Chapter 52: The Canadian Shield

The Canadian Shield stretches over half that country and even includes a little of the United States in the Adirondack Mountain range and upper Michigan Peninsula. It sweeps east and west across half of Canada and extends far north into the arctic region and Greenland. It consists of a thin layer of topsoil overlaying ancient bedrock, mainly granite from the Archean Eon. You don’t have to know how old that is; it is as old as it sounds and forms the veritable bedrock of the North American Continent.

From a Goose’s perspective, the Shield is easy to spot. After flying north over Lake Ontario the undulating fertile fields give way to a vast terrain of thousands of small lakes pockmarked with hundreds of thousands of rock outcroppings and boulders. At its southern fringe lies the Canadian Cottage District that stretches up to one day’s drive north from every urban center in Ontario and Quebec. Here Canadians spend the summer in mostly blissful weekend retreat, boating, swimming, barbecuing and swatting.

Each area has a name for these cottage’s screened-in porches. In the fancy Lake of Bays enclave in Central Ontario, for example, they’re “Muskoka Rooms.” In Northern New York, they’re “Adirondack Rooms.” No matter how grand the name, the function of these oases is far more pedestrian: to protect people from the hordes of Black Flies and Mosquitoes that plague this beautiful land.

When people have to go outside in Black Fly season — stretching, appropriately enough, from Mother’s Day to Father’s Day — they don net suits which, while they may be purchased on the internet, have nothing to do with that at all. A hat with a cascading net tops the suit and flows over a double layer jump suit so the Black Flies or “small house flies with alligator jaws,” as some people call them, can’t reach the skin. The suits also come in handy at other times in the summer when Mosquitoes, “No-see-ums” or the more swattable Moose Flies enjoy their hunting seasons on humans.

During Black Fly time, the Canadian Shield resembles a sci-fi movie set where hazmat-clad actors try to cope with the aftereffects of a nuclear attack or virulent new virus, but this is no fantasy. Pity the poor creature caught outside unprotected. Domestic and wild animals have died due to anaphylactic shock or acute anemia from the loss of so much blood.

Captain Don was having trouble preparing himself for his encounter with the Lord of the Black Flies. If just a fraction of the Fox News non-fiction about the Lord of the Flies were true — which was probably the case given those fractious folks’ penchant for fabricating facts — the Captain would be dealing with one diabolical dude indeed.

The Captain had spent most of the winter trying to pin down this elusive figure. He had read all the available literature, which wasn’t much besides that Fox News special on the World’s Most Horrible Pests, and studied the famous grainy photograph, the only one known to exist, of the dark lord in his pre-Fly form, dancing at that ball in Prague. The problem was that most Black Flies overwintered in the egg stage and were thus unreachable until they hatched.

There was a brief one-week period in early spring when it was possible to approach the Flies before they lapsed into their bite-often, suck-anything, marauding frame of mind. According to Fox, they could flip from benign to lethal at any time, one moment composed Houseflies, the next buzzing, swarming Wasps. According to the network, only Fox’s squadron of experts could tell what stage they were in at any given moment.

The Captain was to jet into Toronto, pick up his rental car and head north to Algonquin Provincial Park, in the heart of the Canadian Shield and the reputed home of His Lordship. After that, it was anybody’s guess. There were more than 7000 square kilometers of wilderness to search, an impossible task without some assistance. He hoped to enlist the aid of one of the many backcountry guides who called it home.

Easier said than done, Captain Don knew all too well. “Many Canadians, experts and visitors alike, had certainly seen Black Flies, not many had ever seen the Venerable Lord. Some would dispute that such a figure even existed,” he said.

“These non-believers,” the Captain explained, “are the humanists and evolutionists, mostly non-Fox-TV-News watchers who aren’t privy to information from that organization, who insist that random buzzing, alone, can account for the hordes of Flies who descend on every living being caught outside.

“There are others, however, who see more method in the seeming madness of Black Fly season. They hypothesize a supreme leader who works out the major details, sets strategies, schedules deployments and then leaves it to his many minions to carry out individual biting attacks,” the Captain explained.

“Believers in a supreme Fly leader are the type of people who would bundle their families off to Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, Florida, where they can have oodles of creationist, Darwin-free, Bible fun without any Black Flies to worry about,” the Captain said.

“I usually agree with the non-theistic, evolutionary side of things, but have to demur in this case. I have it on good authority that a Lord of the Black Flies not only exists but is approachable, albeit only for a few days, at the very start of the Black Fly season.

Captain Don was headed north to find out.