Chapter 17
Things happen fast when you don’t want them to.
I was in the water, kicking hard. I might have been kicking upwards or I might have been kicking down towards the bottom. It was hard to tell. The lake water was cold and dark. I think I saw a foot flash by my head. It might have belonged to Granddad Angus or Warren or Dulsie. I tried not to swallow but the water kept pushing past my lips. I could taste it. I did my best not to choke. I tried to stay calm. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it?
Don’t panic, I told myself.
Try and drown calmly.
I sank a little deeper, in spite of my kicking.
Just how deep was this lake, anyway?
From down here in the deep darkness I could see the faces of the ghosts of those missing Cub Scouts staring up at me, looming like soft white jellyfish. The closest ghost reached out a glowing hand and touched my arm. Then he said something to me. Not in words, not the kind that you speak. He said something to me in the same way that a cool breeze will talk to you on a hot August afternoon and whisper of school and snowplows and leaves falling away.
You can stay here with us, is what his feelings said to me.
I’m not ready to stay just yet, is what I felt back—and then a warm, calm kind of glow seeped into my bones. For a moment I was absolutely certain that for some unfathomable reason I had stopped sinking.
I smiled a little and swallowed and started to choke and then something grabbed hold of my neck. I felt myself being dragged upwards. “Whaaaawwhackhwahakchwahak.”
I emerged from the water, hacking and coughing and glad to be able to breathe. Warren held the back of my neck tight enough to cut off my circulation. I’d always imagined if I found myself in a life-or-death situation it would be Granddad Angus who’d save me.
Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined boring old Warren Boudreau would dive into a bottomless lake and save my life. I hacked and coughed a bit more to hide my surprise.
“You can swim, can’t you?” Warren asked.
I nodded, only half hearing him. I kept thinking about those ghostly Cub Scouts I had seen. I kept looking back behind me, but there was nothing but lake water and a whole lot of cold. All I could see were the moonbeams shining fat and white spotlight haloes over the deep, silent waters of Muddy Lake.
“Lean on Fogopogo and keep kicking towards open water,” he told me. “We need to put some distance between us and that shotgun before we try and clamber back under the moose hide and into the dory.”
I nodded weakly and hung on to the side of the dory monster, kicking with the strength of a half-frozen pollywog. Warren was in the water, kicking right along with me. All the while Granddad Angus kept asking me if I was okay and I kept nodding back, like he could hear my head bobbing up and down.
“He’s fine, Angus,” Warren sputtered. “And we’re almost there.”
We kicked out into the lake. The shotgun blasted a few more times, but it sounded as if whoever was shooting was aiming in all the wrong directions. I clambered into the dory like I was three-parts sea monkey and helped Warren back under the cover of moose hide and crow feathers. Granddad Angus hugged me and held me like he was still afraid I was going to drift away.
“That was fun,” Warren said, grinning as if he’d somehow caught Granddad Angus’s knock-knock-joke grin. “Let’s do it again.”
“Dad!” Dulsie exclaimed in disbelief.
“We need more weight in the dory,” Granddad Angus suggested, finally letting me go. “Dories sail best if they’re loaded to the gunnels with a cargo of dead fish.”
I kept thinking about how we had very nearly become a cargo of dead fish only I didn’t say anything because I could tell that Granddad Angus had been pretty scared for me.
Not that I’d needed any help being scared.
“Head for the river,” Granddad Angus went on. “Just in case whoever did all that shooting decides to straighten out his aim.”
I kept looking behind me back towards the cold swallow of that dark old lake. A part of me wondered what it would have been like to just settle down to the bottom. A bigger part of me was Christmas-morning happy that I hadn’t actually drowned.
The lake wasn’t telling me anything. If there was a story hidden down there it sure wasn’t doing much talking right now.
Except, just for an instant, I thought I saw the face of a boy poking up out of the water, grinning at me. I waved. The boy held his fingers up in the Cub Scout salute and waved back.
“What are you waving at, Roland?” Warren wanted to know.
He looked back when he asked me and I don’t believe he saw what I did. I might have just imagined the whole thing. Nearly drowning could surely bring on hallucinations, but another part of me, hidden deeper inside, told me that maybe what I was looking at was a little more than real.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just waving at nothing.”
“We’d better get this into the shore and pick up some ballast before we try to take it any further,” Granddad Angus said.
We needed to get the oars out to steer the monster towards the river bank. Once we got into shallow enough water, Granddad Angus handed me one of the oars.
“Lean on that and push down hard and forward,” he told me. “Push against the stone of the riverbed and get us in close enough to wade ashore.”
I caught hold of the oar and leaned into it.
Just for a moment I could feel the current of the river and the hard of the stone throbbing through the long grain of the oar. I could feel the ocean’s tug further down the river and the wind blowing through the trees that leaned and nodded and bowed to the river. I could feel the seagulls soaring and I could count the waves that rolled into Deeper Harbour and somehow or other, amongst all the deep, strong feelings that rolled through the veins of my body for that half a second, I could feel Granddad Angus grinning at me.
Dulsie and me and Warren waded ashore and loaded some good river stone into the belly of Fogopogo to keep him weighted safely in the water. Granddad Angus held the monster while we loaded. We pushed off once again.
We tested the dory in the shallow water, rocking and jumping to make sure we weren’t going to take on any more water. I leaned on Warren and we pedal-paddled as hard as we could. Even with Dulsie leaning in the same direction, the monster safely held its course without tipping.
I looked forward as we moved down the river, aiming our sea beast towards the open mouth of the Drain and out towards the ocean.