I don’t believe in ghosts, but the campsite where we stood felt heavy with loss. I glanced between the trees, the branches swayed, and a breeze whispered across my cheek. I had come to this remote island by boat with Jerry Schmanda, who had been a member of a search party 28 years before. He stamped a steel-toe rubber boot into the dirt and dragged it. The pine needles parted to either side of his foot to expose the earth underneath. This was what he wanted to show me, a drag mark made by the impression of a body.
We were in a vast wilderness area north of Toronto called Algonquin Park. The browned needles of evergreens lay thick at that time of year. They crunched underfoot. It was early fall and soon the reds, oranges, and yellows would bloom into a riot of color.
Not yet, though. Before the leaves turn, mid-September, there were still hints of a softer season in the land. Sunlight dappled through the trees, water lapped at a thin strip of beach, and the scent of pine hung heavy in the air. Above us, a raven caught a plume and dipped a wing to slice through the sky.
Terror had ripped through this beautiful place.
Jerry put a hand to his chest and shivered. It happened in 1991, but at that moment, the memory came forward to join us. “You OK?” I asked.
“It’s kind of like the blood moves,” he said, describing the surge in his chest. He took a deep breath.
Jerry is fit, lithe, in his fifties, and spry, a body in constant motion. We had only met an hour before, but it felt like longer. He told me about the five winter months he had lived in a cabin in Algonquin Park with four dogs, without a furnace or running water, which he spent chopping firewood endlessly. I could think of nothing better. We had both spent a lot of time in the park. A friendship can be forged by a place.
By the time the search party found them, the couple had been missing for five days.
Algonquin Park is nearly 3,000 square miles, a forest with more than 2,400 lakes and rivers and streams running through it. The borders of the park ring an area the size of Cyprus or Puerto Rico, or about half of New Jersey.
We stood in the middle of the south arm of a large lake called Opeongo. Jerry had brought me here by boat to tell his part of the story. A couple from Toronto went on a camping trip for a long weekend. When they didn’t show up for work on Tuesday, their family and friends called the park office. By the time the search party found them, the couple had been missing for five days.
When Jerry pulled up at the campsite in 1991, it looked as if the couple had just arrived. There were paper bags of groceries left in the boat. The Coleman stove had been lit and gone cold. A tent was set up. There were two camping chairs by the ring of rocks that marked the fire, one chair knocked over, one still upright. A Styrofoam tray of ground beef sat by the fire. It was untouched except for a tiny prick in the plastic. “Like a raven had picked at it or something,” Jerry said.
The search party climbed out of the boats and spread out to do a hasty search, a quick look around for any sign of life. They talked quietly among themselves as they did. None of them knew what to make of what they saw. They speculated about things like suicide, double suicide, or murder-suicide—all guesses far more statistically likely than the reality. This was a crime scene of a different kind.
One of the searchers wondered aloud if the couple had been hurt. If either one or both had tried to make it back by land, they would have crossed the water via a short channel. From there, they might have had to climb a hill, but even if disoriented or lost, they would sooner or later run into a road. With hindsight, Jerry said, “It didn’t make sense — that would be a day or two.” They would have been found already.
Jerry showed me where he’d opened the flap of the tent. He remembered a thin inflatable camping mattress inside with a dusty paw print on it. He didn’t think much of it at the time. With food left around and no people at the site, animals were bound to come through. The sleeping bags were still wrapped up in plastic garbage bags. It looked as though the couple hadn’t even spent the night.
We walked up the slight slope toward the back of the campsite. The land climbs toward a ridge that runs the length of the island like a backbone. There the underbrush is thicker with balsams, small spruce, and shrubs. It provides cover. If I crouched down, it would be difficult for someone standing by the campfire to spot me.
Jerry pointed to where the bodies were found. “My dad was a butcher,” he said, explaining why he went to look at them. His fingers didn’t touch me, but he mimed the action of a slice on my shoulder. “The flesh peeled off the bone. You could see the shoulder. A fully intact hand.”
I had only told him part of my story. He didn’t know he was tracing a large scar still raw from the deep cut made ten months earlier. I had three other scars—one at the side of my ribs, another at the small of my back, and a short gash at the base of my neck. The wounds were healed but still sensitive to heat and cold and touch. I tried not to flinch.
When the men in the search party found the drag marks, they knew something had gone terribly wrong. Staying close, they walked level with each other in a line to follow the marks up the slope toward the back of the campsite.
Jerry and I retraced their steps.
At first, the trees were spread wide apart and it was easy to walk between them. Mixed in between the sturdy pines were a few birch trees with silvery bark that had been peeled back. The dirt was packed tight around the base of the trees. Their roots wove through the ground like veins under skin. A gentle breeze pushed the canopy back and forth in a sway like it was breathing.
The men had kept moving in the line toward the denser bush at the back of the campsite. An officer with the Ontario Provincial Police, Steve Swerjeski, heard a sound. He told everyone to stand still. They listened. Again they heard a huff, a kind of cough.
There was something on the island with them. It took cover in the brush. It was watching and knew they were approaching. The huff was a warning, they shouldn’t come any closer.
“So then”—Jerry pointed up to where the sound came from, his hand touching his chest again—”we said, bear.”
This is an excerpt from Claire Cameron’s book How to Survive a Bear Attack, a memoir in which she investigates a deadly bear attack in Algonquin Park while grappling with her own cancer diagnosis.
