“It was found in a wall when they were doing renovations,” said Amelia. “What can you tell us about it?”
The girl looked surprised. “Nothing, except what I’ve already said. I’ve seen maps sorta like this, in history books on orienteering, but never actually seen one in person. It’s sorta cool, isn’t it?”
Amelia wondered if she knew what “cool” meant.
The girl kept looking over her shoulder at the long line of customers waiting for coffee and doughnuts. And at her frantic supervisor, who was shooting her vile looks.
I’m on break, she mouthed to her boss, then turned her back on the pimply young man, her eyes drawn to the map again. There was something compelling about it. Perhaps the simplicity. Perhaps the unbridled joy. Perhaps the cow.
“Any idea who would’ve made this?” Huifen asked.
“Nope. None. This was made by hand. No surprise. There weren’t many people doing orienteering back then.”
As opposed to here now, thought Amelia, and asked, “What is orienteering, anyway?”
Like Huifen, she’d looked it up online, but this girl was the head of the local club, which consisted of her, her brother and two cousins, and might be able to tell them something not found on Wikipedia.
“It’s like a scavenger hunt,” the girl said. “But instead of written clues and puzzles to solve, we have a compass and a map. Certain spots are marked and we have to get to them as fast as we can. We call them controls.”
“So it’s a race?” asked Huifen.
“Yes. What makes it fun is that the fastest way between the controls isn’t always the shortest. We have to figure out the best route. And then we run.”
Amelia wondered if she knew what “fun” meant.
“You must be in good shape,” said Huifen.
“We are. We’re running flat out, and not always on roads or even paths. It’s cross-country. Through fields and forests and up and down hills and over rivers. It’s crazy. You get pumped.”
She seemed to have a good grasp on “crazy,” thought Amelia.
“What happens when you get to a, did you call it a control?” asked Huifen.
“There’s a little flag and a stamp to show we’ve been there. And then we run to the next one. I don’t know why it isn’t more popular.”
Amelia had an idea. There was, though, a virtual game of orienteering that was apparently gaining popularity.
“Do you know anything about the history of orienteering in the area?” Huifen asked. “Who started it? Who first did it?”
“Not really,” she shook her head. “It started before the First World War, I know that, and had something to do with military training. The guys like hearing about that. They pretend they’re on a battlefield. But I don’t know anything about how it started locally. It sorta dies out, then comes back.”
She looked down at the map, wistfully.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Whoever did this must’ve loved orienteering. But you know, it’s also sorta strange. I mean, there’re landmarks from different seasons. And what’s with the pyramid?”
She pointed to the upper-right quadrant of the map.
Amelia looked at it again herself. Of all the strange things about the map, that was the weirdest. The rest could be explained, but that could not.
“Is it an orienteering symbol?” she asked.
The girl shook her head. “Not that I know of. What’s there? Anything?”
Huifen brought up a map of the area on her iPhone. They crowded around as she made it larger, then smaller.
There was, not surprisingly, no pyramid. In fact, there was no nothing. Just forest.
“Maybe it’s a tent,” said Amelia.
“Or a hill. A mountain,” said the girl, getting into the spirit.
But Huifen shook her head as she examined her iPhone. “Non. Ahh, well, maybe it’s an in-joke, like the snowman and the cow.”
“Must be,” said Amelia.
She took a sip from the thick white mug. A Tim Hortons double double. It tasted not at all like coffee, but it did taste of treats from childhood. Sweet and rich. She looked across the table and could almost see her dad sitting there. He’d brought her to Timmy’s, as he called it, after her figure skating class. He all gruff and she in her pink sequined costume. Sitting primly.
He’d give her one sip of his double double. Don’t tell your mother, he’d say.
She hadn’t. Never did. It was a secret she kept even now.
The girl had nothing else to offer and her break was up. She went back behind the counter and Amelia watched her running from customer to coffee machine to doughnut counter.
Huifen pointed to her mouth and Amelia quickly picked up a thin napkin and wiped away some strawberry jam and icing sugar.
They sat in the sun streaming through the window and looked at the parking lot of the Tim Hortons in Cowansville. Sun bounced and magnified off the ice and snow and the puddles where it had melted. Outside, the world was brilliant silver and gold and diamonds, and inside the doughnut joint it smelled of yeast and sugar and coffee and tasted of an as yet unmarred childhood.
“What now?” Amelia asked.
“Professor Charpentier said this was made by someone who knew how to do maps,” said Huifen.
“A cartographer,” said Amelia. “I wonder who was mapping the area back then. Around 1900.”
“I guess someone must’ve been,” said Huifen.
The two young women looked at each other.
Maps were just something they took for granted, never thinking someone had had to actually walk the land and survey every hill and river.
“Is there a government office of cartography?” Huifen asked, picking up her iPhone once again, as did Amelia. It was her generation’s compass, how they navigated through life.
They silently clicked away, in an unofficial race for the answer.
“There’s the Geological Survey,” said Amelia. “They do maps.”
“That’s federal,” said Huifen. “Go further.”
Amelia did and looked up a minute later. “The Commission de toponymie du Québec?”
Huifen nodded. “I think that should be our next stop. There’s a government building here in Cowansville.”
“But it says here the toponymie department only started in the 1970s.”
“Read further.”
Amelia did. “Oh.”
“Oh,” said Huifen. “Let’s go.”
They folded up the map and left, waving to the young woman behind the counter, who was gracefully and rapidly moving from station to station.
Huifen drove while Amelia punched the coordinates of the government office into the GPS, asking it to choose the quickest route.
Their research, albeit superficial, had uncovered that while the Commission de toponymie had only existed since 1977, it had been the job of successive government employees to map Québec towns, villages, mountains, lakes and rivers and to give them their official names since 1912.
*
“You wanna know who owned a building in the early 1900s?” asked the town clerk in Saint-Rémy.
The two young men nodded.
“Why?”
Nathaniel could see Jacques bristling at the question and jumped in.
“A school project,” he said. “History of the area. They’re public record, aren’t they?”
The clerk admitted they were. “But good luck finding the information.”
“Why?”
“Our property records go back two hundred years or more,” he said. “But they’re not all on computer.”
“Then where are they?” asked Nathaniel.
“On cards. In the basement.”
“Of course they are,” said Jacques.
The clerk opened the wooden door and turned on the light. A single dirty bulb hung by a suspiciously old cord from the ceiling, lighting the stairs down.
“Keep your coats on,” he advised.
“It’s cold?” asked Nathaniel.
“Among other things. You might want gloves too.” He made a face and all but crossed himself as the two young men descended the wooden steps.
They stood on the dirt floor, wiping real or imagined cobwebs from their faces. Rows of gunmetal gray filing cabinets lined the cinder-block walls, containing the records of ownership. Somewhere in there was a card telling them who’d owned the bistro when it had been a private home.
And that would tell them who’d made the map, and sealed it in the wall.
“Shit,” said Jacques, surveying the banks of records.