The Land God Gave to Cain Read Online Free PDF

Labrador. She hadn’t mentioned the message my father had picked up. She wasn’t worried that the lives of those two men might be at stake. It was Labrador itself that was on her mind, which struck me as odd. And then I began thinking about my father again, wishing I had known him better. If I had known him better, I might have understood what it was about Labrador that had so fascinated him.
    And then I got out the log books and looked through them again. It wasn’t difficult to see why the authorities and the “experts” had decided to disregard the message. The books were such a mess. And yet, running through them, was this thread of the Labrador expedition.
    My training as an engineer had taught me to break every problem down to its essentials, and before I knew what I was doing, I had got out pencil and paper and was jotting down every reference in the log books that could conceivably have a bearing on Briffe’s expedition. Disentangled from all the jottings and drawings and scraps of other messages, the thread became stronger and more lucid. It told a definite story, though it was necessary to read between the lines to get at it, for it soon became clear to me that my father seldom took down anything verbatim; a single line of comment or a brief note to give him the gist of the transmission was all he bothered about. This was not surprising since the forming of legible characters had always been a labour to him. Indeed, there were several jottings that it was quite impossible for me to decipher.
    In all I found I had isolated seventy-three references. Twelve of these were unintelligible and seven I finally discarded as having no bearing on the subject. From the remaining fifty-four I was able, with the help of a little guesswork, to build up some sort of a picture of what had happened. Briffe had presumably started out on his survey sometime around end-July for the first reference to a location occurred on August 10. The note simply said A2—where’s that? Three days later there was a reference to— Minipi River area: and on August 15 my father had noted: Moved to A3 . Then followed B1, B2 and B3. Clearly these were code names for the areas under survey and as A1 would have been the first, my father must have been picking up Ledder’s reports almost from the start. There was no indication of the purpose of Briffe’s expedition—whether he was prospecting for gold or uranium or just a base metal like iron ore. He might simply be making a general survey, but this seemed unlikely since he was working for a mining company and was coding his areas and reports. The fact that the location code was dropped in later reports suggested negative results. This happened, not only in the case of A2, but in several other cases as well. Thus A3 later became Mouni Rapids and B2 near old H.B. Post . Against the reference to Mouni Rapids my father had written— Winokapau! The right direction .
    By September 9, the expedition had reached Area C1. This was later referred to as Disappointment , and later still it became obvious that it was the name of a lake. These scraps of information were all apparently gleaned from the same source—VO6AZ. And always at the same time—2200 hours. An entry for August 3 appeared to be the first reference to the expedition. It simply said: Interesting—some sort of code . The next day’s entry read. 2200. VO6AZ again. Survey report? And he had scrawled in pencil: EMPLOYED BY THE McGOVERN MINING AND EXPLORATION COMPANY OF MONTREAL?
    And on the top of the next page, again in pencil: KEEP WATCH 20 METRE BAND 10 PM . Later in August was an entry 2200—VO6AZ. Code again! Why can’t he report in clear? And a note on the following page: BRIFFE, BRIFFE, BRIFFE. WHO IS BRIFFE? 75 METRE PHONE. NET FREQUENCY 3.780 kcs. WATCH 2000 . But this was so fantastically scrawled over that I had difficulty in deciphering it. Two pages further on I found