Free Coppermine by Keith Ross Leckie Page B

him for stealing the crucifix and demanded it back. Rouvière took his hand to show him things and they swam forward in the darkness together. Creed awoke happy and more optimistic than ever before that the priests might still be alive.
    THEY LEFT THE TIP of the eastern peninsula and for the next two and a half weeks they made their way across the Great Bear Lake, trying to stay within distant sight of shore. They spent two nights on the tip of another peninsula to the west, where it rained in curtains for thirty-six hours straight. They spent the time in the gloom of the tent while Creed wrote in his notebook and read Hearne’s diary and most of Ford’s novel about friendship and betrayal. The boy finished his Chaucer.
    Creed noticed that each morning before they left land the boy would walk along the shore and carefully select a handful of coloured pebbles, sparkling quartz or pink granite, and put them in his pocket. After they had set out on the water, he would lay his paddle across the gunnels and carefully drop the pebbles one by one into the translucent depths.
    “What are the pebbles for?”
    “Gifts for the beings who live in the lake.”
    “What beings?”
    “Lake spirits. They have to be treated with respect.”
    “What do they look like?”
    “I don’t know. They can take many forms down there. I don’t like to think about what they look like. Maybe they’re invisible. Hope we don’t see any.”
    “I hope they like your pebbles.”
    GOOD WEATHER HELD for them during the second week, and one morning they went ashore and cut another mast and boom, rigging a smaller canvas sail that worked for a few days until the wind shifted directly north again. By this time they could make out the thin black line on the horizon that was the north shore and they didn’t mind the paddling. The north wind offered a challenge and they approached landfall well into the next dawn. The very basic maps Creed had been given at Fort Norman proved true, for they could see the mouth of the Dease River in front of them. It would take them farther north and west, to the cabin the priests called home.
    As they approached the mouth of the river, Creed’s eye caught something on the shore to the east, a structure of some kind that did not fit with the topography or flora. He guided their craft toward it, noting that he could see through the clear water to the stony bottom of the lake. The thing onshore that had drawn his attention was a large old York boat, wrecked on the shallow, rocky shore many years before. It was thirty feet long and made of thick planks, a huge open rowboat that would need a team of several strong men to row it, like a Viking long ship. The weathered mast was still in place, but the main propulsion would have come from the strength of men’s backs. Could be the property of Hudson’s Bay or private traders. Must have been blown up on the rocks by a southwest gale. Creed wondered what had become of the crew. As they drew closer, he could make out the battered nameplate, The Jupiter, and his first thought was how the hard men who had pushed this far north years before through this unforgiving land still kept a whimsical eye on the planets and stars. But then he recalled that Jupiter was the father of the god of war.
    It was a relief to be paddling near shore again, with some shelter from the wind and rollers. Several hours beyond the mouth, now on the flat river, they were paddling past a high, rocky point and Creed had the feeling they were being watched.
    “I feel it too,” the boy told him, and together they scanned the high rocks, but they could see nothing.
    To the north of Great Bear Lake, along the riverbanks, the black spruce and pine were noticeably shorter and more spare on the hills, and rather than solid forest, they grew in copses, gathering resourcefully in the sheltered valleys, behind windbreaks, leaving wide open spaces of rock and tundra. Creed and the boy were approaching the end of