WHERE ARE MY GAUCHIES?”

The players had just come back from an early-morning dip in the Ottawa River and were supposed to change quickly for the long bus ride to Algonquin Park. Nish had been first in the water, first out of the water, first dried off, and first back to the tent. Travis was only stepping off the beach when he heard the yells from inside their tent.

“WHO TOOK MY GAUCHIES?”

Travis hurried up, pulled back the flaps, and there was Nish, buck naked in the centre of the tent, kicking everyone’s sleeping bags and clothes as fast as his feet could move. He seemed near panic.

“My boxers are gone!” he shouted at Travis, as if Travis would know what had become of them. “All of them. What the hell’s going on here?”

“Calm down,” Travis said. “You’ve just misplaced them like you do with everything.”

“Somebody’s stolen them.”

“Who’d want to touch your boxer shorts?” Fahd asked as he ducked inside.

“That’s what I want to know,” cried Nish, missing Fahd’s point.

Travis, who was the most organized, led them on a careful check of all their clothes. This wasn’t the first time they’d been on a hunt like this: Travis still chuckled when he remembered how Nish’s boxers had once ended up in the freezer. The boys carefully made piles of Lars’s stuff, and Fahd’s, and Andy’s, Jesse’s, Dmitri’s, Travis’s, Nish’s–but nowhere could they find any of Nish’s distinctive yellow-and-green boxer shorts.

“Call the police,” Nish said.

“And what?” Travis asked. “Ask them to put out an all-points-bulletin on missing underwear? You’ll just have to borrow some.”

“Not mine!” said Fahd with alarm.

“Not mine!”

“Not mine, either!”

“Nor mine!”

“Forget it,” Nish said angrily. “They’re all too small anyway.”

They poked around in the clothes some more, but it was futile. Finally Nish sighed heavily, a sign that he was giving up.

“What’ll you do?” asked Fahd.

“Go naked, pal–that okay with you? Will you mind my big white butt sitting on your lap?”

“Oh, God!” said Fahd. “Can’t you find something?”

“You can wear your bathing suit,” Travis suggested. “We’ll probably be swimming again anyway.”

“It’s wet.”

“So what? Put it on.”

Nish made a face and stepped back into his bathing suit, then pulled his wide khaki shorts over top. The wet bathing suit immediately soaked through to the front of his shorts.

“Jeez,” said Nish. “Now I look like I wet myself.”

“Better that than naked,” said Fahd. “C’mon, let’s go–we’re already five minutes late.”

They finished dressing, grabbed their towels, and ran to catch the team bus, which Mr. Dillinger had already pulled up to the front gate of the camp. The rest of the Owls were already aboard, and a great cheer went up when the stragglers came into sight.

Nish, worried about the wet spots on his shorts, wrapped his swimming towel around himself as he ran. He was last to the bus, and had to wait while the others filed by Mr. Dillinger.

Joe Hall was already there. He shook a finger at each late boy, but didn’t really seem all that angry. His eyes went wide when he saw Nish wrapped in a damp towel.

“You got anything on under there, big boy?” shouted Sam from well back in the bus.

Nish looked up, his face reddening. “Somebody stole my boxers. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

The whole bus broke into laughter. They’d been waiting for this moment.

“Check the flagpole!” Jenny shouted.

Nish looked from face to face, but saw no allies, no explanation. Finally, he bent down and leaned towards the window, staring up as far as he could see.

There, at the top of the camp flagpole, Nish’s boxer shorts flapped in a gentle breeze.

“Who did that?” Nish asked, unnecessarily.

“We did!” the girls on the team all said at once.

“We’re all just so grateful for men’s lingerie,” Sam said, her voice almost exactly the same as Nish’s at the camp supper.

The bus broke up. Red-faced and furious, Nish bolted past Fahd for a seat by the window. He swept the towel from around his waist and threw it over his head to escape his tormentors.

Mr. Dillinger helped poor Nish out. He slammed a Sum 41 CD into the bus player and cranked it up loud.

The bus jumped as it pulled out, wheels spinning and screeching slightly as the dirt changed to pavement. Everyone in the bus broke into a cheer.

They were headed for Algonquin Park.

They were off to visit a ghost.

The “ghosts” had been Mr. Dillinger’s idea. He’d spent all of June planning this trip. He’d been delighted when the organizers of the Little Stanley Cup had insisted that the tournament be as much about seeing new things as playing new teams, and he’d enthusiastically signed the Owls up for the river rafting and mountain biking and watching the magnificent fireworks on Parliament Hill.

But the ghost idea had been his alone. He’d read an article about all the ghosts the area could lay claim to, and he asked the Owls if they had any interest in trying to see one. It was a crazy idea–just the sort of brilliant, offbeat activity Mr. Dillinger was so good at coming up with–and they’d cheered the suggestion loudly.

He took them down to Sparks Street and had a local historian point out the precise spot where Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of the Fathers of Confederation, had been shot in the back by James Patrick Whelan as McGee fiddled with his latch key. The historian was wonderful, even dressing up in period costume to tell the story of the assassin, the last person publicly hanged in Canada. “It happened on February 11, 1869,” the historian told them. “The people came by the hundreds, from all over, to watch Whelan hang from the gallows just down the street from here. To this day, there are people who claim the ghost of James Patrick Whelan still walks the streets of Ottawa on dark, misty nights. And there are those who say Thomas D’Arcy McGee sometimes rises to speak in the House of Commons on nights when Parliament isn’t in session.”

They’d toured Laurier House, where Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier had once lived. The staff who looked after the house told them of the strange happenings that had occurred there: furniture that had been moved in the night, lights on in the morning that had been turned off when the house was closed the previous day. They went to the William Lyon Mackenzie King estate in the Gatineau Hills and toured the strange grounds where King, who seemed a madman to the Owls, had brought relics of old churches and buildings from as far away as London, England, and erected them in the woods. A tour guide told them how King, even when he was prime minister, held seances to consult his dead dog and mother on how to run the country.

And now, Mr. Dillinger had said, they were off to visit “the greatest Canadian ghost of them all: Tom Thomson.”

 

It was a long bus ride to Algonquin Park. Some of the Owls slept. Fahd played with his Game Boy. Sarah read. Wilson and Sam listened to hip-hop on their portable CD players. But Travis just turned to the window and stared out at the glittering lakes and endless bush.

They were well inside the park when Travis felt the bus suddenly slow and pull off to the side of the road.

“Shhhhhh,” Mr. Dillinger said from the front of the bus. “Everyone out, but keep it quiet.”

Travis wasn’t sure at first what they were getting out for, but when he stepped down into the bright wincing light of the day he realized the bus was not alone. Several vehicles, some wearing canoes on their roofs like caps, had also stopped. And up ahead, a crowd of visitors had gathered, many of them with cameras raised.

“A moose cow and her calf,” whispered Mr. Dillinger. “Go gently.”

Travis and Nish pushed through to the front of the crowd. They faced a bog, which farther out gave way to water, and here the moose and her calf were standing, shoulder deep, calmly biting down into the water and then slowly chewing as they gazed about like moose tourists who had suddenly come upon a herd of humans.

“Who chews their water?” Nish asked.

“They’re eating,” said Travis. “There are weeds growing just under the water.”

“Gross!” Nish said.

But Travis was fascinated by the big animals and, in particular, by their lack of fear. Surely they had noticed the people standing about, the cars and trucks pulling off to the side of the road and stopping in a cloud of dust. But they seemed, if anything, amused by all the attention.

Travis took a few photographs on his disposable camera and then, almost in an instant, the moose were gone, dark shadows slipping into the darker shadows of the deep bush.

“Wow!” said a voice beside Travis.

It was Sam. She was shaking with excitement. “Did you ever see anything so beautiful?”

Travis didn’t know if he had. But it was more than the moose. It was the park itself, so green, so wild, the hills so sudden and the rock cuts so deep, the lakes so blue and clean and inviting. They stopped at the Lake of Two Rivers picnic grounds and had lunch and swam–Nish first in because he was already in his bathing suit–and then continued to Canoe Lake, where the ghost of Tom Thomson was supposedly waiting for them.

“This ghost business is a load of garbage,” Nish was saying in a seat far behind Travis. Nish’s voice was back to normal: a touch too loud, a bit too confident, a little too much bluster. “It’s like UFOs,” he said. “You got all these people claiming to see one, but how come nobody’s ever got a picture of one?”

“There’s lots of pictures of UFOs,” said Data, who counted himself an expert on anything to do with space.

“They’re all fakes,” Nish said.

“How do you know the authorities don’t just say that so people don’t panic?” said Data. “Just imagine for a second if the government came out and announced that aliens from outer space were really flying over New York or Vancouver–or Algonquin Park, for that matter.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it for myself,” said Nish, as if that was an end to the argument.

They pulled off at Canoe Lake. Mr. Dillinger had arranged everything. There was a barge boat waiting for them at the Portage Store, big enough to hold everyone, as well as a couple of park rangers, one to run the outboard and one, an older man who smoked a pipe, to point out the sights.

On the long run up the lake, the older ranger told the Owls the essentials of the Tom Thomson story. Now Canada’s most famous painter, he was unknown when he first came to the park just before the First World War. Some of the rangers at the time thought he should be arrested as a madman for setting up a three-legged stand, resting a board on it, and then slapping paint all over the board. “They’d never ever heard of an ‘artist’!”

Over the next few summers, however, Thomson had become as much a part of the park as the rangers themselves. They taught him how to paddle a canoe, how to fish for lake trout, how to set up a camp, and how to find his way around the intricate highway of park lakes.

“People came in then by train,” said the ranger. “Train’s long gone, so’s the lodge he stayed at when he wasn’t camping. The woman he was engaged to marry died a lonely old woman years ago, convinced to the end that Tom’s body still lay in a shallow grave at the top of that hill there with the birch trees.”

He pointed to the shore, to a splash of white birch on a small hill overlooking the lake. Travis felt a chill run down his back.

As an island came near, the ranger steering the boat killed the outboard. The silence was shocking. The older ranger waited, knowing he had his audience in the palm of his hand.

“Right here,” he said, pointing down into the calm black waters off the island, “is where Tom Thomson’s body rose to the surface in July of 1917.”

“What happened?” asked Fahd, his eyes wide open.

The ranger shrugged and smiled. “No one knows. Eight days earlier he’d set off from that far point over there on a short fishing trip and never returned. They found his canoe, but never his paddle–and paddles float. So do bodies after a few days in warm water, but they didn’t find him for more than a week, and when they did they also found a length of wire wrapped round and round his ankle–almost as if he’d been tied down to something–and a small, bleeding hole in his temple.”

“Murder!” Fahd practically shouted.

“Maybe. There’d been a fight the night before, people say, and the lodge owner, Shannon Fraser, had supposedly struck Tom a blow, and Tom fell down and cracked his head on the fire grate. Some say Fraser and his wife dumped Tom overboard that night with something heavy tied to his ankle, and then cast his canoe adrift, hoping people would presume he’d drowned and wasn’t ever coming up. Tom had also argued with an American cottager down the way”–he pointed to the opposite shore–“about the war (Canada was in it, the United States not yet) and the story goes that the hole in Tom’s temple came from a .22 fired by the cottager as Tom paddled by. There’s also those who say he struck his head when he fell in his canoe while standing up to take a leak–”

“What?” Nish screeched.

“That’s one theory,” the ranger said, smiling. “But none of us here put much stock in it. It only takes a few paddle-strokes to reach shore around here–so why would anybody be so stupid?”

“What do you think happened?” asked Sarah.

The ranger nodded. “I think he was murdered. I think that’s why people say they keep seeing him come back. He’s trying to tell us something.”