-c- 2008 Mcgraw-hill Ryerson Limited -

If anyone finds this, do not follow the compass. Bury it. Leave this place. There are things older than geographers here.

Elias had heard the story before. Every summer, August told it. But this time, his grandfather’s hands shook as he lit a cigarette. “Tivon was my teacher,” August said quietly. “He disappeared on the Kazan River in ’32. They never found his body. But last month, a biologist with Environment Canada found this.” He pulled a folded, water-stained page from his shirt pocket. The paper was brittle as dried skin. On it, in faint pencil, was a hand-drawn map of a river that didn’t match any known tributary of the Kazan.

That night, he didn’t sleep well. He dreamed of a man in a tweed jacket, walking ahead of him. The man never turned around. His footprints left no mark on the moss.

Ninety years. Tivon had been here for ninety years, trapped by a thing that wore the faces of the dead. -C- 2008 mcgraw-hill ryerson limited

He did not shoot the thing. He did not run. He walked forward, past the woman who was not his mother, past the threshold of the cabin, and out into the valley. He walked to the black river. He took the brass compass, wound his arm back, and threw it as far as he could into the dark water.

Behind him, the thing wearing his mother’s face screamed—not with a human voice, but with the sound of grinding rocks, the collapse of permafrost, the shriek of a billion mosquitoes dying in a flash of cold.

But that was a question for another summer. If anyone finds this, do not follow the compass

“It’s broken,” Elias said, trying to hand it back.

The cabin was one room. A cast-iron stove, cold. A bunk with a wool blanket rotted to threads. On a pine table, a journal lay open. The handwriting was small, precise, desperately tired.

The next morning, August died in his sleep. Elias found him with a smile on his face, one hand reaching toward the nightstand where the compass used to sit. There are things older than geographers here

And every year after, on the anniversary of that summer, Elias would walk to the tree and sit for a while. He never heard the loon again. But sometimes, just at dusk, he thought he felt a needle turning in his chest—pointing not north, not northeast, but simply home .

Grandfather August closed Elias’s fingers around the cold metal. “No. It’s just old. Like me.” He smiled, his teeth yellowed from fifty years of smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. “This compass belonged to a geographer named Tivon Arkell. In 1928, he walked from Moose Factory to the Arctic Circle with nothing but this, a pencil, and a single wool blanket.”

Delilah circled once, landed on a small lake that hadn’t been there before, and taxied to the shore. She looked at him for a long time.

At the bottom of the valley, beside the black river, stood a cabin. Not old—ancient. The logs had been hewn with an axe, not a saw. Moss grew thick on the roof. One window was broken. The door hung open.

Elias laughed. “That’s impossible.”