“There it is at last!” Alec Ross said aloud as his canoe rounded a rocky point.
He could see the four wind-bent pine trees on his tiny half-acre island of Georgian Bay granite.
It had been eight years since Alec had last been on Portal Island. His father had bought it nearly a century ago as a retreat, or as he imagined it, a portal to where he could sketch and paint landscapes of his beloved islands of the Bay. After he died, Alec and his small family took it over in the same spirit, soaking up the natural lore of the islands and channels along the east shore of Georgian Bay. Necessity had taken him and his wife Mary away for those eight years but his adult son Harry had continued the family tradition.
Now Alec was returning to his retreat with Mary’s ashes to place them beneath the soft moss at the foot of a pine, as he had done with his parents. He landed the canoe on the east side of the island, protected from the prevailing winds of the open Bay. After unloading his gear and supplies for his stay, he hauled the canoe up the sloping rock and turned it over. Harry had built a sturdy tent platform beneath the pines, with a lockable steel box at one end to store camping equipment. Alec soon had a tent up, gas stove working and food stored in the box. After a quick supper, he slid a folding camp chair from under the platform, poured himself a whisky and water, and settled down to watch the sun set beyond the outer rocks to the west.
The next evening the wind dropped, there were few clouds in the sky, and it appeared to be an ideal time to carry out his plan for Mary’s ashes. First, he chose the place –under the moss growing among the twisted roots of the largest pine tree. He removed the moss to expose the bare rock. Then he set up the chair to face the open water where the sun would soon set. From the storage box he removed an old Walkman cassette player, put new batteries in it, plugged in headphones, and tested it, surprised at the quality of the sound from an old cassette that had been left in it years ago. Alec replaced it with a new one he had purposely recorded of the Adagio from Mozart’s clarinet concerto, a piece whose beautiful melancholy but melodic aire would match his mood, and maybe please Mary’s spirit, should she be listening.
The ritual went according to plan. Alec replaced the moss, turned on Mozart, sat back in his chair, and raised his glass to Mary as he watched the twilight replace a memorable Georgian Bay sunset.
Gradually over the next few days, Alec explored the nooks and crannies he had known since childhood on the island and its adjacent neighbours. On the lee side of the largest one he discovered two large stone fireplaces, reminding him that a similar one was hidden among some juniper bushes on Portal. After returning, he cut back the shrubs to reveal, not merely a simple camp firepit, but a much larger arrangement of rocks intended for some serious long-term cooking.
Like the firepits on the larger island, there were no burn marks on the inner surfaces of the stones, so obviously it had been many years, maybe even centuries, since any of them had been used. He also observed that they had been built on solid granite to prevent the fires from spreading. Were they built and regularly used by indigenous people — Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwa, and Wendat (Huron) — who had fished among these islands for centuries before Europeans arrived early in the 1600s?
Twilight among the islands where Alec disappeared.
