My uncle continued, ‘Al Gonquin was now in a pickle. He’d promised the hand of his daughter in marriage to the brave who threw the heaviest stone the farthest but no one knew who that man was and now Minnemoosah entered the picture. She was a bit like your mother, Brucie, small, sensible, feisty, a good woman but with her own mind. “Fearless Father,” she said, “it’s my life and I'll decide who I marry,” and right then and there she chose a brave brave named Mikkimoosah.’
‘What happened to them?’ Grace asked.
‘Well, Al moved up north to Haliburton and named a park after himself, the braves all moved up to Mud Lake, where the Reserve now is, and Minnemoosah and Mikkimoosah moved to California where they went into the movies.’
Grace’s eyes danced and she clapped her hands until they hurt.
‘Tell me another!’ she implored my uncle.
‘Would you like to hear a true story told to me by Edgar Ten Fingers?’
‘Yes! Yes!’ Grace answered. Glory also gave an affirming nod and our mothers smiled.
Perry and I were more interested in doing rather than listening. We decided to see what was happening at frog bog.
THE GANG'S HIDEOUT
Nothing much happened at frog bog. There were no snakes or snapping turtles to try to catch. Perry and I parted, each going to our own cottage, but we decided to go to our fort in the woods the following morning. After breakfast the next day, as I left the cottage, I saw my uncle sitting in his chair with tears in his eyes. I didn’t like seeing grown-ups cry. I didn’t think they should. I thought he should go someplace else if he wasn’t happy but I didn’t say that. Instead I asked him if he wanted to come to the fort with me.
My uncle and I had sometimes continued to walk together and when we did we both felt comfortable in each other’s company. We might walk in silence but I knew there was always something in my uncle’s mind, something just beyond the reach of his telling, but whatever it was I never knew. I shared his silence with a relaxed ease. I shared my father’s silence too when I went somewhere with him, but when he was silent I knew he had nothing to say. I thought he didn’t think much. My uncle’s mind was always working. Earlier in the summer I’d wanted to know what was weighing on it, but now I felt comfortable in my uncle’s privacy.
As we walked up to the paved road we smelled skunk and saw one dead by the side of the road. Others pinched their noses when they smelled skunk but my uncle and I went to look. Uncle Reub prodded it with a stick.
‘It must have just been killed. It’s still soft and it hasn’t bloated up yet.’
Using his foot to hold its tail in place, he cut it off with his knife and kicked the tail into the chicory growing on the side of the road.
‘Why did you do that?’ I asked.
‘To a hungry animal a skunk looks innocent, waddling around, looking after its own business,’ Uncle said. ‘It doesn’t need powerful muscles. Instead it surprises its enemy with its stench. I’ll collect that tail when we return. It’s beautiful. It might come in handy.’
‘Mum won’t let you,’ I commented.
‘I won’t take it to the cottage. I’ll borrow some of your mother’s gin and store it in it. The smell will be gone in a week.’
We crossed the paved road then continued down a short dirt road and into the forest. Last summer, in that forest, not far from an abandoned railroad line that once went from Peterborough to Lake Chemong, I had discovered a pile of pine logs, each one around four inches thick and ten feet long. They had been there for years, I thought. I told Dad and on a spring visit this year, when the clearing in the woods was blanketed by trilliums, the two of us collected them. Dad and I carried two at a time back to his station wagon until we collected enough for Dad to build a magnificent tree house with a floor and ceiling and two walls in the giant willow tree on their front lawn. Uncle Reub now enjoyed that tree house. Once, I heard him calling me but he wasn’t in his usual lawn chair overlooking the lake. I looked up and my uncle was in the tree house, leaning over the railing, in his white undershirt and black city trousers but with thin branches of willow leaves, like a hula skirt, tucked all around his belt.
We walked silently deeper into the woods through a grove of cedars with thick brown trunks like massive Havana cigars. That part of the forest had an aromatic smell, a bit like tobacco. Then we reached a grove of birch trees where it was lighter and cheerier. Perry, Rob, Steve and I had stripped off bark from most of the trees, to write messages to each other. We had carved our names in some of the birch trees and each year our names got larger.
We reached the sugar bush and amongst the stand of maples were three lonesome wind-buffeted white pine trees, the tallest of all the trees, and all of them leaned east, away from the lake. Beyond the sugar bush was a clearing, covered in poison ivy. I was always careful but my bare leg rubbed against some of its leaves.
‘Brucie, come over here.’
My uncle crushed and rolled two burdock leaves in his hands then rubbed the juicy plant over my legs.
‘This burdock’s an immigrant, like your great grandparents,’ he said, as he rubbed the leaves on my ankle. ‘They arrived from Russia eighty years ago but this plant arrived with the Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower and you know, it’s just about as good as any medicine for stopping the itching from poison ivy.’
‘How do you know that?’ I asked.
‘Edgar Ten Fingers told me,’ Uncle answered, ‘although once you’ve got itchy pimples, fish blood is good. You let it dry and it stops the itching.’
‘Why is he called Edgar Ten Fingers?’ I asked.
‘And why are you called Bruce Fogle?’ my uncle replied. ‘It’s simply his name.’
The forest got darker again until deep in the woods we reached a place where even in the driest summer, even when it never rained, the black earth never dried. In that private jungle the air was soaked in a delicate damp smell. This was where our fort was.
My uncle and I crossed a stretch of greasy earth on planks us boys had taken from cedar fences, and arrived at a place where all summer the sun never shone. Here lived snakes and birds and small animals we never saw anywhere else. When Perry and I lay on the ground and were perfectly still we could hear scurrying feet. Once, only once, I saw an owl sitting on a branch right above me. I was interested in it but it wasn’t interested in me. I’d once found deer antlers, whiter than Pepsodent toothpaste, and they were now in my father’s tool shed.
Our fort in this no man’s land, was, we were sure, beyond anywhere anyone had ever been. That’s what we thought. As soon as we arrived at the lake each summer, Perry and I, Rob and Steve visited our fort, raised ramparts, built defences, stocked up on candles and made ready for attacks. Steve told us what to do and he and Rob did most of the work. He told us we lived in the Dominion of Canada but this was our very own Dominion of Boys. I was good at doing what I was told to do and even when I wasn’t strong enough I kept trying. Perry got tired easily and when that happened he gave up. No one was ever allowed to visit our fort, especially girls, not even Grace. Now I had brought my uncle.
Deep in those woods there were many skulls scattered in the leaf mould and litter, tiny little skulls that once housed the brains of the snakes we had captured and killed the year before and hung around the fort to prevent other boys, or witches, from coming near. Pinching stag beetles ambled across the brown ground