Summer without campfire stories? No way! Here’s one of mine that we will
publish in three parts over the next three weeks.
Grey twilight fell across the far shore of Shkendang
Lake, obscuring bit by bit the brooding shoreline, the thick-waisted white
pines, and the old cabin standing alone on the rocky point. The cabin’s washed
out red tin roof, and the rough hewn log porch below it, were barely visible
now from the Garrison family cottage directly across the bay.
Shainie Garrison leaned forward and squinted fiercely.
Her slender 13-year-old fingers squeezed the chair armrests with a force that
threatened to snap them. Lights and shadows from the campfire danced in her
intense brown eyes while the faint band of freckles below them coloured with
excitement.
“There it is!” she cried, propelling herself from the
chair and pointing over the fire and across the lake. “It’s there again. The
light.”
Shainie’s father Paul dropped an armload of split
firewood and bent low to peer out over the water. Nothing. Nothing but a dark
far shore and more darkness spreading across the half-kilometre of water
separating them from Ghostly Point.
“Shainie,” her father sighed with exasperation. “We’ve
been through this before. There is nothing there.”
“But dad there was. There was! I saw it! A light was on.
Then it went out. Just like the other times.”
Paul Garrison stepped into the campfire circle and
placed his hands gently on his daughter’s slim shoulders, which trembled from
excitement. “Honey, no one has stayed at the cabin in decades. It’s probably
the last rays of the sun glinting off a window or the roof.”
Shainie looked into the gentleness of her father’s grey
eyes. Oh, how she wanted to believe him. But he was wrong. It wasn’t sunlight.
It was a campfire or lantern light. She
just knew it.
Her parents were becoming concerned at her insistence
that she had seen the light at Ghostly Point several times. It seemed to
possess her, drawing her to sit by the campfire every evening waiting for it to
reappear.
Marcella Garrison understood that her daughter was a
creative child with a vivid imagination, but worried that the phantom light story
was becoming more than a young girl’s fantasy. She wondered if tall tale story
swapping between Shainie and her grandfather, a renowned storyteller, had
anything to do with her daughter’s fantasizing.
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell her all those stories, Dad,”
Marcella told her father one morning. “She needs to stop with these stories
about a light at the cabin.”
“The girl has a wonderful imagination,” said Ira
Desilets, a tall sun-toughened outdoorsman who had built Shainie a small
cedar-strip canoe that she could take out by herself, on the strict
understanding that she wear her life jacket.
“And who knows. . . maybe the girl is seeing something.”
He had encountered some genuine mysteries in his many
years in bush country. Every tale of the woods, no matter how outrageous, was
based on some truth. Even the story of how the lake got its name.
Shkendang is ‘grieving’ in the Ojibwe language and the
Ojibwe who had lived in the area named it after a tragedy a century before.
Every spring before the Europeans arrived, the Ojibwe
came to the lake to catch the lake trout that were plentiful just after the ice
melted. They camped at
Ghostly Point and at night their campfires illuminated
the waters surrounding the rocky point. Their chants joined the wood smoke
drifting skyward to Gzhemnidoo, the great spirit, in respect and thanks for the
nourishment they took from Mother Earth.
Their Gimaa, or leader, had one daughter who he affectionately
called Moong, meaning Loon Who Brings Happiness. She was beautiful, happy, and
skilled in the woods as a hunter, fisher and gatherer of food, much like the
loons with whom they shared the lake.
Early
one morning Moong canoed out to fish alone. She planned to fill her canoe
bottom with trout to impress and please her father, ignoring the warning of an
old man who cautioned about dark skies building on the western horizon.
Next week: Part 2 - The tragedy
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