There was one road through the forest. You could follow it on the map, a single blue line threading its way north with no crossroads and only an occasional tiny town which, when you reached it, turned out to be a gas station, a general store, and a few Indian houses. Otherwise there was nothing to see almost the entire length of the province, nothing but trees. On either side of the road they rose up in unbroken walls of green. From time to time a logging truck heading south would roar by, loaded with gigantic logs 8, 10, 12 feet thick, but you never saw where these logs were coming from, never saw one space where the trees were not.
As he expected, when he tried the door to the office it was locked. “There’s no one here,” he called back to the car, and his wife replied, “Well, look around.”
“She went to town,” the boy said. The man glanced over his shoulder. The town was less than three city blocks long and had no side streets. It was hemmed in on every side by a solid wall of trees.
The boy shook his head.
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By the looks of things all the cottages were unoccupied if not actually abandoned. But when the boy took him into a unit at the end of the court, the man was surprised to find a clean linoleum-floored room with a working sink, refrigerator, and electric grill. There was a wooden rocking chair, a sunken-in easy chair, and, the man noted with satisfaction, a double bed.
They were unpacked and Mary was in the shower when the lady returned from town and knocked on their door. She was a little white woman of over 60 with freshly curled hair; she had been in the beauty parlor. John followed her into her office and signed the register. “They have a beauty parlor here?” he asked, somewhat amused.
The next morning John spoke to the lady and arranged a price for the remainder of the week. “Is there any place around here where a man could go fishing?” he asked. The lady shook her head. She knew nothing about fishing. Maybe George did.
