Wake The Stone Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

one?”
    â€œWhat one?”
    â€œThe train in your dream. The train that brought you here.”
    â€œI dunno. Maybe.”
    ***
    Every day at the lake that summer was perfect. In the morning after breakfast we would put on our bathing suits and head down to the dock. We swam and rowed around in the little rowboat called the Little Tink that my dad built for my mom. Some days we walked down the train tracks to East Loon to get candy from Hans Hogan’s store, and on the walk back we’d pick pails of wild strawberries that Mom made into jam. We swam until we had elephant skin and fished off the dock using worms we found under the rocks.
    One day Dad and I were splitting wood and Nakina asked if she could help. Dad showed her how to set the piece of wood she was going to split on the chopping block and stand with her feet apart. He showed her how to set the blade of the axe where she was going to make her cut and to check for knots, which could be hard to split. He showed her how to raise the axe slowly over her head, sliding one hand further along the handle and bringing it down in one fast smooth move onto the centre of the wood. She messed up a bit at first but once she got the hang of it she was pretty good.
    Before supper Mom and Dad came down to the lake for a swim, and while they sat on the dock drying off we listened to them talk. Mom said when she was a kid they’d sit on the dock and listen to music from Captain Nobel’s camp. He was famous. Invented some kind of gas mask I think and he had this grand piano at his camp. Don’t know how it got there — maybe they took it over on a boat. Mom said sometimes his buddy Robert Flaherty visited him. Flaherty was the very first documentary filmmaker. He went up to the Arctic and shot the film Nanook of the North . Flaherty played violin and Captain Nobel played piano, and all the folks on the lake would sit on their docks under the moonlight listening to their music.
    Sometimes after supper Dad built a bonfire, and we roasted marshmallows and watched fireflies flit like Christmas lights in the trees. If it was raining we stayed inside and Dad would put a good fire in the fireplace. Mom and Dad and Nakina played board games or cribbage, and I sat by the fire and read. I’d brought a pile of art books with me from the library. It was the best summer. Until the end.
    It was our last day at camp and Nakina and I had been rowing along the shoreline in the Little Tink. We’d rowed across to East Loon because I wanted to show Nakina where Sheila Burnford lived.
    â€œLook, there she is on her dock.”
    â€œSo who is she?” Nakina asked.
    â€œA writer. Did you ever read The Incredible Journey ?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI’ll lend you my copy. It’s about two dogs and a cat that get separated from their owners and they cross the country to find their way home.”
    â€œAnd that’s her?”
    â€œYeah.” I rowed a bit closer to the dock and we could see an older woman sitting in a chair on the dock reading.
    â€œThey made a movie of it,” I said.
    â€œOf what?”
    â€œ The Incredible Journey. It was a movie.”
    Nakina was dragging her hand in the water making patterns as I rowed. I put down the oars and waved to Mrs. Burnford. She waved back.
    I rowed to the far end of the lake, past the girls’ camp, and then along the West Loon shore. I loved the squeaking sound the oars made in the oarlocks when I raised the paddles. We were passing a neighbour’s dock and Nakina and I were talking about what we were going to do when we got back to town. She stopped talking in the middle of a sentence and when I looked up I saw she had that spacey look she got just before a seizure.
    â€œNakina?”
    She didn’t answer, so I turned the boat around and started rowing towards the closest dock, but it was too late. First she went stiff, then she started thrashing around, and before I could