“But there was nobody in there. No sign of the owner. So I came back and the smell hit me.”
“You think it’s the guy from the campsite?” When I didn’t answer he said, “Where is it? We’ll have to report this.”
“It’s down the path near where we picked up our grubs. It’s in at least two pieces along the trail and …” I suppressed a gag and pointed back the way I had come.
Ryan rallied at this. “Oh gross, Cordi, don’t tell me we took grubs off a dead body, a dead human body …”
When I didn’t answer Ryan stared at me and raised his hairy eyebrows.
“Better lead the way.”
“You sure you want to see this?” I said.
“You did.”
“Yeah, but I had no choice. I practically tripped over it. It’s not a pretty sight.”
He shrugged. “Maybe there’s a photo op here for the local paper. I owe them a favour.”
It was my turn to roll my eyes.
“And you call me gross. No paper in their right mind would print a photo of this unless they wanted to scare their readers away.”
“For God’s sake, Cordi, I didn’t mean taking pictures of the body. I was thinking of some pictures of the campsite, lonely, deserted. Imagine the pathos you could build up. And I could get a good writer to write the text: an article about camp safety and the dangers of camping alone. It could be very powerful as long as the writer doesn’t go all gushy and sentimental, and if we can find out how he died.”
I had to admit that the campsite did look sad and lonely and it would make a powerful picture, especially knowing what lay in the bushes this side of it.
We picked up our gear and I led the way. We walked back along the portage trail to where we had collected the grubs. Ryan grimaced at what we’d thought was part of a coon as I located the partly overgrown trail that led to where part of the torso lay half concealed in pine needles.
“Jesus,” whispered Ryan. “What the hell happened to the guy? He looks as though he’s been ripped to shreds.”
“He has. By scavengers.”
“Oh gross, Cor.” Ryan shivered. I heard the tremble in his voice and watched his face turn a paler shade of white as he struggled to keep his breakfast down. He took two deep breaths and turned away from the body. I felt somehow relieved that he was handling it as badly as I had and then felt ashamed of my thoughts.
“How’d the guy die?”
“Maybe he had a heart attack or hurt himself and couldn’t get to help,” I said, not wanting to say what was in both our minds. Of course, Ryan had no such qualms.
“You think it was a bear?” he asked, as he struggled with his pack.
Ryan’s voice quavered on the word bear. Ryan wasn’t afraid of much, but he did have a pathological fear of bears. He’d once blasted a poor little mouse with the flare gun outside our tent when we were kids, thinking it was a bear. After all the screaming and yelling in the dark had died down he promised our parents he’d never use a flare gun again. He now uses pepper spray, and I watched as he struggled to get it out of his pack.
“I’m getting the hell out of here,” said Ryan as he moved away from the body, shook the can of pepper spray, and checked the nozzle. Not for the first time I wondered what would happen if the wind changed direction just after he used it, or the spray bounced off the bear and back at us. Three blinded creatures lashing out in panic. Charming thought. Perhaps a flare gun would be better after all. What a team we made. I was afraid of rapids and we were both afraid of bears. So why wasn’t I afraid now?
We figured our best bet to get help and still get out of the bush by nightfall was to portage our stuff and then go report the discovery of the body. The topographical map showed a lumber road near the end of the portage. We hoped we could flag down a lumber truck or something. The portage got progressively worse, with large sections of mud and swamp in the lower stretches of the trail. The rain in the last few nights had made everything a boggy, mucky mess. There were no recent signs that anyone had passed this way before us, and I wondered if the last person to travel this trail now lay dead by its side. At the end of the portage we dumped our gear and I emptied the specimens from my collection pack to lighten the load. It was pure habit. I never went anywhere without a collecting pack. You never knew what you might find.
“Cordi, why not just leave it this time? We don’t have time to collect with a wild bear out there.”
I swung the pack over one shoulder and, with Ryan twitching and jerking like a marionette on the lookout for bears, we retraced our steps back over the portage to get the canoe.
It still lay peacefully in the water, safely tied bow and stern to some small boulders where the cliff that soared above had given up some of its weight.
“You take the bow. I’ll get the stern,” I said above the din of the rapids. I untangled and untied my line and, holding tight to keep the canoe near the ledge, bent down and grabbed the gunnel.
Ryan was still struggling with the bowline. The canoe still had some water in it. We hadn’t done a good job of bailing after the last set of rapids. When we pulled it out of the water it would all come my way first.
“Hang on,” I said, as Ryan prepared to hoist it out. “No way I’m going to get soaked.”
I grabbed hold of the rock ledge with one hand and stepped into the canoe, letting the water sluice by my feet to the stern. The bailer was behind the stern seat where my bug collection was strapped and I reached back with my free hand, retrieved the bailer, and began to bail.
Ryan squatted down and held on to the gunnel amidships to steady her.
Suddenly I heard a sharp intake of breath and looked up to see Ryan reaching his free hand into a crevice among the rocks. “Would you take a look at this?”
When he pulled his hand out he was clutching a roll of film. It must have fallen out when we’d taken the packs out of the canoe. I thought of the hours of patience represented by that roll of film. He must have spent twenty to thirty hours stalking things or waiting patiently in a blind. I mentally went through all the pictures he’d taken, wondering how many of the really good ones he had almost lost. Good pictures were worth a lot of money. He had one he had sold over a hundred times, grossing twenty thousand bucks.
How the hell could he be so careless? As I went back to bailing, an osprey called out a short sharp squawk of alarm, and I looked up to see it veering away from the cliff that soared straight up above the rocky ledge where we’d moored the canoe. There was a blur of something purple on the clifftop, and as I looked I saw the cliff move; I watched as if in a trance as a boulder the size of a basketball tumbled down toward us against the cold blue sky and the unforgiving granite of the cliff face.
“Above you! Look out!” I yelled at Ryan, shaking myself out of the confusion of what I thought I had seen.
He looked up in alarm, twisting his body at the last moment, his face grimacing as the boulder glanced off his right shoulder. He slipped on the rocky ledge and fell sideways into the canoe.
The weight of his body jerked the canoe against the rock in an ugly scraping of fibreglass. My body was flung toward the rock as the canoe began to tip in toward it. I flung out my hands to grab the rock and prevent the gunnel from going under, but there was nothing to grip, and the canoe suddenly tilted dizzily in the other direction as Ryan tried to sit up.
I fought to keep myself from being flung out of the canoe and grabbed a paddle just as the current slammed against the canoe, catching the stern and swinging it around to face the rapids below.
“We’re going down backwards.” I yelled at Ryan.