Authors: Bernadette Calonego
Lori didn’t have to be told twice. She was happy to be done with this subject. How had it possibly come up again? What did German submarines have to do with her? She recalled that Volker, during his stay in Canada, always responded patiently when confronted with the issue of the Third Reich. Lori was the one who finally couldn’t take it anymore.
“You weren’t in the war, Volker, and you aren’t a Nazi, and you don’t give a damn about Hitler, and you’d never hurt a fly,” she’d said after one of those conversations. “Why do you have a guilty conscience about things you haven’t done and would never do? Aren’t you sick of it?”
Volker stared at her, half in amazement, half in irritation.
“It’s not a question, Lori, of whether I’m sick of it or not. I must take a position on it today because it happened in my country. I don’t feel like a victim or a perpetrator, but I do feel responsible for not letting it be forgotten so it won’t ever happen again.”
And then he reminded her that it took decades for the Canadian government to apologize for the churches’ compulsory residential schools where Indian children were abused, and for simply taking the children away from their parents—and the parents from their children.
Back then, Lori was still in denial about the fact that Volker was right to handle the subject in a mature way, unlike herself. When he pointed out that Canada took in a lot of Nazis after World War II but refused entry to many Jews, she wasn’t about to back down.
“So we’re back to believing in original sin, are we?” she retorted, whereupon Volker walked out of the room. It took her two days to be generous enough to apologize. At the time, she couldn’t admit to herself that the invisible rift between them had widened just a tiny bit more.
The roar of the rotors broke her train of thought. She put on her headset. Gideon’s voice came out of nowhere.
“Camera all set?”
Lori nodded. The helicopter wound its way up into the air. Her side of the helicopter had no door, just a net stretched across the opening. Lori watched the landscape below as it got smaller and broader at the same time. Countless inlets ate their way into the rocky coast. Where the land flattened out, gravel beaches arced their way around forested bays. From that height, Lori could see where generations of men had cut down trees for firewood, leaving sparse bushes clinging to the stony ground. Sloughs and small lakes glinted in the washed-out tundra like signal lights.
Lori wasn’t sure why, but she forgot everything around her at times like these. The landscape was enchanting, with its breathtaking beauty: black rocks, water, more and more water, the cliffs towering over the ocean, the brown underbrush interspersed with green, and then the shimmering bog of the tundra and the low banks of gnarled bush. She felt as if her soul had separated from her body, been liberated from all mundane things to hover above the earth. She had an all-encompassing feeling that she couldn’t pin down, but it was like . . . like a feeling of security. Of belonging. She felt curiously safe in this rough, inhospitable environment.
“Caribou!” Weston, sitting behind her, pointed them out.
Lori shook off her trance and started shooting. She eased out into the net, the yawning void beneath her. The camera was all that mattered right now.
A herd of perhaps ten caribou flew away over the plain. The helicopter made a loop, and the half-moon of a long beach appeared far below, giving way to stony terrain rampant with thick bushes like unkempt tufts of hair.
“Do you see it?” That was Weston.
She scanned the terrain.
“Where?” She’d scarcely asked the question when she saw what he meant. An anomalous form rising from the bedrock like a wart. A foreign body that didn’t fit in with the landscape. Gideon circled many times to give Lori the best camera angles. Then he landed on a flat spot several hundred yards away from the burial mound. The helicopter’s downdraft flattened the vegetation and created clouds of dust all around.
She stooped down as she quickly scurried away to a spot where she could photograph the two men removing the cargo.
Then the machine lifted off and disappeared over the horizon, the roar growing softer until it died out. Cool air came in off the ocean. Lori looked at the jumble of equipment and cartons on the ground.
“I thought the camp was over a mile away?”
“It is, but we couldn’t land there. We’ve got to lug this stuff over, the tools and everything we need for excavating. Not everything, actually, more’s coming.”
Weston picked up her tripod and also shouldered her backpack.
She tried to orient herself.
“I’ve got to look at the burial mound first. Where is it, anyway?”
“Over that way. You can’t see it from here because of that rise in the land. No wonder the mound wasn’t discovered for so long, even though a lot of boats must have landed here.”
They started off. Lori could feel the stony bedrock through the soles of her hiking boots.
“Who did you say discovered it?”
“Who it was, I don’t know. A hunter in a pub first told me about it seven years ago. He told me later that, if he hadn’t been drunk, he wouldn’t have spilled the beans. But other people must have discovered the mound before then; they just didn’t think anything of it.”
“Did people around here know about it?”
“I don’t think most of them did. It reminds me of the Viking settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows at the northern tip of Newfoundland. You know it, of course.”
“Yes. That’s where the first Vikings landed on the continent a thousand years ago, right?”
“Exactly. The Norwegian, husband-and-wife archaeology team of Helge and Anne-Stine Ingstad once asked some villagers if there were any striking rises or depressions near the coast”—he stopped to free his pant leg from a thorn bush—“and the locals showed them the remains of a nearby ancient settlement.”
“Did the people in L’Anse aux Meadows know that the settlement remains were Viking?”
“No, they thought Indians had lived there many centuries before.”
“So how did the archaeologists figure out that it was the Vikings?” Lori planted her feet carefully between stones and bushes as she spoke.
“They dug up a typical Viking brooch—the ultimate proof.”
One little brooch,
Lori thought to herself. Sometimes a very small thing is all it takes to clear up a mystery.
She suddenly noticed she still had her life jacket on. A tiny, blaring yellow dot in the vast tundra. Andrew would die laughing if he could see her. She stopped and looked down at herself with a grin. Weston turned around, and she handed him the camera.
“Here, take a historic picture. I most definitely am the first person to run around the Barrens in a life jacket.”
Weston grunted his amusement.
“I thought you were just crazy about bright colors.”
He took a few steps back and clicked the camera.
“Think you could find your way back to Stormy Cove from here?”
She shook her head.
“You?”
“More or less. But I’d probably fall into a bog on the way. It can happen to anyone. It happened to George H. W. Bush in Labrador.”
“The US president?”
“Yes. He was salmon fishing up in Labrador and wandered onto boggy ground and got stuck up to his hips. A secret service agent and a Mountie had to pull him out. The Americans came within an inch of losing a former president in a bog.”
“When was that?”
“I think it was after he’d lost the election to Bill Clinton. Sometime in the nineties.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Maybe I’d better leave the life jacket on.”
He smiled.
“As you like. That way I can’t lose you.”
He’d have to have eyes in the back of his head,
Lori thought, because Weston was walking three feet ahead of her, a sinewy, slim figure with a seemingly effortless stride, shouldering the tripod and backpack.
She’d loved to have known what he was thinking at that moment. The second “groundbreaking” excavation of his life. Maybe even more significant than the first. If a well-preserved skeleton and a heap of funeral objects were lying beneath the boulders, this dig would make him one of the best-known archaeologists in Canada.
Her curiosity got the best of her.
“Are Beth and Gideon good friends?”
He turned around.
“Beth and Gideon? Why?”
“I just thought—he put his arm around her.”
Weston laughed.
“Oh, she’s probably trying to keep his spirits up. Gideon’s very important to us. He keeps doing us favors when he doesn’t have to. But he likes to flirt—at least, when his sister isn’t around. She wouldn’t put up with that for a second.”
He raised his eyes to look across the vast tundra.
“It’s very ironic.”
An inquiring look on her part.
“It was an incredible fluke that we found the first grave . . . a pure fluke. We simply stumbled over it because our tents were nearby. We didn’t have a clue that anything like that was in the vicinity.” He shifted the tripod to his other shoulder. “Discovering
this
grave was also pure coincidence.”
He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe it.
Lori wrinkled her forehead.
“I thought your crew was living in Gideon’s lodge, not tents.”
“We did stay there later, during the dig. We had money from the government at that point.”
“And from oil companies?”
Weston didn’t lose his cool.
“No, universities.”
Lori looked back and tried to locate the spot where they had landed.
A thought kept echoing in her mind: finding the ancient Indian grave may have been pure chance, but it was no accident that Jacinta’s grave was found. The person who constructed that grave wanted it to be. It took a long time, of course, but the killer knew the new road between Stormy Cove and Cod Cove would go right through there. And the road workers would eventually find the grave. It was perfectly worked out.
They walked along in silence. Suddenly, Weston changed direction and made a detour that brought them back near the beach that meandered in broad curves around the tundra. He dropped the tripod and put down the backpack beside a depression in the ground.
“Here we are.”
Lori could tell he was watching for her reaction.
She walked across the indentation and lowered her camera.
About seventy feet in front of her was a rather long bank rising out of the ground. She could clearly pick out large boulders, though moss and lichens filled up the gaps. She stood stock-still. Transported. It wasn’t the exterior of the burial mound itself that thrilled her; it was the thought that people had erected this monument seven thousand years ago, and that she, Lori, on this very day in the t
hird millennium AD, could still behold it.
Like in a dream, she approached a spot where rich green moss and white lichen contrasted with the dark background of the low, scrubby fir trees. And another color caught her eye, the red of rusty sand that circled the rocks. A reddish color that reminded her of the T
artan surface of tennis courts in Vancouver.
She recalled what she’d learned about the first gravesite. That perhaps fifteen people—men and women from several families—had used moose antlers or their bare hands to dig a pit in the ground so deep that they couldn’t see over the top, and wide enough for twenty standing people. Then they laid the child’s body in it—a ten- or twelve-year-old—on its stomach, made a fire at its feet and beside its head. They laid gifts on the dead child’s head and next to its body. And then they did something that particularly baffled the archaeologists: the gravediggers laid a stone slab on the corpse’s back. As if its spirit must not escape from the grave under any circumstances.
Finally, they filled the grave up to the top with sand and carried large rocks to it—three hundred of them, each up to twenty-five pounds in weight—and piled them up to form a mound. Like the one before her now.
These people had no idea how long the burial mound would endure, or how long the world would. They might have known a few other clans along the coast, known the animals that would save them from starvation—caribou, sea lions, seals, fish, and a few birds. Their universe was a small section of the shore and the hinterland, with its bears and game. But something motivated them to bury a child, to perform a ritual, to imbue the child’s death with a meaning in their world that would allow their life to go on.
Lori looked down to the beach and over the ocean to the cliffs on the horizon. It must have looked exactly like this back then; what she was now seeing was exactly what the people at that time saw when their brief subarctic summer began. Everything was about survival. Surviving hunger, forest fires, the icy winter, bears, and the dark forces whose messages their shamans conveyed.
Lori’s gaze fell on Weston, who still stood where he’d dropped her equipment.
He hasn’t breathed a word,
she thought.
Because he knows the effect these places have.
Their eyes met, and he slowly came toward her. He waited for her to say something.
“And you’re certain there’s a skeleton in that mound?”
“Pretty sure. We found two empty graves in Quebec, but that’s because acid soil had dissolved the bones. That’s not the case here.”
“So graves like these are rare?”
“Seems so or else we’d have found more of them. I think these people couldn’t have managed to build many graves like these.”
“Why?”
“Because they’d probably have to work on one for almost a week. That’s a precious amount of time in a short summer. Within a few weeks, they had to hunt enough animals to make it through the whole winter. There was no time to waste.”
“And still they went to the trouble to do it.”
She shook red sand off her shoes. Love’s labor’s lost—she saw that immediately. Sand was stuck fast to the spots where she hadn’t been able to scrub off the slime from yesterday’s fish. It sort of resembled German measles.
Weston seemed to be deep in thought. Was he thinking about the archaeological treasures under the ground? What if he only found shards or colored dust? He cleared his throat.