The train dropped him at Portage Bay with a
satchel, a broken leg, and a letter stamped with
the Dominion’s seal: exile for embezzling funds
meant for the Grand Trunk’s northern spurs. No
trial. No appeal. The stationmaster wouldn’t
meet his eyes. He walked the halfkilometre to
the shore, boots crunching on frostlaced gravel,
past the shuttered general store and the
hollowedout hockey rink—its boards rotting, its
goalposts rusted into the earth like forgotten
crosses.
He was a fisherman now. Not by choice. The town
didn’t trust men who wore suits. He slept in a
shed behind the net loft, ate salt cod boiled in
a kettle, and hauled seine nets through black
water where the lake refused to freeze solid
even in January. The locals called it the Breath
of the North—something old, something wrong. No
one fished past the breakwater. No one skated
after dusk. But the boys still came, in patched
sweaters and mismatched skates, to scrape the
ice clean each morning, as if the rink
remembered its purpose.
On the third week of February, the ice cracked
open overnight. Not from thaw. From pressure. A
deep, groaning split ran from the centre to the
east goal, wide enough to drop a man through.
The town gathered at dawn, mittens in hand,
breath steaming like ghosts. They didn’t call
the police. Didn’t call the priest. They brought
shovels and lanterns and silence.
He was the first to climb down.
The ice held him—thick as a church bell, cold as
a widow’s kiss. Below, tangled in broken sticks
and frayed laces, lay three bodies. Not old. Not
from the flood of ’98. One wore a sweater with a
faded Maple Leaf patch. Another had a hockey
stick still gripped in stiff fingers, carved
with the initials W.M. The third, a child, held
a puck in both hands, its surface etched with a
single word: Mikwam.
The town knew. No one spoke. The RCMP came three
days later. Left after one look. The mayor
burned the letter from Ottawa that night. The
rule wasn’t written: no one digs where the ice
remembers. But he had. And now the rink would
never be filled again.
He stayed. Not to atone. Not to confess. He
carved new skates from ash and moosehide. Each
dawn, he alone stepped onto the cracked ice,
pushed the snow aside, and skated in slow
circles—left to right, right to left—until his
breath fogged the sky and the wind forgot his
name. The boys came to watch. No one asked why.
The ice, they said, had chosen him.
He never left. The town never buried the bones.
The rink stayed open, silent and broken, its ice
never freezing whole again. And every winter,
when the wind blew just right, you could hear it—
the scrape of a stick, the gasp of a child, and
the slow, steady pulse of someone still skating,
alone, in the dark.
