Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [55]
“Do you want to fish any more this morning?” I said to David, but he shook his head: “Let’s go take that rock painting.”
I burned the fish bones, the spines fragile as petals; the innards I planted in the forest. They were not seeds, in the spring no minnows would sprout up. Deer skeleton we found on the island, shreds of flesh on it still, he said the wolves had killed it in the winter because it was old, that was natural. If we dived for them and used our teeth to catch them, fighting on their own grounds, that would be fair, but hooks were substitutes and air wasn’t their place.
The two of them fiddled with the movie camera, adjusting and discussing it; then we could start.
According to the map the rock painting was in a bay near the Americans’ camp. They didn’t seem to be up yet, there was no smoke coming from their fireplace. I thought, maybe it worked and they’re dead.
I looked for a dip in the shore, a line that would fit the mapline. It was there, site of the x, unmistakable: cliff with sheer face, the kind they would have chosen to paint on, no other flat rock in sight. He had been here and long before him the original ones, the first explorers, leaving behind them their sign, word, but not its meaning. I leaned forward, scanning the cliff surface; we let the canoes drift in sideways till they scraped the stone.
“Where is it?” David said; and to Joe, “You’ll have to steady the canoe, there’s no way we can shoot from land.”
“It might be hard to see at first,” I said, “Faded. It ought to be right here somewhere.” But it wasn’t: no man with antlers, nothing like red paint or even a stain, the rock surface extended under my hand, coarsegrained, lunar, broken only by a pink-white vein of quartz that ran across it, a diagonal marking the slow tilt of the land; nothing human.
Either I hadn’t remembered the map properly or what he’d written on the map was wrong. I’d reasoned it out, unravelled the clues in his puzzle the way he taught us and they’d led nowhere. I felt as though he’d lied to me.
“Who told you about it?” David said, cross-examining.
“I just thought it was here,” I said. “Someone mentioned it. Maybe it was another lake.” For a moment I knew: of course, the lake had been flooded, it would be twenty feet under water. But that was the other lake, this one was part of a separate system, the watershed divided them. The map said he’d found them on the main lake too; according to the letter he’d been taking pictures of them. But when I’d searched the cabin there had been no camera. No drawings, no camera, I’d done it wrong, I would have to look again.
They were disappointed, they’d expected something picturesque or bizarre, something they could utilize. He hadn’t followed the rules, he’d cheated, I wanted to confront him, demand an explanation: You said it would be here.
We turned back. The Americans were up, they were still alive; they were setting out in their canoe, the front one had his fishing rod trailing over the bow. Joe and I were ahead, we approached them at right angles.
“Hi,” the front one said, to me, bleached grin. “Any luck?” That was their armour, bland ignorance, heads empty as weather balloons: with that they could defend themselves against anything. Straight power, they mainlined it; I imagined the surge of electricity, nerve juice, as they hit it, brought it down, flapping like a crippled plane. The innocents get slaughtered because they exist, I thought, there is nothing inside the happy killers to restrain them, no conscience or piety; for them the only things worthy of life were human, their own kind of human, framed in the proper clothes and gimmicks, laminated. It would have been different