that will lead him to sleep. But he is exhausted still on this morning, his feet are like stone weights in the bottom of lobster pots.
He has learned to read the ice, knows that he can trust even small pans if they have the right texture, the right look about them. He thinks he knows this frozen landscape, but he is wrong. He makes a leap onto a small ice pan, feels it tilt and give. He is amazed as he realizes that his brain had already given him the signal that it was a wrong step. Old instincts working but a split second too slowly, failing him. A steady stance in a dory is not the same as walking on springtime ice. He drops the pick, feels himself sliding, as if he has fallen onto a big kitchen table face first and its wooden legs give. He tries to grab onto something and then realizes the small ice island is upending itself and coming fully over on him.
Cold knives of water fill up his boots and his oilskins and the hard ice comes down above him, shutting out the light and the sky. His hands form into fists and he pounds at it, then tries to push it away, but it has suddenly become a cunning, cruel thing of immense weight.
Sylvie feels the bursting pain in the throat of her husband as he tries to scream, tries to claw his way along the underside of the ice to find the sweet, living air to feed his lungs. She feels the panic, the fear, things completely new and alien to her calm, cerebral husband. Then suffers the immense sadness and regret that comes with his final exhaustion and the knowledge of his foolish error.
Sylvie draws a deep breath and tests her own breathing. With eyes still closed, she can see the surviving seals upon the ice with the morning sun warming their fur. She hears other men shouting in the enthusiasm of their bloody work but she does not turn in that direction. She is looking to the east, towards the rising sun, blooming warm red and yellow over the panorama of the ice field. She makes what peace she can with David’s belief that we live or die by chance alone. And envisions what is left of her husband, floating up in the stream between two stolid ice islands, his back to the sky, rubber boots keeping the feet afloat, his face down, as if something is of extraordinary interest on the bottom of the ocean.
Chapter Seven
Todd Sanger, twelve years old, from Upper Montclair, New Jersey, peered over the side of the steaming ferry boat. “Diatoms,” he said to his little sister,Angeline.“I bet there’s millions and millions of diatoms in there.” Todd was a smart kid who loved science; anything that had to do with science was very dear to him. His father had nicknamed him Beaver after an old TV show, but the kids at Upper Montclair Elementary had shifted it to Beavis.
“Do they all have names?” Angeline asked.
“There are quite a few different subspecies, and yes, they all have names. Scientific names in Latin.”
“Wow.”
“Some of them glow at night.”
“I’d like to meet them.”
Todd just gave her that big-brother look. Girls, what did they know?
Actually Angeline knew a lot. She knew they were going to a magic island where fairy-tale people lived in gingerbread houses. She knew they were going to see whales. Whales and fishermen, and now they were sailing over a bay of diatoms, several million of them with Latin names and a lot of them friends with her brother. This is what Angeline knew and she perceived she was in a happily-ever-after story because that’s the way that all her mother’s stories ended for her.
It was a day like no other she had ever experienced. Sun, sea, gulls like gravity-free dancers in the sky. Angeline’s mother and father by the railing, arms about each other. Angeline had only been on one other ferry before in her life— the Staten Island Ferry, where people spit over the side and ground cigarettes into the floor. Everyone on the Staten Island Ferry coughed and so did she when she traversed the dark waters of New York.
No one was coughing on the ferry to Ragged Island. There were maybe twelve other people on board, and they all looked interesting to her for she knew they must be island people, all torn from the pages of a story book.
“God, smell that fresh air,” Angeline’s father, Bruce, said. The air wasn’t really fresh at all but permeated with diesel exhaust from the big engine turning the propeller that churned the harbour waters beneath them.
“Do you think there’s much poverty on the island?” Bruce Sanger’s wife, Elise, asked him.
“I don’t think they have poverty here in Canada, at least not in the same way as in the States. People in rural areas might be poor but they tend to be self-sufficient.”
Elise gave him that dubious look wives give their husbands when husbands pretend to know things that they really don’t. Elise was very concerned with social issues and volunteered her time to various organizations to stop child labour in Pakistan, to end cruelty to lab animals in Switzerland, and to alleviate educational deficiencies in the inner city in places like Newark and Paterson, New Jersey.“We’ll see,” she said. She knew that if there was any genuine poverty to be found on Ragged Island, she would sniff it out and rub Bruce’s nose in it. It wasn’t that she was cruel. She just liked being right.
“This is going to be extremely educational for the kids,” Bruce said.“I think it was worth the long drive.”
“I wanted to tell the manager of that motel in Maine that the moose head on the wall wasn’t appreciated.”
“It was kind of spooky. But I’m sure it was just an artifact of days gone by.”
“Still. It wasn’t appreciated. Killing animals for sport — that’s not a matter to be taken lightly.”
“I agree.” Bruce hadn’t told Elise yet about every aspect of this curious eco-tour that the Chicago Internet tour agency had lined up for them. She knew about the whales and the island but not about Phonse Doucette’s junkyard. Bruce should not have been attracted to anything involving guns but something about this caught his fancy. He was hoping there would be something else on the island — after the whale boat tour — to attract Elise and the kids and keep them occupied. Poverty might work after all. If there was poverty, Elise would detect it and go to work studying it and he’d have some time to himself. Todd could go with him, maybe, while Angie tagged along with her mom for a look at island poverty. Bruce hoped he was wrong about poverty in Canada, after all. If there was a big junkyard, there must be poor people nearby, Bruce reasoned, but he knew he was far out of his familiar territory.
Familiar territory to Bruce Sanger was his office at Small, Smith and McCall Investments. He had an important job as a stock analyst and advisor for a currently fashionable mutual fund called the Earth First Fund. It was an “ethical” fund, at least as far as anything could be ethical in the investment patch. Right before the trip, he pumped ten million dollars into an environmentally friendly ceramic roofing tile plant in Chile that was reported to be labour friendly. He’d also brought about a big push of the fund’s money into a geothermal power source in California and a super blue-green algae health food product company in Oregon. He wondered if there was something in a place like Nova Scotia that the ethical investing world had ignored. Something that did not diminish the ozone layer or rile Greenpeace and yet returned an 8 percent dividend each year. He wondered.
The island grew upon the horizon ever so slowly as they steamed on. “We must be travelling at thirty knots,” Todd announced to his sister.
“What do you mean?” In her mind, a knot involved a piece of rope.“How do you know?”
“I just do. It’s a nautical term. Nobody ever says ‘miles per hour’ at sea. You’re always travelling at so many knots.”
“And we have thirty of them, right?”
“Right. I bet the water’s over twelve fathoms deep here.”
“It is?”
“Could be deeper. You could tell if you had sonar.”
“Who is that?”
“It’s not a who, it’s an it. Tells distance from an object, underwater.