There was a constant whip crack of willow saplings as they passed, and as the lead trailblazer of their portage, Damian bore the brunt of the punishment. Domenic considered himself to be in reasonably good shape, but it became clear early in their journey that Damian’s time in the park had attuned his body far better to the rigours of crossing this terrain. It went without saying that Domenic wouldn’t ask for a break, but he offered no argument when Damian finally got lashed by one willow sapling too many and called a halt, as much for mental respite as physical.
Domenic lowered the canoe from his shoulders and sank gratefully to the ground, bone weary and exhausted. “How far is it back to the park boundary once we get to the Little Buffalo?”
Damian looked up from tending a willow-inflicted wound and shrugged. “Forty kilometres maybe. Downriver. With the two of us paddling, going full-on, we should be out in two days.”
“I can’t help feeling if we’re going to be working this hard anyway, it might be worth heading straight north over land until we could pick up the Great Slave River. If you know the approximate coordinates of where we are now, I might be able to work out which is the shorter route.”
“Without any paper? How are you going to keep track of all those trig calculations?”
“After I get each answer, maybe you could just remember the numbers in your head,” suggested Domenic.
“Like that guy in Rain Man, you mean?” Damian shook his head dubiously. “That’d never work, obviously.”
“Why not?”
“Well, if I’m that guy, that would make you the Tom Cruise character.” He looked at Domenic frankly. “As your brother, it’s my job to tell you the hard truths, and bro, you ain’t no Tom Cruise.”
Domenic gave his brother a weary grin. “I still don’t understand why we couldn’t just backtrack on the river I came in on. At least we’d have been going in the right direction.”
“Yeah, well, if you move back into the frying pan from the fire, you’re going in the right direction. There could be a couple of branches to that river, or five, or ten that you didn’t even notice on your way down. Wandering off course is not a good idea up here. You get lost in this place, you stay lost. Better we stick to a route at least one of us is familiar with.”
Domenic was still coming to terms with how far off course he’d veered, and how easy it had been to become totally, irretrievably lost in this landscape. If his brother hadn’t shown up, who knew where he might have ended up? Damian’s words were still with him. This was a place of stark, sweeping beauty. It could overwhelm you until you felt your heart might almost explode with the sheer scale of it all. But it was a dangerous place to be if you weren’t prepared to respect its threats. And sometimes even if you were. He moved off to the edge of a small stream nearby to fill his water bottle.
“I wouldn’t,” said Damian. “Giardia’s bad out here where the water is shallow. You don’t want to spend the rest of this trip fighting beaver fever. The water quality is going to be better on the Little Buff.”
“That’s not the main reason you want to go back there, though, is it?”
Damian shook his head sadly. “We need to bring her out with us, Domino. I owe it to her.”
Domenic reached into his pack and withdrew the lone remaining beer. He popped the top and took a drink before handing it over. He could tell from his brother’s look that Damian realized he had brought it for Annie Prior, for when he found them both, alive and safe. But he drank from the can gratefully anyway.
The shadows of two large birds drifted over the men and they looked up, tracking the Whooping Cranes as their slow wing beats seemed to carry them effortlessly over the waterlogged landscape. “Forget portaging,” said Damian, “that’s the way to travel over this stuff.”
“New arrivals?” asked Domenic.
“That’d be my guess.”
The two men watched the cranes until they disappeared over the still, silent terrain. “Four thousand kilometres,” said Domenic. “That’s some journey. The endurance they must have, the energy resources they need to consume. You can hardly imagine the condition they must be in when they arrive here.”
Damian nodded slowly. “I thought that’s what she would be looking at, when we trapped those cranes Annie wanted. But we didn’t check for body fat or feather wear. No blood samples, either, or measurements.”
Domenic shot his brother a puzzled look. “What data was she looking for then?”
Damian fished in his boot and withdrew a plastic bag. Inside, a tiny blue memory chip shone like a jewel. “Mostly the kind that’s on this.”
“The birds were wearing cameras?”
Damian nodded. “Altitude-triggered.” He held up the bag in his fingers and stared at the chip. “I still had this one with me when she died. I didn’t even have the chance to turn it over to her. No idea what’s on it though.”
Domenic looked around the undulating boreal marshland surrounding them. “I wonder, did Annie Prior ever show any interest in the landforms as you were passing through?”
Damian lowered the bag and looked at his brother in astonishment. “All the time. Sometimes, it seemed that she was almost as interested in that stuff as she was in the cranes we were tracking. What makes you ask?”
“I think she was looking for evidence of Dene settlement. The trouble is, the Dene are transient, aren’t they? So there would be no middens, no evidence of permanently established campsites.”
Damian smiled indulgently. “Unfortunately, whoever gave you your crash course in Dene culture didn’t give you the whole picture. The Dene were a transient people. They would have left no record of any permanent settlements, but every summer the various bands would meet up near a lake somewhere. They’d come from miles around to feast and trade. The locations of these meeting places aren’t well known outside the Dene community, but if they used the same sites every year, I’m sure there would still be bones and artifacts there. But what does any of this have to do with Annie?”
“Annie Prior wasn’t a biologist. She was a cultural anthropologist.”
“What? No, that’s crazy.” Damian was half standing in surprise. “I know she was interested in the Whooping Crane’s place in the First Nations culture. We talked about it all the time. The university she worked at is near the Black Hills. There’s plenty of good crane habitat out that way, and a lot of it is on Indigenous land. But we were here to get tracking data from the birds. I know. I recovered it for her.”
“Annie Prior entered the park on an anthropological study permit, Damian. She hadn’t filed a plan to do any wildlife research at all.”
Damian was shaking his head now. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe any of this.”
But Domenic had been decoding his brother’s reactions for a long time. And he could tell that despite Damian’s denials, he did.
“Did you ever hear her mention a man named Gaetan Robideau? When I talked to him, he said he had just returned from conducting a ritual in the park. Something about drinking birch sap. It means he would have been in here at the time she died.”
“He your dubious Dene source? Drinking birch sap is part of a purification ceremony. It serves as a form of atonement, too, I think.”
“Robideau told me it would be the water that took Annie Prior, Damian,” said Domenic. “He said it was because she refused to pay.”
Damian smiled softly. “He’s talking about the Dene practice of honouring the river. The first time they go onto the water each spring, they ask the water for its protection: Stay calm for me, take care of me when I am upon you.”
“He said it as if he knew it was going to happen to her. Or maybe already had.”
His brother shook his head. “It wasn’t foreknowledge. It’s just the kind of certainty that comes when your connection with the land is as fundamental as it is with the Dene. I’m not sure you can read anything else into it. It wasn’t Gaetan Robideau who caused Annie’s death, Domino. And it wasn’t to do with any studies of the Dene, either.”
He indicated a roiling band of deep grey clouds on the horizon. “Those thunderheads are still building. This storm’s going to be a bad one. This whole area will become a lake in a matter of hours. We need to find some deeper water that we can follow up into a back channel somewhere to ride it out.”
Domenic rose and lifted the canoe. Once again, his brother had successfully evaded further discussions about Annie Prior’s death. But there was something about his final comment that struck a chord with Domenic this time. The emphatic way Damian was able to declare who wasn’t involved in her death suggested he almost certainly knew who was.