![[Unlocking the Air]](/unlock/perm-images/1332banner700x103.jpg "gold creek, golden ears provincial park, bc")
Well, that's one mystery solved, and less overtly awful than I feared.
There was a CBC report centred on these lads the other night, and the more I watched the older boy's face the less I believed what he said. What I was afraid of was that he'd killed his parents and dumped their bodies; that he and his brother might be ordinary runaways was more likely but less distressing. What I saw was a boy who enjoys manipulating others and for whom empathy is a foreign concept.
That anyone at the CBC or in the RCMP accepted their story was something I'd discounted from the start; it was romantic enough on the whole but in its details implausible. That two people, even expertly woods-savvy, could homestead and raise children no more than an hour's backcountry walk from Revelstoke with no one knowing they were there for lo these fifteen to twenty years was simply not on. Therefore, they were lying, or rather the older boy was lying; the younger had little to say. Miserable, but not talkative. The way the older was lying, and the kinds of things he chose to say or avoid, led me to think he'd done something terrible.
I'm glad he hasn't, so far (aside from gross abuse of the trust and good will of a number of people in Vernon), and hope he never does. But I expect he will.
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