The Plains of Abraham

Chapter 2

We rose at dawn, broke camp, and set out in the emerging light. Although the current was against us, the water was calm. No wind meant no breakers. For an interminable week we'd been fighting the wind, the breakers, and the rocks.

Always the rocks. To compensate for their frustrating immobility and inevitable erosion they blocked the channels and delighted in pulverizing birchbark. Sometimes the rapids were so populated with boulders we had to walk waist-deep in the river, dragging the canoe behind us, like pulling a sled up a hill.

Our bruised and warped canoe was already ailing when we stole it, but we hadn't been aware of that in the darkness, in our rush to grab and flee. Each new encounter with a rock further battered the hull. Often we stopped to patch a hole with a piece of bark and some spruce gum. A mumbled prayer, the sign of the cross, and we were on our way again.

The Laurent River was wide as a musket shot at its widest points. Small headlands, dense with intrepid hardwoods and giant ferns, jutted into the swiftly moving water. Beyond, where the terrain rose and loomed indulgently over the valley, the hills undulated in mottled greens and browns.

Malcolm took the stern. In a canoe it's the captain's position, where course decisions are made. We knelt rather than sat, to spare our backs some stress. While paddling we only spoke when necessary and usually in single words or short phrases. The only other noises came from paddles chopping water and the honk of mallards overhead as they made their way south.

Malcolm kept grumbling about our late season start. He frowned at maple leaves riotously celebrating the fall and dug his paddle more aggressively into the water. As the day progressed his breathing devolved into soft rhythmic grunts.

It was necessary to pace ourselves. Although the faster we went, the sooner we would reach the fabled kingdom of Ellanoy, the sooner we would also encounter mutants.

They were descended from people exposed to the radiation. Some walked on hooved feet, according to legend. Others had only one eye, centered on their faces, or were headless altogether, with sense organs mounted on their chests. One tribe was ruled by a dog king; its members spoke in a barking dialect. And somewhere out there were people whose legs were reversed at the knee, allowing them to run backwards at high speed. All these and more we learned about in school and sketched uneasily in our notebooks.

The scariest creature inhabiting the interior wasn't humanoid at all. It was the Griffin, with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Griffins swooped down and snatched victims up in their beaks, chewing on them even as they returned to their roosts. Some breathed fire.

Malcolm didn't buy any of that. It had been twelve generations since the war, he said. The radiation should have dissipated by now. The myths had been planted in school books, he argued, to frighten would-be explorers and dissuade emigrants.

He pointed at the sky. "See the ducks? They're proof the environment is healthy again. Also the rabbits," he added.

"Stupid rabbits," I corrected him.

My indoctrination had been too comprehensive for me to dismiss mutants and Griffins so readily. Nevertheless the evidence was in Malcolm's favor. We'd paddled past the ancient ruins of Mount Royal and Saint Maurice and encountered nothing but charred skylines and enterprising weeds, storied cities reduced to soot and unearthly silence. If mutants inhabited the rubble we'd probably have encountered them by now.

The canoe leaked, apparently unable to decide whether it wanted to ride above or below the surface. We needed to build a new one and we would have to do so from scratch. It would require stopping for an extended period, which inspired Malcolm to push even harder.