Mud Lake: If Any

Death too, I think at times, is just another one of our match box toys.

I am now, as the lecturing surgeons say, preparing the electrodes for insertion. I am now, into the alien elements, inserting myself. My colleague, gentle Nye, will observe the reactions of the patient, if any. If any?

The duck boat has been swamped, almost suddenly. We are clinging to its metal sides. Cold; somewhat reassuring. Beyond us and around us, when we have recovered from the shock, from a frightened awareness of chill waters to which we submit not, there appears one of those dinky visions the times are wont to grant us. The Sporting Goods Department at Simpson’s, struck by flood, floats toward shore: six wicker goose decoys, a worn pair of oars, one green Alpine tent, eight hand-carved mallards with their neck-wrapped anchors, two arcticdown sleeping bags, a box of Cheerios, my ragged lambswool vest, a soggy blue duffel bag, Nye’s insulated pants and jacket of cross-hatched nylon, a spare pair of sole-up rubber boots. Lo, the affluent surface of things.

The waves are gentle. The water not too cold — for mid-­September near Flin Flon. Shore less than a mile off. We can push it in thirty minutes, je me dis. We bob beside the camouflage-green boat, two anchored heads, and observe one another. A perfect layout of decoys, je me dis, if one wanted to call down some passing, strange flock of honking department stores, a migrating flock of Sears-Roebucks, Eatons, Fitchs, Saks, Morgans, Simpsons, Magnins.

Except who then would be the hunters? What highball could lure down such monsters? Nye and I are both submerged to our shoulders. The guns, the ammunition, the camp stove, all things of solidity, are already at the bottom of Mud Lake. Amidst this absurdity of floating paraphernalia, buoyed by their still water-proof lace of feathers, float the one single redeeming object, our afternoon’s booty of mallards and coots and buffleheads.

It has been, so far, an unusual voyage but not bizarre.

Relying upon childhood memories of a far more southerly portion of Manitoba, I had blind-guided Nye, a fellow trumpet player and sojourner in Iowa, a veteran of African campaigns, on a long, long trip up beyond the 55th parallel, beyond Snow Lake, beyond the cessation of roads, to the inlet of Little Herbe Lake, to a perfect, marshy river mouth, untrampled by even one other hunter, and as fat with ducks as is a Christmas cake with sweet rinds. It was almost too good a spot, the kind one should visit once and then leave, letting its memory remain to alter and modify your impression of later places both mediocre and uncommon.

So we did only visit it once. It was no regular trip up Little Herbe, and we had progressed as much by intuition as by map-knowledge. We came back down below the 55th (and thus south of the early season), to wait for our one afternoon of regular-­season hunting. Off a rock ledge, in deep, clean water we did get some pike; and we thought we might get some Canadas. At nightfall we could hear them, high, high overhead.

Down off the road from Flin Flon to the Pas, we found a suitably ugly lake, with a harsh, muddy, cat-tail shore, and spent the morning getting our gear through the two hundred yards of shore mud and crossing the lake. Shooting opened at noon; we had a good afternoon, and set off back across the lake.

I’m not sure why the boat was so loaded. Whether we were afraid of theft or had developed a possible plan of spending the night on the far shore and then driving night and day back to Iowa. But loaded it was. I was scanning the shore with Nye’s monocular, looking for a break in the shore mud, when I realized that the waves we had been moving through had slowly been attacking us, gently but progressively spilling over the bow, sloshing into the bottom of the boat beneath its mask of gear. I moved back as soon as I could get my legs untangled, but it was too late. We had made our mistake.

I must have scrambled, because the monocular never showed up, but I don’t remember being frightened. Nye responded to some pre-imagined plan and freed the motor before we swamped. I stated that we were in trouble, but I was only thinking of wet-clothes trouble, not of the aglaecean, hungry water-monsters with which in childhood old trappers frightened me. No mile-long pike troubled me.

I watched our bobbing gear spread out and move ridiculously towards shore, and that expressed our destination. Never leave the boat. We would hang on, and kick behind its stern — our camouflaged, water-heavy, turtle board. But first we had to rock as much water out as possible, and it was on the recoil from one of these foundationless heaves, pushing against the elements that melt away, that I hit the Leacock bottom of that muddy, ugly lake. It oozed beneath me, an ooze of treacle and slushy cement. Which did frighten me. I thought of sinking-sand. And I laughed, rather loudly. Once I had my footing.

Nye turned full-face to me. And I saw, laughing, thinking really only of Lake Wissanotti, that Nye was truly frightened. The aglaecean were taking teeth-sharp bites at him. I remembered then, back in Iowa, his wife bending across to warn me that Nye’s response to penicillin was lost in the war, that for him pneumonia could have no sure cure. And he had his hip boots on still, ready for the shore mud, not for this quick calamity. Or say that the German mine was finally tripped beneath his ambulance still rambling across the Sahara, and, wounded and thirst-wracked, he could see the whole muddy lake as no other than a tongue-split mirage.

“Hey, hey,” I said. “Bottom. It’s the old muddy bottom. Get out the bread-balls and we can bob for suckers.”

A mile from shore, we were only neck-deep from bottom. And he laughed too, letting go. Welcoming the mud.

We became surface-floaters again. Collected some of our decoys and protective clothing. Spread by the waves, and soggy, it had lost some of its absurdity; still we let much of it go. We turned down the chance to practice an enforced economy; we dried the gear in the sun and by a fire and slept dry.

Nye knew his Thoreau better than I. “Minks and muskrats,” he mumbled. “We go from the desperate city into the desperate country and console ourselves with the bravery of minks and muskrats.”

In the early morning, long before sunrise, there was a single shot.

“Poachers,” said Nye, mocking my Englishness.

“Somebody who really lives here,” said I. “Probably that old Indian who bummed the smokes. Potting a fat hen for Sunday dinner.” Said I from my arcticdown, mocking something else, something to do with my own sense of most questionable survival. Was it not my true ancestor who had fired the single shot?

It is one of the strangenesses of youth that you can treat a specific chance of death with no more care than you’d give to your old Dinky Toy, that one-inch, green-camouflaged, British Army troop lorry.