Читать книгу Tom Thomson's Last Paddle - Larry McCloskey - Страница 10

Caitlin’s trepidation increased as the distant canoe with the only adults in about a million miles faded from sight. And because they couldn’t go back until morning Caitlin felt real panic. Naturally she communicated this fear directly to her best friend.

“Guess we can’t get gelato here, huh?”

Dani understood her friend’s fear and harboured some anxiety herself. Naturally she communicated this back. “No, but I’ll bet we could paddle across Canoe Lake, then hitchhike to Ottawa and be back before it gets really dark.”

The girls looked at each other and smiled weakly.

“Come on, Caitlin, let’s set up our tent. It’ll be fine, really,” Dani said, meaning there was no way they could get back now, and besides, how could they face their dads if they went back early?

“Well, I guess the campsite is okay and the sunset is getting real pretty,” Caitlin said, meaning they weren’t nearly as pretty as an outhouse would be right about now.

The girls worked hard for the next thirty minutes, setting up their tent, gathering fallen branches, hauling a bucket of water, and setting it beside the fire pit. Nikki followed first Dani and then Caitlin around the campsite, sniffing and watching with keen interest as the girls fended for themselves. Caitlin struggled to figure our where the heck all the contraptions that came with the tent were supposed to go. Dani smiled to herself, thinking about her dad asking Bob for about the millionth time, “But will they remember to bring water up from the lake to keep from burning down the forest?” The moment the tent was finally erected Nikki plunged in for his beauty sleep.

As they sat beside a steady fire in the great outdoors, the girls thought their gourmet meal of hot dogs and marshmallows tasted especially good. Their dads had packed a large salad, but the girls had forgotten about it until they had eaten their marshmallows.

“Maybe we’ll want some for breakfast,” Dani suggested.

“And maybe there’s a washroom with a Jacuzzi just beyond those trees,” Caitlin said, drawing circles in the air with the smoke from her marshmallow stick.

After the ripening sunset stripped the last shades of purple and orange from the sky, the girls settled into their sleeping bags for the night. Talk within the tent was punctuated by an assortment of strange sounds outside.

Whenever Caitlin asked, “What’s that?” as she tended to do every few minutes, Dani answered with calming words in an anxious voice: “They’re just the natural sounds of the forest.”

Dani had heard this line in a documentary film once. She vaguely wondered if the film had meant spooky instead of natural. For a while the girls were quiet, listening to the forest and the sounds of their own breathing. They could hear frogs croaking, the gentle lapping of water on the shore, and the buzzing of mosquitoes close to their ears.

“Caitlin, they’re just a few sounds we’re going to have to get used to. In fact, we’re already getting—” A piercing hoot cut through the forest. Each girl grabbed the other, naturally, to shield herself from the eerie, natural sound. “It’s… it’s… it’s okay,” Dani stammered. “Just… just an owl.”

Caitlin released her grip on her friend. “How the heck do skunks and porcupines ever sleep around here at night?”

Dani rolled her eyes and wondered, If you roll your eyes in the dark and no one sees you do it, did it really happen? “Caitlin, skunks and porcupines don’t sleep at night. They sleep during the day.”

“Naturally,” Caitlin said.

“It’s ’cause they’re nocturnal,” Dani said in the matter-of-fact voice she always used when she was trying to impress.

“No, Dani, it’s ’cause of all the racket,” Caitlin countered. “It makes them all natural insomniacs, and us, too.”

“Caitlin, I’m sure we’ll soon be used to the sounds—” Dani’s voice went shrill as the great horned owl continued its serenade.

Caitlin laughed hysterically, and soon Dani managed a giggle. “Okay, so it may take a few months to get used to the sounds, We’ll just have to stay here until we do.”

The girls lay awake talking and listening for a long time. Eventually exhaustion displaced fear and they drifted into deep, satisfying sleep. For about five minutes.

“You awake, Dani?”

“Yeah, how ’bout you?”

“No, I’m asleep. I’m talking in my sleep ’cause you hypnotized me, or else the owl did. Maybe you can check for me.”

Dani ignored her friend’s early-morning sarcasm. “I’m not even tired.”

“Neither am I,” Caitlin said with excitement, “and it’s still nighttime.”

Dani lifted the tent flap. Whispers of light had begun to filter through the darkness. “We’re in the Hour of the Dead,” she said in her most serious voice.

“Huh?” Caitlin said, truly puzzled.

Dani continued in a serious and dramatic voice. “It’s the beginning of dawn, and I read that this is the time when most people die.”

“Wow,” Caitlin whispered.

“It’s the time when the world is most calm, so people leave this mortal coil.” Dani remembered hearing a guy called Hamlet talk like that.

“Or else people die ’cause it’s so spooky outside,” Caitlin added, but Dani was alone with her thoughts. “Hey, Dani, I’m not even tired. Maybe it should be called the Hour of the Wide Awake.”

Dani snapped back to the world of the living. “You know, you’re right. I’m wide awake, too. Come on, let’s go outside and look around.”

“Ah…” But before Caitlin could finish her objection Dani was out of the tent. When Nikki also roused himself with a world-record yawn and stretch, Caitlin concluded she had no choice but to check out this hour-of-the-dead thing. The girls stood listening to, without seeing, hundreds of birds screeching and flapping about overhead as if the entire world were already awake and eager to greet the new day. A shroud of mist lay across the entire lake and campsite.

“Wow!” Dani said.

“You can say that again,” Caitlin agreed.

“Wow!” Dani obliged. “It’s so…”

“Spooky.”

“Beautiful,” Dani whispered.

“Spooky,” Caitlin whispered.

Close to the girls but lost to the mist came a slap and a flapping of wings. The pair were startled and then mesmerized by the long, eerie sound of a loon puncturing the dull blanket of mist.

“Spooky,” Dani said.

“It’s so beautiful,” Caitlin said, her thoughts finally no longer preoccupied with outhouses.

The cry of the loon echoed across the lake unmuffled by the mistlike waves lapping the shore. As the echo faded, it seemed as if everything had stopped. The girls let out a breath together. As a second cry erupted, they strained to see through the mist and emerging light.

“There,” Dani said, pointing toward a noise coming from somewhere within the thick mist. But this sound wasn’t from a loon. The girls heard a whiz followed by a dull plop. As the pair searched the mist for the source, a shape slowly emerged.

“Something floating,” Dani said, straining on her tiptoes.

“Could be an outhouse,” Caitlin offered, reverting to her old obsession.

Dani was about to speak when the shape disappeared altogether.

Again they heard a distinct whiz followed by a dull plop. The girls leaned forward, each holding an overhanging branch to keep from falling into the water.

“I’ve been counting. It’s been about seventy seconds between whizzes,” Dani observed.

“Interesting,” Caitlin said. Every little mystery’s got to be figured out by that girl, she thought.

Dani leaned farther into the mist, determined to discover the source of the mysterious sounds and shape. Caitlin was about to comment on the precarious angle of Dani’s leaning but was struck by an amusing thought: The Leaning Tower of Dani. Caitlin was about to share her amusing thought when her friend’s branch snapped and Dani did a belly flop into the lake. Although only knee-deep, Dani shouted from the shock of her cold morning swim. She splashed wildly, and Caitlin almost followed her friend as she put a hand over her mouth, forgetting she, too, was suspended over the water from a tree twig. Just as Dani quit flailing in the water and attempted to pull herself out, both girls heard a distinct voice exclaim, “Darn!”

Dani stood completely still, dripping, shivering, and listening.

“Did you hear that, Dani?” Caitlin whispered loudly.

As Dani opened her mouth to speak, a shape emerged from the mist. A battered grey-green canoe came straight toward where Dani stood, without causing the slightest ripple in the water. Even before the back of the canoe appeared, the girls detected the sweet smell of tobacco.

Dani was about to reach out and touch the bow of the canoe when she glimpsed the figure of a man seated at the stern. Just as the boat was about to drift into Dani, the dark figure gave a barely perceptible turn of the paddle and it veered away. As the girls attempted to collect their scattered wits and fend for themselves by screaming and running, the dark stranger uttered a single word: “Mornin’.”

The stranger placed the paddle he gripped in his right hand and the fishing rod he held in his left hand on the thwart of the canoe. Then he placed his elbows in his lap and calmly removed the pipe between his teeth. While the girls stared, he searched in his shirt for a box of matches and carefully relit his pipe. The girls waited anxiously for the stranger to speak. Instead he puffed on his pipe until he seemed satisfied it was well lit. With a blank expression on his face, he muttered, this time through clenched teeth, “Mornin’.”

Dani desperately wanted to tell this intrusive stranger how frightening he and his phantom canoe were to two twelve-years-olds out for a walk or swim during the Hour of the Dead on their first-ever camping trip all by themselves. Caitlin wanted to scream because it seemed the right thing to do somehow. But both girls were disarmed by the simple greeting from a stranger who hardly seemed to notice them at all. They wanted to take decisive action, but found themselves just saying “Morning.” The girls were even more confused as the stranger touched two fingers to the peak of his worn hat and slightly bowed his head.

Dani decided she’d had enough. “What the… who do you… why in the world?”

Caitlin decided to complement her friend’s effort. “We wondered.. .I mean, we thought.. .and it sure is early, don’t you think?”

The stranger’s pipe moved along clenched teeth from one side to the other. “You’re scarin’ the fish away.” No reproach or threat, just a statement of fact.

“We scared… we scared… we scared…” As Dani finished saying scared for the third time, the branch Caitlin was holding snapped and she fell, rather dramatically, into the water. After Caitlin’s splashing and screaming subsided, the stranger muttered, “Yup, that’ll scare ’em, all right.”

Caitlin finally steadied herself, placed her dripping hands on her dripping hips, and said, “If we scared the fish, mister, it’s ’cause you scared the living daylights—or nightlights—out of us, whoever you are.” Caitlin finished her sentence with a dripping snort.

For the first time the stranger seemed to look at the soaking, dishevelled mess the girls had become. The trace of a smile creased his lips through bared teeth as he slowly removed his pipe and said, “Name’s Tom. Tom Thomson.”