My original and initial plan was to find a survivor of the rampage at Camp Blood, but this is better in that it’s previous to that. And it’s even got old timey details that I could never in a hundred tries make up. Let me give you a perfect example.
Evidently when mining collapsed from all the producing mines in the new town of Proofrock getting swamped by Indian Lake having risen and risen, people started having to boat across the new lake to hunt elk if they didn’t want to starve. No seasons, no limits other than how many bullets you had and how smart the elk were. But the problem that came up really fast was getting those big heavy elk back across the lake to town. You can search online that they weigh anywhere from 500
to 730 pounds.
The solution to all that heaviness was to use rawhide string or a belt to tie the elk’s mouth shut, and also plug up their aft end, as Mr. Krabs might say and I don’t want to think about, and then using your mouth to blow as much air as you could into the elk’s nose holes and plug them up with mud before the air can whistle back out.
What you’ve done now is turn this big dead animal into a flotation device, sir.
So one day Christine Gillette’s friend’s dad Mr. Bill got an elk, and only shot it in the head instead of the side so there wouldn’t be another hole to plug with mud.
And there he is floating that kill back to town like a champion hunter when that elk thrashes awake in the water and blows its two nose plugs of mud up onto Mr. Bill’s boat like dog droppings fresh from the dog, and you can tell we’re in the interview now, since this is Paraphrase and Distillation instead of Transcription, just like the example you gave us.
What had happened, Christine Gillette says because she wants me to get an A for this project and therefore save my semester grade in one fell swoop, was Mr.
Bill had evidently shot that elk only in the BASE of its horn, not the skull, so the elk was only knocked out. And Mr. Bill hadn’t dressed it out by cutting its stomach open because then all its air would leak out too.
So now this awake and severely unhappy elk was tied to his actual boat, which has to be a panic situation. What Mr. Bill had to do in order not to sink down to Drown Town, which was still Henderson-Golding to him, was shoot that elk between the eyes and then cut the rope, at which point that elk sunk and sunk.
End of story? Not even close, sir.
That was too much good meat to just kiss goodbye in starvation times, see. So Mr. Bill came back with an iron hook from the hardware store and paddled back and forth all night until he hooked onto what he was sure was that elk. Either that or a submarined log. But he didn’t think it was going to be a log. Because it was too heavy to lift with arms and shoulders, he brought in this local dude Cross Bull Joe, who drove the model A version of a tow truck. This means he had a cable and winch on his truck. And what he did was back that truck all the way down the old pier, as Christine Gillette called it, the outsides of his rear tires hanging over the actual edges on both sides.
What I asked her here as I’m sure you can guess was “OLD pier?” As in, there was another before the one that’s there NOW? How do we not all know this? What ELSE do we not know, sir? This is why history class is a requirement. If I wasn’t for sure graduating, I could take it again and again, until I knew about ALL the old piers.
But, Christine Gillette. Or, Cross Bull Joe, really. His winch strained and pulled and I imagine that, like Quint in Jaws, he had to pour water on that winding-up cable. What he finally pulled up made all the women scream, all the children fall to their knees, and all the men take a long step back like whoah.
It was an Indian girl, sir.
Which, I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Holmes. You’re thinking that it’s sad but people drown in lakes every day, probably more back then before life jackets and safety signs, and that Indian Lake is cold enough that they don’t even decompose, just bob around in Ezekiel’s Cold Box, waiting for the day somebody with a tow truck hooks them, pulls them up into the light. I know this is what you’re thinking because it’s also what I was thinking.
But we’re both wrong, sir.
The way Christine Gillette told it to me, the way they knew this wasn’t some random Shoshone or Bannock in a stolen and rotting water logged dress was what happened 10 seconds later. But let’s time these explosions if we can. The first for me sitting there in room 522 of Pleasant Valley Assisted Living was what you’re probably asking now, which is “Stacey Graves was INDIAN?”
If you’re rocked and shocked, it’s because this is not exactly common knowledge and it’s also not part of the accepted lore about our Lake Witch. But evidently Stacey Graves had been half Indian, meaning that since her dad was all white, her mom must have been full blooded. Which everybody used to know and I guess we still would if we talked to the right old people. Christine Gillette told me that the boogeyman of Indian Lake used to not even be Stacey Graves in the first place, OR Ezekiel with his big hands. It used to be Stacey Graves’s MOM, always walking around the shore line looking for her lost daughter, and taking any kids after dark back to her cave where she would hold them to her, in Christine Gillette’s picture painty words, “leathery dugs” and make them drink her milk, which pretty much did the opposite of real mother’s milk, so the lesson there was to not go out after dark, kids, get it?