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The Call

Cormorant Bay
August 16, 2001

If you were to look down at it from some height of land, you’d see how much this small mining town resembles a drop of ink on blotter paper, spreading raggedly in all directions without design. On the eastern fringe of town a slow black river runs north for three hundred
miles, linking up with other waterways until it eventually spills into James Bay at the old trading post the Hudson’s Bay Company once called Moose Fort. Traders coming and going from there would portage across the place where the town now sits, a strip of land between the Black River and the Frederickhouse. These traders, and the Cree before them, used to tell stories about an evil presence that lived right here but very few of these tales managed to make it past the rational filters of our modern age.

There’s a two room cabin along the bank of the Black River that was built in 1914 by a Cree man  ho called himself Charlie Cormorant. In the 1950s a teenage boy used to visit and, when he did, Charlie would build a fire and roast a pickerel skewered on an alder twig. The two would sit on a rock by the firepit, eat pieces of fish and pass back and forth a bottle of sweet wine. Then Charlie Cormorant would tell the boy a story.

It’s August 15th, 2001, and now that boy is as old as Charlie once was. His uncut grey hair falls to his shoulders and, although he is not Cree, his skin is creased and coppery from years in the summer and winter sun. At noon, when he hears the great Rostov bell ring the Angelus, he climbs into his fourteen foot aluminium boat, rows three miles upriver and fishes without apparent thought while the current carries him back downstream. When he returns he brings the fish up to his shack and guts them, and each time the steel slips into a silvery belly he can feel the blade of time penetrate him. When he’s done he makes a birch fire, and while it burns hot he goes inside and watches how the westering sun balances on the tips of the black spruce. When it slips below, he remarks how the room seems to be darkening in response to his thoughts of the dead child. Now in the midst of a past that will not remain in the past, he hears the nearby report of a pistol coming from the sandy bank just upriver, and knows not only who has fired this shot but that she has meant for him to hear. It is time now, so he rises from his chair and heads to the door.