Chapter One

Sara knew something was wrong when all the kids went quiet.

A raven’s long black wings swept through the air low over her head. His caw sounded like the alarm on her bedside clock radio and it alerted the rest of his conspiracy. Six of the big birds swooped down and began circling above the six little heads of her stationary students at the shore.

Mary’s tiny hand squeezed Sara’s hard. “What is it?” she asked in barely more than a whisper.

“Maybe they’ve found some rubies?” Sara forced herself to sound cheerful, even though she knew darn well that the kids couldn’t have found rubies. River had shown his classmates garnets, not rubies, but his grand tale of finding precious gems had worked the kids into a frenzy. She’d hoped that adding a side-trip on the mainland would be a good way to start teaching them about the wealth of minerals beneath their native lands. She’d also hoped that spending some time running up and down the shore, looking under rocks and hunting for treasure, would help bring Mary a little bit out of her silent shell. “Let’s go see what they’ve found.”

Sara took one step forward and the loud crack of the dried branch her hiking boot landed on reverberated in the silent forest. Even the river was quiet.

Mary’s bright green frog-faced rubber boots shuffled through some brittle yellowed leaves that crinkled.

They both stopped dead when the class parted to let Sara see what they’d found.

When she’d been living in Toronto, the only time Sara had seen violent death was when she drove by raccoon or squirrel or skunk roadkill. In the years since she’d moved up here she’d learned how to quell her queasiness whenever someone came back to the reserve from a hunt. She’d even agreed to try her hand at partridge plucking when she and the kids got over to the petawanagang fall gathering camp. But seeing an animal, big or small, moose or beaver, get skinned was still too much for her stomach and as she looked at the carcass lying on the rocky shore she felt herself starting to hyperventilate. Her short bursts of breath instantly condensed into puffy little white clouds when they hit the cold air.

The carcass she was looking at wasn’t a furry woodland creature. He was a Homo sapiens. Someone she’d met, talked to.

A large dark brown stain of dried blood circled the hole in his chest.

He hadn’t been skinned.

But his face had been carved.

A rhombus-shaped patch of skin had been sliced out of his forehead; the kids would have called it a diamond.

Mary, pulling hard on her hand, tugged Sara out of her frozen state of shock. She kneeled down to hear what Mary wanted to whisper to her.

“Did the mining kill him, too, Teacher?”

Chapter Two

My underused legs were almost as wobbly as the long suspension bridge as I started to walk across the wide canyon, and I had a hard time keeping myself steady to take photographs of the spectacular scenery. North of Lake Superior the fall colours weren’t as brilliant as they would soon be further south, but the yellow leaves on the thousands of white-barked birch trees in the forest still packed a visual punch next to the blanket of deep green coniferous trees under a robin’s egg clear blue sky. I’d just put the lens cap back on my camera when I was surprised to hear my phone ringing.

The GPS display in my car had gone wonky and started showing all sorts of disjointed images, only a few of them with squiggles that resembled roads, when I turned onto Ouimet Canyon Road and I’d just assumed that I’d lost cell reception, too. I wouldn’t have bothered answering the call, but I recognised Auntie Em’s ringtone. Hers was one of only two ringtones that I always answered. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear her voice. I only heard the hiss and crackle of static, then silence. Signal lost.

I’d just been strapped into the harness for my ride down the country’s highest, longest and fastest zip-line when she called again. This time I heard her, but only three words of what she said were clear.

“Lee?”

Her first word was a waste of clear signal time. I already knew my own name.

The second word came several snaps, crackles and pops after the first.

“…Stuart…”

I felt myself stand a little taller and the invisible barriers around my heart immediately went into self-protection fortification mode.

Then came the third word.

“…killed…”

Those self-protective barriers broke off in big chunks that were blown away as I zipped over Hawk’s View Canyon at seventy-two kilometres an hour.

Stuart had been killed?

I didn’t see the view because I’d closed my eyes tight to lock in any tears that might try to escape.

I hadn’t spoken to him in over twenty years.

I’d never get the chance to talk to him now, to ask him why.

Auntie Em called again just as my feet touched solid ground.

“What happened to Dad?” That word, ‘Dad’, felt strange in my mouth. I hadn’t said it, not once, since I’d heard an even more powerful word——‘Guilty.’

“Nothing’s happened to him, but some innocence lawyers are working on his case and they want to talk to you. I told them…” more static “…when you get back.”

“Oh.” Why did I feel such a rush of relief to hear that someone who’d been dead to me for half of my life wasn’t, in fact, dead? “I heard you say the word ‘killed.’ Who was killed?”

Static. “…shot…” louder static complete with a few electronic squeals, then “…Jack…”

Signal lost.

Legs buckled.

My butt would have hit the dirt if Ted, the kid who was working the receiving end of the zip-line, hadn’t held tight onto the straps of my harness.

“Phone! I need a real, hooked up to a real phone line, phone!” I screeched at Ted. It wasn’t his fault that I was losing my mind to panic, but I didn’t have a firm enough grip on the part that wasn’t panicking yet to attempt faking the politeness that Canadians are known for.

“Um…the campground office is closed for the season, but there’s a phone up at the ticket booth.” Ted took a step or two back from me as I frantically kicked myself out the harness.

“Does your cell phone get reception down here?”

He shook his head. “Sorry.”

“Drive me up to the ticket booth—now! This is an emergency!” What words of Auntie Em’s had I missed? ‘Someone has been shot and killed and Jack is looking into it. That had to be it. Had to be. Because the only other alternative was that Jack was the one who’d been… nope, not going there.

“But they said you wanted to hike up the canyon—”

“I need to get to a fucking phone!”

“Mark’s already left in the truck. They told me I should do the hike with you.”

“Where’s the trail?”

“It starts there, but—”

Seeing him point his finger was as good as hearing the starter’s pistol at the beginning of a race.

My legs, heart and lungs got the exercise they’d been so sorely missing during the fifty hours it had taken me to drive this far across the country. I loved my country dearly, but it was too damn big! And there were too many areas with lousy or non-existent cell phone reception. Not for the first time, I cursed myself for accepting the contract from Tourism Canada to do a series of cross-country articles.

I ran as hard as I could along the well-groomed trail that started on the canyon floor and went up metre after metre. I was pretty sure that I swallowed at least one spider when I ran face first, mouth wide open to suck in more oxygen, through a couple of webs that crossed the trail. I hadn’t slowed down to take off my thick sweater when my body temperature started going up; I’d just hauled it off as I ran.

A bright red pick-up truck and my black Audi SUV were the only vehicles in the parking lot. I recognised Ted’s co-worker, Mark, by the puffy down vest he was wearing over a plaid flannel shirt. He was leaning against the side of his truck, talking on a cell phone.

“I need to use your phone!” I shouted as I ran across the parking lot.

Mark ended his call. “Where’s Ted? Did something happen to him on the trail?” He sounded only slightly concerned.

“I ran, he’s walking.” My lungs hurt from sucking in so much cold air and my heart rate wasn’t decreasing any despite no longer having to pump energy into my thighs. “I have a family emergency. I need to call my aunt.”

“Okay, but where is she?” He wasn’t holding his phone out for me to take.

“Port Hamlin.”

“Is that long distance? I don’t have a Canada-wide long-distance plan and my parents would kill me if—”

To hell with it! The ticket office was only a few quick long strides away and Ted had already told me there was a phone in there. But the door was locked.

Damn it! I could see the blessed instrument of communication sitting on the desk across from the ticket window.

I took a step back and raised my right foot higher than most averagely tall people would have had to.

“Hey! You can’t—” Mark spoke too late.

My thick-soled hiking boot hit a direct bull’s eye on the flimsy frame, causing the door to fly open and bang against the inside wall of the office so hard that two panes of glass in the door’s window shattered.

As I listened to Auntie Em’s phone ring, on a very clear line, I overheard Mark talking to someone on his cell phone about the blonde lady who’d gone ‘crazy loco.’

“Hel—”

I didn’t wait for Auntie Em to finish saying ‘hello.’ “Jack’s been shot?”

“Oh, dear Lord, no! When?”

“What do you mean when? You’re the one who just told me about it.”

“I said no such thing!”

“But you said someone had been killed and then you said ‘shot’ and ‘Jack’—”

“I didn’t say Jack had been shot.”

Finally, my heart rate started going down and I sat down on one of the two chairs in the office. “Thank God.”

“How much of what I said did you hear?”

“Not enough, obviously.”

“Where are you?”

What did my location have to do with anything? “About an hour and a half outside of Thunder Bay.”

“East or west of Thunder Bay?”

“East. Why?”

“I just wanted to know if you’d passed Thunder Bay yet. Are you in your hotel room?”

“Not yet.” Paying to repair the door and broken window panes would probably cost me more than tonight’s hotel room, but I wouldn’t charge those expenses to Tourism Canada. And I’d write an extra nice paragraph in my Ontario article about the incredibly helpful and friendly staff at Hawk’s View Canyon to help make up for my vandalism. “So? Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“I bumped into Blaze in the woods over by your house today. He’s extremely upset, and rightly so. His grandfather is going to be arrested for murder and I suggested that you might be able to help him.”

“And this couldn’t wait until I get back? I’m not exactly close to home right now.”

“But you are close to his home and that’s where the trouble is. The thing is, Blaze is convinced that his grandfather is innocent. He’s a councillor in Webequie and Blaze says if he wanted this man gone he would have simply had him thrown off the reserve, but the OPP are convinced—”

And speaking of the OPP, an Ontario Provincial Police cruiser was just pulling into the parking lot with its lights flashing. Thankfully, its siren wasn’t blaring. “Auntie Em, I have to go.”

“But I haven’t even told you—”

“I really have to go.” A big burly man, made to look extra bulky by the bullet-proof vest under his parka, was sauntering over to the ticket office. I smiled as sweetly and apologetically as I could at him. He didn’t smile back.

“…and Blaze really needs your help.”

“How am I supposed to do that? I’m not there, wherever there is, and more importantly I don’t know the first thing about investigating a murder. I investigate places—”

“And the people in them. You’re the one who solved the murders at Berkshire College earlier this year.”

“With Jack’s help.” And hindrance, but it wasn’t the time to get into that discussion. “He’s the one you should be calling. He loves this kind of stuff.”

“As I told you when I called before—”

“When I couldn’t hear you—”

The OPP officer cleared his throat, loudly. “Hate to interrupt, but there’s the matter of the broken door I’d like to talk to you about.” He was so politely Canadian.

“Give me a minute,” I said to him.

“It’s going to take more than a minute to explain everything to you.”

“I wasn’t talking to you, Auntie Em.”

“I’d like it if you’d stop talking and start listening, just this once.”

“Seriously, call Jack. He’d jump all over this in a heartbeat.”

“Jack’s not an option.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons: he’s even further away than you are, he’s still in Antwerp on business, and Blaze has explained to me that because of that business he’s the last person anyone in Webequie would open up to.”

I opened my mouth to ask her another question but closed it again when I saw the burly cop’s thick index finger push down on one of the little nubs on the phone’s base where the receiver would rest when I eventually hung up. He’d hung up for me, without the assistance of the receiver still in my hand. “Oh boy.”

“Let’s talk about the door.”

I politely obliged. And apologised profusely.

Thankfully, the owners of Hawk’s View Canyon accepted my apology when the officer put me on the phone with them. They agreed to not press charges when I agreed to the amount they asked for to cover the cost of the repairs.

One thousand dollars on my credit card later, I was pulling out of the Hawk’s View Canyon parking lot.

There was just enough daylight left for me to nip up further north to Ouimet Canyon and get some great shots of the provincially owned, zip-line free, miniature Canadian version of the Grand Canyon. The highway swooped down closer to Lake Superior as I drove toward Thunder Bay and I could see the dark outline of the flat tops and sheer cliffs of the mesa across the bay that really did look like a Sleeping Giant lying in the water. Tomorrow I’d be out there.

Before that I desperately wanted a hot shower, a meal and a good long sleep. Only after I’d had the first two of those, and after I’d transferred the day’s photos from my camera to my computer and labelled them, and after I’d answered some emails, and after I’d checked my bank account to see if the second instalment from Tourism Canada had been deposited, did I have the emotional wherewithal to call Auntie Em back. She was on a mission and saying no to her always took a toll.

I told her about the deposit into my account first and that I’d transferred the entire amount into her account. Even though I could tell she was itching to talk to me about whatever was going on with Blaze and his grandfather, I knew she’d be pleased to hear that within forty-eight hours she’d have enough money to pay the last instalment of our property tax bill for the year. Those taxes had been the sole reason for me accepting the Tourism Canada contract. Hearing the relief in her voice made every minute of every boring hour spent in my car worth it.

“So, let me get this straight—the dead man was having an affair with Blaze’s grandmother and he was shot with Blaze’s grandfather’s gun and he was prospecting for minerals on Webequie lands, lands that the people of Webequie, including Blaze’s grandfather, vehemently don’t want developed?”

“Yes.”

“I feel really bad for Blaze, but if I was a cop his grandfather would be the first person I’d suspect, too.”

“But he didn’t do it.”

“So says Blaze. I like the kid, really like him, but you have to admit that he’s a bit biased.”

“They said the same thing about you when you testified at Stuart’s trial.”

“That was a cheap shot.” And even though it had been fired by Auntie Em, the only person on the planet whom I almost trusted completely, it instantly put me on the defensive. “Bias had nothing to do with my testimony. I told the truth. He couldn’t have killed Sheila or Connie because he was with me when they were attacked. As for the other five women, I have no idea what happened.”

“But, twenty years on, you still wonder if he was wrongly convicted.”

“I don’t—”

“Nonsense. We both wonder about it, whether we admit it to each other or not. And, despite your testimony, he was convicted of killing Connie. I know that eats at you. As you said, you know he didn’t kill her. Now Blaze is going through something similar.”

Deflect, deflect, deflect. I wasn’t ready to have the conversation or explore the questions that had been silently sitting in both my mind and Auntie Em’s for over two decades. I seriously doubted I’d ever be ready. “Was Blaze with his grandfather when the man was killed?”

“No, he was down here in his classes at Berkshire. But he knows his grandfather, knows he’s incapable of committing a murder.”

I’d thought the same thing about Da…Stuart, but maybe I’d been wrong? The jury thought I was.

“And he thinks that racism may have played a part in the OPP zeroing in on his grandfather so quickly.”

“Racism?”

“Because of the mutilation.”

“The what?”

“I must have forgotten to mention that bit. Whoever killed him cut a diamond shape in his forehead.”

How could someone forget to mention a gruesome detail like that?

“Blaze wonders if maybe the mutilation made the OPP officers assume that a First Nations person did it, because of the whole mining issue up there, but that would be just plain ignorant.”

“I think the fact that it was his gun that shot his wife’s lover may have had more to do with the OPP—”

“Blaze says that the NAPS officers in Webequie don’t think his grandfather did it, but the OPP came marching in and took over everything and—”

“What’s NAPS?”

“I haven’t got the foggiest idea, but Blaze will explain it all to you when you talk to him. I gave him your cell number and he’s going to call you tomorrow. He’ll probably call during his lunch period.”

“I’ll be hiking Sleeping Giant all day and don’t know if I’ll have cell reception out there.”

“Then he’ll leave a message and you can call him back.”

“I haven’t decided if I’m going to get involved in this or not.”

“That’s nice. And another thing, before I forget, Blaze doesn’t want Jack to know about this.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know about it either but Blaze not wanting Jack involved didn’t make sense. Jack was going to sponsor him for the next few years when he went to the Ontario College of Art and Design. Without Jack, Blaze wouldn’t be able to afford the tuition or the living expenses. “What’s his problem with Jack?”

“It’s not Jack personally, it’s his business. Both Jack’s company and De Beers have mines near Blaze’s reserve and both companies are making noises about wanting to open second mines. It’s a contentious issue and Blaze says Jack might not be welcomed with open arms if he suddenly showed up in Webequie. Now that I think of it, I wonder if that rock on the ring Jack gave you came from his mine up there? Canadian diamonds are some of the biggest and best in the world and the one on that ring is definitely big. I wish you’d hurry up and move it from your right hand to your left. I don’t know why you’re dithering—”

I wasn’t sure if I’d answer Blaze’s call, but I was more than sure that it was time to end the call with Auntie Em. Her incessant chant of ‘Marry Jack’ was starting to feel like water torture. She found a way to bring it into every conversation.

Who proposes to someone two days after a first date? Marriage was something to be cautiously and thoughtfully considered. Okay, so we’d been best friends since high school and knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses almost too well, but still. And admittedly our first date hadn’t really been a date; it had been one night of lovemaking that had definitely changed the nature of our relationship. Changed it so much that two days later Jack whipped out the little velvet box with the big honkin’ ring in it.

It was late in Antwerp, but Jack would probably still be awake and working. Even though I knew he hadn’t been shot I wanted to see him alive and well with my own eyes. I unzipped the inner side compartment in my backpack, pulled out the velvet box, opened it and then slipped the ring on the fourth finger of my right hand. Auntie Em was right. The diamond solitaire was big, really big. And super sparkly.

I pulled the ring off and slowly slid it down onto the fourth finger of my left hand. It looked brighter there. The fingers on my right hand were still red. The skin on them would probably always look as if it had been melted and smeared, because it had been melted and a lot of it was actually skin that had been grafted on. My left hand hadn’t been burned in the fire. The fire that almost took Jack away from me permanently.

The thought of losing him forever had been terrifying, but the thought of being locked into such an all-encompassing commitment was almost as terrifying. On my left hand the ring looked like a padlock, permanently closing any and all escape routes. I moved it back over to my right hand. It still looked a bit like a padlock, but one that could be quickly removed. The fact that the fingers on my right hand were now slightly thinner than the ones on my left helped bolster that feeling.

I opened my computer and sent a FaceTime request to Jack. Not surprisingly, he answered almost immediately.

“Hey! I was just thinking about you.” Despite the late hour he still looked perfectly groomed; his face clean shaven, his white shirt crisp and unwrinkled, only his tie had been loosened a bit and looked a little sloppy. “Adaya and I are just finishing some paperwork.”

Adaya’s hands slipped into the shot, resting with too much familiarity on Jack’s shoulders, and I instantly wanted to shout ‘Get your hands off him, bitch!’, but bit my tongue. I liked Adaya. She was super smart and independent and she ran Jack’s professional life better than any executive assistant before her had. But did she have to be so beautiful? She was long and lean, like Jack, so there weren’t any height issues between them. She barely had to wear heels to look him in the eye. I’d need stilts to be able to look him in the eye. And her accent, a mix of Indian and upper crust British, was too feminine. I wished she was wearing a padlock on her left hand. Her face lowered into the frame and I could see that not a single hair was sticking out of place from her stylish cut. I reached up to feel if my hair had dried since my shower and hoped it looked fairly smooth. I probably should have brushed it before calling Jack.

“Hi, Lee. How are you?” she asked with a great big smile.

“I’m great. You?”

“Busy, as always. I just need Mr Bossy Pants’ signature on one more thing and then I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.”

Great, she had a nickname for him. At least the word ‘boss’ was in that name.

I fluffed my hair with my hands while they bent their heads over whatever papers were on the desk in front of them.

“Thanks, Adaya. Nice work today.”

“Goodnight, Jack. See you in the morning,” Adaya said as she walked out of the shot. “Goodnight to you, too, Lee.”

“Nice ring.” Jack smiled his big goofy grin that almost filled the screen and his cheeks pushed his dark-framed glasses up to his equally dark eyebrows.

I lowered my hand so that it would be out of camera range.

“How was the drive from Sault Ste. Marie today?”

“Beautiful, but nine hours long. I had to slow down and stop for road repair crews four times.”

“The joys of highway driving in a country that only has two seasons—winter and construction. They’re probably scrambling to get everything done before the ground freezes. Anything interesting happen?”

Not much. I thought you’d been shot and killed at one point, and Stuart may be appealing his convictions…but I didn’t actually say any of those things. “I saw a moose. And I did the zip-line at Hawk’s View Canyon.” He didn’t need to know about my sprint up to the top of the canyon, or about me almost being charged with breaking and entering.

“You’re hiking Sleeping Giant tomorrow, right?”

I nodded. “I am so looking forward to spending a day out of my car. I’m getting sick of sitting in it.”

“Isn’t it comfortable? I can buy you a new—”

“Stop there. I don’t want you to buy me a new car. This one’s barely a year old and I haven’t finished paying you back for it. Besides, it’s not the car I’m sick of, it’s sitting stationary for so many long stretches in a row.” A flash of brilliant light reflected off the boulder on my finger. “About this ring…”

“Yes?” He sounded too hopeful.

“Is this one of your diamonds? From the mine near here?”

“It’s one of ours, but it’s from Dad’s first Canadian mine up in the Northwest Territories. It’s actually the first diamond processed from that mine. Dad had a special ring made for Mum just for it. Why? Would you rather have one from the Winisk mine?”

“No! I was just curious about where it came from, that’s all. How’s your trip going?” I wanted to talk about anything other than the ring and what it stood for.

“Really well. We’re projecting over nine-hundred thousand carats out of the Winisk mine this year and one-point-five million out of the Wekweètì mine north of Yellowknife, and we’re starting to get excited about a possible new site so working out all the contracts over here is vital. It’s been going so well that I might be heading home in a day or two. Feel like some company on your drive across the Prairies?”

Not really. I preferred to go exploring on my own. “Maybe. Let me know when you’re heading back and we’ll see where I am by then. I’ve got a lot of stuff booked for side-trips and—”

“And you prefer to explore solo. Got it. I do miss you, though. How about I just fly in for an overnight visit?”

“Will you buy me dinner?”

“Food’s not what I’m hungry for, but okay if that’s what it’ll take to get you to say yes. You make the reservations, anywhere you want.”

“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of room service. Maybe a tray of strawberries, some freshly whipped cream, a little pot of warm melted chocolate…”

“I like the way you think, Ms Smith!”

“And I like what you’re capable of doing with nibbles, Mr Hughes.”

“I’m going to need a cold shower after this call. Just tell me when and where and I’ll be there with bells on my toes.”

“Bells, huh? That’s a new one.”

“Less messy than honey, too. Mrs Dawson’s probably still scrubbing to get it all out of the grout in my shower at home.”

That made me laugh. And tingle in a very sensual way, too, when I remembered our hour in the shower just before I left on my trip. “I do love you, Jack. You know that, right?”

He nodded. “I know. And you know I’ll wait as long as it takes for you to move that ring over to the other hand.”

The ring stayed on my right hand, but only until the big diamond scraped against the burn scars on my right leg and woke me up. Then it went back into the velvet box.

Chapter Three

I got up early to avoid the lines I’d been warned to expect at the Hoito restaurant. Thunder Bay was home to the largest Finnish population outside of Finland and the Hoito had been serving their famous pancakes from the bottom floor of the Finnish Labour Temple since 1918. Even though there were only three pancakes on my plate, they were huge and I could feel the waistband of my jeans grabbing me tighter as I swallowed the last bite. I didn’t mind, though. The pancakes were delicious and I knew I’d burn them off on my hike.

I visited the Terry Fox Monument before heading to the park. Standing there looking up at Terry frozen forever in bronze, with a panoramic view of Thunder Bay and the Sleeping Giant resting in the distance, put my trip in perspective. He’d only been twenty-two years old when he ran his Marathon of Hope. Like the inscription on the monument said, he ‘inspired an entire generation of Canadians.’ He’d run over 5,000 kilometres on one leg before his cancer stopped him just outside of Thunder Bay and he hadn’t complained once. I’d travelled the same journey in a luxury SUV. I had nothing to complain about and I wouldn’t complain again.

Lorne, the superintendent of Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, was waiting for me when I pulled into the parking lot. There were over 100 kilometres of hiking trails in the park, but I was only interested in one trail in particular—the longest one, the Top of the Giant trail. It was going to be an all day, 22-kilometre outdoor adventure and I could hardly wait. Lorne said it would take us about eight hours, but he hadn’t counted on my penchant for exploring everything and everywhere.

It was another beautiful fall day, the air clean and crisp. I needed my sweater when we started, but took it off and tied it around my waist long before reaching the flat top. I had to put it back on when we sat at the edge of the 240-metre sheer cliffs that offered a stunning 360-degree view of Thunder Bay, the Sibley peninsula and Lake Superior. From my pre-trip research I knew that Superior was, by surface area, the largest freshwater lake in the world. What surprised me was that the water was weirdly Caribbean blue. Looking out across it, the U.S. so far away on the other side that I couldn’t see it, it was easy to understand why the lake was often called an inland sea.

Lorne talked the whole time. While I appreciated all the information he was giving me about the trees in the forest, the plants on the ground, the many animal residents—black bears, bobcats, lynxes, moose, white-tailed deer, wolves, the list went on forever—I would have preferred to hear the wind rustling the marigold yellow leaves, the sound of my hiking boots squishing into thick emerald moss, the big waves crashing against the rocky shore. The only man-made noise we heard was the sound of a tractor mower that was doing the final fall trim before snow covered the numerous Nordic ski trails, but as we went higher, we left that sound behind.

It was a very different man-made sound that interrupted Lorne telling me about the Legend of Nanabijou while we sat on top of the giant. Apparently, there was excellent cell phone reception up there.

Auntie Em hadn’t simply suggested to Blaze that I’d help him, she’d downright promised him that I would. And hearing the desperation in his voice stirred up too many memories in me. He simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe that someone he loved could do something so horrible.

“Where is Webequie?” Maybe I could just pop up there for a day trip, talk to a few people and then get back on the road west? I wouldn’t be able to solve anything in that amount of time, but at least it would look like I was trying to keep Auntie Em’s promise to him.

“It’s about 600 kilometres north of Thunder Bay.”

Definitely not a one-day round trip. More time stuck in my car. Oh joy. Oops. I mentally kicked myself for letting that complaint slip out and wondered what shape the roads would be in. Road maintenance probably wasn’t a big concern that far away from…away from everywhere. “That would take what, about seven hours to drive?”

“You can’t drive. There aren’t any roads, except in the winter when the lakes freeze over. There’s an ice road then.”

If my empathy for Blaze wasn’t enough of a draw, the thought of being that far off the beaten path was. I’d never been to such a remote place in my own country. And wasn’t I known for finding the unusual? If I went up there, I could write about something that most Canadians didn’t even know about, something I only knew about because of Jack. Another government agency, Export Development Canada, would probably love to have me let the world know that Canada produced more diamonds than South Africa and was the third largest diamond producing country on the planet. “If I go, where would I stay? Is there a hotel?”

“There are a couple of rooms at the Northern, but I think they’re full right now. I talked to Sara and she said you could stay at her house.”

“Sara?”

“Sara Holly. She was my teacher in elementary school. She’s the Berkshire grad who recommended me for the bursary at Berkshire.”

The bursary that Jack had paid for, the Jack who Blaze didn’t want involved in this.

“She doesn’t believe Dodo did it either.”

“Who’s Dodo?”

“My grandfather.”

I watched a hawk swoop down and snatch up a little red squirrel. Life could be brutal sometimes, no matter your species.

“Please, Lee? He’ll die if he’s padlocked into a cage for the rest of his life. The land is his life. He needs to be free to live.”

He just had to use the word padlock.

“I’ll fly up tomorrow.”

Chapter Four

The Google Earth view on my computer screen hadn’t done justice to the vast boreal expanse of northern Ontario that was just 700 metres underneath me. Only once in all my travels had I flown over such a large and seemingly uninhabited area. But, as with my flight over the Kimberley in Western Australia, I knew there was life down there; gilled, winged, four-legged and two. I also knew that the human population below me was decreasing exponentially with each kilometre travelled north. Behind me were over 100,000 people in Thunder Bay; ahead of me were less than 1,000 people in Webequie.

Blaze hadn’t been exaggerating when he said there were no roads to Webequie. There weren’t any roads—period. Instead, the landscape was intricately laced with rivers that wound their way up to Hudson Bay and pockmarked by lakes too numerous to count. One grouping of five small lakes reminded me of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. They looked like fingernail scratches on the surface of the earth and must have been made when the glaciers scraped their way south during the Ice Age.

We’d left Thunder Bay with eight passengers inside the single-propeller Cessna Caravan and I began to understand that little planes like ours were the only form of public transit this far north. Two people got off and one person got on when we stopped in Sioux Lookout. Three people got off in some place called Eabametoong. That left just four passengers in the plane for the next leg of the two-hour trip. I was in the single seat under the wing. In one of the double seats across the aisle from me was a wizened old woman who had a brightly coloured scarf over her head that was tightly tied under her chin; her brown face was so chiselled with age that she almost looked as if her head had been shrunken. In the seat behind her sat the man who’d boarded in Sioux Lookout. He was equally old and brown, but less wrinkled. In front of me was a red-haired giant of a man wearing a bright red Roots hoodie sweatshirt.

The carrot-topped giant turned around to talk to me over his headrest. “First time going to Webequie?”

“Yes.”

“Teacher or visiting nurse?”

“Neither. I’m writing a series of travel articles for Tourism Canada.”

“And they want one about Webequie?” He sounded surprised.

I just nodded. Webequie wasn’t on the suggested list, but I’d never been very good at obeying suggestions and they had said I could throw in some unusual spots if I found any along the way. “What about you? Is this your first time going to Webequie?”

“Second time. I’ve been doing research over in Wunnumin. I’m coming to visit my cousin.”

I had no idea where Wunnumin was. “Your family lives in Webequie?” I highly doubted it. He was too tall, too red-haired, too just plain hairy, and way too white to be of First Nations descent.

“No, my cousin works in the area. She’s a prospector.”

“Is your research mining related?”

“Not even close! I’m an accredited Sasquatch researcher.”

I had to fight to stop myself from laughing out loud and suggesting that his professional qualifications were on par with claiming to be an accredited unicorn trainer. How, I wondered, did one get accredited in his field? As far as I knew no one had proven that Sasquatch or Bigfoot existed in North America. Or that his white-haired cousin, Yeti, existed in the Himalayas. The general consensus was that if something that big and hairy was walking around somebody, on either continent, would have found some solid proof. There was a reality show called Finding Bigfoot, but several seasons into the series they hadn’t actually found him, or her—they were still just looking. If Big Red dyed all his hair dark brown and let it grow out another centimetre or two he could just look in a mirror and save himself a lot of work. What could I possibly say in response to his occupation declaration? “Oh” was the only thing I could think of.

I may have managed to hold my laughter in, but the woman across the aisle from me didn’t. She laughed and shook her head in disbelief. “Amitigoshi,” she scoffed, but not in a language I understood.

The man in the seat behind her understood it, though. He laughed so hard that it made him cough.

“Are there a lot of Sasquatches around here?” Was that the plural of Sasquatch? Sasquatchi?

“There’ve been a couple of reported sightings, but nothing recently. I’m just coming to offer moral support. My cousin’s dealing with some stuff, having a hard time. I left all my scientific equipment back in Wunnumin.”

The plane started to descend and I looked back out the window. The forest had been thinning out more and more with each kilometre we travelled north and ahead in the distance the trees started to look like cocktail toothpicks sticking up from a never-ending tray. Polar Bear Provincial Park was up there, stretching to the shore of Hudson Bay.

We dropped closer to a long thin flat island in the Winisk River and I spotted a most definitely man-made short strip in the middle of it. South of the airstrip the island still looked nature-pure, but north of it was a collection of low buildings that were neatly lined up in straight rows along the shore on both sides of the island and along the two main roads that ran north/south. As we got closer the buildings reminded me of the plastic rectangular hotels placed on a Monopoly game board, but the Monopoly hotels were red and most of the houses on the island were dirty white, verging on grey.

The pilot did a wide circle as a big white helicopter lifted off from the island and immediately headed east. I almost banged my nose against the window when I did a double-take and leaned in closer to the window to get a better look at that helicopter. Even at a distance I recognized the stylised blue design on the it—Hughes Diamonds, with the ‘a’ in ‘Diamonds’ shaped like a big diamond.

What the hell? Had Jack decided to surprise me? He knew I wasn’t a big fan of surprises. I hated them, in fact. How did he know I was going to Webequie? I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t lied to him. I’d just dodged the issue by feigning exhaustion after my Sleeping Giant hike as an excuse to avoid our nightly FaceTime chat. He had an uncanny knack of being able to read my face too well. He thought I was heading to Lake of the Woods to go canoeing and take photographs of the 5000-year-old rock paintings near Sioux Narrows. I’d planned to justify not telling him about my unexpected trip to Webequie by explaining that Blaze had specifically asked me not to tell him. But that wasn’t the whole truth. My trips, my job, they were mine. Just mine. And I wanted to keep them that way, whether I married Jack or not. Just like his job was his business, not mine. Auntie Em must have blabbed to him. My anger at both her and Jack was slightly diluted by my own guilt. I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was the one who was heading dangerously close to crossing the line between our independent lives.

The Hughes helicopter shrunk to a little speck in the sky as we bumped down onto the dirt strip, passed a large collection of metal oil drums stacked near the runway and a parked private jet that was smaller than Jack’s, and jostled over to three small single-story metal-sided buildings that were more like overgrown sheds.

Big Red bolted out of his seat and bounded down the steps to the airstrip almost before the pilot had a chance to lower them all the way.

“You go ahead,” I said to the woman across from me. I wasn’t just being polite. I wanted to delay facing Jack for as long as I could.

She took me up on my offer.

The man sitting behind her stayed seated and waved me on to go. “This isn’t my stop. I’m going to Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug.”

Part of me wanted to go with him.

Right then. I couldn’t put it off any longer. I took more time than was really necessary putting on my new big puffy Canada Goose parka. It was so puffy that I hadn’t been able to jam it into my almost full backpack. I took a deep breath and stomped down the steps of the plane.

I looked around for Jack as I waited for the pilot to haul my backpack out of the back of the plane, but couldn’t see him anywhere. Maybe he was waiting for me outside the gate of the chain link fence that surrounded the airport? The only vehicle sitting on the other side of the open gate was a beat up old pick-up truck. There was someone sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck but when he got out and started walking toward our plane it was clear that he wasn’t Jack. Jack would never have been seen dead in a baseball cap. Not only was the man wearing a baseball cap, he had a long ponytail hanging down out of the opening in the back of it. Definitely not well-groomed Jack.

A baseball cap seemed to be the headgear of choice for just about every man I could see on the airfield. And almost everyone was wearing a hoodie sweatshirt, instead of a coat.

I was the only person wearing a parka and its shiny new whiteness made me feel very self-conscious. At least I was wearing jeans like almost everyone else, but my parka was so long on me that only the lower halves of my calves were visible.

Even though I knew I was in my home country I felt as if I’d entered a foreign land. I didn’t know the places or understand the people’s language and I didn’t look like them either. I was the antithesis of the heavy-set, dark-skinned, dark-haired Peacekeeper who looked through my backpack to make sure I hadn’t brought any alcohol to the reserve.

I was in a different nation in fact, an Ojibway nation—the Webequie First Nation, Indian Reserve #240. I was on a reserve. A First Nation reserve. That blew my mind.

I had to pass through the Wahta Mohawk First Nation whenever I drove from Toronto up to my home in Port Hamlin and I treasured the two little birch bark boxes that were embroidered with dyed porcupine quills that Da…Stuart had bought for me from the Wolf Den near the Shawanaga First Nation just north of Parry Sound, but Webequie was different. It wasn’t a ten-minute drive away from the closest Tim Hortons or McDonald’s. It was the real, isolated, deal.

Big Red heaved his equally oversized backpack up onto his shoulders and strode like a man on a mission toward the gates at the airport entrance. The elderly woman struggled to pull her wheeled suitcase across the bumpy dirt so I offered to pull it for her and was surprised by how heavy it was.

“Meegwetch,” she said. She’d used one of the Oji-Cree words I’d had Blaze teach me.

“You’re welcome.”

She seemed pleased by my understanding of her thanks. “You’re the one Blaze called?”

“Lee Smith.” I stopped walking beside her, let go of the handle of her suitcase, held my hand out to shake hers and used another word that Blaze had taught me. “Boozhoo.”

The creases on her face deepened to crevasses when she smiled. “Hello to you, too. I’m Elba.”

I let Elba lead the way toward the gates because I had no idea where to go. Presumably Blaze’s teacher friend would be at the school, but I didn’t know where the school was. And I didn’t know how I was going to get there. Not surprisingly, there weren’t any taxis waiting for arriving passengers at the Webequie airport.

The man from the pick-up truck walked straight to Elba and greeted her with a hug.

“Did I miss Marvin?” she asked him.

“Yeah, the Hughes crew just left.”

The Hughes crew…I should have thought of that. Jack probably hired lots of people from the reserve to work at his mine. That made much more sense than the thought of Jack jumping into his jet to spend the night flying across the Atlantic just to surprise me.

Elba and the man switched to speaking in Oji-Cree, using none of the few words that Blaze had taught me. The man’s long hair was jet black and the skin on his face was worn brown leather, with very few wrinkles. His faded jeans hugged his muscular thighs so tightly that I could almost see the curves of each one of his quads. I thought he and Elba would switch back to English and introduce me to him, but I thought wrong. All I got from him was a curt nod and a cursory glance.

He lifted Elba’s suitcase up and put it in the bed of the truck with no more effort than it would have taken him to pull a tissue out of the box. “Sara asked me to bring both of you to the school.”

He held his hand out to take my backpack, but I was already trying to make it look like I, too, was capable of lifting it over the truck’s tailgate without effort. It took a lot of effort to make it look easy.

“Where did you think you were going? The Arctic?” His look of disapproval as he stared at my parka made me feel even smaller than my actual size. “Good thing we don’t have any snow yet, nobody would be able to find you if you got lost.”

“The white ones were on sale,” I said as my backpack crashed down into the truck bed. What was this guy’s problem? Whatever it was, it was his problem—not mine. I stopped myself from explaining that the parka wouldn’t fit in my backpack. “I’m Lee.”

“I know.” He was already opening the creaky driver’s door.

He didn’t need words, in any language, to get his message across: I don’t want you here.

At that moment I didn’t want to be there either. I’d never felt so unwelcome so soon after arriving in a new place. What a jerk.

***

Elba sat in the middle of the front bench seat of the truck. I sat beside her and stared at the scenery. They talked to each other in only Oji-Cree. I understood that it was their native language and that they probably felt more comfortable using it instead of English, but it would have been nice if they’d tried to acknowledge my existence in the truck. I almost asked to be let out when we drove past Big Red walking at the side of the road. His sanity was questionable, but I understood him.