North Shore Journal: Brigade in the Fog

No sooner had the men imagined their coming feast at the sight of the flashing silver below them along the bottom, than a thin long mustache of fog had formed around the outcropping of the rushing gully of a creek at shore.  At their near manic pace of some 40-60 strokes per minute, they had outrun one brief storm only to find themselves entering a warm pocket slipping down the emerald mountains and piling up at shoreline which shortly disappeared.  "Whoa," the gouvernail whaled out loud.  They had great momentum, a plan that all agreed upon, to locate the gull island, all the while trailing a fishing line to snatch what they knew was a fleeting school of salmon.  All of the milieux (middle oarsman) lifted paddles unwillingly, unfazed by encroaching danger.  These men would oar through ten foot waves if they must – would leave it up to the avant, a more experienced Voyageur of these northern waters.

Yet all knew the true dangers of forcing a Montreal Brigade over waters at dawn hours.  Water already reached all but six inches from the top of the birchbark.  Hundreds of pounds of furs, all wrapped and sealed, would not take kindly to overexposure at this stage to water.  The mens' stomachs growled.  There had been no 'pipe' in hours.  What had been before them a great animated picture of shore and offshore islands, the horizon line in gray tones to the south and virtually every ironed out wave, had turned to a senseless panorama of monotonous fog.  As they drifted, the avant and gouvernail deliberated whether to degrade (rest at shore) or push forward.  The brigade held steady together, the men holding the sides of one another as the canoes tipped side to side in rolling waves, making a large raft.  "Hush, now," said the avant, a short, pesky man, but with a voice like a launching cannon, who no man crossed in argument of the ways of the wilderness or the natives that inhabited it.  They were alive this far, all the way from Montreal, through all sorts of weather and calamity, no reason to beg for change now.  "Listen for the shriek of the gulls."  A faint, mellow smell of wildflowers filled the air.  A sharp stick of lightning stabbed in through the gray sheets.  "We are near land.  Rocks dead ahead."  The men wondered what it was that he could see that they could not.  Sometimes predictions might lead to traveling in the precise opposite direction than what they intended. As if out of nowhere, enormous jagged stones moved in among them.  The oarsmen knocked themselves loose with the end of the their paddles, then pushing off.  Waves lapped up over smaller rocks and churned spray up over the bow.  "Degrade, Degrade," the avant called out.