It wasn’t too long before I figured it out. In fact, I knew what he was saying by the time I took cover. I was back in my hiding spot under the fallen trees in the woods a long way from the village, munching hungrily on the granola bars.
“The Eye! Remember the Eye!” That’s what he was saying!
But what could he possibly mean by that? We were on the Eye, how could I not remember it?
Think!
Well, what was the Eye, really? Was it the island? Or was it something else?
Then, I remembered the Eye.
Before we left, as part of the history lesson the three of us had put ourselves through, we had read about how the island got its name. There had been several villages out here at one time and the largest had the church; that village and the island were known by the same name. But the real Ireland’s Eye was an extraordinary chunk of rock, sitting on a cliff on the eastern side of the island, staring out across the ocean towards the old countries. It was almost circular and at its centre was a hole. Through it, the old folks claimed, in just the right light and on the right sort of day, you could see all the way to Ireland. It was Ireland’s Eye.
Goosebumps began to grow on my skin as I remembered something else that Dad once mentioned about the Eye. He told me, with a laugh as I recall, that there were still a great many superstitions about the Eye. He said that the people of Newfoundland respected the memory of those who had lived here and believed that the Eye itself had always been good luck to the island’s inhabitants. Of course, over the years they had suffered tragedies, many at sea. He told me about one old man, for example, who sliced off part of his arm while working alone in the village sawmill and had to be hauled fifty kilometres to a hospital on the mainland, rowed by housewives because the men were away fishing. But despite such incidents, the people of Ireland’s Eye had never suffered the sort of monumental losses experienced by many other towns, tragedies where men went down by the boatload to icy deaths. The Eye, everyone believed, was good luck. Old folks said that taking the people away from the island had not helped the luck of Newfoundland, but if respect for the Eye and its power was maintained, tragedies at sea might still be minimized. No Newfoundland sailor worth a bucket of cod, Dad had said, would ever sail past the Eye without turning to look upon it and to salute it.
Dad had told me that story more than once and each time he added the same interesting fact. Every even day of every month the coast guard motored past the Eye. At exactly twelve noon the skipper turned and solemnly saluted.
I wear a wristwatch. I know that’s weird. I looked at the date on it. It was an even day. I looked at the time. It was 11:46. I had exactly fourteen minutes to get to the Eye!
I picked up the flare gun and ran.
In five minutes I was at the edge of the woods. I burst out into the sunshine not far from the church and headed overland as if I had wings on my feet. There was no use worrying about whether or not the old Newfoundlander and his crew saw me. There wasn’t any time for that. This was our last gasp. If I didn’t get to the Eye on time we would never leave the island alive. Surely in two days they would find me, my ability to elude them sapped by fatigue and hunger.
I heard them shout shortly after I appeared and I knew they were coming after me. I glanced down at my watch as I ran. Less than ten minutes left. By my calculations the Eye was at least that far away.
Why in the name of Teeder Kennedy hadn’t we visited the Eye yet? We’d been here for nearly forty-eight hours before we ran into trouble and yet we hadn’t so much as glanced at it! Now I had to find it running at warp speed with a posse of goons after me! This was going to be a very quick visit indeed.
I knew approximately where it was—somewhere a little farther along the coast, probably at the top of the hill on the far side of the next natural harbour, ocean-ward, a huge rock with an eye looking straight eastward across the Atlantic. But will I be able to see it when I get close, I thought? Or will I be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, desperately searching for it?
I actually had to run towards the water a few hundred metres in order to get where I was going. It was only down there that I could turn and race along an old rocky pathway that led up a hill to my left, in the direction of the Eye. From the top of that big steep pinnacle I would be able to see the full sweep of the next harbour.
For a few minutes my pursuers and I were running straight at each other. Over the dock and across the stony beach they came, snarling and shouting. In seconds I could see their faces as they flew towards me, almost licking their lips it seemed. I reached the turn about a hundred metres in front of the closest man. It was the guy with the gun. As I turned and scrambled up the rough pathway, he yelled at me. I actually jumped, shocked to hear the sound of his voice so close. Scurrying upward, I stumbled.
When I rose I fell again and for an instant it seemed like a dream, one where someone is chasing you and you can’t move. The gunman was getting so close I could hear him breathing. But the next time I rose I dug my foot in hard, gained a good grip, and shot up the hill.
At the top, I turned and glanced behind me. The first goon was still close, though the others, too fat to keep up, were fading. Without pausing to look where I was going, I started running again. All my searching would have to be done on the fly. I looked around at my surroundings bouncing up and down in my view, the sounds of the ocean muffled by my heavy breathing. What I saw was stunningly beautiful.
It seemed I could see the whole island, quiet and majestic, no longer touched by human hands. And beyond it the ocean stretched out before me like a vast blanket of blue, dotted by other islands and the coast of Newfoundland winding around on three sides in the distance. The land seemed so silent now and the water so peaceful, as if no one and nothing lived there.
Straight ahead was the other arm of the harbour and then the greatest stretch of water I had ever seen. It was endless. It touched the sky. Somewhere out there in the distance, past the horizon, were the British Isles and France and Germany and Russia beyond; from there you would come to Japan and over the Pacific to Hawaii and more of the Pacific to Vancouver and then overland to Toronto and back out to Newfoundland and this little island.
But the very first country you would see, should you stand out there at the end of the harbour and look through a hole in a rock, was Ireland!
I scanned the whole length of the arm…and there it was! A majestic dark rock, almost circular, sitting up at the very edge of the precipice, pointing out across the Atlantic. Beneath it was a spectacular shale cliff of a most unusual shape. It formed a huge letter C, with its top hanging out over the water like a man dangling off a ledge. The ocean crashed against the treacherous shore underneath.
But something wasn’t right. From here, it looked like the rock had no hole in it!
How could it not be Ireland’s Eye—it seemed to be in the right place. Maybe the eye was very small. Whatever the case, I had no choice: Eye or not, I was headed for it. I’d have to deal with the consequences when I got there.
I peeked at my watch. There were five minutes left.
My path from here to that rock was down a slight decline through a long stretch of woods and then back up an incline on the other side where I’d have to take a sharp turn to the right and then motor along the top of the arm, moving slightly upward as I went towards the precipice. It looked to me like a ten-minute sprint, and nearly half of it was through the woods. I put my head down and ran like I had never run before.
I entered the woods without changing gears. How do you move most efficiently in here, I thought. Think, I heard my grandfather say. Well, what makes sense? You have to see where you are going, first of all, but you can’t look down. I crouched a bit as I ran, and I tried to use my peripheral vision. That’s something coaches always talk about in hockey, being able to see things without looking directly at them. I remembered reading a book once about high-wire walkers and learning that they never looked directly at the wire. Their eyes were cast slightly ahead of them, though they saw the whole wire, from the point where their feet touched it out to great distances in front of them. I looked in front of me, but tried to be aware, peripherally, of the stumps and logs beneath me. Much to my surprise I flew.
Before long I was bursting out of the far side of the woods and making the turn along the grassy land at the beginning of the arm. I glanced down at my watch again. Two minutes to go. I could see the rock now, but it looked five minutes away. I remembered seeing a clip of an old commentator named Howie Meeker talking about “afterburners” on Hockey Night in Canada, explaining how a speedy player gets going at what looks like top speed and then turns on the afterburners and goes even faster. If I had any such things, I had to use them now. Howie Meeker, rookie of the year in 1946, right wing with the immortal Teeder, on the ice when Barilko scored. I turned on the afterburners.
But what I heard next almost stopped me in my tracks: the crunching sound of the hurried footsteps of the man with the gun. He was already out of the woods and lumbering towards me. It hardly seemed possible, but he was gaining ground. We tore along the grass and then onto the rocks. I couldn’t help glancing back at him every ten strides or so. He was less than fifty metres away!
A minute to go.
There was the rock right in front of me. I could hit it with a slapshot from here.
“I’S GOT YU NOW, YU LITTLE MOLE!” screamed the gunman in an ugly voice. He was about twenty strides behind me.
Thirty seconds.
He was ten steps behind.
Twenty seconds.
He started reaching out with his hands.
Ten seconds.
I came to the rock. It was three metres high. But there! There about halfway up was a little hole about the size of an eyeball! A few feet below it a piece of the rock jutted out. I leapt at it, planted one foot on it, lifted the other one, and jammed it straight into the eye of Ireland’s Eye.
Just as my first foot left the rock the gunman threw down his gun and reached for me. He just missed. Now I was struggling, reaching for the top of the rock, trying desperately to pull myself up. He jumped and caught my foot! Help me, Grandpa! Help me!
My running shoe came off in his hand. I heard him curse and throw it. It went sailing, in a long looping arch, out over the precipice and down into the ocean below.
He swung at my foot again. But I pulled it up and with one great heave landed myself on the top of Ireland’s Eye. For an instant I turned and looked down at my enemy. There was hate in his eyes—he was, in my grandfather’s words, spitting mad. I smiled at him.
Now he was climbing the rock, coming towards me at twice the speed I had risen. I pulled the flare gun out of my pocket and glanced out to the ocean.
No coast guard!
But then I scanned towards the opening of the village harbour and saw it, puttering along without a care in the world. I prayed on the grave of Bill Barilko that I wasn’t too late. There would only be an instant, right at noon, when the captain would look the Eye in the eye and give it a salute.
Hoping it wasn’t too late, I took the flare and put it to the barrel of the gun. At that moment the man grabbed my foot and yanked. The flare dropped from my hands, hit the rock and, in an agonizingly slow descent, fell over the edge and dropped down the far side of the precipice, following my running shoe into the ocean.
“DAMN!” I cried.
The man pulled himself up onto the rock and struggled to his knees. I snatched the other flare out of my pocket—the last one. I snapped it into the gun. The man rose.
We looked at each other.
“Don’t do it!” he said.
But I fired. Up went the flare—that beautiful, smoking, bursting red flare shot into the blue sky of Ireland’s Eye. For an instant we both turned and watched it. And then we looked at the coast guard. We stood there for a long time, both of us silent. He hoping the captain’s watch was fast and me hoping it was just a little slow.
For a second it seemed as if the coast guard boat actually came to a full stop. And then it turned. It was making a bee-line for Ireland’s Eye cove, and Mom and Dad!
“YES!” I shouted. “YES!”
“Yu little rat! Yu—” screamed the man.
But a snarling voice from below cut him off. “Get down from there, yu bozo!” shouted the old Newfoundlander, standing there red-faced and frantic. “We’ve gotta get out of here, fast! We’ve gotta make it back to the boats before that damn coast guard does! Forget about the boy!”
They had been standing less than fifty metres away, huffing and puffing, watching the flare arc into the sky, waiting to see if the captain had seen it. Now they turned tail and ran.
The gunman scowled at me and descended the Eye. I looked back towards the boat and watched with satisfaction as it steamed through the opening into the harbour.
That was a mistake. Lesson One when dealing with scum: never turn your back on them.
As the goon was descending the Eye he had noticed that I was looking the other way.
“Take the money out of my pocket, will yu, yu little rat!” he said under his breath. Then he shoved me.
I fell from the Eye and hit the ground with terrific force. I had been pushed so hard that I kept spinning when I landed. In a flash I was rolling over the edge of the precipice!
As I fell, I had the strangest thought. It wasn’t a deep feeling about my short time on earth, or an image of my grandfather. My life didn’t pass in front of my eyes. It wasn’t a profound thought. It just seemed funny to me that after saving Mom and Dad, it would be me who would die, and I would do it by falling from Ireland’s Eye.