August 1930, Fort Reliance.

Hello and Happy New Year, everyone. I am running out of days in the month. In the first weeks of December I was at work writing Revision Four of the Company Operations Manual, for our little mom and pop flying business, and my Christmas gift from Transport Canada was a stamp of approval.

I have also been at work, by fits and starts, on a historical novel.

And hey, you might enjoy an excerpt from the draft of the novel even more than an excerpt from the revised and approved Ops Manual.

It is a mild moonlit night as I get ready to post this, and what follows is a bit of foreshadowing, linked to the macabre events of another mild and moonlit night, 140 miles east of here on the upper Thelon, in early December, 1930. Linked to the piece I posted here back in May, “The Discovery.”

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to get this manuscript done and find a home for it. But then again, that was a resolution last year, come to think of it. 

(“The Procrastinators Anonymous meeting has been cancelled and re-scheduled for a week from Tuesday…”)

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August, 1930. Fort Reliance

On a morning in late July, the week after the first three motor scows had pulled into Police Bay at Reliance, Blacky Lanner was lying alongside the wharf wrapped in a tattered wool blanket, his shirt and shoes off and his trousers still on.

Emil Bode, Howard Price and Jack Stark had taken on a paid stint as stevedores offloading and stowing boxes and kegs off the scows, and lightering supplies by skiff over to the police cabin. Stark passed Lanner with a big wheelbarrow, the steel wheel clattering on the stones. Lanner rolled over in his blanket and opened his eyes. Stark swerved the wheelbarrow toward his head and Lanner let out a low growl. Stark laughed.

You nutty bastard, it’s nearly noon.

Lanner said, Ya, but it’s summer, and today there’s no mo-skeet-toes, and I’m yus’ gonna keep on sleepin’.

Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead, said Stark.  So I’m told. 

Stark met Emil coming the other way up the path, jockeying the other wheelbarrow with a big wooden crate in it. Bode stopped and straightened up.

Nice day, he said.  No blackflies yet.

Stark said, Are you partnering up with that lump on the beach down there, I mean for winter?

Emil put his index finger up across his lips and shook his head.  Stark raised his eyebrows and nodded. Walked on.

That same evening they were cooking supper. Stark and Emil and Price, around a fireplace alongside the deck of the trader’s cabin. Lanner had rowed out in one of the skiffs to visit his net.

Stark said, so you aren’t going with Blacky?

Emil said no, Gene Olson and me are gonna partner up. Go to the Thelon below Jim Lake. I know a good place.

And Lanner?

Lanner can just go it alone.

I don’t know if he can, to tell the truth.

Well he can find somebody else then.

Well, Stark said, he won’t.  He told me he knew you would come around. And I don’t think anybody else will touch him with a ten-foot pole.

Well I won’t. Come around. Or touch him with a pole, no matter how long.

Stark chuckled.  You told him yet?

He knows.

And?

He got his back up and said he did all the work anyway and he doesn’t need me and that I can rot in hell and maybe he can help put me there some night.

Stark shook his head then. Emil, he said, you watch out.

Bode said, Oh, we’re gonna go way out, bring two years of stuff, and after two winters out that way we’re gonna yus’ keep goin’ east, and go out by way of Baker.  And after that I t’ink I might be done in this country. And Gene thinks he might be done too.  Done like dinner.

Let’s eat.

…

… One afternoon a week or so later, Stark came across to the shack on the point in the middle of Police Bay. Half a dozen trappers were sitting in the sun, and Lanner was sound asleep again, on the gravel by the fire pit. 

I was over at the police just now. That cop Williams has a newspaper from Edmonton, from July, with a story about Jack Hornby.

Olson grunted. Another one?

Stark chuckled. No, same one. The dead one. The good lord broke the mold after him.

They’re still writing about him?

Mattsen said, Oh if you do something crazy enough the papers will write about it for years. No one wants to read stories about people ‘yus gettin’ along, happy folks ‘yus workin’, raisin’ kids, goin’ to church. You know. They want people starvin’, killin’ each other, cops chasin’ ‘em. Rum-runner gangsters. Valentine’s Day massacres. That sort of thing.

Stark nodded. I never met Hornby face to face. Only heard about him. I was over in the mountains. You figure he was crazy?

Oh he was every bit as crazy as they come, Olson said. ‘Specially that last year or two.

Or three, Emil said. He was crazy as a loon. But you know what? Sittin’ here right now I can name a half dozen fellows yus’ as crazy as Hornby. Without even tryin’. Most of ‘em harmless. Hornby was crazy and harmless. I’m harmless myself, and some days I do think I have to be crazy. Yus’ to do this. Sometimes I t’ink ever’one of us out here is crazy. By January, or maybe by December. Almost have to be. Dark, cold, no women or children, nobody around. Yus’ killin’ and skinnin’ fur all day, every day. Goin’ to bed and wakin’ up and killin’ and skinnin’ again. You ever live in a six foot by nine foot tent for a week with the carcasses of three doped wolves you brought in to skin, all hung up around the stove, hangin’ right from the ridgepole to the floor, and you’re waitin’ for the damned things to thaw? Crawling around underneath dose stinkers, wolf hair and wolf slobber and wolf blood ‘yus everywhere you look, and it’s forty below an’ darker dan de inside of a cow outside? And there’s two of you in dere and one of ‘em is Blacky Lanner? My God almighty, Jack Stark, a man can’t be anything but crazy after a winter of that. And every one of us has done it, or something close. Some for year after year. Not to mention any names. He smiled at Stark.

Stark grinned. And who’s the nuttiest nut in the nuthouse, then — just in your half-nutty view on it?

Emil turned toward where Lanner was sprawled on the gravel, looked back at Stark and Gene and the others, looked at Lanner and gave his head a little tilt. He said, well it sure wasn’t Jack Hornby, rest his crazy ass.

His very bony and crazy ass, said Gene.

Stark nodded again but he had stopped smiling. He shook his head and started fussing with his pipe.

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It was the third of August when Arab Pete’s scow, the last one of the season, the one everyone had been waiting for, pulled in and tied up over at the police post, and the mail bag came out. A final round of letters got read, and some were answered. A day of purchasing and provisioning: tobacco and flour; boxes of bullets; vials of strychnine; sacks of green coffee beans and boxes of tea leaves; Debits in Pete Baker’s ledger book, against fur come spring, and some payments in cash.

Early the next day, on the morning he and Gene were to start up Pike’s to Artillery Lake and the Barrens, Bode passed right by Lanner’s camp on the point south of the police post. Blacky was lying alongside his tent, still in his boots, his hair full of woodchips and sand, a hungover grimace on his face even as he slept.  Emil stood for a minute, wanting to say something, some sort of a warning or a threat, but there was nothing he could think of to say. He walked on.

His uncle liked to say, “Sovende hund skal man ej vække.” Let sleeping dogs lie, they said in Canada. Emil would not see Lanner again until early December, and then it would be only a glimpse, at a distance. But the glimpse, the realization that it was Lanner, would turn his insides to jelly.

Excerpt from the RCMP Commissioner’s Report, 1932: