In November night comes early on the coast of Newfoundland, and in Proctor’s Cove it was cold and quiet.
Sarah’s footsteps crunched loudly over the frosty path. She hated walking home alone. Her once bustling community had begun to slow down; People were moving away. By day it was lonely but at night, the stillness seemed almost scary. The warm lamp-lit windows were getting fewer and farther between.
The whole place felt as though it were fading — dying before her very eyes.
Sarah shivered. She wished she had a lamp with her now, something to throw some light on the path ahead. Though really, she told herself, the moon was bright enough and, once her eyes adjusted, it would be practically light as day.
Still, she felt uneasy.
A Familiar Sight
She rounded a turn and the road opened up to the broad expanse of frozen marsh. Suddenly ahead of her she caught sight of something was moving. Her heart quickened.
What was it? A person? An animal? In the shadows of the dense spruce it was hard to make out.
Sarah looked into the night. It was definitely a person, she decided.
Suddenly, she recognized the silhouette. It was Jake. He was well ahead of her and moving quickly farther away. There was no mistaking him, his familiar stride. He seemed to almost glide across the frozen ground.
There was no one she would rather have seen.
In the last few months she had grown quite fond of Jake. They had seen quite a lot of each other. She hoped, he might ask her to marry him.
He was, she figured, quite a catch — strong, handsome and fun-loving. More importantly he was a good, trustworthy worker with decent prospects. At the firm, his boss usually chose him to bring supplies and carry messages to and from the settlement — if his boss thought him dependable enough for such an important job… well, that had to bode well.
“Hello, Jake,” she called. “Wait for a body, won’t you?”
Jake continued on at his brisk pace. She noticed a gun slung over his shoulder, it seemed to glint in the moonlight.
“Jake,” she called again. Still he gave no sign that he heard her.
She quickened her pace, trying to close the distance between them. Her breath came in clouds as she ran. Then Jake veered from the path, out into the frozen bog, and seemed to vanish.
She peered across the moonlit expanse. It was a clear night but she couldn’t find him. There was nothing but a breath of mist, lingering above the frozen ground. It didn’t make any sense — there were no trees, no goldwithy, nothing. A house-cat couldn’t have found a place to hide on that bog, let alone a man.
She felt her heart in her throat. She had to get out of there. She re-doubled her efforts, faster and faster she moved down the trail until she found herself at Jake’s house, pushing against the door.
She burst in and found him. He was sitting in the warm kitchen, working on a pair of boots. She sat at the table, across from him, watching him work.
He had been there all evening, he assured her as he tugged on the needle. He hadn’t been out on the road at all. She believed him… and yet, she was sure she had just watched him walk it.
Seeing she was upset, he set the boot aside and made her a cup of tea. They chatted pleasantly and Sarah felt her anxiety ebb away.
When they finished, he walked her back to her house, left her at the gate and sighed. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ he thought, ‘if my home were her home.”
The thought made him smile.
As Sarah got ready for bed, her thoughts turned back to the bog, and what she had seen. She couldn’t shake the image of Jake walking away from her, his gun glinting in the moonlight.
It felt like a nightmare.
By morning she’d convinced herself she’d been crazy, that she hadn’t seen anything at all.
And that might have been the end of it — a strange imagining on a moonlit road, and nothing more.
Except that wasn’t the end of it.
Jake Is Missing
A few days later, Jake went out to work. In many respects it promised to be a day like any other. As he often was, he was sent out on an errand to a nearby settlement. He threw his gun over his shoulder and he never came back.
Hours passed and there was no sign of him. So the men of Proctor’s Cove went looking.
It was dark when they found him.
His body was in the bog. He was face down on the ice. He must have slipped and somehow, when he fell, his gun had discharged.
The shot might as well have been aimed at his heart; it tore through the young man and he died where he fell.
If Sarah had been there, she would have recognized the scene. It was the same stretch of frozen bog, the same moonlit ground, and the same young man she had watched disappear into the darkness less than a week earlier.
Only this time, Jake had not vanished.
He had fallen, and he would never rise again. Sarah had seen it play out — a grim foreshadowing of the death of the man she loved — days before it happened.
A Premonition
There is no neat and tidy explanation for Sarah’s experience.
Old folks along Newfoundland’s shores might have called what she saw a fetch or token. Tales of such sightings — seeing the spectres of living people before they die — have been told up and down the Newfoundland coast for centuries.
And maybe they’re right
Perhaps time moves differently on this rocky island. Maybe on cold and lonely nights, the path between today and tomorrow bends back on itself. And maybe sometimes, if you’re looking in the right direction, you’ll catch a glimpse of things best left unseen.
We may never know.
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Are There Such Things As Tokens, Charles Jamieson, Newfoundland Quarterly, Vol. 28, no. 3, December, 1928
Fetch, Dictionary of Newfoundland English
Token, Dictionary of Newfoundland English
One moonlit night in Proctor’s Cove, Sarah saw Jake walking across a frozen bog. There was just one problem: Jake was sitting at home, and he hadn’t been out all evening.