure. Big Paul's money." He stared around. "A lot of people looked for that. I used to look for it in my spare time. That's it? Just to look for the money? Well, if that's true, maybe I can help; I can show you places where people have looked, if you have a map." He looked at my collection of worldly goods. "Your friend's got the map."

"Who's Cork?"

"Oh," he said. "I guess you've met him. Nasty fucker, when he's pissed off. Good to his friends, though."

"I bet he doesn't have many friends."

"Two of them, at last count, and he's both of them. One drunk and one sober. He's nicer when he's sober. Look, my name's Frank. Frank Smith. I was just concerned about your safety. We lose a canoer or two when the wind gets up out here."

"Frankly bullshitting," I thought, would be a closer name. I reached for my wallet and handed him a business card.

He read it. "Photographer? Rain pictures? Well, you'll get your chance tomorrow. Could be a steady drizzle."

"If my friend, Old Fuckface, comes back with my camera," I said.

"You not with those women?"

"No friends of mine," I told him.

"Maybe I can help you guys find a good campsite." He pointed to the south. "There are some good ones just south of Sandy Island. Lots of flat land and firewood."

"Oh, I think we'll find a good one ourselves, if he ever comes back."

"I mean, if you all want to come back next weekend, I can get you a cottage on Bateau. Lot more comfortable than a tent in the rain. I can get you those maps, too."

"I'll be camping without a tent if that canoe doesn't show up."

"You think about it. Got a fireplace and a great view. And a barbecue."

It was a nice offer. Assuming I believed him. He was certainly trying his best to get me off this nice little point of land. Not that I'd had any notions about camping here anyway.

"Great offer," I said. "But this is my only weekend off." It was a lie, but he started that process. "Back to the old grind in a couple of days."

"You might want to camp on the lee side of the island, eh? Breaks the wind. You can get a lot of wind on this side. Blows tents right over. Some great campsites on the other shore."

I doubted it. "Frank" didn't look like a camping short of person. "You know," I said, "maybe we'll try that. It makes sense."

"Ah, okay." He got up. "Anything I can do for you? Take you to the marina."

"Nah," I said. "George'll be back eventually. I'll just wait here and read my book." I looked up: it was getting late in the afternoon, and starting to chill.

"Okay. Sure." He mumbled a few good-byes and pushed off. In a minute he got the motor going and the boat disappeared to the north.

Twenty-three minutes and seven seconds later, Phil appeared, coming from the south.

"Hi, Buddy," Phil said, sliding the canoe against the granite and scraping off a couple of bucks worth of plastic.

"I'm going to kill you," I told him, grabbing onto the front of the canoe in a death grip.

"Thanks." Phil scrambled out. Actually, at his age, people don't scramble out of canoes. It's more like a scrambled egg trying to walk. I didn't offer him a hand.

"Hey," he said. "Help me get this stuff unloaded.

"Go into the woods," I said. "Sit behind a tree. If I'm not here when you get back, wait three weeks. If I'm still not back, send me a postcard."

Phil began chucking bags and boxes onto the rock. When you're planning to portage, you travel light and keep everything in bags with handles. But when you're not planning to portage you take everything but the automatic breadmaker and carry it in shopping bags and cardboard boxes.

"I don't want to camp here," I said, quite clearly and distinctly. "This is not where I want to camp."

"The bitch patrol is about fifteen minutes behind me," Phil said, running with a bunch of bags for the shelter of the nearest swamp cedars.

I can't say I liked the idea, but at least I got what he was after, so I tied the canoe and made the dash with a box and a couple of bags. It's so very easy to reach middle age without losing the silliness of youth.

Two trips later, the canoe was empty enough that we could haul it, still containing paddles and lifejackets and some bags, over the rock and behind the trees. I ran back to get my sleeping bag and book, and settled in beside Phil, with a green tarp in front of us.

"Asshole," I whispered.

"Keep it down."

"Moron," I added, a little louder, but not much.

"Here'" Phil said, reaching into a canvas pack. He handed me a Coke and a bottle of Irish Whiskey.

I took a big sip of one, and a big gulp of the other. He owed me, big time.

Phil nudged me. The kayaks glided by, a few hundred yards offshore. "We fooled them," he chuckled.

I hate people who chuckle. I had another sip and gulp. I hoped he paid big bucks for the whiskey. I had another gulp. It helped.

The kayaks didn't disappear, although they got hazier with the whiskey. They circled around and stopped at a rocky little islet well offshore. After a couple of minutes, both women got out and dragged the front of the kayaks up onto the rocks.

"Now what, shithead," I asked.

"Well," he said, "we can't just drag our stuff out there like we got caught hiding in the bushes."

"I came here," I said, "to take some pictures. To camp on a nice little scenic island and take some pictures. Of the island. Not of the back of a cedar tree." I was sitting on something uncomfortable, so I had some more whiskey.

"You want to go out there?" Phil waved his hand at the water.

"You think they know we're here?" I asked, avoiding the question. I finished the whiskey: it was the only thing that kept me from feeling like I was eight years old. That and the pains in my joints. I wiggled, but a cedar branch tried to give me an enema.

"Not a chance. They just gave up for the night and picked a convenient location."

"I don't want to camp here," I said, " and it's getting late."

"I guess we'll have to cross the island," Phil said.

"Up yours, sideways," I said. I'd have come up with something more scintillating but the whiskey on an empty stomach interfered. Never drink while canoeing; you might miss your own drowning. Never drink while portaging; you get impaled a lot and fall down a lot.

"Why not?"

"It's a mile wide," I said, which was an exaggeration, but considering the interior was probably a mass of tangled trees and potholes, it wasn't much of an exaggeration.

"Let me see that map."

While Phil studied the map in the long shadows of early evening, I had an energy bar and washed it down with water. I've gotten past the point of enjoying those bars, but if you're hiding on an island behind a cedar tree, they'll do just fine. At that point I could have eaten a raw turnip and enjoyed it.

"Where do you think we are?" Phil waved the map.

I studied the map. "There."

"Not a problem," Phil said. "We can deke over to this little bay here."

I looked. It was a lot shorter than crossing the island. My mind still told me to get back out to the nearest water and the hell with the women.

But I gave in to my stupider instincts, and vowing revenge on Phil, began hauling our stuff over to the little bay on the south end of the island. I must have done something really evil in a previous lifetime to deserve such penance. For a while there was just the thump of log, scrape of rock, tickle of branches.

An hour later found us in the bay. I was in the back of the canoe and Phil, wearing only underwear and shoes, was towing me, canoe, and goods through a tiny bay filled with rocks, pine snags, and yellow-brown muck.

And lily pads. Do you know that there re lots of kinds of lily pads? And that most of them have a lot of what looks like sand on them? I leaned over and touched the stuff. It was soft, like miniscule mud balls. I figured it was bug poop, since the pads usually have lots of bugs land on them. I washed a couple of pad surfaces off with a swish of my paddle, but I doubt if I made a positive or negative change to the functioning of the universe.

Phil made an impossible-to-describe sound and almost tripped on something underwater. He looked like the last time I was in Florida and someone told me about sting rays.

"Snapping turtles," I told him, helping steer with a paddle "eat mostly underwater moss. They also like lily-pad roots."

Phil grunted as he stepped into a deeper hole.

"But they will take any flesh that shows up," I added. "In winter, they breathe through their anuses."

"Why do snapping turtles breathe through their anuses?" Phil said, jerking at the canoe.

"In winter," I told him, "a snapping turtle settles to the bottom to spend the winter hibernating. Like a frog, a turtle has to absorb enough oxygen from the water to keep herself alive. Unlike a frog," I said, trying to push a waterlogged tree trunk away from the canoe, "a snapping turtle is so heavily armored that there isn't enough surface area. So she extends her anus way out and breathes through the skin on that."

Phil had got us to water deep enough to float the canoe, so he hauled himself onto a rock and washed the muck out of his shoes and underwear, and off his legs.

"I notice," he said, getting back into the canoe, that you finished off that bottle of whiskey. Are you sure you can think straight, let alone paddle straight?"

"A small bottle, at best," I said, "and I burned it off hauling our goddamn stuff over those goddamn rocks and goddamn logs and through those goddamn boggy goddamn sections. Do you have any more?" My head was hammering like six miners from INCO were extracting nickel from some interior vein. I've really got to stop drinking.

When I was young my father taught grades one through eight in a one-room school. He got good at it, but after a few years of dropping bombs on Germans in the way, it was of an anticlimax, I suppose.

He'd drink on Thursday evening, setting out a 24 pack of beer and sitting in his chair in the living room, which was, in that small house, also the TV room. He refused to drink the rest of the week, so I guess he made up for it on Thursdays. I once asked him why he didn't drink on Friday evenings, and he said he didn't want to be hung over on his own time.

About eight, my mother would join him, and they'd drink and talk for a couple of hours. Sometimes we'd watch TV till after nine, but when my sister and I went to bed they'd still be talking about everything under the sun. Sometime past eleven my mother'd go off to bed and my father would drink another three or four before stumbling after her an hour later. I learned the hard way that after a dozen beer he started to sober up and could beat me in chess, but his coordination didn't improve.

Once or twice in all the years I was there some disreputable friend would show up with hard liquor, which my father normally wouldn't touch. It made him over-the-wall dance on the tables drunk in no time.

Friday mornings they kids in the school learned not to get on his nerves. He'd been an officer in the war and it showed.

But I never grew up with a bad image of drinking, and I married a woman who eventually couldn't drink, so I tended to indulge on camping trips, carefully calculating (so I told myself) when I could drink and either sleep or portage it off before canoeing.

"You don't need any more. You need to paddle. It's going to be dark in an hour.

"We didn't pack to portage," I told him. Remember where I noted that if you're going out into Georgian Bay, you're not going to worry about portaging. You can take whatever fits into the canoe.

"We didn't plan to portage."

"I plan to kill you."

"Wait till we camp. You need someone to help you paddle."

"Whoa," I said. "Stop there." I pointed at a place near the shore.

He steered me over, and I got out. From shore I broke off pieces of wood from a fallen and well-dried oak tree. Damn stuff is tough, but the tree had fallen hard enough to break off a few big branches. I threw the chunks into the canoe. Bugs crawled out of the wood in searching parties.

"Hard stuff to portage," Phil said. But he held the canoe against the shore.

We got out of the bay, which was on the south shore of Bateau Island, and went east, away from the women and their kayaks. If you have a map, you'll realize this put us back on the east side of the island, where we'd been much earlier that day.

"Déjà vu," I said, dumping a couple of codeine tablets and of Pepsi onto my stomach.

"Worth seeing twice."

"Getting late."

"Paddle harder."

I did. We rounded the northern tip of the island again, facing the open waters of Georgian Bay again. The sun was low over the water, and there was a steady chop to the surface, with a faint underlying swell under that. It was hard to detect the swell, but I felt it in my stomach. Or maybe it was the codeine.

"Any preferences?" Phil asked me.

I looked at the map. "South, towards Cachia or Dearlove," I decided.

"Not out to Blizard?" An island with an odd spelling.

"Too far out; too late in the day."

He sighed. "You're right, as usual. But," he noted, "the wind's dying, and it doesn't look that far.

I don't know where I acquired a genuine wet noodle backbone. Blizard called and we answered. That sounds good.

We paddled against a starboard wind and choppy waves for about an hour while the sun moved its lazy way towards the horizon. I felt the vulnerability of the canoe in the open water, but the winds didn't get any worse and we got into the lee of Blizard Island without mishap.

The archipelago of four islands was without cottages, and there were several places, marked with blackened fire-pits, where people had camped before. There are organized groups of kayakers that use these islands in summer, so we weren't involved in ecological terrorism to make a camp and a campfire here.

I walked about the island. Looking back towards the mainland, I could see the trees on Bateau Island.

Cork hadn't improved any since the last time I saw him.

It was getting late, and Phil had loaded his metal detector into the canoe and paddled it over the narrow space to another, smaller island. "Don't need you," he'd told me.

I'd been just as glad to be alone; I was in one of those moods where company wasn't really wanted.

I was sitting by the fire - we'd found a washed-up branch that might burn when it was dried, and I was glad I'd brought the wood in the canoe - when a motorboat came up from the south, around the point, and came to a stop against the slick rock shore.

It sure looked like the same motorboat as "Frank" had been in, but this time Cork was running it. He was alone.

I didn't like the way he didn't even look at me as he came to the shore.

He slid the boat against the rock, stepped out carrying a rope, and tied the boat to the nearest big boulder. There weren't any trees close to the shore - and the few that were near the center of the island were pretty small and bent. I'd just got the camera set up for a couple of evening shots, maybe with the trees and the fire and the sunset. Although it wasn't working out to be much of a sunset; the clouds just weren't cooperating.

I'd been figuring that taking up metal-detecting might be a better bet than photography. You don't care so much what the lighting's like with a metal detector.

And I'd been feeling old. Old and sad. I get that way. Sitting on my Pity Pot, as they say at AA and OA and all them.

Then Cork came in his boat.

"What do you want, motherfucker," I thought, and pictured shoving a burning log into his pants. But I didn't say any of that, because I'm a nice guy.

Then again, I didn't say anything at all, because I may be a nice guy, but I'm not a very sociable one. And I'm also not a big guy.

"Well, hi," said Cork.

As I said, he hadn't improved any. Too big to be comfortable with, and carrying himself with a smoothness of too many muscles and not enough fat weighing him down.

He had hair just too long to be civilized, and a moustache that hung down and threatened to make him look like Fu Manchu crossed with a pro sheep molester.

"Have a seat," I said, 'indicating a sharp boulder, as I got the camera on the tripod and snapped a couple of test shots of the nearest shrub.

"Good camera," Cork said.

"Good enough, I guess," I said.

"Weather and warning; gonna rain by morning," Cork said. He was still standing. Cork took a long look around the campsite. "You guys might find it more comfortable on one of the inner islands."

"These ones take better pictures." I seemed to be trying to explain myself to him.

"I'd like to sit in your chair," I think," he said abruptly. "You go there."

I hadn't begun to think of the options available in that statement when he took two large strides, grabbed me by the hair with one hand and slid another hand under my legs. He lifted me up very smoothly and slid the one hand up inside my legs to wrap it around my genitals. I went up, and over, and found myself sitting on the sharp rock I'd pointed out to him.

I slid off, and looked up from the ground to find him in my lawn chair, watching me. "This," he said, " is a lot more comfortable, I think." He didn't smile.

I watched him without comment as he wrapped a hand around the leg of the lawn chair and pressed a dent into it. I guess they don't make them like they used to. He rummaged through the packsack by the chair and came up with a sandwich wrapped in cellophane. Carefully, he peeled the wrap off and ate the sandwich slowly.

Then he reached again into the packsack and came up with a few more sandwiches and a couple of chocolate bars. He stuffed one of the bars into a shirt pocket and tossed the rest into the bushes.

I started to get up. "Don't," he said. I didn't.

"Sometimes," he said, "I think of these as my islands. Isn't that weird?" He scratched his long chin. "I boat here and I look at them and sometimes I think they're like my friends. Friends that don't ask anything of me except to watch out for my propeller." He looked away. "I know they're not mine. But I feel protective of them."

I was uncomfortable on the rock but the image of me flying superman-like into the trees or the water was just too clear. I didn't think of a thing to say; my mind was picturing myself hitting Cork with something heavy. Many times.

"When it gets dark out here," Cork went on, "I'd like to be more or less alone." He looked at me. "You know what I mean? Is my meaning clear? Nobody watching my boat and nobody taking pictures of anything. That would annoy me. You wouldn't like me if I were annoyed. Let's see your wallet."

For a moment, I hesitated, then pointed to the pack my camera equipment was in. I keep my wallet there because it's uncomfortable in my pocket when I canoe. And it'll stay dry if the canoe rolls over.

"Get it for me. Or you could end up with a really sore asshole."

I didn't want to ask how, so I got up and picked up the bag.

"Bring it to me on your knees."

"Fuck you," I said.

"Do you know how easy it is to wreck a guy's knees?" Cork smiled broadly. "You just put one thumb under the edge of the kneecap and twist a little. Poor bastard'll never walk straight again.

I said nothing. I tossed him the bag.

"Thanks," he said and I mixed hate and gratitude into an unhealthy mental stew. He opened the bag, took out the wallet, and inspected the contents, one card at a time. "Photographer?" he asked. "That's why the camera equipment?" He opened the camera and took out the roll of film, pulling it loose. "Doesn't look like any pictures of me on there," he said. "Let's keep it that way." He put the camera and wallet carefully back into the case. Then he checked the film. "ASA 400? Good for evening shots, but not for night shots. Good to see that." He put the case away.

I stood there like a tree. Or a turkey.

"My advice is that you guys camp about a mile south of here. But I don't think you're intelligent enough. So my other advice is that you have a party here, with a big fire and you don't take any pictures and you still be here in the morning, so I don't think you're snoops of some sort. I really don't like snoops.

He yawned. "Missed my afternoon nap, feel like crap. I might be back; I might not."

Then without a goodbye he got into the boat, started the motor, and disappeared around the top of the island. When he reappeared between a couple of trees, I took a couple of long shots of him, his boat, and his profile, but the distance was too great and the camera shook too much.

One thing struck me as he disappeared. He hadn't done a thing that couldn't plausibly be denied in front of a third party. His word against mine. Nothing broken, no injuries. Have him charged with throwing my chocolate bars into the bushes.

Phil got back ten minutes later, his metal detector slung over his shoulder. "Don't say anything," he cautioned.

I handed him a sandwich, a hot slab of pork between a couple of slices of multigrain bread, with sauerkraut and mustard. He took it, so I handed him a beer.

He dropped into a lawn chair, took a bite of the sandwich, a chug of the beer. Swallowed, coughed.

"Cork find you?" I asked.

"Cork? No. Was he the guy in the boat? He waved, but didn't stop."

"You have all the luck." I made myself a similar sandwich, with more sauerkraut.

"He was here?"

"He was here."

Phil pondered that through half a sandwich and most of a beer. "What'd he want," he asked, finally.

"One of my pictures, autographed."

"More likely one of your balls, stomped flat."

"You know the guy?"

"I've seen his type."

"Stereotyping," I said. "One of the great evils of our time."

"What did you claim to be?"

"I told him I took pictures in the rain." I was tempted to have a beer. I thought about it, and giving into temptation seemed like the wisest move. I found a Labatt's Blue and opened it.

"You keep drinking like that," Phil said, reaching for his own beer, "and we're going to run out of the stuff in a week or so." He put big slab of pork into the frying pan. "Then we'll have to get into the harder stuff. If you left any this afternoon."

We contemplated the blue velvet sky and the deepening shadows and the scary dark water around us. "Did he believe you?" Phil asked, after a while. He hauled his jacket out of a packsack and tossed me my jacket.

"Beats me. He wanted us out of the area by sundown. In case I got pictures of something." I made myself another sandwich. There wasn't much sauerkraut left, and I offered it to Phil, but he declined, so I finished it up.

"What do you think?" Phil watched the stars coming out.

"Smuggling is the obvious reason," I said. "Something going on after dark that they don't want people to see. Or to take pictures of. Find anything on that island you went to?"

"Nothing on that island," Phil said. "But it was pretty low on my list, anyway."

"You have a list?" I had list; a list to the left.

He was silent a while. More stars came out, then dimmed as high, thin clouds moved in. The forecast had been for increasing cloudiness and probably a gentle rain by morning.

The fire popped - whatever wood I'd gotten was one of those popping varieties that shoots embers out at you, as if it didn't want to go quietly into the night as smoke and ash. I handed Phil a cup half full of tequila. He can drink the stuff - I get headaches. So I'd brought a couple of quarts for him.

"That wasn't my prime target," Phil said. I just thought I'd check it out anyway." He obviously still had good places to go and good prospects to check out, but he hid it well. Very well.

I passed him a bag of peanuts, and poured myself a slug of high-pulp orange juice, diluted with vodka. It occurred to me that I should have demanded a couple of bottles from Cork. I shoveled in a couple of handfuls of peanuts to complete my healthy snack. I always get hungry when I drink.

Actually, I'm hungry most of the time. If it weren't for Aisha I'd be shaped like a blimp and running a used-book store.

When I was half full of peanuts and vodka, I told Phil about Cork's visit. I didn't exaggerate or leave out anything.

He grunted. "Told, you. I know the type."

I just raised my eyebrows. "A bully that's really a coward and you just have to be tough with him?"

"You get that crap in school, too?"

I nodded.

"I guess there are some bullies that are big and stupid and just have to be taught a lesson," Phil said, "but there are also genuinely smart and nasty bullies. Kick the crap out of you and make it look like it's your fault."

"Rough childhood?"

"Whose isn't, most of the time." He watched the clouds take over the velvet sky and the world dim. "Had one of those in grade six. Hefty kid named Tommy Berger. Never left a mark on me and always had someone around to say I'd started it by chucking a rock at him if he had to."

"I knew a kid like that. Switched schools once just to get away." Sometimes adulthood wasn't as bad as it was cracked up to be.

"I eventually had enough, and adjusted his outlook."

I looked up, but said nothing.

"Ambushed him when he was alone and looking the other way. Broke his leg with a baseball bat."

"He knew who did it?"

"Not then. I figured he'd just take it out on me and some other pushovers as soon as his leg healed."

I waited again.

"As soon as he was out on crutches I walked up behind him again and did the other leg."

"I should think his parents or the police would get involved by that point."

"Oh the first time he said he tripped. He wanted revenge without anybody knowing. The second time he blamed some high-school kids he couldn't quite describe. I knew I had him then. He used to walk to school and I'd walk beside him describing things that people did to people. I guess he figured he'd have to kill me or keep away from me and he was smart enough to know you don't get away with killing people. Besides, in those days I was a little guy and I used to carry a five-inch hatpin." He looked away. "I explained how easily hidden a hatpin is, and how easily disposed of. And how you can kill at guy just by sliding it in beside his neck and into his heart."

"Did you happen to bring a baseball bat?" Every time I thought of Cork, there was a little tremor somewhere in me and I wondered if I'd sleep that night.

Phil looked at me. "This guy sounds like big-time trouble. If he's got any sort of smarts, he'll let you off with a warning. Hell, we're planning on doing what he wants anyway – staying tight till morning."

"And if we run into him again?"

"If there's more than one of us, he probably won't do anything."

"What if we meet him alone."

"Consider killing him."

"Sounds a bit drastic?" I watched the dark waters.

"I imagine. But consider it as an option. These guys expect people like us to hold back. We'll get one punch in, then it'll be his turn. You can't let that happen."

"Found nothing on the island, I guess," I said, to change the subject. I was afraid he was right.

"Rocks, trees, a small rattlesnake."

"What's the code say?" I asked.

"Crock of shit."
What could I say. It was true. "Nice-looking crock of shit," I finally said.

"Very impressive crock of shit," Phil agreed. He sighed and kicked at the fire.

Always have a fire. A fire's part of our souls and warms our hearts and holds our dreams and comforts. A fire's warm and changing and dancing and a good one is one you have to poke at or bring firewood to every few minutes. A guy fire is one that throws sparks, so you can cuss it and swat at yourself and keep busy with. Otherwise you start thinking too much. Nothing more dangerous than an out-of-control fire, unless it's out-of control thinking.

Pouring myself a final final drink, I paused; I could hear voices out on the water, from toward the mainland. I gestured to Phil, and we stood up and moved back into the shadows.

Still clutching our drinks and our bags of peanuts, of course.

The voices got louder. I figured anybody dangerous wouldn't make so much noise, so I set my food and drink carefully onto a flat rock and got the flashlight from my pack.

"Hey, don't shine it in my eyes. I can't see the bloody rocks," Nancy said. She was holding the paddle in front of her eyes.

I shone the light onto the shoreline as the kayaks came in. Heather got out first, Phil steadying her kayak as she clambered out. You don't get out of a kayak; you clamber out.

The three of us pulled the kayak onto the island, then went back and did the same for Nancy's kayak.

"We," said Nancy, "are going to camp with you guys." She opened a hatch on her kayak and started tossing various plastic wrapped stuffs onto the ground.

I looked at Phil. He raised his eyebrows. I looked at Heather. She laughed, quietly, then opened the hatch of her kayak.

"We've taken the best tent sites," I noted. I shone the flashlight onto the tents, well apart. The general layout of the floor of most islands is like that of a demolition site, after they've blown up the building but before the trucks have made it into a parking lot. Must have a word with those glaciers, sometime.

"There must be someplace to put a tent." Nancy was in a nasty mood.

"That depends," Phil said, "on how much of an angle you can sleep on, and how close you want to be to Win. He snores," Phil added. "Like a train with one bad axle going down a thirty-degree grade with its brakes on and running over a pack of hyenas tied to the tracks at the same time."

"And," I said, "Phil's worse."

"Am not. Couldn't be."

"You are," I said. "I've listened to you many times. And I've never kept myself awake all night, snoring."

"Just how far would we have to put a tent to be able to sleep." Heather looked skeptically into the darkness.

"Thirty-five meters from Phil," I said.

"That's an absolute slander," Phil said, "but forty meters from Win is barely enough, and then only if there's a thunderstorm and a heavy surf and you're camped at the end of a busy runway."

Nancy got a flashlight and she and Heather walked into the darkness, slowly. While they were gone, Phil and I relieved our bladders behind a nearby cedar, then sat back into our lawn chairs, poured ourselves some cola.

"What's up, do you think?" Phil finally said, very quietly.

"I suspect," I said, "that those two figured they'd be safer with us than with Cork and his friends loose among these islands at night."

"You think Cork met these two?"

"Seems likely to me. He's got something going on around here tonight and he's gonna scout out all the possible trouble."

"And those two look scoutable."

"Lecher."

"Look who's talking. But I think maybe women have a better sense of people's personalities than guys do."

Phil snorted. "Women are just more easily scared. A couple of million years of interfacing with us guys tends to make women and rabbits cautious."

The women came back, swinging the flashlight. "We've found a place that'll do. It's a little closer than we'd like, but if you two dudes snore too much, we'll just beat you to death with rocks."

"I often thought of that at three in the morning," Phil said, "in the days I shared a tent with Win, here."

"You never shared a tent," I said. "You and your flatulence took up a tent and a half. I slept with my head out the door."

"I'd have preferred your feet out the door," Phil said. "Or stuck in a bucket of activated charcoal."

"Boys have trouble growing up," Nancy said.

"Don't wanna. Won't let it. Not gonna happen," Phil said. "Peter Pan forever. Hunt treasure or follow treasure-hunters around till my balls fall off."

"You want us to grow up like Cork?" I asked.

"Cork?" Heather looked puzzled.

"One of those guys buzzing around in the aluminum boat this evening."

"Ah," said Nancy, turning off her flashlight. "The big guy or the smaller one?"

"Big guy," I said. "Evil-looker. And his looks are better than his personality." I put another branch on the fire. "I talked with both of them today, one at a time. If we're talking about the same guys."

"Probably," said Heather. "We had a chat with both of them at once."

"A friendly chat, I assume," Phil said. "Although I've never met either of them myself."

"Nancy could have been more polite, I think," Heather said, smiling.

And afterwards they must have thought they'd be more comfortable camping closer to us, I figured, though I didn't say so.

Despite his theory about women being more cautious than men, once, long ago, Phil had told me that women were made smarter than men. "It's true," he assured me. The female brain is better integrated than that of the male."

"Then why," I wanted to know," sipping tea at a booth in a Zeller's cafeteria, "do men run the world." He started to say something, but I held up a hand. "Men," I said dominate all political arenas and all corporate head offices."

"When the gods-that-be," Phil answered, "made the female, they were concerned that females would quickly take over the planet."

"They'd make slaves of us men?" I plopped my teabag onto the tabletop. You've got to get the teabag out of the teapot if you don't want your tea too strong, and there's never a really good place to put it.

"They'd do the logical thing," Phil said, "and replace us all with a permanent semen tank and a fancy turkey baster."

"They'd still get half boys that way," I said. The tea was getting cold quickly, since it (and I) was directly under an air-conditioning exhaust.

"Science could find a way around that." Phil put pepper into his coffee, drawing the glances of a few refugees from the store. "And if not, there's always the chick-sorter method."

"Who?"

"Ever seen them sort chicks at a chicken hatchery?" Phil smiled. "Half the hatchlings are males, you know, and they really want females. So they hire a chicken sexer. He divides the chicks into male and female. Then someone takes each little rooster and snaps its neck and drops it into a barrel. Pet food, eventually." Phil took a drink of his coffee.

I was lost for a moment in visions of a barrel of pink babies, necks snapped, little penises sticking out. "So why hasn't that happened?" I asked him. "Does raw testosterone triumph over brains? That's my theory."

"Only in an all-male crowd or one run on male rules," Phil said. "Humanity's progress shows that brains and cunning beat testosterone in the long run."

"Then...." I'd ogled a waitress bending over to clean up a table. She wasn't all that attractive; it was mostly pro forma.

"Asimov and his robots." Phil had a habit of doing that - tossing out a reference without explanation. Like, if you didn't know the reference, you were left feeling uncomfortable. It helped explain why Phil often ran short on friends and girlfriends.

"The laws of robotics." I contemplated the menu on the blackboard; the peanut butter and toast appealed to me, as usual, but if they turned the air conditioner up any more I might just go for the hot chocolate.

"The point, as Asimov said, is that you don't make a car without brakes so you'd never make a robot without a safety mechanism."

"Women are like robots?"

"Like a superior creation, and only that, as I've said. The improved model."

"And what is the safety mechanism," I asked. "What keeps women from turning us into catfood?"

"Well, women have the usual primitive drives such as sex and motherhood," Phil said, "but they're genetically programmed to fall in love with and submit to males."

"Not the ones I know," I said.

"You haven't tried the secret words."

"Ah...." I said.

"You have just to combine the word 'love' with the word 'always' or 'forever', and see what happens."

"You think so?" I asked, skeptically.

"Works most of the time." You can see a woman give you a doubtful look, and then like magic the little IQ switches in her brain will start switching off, like HAL in the 2001 movie. Her eyes will lose focus, and she'll get a strange little smile. After that, she'll practically collapse into your arms."

I've often wondered, over the years, just how much truth there was in that. But at the time, I asked for a demo.

"Could be dangerous, when they come to," Phil said. "Worse, if they believe you."

"Just a theory, then," I said. I must admit I smirked.

Phil sighed. "Follow me." He got up. I got up. He walked over to a table where Jean Thomas was about to sit down with her five-year-old daughter. We knew her enough to speak to her, just. She was really good-looking, which gave her a bad attitude towards most men.

Phil walked right up to her. She gave him a look like "the doofus parade must be in town". Of course she didn't include me in that parade.

"I believe that love should be forever and ever," Phil said. "True love is for always."

I've often wondered, over the years, just how many women never lose hope that there is love that just goes on forever, in spite of their discoveries about marriage and what men are really like.

I waited for the reaction. Something, for sure, was happening in her brain. She glanced at her daughter, now seated at a table. She looked up, tilted her pretty head, and kneed Phil in the groin.

A strange and doubtful look passed over Phil's face then like magic the little IQ switches in his brain started switching off, like HAL in the 2001 movie. His eyes sort of lost focus, and he developed a strange little twisted smile on his face. Then he sort of collapsed into my arms.

"Oh," she said. "What have I done?"

"What did you do, mommy?" asked her daughter.

"I'll get you a cinnamon bun," her mother said to her, and walked away.

I straightened Phil up to a more or less vertical position, and led him to the door.

"This," he said, "is a dangerous and unpredictable world. It is not for the faint-hearted.

He had a point, even if it was more like a question mark than an exclamation point right then.

***

"What's that you're cooking?" Heather asked, as I got out an insulated pack and took from it an inner insulated pack.

"His opening-night special," Phil explained, getting out a packet of dried lasagna mix with a picture of a happy hiker on the front of it. "He's only got two nights to catch up on three months worth of cholesterol and nitrates."

I looked up at Heather, then at and Nancy, who were about to cook hotdogs over the fire. I unfolded the little camp stove and put the big frying pan on it. Then I poured out some peanut oil and added the contents of the insulated pouch, one sirloin steak, three sausages, and five strips of bacon. I looked up into the eyes of the women.

"You eat that shit?" Nancy asked.

Phil answered, stirring lake water into his mix in the rusty can he used for a pot. ""Aisha - that's his wife - she feeds him soy and tofu and greens all year. Sometimes I think he goes camping just to get his arteries reclogged."

Above the wonderful sizzle, I asked, "isn't that just as bad, those hotdogs?"

"Tofu and soy," Nancy said. "At least mine are.

Heather smiled. "Beef and nitrates. Gotta love the stuff."

Nancy turned to her. "You didn't tell me you were eating that stuff."

"Damn right," Heather offered, putting her wiener, blackened on the outside at least, into a somewhat squished bun. Then she added mustard, tossing the empty plastic packet onto the fire.

She wolfed that first hot dog; there was no other term for it. Phil and I both lost track of what we were doing for a moment.

I could have put my meat on the plate I'd brought with me, but something prompted me to stab the steak with my knife, slap some of the grease off it onto a rock, and just start chewing on one end. Halfway through, I got out a plastic bottle of vodka and took a big sip.

People were looking at me, but I didn't care. I was enjoying the meat and the vodka made my headache, which I'd had since drinking so much of Phil's whiskey that afternoon, feel better. Not any less, mind you, just a better quality of headache.

I ate the sausages and bacon the same way, slapping them silly on a rock then ripping chunks out of them.

"Vodka?" asked Heather. I handed her the bottle. She took it like I'd handed her my firstborn kid.

"Careful," said Phil. "It's a little over-proof."

"Damn right," whispered Heather, after having a swig, then handing the bottle back. "You got your own still, or what?"

"I bring it in from the States, as grain alcohol at double the concentration of normal vodka, then dilute it."

"Aisha hasn't figured it out yet," Phil noted.

"They sell - what's it - grain alcohol in the States? Is that like the 'alcool" they sell in the liquor stores here?" Heather actually looked interested.

"Same stuff," I said, "chawing down some very crisp bacon. Alcohol in water. Difference is, the stuff in the States is twice as strong - eighty percent alcohol."

"I'd think that stuff would kill you," Nancy observed.

"Can't drink it straight," I said. "Gotta dilute it. But they only allow a certain size of bottle to be brought back to Canada."

"That explains a lot," Nancy said, as if it explained a lot about me.

"Want a taste?"

Nancy held out a red plastic cup and I poured some of the mix in there. Phil held out a stainless steel cup and I handed him the bottle. He put a lot in there. I was glad I'd brought a lot and that it had been his whiskey we'd been drinking that afternoon. Nancy made a face when she tasted her sample, and added water to it. Phil sipped, rolled it around his mouth, and smiled.

We ate in silence for a while, as the sky crawled overhead like a gray pavement and stars didn't climb into the sky. There were noises from the water, but no loon calls. A pair of mink eyes glowed out from behind a log, then disappeared.

Far away, there was the gleam of cottage windows, and a fisherman's boat coming in to his cottage for a beer and some Kraft Dinner. In the other direction, there were couple of large boats far out on the bay.

It was perfectly peaceful, and not raining yet. The lapping of waves grew less and the fire crackled more. I poured myself another drink. Around me on this small outer island were my friend and two younger women. I wished I were alone.

Actually, I'd have been happy if Aisha were there, but you don't get everything you ask for.

Not in this life.

"Win wishes he were alone." Phil dropped that little bomb into the peace.

There was a heavy sigh from across the fire. "We're not good company?"

I quoted a couple of lines that Nancy had called me when we were dining by candlelight at the café back on the mainland.

"And you took all that seriously?" Nancy held out her cup for more booze.

"Well," I said, "I distinctly remember my knees getting shaky and my balls retreating into my body."

She nodded. "I've had worse dates, but not many."

"It's not the company, or rather it's the company in general," Phil said, getting out a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips and passing them my way. I declined, citing concern about my weight, but Nancy took a few.

"Win," Phil said, "takes pictures in the rain."

Both girls looked at me. "It's true," I assured them. "Great moody pictures of landscapes in the rain."

"Professionally?" Heather wanted to know. "You sell many?"

"A few," I said. "Enough to pay costs and get a new camera or lens from time to time."

"Cover of _Outbound_? Couple of years ago?"

"That was mine," I acknowledged, shifting around on my lawn chair and reaching for the chips. At the moment I was contemplating islands in the rain, all moody and misty and with Heather dancing all nude in them. Maybe without the islands.

"Ah."

"Good picture." Heather took in another wiener, minus the bun. Her fourth, I figured. She must have some metabolism to stay relatively thin.

"On the other hand," Phil said, "you're on a tiny little island with this photographer, so what else is a person going to say but a compliment?"

"You're being an idiot again," Nancy said, gnawing at an overcooked soyweiner."

"By your logic," I told Phil, "that must have been a compliment."

"Yes, he is a good photographer," said Phil, "in his own way."

"Where I come from," I told him, "that's known as a 'Peterborough compliment."

"But why here?" Phil asked. "Didn't like the other campsite? Few women have raved about our company."

"The landscape looked better over this way."

"As in our mutual friend Cork Detson - the big guy - might have to stumble over the two of us if he were on his way to asking you for a date?" Phil hauled out a bottle of something. It was clear and it was in a two-liter jug that said "ginger ale" but I had a feeling that it wasn't ginger ale. "Or just keeping an eye on us and our maps?"

"Gin?" I asked.

"White wine. I'm trying to cut down." Phil came up with a couple of plastic wine glasses, but he and Heather were the only ones interested.

"Ghost-story time?" I asked, sitting back in my lawn chair and contemplating the alcohol in my cup.

Phil was in his own lawn chair, a shortened version that left his legs to stretch out and over a log. Nancy was braced against an odd-shaped pink granite boulder, and Heather was standing, wine glass in hand, looking out over the dark water."

"Treasure-story time," Nancy suggested.

"Ahhhhhh....." Phil said. "Treasure time. Always liked that story as a kid."

"You're looking for some sort of collaboration," I suggested.

"How good is the information you've got?" Nancy wanted to know.

"Are s Big Paul's grand-daughter?" I asked, finishing off the booze and watching the world warm up.

"Great grand-niece." Nancy shifted. Granite boulders are never all that comfy; hence the lawn chairs. I'd rested against a lot of them when I was younger; now I'll go without a lot of things on a trip to have a lawn chair along.

"Did he really hide money out here?" I contemplated more alcohol, but decided instead to put the teapot on. I hung a billy can from a stick over the fire. It would have been both faster and easier to get the gas stove going, but everyone needed a breather and everyone needed something to watch.

"Most people with no brains are convinced of it," Heather said, moving along the line between shadow and darkness, the campfire light dancing on her clothes and changing her contours as she moved.

"Obviously," Nancy said, "you two believe it, too, or you wouldn't be here."

"Got that right," Phil said, farting noisily at the same time. "Just ask ol' Win, here."

"Me?" I'm just a follower." I scratched my beard and polished my glasses on an old piece of tissue I found in my pocket. I thought about getting my jacket out; it was going to get chilly later, although the cloud cover would keep some of the day's heat in.

"That true?" Heather asked, from the shadows. "He looks more Machiavellian than that."

"Oh, for sure, he's all of that." Phil reached over to his travel bag and hauled out a laminated and waterproof copy of our map and handed it to Nancy.

She looked at me and looked at Phil and looked at Heather, and set it down, still rolled up. "Why this?"

"It's got all the islands on it, with my cryptic markings."

"And I wouldn't be able to figure them out?" Nancy looked sideways at the map and then back at Phil.

"Nope."

Nancy got up. "The money belonged to my family." She sat on another log. "I feel I have some stake in it."

"We could come back some other time, Win and I."

"You could always have done that." She swatted at some bug that came circling the fire.

"Have a look at the map."

Nancy did, with Heather sliding in to peek over her shoulder with a small flashlight. "Just a map," Nancy said after a minute. No markings on it that I can see."

"All in my head," Phil said, "and in this wonderful manuscript." He hauled out the navigational book and flipped it open to the page with the code on it. He handed it to her.

Where this was going, I didn't know, but it added interest to the night. If I wasn't going to be alone, I might as well have some interest.

Not like there was anything out here or we'd ever find it.

"This is some kind of code?"

"Just a transposition with a key to some lettering on the cover of a Seagram's bottle."

Nancy held the book on her fingertips, like it was the fifth revelation of John the Baptist or maybe was secretly filled with springy snakes.

"Have a look through it." Phil didn't seem concerned.

"I might not give it back." Nancy smiled, mockingly.

"Doesn't matter," Phil said.

"It's too hard for a woman to break?"

"A fake!" Heather disappeared back into the shadows for a moment.

"You think so?" Nancy stared into the darkness.

"Ask Win."

"Me?" I reached for the cup, but it was empty.

"You!" This from Phil. "You faked the whole bloody thing just to get me out on this island!" He got up and picked up a very, very large knife.

"I proclaim my innocence! I'm already circumcised!" I got up from my seat.

I reached into my bag and came out with a large flat knife in a rustic scabbard. "I can take you with one eye tied behind my back!"

"Man to man!"

"Man to man!"

Phil turned to the women, and said, "Please excuse us. We have a debt of honor to settle." He bowed to me.

I walked ahead of Phil into the darkness, letting my eyes try to adjust. There was mostly bare rock on the island, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

We crossed the ridge of the island in less than a hundred feet, and stepped down the other side until we couldn't see the firelight. The waters of Georgian Bay made little lapping sounds on the granite shore, and some creature made a night sound in one of the cedars.

"What the heck was that," I asked. I couldn't decide if it was a real bird or if two of Cork's friends were out there with blood-spattered femurs over their shoulders, about to adjust our anatomies.

"BTSOM-Bird," Phil replied. That didn't help. Phil commonly categorized wildlife into BTSOM-birds, BTSOM trees and BTSOM bugs. Because BTSOM stood for "beats the shit outta me", it was a broad category.

"Thought so," I said. "Did you bring a flashlight?"

"Nope. You?"

"Not a chance," I said. "Let's try not to pee on each other's shoes."

In the night I heard the bird once again, and, out on the water, the sound of a motor.

"Sounds like Bill's motor," I said. "But most motors sound the same to me."

Phil peered into the night. "Whoever's out there is running without lights. Must know the place pretty well."

"Lotta rocks out there?" I tucked the relevant portions of my external genitalia back into my pants, making sure nothing got caught on the zipper on the way by.

"Rocks, islands, sunkers."

"Sunkers?"

"Newfoundland term for rocks just under the surface. Bloody bay is full of them. You get yourself a boat here and you've got to keep away from the scenic parts, or else spend all the time looking at the charts and the water.

"Well, he seems to be going pretty steadily."

Phil pointed to the north. "Watch out that way."

I did. It was black out there, but a couple of red lights sparkled, then, from closer, a green one.

Then, from the general direction of the motorboat sound came a double green wink, very indistinct.

"Almost didn't catch that last one," I said.

"Probably pointed away from us," Phil said, "towards the ship."

"Ship?"

"There was an ocean freighter anchored out there earlier."

"So maybe Cork wasn't lying. Maybe there is some smuggling going on tonight." I listened for more noises but there was only the faint outboard motor sound.

"Makes sense." Phil scratched himself. "But if so, they're going to be worried about us being so close."

"You think?"

"If I were them, I'd send someone to make sure we're just happy campers and not government agents."

"Yeah. That makes sense, too."

The women were at the campfire when we got back, both sitting down on logs, and Nancy trying to read a book by the firelight.

I sat down in my lawn chair. Phil went down to the shore.

"Have a good pee?" Nancy asked.

"Not bad," I said. "You?"

"Reasonable, under the circumstances."

Things were more comfortable as we settled down, Phil and I on our lawn chairs and the women, Heather and Nancy, on the ground, resting against a couple of boulders.

They didn't look too comfortable, but I was. Gotta love them lawn chairs. I didn't even consider having another shot of that vodka.

Nancy indicated the book of navigational charts beside her. "You really think this is a fake? If it isn't, it might be just what we - you - need to find anything that's there."

Phil pointed at me. "Win faked it."

I mixed up some vodka with a can of Coke, carefully. "That's a hangin' accusation, pardner."

"It uses a key based on a Seagram's whiskey-bottle label," Phil said. "After that, it's a simple substitution code, starting with W - for 'Win' - as 1."

I scowled at him, not knowing what else to do.

"The keys that it's a fake are that it starts with 'W', the 'S' is out-of-sequence, and Seagram's didn't start using that label until four years after the supposed event." Phil looked at me.

Heather and Nancy also looked at me.

"It'll take more than that to hang me," I mumbled, watching the clouds going by. "Besides, Phil and I came to a conclusion out there in the dark. About some visitors we might get tonight."

The women looked at Phil. "There might just be another booze-smuggling operation going on tonight," Phil said, "or maybe Win here has arranged a re-enactment of the original."

"We figure," I jumped in, "that someone's brought a ship and anchored it out there. And we heard a boat - with no lights - go by. We think there's a rendezvous, and Cork said they were smuggling liquor."

"That," said Nancy, "is probably a Chinese freighter that's heading for the Sound. They're scheduled to pick up some industrial equipment from the old Northland Steel Works factory. Everybody in town's been talking about it."

"Seems unlikely that the Chinese are into liquor smuggling," I said. "There's not enough of a markup for an operation that big."

Three people poked at the dying fire, and Nancy threw on another log.

"Besides," I added, "Cork said that's what was going down tonight, and I find it hard to believe him."

"Anyway," said Phil, "they tried to talk us into camping a lot further away. Now we figure they'll send someone to make sure we're what we're supposed to be, and not federal agents with submachine guns."

"If it's more valuable stuff than liquor," Heather said, "you might be right."

There was silence as we listened for something more than our imaginations over the crackling of the fire. Logs out that way tend to be from evergreens, and evergreens crackle a lot.

"I hear a boat," Heather said, but it was another minute before the rest of us did.

"Actually, " said Phil, looking right at me, and sliding his knife under his jacket, "it might be really important to confirm that you, my friend, did fake all this."

I slid my own knife under my own jacket. "You think so?"

"We need to know whether to protect the chart or if we can sacrifice it," said Heather.

That made sense. "Phil got it right on," I said. "It probably took me longer to make up that code than it took Phil to break it."

"Why in God's name...." Nancy began. She looked like my grade eight teacher the time I'd brought in a bag of my dog's turds with bits of my essay in them, to show that I wasn't lying this time. It seemed funnier in grade eight.

"Hey," Phil said, "I deserved it. I'll tell you about it sometime, as soon as I've figured a way to, ah, adequately repay my friend here. Who, by the way, was just after a few pictures in tomorrow morning's rain."

"Goddamn you motherfuckers," Nancy said. "You mean there's no money here?"

"As much as there was before we started out, anyway," I said. "Haven't you searched these islands a few times."

"Hell, yes," Nancy said. "I was just hoping you had some definite clue."

"Not us," Phil laughed, "they don't come any more clueless than us."

Couldn't argue with that one.

From out of the dark water came the sound of a motor coming really slowly, with a flashlight waving freely between the water under the boat and the shoreline. It was a bright light and it momentarily blinded me when it swung my way.

"Ahoy!" came a voice from the boat. I didn't know anybody said ahoy anymore.

"Ahoy," I called back. I looked around. Phil and Nancy hadn't moved but Heather had disappeared.

We watched as the boat came close and the motor stopped. The boat continued in until it made banging noises on the rock shore. Fiberglas, I figured, from the sound. They don't make any of them anymore; it's all traditional wood or indestructible aluminum.

A rather tall, thin woman, dressed in green pants and an orange sweater stepped from the boat onto the shore, holding the end of a rope that would hold the Titanic. She had short blonde hair and braces on her teeth. Early forties, I thought. Something about her reminded me of a snake. For the life of me, I couldn't think what it was. She squinted into the firelight, and when nobody said anything, she trailed the rope out, slithering it across the rock and tearing at the tiny raspberry bushes until she could loop it around a boulder.

Then she walked up to the fireplace and Bill Bunch himself stepped out of the boat. He looked around. He'd have been in his early 30's, 5'11 with close-cropped hair, and glasses. He wore black running shoes, jeans, and a horizontally striped shirt that made him look like an escaped prisoner.

"Hi," he said, "looking at me. We meet again."

I didn't say a thing, and Nancy and Phil remained perfectly silent.

"Can we sit down?" the woman asked.

"Pull up an island," Phil said, "and make yourself comfortable."

Bill got a case of beer in cans from the boat, and set it beside Nancy. Then he hauled out a couple of folding concert chairs - the ones that come in a bag - and set them down not far from me.

Now bringing twenty-four beer for six people seemed like a mighty neighborly thing to do, but not bringing any extra lawn chairs was, I thought, a major mistake. You might be able to get people drunk, but unless they're comfortable, they'll be forever getting up and wandering about. I just cannot imagine how a million years of humanity evolved without inventing a lawn chair first.

Look at a cat or a dog curled up or sitting on their haunches. They're comfy when they're asleep or sitting. Not humans, unless they're properly supported in the proper places. Just try to sit or sleep outside without support. You'll never be comfortable and in half an hour you'll ache something awful, somewhere.

I was going to hang on to my lawn chair in any case, because I'd felt that Nancy and Heather, arriving all uninvited, deserved no better than rock to sit on and old log to lean against.

But everything's relative, as Einstein used to say before he decided quantum theory was as bogus as my treasure code, and Heather and Nancy were suddenly looking a lot more like my kind of people than these two.

Neither of whom offered anybody a chair.

"I'm Bill," Bill Bunch said. "And this here's Alice." Alice took a nod, ripped open the case of beer - Bud Lite, I saw, like these islands just needed a bunch of cans of Bud Lite to compliment their natural beauty - and handed cold beer out. The she coiled herself into a chair. I reached for a beer, to say I was in the game. After a brief hesitation, so did Nancy. Phil followed in due course.

At this point Heather reappeared from the darkness and took one for herself out of the case. She sat down without comment.

A succession of popping sounds announced the opening of six beer. Was this, I wondered, a Canadian version of some modern bonding ritual you normally find in Arkansas where a group of people all becomes a unit by sharing Bud Lite?

On the other hand, if it had been we who had offered something to the new guys, maybe that would have been some sort of acceptance into our group.

Rather, since they'd simply shown up and offered the beer (if you can call it that) to us, were they saying that these islands were theirs and they were accepting us as visitors?

At least, when Bill offered their names, neither of them tried to shake hands with anybody. Maybe they knew what would happen.

Of course, nobody offered to shake their hands or even say "thanks" for the beer. Nor did anybody seem to want to tell Bill and Alice their own names.

Heather reached out and grabbed a piece of wood to put onto the fire. Claiming part ownership of the fire, now, was she? Well, I couldn't object: it was all relative, and I figured Phil and I had made a temporary truce with Heather and Nancy now that Bill and Alice had stomped onto our little piece of land.

"We were looking out the cottage window," Alice lied, "and figured you people were new to these islands." She smiled at me and continued. "We've been here for years now, maybe twenty years now, and we figured maybe you'd like to know something about these islands."

We nodded, silently. Sure. Like they weren't sent to hold us down until whatever was happening was over. I had a couple more sips on my beer.

"I'm a adult-education teacher in Barrie," Bill announced, suddenly. "I got into it when I was twenty-eight. I was sitting in my father's office – he manages four companies in the Toronto area – when his boss came in and gave him hell for something or other. Really laid it on him.

"Well, my father'd managed those companies for over twenty years and knew what he was doing better than the boss, but he couldn't say anything. Just took it.

"So I said to myself, what the hell's the use of being somebody else's whipping boy?" Bill looked around. "I quit my job with the company and now I'm teaching people who really need to learn. It feels good, you know. I do a lot of night school and get odd jobs and if I don't like them, I quit. I know Mary – that's my wife – would like more money, because we often run short, but I like being able to go around and do things I want. I spend a lot of time out on these islands if I can." He paused for breath.

"Ready?" Phil said to Nancy.

"As good a time as any," she answered, although she couldn't have had any more clue than I what he was talking about, whether he was ready to assault out visitors with rocks or to disrobe and have a quickie out behind the kayaks.

Phil set his beer can aside, and got out of the lawn chair. "You can use this till we get back," he said to Heather. "I got the code book," he continued, getting the book of navigational charts. "Got the map?" he asked, looking at Nancy.

"Over here," she said, getting up and pulling the topographical map out of my packsack.

"Flashlight?" Phil asked.

"Got it." Nancy said, taking a rather large one from her own packsack.

"We'll try not to damage your canoe," Phil said to me, assembling his metal detector.

What Alice and Bill were supposed to do about this impromptu performance I didn't know, and from the look on their faces, neither did they. Bill took to clenching his fist and Alice started licking her lips while one eyebrow went up and down.

Nancy turned to our unwelcome guests. "You can entertain our friends with some island stories. We're off to find the money box." She showed Alice the code along the edges of the old set of navigational charts.

Heather got up and settled carefully into Phil's chair. "Ah," she said. "That's lots better."

"We should have brought a few extra lawn chairs," Bill said as Nancy and Phil started loading the canoe with paddles and lifejackets. "Do you want me to go get some?" He was clearly agitated and at a loss as to what to do. Alice didn't look any happier as Nancy got into the front of the canoe and Phil pushed off and sat in the rear seat. They disappeared into the night like someone had got some flat black spray and sprayed them out of existence. For a moment we could hear the noise from the paddles, then even that was gone.

I had to trust that Phil could see and hear better than I could, but he didn't have the campfire and its light and crackling sounds to contend with.

I figured Alice and Bill were having a major psychological problem now that Phil and Nancy were gone. But what could they do? If Bill took the motorboat, that would leave Alice with no way off the island.

The whole thing was so quick and smooth even I had a hard time.

Heather turned to me. "I presume this is the lost loot of Big Paul they're talking about."

I pretended to look confused. "Ah.... Well, I guess if Phil thinks it's okay.... Yes, actually. He thinks he's got a lead on it." My nose got itchy.

"People been looking for that for... well, Nancy's grandfather went out looking for that. I figure it's all just a story." Bill shook his head.

"Well I thought so, too," I said, putting a billy-can of water over the fire, "but then I saw what Phil did with the code and the charts."'

"I never heard of a code," Alice said. "And I've known the story since I was a kid. Even went out with one of my boyfriends a couple of times to look for the money." She smiled. "At least that's what he told me till we got out here."

"Still don't believe it," Bill said, trying to peer into the darkness beyond the campfire light where Phil and Nancy had disappeared.

"Looks pretty genuine to me," I said. "Written in a book of navigational charts of the area. Got another beer?" They passed me a can of Bud Lite. It wasn't as cold as the first one. It didn't improve the flavor.

Heather declined the offer of a beer. She sat like a queen in Phil's lawn chair, watching the action. For a moment there was no action. That was okay: it made other people uncomfortable before it bothered me.

"Cork..." Phil started. Bill and Alice looked up.

From far out in the night came a sharp noise.

Alice sat up. "That sounded like a rifle shot."

"303, if I'm not mistaken." Bill got up and walked down to the shore.

A bunch more shots came in on the night air. I wondered where Phil and Nancy were.

I probably knew Phil as well as anyone could, and I just couldn't see him taking off into the night like that. A flashlight would be of limited use out in these islands, and it was easy enough to lose your way in daylight.

Then, of course, there was Cork out there somewhere. I had no desire to be out in the dark with a dickhead like that, even in broad daylight; there was something about him that reminded me of a one-man street gang.

So my guess was that he'd taken Nancy away just to get away, and they'd probably sneak back to the island somewhere along the shore. Heck, maybe they'd just circle the island.

Now, I'm an independent bastard, and like to paddle my own canoe. Unfortunately my own canoe wasn't there any longer. I was on Blizard Island with two kayaks and a fishing boat. And Alice and Bill. I needed them like I needed another hemorrhoid.

When I was very young I tried too hard to be friends with other kids. Do you realize kids are monsters, selfish to the point of being psychotic? Only the fact that they're small in size and too young to know better saves them from the wrath of adults. Only the fact that they'll probably grow out of it.

I piss off my friends. I don't have many and I piss them off, one or another with great regularity. What do you think I do when I find I've insulted Phil or Chet or Ron? Not what I want to do, which is to find a way to piss the rest of them off and become a hermit.

My father once told me, when he got old and frail, "I'm tired of living and scared of dying." I think he was quoting a song from _Showboat_. The wonder of the world fades with the magic of youth. The songs sound all the same and the pictures I take in a slow falling rain are the ghosts of my childhood tapping on the windows of my soul and they're too much the same.

I learned, later than I should have that sharing a drink with a friend remains a constant warm glow long after the fireworks of the rest of the world are ashes falling from the sky. I was still fighting that. I was still thinking that my primary goal was to get away. Even without a canoe.

So I was mentally eyeballing Alice's boat when the first shot came. That stopped me.

Because, let's face it, it seemed pretty obvious that something was going down out there that night, and that some of the locals didn't really want any of us poking our snotty city noses into it.

It was quite easy to say, "nobody's gonna tell me where I can't paddle" in the daytime, but an hour before midnight on a rocky little island – that was a different proposition. I decided that maybe I'd sit back in the chair, by the fire, take a Bud Lite, and just hope Phil and Nancy weren't getting ventilated out there. Not to mention my canoe.

On second thought, I decided to sit a little further from the light of the fire. If someone had planned a midnight meeting, they were about an hour early out there. A chilly wind danced with the pine tree nearby.

Alice was peering intently into the darkness, shielding her eyes from the fireplace glare, and Bill was at the shore. What with the echoes, it really wasn't possible to tell where the shot came from. I did keep in mind that bullets can skip over the water a long ways on a calm night. And that, to a boat, the only really visible thing was our little patch of island, lit by a campfire.

The same thought must have occurred to Bill when a volley of shots mixed with the sound of what might have been a machine gun or automatic rifle, changed the atmosphere. They didn't sound any closer, but Bill walked to his boat, took out a bailing bucket, and used it to scoop lake water onto the fire.

There was a volcanic hiss and cloud of steam, then a few embers, which Bill got with the second bucket of water. We must have all been waving at the steam. The noise covered my retreat back a few more steps.

We entered blackness just like that. I wondered where Heather had got to.

"Sounded like shooting," Alice's voice noted from the darkness. That certainly confirmed my observation. "What's going on?' Like Bill or I might have a clue. Like I might have a clue.

"Rifle," Bill said, "and AK47."

"Jesus Fucking Christ," Alice said. "Is there anything we can do?"

"Well," Bill said, "for one thing we might just want to keep quiet until we figure out what to do next." His toe squashed the last ember. By now my eyes were at least able to separate sky, island, and water, but that was about it

"Where are those other two?" Alice stumbled over something.

"Win?" Bill asked. "That you there?" There was enough light in the night to give him a faint silhouette against the sky. He looked like the abominable bogeyman come to get me for my childhood sins. I felt like covering my crotch and running through the woods.

That, of course, was guaranteed to leave at least one eyeball impaled on a cedar twig. Cedars are nice trees, but not the friendliest of their genus. I just backed slowly behind a bush and lay down.

Heather was out there in the darkness of the island, too, but at least she'd have firm ground under her. I couldn't say the same for Phil and Nancy and my damn canoe. Without the fire, they'd have trouble finding Blizard Island. And if I were them and were out on the water somewhere, shining a flashlight seemed at that moment like a very very bad idea.

"There's not much point in staying here." Alice's voice followed a dark shadow that edged towards me." She added some interesting words when she bumped into something.

"What do you suggest?" Bill seemed more confused than sarcastic.

"Home," she said. "Back to the cottage. If Cork's going to find us, that's where he'll look."

"What about these two?"

"I guess they don't matter now," Alice said, and I didn't know what she meant by that. I'd gone down on my hands and knees and was most of the way to the place where the kayaks had been beached.

A flashlight did a quick search, and caught me in the act of escape. It also showed me that neither kayak was where it had been left.

"Hey!" Bill yelled.

I didn't figure they could yell and shine a flashlight for much longer before someone found them, so as soon as the light went out, I went, bent over, into the nearest patch of Juniperis Virginiana, the tree of life, one hand over my eyes and one over my beloved genitalia.

There are a lot of things one can run into on a rocky little island in the dark. There are branches dropped from trees and logs washed in with winter storms. There's rocks just lying around and rocks that stick out of the soil.

My first big trip took me headfirst into a dip in the land. I threw my hands out in front of me, which turned out to be a mistake, crotch-wise, since the dip had an old log in it. You might imagine old logs as being cylindrical things with a smooth finish. Evergreens aren't like that; they hang onto their branches long after they're dead, and it's only the bombardment of wind, rain, and photographer's crotches that wears those down to nasty little stubs.

My face, fortunately, landed in something really soft. For a moment my libido – that of it which wasn't hurting – fantasized that I'd found Heather. But what I removed from my wide-open mouth (I tried to close it, but that wasn't going to happen) turned out to be moss. Soft, but damp.

I lay there, my torso wrapped around the log and my head against the moss, for a moment. Alice and Bill were still by their boat, to judge by the voices. The conversation went something like this:

"The motherfucker's probably hiding in those bushes."

"Jesus Christ. What the fuck do we care? He's not our problem now anyway."

"Fuck that. Cork'll want to know where he went. We fucking gotta have something to tell him."

"Fuck Cork. It was his fucking idea that fucking got us here in the first fucking place. Let's go before we fucking get shot or something."

Well, it wasn't Shakespeare, but I was happy with the last idea.

"Throw everything in the fucking boat."

"What about the beer?"

"Fuck the beer. Just get the chairs. Have you seen the girl?"

It was Bud Lite, so I wasn't concerned about intercourse with the beer cans. And I was glad they had no idea where Heather was. Mind you, if she was out in a kayak they were more likely to meet her on the water than on the island.

There was noise, then the sound of an aluminum boat sliding over rock and into water. When the motor started, I began to get myself out of my oasis. Then I sat on the moss and moaned. I felt like I'd been the bum sleeping in the dumpster when the trash truck finished its rounds.

Since nobody I knew was back at the campsite, I crawled and stumbled across the island to the far shore. Blizard Island isn't very big, so it only took a couple of lifetimes.

I figured to wait by the shore till morning came, or someone showed up to rescue me. I figured anybody but Cork would do.

I tried to make myself comfortable against a crooked rock and figure out what the dark shapes all around might be as midnight got closer. One moved.

"Well, if it ain't my old buddy," Cork said.

Now I want you to realize that there had been a lot of shooting out there, and to the best of my knowledge Cork had been the only one out there except for Phil and Nancy.

It's not that I'd wished the dear boy any harm, but my gut feeling had been that I'd have preferred to see him again as a morgue shot on the cover of the local newspaper. But here he was, sounding way too healthy for me. And way too close.

I got up, aching in a few places I'd sooner not have ached in, but aided in no small measure by the fact that Cork had got his large hand around my neck and was using it to provide substantial lift. He was a quick man, that Cork Detson, real quick.

"My friend," he said, pushing me against a tree and frisking me, "I'm very glad to see you."

"Arghhh," I replied.

"This little smuggling operation of ours has gone rather badly tonight," he said, "and it seems quite a coincidence that you guys should be so close just when all that happened."

I would have pointed out that coincidences happen, but I still had his thumb in my windpipe.

"And yet," he mused, "you guys just don't seem like anybody who actually knows what they're doing. Shall we go for a ride?"

"Nope," I said.

He laughed. Then he said, "you want to be walked or dragged?" and took out something. When that something pressed coldly against my left eyeball, I figured it must be a pistol.

"I'll walk."

"Thought you'd see it my way." He shoved me down the granite slope towards the water, where I met with the edge of his motorboat and fell forward. Cork picked me by the legs and flipped me into the boat, where I made intimate acquaintance with a bunch of unidentified hard and sharp objects. There were three large coolers in the boat, strapped down securely.

With a loud grating noise the aluminum boat slipped into the waters of Georgian Bay and shuddered as Cork leaped in. The boat rocked, then the motor started and we headed out into the darkness.

I huddled as best I could on the front seat, my windbreaker cutting the night wind, but not enough. It was overcast and moonless, and darker than the crawl space under my heart.

The outboard motor put out a steady lion's growl and the aluminum boat slapped into the waves. The horizon was a dim purple velvet between the water and the sky. I could just make out the silhouette of Cork, one hand on the steering arm of the motor. I couldn't see his other arm, but figured he had it in his pocket, curled around the gun.

I was getting fonder of him because he hadn't killed me yet. If he kept it up, and I couldn't find a way to rip his throat out and throw it to the fish, we could get to be real friends. Boat buddies, like.

Thirty Thousand Islands, I thought. A hundred times that number of rocks just above the surface of the water. A hundred times that number of rocks just below the surface. 6

And there we were, Cork Detson and I, almost friends, barreling through this water wonderland at three in the morning with a thirty-horse Evinrude and not so much as a penlight. I wondered just how good his night vision could be. He'd been raised locally, but I wondered how good his memory could be. I pictured myself pitched backward over the front of the boat onto an island in a symphony of tearing aluminum. Then, of course, a flying six-foot-one Detson would land on me, breaking the rest of my bones.

I thought about rushing him, taking us both over the back of the boat and working out our differences in the water, but he was big and he was quick. And he had the gun.

"Don't cogitate about it, little buddy," Cork said, over the sound of the motor. "I can get three shots off before you can cough, and one of them's all it'll take."

Like I said, my new friend was quick. I believed him. We roared on into the velvet night.

There was a loud bang that stopped my heart a moment. The boat rocked up and down like a harpooned whale. I hung on to the sides, and the motor stopped.

In a moment the boat came to a halt. There was a coolness to the night air, but I no longer had so much wind blowing by. The boat shifted and creaked. Cork said a few words that seemed suitable. But people his size don't need as many good phrases as smaller men do. He did something with the motor.

"We broke a shear pin," he said. Using "we" seemed a bit of a stretch, but I didn't want to argue the point. He had the one and only gun, after all. I reached into the windbreaker pocket and found a mint. I washed the lint off it, and popped it into my mouth. I was prepared to wait. I went down a seven-page list of my options and that was the only one on it. I waited.

"I'll probably have to slay you now," he said, "and I guess I know how."

My mouth went as dry as the armpit of a cactus and the mint began to rattle against my molars.

"I've got a few supernumerary shear pins," Cork said, "but it takes both hands to put a new one in, and I can't trust you while I'm doing it."

So much for being boat buddies.

"There must be a better way," I said, more loudly than I'd intended. I thought about leaping out of the boat and swimming underwater a mile or two and finding an island in the dark and hiding in the trees there, but I wasn't sure about steps one and two. Step three looked dubious in the dark, too.

He laughed. "Like what?"

"You could tie me up." I'd seen it in the movies.

"All I've got is the anchor rope, and if it was any good for tying up people, I'd have attained that objective a while back. Besides, who's going to hold the firearm? Or do you want me to hold it with my toes? Or stuff it up my nose. Hm?"

"Maybe I could tie myself up."

"I'm sure you'd do a singular and consummate job, but I must admit I've never seen it done. I think I'll have to disappear you. Hole you and smear you."

The mint rattled against a bicuspid; one I'd had filled a couple of years ago. Tooth decay. Those mints are deadly.

"I could change the shear pin," I suggested.

"You?"

"Me."

"Tell me the consecution of events."

"Remove cotter pin," I said. "Remove drive nut, use new shear pin to push old one out, replace drive nut, put cotter pin back in." The mint disappeared somewhere into the ebony night.

Cork's silhouette moved as he thought. "Easier to kill you. Tip you and spill you."

"You need me to find the money."

'I might need you to find the assets."

"Lots of money," I noted.

"Get an oar," he said.

I got an oar.

"Paddle us frontward and to the left."

I leaned over the bow and paddled, awkwardly. A small boat isn't meant to be paddled, especially with an oar. I paddled three strokes on the right and two on the left, then repeated. After a minute or two, Cork called, "Paddle more on the right." I did. It was just as dark. I still couldn't see anything.

Abruptly the oar touched bottom. I could see a dark mass breaking the thin purple horizon line. Cork must have had eyes like an owl to find an island in the dark.

"Take your clothes off," he said. "Unbutton and doff."

"Pardon."

"Now."

I compromised, and stripped down to my underwear.

"Egress," he said. "But hang onto the boat."

I got out, hanging onto the boat. The water was surprisingly warm, but my feet found bottom about knee deep.

"Get to the posterior end of the boat."

I walked hand over hand and rotated the boat at the same time. Eventually I felt my way to the back and got smacked on the side of the head with the motor shaft, which had been raised into a horizontal position. My hand felt its way to the prop. It was nicked but it spun freely: Cork's diagnosis was accurate.

There was a rattling in the boat. The waves rocked it against me.

"Here are the pliers."

"Where?" I couldn't see a thing.

"Here." They smacked against the side of my head. I grabbed them; a pair of vice grips. I decided to remove all his body parts with them. The spherical body parts would get carefully pressed and mailed to a remote corner of Nunavut in small envelopes. The sausage-shaped parts would get put onto a shark hook and used to catch goldfish. After I fixed the prop so I didn't get shot.

"I can't see," I said. "Can't you turn on a light?"

"I'd rather not utilize the flashlight," Cork said. "Maybe I should do it myself. Put you on a shelf."

It wasn't that hard. I straightened the cotter pin and pulled it out. I had nowhere to put it so I stuffed it into my cheek. It was oily and cold, small and sharp-edged.

I adjusted the vice grips and unscrewed the drive nut. It was greasy and too large for my mouth, so I stuffed it into my undershorts, at the front, where it wouldn't fall out. Designed to hold nuts, that outfit.

I felt the shaft; the broken shear pin seemed to have fallen out when I removed the nut. All to the good. I held out my hand and felt a shear pin dropped into it. I reassembled the assembly

I hesitated. The underwater option started to look good.

"I'd get you when you came up, buttercup." Cork said. But I knew he didn't read minds, or he'd already have ventilated me. He just knew how a cornered rat felt. And I didn't like his rhymes, but I know how sensitive a poet can be, so I kept my mouth closed.

I climbed back into the boat, at the front. I took off my wet underwear and put my dry clothes on after I'd air dried for a minute. The motor roared again, and the bow lifted as we headed back into the night. I curled up and tried to get some sleep.

I'm not known for my courage or my swiftness of action, but I do have my moments. One of those moments happened as Cork's flashlight flicked on and the motor slowed. The bastard must eat a lot of carrots, I thought, to sense something out in that blackness. The flashlight swung across the water and lit up, dimly, a kayak – no, two kayaks, maybe hundred yards away. I thought I recognized Heather in the lead kayak. The second one was empty.

I took in the scene. Cork had throttled back the outboard motor and the boat wallowed in the water for a moment. Cork was turned, looking backward, his flashlight picking out Heather and her two kayaks. She was paused in mid-stroke, her paddle in the air.

Cork reached into his coat pocket.

I had passed some sort of valley of fear by this point. I stood up and walked quickly to the back of the boat, barely keeping my balance in the sway and bruising my feet on various unseen things. It looked like Cork was reaching for the gun, or maybe he wasn't. In retrospect, I imagine he'd more likely have run the kayak down. Who knows? It was past the witching hour and time to wrestle with a goblin.

Reaching the back end of the boat, and stepping on one of Cork's big feet, I wrapped my arms around his neck and just continued, over the back of the boat and towards the dark, dark water.

For a long moment I hung there, head to head with Cork, one of his arms flailing my back like some sort of pile driver. I ignored him and took as many deep breaths as I could.

Then he tumbled back over the transom with me and into the midnight waters of Georgian Bay.

As soon as the waters closed over my head, I let go, getting a kick in the leg and a punch in the ribs as I did. I waved my hands, pushing me deeper underwater. I wasn't sure whether the propeller was turning or not, so I started moving away from the boat in the general direction of the kayak.

When I came up, not far away (Olympic swimmer I am not), I could see Cork's boat rocking, presumably as he tried to get back into it. Against the sky I could see Heather's kayak coming towards me.

I turned to see if Cork had got back on board and/or found his gun, and saw a bright light illuminate his boat. Cork was still hanging off the back of it when a much larger boat – the one with a light coming from it – hit Cork's boat right in the middle.

The sound carried very well, I must say. Sort of like a 747 hitting a bakeware factory. The big boat reared up, and Cork's boat folded up, and a shitload of waves – none especially big, fortunately – came my way.

"Grab on to the end of the kayak," Heather advised. I grabbed onto the side and almost flipped her over. She hit the water with her paddle, hard, and the side of my head a little more gently. "The _end_ of the kayak," she advised.

I caught on and didn't even have to ask which end.

"Now what?" I asked, although there didn't seem like there were a lot of options open.

"Shut up!" Heather said, beginning a long turn in the kayak. My weight seemed to make the procedure difficult, so I let go. When the kayak did a quick turn I swam over and grabbed the back of the kayak that was being towed.

There was a lot of shouting over where Cork's boat had been, and someone fired a couple of shots. Then lights started flashing around the water, and I expected a little hole to appear in the back of my head and my brains to jump out the front. It didn't happen, but it's a funny feeling and it certainly makes one appreciate things.

I kicked gently, trying not to make any noise, and the kayaks slid further into the darkness. After a few minutes the noises in the background seemed far enough away that I asked, "Where are we going?"

Heather kept paddling. "Beats me; I'm lost."

That was comforting, and I wondered if morning would find us somewhere out in the middle of Georgian Bay, out of sight of land.

"I think there's an island ahead."

I looked up. There was a definite darker patch ahead. In a minute or two the lead kayak hit some sort of shoreline with a crunch. I swam the other one in until my feet felt bottom. Then I staggered out of the water like the creature from the black lagoon and stood up, water pouring out of my pockets.

"I'm cold," I noted.

"You're alive," she countered. She had a point.

"Is there a paddle for this thing?" I asked.

"Inside the front hatch, in two sections. With a lifejacket."

If I had known how to open the hatch, if I'd been able to see the paddle sections, and if I'd had a flashlight to figure out how to join the sections together, maybe it would have taken a lot less time.

But I did it. Heather was still sitting calmly in the one kayak when I finally tumbled into the other one, gripping a double-ended paddle and wearing the lifejacket for what warmth I could get.

The kayaks bobbed very gently along the dark mass of the island. The sky was still overcast, and starless, and it felt like it was going to rain. On the other hand, seeing as I was soaking wet and sitting in a puddle in the kayak, no wonder it seemed like it was going to rain.

"Any idea where we are?" the lifelong paddler of remote areas asked the younger person who'd probably never been out on Georgian Bay before.

"Follow me."

It sounded like a good idea, so I did. The exercise of swinging the paddle at least warmed me. As we passed the tip of the little island, I could see the lights of the ship in the distance.

"If that ship hasn't moved," Heather said, "we might be able to figure out where Blizard Island is.

I did a calculation. "To our left and closer to the ship." That fit in with the travelling I'd done in Cork's boat.

Heather swung her paddle and started off towards the ship. I followed, because sometimes following's what I'm good at.

In ten minutes or so, the ship didn't seem noticeably closer, but we were closing in on another island. I squinted. "That's Blizzard."

"You sure?"

"I was planning on including that snaggled pine in one of my photos."

"Sounds a little trite."

"Sometimes people like trite. A photographer's gotta sell a few."

"Right. Of course."

"Anyway," I said, shivering, "I think this is Blizard."

"You recognize one tree?"

"I like trees. They stand still for pictures and they don't ask for anything. Every one is different, when it's grown up."

"Okay. This is Blizard. We must be close to the campsite."

"I don't remember exactly," I said, "but I think we're south of the campsite."

"We'll go north." Heather started paddling.

I ducked her paddle. "Do we stop at the tents."

"We could snuggle in a tent till you're warm again."

"Ah...."

"But I'd feel better if I cut your cock off and threw it to the catfish first."

"Ah.... Catfish?" I asked, for lack of anything else to say.

"Channel catfish. Unlike most catfish, they like clear water. And fresh meat."

"Do we have any other plans?"

"Sure, leave it to me. Let's circle the island and see what we find."

That seemed like a better idea than sitting in the kayak shivering, and even better than getting my dick thrown to the catfish. Aisha was bound to ask, sooner or later, about my missing dick. We paddled north, keeping the dark shape of the island on our left and the lights from the mystery ship ahead of us.

And, maybe, the dark torpedo shape of a large and hungry catfish in clear dark waters under the kayak.

Sometime we must have passed the place where the tents were still set up. But there was no fire, and no boats along the shore, so I was never certain when we did. I was, after all, tired. I'm not a late night guy, and only the events and the cold of my wet clothes were keeping me awake.

We got a few drops of rain as we came to the tip of Blizard. A gentle swell and a disappearance of the utter blackness beside us marked the end of the island. As we turned west, I squinted at a long shape at the shoreline. It was, for sure, a canoe. "Flashlight?" I asked. "On shore."

From Heather's kayak a light snapped on, traveled the shore, paused at what was absolutely, positively, my canoe, and as abruptly snapped off.

"Is that you, Win?"

I was more than happy to hear Phil's voice.

"A bio-engineered clone," I called back. "Are you alone?"

"Nobody would clone you," Phil said. "There are intergalactic laws against it on esthetic grounds."

"You alone?" Heather asked.

"All alone on this Christly dark island, with wet clothes and a bad attitude."

"Where's Nancy?" Heather moved her kayak in until it scraped rock.

I could see a dark form moving on the island. I edged in and tried to decide how to get out of the kayak without getting my soaking feet wet. I didn't really want to get out of the kayak – the puddle of water I sat in was just warming up.

"We ran into a bunch of guys in a boat," Phil said, grabbing on to Heather's kayak. "They took her."

"You're a drip," I said to Phil. "I can hear it."

"Who took her? Where?" Heather rested one end of the paddle onshore to stabilize her kayak. My kayak just rocked back and forth, grating on the rock on the forth part.

"Bunch of guys who didn't speak much English. Oriental, to judge by their accents."

"Where?" Heather's voice was sharper.

"Beats me. They came up beside us, showed us a nasty-looking gun of some sort, and one guy told us to get in the boat."

"So why are you here?"

"When one of them grabbed Nancy, I rolled the canoe. I hung onto a paddle and they eventually gave up looking for me. I got in the canoe and paddled it back here. I don't know where she went. I guess she's either still in the boat or they took her to that ship."

"You're shivering," Heather said.

"Wet and cold, ma'am," Phil said. "I'd be grateful if you could point the way to Blizard Island."

"You're on Blizard Island," I said. "At the north tip."

"Shit."

"Now what do we do?" he asked. But I'd lost all my leadership skills when I got wet. Or maybe I didn't have any to start with.

"You're going to have to get warm," Heather said. "You'd better get back to the campsite. Just follow the shore; you can't miss it."

That was strange; I'd done a nice job of missing it fifteen minutes ago.

"What about Nancy?"

"We're going out to the ship and see what's going on. Maybe we can negotiate." That's what I should have said, but Heather said it instead.

"I think maybe we should just paddle back to the mainland and call the cops." I didn't like the look of the ship and I knew there were guns around.

"Go ahead. Send me a postcard when you get there."

The night, or maybe just me, started to warm up as we approached the ship. My clothes were wet, but not quite as cold a wet.Maybe twenty minutes into paddling – it wasn't hard; we just kept the ship lights ahead of us – we could make out the hulk of the ship against the darkness. The ship didn't seem to be moving at all.

At that point Heather waited for me to catch pull alongside and asked, in a whisper, "Do you have a plan?"

I thought about it. "Nope."

"Any ideas?"

For Christ's sake, it was somewhere an hour or two past midnight. Which meant it was five hours past my natural bedtime, even not considering the quantity of alcohol I'd consumed that day. I was tired as a marathon runner that's just got to Montreal only to discover the race ended at Kingston. And hungry. And, as my prostate informed me I had to pee really, really bad, and was wondering how to do it in a kayak. So any ideas I had didn't involve ships and rescuing people.

"This ship is in trouble," I said anyway. "Whatever they're doing is something they don't want the authorities to know about. So if they've ended up with Nancy, they'll want let her go before they're in any more trouble."

Heather broke the ensuing silence with, "Okay. You go negotiate," and with a paddle swing that almost took my head off, moved her kayak towards the ship. I guessed it was an idea of some sort.

There were lights on the ship, but none pointing at the water, so we started at the bow, which was pointing at Blizard Island, and followed the hull. There were noises bouncing from the hull, so something was going on inside.

My kayak banged into Heather's somewhere past the halfway point. "Ladder," she said quietly. She shone the flashlight on a rope-and-board ladder hanging over the side and disappearing into the water.

"You know," I remarked, wisely and sagely and oldguyly, "if I get on that ladder I don't know if I can get back into the kayak."

There was a long silence. It just kept getting longer. Finally Heather said, "as soon as you're on the ladder, I'll tie your kayak to it."

The wet bottom of my seat made an obscene sucking sound like Caspar, the Nith River monster lifting himself onto a mud-and-cattail shore. I grabbed the ladder and tried to pull myself out of the kayak. It didn't work like it would have when I was a kid. The kayak sort of rolled out from under me and I guess Heather pulled it away before it rolled over.

A bit of scrambling left me standing on the ladder, my feet on a wooden rung somewhere under water. I stepped up a couple of rungs until I was out of Georgian Bay entirely, water dripping from my shoes. The ladder swayed.

Heather spoke: "If you have to, just scream my name and jump off the ship. I'll find you."

After another minute or so, Heather asked, "Are you going up?"

"I'm taking a leak," I said. I'd figured it would be the last chance I might have for a while, and I wanted my mind to focus on other things for a change.

"Oh." She didn't ask me to hurry; maybe she knew about prostate problems from a previous incarnation.

Then I started up. It wasn't a big ship, so it was only a mile or two straight up on a wildly gyrating trapeze assembly. I went under the deck railing like I'd made it to the pearly gates.

You'd think that if you were running a ship in the middle of the night in among rocks and you had boats around shooting machine guns or whatever, and you had a ladder hanging down the side of the ship, then maybe you'd post a guard.

Maybe I was looking for someone to surrender to.

The other option, from watching too many movies and action TV shows, was for me to sneak up behind some evil-looking character, wring his neck with my bare hands or slice his throat with a jagged fingernail, steal his machine gun, and take over the ship. After rescuing the hostage unharmed of course.

Nobody came to take me hostage so I could negotiate. Nobody shot me, either, which brightened my spirits.

I looked around. I was on a back deck of some sort, with piles of stuff that looked like loading and unloading stuff all around me. The ship was making creaky ship noises and I could hear people talking, but not in English. A couple of the voices seemed to be coming closer.

At that point I decided to kayak the thirty miles or so to Parry Sound and explain it all to the "authorities". Any authorities.

I crawled back to the railing, stuck my head under the railing, and called out, "Heather?"

"Still here."

You know, I couldn't see how I could get back in the kayak even if I used the rope. Kayaks are rolly and bobby things and the ladder wasn't any better. The odds didn't look good. And if I jumped, I couldn't see how I'd get into the kayak either. Maybe Heather knew some tricks, but even then I suspected it would take a lot of help. And I really didn't think I'd get any help if I came over alone.

"Don't stay too close, in case I have to jump." I had to say something and this seemed reasonably intelligent.

"Okay."

That seemed to end that conversation. I backed up and stood up.

Still unshot and seemingly undetected, I figured I'd either have to hide or be brave. I looked for a place to hide.

Then I took a deep breath, hoping it wasn't going to be one of my last ones, and marched resolutely forward, as if I were king of the bay. I kept one eye on the railing, in case I decided to do an unkingly thing like leap off the ship.

The first person I met was some officer. Anyway, he wore a hat with a lot of fancy gold braid on it. He said something I didn't catch, then shone a light on my face. I bravely squinted.

There was a lot of talking to some other people, but I didn't catch how many because of the light. Then the light dropped and somebody frisked me.

Another guy with a light went to the railing and shone it around. I caught the word, "kayak" so it was a reasonable guess he'd spotted Heather down there.

Nobody seemed to have a gun, so I decided not to do the old over-the-railing-and-into-the-deep-cold-inky-water trick. There was more shuffling then somebody said, with a smooth American accent, "Can we ask you what you're doing on this ship, sir?"

"I'm looking for someone," I said, shivering in my still-damp clothes. "I think she's on board somewhere."

There was more talk, presumably as this was translated.

"A young woman," the man said. "Short, dark, and noisy."

"That'll be her," I said. "Nancy."

This led to a lot of talk, followed by some of arguing. The man asked me, "Are you cold?"

"I'm wet," I said, "and cold."

"Follow us."

It was the railing, now or never. I had pictures of Heather smacking my head with a paddle every time I came up for air. I followed them, with the flashlight guy just behind me.

We stepped through a low steel door, walked a few feet down a steel hallway, and stepped through another steel door into a small room with tables and vending machines. Inside, sitting at a table, were three other oriental gentlemen and Nancy Barnes.

"My God!" said Nancy.

"I appreciate the salutation," I said, "but I'm only human."

"Where's Heather?" Nancy stood up. No one made a move to stop her.

I pointed. "Over that way, in a kayak"

"And how did you get here?"

"A kayak. Your kayak, I guess."

Nancy turned to the English-speaking fellow. "Can I leave?"

He looked puzzled. "How."

"My kayak's out there."

"Hey!" I said. "Can you get into the kayak from a rope ladder?"

"Just watch me."

"What about him?" the English-speaking guy asked.

"What about me?" I asked, somewhat more loudly.

"Maybe we can send help?" Nancy offered, as if she cared. It was a question, not a statement.

"Are you going to let her go?" I waved at Nancy.

There was only a bit of chatter before the English-speaking guy said, "She was brought here by mistake by some of our crew and we'd be most happy if she could get back to where she belonged safely."

I turned to Nancy. "What's going on here? Doesn't anybody know that the ship is way out of the ship channel?" I turned, to the English-speaker. "By my maps, it's dangerous here, Mr..... ah."

"You can call me Peter," he said. "There's been a disagreement among the crew, and we're working on solving it. Until then, we'll just have to be patient."

"Some disagreement!" Nancy said to me. "Some of the crew have taken over the control room or whatever you call it."

"Bridge," I suggested.

"Bridge," Peter confirmed.

"Whatever." Nancy stood up. "I didn't get the feeling that much was going on in the way of negotiations."

Things made sense. "I don't suppose you wanted to call the Canadian Cost Guard or anything. Not with Cork out there."

"Mr. Detson," Peter said, "has been a complicating factor in all this. And one of the reasons we're trying to solve this one by ourselves."

"What do the rebels want?"

"Nothing for you to worry about," Peter said. "We're doing our best but we'd really like to get both of you off the ship." He had to turn aside a moment and argue with a rather large man who had a dark scowl and a mean look.

"You could drop us off on an island," I suggested.

"They don't have any boats!" Nancy said.

"We have two boats," Peter said. "One is controlled by the people you call 'rebels' and the other has been overdue for an hour now."

"There's a kayak waiting for her," I said, "She just has to call for it."

Peter talked with the rest for a long while, then turned back. "We'd be happy to let the lady off this ship, with our humblest apologies and regrets for any inconvenience."

"What about you?" Nancy asked me.

"I'm stuck here, but it looks a lot better for this ship with me here, rather than you." I felt in my pocket just in case my knife had magically returned, but it hadn't been there in the boat with Cork and it wasn't there now.

"Because you're a man?" Nancy glared at me.

"That's one reason. And because I wasn't brought here; I came of my own free will – and uninvited. Looks a lot better for the people running this ship if explanations are required."

Peter nodded. "We'll take care of...."

"Call me 'Win'," I said.

"We'll take care of Win," he assured me. The rather large man with a dark scowl and a mean look tried to smile at me, I think. It didn't work.

"Can I get a drink of Pepsi?" I asked.

Peter laughed and said something to one of the other men. I was soon given a can from one of the machines across the room. They also threw me a couple of packs of candy. The labels were in Chinese, so I didn't know what they were, but I wolfed them down with the Pepsi for the sugar boost and stuffed the wrappers in my pockets for souvenirs.

"Ready to go?" I asked Nancy.

"Anytime."

I led the party outdoors to the railing and followed it back to the place where the ladder led down into the darkness. I asked to have a light shone on my face.

Peter talked to the fellow with a flashlight and then to me. "If someone starts shooting at you, duck down. We'll turn the light off."

I found that less comforting than one might think.

"Heather!" I yelled into the night, with my face lit from the side like some ghost act.

"Right here," came the response from just below me.

"Nancy's going to come down the ladder and get into her kayak," I said, much less loudly. "If you think she can do it."

"I've seen her do harder things. Nancy?"

"Coming down," Nancy said, and the light covered her and the ladder, then briefly down to the water where Heather was, one hand on the ladder and one on the other kayak.

"I'll swing your boat around while you get down," Heather called, and let go of the ladder.

By the time Nancy got down, the empty kayak was touching the ladder, although Heather seemed to have a problem keeping the two items from drifting apart. She did a lot of juggling with her paddle, from what I could see, and a lot of rocking back and forth.

It didn't seem to bother Nancy. When she got close enough, she put one foot on the deck of her kayak, moved it until the cockpit was right beneath her and more or less dropped into the kayak like a lump of potatoes. She grabbed the ladder to stop the kayak from rolling over, then grabbed the paddle from the clips that held it to the kayak, and pushed off.

"We thank you!" Heather blew me a kiss.

"By tomorrow you won't remember my name!" I called back, as they drifted away from the ship.

"If you jump into the water, we can tow you somewhere," Nancy said.

"I'll take my chances up here where it's dry," I said, although I was still wondering about people shooting at me.

They paddled out of the flashlight beam and suddenly I felt all alone in a far foreign land. So I was still in Canada, it was way past midnight and I was tired and disoriented. Or maybe, given the nature of the ship, too oriented.

"Let's get warm," I suggested to Peter.

In the cafeteria again, most of the other guys disappeared doing odd things. I took a still-wet wallet out of my pants pocket and found a twenty, which I offered to Peter. "I'd like to buy some more Pepsi and a lot of chips," I told him. He hesitated, then took the money. In a few minutes he came back with two cans of Pepsi and three bags of chips and a bag of peanuts.

I went through the lot in the next fifteen minutes.

"Let's get this straight," I said. "Some rebels have taken over the control room - the bridge - of this ship. So you're stuck here. And they took one of the ship's boats, too."

"It's a problem we're working on," Peter said.

"Who's got the gun?" I asked.

Peter closed his eyes for a long time. "The boat with the, ah, rebels have an AK-47. It's the only gun we had."

"So what the hell were they shooting at?"

"It was a belief among some of the crew members that the other boat had gone to get authorities to arrest them."

"And so they went out to try to stop them?" Peter didn't answer, so I asked, "Did they have any reason....?" I stopped. It was way late in the night or early in the morning and I wasn't thinking too well. "Of course not. What with doing business with Cork, you sure wouldn't want to have any sort of authorities around."

Peter nodded. "But why are you here?" he asked.

"I came here to take pictures." Peter looked puzzled. "I'm a photographer," I told him.

Peter nodded. "And the others?"

"All here," I said, "to look for some money that might have been hidden on one of these islands many decades ago."

"And you're not with Mr. Detson?"

"Hell no," I said. "Cork's been wondering we're plainclothes members of the Mounties. Here to check on what he's doing." I shook my sleep-fogged head. "I just came to take pictures."

"Well," said Peter. "I guess we just have to wait." He spoke to the rather large man with a dark scowl and a mean look. I gathered he wasn't much the waiting kind.

"What do the rebels want?" I asked.

"Nothing we can't work out." He paused, then must have figured I deserved more of an explanation. "There's been a change in ownership back overseas. Some of the men believe that they won't get paid when they go home. Some have a personal quarrel with the first mate. Others want to jump ship and claim refugee status in Canada."

"I don't think you can just jump ship and become a refugee here anymore."

Peter smiled. "These people are not well educated. They believe more in rumors than in anything I could tell them."

"So we wait," I said, leaning back to put my head against the wall and closing my eyes."

"For now, we wait."

So many nights of insomnia in my life. So many three-in-the-morning television infomercials. So easy to be awake. Tired as I was, I couldn't see myself getting any sleep sitting on a hard floor, my head leaning against a steel wall that never stopped rumbling.

I woke up to the sound of the ship's motors and a banging sound. I was alone in the cafeteria. Out in the hall, I found a grimy men's washroom and washed my face in cold water.

Back in the cafeteria, I was halfway through a Pepsi and chocolate bar when Peter showed up. He was accompanied by the rather large man with a dark scowl and a mean look, who was accompanied by a knife not quite long enough to be a sword. I didn't know whether he was Peter's bodyguard or watcher or what.

"I hear the engines," I noted.

"We might need your help," Peter said, indicating I should follow him.

I finished the pop and stuffed the chocolate bar into my pocket. I was glad to find that, except for some residual dampness in my pocket, my clothes were mostly dry. I put on my socks, which had been draped over the pop machine, and put on my shoes.

Peter led me not to the bridge, but down into the ship's depths, one steel staircase after another.

Four men lined the wall while one man hammered at a steel door with a fire ax. Not, it seemed, to much effect.

"Strong door," I noted, when the ax man paused for breath.

"Engine room. Piracy. South China Sea."

I nodded. If you wanted to avoid having pirates take over your ship, you'd make the engine-room and the bridge as difficult as possible to break into.

Three more men appeared, wrestling a ten-foot length of steel pipe down the stairs. I didn't have to be told; I grabbed on with the rest of them, and we started using the pipe, maybe five inches in diameter, as a battering ram. The noise made my head hurt even more than usual.

I'd have asked Peter what the hell was going on, but carrying out a conversation at that point didn't seem like a great idea, even if it were possible.

It seemed obvious to me that the "rebels" had control of the engine room as well as the bridge, and that someone had decided that the situation was no longer tolerable. The rumble of engines throughout the ship was probably the reason for the hurry. Unless someone knew the waters very well, it would be hard to go anywhere in a ship without joining the hundreds of wrecks already on the bottom of Georgian Bay.

Swinging the steel pipe, I had a sudden thought. Maybe the captain had hired a local pilot to take them to open water. They'd have stopped the ship at that point to send the pilot home by boat. A perfect time to let the ship idle for a while, or overnight. And perfect time to do whatever smuggling or other illegal deal Cork had arranged. Then the ship would be on its way.

It wouldn't be long until morning; a couple of hours, probably. I figured Heather and Nancy had gone back to Blizard Island to get their stuff. Maybe then they'd get the hell out of there and back to the mainland. It would be slow at night, but it could be done.

Phil. Phil worried me. My canoe was on Blizard, but I couldn't be sure Phil was okay. Or if he had the sense to hide somewhere safe or go get the Mounties or something useful.

Cork. Well, if he hadn't drowned when his boat went under, then he might have made it to the nearest point exposed bit of rock. I hoped it wasn't Blizard Island.

The other two, I wasn't worried about.

The tempo of the ship's engines picked up as we hammered on that steel door. Someone wanted to get somewhere in a hurry. I felt like a cat who'd gone to sleep on the engine block and woke to find the ground zipping by when I looked down.

We could only get four guys on the steel battering pipe at a time, so we took turns. Twice we punched jagged holes in the door, but that wouldn't let anything bigger than a groundhog in, so Peter started again at a different location. I had some good theories as to where to pound, but nobody asked me.

I was standing at the back, to one side when the door gave way, opening a few inches. Some of the guys leaned against it and pushed. It had obviously been blocked by furniture, so it took a minute before they got in.

Inside the engine room stood three frightened-looking guys with steel bars held in front of them. Slowly "my guys" edged into the room. Peter said something in a loud voice, but it didn't make any difference to the three guys with the steel Win-bashers.

The rather large man with a dark scowl and a mean look waved his knife. Peter sighed heavily, and took out a small pistol from his pocket. I guess he'd lied to me about how many guns there were.

For a moment, the other three guys hesitated, then one put down his steel bar. The other two looked at each other a moment, then did the same. Two of the crew started towards a set of controls across the room.

The ambient noises suddenly increased by a factor of five or so, and the floor shook. Hell, everything shook, including the walls and me.

The ship's engines faltered into silence, but the rest of the noise and a deep rumbling continued. Everyone but me made a run for the door and disappeared up the stairs.

For a moment I was alone. Then I figured that this was no time to be a non-conformist, and started up the steel stairway as fast as my legs could take me.

The rumbling continued while I made my way up various passageways and stairs. I didn't remember which way I'd come, but I could hear the others ahead of me. And it wasn't that big a ship, when you get right down to it.

I got on deck eventually, to find myself at the back of a group of loudly talking men. They were edging their way to the front, and I followed them, not able to see much because my eyes weren't adjusted to the darkness yet.

I'm a sociable guy; I just ambled along with the rest of them.

The deck was lit by a couple of bulbs, and I followed everybody to the railing. I looked over the railing, like everybody else, but I couldn't see anything.

I squinted out into the darkness, and as my eyes adjusted I noticed first that one horizon was noticeably lighter than the other. And that there were a couple of sparkles of light over that way. Brilliant man that I am, I deduced that I was looking towards the islands closer to the mainland, and that some insomniacs in some cottages were up.

In a moment I could make out some triangular dark points just ahead. It didn't take too much to figure out that these were trees and that although the engine was still running, the ship wasn't moving. The fact that someone was shining a flashlight on a nice set of gnarled cedars helped.

We had reached land.

I edged over to the guy with the flashlight, bumped aside the guy next to him (pushy bastards, us Canadians), and told him to shine the flashlight down. Much to my surprise, he did; but then again, he'd been waving the light all over anyway.

In the moving light I caught a fleeting glimpse of my canoe.

Blizard Island's the hub of the universe. I'd never known that until that moment. Everything came to it, if you just waited long enough.

I guess I'd waited long enough.

I was glad the ship had missed my canoe when it hit land. But I wondered where everybody had got to. If Heather and Nancy had been sensible, they'd have lit out for the mainland. Maybe they did, I thought, and that's why the lights on shore. Maybe they woke up somebody at a cottage.

On the other hand, there were two ship's boats and at least one Kalashnikov out there. One of which boats was full of ship's crew out to keep whatever was being smuggled – that was the best explanation of events – from being found out. The other ship's boat was full of uncooperative "rebels" who were supposedly trying to get into Canada without applying at the consulate.

Phil might be on Blizard, waiting for me somewhere. Or something might have happened to him. Or Cork might have survived and be cooking Phil over a fire. Or Phil might be cooking Cork over a fire.

Not to mention Alice and Bill out in a small boat or heading to Mexico via the Mississippi.

A whole theatre out there and me without the script.

The world suddenly got real silent, and I realized the ship's engines had stopped. I glanced at the bridge. Peter was up there. I hadn't a clue what had happened to the guys who had taken control before, but I suspected that they'd realized they'd come as far as they were going to come on this ship.

The ship groaned and tilted back. I was blinded as the flashlight beam passed my eyes and when I could see again, I was left alone on the front of the ship. I ambled to the prow and looked over the railing. There was rock thirty feet directly below me. All I needed was a ladder.

I could have run to the back and jumped into what was probably deep enough water, but I'd had enough of being wet.

I watched as the others uncased some life rafts, inflated them, and tossed them over the side, followed by a couple of rope ladders. What the hell, I edged over to be at the back of the group, although I knew from the depth charts that the ship probably wouldn't completely sink and was probably the best place to stay.

Two of the crew I'd helped with the battering ram seemed to get nervous as I got closer. Didn't trust the locals, maybe. They got me by the shoulders, marched me to the middle of the deck, and sat me on a box of something. I stayed.

In a few minutes the last of the crew had vanished over the side, presumably to get into life rafts and make the twenty-foot trip to the island.

The ship continued to creak, and listed a bit more. I sat.

Eventually, Peter showed up, and sat beside me.

"Hi," I said.

"If I leave the ship, you can claim it for salvage," he said.

"You're the captain?"

"That depends upon whether Gee Chung ever returns. He left in the ship's boat."

"And left you in charge?" I closed my eyes.

"That was the idea."

"I'd be glad to get off the ship," I said. "I'd like to get onto dry land."

"Sounds like a good idea to me," he said.

"Better than shooting me," I noted.

"I thought so." He got up, chuckling. "Help me with this ladder."

We opened another life-raft holder and he hauled out a rope ladder. He tied one end of it to the railing at the front of the ship, tossed the rest over, and invited me to climb down.

I crawled under the railing, grabbed the ladder, and put my foot onto a rung. I love rope ladders. All my worst enemies should have one. But I got down to the bottom and into a rubber raft. Several men followed, including the rather large man with a dark scowl and a mean look.

I was out of the light of the deck, and I could see that it was definitely getting towards dawn. We covered the distance to the shore and I jumped out.

I stood on the rock, the ship towering over me, and saw a whole bunch of rubber rafts full of people still bobbing along the shore like some sort of D-day pre-dawn invasion. One by one, the crew got out of their rafts.

If what Peter said was true, then these guys included a bunch that didn't want to get back on the ship and go back to wherever the ship had called home. I looked up and waved at Peter, who was leaning over the railing. By now it was light enough that we could see each other as gray blobs. He waved back, captain of a ship that wasn't going anyplace soon.

I was also in a group of people with whom it was going to be hard to communicate. This became important when a couple of them started investigating my canoe. I jogged over and tried to explain it to them. Some other fellow asked me, "You own canoe?"

"Yes," I said, nodding vigorously. "My canoe!"

He looked skeptical, but explained it to the others. I didn't expect it to make much difference, since some of them would figure out pretty quick that they were on an island and that they sorta like outnumbered me. But the others seemed to accept it, for the moment, at least.

There was a brief conversation, and the one man asked me, "Island?" pointing to the ground.

"Yes," I said. "Small island." I made small-size gestures with my hands.

"Canada?" he asked, pointing in various directions.

"Canada," I said, pointing straight down. Then I pointed to the east and waved my arms around. "Canada," I said. They probably got the idea.

A lot of the guys were smoking, and when I saw that they had matches and were getting cold, I figured it was time for a fire.

I found some driftwood and dead branches from the lower part of a cedar tree, and with the help of a smoker we got a small fire going. Some of the other guys got helpful and rounded up wood living and dead, including my paddle. I rescued the paddle and left them talking and making the fire bigger. At that rate they'd run out of burnable wood pretty soon, but it served the purpose for now, even if it just kept them busy.

At this point things were looking up. I was off the ship, nobody was trying to kidnap me, and not a shot was being fired. I was getting chilly but the best fireside places were taken. And the guys I was with were eyeballing the local trees. They would be difficult to get loose, and besides, they'' probably been there a couple of centuries and I hated to root them up.

I looked up at the ship. Peter was silhouetted on the rail. "Wood!" I yelled at him. He hesitated a moment, then disappeared. A minute or so later various articles made of wood started coming over the railing. I recognized one as a picnic table, before it hit the island; and a few chairs; the rest might have been used to hold cargo. After a minute, it stopped coming down and Peter looked over. "Thank you!" I called. He gave me the thumbs up.

When the men started putting the wood onto the fire, I figured I'd probably saved the island's trees. My good deed for the day.

I was on dry land, and the night was ending.

And I had my canoe and a paddle, even if I was short the legally required bailing bucket, lifejacket, whistle, and forty feet of rope. And the sword of morning was in the sky.

"Phil!" I yelled couple of times. How far could he have gotten? He'd probably been the one to beach the canoe, so maybe he was still on the island. Unless Alice and Bill or Cork had got him.

The crew probably had no idea what I was yelling, and ignored me. The first bright flash of sunlight crept over the distant shoreline as I slid the canoe into the water and got into it.

It felt damn good.

I figured the east side of the island, where we'd made camp, was the logical place for Phil to go, so I started down the west side. Phil was perverse most of the time. I called out for him as I went.

Blizard Island hasn't much in the way of trees, and it isn't all that big. Which is why I didn't get away from the ship and the sound of the sailors until I'd paddled quite a way along the coast.

The wind was just starting to pick up, but it was coming from the land side so far, which was good. It was still mostly overcast, with broken cloud, which meant my chances of getting any rain pictures were getting slim. And the chances of getting a nice set of canoe-scaring waves were going to get a lot better. So much for weather forecasting.

The canoe was empty, except for me, which made it light and hard to steer. A canoe works better with weight at both ends. This is especially true in a wind, so I wasn't looking forward to a wind coming up.

But life was fine.

Someone out Owen Sound way a century ago made a really big canoe out of iron, they say. I guess they figured it wasn't going to be portaged, and it would be more stable. But apparently it didn't go up and down with the waves, it just cut through them. Which gets a lot of water in a canoe.

Does this sound strange? I'm alone in a canoe at daybreak, and my friend is missing, and there are people with machine guns out on the water, and there I am contemplating the wind and enjoying – yes enjoying – being away from everybody in my own damn canoe.

There was water below me, deep and dark, except where I kept grounding on shallow spots because I didn't want to get too far from the shore.

There was sky above me, the clouds pink with the first sunlight of the day, and purple velvet between their ragged edges.

There was rock and ages-old cedars to my left, still turning from gray to green the gray of reality, and the tiny lapping sounds of water against granite.

And, to my right, a line that represented the horizon, where sky met water, way out on the bay that Aisha had been so very, very concerned about.

I paused every now and again, to call, "Phil", and heard nothing but the lapping water, a few birds, and once, far away, a loon. It was better than the sound of shots would have been but my sense of solitude was starting to become a sense of being too damn alone.

I wasn't far from the south end of the island – one island's length from a grounded ship – when I paused to squint at a shape onshore. There are a lot of boulders on the islands around Georgian Bay, and a few hummocks made of old logs and weeds, but this shape looked different.

Sometimes when I go driving with Aisha I'll slow down just catching a shape out of the corner of my eye. I'll point, and the shape often turns into a fox or a vulture or a wild turkey. Aisha marvels that I can spot things like that, but I figure it's a product of a million years of evolution. Men did the hunting, where shape recognition was valuable, while women stayed in camp developing language and social skills. You don't need to ask which has turned out to be more valuable.

I edged up to the shore, grounded the canoe carefully on a shallow spot, and took a big step onto the shore. The canoe, being a canoe, immediately took off for open water, but I snagged it with the end of the paddle and hauled its ass back then onto the shore.

I kept the paddle with me as I made my way to the lump. The lump became a lump with a shirt on as I got closer and the light got stronger. When I got to it, I recognized it as a man, but when I poked him, nothing happened.

Mortality. Ain't it fun? It was time to bend over and find out who this was, or had been, but I hesitated until I was reasonably sure it wasn't Phil. The figure had no shoes, and no jacket, but I knew that shirt wasn't Phil's.

I knelt to confirm that this was, as I suspected, Cork Detson lying there, then backed away as if I expected it to be a trick and he'd jump up, kill me and take my canoe.

But he didn't, and I touched his cheek. It was cold as the rock he was lying on. I circled the body, and discovered that what I thought was a curled stick in his hand was a stout Massassauga rattlesnake, about half as long as his arm and as thick as his protruding tongue. And just as dead as Cork was.

I contemplated this a moment, my brain working with all the sleep-deprived speed of a bus without wheels. I looked around. "Phil?" I called, not as loud anymore. But there were only the same sounds, and the cry of a seagull coming in from the lake.

Now a Massassauga rattlesnake can kill a person, but it's not likely; they just don't carry enough venom to kill a normal adult. Not that I was going to argue; I decided to donate to the rattlesnake preservation society, if there was one, when I got back home. Just in case Cork, who knew these islands well, actually had made a fatal mistake of some serpentine sort.

I was most of the way to the canoe when I did a U-turn and came back. Carefully, I checked around for anything else at the scene. From under the dead guy, tucked under one leg, I pulled out a piece of paper. Phil's library card. I tucked it into my shirt pocket, and after completing a search, pried Cork up at various places to see if there were any other interesting items under him. I couldn't find any, but I didn't get to look at all the space under him. I searched my pockets and found the candy wrapper I'd stuffed there when I was on the ship. It had nice Chinese writing on it, so I tucked it into one of Cork's pockets.

Without saying goodbye, even to the snake, I returned to my canoe and pushed off.

I did some confused, sleep-addled thinking as I continued following the shore. What killed Cork? It hadn't been cold enough for hypothermia, and I really couldn't see the snake doing it, although I could have been wrong about that. Did he have a bullet hole from an AK-47 somewhere on the side I couldn't see?

Or had Phil made the acquaintance of Mr. Detson and done something rash to a man exhausted from a long swim? To a man he didn't really know? Maybe he and Cork had had a half-hour's acquaintance and Cork had explained a few things in his own inimitable way. About a canoe, say. Cork was a nasty piece of work, but Phil was a special case in his own way.

It seemed a stretch, even for a person knowingly obstructing justice by removing evidence. I didn't thing Aisha would approve of my act, but if I had my way, Aisha wasn't ever going to find out.

So it was that I got right back to the landing point, having almost circled the island, before I got back to the campsite. There was no sign of Phil, and no sign of the kayaks. I liked that last part. Charming as those girls were, I'd feel better if they were out of harm's way.

That feeling of solitude lasted till I got to the place where we'd made the fire. The two kayaks were stashed under a cedar tree. I dragged the canoe onto dry ground and marched up. Sitting in front of a cold ash-pit on lawn chairs were Heather and Nancy. Phil sat to one side. All of them stared at me.

"Phil!" I said. "Boy am I glad to find you. Where the hell you been?"

The trio sat there, staring at me.

"We can make a fire," I suggested. My camping motto is, if in doubt, make a campfire. I got silence, and stares. I began to wonder if I'd stumbled into Madam Tussaud's or if these people had been taken over by aliens. It was spooky.

I noticed that Heather was looking just past me, to my left. I turned slowly that way.

There was a guy standing there, dressing in dark camouflage clothing, with only the eyes and mouth showing on his face. Ski mask, I decided.

"Can I help you?" I asked, because that's what people had always asked me when they meant, "what the fuck do you think you're doing here?" Then I noticed the short black gun he was holding. It looked very efficient, whatever it was, like a machine gun you could fit into a briefcase.

He said nothing. My eye caught more movement to my right, and a couple more of these guys appeared out of the shadows. Hey, I was impressed.

"Sit," said one of the new arrivals. Sit, hell, I'd have rolled over and eaten Kibbles at that point. People with guns have that effect on me. I sat.

Another guy came in from the shore. He squatted beside me. "Talk quietly," he said, "or I'll break some part of you."

I nodded, which is about as quiet as you get, and he asked, "What is your position in this group?"

"A bit to the southeast," I answered, but maybe not quietly enough. He tapped me on the head with his gun; just enough to draw blood and hurt like hell. "We have no positions," I said, "but I'll nominate myself as leader-in-chief of this arm of the galaxy if you'd like."

"Smartass," he didn't say. He just nodded. "There's a ship," he said, "at the north end of the island. What do you know about it?"

"I was on it for an hour or two last night, I said. "But I don't even know its name or what it's doing here." I didn't want to calculate the odds of a person being on a ship without even knowing its name. I braced for another whack on the head.

My man looked up, and nodded to somebody behind me. I didn't know whether that was good or bad, but I had the feeling that the truth wasn't going to do me any harm right there. Besides, I was too tired to make stuff up. I've had more sleep driving the Don Valley Parkway that I got in the last twelve hours.

"Why were you on the ship?"

"Hostage exchange, sort of. They captured Nancy earlier in the night and I stayed when she left." The guy made some notes in a tiny notebook. "They'd have let me go, but there weren't any more boats available," I added.

"Why did they beach the ship?"

"Some sort of mutiny on board," I said, and explained about the rebels controlling the engine room and bridge. "I think it might have been about wages and maybe some of them wanted to get into Canada as refugees."

"Listen carefully," my man in black said. "I need to know what you're doing on this island."

"I'm here to take pictures. I'm a photographer."

"You have a card?"

I fished one from my wallet. It was more than somewhat damp.

"And the rest of the group?"

"Treasure!" I said, expecting another bop from a gun barrel on my head. None came, so I told him the long sad story of Big Paul and his booze and my unfortunate companions. And about Cork and his friends and maybe they were smuggling liquor.

"You believe that?" He shifted and smiled.

"I figured they were smuggling something," I said, "but alcohol didn't seem very likely to me." From out in the bay I could hear the sounds of boats and a helicopter or two.

"Well," he said, "we've got a problem here." He sat back and put his notebook away. "This ship – it's the Oyakki Maru by the way – delivered a load of Christmas ornaments to Toronto. Then it picked up a bunch of old industrial material from Parry Sound."

I said nothing.

He continued. "It stopped out there," he pointed to the north "last night and the ship's boat went out to meet another boat, so we suspect something was transferred last night."

I nodded.

"They sent out two ship's boats, neither of which returned to the ship. In fact, the only boats of any kind that went to the ship were your kayaks. If," he went on, "smuggling was going on, that sure looks like you were part of it."

"Know what I think?" I said. "I think you were watching that boat and none of it makes sense to you. But you're worried about somebody smuggling in some real nasty stuff, like anthrax or nuclear material or whatever."

He took a stick of gum, and popped it into his mouth. He called another guy over, and gave some sort of signal with his fingers. The other guy booted me behind my knees and I suddenly found myself kneeling. The ground wasn't even.

"But," I went on anyway "I think this was just a small-scale smuggling operation between Cork and the captain of the ship."

"We'll ask this Cork when we find him." He got out a small pair of pliers and said, "You have a loose piece of scalp. Maybe we can help it."

"He's not going anywhere," I said, getting up. "He's dead. He's lying over that way, on this island." They let me stay standing, which was awfully kind of them.

Well, that got some action. My man had a quick conference with somebody – I didn't turn around to look – and sat there for a while, contemplating me as a murderer, I suppose.

"We'll go for a walk," he said, getting up. When I didn't get move, he added, "you can lead." I guess he was used to people who watched the muzzle of his gun instead of taking things for granted.

I started inland. There were a few places that didn't ache, but my head wasn't one of them. It was quite overcast, but not raining yet, which was probably good for anybody not actually planning to take pictures in the rain. Maybe I was making a positive impression; he let me take a moment to ache at the universe.

"Don't get out of sight," he said. Then he added, "one-inch circle at thirty yards against a running target, twelve shots out of fifteen." He tilted his head my way and added, "probably not as good on full automatic, but it's hard to tell when the body's all mangled like that."

Don't call me dense. I got the point, and slowed. Another helicopter sound came in from the distance, and a couple of motorboat sounds.

Like I said, it isn't much of an island. We scrambled across the mossy ditches and under the cedars; me collecting spider webs wet with morning dew and well populated with spiders, until we broke out onto flat rock on the other side. I looked both ways and saw a helicopter coming in towards the ship. Strangely, it seemed to be coming from the open water area, rather than from the mainland.

We walked steadily along the shore for a few minutes, and I readily spotted Cork's mortal remains, still huddled on the bare pink granite rock.

"Ah," I said, "I'd be happier if I had a name to call you by."

"What's yours?" he asked, kneeling over Cork.

"Win."

"He thought for a moment. "Call me Lew." "This is Cork Detson, you say."

"Well Lew," I said, "I have no way of knowing who the hell he was, but last night I got the distinct impression that that was his name." I sat on an uncomfortable rock. "We were never properly introduced, he and I."

"Roll him over," Lew said.

"Pardon."

"One of us has to do it, and I usually understand it's the guy without the gun." He smiled at me. His dirty little automatic weapon was slung at his side.

"Piss on you," I said, but I grabbed one of Cork's arms and rolled him. He didn't roll too well; I guessed rigor mortis was setting in. The candy wrapper lay there, so I stuffed it casually in one of Cork's pockets. Lew just raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

"Snakebit?" Lew asked me.

"Doubt it," I said, and told him how a Massassauga doesn't really carry enough poison to do in a grown man like Cork. "How long would you say it is?" I asked.

"Coupla feet, maybe. Lew was obviously a bit shy on the metric system.

"A rattler's got a striking distance of maybe a third of its body length. That means, about eight inches."

"He'd have had to be kissing it," Lew said.

"Or trying to use it as a pillow. It's possible he tried to nap on a rattlesnake, and it's possible that a neck bite could stop a man's heart. But it sure doesn't seem likely to me."

"I think you're right," Lew said, "but things are going to be a lot simpler around here if he died of a snakebite."

"What do you think killed him?" I asked.

Lew waved me away from the body. I found a piece of rocky shore to sit on and nice piece of rock to lean against, and closed my eyes. It looked a lot like rain just before my eyelids covered the universe. But I didn't sleep much and a seagull or two called out its annoyance.

"He's got fang marks on his neck, and there's a bruise there, but I think you're right. He was dead when the snake bit him." Lew waited till the seagull paused. "I think somebody shoved a sharp thing, maybe a long needle, down into his heart while he was sleeping."

A guy with a gun and a dead body, and I was still just about asleep until he said that. I let the chill run up my spine. "Nasty," I said. Opening my eyes, I watched him.

"Effective." He poked at the body, but didn't find anything to focus his attention. "If it's true, someone knew enough to stick it in through the neck and down. Then maybe cover it with a snakebite."

"Who are you guys?" I asked him. I was tired beyond the redemption of humanity of any stripe, and my eyelids dropped over the world again.

"Coast guard," he said. "Canadian Coast guard."

I laughed. He smiled. "Canadian Ninja Coast Guard," I said. Even without his central-U.S. accent, he was more likely to be advance guard from Atlantis than from the Canadian Coast Guard.

"I like that one," Lew said.

I came out of a bizarre dream in which I was teaching economics on the shore to a group of pandas who didn't speak English and were eyeing me for lunch. Heather, dressed only in moonbeams was dancing again by the water. I just had to get one of Galbraith's simpler concepts over to the pandas, then I could go see Heather, but she was half-hidden by some panda asking a really stupid question of some sort, in a foreign language. Maybe it meant something. Someone was kicking my foot. I opened my eyes. I was sitting on a rocky shore, the sky looked like rain at any moment, and Lew was nudging my foot with his brown army boot.

"Nap's over," he said. "Up and at 'em."

Jesus Fucking Christ," I said, suddenly wishing I were back with the pandas. "How long did you give me."

"Almost fifteen minutes. Probably more than you deserve." He turned and walked away, stepping around Cork and heading north. I could hear helicopters, more than one, somewhere in the distance, and maybe a couple of outboard motors.

I followed, pausing only to bend over Cork. I checked that the candy wrapper with Chinese writing on it was still in Cork's pocket. He didn't object.

I stumbled down the shore, stepping over logs and rocks and other tripum stuff, till we got in sight of the ship, still patiently grounded on Canadian rock. There were a bunch of uniformed guys as well as the ship's crew, and a big yellow helicopter was parked aslant on a clear spot.

An inflatable with a big motor on the back slid towards us. The water had barely a ripple and the boat made almost no sound, despite the size of the motor. A murmur of voices from the area of the ship and the distant thwopping of a helicopter assured me I hadn't gone deaf.

"Now what?" I asked Lew.

"Those Bill and Alice people you told me about. We're going to find them if we can."

"Can't I just stay here and sleep?"

"You've got to identify them for us." He grabbed a rope from the boat, and hauled it towards the shore. One of the two men in it got out and took the rope.

Three guys with ugly little machine guns. The odds didn't look great, so I got in, clambering over the black rubber pontoon. I sat on a seat in the middle, and when Lew was in, the guy on shore kicked the boat away and we were off, turning back towards the ship.

"You might want to get somebody else from my group," I said. "To help with the identifications."

"Your eyes gone bad all of a sudden?" Lew asked. He sat at the front of the boat, turned to face me.

"I was never good at faces," I said, "so it might be quicker if we had someone else." It was the truth.

"We'll take that chance," Lew said. He murmured sweet nothings into a small black box. The water hissed by, and the big outboard, painted in splotchy camouflage colors, hummed a hymn. We passed the group on shore. The fire had gone out, and the crew were milling in groups. Some people in black outfits stood among them.

As we rounded the back of the ship, I looked up, but couldn't see any activity up there.

It took us less than ten minutes to get back to the campsite. Gypsy, my big plastic canoe, was still sitting on the shore with one end touching the water. Heather was standing at the edge beside it. She handed me some food: a bagel and some pepperoni sticks, as well as a bottle of water. She'd obviously been into my pack.

"Things are looking up," I said. I waved goodbye as the raft started. She was already on her way back to the camp, and didn't see it. I said nothing to the guy running the motor behind us or to Lew, on the seat in front of me. They didn't seem to mind. The guy at the motor had a brush cut, a hooknose, and an attitude that precluded trying to make conversation with him. He had that look in his eyes that would stop a hawk out of a clear sky.

I examined the food and I ate it all. I loved it all. The morning had finally come, I had a chauffeured trip in a rubber boat, and all I had to do was identify and annoy Alice and Bill. The world brightened and it started to rain.

"Where do we start?" I asked Lew.

"You said they said they could see you from their cottage, so we'll start with the nearest cottages."

"They could have been fibbing, you know."

"Gotta start somewhere."

We got to the closest island with cottages, and cruised in towards a nice little place with a wooden dock. "No sign of their boat," I said. I covered my eyes and tried for a micro nap.

"You'd recognize a boat before you'd recognize a face?" Lew asked.

"Ah... yes, actually."

Lew got out and walked to the cottage. It looked empty, with boats on the rocks instead of at the dock. Lew inspected the place, then put something to his eyes and looked around. Infrared, I figured, checking for heat sources.

After disappearing behind the building for a moment, he came back and got into the inflatable.

"This could take a while."

"We'll take the time. Anyway, we'll be getting help shortly."

Something didn't beep on Lew's walkie-talkie, but he spoke into his shirt pocket. Quietly. Then he looked up at me and said, "We've got the angels on our side now."

"Right through the clouds?" It was spitting rain now and I was looking forward to getting wet and cold again. Not. I figured they had something checking the infrared signals from the local cottages.

"Still works. Saves time. We've got a cottage at the tip of this island. It's got heat from the kitchen and a bit from a motorboat."

If I hadn't been so tired it might have impressed me. But I slid down to the bottom of the boat and closed my eyes, even with drops of rain falling on me and the boat slapping against the increasing waves.

I must have got over a minute of deep slumber before Lew woke me.

I crawled up to the seat and looked over. "That looks like their boat," I said, nodding at the fishing boat tied to a steel dock.

We walked slowly up to the house. At least I did. Somehow Lew disappeared from behind me after a few steps. I guess he figured that if someone was going to start shooting, I could warn him by falling onto the stones and bleeding to death.

I walked up and knocked on the door. There was no answer. "I know you're in there," I yelled. "I'm going to count to five and kick the door in." I stood to one side, and started counting. I figured when I got to four I'd start running for the dock. Or the woods; I hadn't quite made up my mind.

The door opened at three and Alice glared at me, chin thrust forward. "Nice to see you again," I said.

"Who are you?" she asked. "I don't know you."

"I'm the one who knows what's going on, and I think you'd like to know, too." I waited. No doubt she'd like to pretend it was her evil twin sister I'd met the night before, but there was no doubt she must be frantic wondering what the hell was happening.

She stood back. I entered.

"Wanna make love?" I asked.

"No," she said.

"Can I sit down?" There was a fire in a stone fireplace and a table with a couple of white coffee cups on it. On the table was a pair of lamps with coiled rattlesnakes as the bases. Pottery from Arizona, I figured, since the snakes looked like western diamondbacks. Cute.

"Do you have to?"

I sighed one of those world-weary sighs that reach out to the ends of the universe. "You will want to hear this," I said, "and so will Bill, if that's his real name." I walked over to the end of the table closest to the fireplace and pulled out a chair. I turned it to face the fireplace and said, "The ship's on the rocks, Cork's dead, and there's guys with submachine guns all over the place."

Bill came through a door and sat down at the table. His eyes were wide. He pulled at one eyebrow.

"Better get him a coffee," I suggested.

Alice hesitated, then turned on a gas stove and put on a kettle of water. Then she sat down and looked at both of us.

"We don't know you," she said. "We never saw you."

"I'm fine with that," I said. "I really don't care. But right outside your cottage there's a guy in a camouflage outfit with a nasty little machine gun slung over his back. He's probably wiring this place with listening devices or explosives right now."

Alice and Bill just looked at each other. The kettle started to boil. "Tea," I said. "I don't like coffee and I'm really, really tired."

Bill got up this time. I went to the door stepped out, and yelled, "Lew, for fuck's sake, get your ass in here!" I tried for an echo off the nearby islands.

"You don't have to shout," said a voice behind me.

"Cased the joint?" I asked Lew. "Wired it with plastique? I'm still alive so they're not shooting people today."

He grinned. "Standard procedure. Besides, even us ninjas need to have a crap now and again."

"I'll have some of your wonderful instant coffee," he told Bill as he came in behind me.

"These people," I said, indicating Alice and Bill, "say they've never met me in spite of my claim I spent a nice time with them around a campfire last night and know them as Alice and Bill. You can figure out which is which. This fellow," I said, indicating Lew, "claims to be a Canadian Coast Guard officer named Lew." I took my teabag out of the cup and dropped it onto the vinyl-covered table. People never think what you're going to do with the teabag.

"A fellow on a freighter who said his name is Peter claimed a bunch of rebel crew ran his ship onto the rocks. Somewhere along the shore of Blizzard Island I found the body of a guy who I called Cork." I looked around. About the only thing I'm sure of is that the ship's on the rock, somebody's dead, and this tea isn't strong enough to keep me awake much longer."

You'd think all that talking would have inspired the others. It didn't. I looked at Lew. "I think these guys were smuggling something and are trying to deny it all."

I turned to Alice. She looked smarter than Bill. "If this guy's Canadian Coast guard, I'm Walt Disney and all his little mice," I said. "I think that when that ship whose name I can't remember because I'm so tired stopped someone thought someone might be smuggling anthrax or nuclear bombs into the continent. I can't see such interest from all these James Bonds for anything else. If I were you, I'd confess real quick, before I fall asleep and he pulls your fingernails out and dumps you into the bay with an anchor accidentally attached."

It was a long speech. I went to the cupboard and found some crackers. I went to the fridge and found some cheese. I love cheese and crackers. I didn't offer any of the others anything.

Bill spoke first.

"We..." he began, waving his arms and spilling coffee.

Alice interrupted him at once. "Shut up."

Bill did. I didn't know whether he was shocked or just used to taking orders from her. He sat down abruptly, and took a sip of coffee.

Alice rubbed her nose in the traditional fashion of all liars and looked me directly in the eye. "Cork," she said, "was a close friend of ours." She sipped her coffee and went on. "He asked us to do him a favor."

Bill stared at her, but said nothing.

Neither Lew nor I bothered to interrupt, so after a moment of silence, she went on. "Cork asked us to watch this guy" – she indicated me –"and his friends to make sure they wouldn't see, ah interfere, with what he was doing. And, ah, that's all we did. Just went over and made sure they didn't wander around and see things they weren't supposed to see."

Lew didn't turn out to be much of an inquisitor, from what I could see, so I asked, "And what was it that we weren't supposed to see? What was Cork doing?" I looked over at Bill, but he didn't take the bait.

"Smuggling," Alice said. "He never said for sure, but all the locals here knew he was into smuggling."

"What," Lew asked, "would he want to smuggle to a Chinese ship or get from a Chinese ship?"

"Animal parts," Alice said.

There was a long silence.

"Animal parts?" I asked.

"You know," Alice said. "Stuff that they make into medicines in China and places like that. Tell them, Bill."

"Ah," Bill's eyes focused on something other than Alice, finally. He went to the cupboard, brought back a package of figgy cookies, and set them on the table. I looked at them like the groom looks at the bride when the motel door closes behind them.

I took a stack of ten or twelve and passed the package to Lew, who took a few. I guess he figured, like me, that the odds were good that Alice and Bill didn't have a readily prepared batch of poisoned cookies handy.

"Bear gall bladders," Bill said about the time I had my mouth full and was off to the cupboard for a glass to get some water in. "That and deer antlers and...." He looked at Alice. "Penises from some animals. Maybe a few other things, too." He looked directly at me. "I'm not sure. I just hear things like that around town."

"He told you this?" I asked, crumbs of Fig Newton scattering everywhere. I watched my hand push any that were on the table onto the floor.

"No," Alice broke in. "It was pretty common knowledge that he was in the market. That he'd buy any of that sort of thing anybody had to sell." She looked over at Bill, then went on. "He'd usually go to Toronto for that sort of deal. So I've heard. But I guess someone was watching him now." She turned and looked out the window over the bay.

In the distance, a helicopter flew by. Then another came in, low and slow over the cottage. We stopped and waited. Like a schoolboy, I was burning to run out and have a look, but instead I helped myself to a cup of lukewarm tea.

In the following silence, Lew asked. "How did Cork get paid for this stuff? These animal bladders or whatever? Cash or exchange."

"Cash. Always cash. American dollars."

"You're sure."

Alice bobbed her head. "Oh yes. He insisted on cash and nothing but. Where would he deal with anything else in Parry Sound?"

"That's right," Bill started to add, but looked at Alice and stopped.

"What do you think?" Lew wanted to know.

"I think this tea is going to make me throw up my Fig Newtons," I said, "and that I'm tired and want to sleep."

"I'm asking you."

"I think Cork sold four thousand bear penises in exchange for a low-yield nuke and a big bag of anthrax," I said, and that this tea was spiked with strychnine."

"Wise-ass." Lew handed me a pistol he extracted from somewhere on him. "If they try to escape, shoot them." He got up and left. Our eyes followed him down to the dock, where he sat and held a long conversation on his Boy Scout walkie-talkie, or whatever they'd issued him.

I looked back at the other two. "Do you think this thing is loaded?" I asked, setting the gun on the table.

"Want me to take a look?" Bill raised his eyebrows.

"Can I take a leak, or are you going to shoot me if I don't sit here?" Alice asked.

"So many decisions," I said. "Go do whatever you want. Strangle Mr. Ninja out there and take his boat for all I care." Alice gave me a nasty look and went through a door at the back of the cottage.

I slid the gun over to Bill, pushing it too hard. He caught it and set it gently on the table. After a moment's examination, he pressed something and a cartridge popped out of the handle. He picked up the parts and examined them. "Eight or nine bullets in here," he said. Reassembling the gun, he passed it to me, handle-first. I dropped it into my pocket.

Then he leaned towards me and whispered, "She was his girlfriend, but they were having a big fight."

"What?" I asked, my head groggy. "Who?"

"Alice and Cork. They were living together until last week." He pointed to a couple of speakers by a large stereo system. "He kicked those in." They did look as if someone had taken a real dislike to them. They were good speakers, Jensens, and it seemed a shame. But then again, I've been so close to kicking in so many speakers in life, or pulling the wires loose, that I was no person to judge. But that was mostly the sappy music they played on them wherever I wanted to have a moment's peace. The Canadian content regulations have made sure that everyone in Canada has heard "Big Yellow Taxi" or "Sweet City Woman" eight hundred million times.

Besides, they were big speakers, and nowadays everyone's into little itty bitty speakers with thick wires running to them and an amp that'll dim the house lights when someone hits a base note.

"They had a big fight about something last week, and he moved out," Bill went on. "Just as well because she wouldn't dare move out on Cork. You just don't do that to that guy. Is he really dead?"

I nodded. "He is, and I've got you pegged for murdering him."

"Me?" No way! Jesus, man, unless I had a nuke to drop on that bastard and a long-range missile to do it with, I'd never think of trying. He's too dangerous. Jesus, I wonder if Alice did it. Did they say how he died?"

"Looked like a rattlesnake," I said.

Bill laughed. "Oh that's rich. Cork used to pick up rattlers in his bare hands. I heard from a guy I knew that he ate one, once, the entire thing. Let's hope it actually was a rattler."

I nodded, groggily. "Yeah."

Outside, Lew was still talking down by the dock. Another helicopter went by, in the distance, and I could hear a motorboat or two out on the water somewhere.

Alice came back in, and I got up. "My turn," I said.

Inside the toilet I dropped my pants and sat down. I really needed to take a crap, and it was so nice to have some time to myself.

You know, I'm not the most social of people, although you wouldn't know it from the trip I was on.

I like – hell I need – to get away from people from time to time and contemplate the sky, the earth, and my own rotten little soul.

I'd dearly have loved to be sitting on the shore of Blizard Island as the sun went down or came up or with the rain falling all over me, all freaking alone and sipping on a whiskey and just feeling bejeezedly alone, alone, alone. Did I mention that before? I guess I did.

Well, I'll mention it again, because it sure hadn't turned out that way. Phil might know when to leave me alone with my thoughts, but Alice and Bill and Lew and Cork the corpse and shipfull of foreign sailors and whatever SAS-clones were out there sure as hell didn't know.

I was sitting on the toilet feeling sorry for myself and thinking how damn near constipated I was, maybe from having a tight sphincter for the last 25 hours and looking at the gun on the floor and thinking this was the best place I'd been in a while, smell or no smell, when a voice I didn't recognize said, from the other side of the door, "You'd better come out now." It was a deep, authoritative voice.

"Okay, I'm done," I said, pulling up my pants.

"We want you to open the door a bit, then slide the gun out on the floor with your foot. Then you can come out."

It seemed like a perfectly reasonable request. I picked the gun up by the tip of the barrel, then dipped it into the toilet bowl to season it. It came out – well, I won't go into details. I put the gun on the floor then flushed the toilet.

Then I opened the door, kicked the gun out into the room, and came out with my hands up.

There were three new guys there, all of them with the same little machine guns and dark outfits that Lew had. One guy looked at me, then picked up the gun. He dropped it real quickly.

From the corner of the room Lew said, "I guess he won't be any trouble,' and came forward.

The guy who'd first picked up the gun kicked it towards Lew and said, "your pistol's damp."

Lew inspected it, then found an old plastic shopping bag and toed the gun into it. He looked at me. "I could make you clean this. I could make you lick it clean."

I smiled. "Then these guys would think you'd lost your cool. And they'd talk about it forever, you know."

"I'll be back," Lew said, "and they will anyway," and went to wash his gun in the lake.

The other guys were grinning. I ignored them and went down to the dock to watch Lew. Nobody tried to stop me. I noticed Bill and Alice sitting on lawn chairs on the front porch of the cottage, talking to yet another dark-suited hero. I wondered what the relationship between Bill and Alice was, but I never found out.

"Tell me," Lew said when I sat on the dock, "that you were afraid the monsters had come and you were trying to hide my gun. Don't tell me," he went on, setting the cleaned and wet gun on the dock, "that you did this out of some anger thing. Cause then I'd have to shoot you."

"The authorities will be here any time," I noted. "The real authorities that deal with grounded ships and things like that. Like immigrants and things. If you haven't found anything serious, it would be in your best interest to get out of here before the media gets here. Just to protect your own – just to make sure people don't find out all about you, if you know what I mean."

"That," said Lew, disassembling the gun without really looking at it, and cleaning it with a small cloth, "is the basic idea. It looks like this was nothing more than a small-time smuggling venture in animal parts for Asian medical shows."

"No anthrax? No nukes?"

"Not that our detectors could find."

"That's what those helicopters were doing."

"One of the things they were doing."

"Now?" I said.

"Now?"

"Now you want our silence, in case we tell the Globe and Mail that the CIA special forces have been running all over these islands, probably without anybody's invite."

"We're allowed. Special circumstances. And we're not the fucking CIA."

"Tell that to the papers."

"What do you want?"

"Well," I said, "Bill and Alice here aren't going to say anything if there's a chance they can pin the whole thing on Cork."

"And the rest of you?"

"You've been scanning these outer islands for metal from the helicopters. Tell us where you found any metal and we're happy to tell the world you're just two retired officers from the OPP in Parry Sound."

He thought. "Probably easier than drowning you guys."

"Not really," I said, "but less messy."

I walked to the end of the dock to be alone. There was a large moving line off a dock support. I leaned over, saw a dark mass moving down there. A catfish, tethered. Lew lent me a knife and I cut the line.

I went back to Blizard Island with Lew and some other dude in a helicopter with pontoons. It was fun. I decided I'd like one for Christmas, so I wouldn't have to paddle upwind any more. I got a good view of the islands. I could see two kayaks out among the islands. Heather and Nancy, I figured, heading home. I didn't know whether to be sad or glad.

The helicopter landed just outside our campsite. I waded ashore like General MacArthur, water to my knees. "I have returned," I told Phil and the two military types with him. They were standing around a small and smoky campfire. One of the guys was covered with ash. You should never stand downwind of a helicopter prop wash.

The other two guys waded out to the helicopter, had a brief shouting match, and got in. Then they left, with our ears trying to adjust to the silence.

"Hello you old motherfucker," I said to Phil. "Did you eat all the hotdogs?"

"Might have a couple left I used to wipe my ass with."

For a minute we just looked at each other. The sound of the helicopter motor disappeared into the distance, leaving only faint sounds coming from the north end of the island.

"Noisy bunch, aren't they?" I said, nodding my head in that direction.

"Probably," Phil said, "just a bunch of very oriental people waiting for a bunch of very confused Parry Sound police to arrive."

"It'll give the police something to do other than looking for lost fishermen."

"I'm surprised there aren't a lot of them sharing our campfire."

"My campfire, stranger."

"Isn't this the one I made last night?"

"It went out. I made this one. It just looks the same."

"Sure does. Anyway, no point in calling me 'stranger'. You're stranger than I'll ever dream of being." I grabbed my lawn chair and pulled it up to the edge of the fire. The smoke swung around in my direction."

"It's all relative, as Albert said."

"He must have had some strange relatives."

"Some special ones, I hear, and a general in the family. I expect someone's guarding them till the real cops show up and they'll do the guarding till the real coast guard shows up."

I realized he'd got one reference beyond me and was talking about the ship and its crew again. "Crowded little island," I commented, tossing a small twig onto the fire. It seemed strange having a fire about ten or eleven in the morning, but I was still tired and this had been a strange trip from the get-go. "We could move."

"I like that idea," Phil said, putting a can of water onto the grate over the fire. "Got any good ideas?"

"Just another island, but not too far. We wouldn't want to miss the rest of the show. Besides," I dug a wiener from the cooler, "somebody's going to want to know what we don't know about Cork." I watched Phil.

"Cork's around?" Phil seemed casual about it.

I pointed. "Over that way a few hundred yards, last I saw. Dead."

Phil went to get a wiener for himself, impaling it sideways on a y-shaped wooden stick. I was using a telescoping gadget I'd got as a gift. "Couldn't happen to a nicer guy," Phil said.

"You and he must have got back onto this island about the same time," I said. "You didn't meet him?" I was getting concerned about how little surprise Phil had learning of Cork's death, and that he didn't have any questions about how Cork died.

"Didn't see him," Phil said, putting ketchup on his hot-dog, a hanging crime as far as I was concerned. I have only mustard on my hot-dogs, like a civilized human.

"Bigger island than it looks," I said.

"Must be bigger than it looks," Phil agreed, watching the horizon. Off to the northwest a couple of fast boats were approaching the island. The police, I figured.

"Phil," I said, putting down my hot-dog and looking him in the eye, do you think hockey players are overpaid?"

"Vastly," Phil said, after a moment's silence. "Unlike the royal family, who provide far more entertainment than they ever get paid for."

"You put ketchup on your hot-dogs," I accused him. "And you laugh at the House of Windsor."

"You got any idea what they use to make mustard that yellow?" Phil said. "Probably what drove the royal family nuts in the first place."

"I'm kinda tired," I said. "I could use some sleep."

"I got a few hours last night under some tree," Phil said. "Go ahead; I'll keep the ghouls and goblins off you."

I curled up in a sleeping bag in the tent, put a towel over my face, and decided after a couple of minutes I was way too wound up to sleep. About that time I must have fallen asleep.

I dreamed that a storm had come up. Heather and I were in the ship, somewhere in the islands. It was dark from the rain, which was driving horizontally and banging against the steel hull. I knew in my heart that the ship was in danger; it was heeling over to an awful degree and I could hear the hull scraping and banging on some rock.

The wind had whipped the sea into froth, and you couldn't tell where the water surface ended and the air began. Strangely, it was all very quiet, like a TV set in the video store with the sound turned off.

I looked up, and the crew, which seemed to include a former prime minister and a journalist, were launching the last lifeboat.

I figured there was one chance to get away, but Heather had gone down to the galley to make sandwiches and I ran after her. When I opened the door, Cork was sitting on the table chewing on a very large snake. I ran back up, but the ship was rolling over as I climbed the steel stairs.

I woke to a loud noise and the tent flapping. A very loud noise and a lot of flapping. I got out of the sleeping bag and out of the tent before the tent pulled up stakes and flew along the ground to snag in a dead cedar. I'd always wondered why dead trees were called snags; I guess I found out.

I was still groggy and confused, because I'd been dreaming I was sitting in a café somewhere with Heather and explaining to her that nudity wasn't allowed in whatever town the café was in. Then she was dancing again on the shore, which was just outside the café.

Adjusting was a stretch.

There were dust and twigs, some of them smoldering, everywhere, particularly in the air, coming at me. Above me looked to be the same helicopter I'd come over on, pontoons and all. It was about ten feet above the ground when it stopped coming down.

A door in the copter opened, and Lew leaned out. He tossed a something at me. I ducked, and it missed me, but I didn't know whether that had been his intention or not. Then they were up and gone, thwopping back towards the mainland.

I found the thrown object, determined that it didn't look explosive, and then joined Phil in stamping out fires started by having the campfire wood blown in all directions, and in gathering up our belongings. I think we got most of them.

"I think we should have changed islands," Phil said, dousing smoking branches in the lake.

"Gotta agree with you now," I said, setting up the lawn chairs. I left the tents in sad-looking bundles.

"Your friends?" Phil asked, as I showed him what gift we'd got. It was a brick, with a bag attached. Inside the bag were a few folded sheets of paper.

"Acquaintances," I said, "at least one of them."

You must have pissed him off, somehow."

"He loaned me his gun once, and I took pretty shitty care of it. I guess he took it personally. But maybe he does keep his promises." I opened the bag and took out the papers. After a look at them, I passed them to Phil.

He looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled. "Any beer left?" he asked.

"In the morning? You never drink beer in the morning."

"You're right," Phil said. "Pass me the scotch that's hidden in the beer cooler bag.

It wasn't a big bottle and it was Alberta Rye instead of scotch, but I guess you have to make some allowances for people like Phil. I handed him the plastic bottle and found his cup among the debris we'd collected and put into a pile. "Get your cup, too," Phil said.

We'd got in the habit of taking plastic bottles of stuff with us years before, when we'd done some camping in Algonquin. The park doesn't allow cans or glass bottles, because people abandon them at the campsites. Besides, plastic bottles don't clink so much when you're loading your camping gear back home.

My cup, of course, was also filled with various debris and lifeforms, so I washed both in the waters of Georgian Bay. The waters by the shore would have been cleaner if someone hadn't scattered a thin film of ash and dirt in the immediate locality.

"Want a fire?" I asked, handing Phil his cup and the bottle.

Phil looked around. "I think we're done with fires for today." He gestured with his cup, and I held out mine. Squinting, he poured half the bottle into my cup and the rest into his cup.

"And what did I do to deserve half the bottle" I asked, warily. I almost said, "who do I have to kill?" but nipped that line before it got past my molars.

"These," said Phil, "are pictures from the air." He pointed to the roll of papers that Lew had chucked from the plane.

"Like aerial photographs, somewhat," I suggested.

"If they were wide-angle they might have got your asshole in them too. These," he continued, still waving his cup around – "no! Don't drink yet!" he said when I was about to take a sip, "wait a goddamn moment won'tcha."

I sank into the lawn chair facing the nonexistent fire and set my cup carefully on a rock. Considering the fact that God seldom provides a horizontal surface anywhere in rock country, this may have constituted an act of bravery on my part. Unnoted by the war medals commission, for sure.

Phil went on. "Now that I've got your undivided attention, I'd like to note that these pictures are of some of the islands around here, and they have little X's all over them."

"Ah," I said. "A promise fulfilled." I gave Phil a smug grin.

"Then it's what I think it is? The location of metal sources in the islands?"

"That's what he said he'd get me," I said. "A gift from above," I added.

"From out of the whirlwind," Phil said. "Not to mention the possibility of a few burning bushes around." He looked around, but nothing was on fire at the moment.

"A check for nukes?" I asked.

"Likely. If somebody tried to sneak a small nuke from the ship to one of the islands, there'd be enough of a metal signature to show up."

"I'd have thought they'd pick up radiation, too."

Phil shrugged. "I imagine they checked out each of these places with a Geiger counter. As well as turning over every aluminum boat and peeking in every cottage."

"Any other places on those pictures."

"Yup."

"Treasure hunt!" I held up my cup.

"Treasure hunt." We both took a big sip.

"Wait!" I think I deserve more than half!" I said.

Phil spat some back into his cup and handed it to me. "On the other hand," I said, ignoring his cup " you've got the metal detector. Half will do."

"Wanna throw a log on the celebratory fire?" I suggested, figuring that when I'd finished my cup of maybe seven ounces of Alberta rye I wouldn't be pronouncing "celebratory" as well, so it was as good a time as any.

Phil picked up an imaginary stick and tossed it to where the fire had been. Then he poked the place with another imaginary stick.

"Footstools." Phil said. "We should have packed footstools."

"Your own goddamn fault," I said. "If you had kept Heather and Nancy here, we could have used them."

"So what," Phil said. "We sit on lawn chairs on a desert island, looking at treasure maps, drinking Irish whiskey, with our feet on a couple of cute chicks? Did you want to have our flies open and get a blow job at the same time?"

"No point in limiting our fantasies." I turned towards the noise at the end of the island. "Our desert island has a way to go to be deserted, it seems." There was the sound of many voices, some giving orders, the sound of approaching boats, and a helicopter and small plane buzzed the end of the island. A fighter came and went, leaving a roll of thunder.

"Some people don't appreciate a good treasure hunt." Phil finished his drink and set his cup down. "It's true you got kidnapped by a ship full of oriental women?"

"An all-female crew," I said. "Six hours of non-stop fucking. I had to run the ship onto the island just to save my life." I looked up at the treetops, to a small red plane circling in. "Last I saw you, you were paddling away with Nancy."

Phil paused a long time, rubbed his nose, and hunched up in the chair. "Many adventures. Got approached by some boat full of strange people. Rolled your canoe. Lost track of Nancy when she got hauled into the boat. Got your canoe and a paddle after they'd gone. Came back to the island and went to sleep under a bush."

"I guess it's good or bad depending on whose bush you go to sleep under. You're lucky Cork didn't find you."

"Yeah." Phil turned and smiled. "But now we're all alone on the island."

Alone must be a state of mind. The north end of the island was still noisy with people and craft coming and going. True, some boats were leaving the island, all right, but a couple of uniformed guys were coming through the trees in our direction.

"Phil," I said, "throw another log onto the fire. We got company."

"Phil followed my eyes. "Welcome," he called. They had provincial police uniforms and looked like they were having a positively neutral time. "Can I put some coffee on for you?" Phil mimed pouring water into a billy can and propping it over the ashes.

"We're going to need some identification," the shorter of the two said, tilting his head.

"Gotta say amen to that," Phil said, putting more imaginary logs on the imaginary fire. "You should see your boss about getting some name tags. And business cards. Business cards are always good. Then you'll always have identification when you need it."

I really didn't think tweaking the local cops was a good idea, so I took out an imaginary toothbrush and picked up my cup and did some imaginary, if thorough, brushing of my teeth.

"Ah,..." the bigger cop said, probably trying to figure out whether to drown me or not.

I reached into my pocket, drew out my wallet, and handed him a damp business card.

"Mr...." He began.

"Szczedziwoj" I said. "At your service. Wilderness photography a specialty." The name's pronounced Chehgeevoy, with maybe an "sh" at the front. It stops most people, which has its advantages. I didn't stand, which probably put me in the same category as a thousand local yahoos and drunken cottagers about to try to wrassle the nearest cop to the ground.

On the other hand, I didn't feel inclined to suck up to anybody at the moment. Even if he had a gun.

"You got a business card?" the other cop asked Phil.

Phil just shook his head. That was fine; I'd expected him to moon the cops.

"Look," I said, "We got here last night. We haven't got much sleep. Anything we tell you is something we're going to have to tell you again, when you can type it up on some sort of form." I scratched my ear. "So why don't we stop up at the police station in Parry Sound tomorrow some time and tell you everything we know?"

The bigger cop, who had probably just enjoyed an hour's jaunt away from the aggressive drivers from Toronto and the drunken locals of Parry Sound was inclined to be forgiving. "That would be fine," but I'd like some photo ID before we go.

So long as they left. I handed him my driver's license, which was, at least dry, since the government now produces plastic-coated cards. I considered for a moment plastic-coating my business cards, since I did have a tendency to fall out of canoes. The bigger cop scanned it, compared it to my business card, and handed my license back to me.

Turning to Phil, he said, "I'd like your name, too."

Phil shook his head. "I don't think so. You'd have to get a new driver's license and passport and you'd disappoint everybody but your kids. Best to stick with your own name."

The smaller cop looked like he was trying to decide whether or not he could get away with a couple of warning shots through Phil's head. He said, slowly, "we'd like to see some photo ID." Then he paused, knowing Phil was about to agree that that's what they'd like to see. "Please show us some photo ID now," he said. Then he added, "sir."

Well I could tell that those were the very words the inquest would hear, so I turned to Phil. "Man-o-War always stopped running when he'd gone once around the track."

Phil laughed, and dug his wallet out of his pack, with two cops wondering if he'd come up with a bazooka. He selected his driver's license and handed it to the smaller cop, who noted the details, slowly, onto a notepad.

"We'd invite you for hotdogs," Phil said, when he'd got his card back, "but we've eaten the last one."

"How unfortunate, sir," the bigger cop said. "We'll expect you sometime tomorrow. You can find the police station in Parry Sound?"

"Did you know," Phil told him, "that snapping turtles breathe through their asses all winter?"

"We'll find it," I said, beating Phil to a response and saving ourselves some trouble. The cops nodded and left without another word.

"Speaking of treasure...." I said.

"Finish your drink," Phil said. Not knowing what else to do, I did. Let me tell you sometime about the evils of alcohol.

"We start with this island?" I suggested.

"No way," Phil said. "There are too many evil people wandering all over here looking for other evil people. We'll go over thataway." He gestured to the west.

Well, there wasn't much in the way of islands to the west, and I figured if I got into the canoe and we missed the island, Phil would just keep paddling out across Georgian Bay. With me backpaddling and making the canoe go in circles, we'd get somewhere in about twelve years.

Besides, Aisha would find out if I paddled drunk, and I wasn't prepared to face that sort of price.

"The best time to treasure-hunt this island is exactly when there are lots and lots of people here," I said, waving my hand and spilling the last of the scotch. It's perfect cover because people will think we're actually doing something useful."

"You have an addiction to paddling sober that is truly sad to see in an old fart," Phil said, shaking his head at the ground.

"Besides," I said, "it's my canoe."

"It's my canoe, it's my canoe, it's my canoe," Phil mocked. He sighed heavily and shook his head again. "I guess I don't have much choice." He looked like the universe had conspired against him.

I got up and took the maps.

"Shouldn't we set up the tent?" Phil asked.

"It's still early," I said. "Shouldn't we eat?"

Phil dug a couple of cans out of a tote and handed me a can opener. I mixed canned corn and canned tuna onto a plate, and handed Phil half. We ate with our fingers, which seemed reasonable at the time. We must have been hungry. We took a few big drinks of water. Then we set out along the island.

We must have stopped every twelve feet to check the map or to pee. You'd think we'd had a dozen beer, rather than some dehydrating scotch. In among the grass there was a goodly sprinkling of the shiny green leaves of poison ivy, but neither of us peed on them; however illogically, it felt like we'd get itchy dicks just from the contact. Nobody needs to be logical all the time.

Finally, Phil looked at the map, and looked at the landscape around us. We were in a tiny moss-and-branch-filled gully on the south end of the island. "Here," he said, pointing at the ground at the lowest point of the gully.

"Here?"

"That's what the map says."

"You just pissed here," I noted.

"Yeah, I did, kinda," Phil agreed.

"Your fucking metal detector."

"I detect; you dig. That was the agreement."

"I don't' remember any fucking agreement like that," I said.

"Your memory isn't what it used to be."

"It's still good enough for that. Besides, it's your piss, not mine."

"That makes it easier?" Phil scratched his foot against a tree.

"It should. You pissed on your boots twice in the last half hour." It was true. When drunk, Phil tended to wave his arms when he talked, even when one of those arms was connected to his dick. His friends had learned to stand well away under occasions like that.

Phil pondered this slowly, swinging his metal detector in large arcs. It beeped every time it came back to the wet spot on the moss. "Make you a deal," he said. "Good forever."

"What deal?" I sat on a log, because the moss was such shifty stuff underfoot.

"My metal detector, you dig unless I've pissed on the place."

I pondered what I might be letting myself in on. "Only if I've renewed the agreement before we leave on an expedition."

"You don't trust me?"

"I don't trust you not to phone me from the Bank of Nova Scotia some midnight telling me to bring a pick and shovel."

"How about on all joint treasure-hunting expeditions?"

"Okay," I said. Something told me a lawyer would have been a good idea, but I figured I could always get one later.

"Hold this." Phil handed me the detector, broke off a dead branch of tree, and scraped a couple of inches of green moss away. Then he took to moving any dead branches nearby – he didn't get the bigger ones moved – and scraping into the spongy ground with his hand when his improvised shovel broke.

We found it about a foot below the moss, and even I got to helping, if only to hold back some tree branches that insisted on swinging back at Phil.

It was pretty rusty. Actually, it was a pile that was as much rust as metal. We worked at it like prospectors going after the Lost Dutchman mine.

When we hit solid rock underneath, Phil sat back, sweating. "What do you think we got?"

"A canoeful of iron oxide, if we want to take it home," I said, "but I hear the market for rust's down nowadays. Maybe we can take it out in the bay and flag down a lake freighter and trade the whole pile for an old donut."

"Wise-ass."

"Maybe we can call it an art object and get a Canada Council grant. Call it 'Abstract With Temporal Vectors and an Odor of Piss" for example," I suggested.

Phil sat on the moss, still huffing, and just looked at me.

"What we really have," I said, "is a mess." I waved my arm around. "We had a pristine island except for a grounded ship and stuff like that, and now we have a mess with pieces of rusty metal."

"No historical value?" Phil asked.

"Your brain has more historical value."

"I guess we put it back."

I couldn't think of anything else to do with it, so we spent half an hour trying to stuff it back where it came from and make the ground into some semblance of what it had looked like before we came. Phil does a lot of metal detecting, and prides himself on "replacing his divots" – making sure there's little trace of his searchings.

It didn't work here. When we were done the place still looked like two warthogs had fought a battle to the death in that little hollow. Maybe we should have numbered the pieces of moss before we dug them up.

And there was a rusty pipe a half meter long that just refused to be buried. Eventually, Phil gave up on it, and took it to the edge of the island and chucked it as far out into the water as he could. I was glad nobody saw that, or we'd have had half the army dredging for it.

"Now what," I asked, when Phil got back.

"Now we leave the scene of the crime and proceed to desecrate another place."

No problem for me. We were starting to get sober with all that work and I wanted some semblance of lucidity before trying another island.

There were three sites from the aerial photo on Blizard Island, one within sight of the ship. There were a dozen people around the ship, and they watched as we dug up a piece of aluminum fishing boat.

Three islands later, on a somewhat bigger island called, for reasons unknown, Palestine Island, we hit pay dirt.

By that time we'd made a fire and had an early supper. Phil's an atheist who firmly believes the gods are out to get him, so it was either bad luck that it was pretty well the last place we looked or good luck that we actually found something.

By agreement, I was digging when we hit a wooden box with metal bands. The wood was mostly rotten, and the metal bands came apart in a shower of rust, but there was a worm-eaten canvas bag inside. The whole thing was maybe a meter square, and half that deep.

I looked at Phil and Phil looked at me, and together we peeled back chunks of canvas. I handed Phil a soggy mass of greenish paper.

He inspected it. "Might have been money, once."

"Worth anything?"

"Only to the worms." Phil set the lump on rock. He peeled back a bit of the outside and shook his head. "Sons of bitches of pirates should stick to gold. Gold doesn't rot."

"Not good enough to redeem?"

"Not good enough for compost."

I reached into the box and started handing out the contents, unlabelled green bottles. Phil took each one and set it aside. There were eighteen of them. There was nothing below the bottles but rotten wood, a couple of rusted iron straps, and solid rock.

"Shall we open one?" Phil asked, waving to them. He was covered with debris and sweating buckets."

"Let's go back to camp."

"Too crowded there."

"Our sleeping bags are there."

"We could bring them here."

"Too much like work."

"We could stay up all night."

"Did that last night. Two in a row seems unlikely."

Phil contemplated that for a while. "Okay, load them into the canoe."

"Me?"

"You. I gotta carry the metal detector."

"I'll take as many as I can carry."

In the end, since it was only a stone's throw to the canoe, we got them all in and paddled back. We must have made a fine sight for someone, being silhouetted against the sunset.

"Is this what it comes to?" Phil inspected a bottle as I set up my tent. He didn't seem inclined to set up his own tent, but hey, I'm for every middle-aged guy doing his own thing wherever possible.

"What?" I said, putting a rock onto a peg. There was no soil to pound pegs into, so one tied as many tent corners as possible to trees, bushes, and twigs, and for the rest you set the peg sideways onto the ground and set a rock on it. It'll pull out and let the tent fall on you in a heavy wind, but, unlike Phil, I hadn't brought a self-supporting tent.

"I asked the gods to bring me success. I put tobacco on a rock to appease the manitous. For this I get eighteen bottles of rotgut alcohol."

"Might be quality American whiskey." I threw my sleeping bag into the tent, along with anything I didn't want to get wet if it rained in the night. My camera was still in its Pelican waterproof case in a ratty old tote, but I put it inside anyway. I was half hoping it would get stolen or washed away someday so I'd have an excuse to buy a new one. On the other hand, it was an old friend.

"They shipped the cheapest possible stuff to the States then," Phil said, poking at the fire. The first stars were coming out, and the clouds were breaking up around them. "And they brought industrial alcohol back."

"They brought alcohol back from the States?" I got the lawn chair as level as I could and scratched myself. Note to self: take shower when arrive home.

"It was legal to make industrial alcohol for export." Phil poured a can of stew into a pot more or less balanced over the fire.

"And Canada imported industrial alcohol..."

Phil stirred the stew. "We flavored it and smuggled it back as well-aged whiskey. Made a lot of Canadian millionaires that way."

I eyeballed the eighteen bottles and took a long sip of water from the canteen. "There's no reason for these bottles," I noted. "Industrial alcohol would come back legitimately in large containers. And nobody would bring back the same stuff he wanted to smuggle out."

Phil got out a corkscrew and opened one bottle. He sniffed it, then took a sip. Then he handed it to me.

I waved my arms. "I damn well deserve my own bottle, considering whatever and your many social diseases."

Phil opened one for me, sniffed it, and passed it over. "Same stuff."

I sniffed, then tilted it back.

"Well," Phil said.

"Whiskey. I've had worse."

"I've made worse," Phil said, confirming a persistent rumor among his few friends.

I took another sip. It did interesting things to the fatigue. "But why bury it with the money?"

I case you're wondering, we never did figure out why eighteen bottles of booze were buried with the money. Perhaps if was just to keep them from providing a clue where the money was. Perhaps anything; not all mysteries get solved in life.

"Poisoned whiskey," I declared. To get rid of anyone who dug up the money."

"Didn't need eighteen bottles for that," Phil said, but he stopped drinking and eyed the bottle suspiciously.

"How do you feel?" I asked. "You had the first drink."

"Magnificent!" Phil took a big slug of whiskey, or maybe faked it.

We talked about Canadian politics for a half-hour or so. Neither of us fell over screaming, so by some unspoken mutual agreement, we started drinking the stuff again.

The sky cleared as the evening approached. Phil got a couple of cans of chili con carne and I dug out some flatbreads. We ate them like old women in purple eat chocolate.

"I thought," I said, "that we'd agreed not to bring beans on a camping trip." It was a general rule that had started in the days when guys still shared a tent, before the snoring started and some people had woken up in the wee small hours of the morning with a pillow over their faces and a madman with an ax sitting on the pillow.

"Fuck the beans," Phil said, "and fuck the farts. I figured we'd be home before I got these out and if not then it was damn fucking well time we did get home." He glared at the ground.

"Fuck the farts," I responded. "Bring on the beans!" I could tell by the way Phil had gotten into bad language that he was getting too drunk to be reasonable and I swallowed another half cup of whiskey to level the playing field. Then I added, "fuck", in case I was one swearword behind.

"Do you think," Phil asked, "that trees are just the souls of people who thought too much in a previous life?"

One thing about Phil, he doesn't get into sad songs and stupid jokes when he's drunk. He gets into bizarre philosophies. I used to try to answer his questions, but I finally learned that I'd just drive him into realms of thought that no human should approach.

"I'm going to kill you with an ax," I said. "One chop every time you fart."

"Can you imagine having nothing to do but feel the wind in your leaves and think about things? You'd solve all the problems of the universe and have nobody to tell it to." Phil scooped the chili into two plastic bowls, and handed me one. I noticed that the bottom of the cooking can was black with burned chili, and that the chili smelled of charring.

I handed him some bread and a spoon. "I'll thank you not to speak about my friends that way, and besides, I'm here, aren't I, and insects under the bark aren't any worse than Bob Stedd's last girlfriend, the one with the scrambled eggs. My glasses are losing their focus. I need new eyes and a canoe filter for my camera."

It was always good to try to distract Phil with nonsense, before he really got maudlin. I'd have traded him for Heather dancing on the shore, but no one seemed to be offering.

"A toast," I said, still needing sleep. "To scrambled eggs." The sky got darker and there were a few gusts of wind. A few lily pads lifted their edges to show their pink parts. Foam gathered where the old gray rock met the dark dark waters of the bay.

Phil raised a glass. ""A toad," he said.

"A toad?"

"Makes as much sense as toast," he said, watching the treetops. "About as much sense. A toast with warts on it. A toast that lives under a damp log." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I propose a toad to all the gods that have let us down, and all the tomorrows they have made to lie to us."

"Naked women," I said. "A toast."

"Try making a toad."

"To all the tomorrows with no naked women. Or booze."

"You have chickenshit for brain cells."

I laughed. "In the last day I've been in and out of a canoe, a kayak, a freighter, and two goddamn aluminum boats with goddamn motors. I've had two pistols and a couple of submachine guns pointed in my direction. I kneed Cork Detson in the chin while doing a somersault over his head into Georgian Bay. I've dug up buried loot and farted upwind in front of a campfire."

"Which means what."

"I have chickenshit for brain cells, but sometimes I hit it lucky." I stirred the chili over the fire, then raised a glass, but didn't feel much like drinking any more. Something to do with my stomach.

For a while we ate chili, washing it down with water and the occasional sip of whiskey. It tasted like hell. All of it, which slowed the consumption. When I woke from a catnap, Phil came up with a stanza of Omar Khayyam:

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon  
Turns Ashes--or it prospers; and anon,  
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face,  
Lighting a little hour or two--is gone.

He knew the poem by heart, at least a couple of versions of it. It's about the futility of life, and I could tell he was getting seriously depressed. It couldn't have been the treasure-hunt; this was the first time he'd actually succeeded in finding something he went after. Or maybe that was exactly it.

Green moss lined a lot of the dips between rocks. I reached over and picked some up. He furrowed his eyebrows as I set it on a rock beside us. The wind got damper and there was a chill to my bones. "It's dying," I said, pointing at the moss.

He raised his eyebrows.

"It can't live on this rock," I said. "We're all going to die." It wasn't much, but I'd had a lot of drink by this time. "Whether you find a gazillion gold doubloons or a box of chicken Oxo, you're going to die. I'm going to die!" My voice was going up, and I was pointing at the moss like it was Jesus on the cross. "We gotta deal with it."

Phil got up and put the moss back where it had come from, more or less.

"Now you're going to heaven, for sure," I said. "God'll send down a chariot with six freakin' big-boobed angels any minute."

The silence stretched on as Phil sat down. He looked at the drink beside him, and turned to watch the water. I poked the fire and looked at him. He was crying, silently.

"I think we should be happy for every day we have alive." I looked over the water, too. "I think the world begins again each morning. When a month is over, I tear the page off the calendar and throw it into the garbage. The world is born again every day."

"Fuck it. If I told Aisha you'd diddled Heather twice behind the canoe I think she wouldn't have that attitude." He stood and turned his back on me. "It accumulates," he said, "like scabs on your face, until you're a monster."

"There are monsters all over the place. You can't be a monster. I know that."

"Then maybe you're the monster."

"Fuck you, then!" I yelled, standing up. Then words failed me, and I sat down. After a moment, I asked, quietly, "Do you think we found Big Paul Stanley's treasure?"

Oh, no doubt," he said. "That was all of it."

"First thing we ever found that we went after," I said.

He turned, smiled, wiped his face with his sleeves. "We're the joke of the gods. They're laughing at us all the time."

"I think they like pain."

"Then they created the right species. Only humans can have mental pain."

By now I was getting pretty morose, too. "Snapping turtles," I noted, "breathe through their assholes in winter." Don't know why I said that.

Phil added a couple of logs to the fire, a good sign. A fire is life, and life is a fire. Or whatever it meant. I'd taken to chewing a chocolate bar and would have made some tea, except that the thought almost made me gag. I wasn't sobering up; I could hardly stand. But I'd stopped getting drunker, and more booze wouldn't change that.

"Wanna fight?" I asked.

He squinted at me. "Kick your head in."

"I know a few tricks." I didn't talk about Cork and he didn't talk about Cork and I wondered if he wondered if I thought he'd killed Cork and I wanted to tell him I didn't care and wasn't going to ask. We seriously didn't discuss the topic, I thought.

On the other hand, if he'd slipped a long needle into Cork's neck and down into his heart right about where there were two fang marks, he might have to answer some interesting questions if a coroner determined that as the cause of death.

It was late afternoon, and overcast. A few drops of rain suddenly fell. Then stopped.

"You didn't get any good pictures," Phil noted.

"I'm slowing down." I opened a Pepsi and poured some into his cup and my own. Then I added some Big Paul's rotgut to it. "A toast," I said.

He eyed the mixture. "To what?" He leaned his head way back in his lawn chair, and looked at the sky. He closed his eyes.

"To all the songs we never sang. To all the times we never stood by the shore and watched the sun go down. While yet we live."

"We could head home, now," he said.

I shook my head. "Promised Aisha. No paddling while intoxicated."

"I'll paddle. You sing."

"That'll work till we hit the waves." I changed the subject. "What's going to happen to Jane?" Jane was a friend, someone we met with in groups of people." She had MS. She'd been A mercurial person, with lots of moods, but generally more positive about life than no. After she'd been diagnosed though, she'd spent her time mentally carving vines onto her tombstone.

"She'll die. It happens." Phil turned up a small stone into an impromptu marker.

"While waiting for it, she could choose happiness or gloom," I noted. I made up a poem:

"People kill themselves  
In their own special way  
Some with a gun  
Some, day by day."

Shouldn't that be 'ways'?" he asked. "Then you have trouble with the concept of 'days.'"

"I could try 'each person'," I suggested.

"That implies everyone does, instead of just those who choose to."

"Sometimes I wonder."

"Sometimes you don't know Dick."

"Sometimes I don't know anybody." I shouldn't have said it. I just should have thought it. We all seem to be in our own little cosmos. We see things the way they are, but other people see the same things differently. Every symbol is different. And there are way more symbols than there are things.

"She'll die," he repeated, and I realized he was talking about Jane again. "She's got a couple of good years left, but she'll waste them feeling sorry for herself." He looked away again. "It's an option," he noted. I didn't like the way he was always looking away. He was removing himself from me, step by step.

At that point I began to wonder if he really had killed Cork. Taken the long hatpin he often carried with him, slid it between Cork's shoulder blade and neck. I suppose it could have happened. Maybe there was a rattlesnake handy. I don't know. It all sounded improbable. But Phil, who should have been at the top of his world, having located a treasure trove, however small, was shedding things and walking into a cave that no one else could enter.

I didn't ask. So I started talking about the weekend, going over the whole thing, in case he'd missed some of it before. I made sure he knew about Cork, what other people had said and about my time in the dark, in his boat.

After a while, he offered me some more booze, and I drank it, with him. We thundered into silence, sitting on a train bound for nowhere. He didn't tell me about his time on the island when I was on the ship. He didn't tell me much. I think he was working on not existing, but having a hard time of it. I guess he needed a manual.

Time passed. No gods descended from the skies, and no ghosts walked in from the cedars. A couple of small planes flew over, checking out the freighter grounded on the tip of our island. Phil showed no interest in going to see the thing, and I didn't push him. A few boats buzzed by without slowing down.

It was late in the afternoon by the time I squeezed into my little tent, rolled up in my sleeping bag, and went into as deep a sleep as you can get on hard rock.

I woke a few times to take a leak or put something quick on my stomach. The first time I woke, it was after dark, and stars were out. One of those times Phil was asleep, rolled in his sleeping bag behind the lawn chair and another time or two he was sitting by the fire. I don't know what time it was any of those times.

Once, surprisingly, there was a moon out. I stepped carefully down to the shore. The campfire was down to a few embers, and Phil was nowhere in sight. Maybe he was one of the dark lumps silvered by moonlight.

I like islands. I told you that. They're not symbols of personal isolation, either real or desired.

Or maybe they are. Maybe I don't want to even ask that question.

I watched the water ripple silver disks into silver shards. And beyond and around were the low dark shapes of a dozen or two of the thirty thousand islands. It was dark. There may have been the tip of a giant catfish's tail in the tiny ripples. Or not. One of the islands may have been a snapping turtle, breathing through its nostrils because it was still warm weather. There was of foam right along the shore. This is produced by bacteria in warm weather more often than by soap. Not everybody knows that, so I slipped myself into my sleeping bag and went right to sleep thinking of turtles.

In the morning, when I got up, Phil was sitting in front of the fire, on a lawn chair, under an umbrella. It was raining lightly. I wished I'd brought an umbrella. I sat on one of the other lawn chairs facing him.

"Breakfast," I said. My head hurt. All of me hurt. I should drink rotgut and sleep on rocks more often. I farted at Phil, but the wind was the wrong way.

Phil rummaged in his packsack and came up with a bag of instant oatmeal mix. I eyed it, blearily. It didn't appeal. I checked my packsack and came up with a couple of bags of trail mix, mostly raisins. I tossed one to Phil.

"What time is it?" I didn't have a working watch on me.

"About nine."

I nodded. "About the time we got out of here."

"Yeah."

"Got a date with the cops in Parry Sound." I didn't look at Phil and he said nothing. After a while I made myself some tea from water heating over the fire. Water from the skies dripped off the hood on my jacket.

When I finished the tea I got up and started loading the canoe. The rule of coming home is that you don't have to wash any dishes or pack anything up properly. Except sleeping bags (they take too long to dry) and spare clothing (you might need it). I stuffed things into the canoe until Phil got up and started stuffing things at the other end. We left enough space for ourselves. Our garbage we put into green garbage bags and mashed into spaces in the canoe. We put our lawn chairs on top of the pile. We looked like a garbage scow.

This left us with the two lawn chairs and a case of mostly-empty bottles of Bud Lite, the legacy of Bill and Alice. I looked at Phil, and he looked at me.

I talked him into loading the chairs and beer onto the top of everything else. We paddled along the shoreline until we got to the tip of the island, where the ship, slanting slightly, was grounded. There was no sign of Peter, and two guys with short-barreled rifles were sitting on rocks, covered in orange plastic. They eyed us suspiciously.

Phil, who was in the stern, angled the canoe into the shore. As I got out, both of the guards, if that's what they were, got up. I set the beer onto the shore, and leaned the lawn chairs against the case.

As the first of the men got within earshot, I yelled, "We brought you some chairs."

By the time they'd pondered that, we were on our way out of there. Last I saw, they were settling into the chairs and opening a beer. In the rain.

Phil paddled and I took pictures from island to island. So I could pretend to someone that I'd accomplished something other than staying alive. We stopped in a bay or two for a rest, saying nothing among the lily pads. Like all the others, they had bug poop on them. I left it there this time. Clean is a fiction. Life on bug poop on lily pads has rights, too.

None of the pictures turned out to be worth a shit, except the one of the ship grounded on the island, which I sold to a newspaper.

We got to Parry Sound and found the police station. It was close to lunch by that time, so we had to come back at one and, together, we told our story into an antique Radio Shack tape recorder. When we were done, we told the guy in charge and he told us to go home. I asked if we'd be needed to testify at the inquest and was told that there wasn't going to be an inquest and we should leave. He didn't look happy.

He was right. That's the last we heard of it. "Man Killed By Snake" made the inside pages of the newspaper a day later. There was little made of the ship grounding itself on the same island and no mention of any boats full of would-be refugees, so I never did find out what happened to the first ship's boat. Or if the crew ever got paid.

I dropped Phil's stuff at his place five hours after we left Parry Sound, and he said thanks. It had been a quite drive, with Phil resting or maybe sleeping in the passenger seat. I'd been tired and not up to conversation. We'd got take-out junk food at a couple of places and kept driving. Traffic had been good.

Aisha was glad to see me. She hustled me into a bathtub and served me a martini while I sat there. After three martinis, I started into the story. It took a few days to get it all told.

I never saw any of the other participants again, though once I thought I saw Heather in a crowd at a concert in Barrie. Can't be sure, though.

Nothing ever seemed to come, from what I could read in the papers, of the smuggling in animal parts or anything I expected to make the news.

Phil and I should have had many laughs about the weekend, but we never really got together again. I mailed him a couple of pictures from the trip, and a week or two after that he emailed thanks to me.

You get friends, I understand, you lose friends. I guess I lost one. It's never a happy event when you lose a friend, but I've lost enough not to bitch when it happens. You only find out the reason in the odd case, so I won't speculate on his motives. Maybe it was something I said. Maybe.

***END***

