The sun: the last rays dressing in orange tones the rest of what the people living in Lake of the Woods, in 1950, called day.
But old man Pierre Lundgsvren could not stay to contemplate. His hands seized the paddle firmly and stroked rhythmically, dipping and pulling back. He did it on one side of the canoe for a minute and corrected the course steering with the blade of the paddle in the crystalline water. When he tired, he paddled on the other side, so the hand that had held the shaft was now grabbing the handle.
Lundgsvren had been doing this for more than half an hour. Every few minutes, always on regular intervals, he looked back and what he saw, or rather, what he did not see, propelled him to overcome any weariness. He paddled along the edge of the strait called Devil's gap and was immediately surrounded by a dense fog from which he emerged in a few seconds.
He looked back again but saw nothing. At least nothing he expected to see. He saw the fog vanishing, the small buoy that indicated, with its red light, the channel for the bigger boats, and the round rock with a funny devil face painted on it in red, white and black, a devil with a disturbing, perpetual smile, that seemed to enjoy the unskillfulness of the captains that hit the rocky walls of the islands with their boats. A devil face with long, twisted moustaches painted with care by Old Man Ray, an employee of the town hall who, as a young boy, had considered himself a virtuous painter and sculptor.
“Speed up, Pierre,” muttered old Lundgsvren to himself while he glanced at the package that occupied the center of the canoe.
Further on, in the incipient darkness coming the woods, he finally saw the island and got closer to it trying to cut the current that came from the south side of the lake. The maneuver would take a while but was the only thing he could do to save some time.
When he finally got to the beach, he looked in all directions but his eyes saw nothing strange. He could not trust his eyes as he usually did, though. He had crossed the fog..., and his instinct, always very fine-tuned and skilled, told him that far over the islands something was coming. It could be anything: a fisherman on a rented boat trying to catch some muskies, a teacher coming back from school to her cabin, a professional rower training at an unusual time... or it could be the thing... Anyway, it would not take long to find it out.
Gathering his weakening strength, old Lundgsvren dragged the canoe along the ground to the bush and hid it the best he could. Using some branches he pulled from a pine, he broomed over the sand he had stepped on. His footprints weren’t covered very well but the old man thought it was enough, mainly because the moonless night would be so dark that no one would be able to see anything.
But he was mistaken... these kind of errors were very common in people his age...
Five hours later, right at midnight, another man got to the beach, traced an found the footprints and the canoe and followed the old man steps on a path that opened through the dense and perennial vegetation of the island. Suddenly this man discovered new, strange footprints that crossed the old man's ones. They were not human, or at least they didn't look like anything human.
He stepped up the pace and saw the cabin. He waited for some minutes, observing, and then got closer to the porch. He hid next to one of the wooden columns of the porch and tried to listen what was happening inside.
Silence.
