In my last Rez Notes (Vol. 17, No. 16), I mentioned there were some people who were stranded for the last 50 years, surveyors left in the middle of nowhere to map out the great white north. Some of these surveyors did not return to civilization to report what they had seen and never to be heard from again. One such surveyor had a near miss with death, from tuberculosis, if he had dared to stay in the lands of no return.
While bedridden in a sanatorium, the surveyor confessed he had done things that he wouldn’t normally do under different circumstances. He told tales of survival, stories of complete and utter hardship and of almost not being able to walk out before succumbing to mosquitoes and TB. He spoke of surviving by stealing fish from nets set by the Crees and how their bosses advised them to have no contact with anyone, thus the need to sneak around without being caught or found out. At that time, the Cold War was in full swing and many paranoid people were afraid of the Russian spy, so technically, industrial covert operations were underway.
Centuries ago, we had to contend with a more deadly opponent, who use to kill, rape, plunder and generally obliterate everything in their path. No, it wasn’t the blond-haired Vikings, but the small kingdom of Portugal that caused so much pain and woe for our people back then. Portugal was actually one of the main contenders for world domination and often duked it out with the other world powers – France, England and Spain. The Portuguese eventually became a scary bedtime story and the name became bastardized with our local Cree dialect and became the now famous Bodgegie (or boogeyman for lack of a better translation).
Today, these superpowers are still battling it out on the soccer field rather than the open seas. FIFA’s World Cup, the event watched around the globe by billions of soccer fans and maniacs, is today’s claim for power. Today, the name Portuguese can be heard often, hopefully, because I bought a FIFA cap to announce my team to the world, the now famous Bodgegie team. Go Bodgegese, go! If anyone wonders why, I say that, now you know.
Back to the scary story, the frightening part is that some people think that the Bodgegie is a real person. Someone or some people are still out there, living a daily life of survival, living indirectly off the spoils of the Cree trapper. I hope that one day those poor souls will find peace, and hopefully that someone will be able to tell them that they can have contact with the real world again and to come back to civilization.
