The Starlight Claim

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  He backtracked up the trail a bit until the opening in the trees was gone from view, then he stopped and looked around, looked back the way he had come. What was going on here? He had walked in on pristine snow. No human had come in before him, not on the trail. Which meant if there was someone at the camp, they’d have had to come in from the lake.

  He shrugged off the Woods pack. The physical relief was instantaneous, but there was no mental relief. He hefted the pack into the bush beside the trail.

  Now what?

  Better not make tracks any closer to the camp. No one in the yard would see the path he’d left unless they actually headed this way. He walked back up the trail a little farther until he found a point he could enter the bush on the eastern side. The underbrush was not too thick. As quietly as he could, Nate pushed his way through, glad of his thick winter clothing against the snagging and whipping of branches intent on snarling a person up — especially a person with serving platters on his feet. Laboriously, he made his way toward the yard but well east of the cabin, over near where the outhouse stood on its own little path at the fringe of the fenced-in garden plot. When he could see the cabin door clearly, he settled on his haunches to wait. The door was intact. There had to be someone inside.

  Maybe it was some friend of his father’s, someone who knew where the key was hidden. Unlikely; Burl didn’t share that information widely. Occasionally he would allow some hunter or fisherman friend to stay there. He never charged anything. Didn’t ever want the camp to become a rental property. Didn’t much like anyone coming up here at all, except family and close friends.

  Nate waited, his eyes never leaving the camp. He was breathing hard, sweating like a pig from the exertion of fighting his way through the bush. But as soon as he settled in to watch, he could feel the cold wrap its thin blue fingers around his throat. He was out of the wind but deep in the shivering shade.

  His father had built the cabin from scratch. It was on the site of a camp that had burned down twenty-five years ago. His father had come to know the man who’d lived there, an eccentric musician. Burl had inherited the property from him when he was only around Nate’s age. The Maestro was what Dad called him: Nathaniel Orlando Gow. Nate was named after him.

  The Maestro had lived in a pyramid of glass, like nothing anyone in these parts had ever seen. Burl had built a more humble cabin out of logs on the footprint of that glass pyramid. He had taken years to do it — done it all himself, as a kind of tribute to the Maestro: harvested the trees; peeled the bark with a drawknife; built a shelter open on all four sides to dry the logs. He’d started the project when he was seventeen and had his first teaching placement before it was done. Now there was a closed-in sunporch at the front, which he’d added after marrying Astrid. When Nate was a baby, Burl had pushed out the back of the cabin to allow for two small bedrooms. But the place was still tiny: a kitchen-dining-living room in front and two bedrooms in back just big enough to stand up and turn around in, with storage areas under and over the beds, like cabins on a boat. The logs were whitewashed on the outside, with green trim around the windows and doors. It was a pretty little cabin, especially now — picturesque — the roof piled high with snow that protruded in undulating curves right out over the gutters, looking like the top of a giant mushroom. The snow was a couple feet deep except for around the chimney, where you could see the new green shingles they’d put up together two summers ago. A roofing bee — Paul and Dodge had been part of the crew. He looked at that patch of green and swallowed hard. The snow had melted, warmed by the heat in the chimney. And now that he looked closely, he could see someone had cleared the snow off the solar panels on the porch roof. Whoever was in the place had been here awhile.

  Nate watched the smoke curl up into the blue, then bend under the wind.

  There was a pair of snowshoes stuck in the snow by the side of the stoop, which was good and trampled down. He could see the snow riveted with yellow holes all around the entranceway. He’d peed off that stoop himself when they’d been up here in the winter, but the sight angered him now, as if some mongrel dog had been marking out his territory.

  Despite a break of trees along the shore, the wind off the lake found Nate, making his eyes water. It was strong enough to raise the powder into swirling white gusts. The windbreak ended by the stairs down to the beach, right beside the cabin. The stairs were invisible now under the snow. About thirty yards out on the lake, this guy — he assumed it was a guy — had dug a hole for water. He could see the corners of a sheet of plywood with snow piled on it as insulation so that the hole didn’t freeze up. Whoever he was, the man was no stranger to the bush.

  And he knew where to find stuff. The ice auger was kept in the work shed off the little garage where they kept the Kawasaki. And that shed key was hidden separately from the house key. Was this a good thing, maybe? If this trespasser knew where all the keys were, he must be someone familiar with the place. Maybe this was all just some weird screwup: maybe Burl had told the guy months ago he could stay there and then forgotten about it. Nate shook his head. His dad didn’t make mistakes like that. But maybe the friend had gotten the dates mixed up somehow.

  Dodge.

  Stop it, he told himself, angry now. No more denial. He’s dead — can’t you get that through your thick head?

  Nate’s eyes wandered out to the lake again. There were no tracks on the snow beyond the water hole. No tracks at all.

  How was that possible?

  There should have been snowmobile tracks, or at least snowshoe tracks, unless the guy had been here for ages, since before the last big fall. When was that? Nate tried to think when they’d had a big snowfall in Sudbury. A couple of weeks or so ago, he thought. Maybe more.

  Had this guy moved in?

  Then the door of the cabin was suddenly flung open again and a man stepped out. Not Dodge. Not a boy, lean and blond, who ran cross-country, but a grown man in black jeans and a shapeless mustard-yellow sweater coming undone at the cuffs and waist. He had a colorful wool scarf wrapped around and around his neck. Nate knew that scarf, knew it was six feet long. His mother had knitted it. The man wore wraparound shades with glittery silver frames. The sides of his head were shaved, but he had a thatch of black hair and a few days’ growth on his chin. He took a long draw on a can of beer. While he might have been around the same age as Nate’s father, he didn’t look like any friend of Burl Crow’s. He stood staring toward the outhouse as if he wasn’t sure he could be bothered heading there. Then Nate realized his gaze was aimed higher, toward the steep hill to the east of the camp where the path meandered up to the cabin on the cliff. Why was he looking there? Nate shook his head. He was just imagining it. Nobody knew about the shack. Its owner was long since dead. The cabin was a Northender secret.

  By now the man on the stoop was shivering from the cold. He tipped his beer for a last swallow and then hurled the can out into the snow before he went back inside. The wind immediately caught the empty blue aluminum can and danced it across the yard toward the bush. There were other beer cans there, like a flock of small birds huddling in the underbrush.

  Definitely no friend of his father’s.

  Which meant . . . What?

  There was no going back. The Budd would have passed Bisco by now on its way northwest and wouldn’t be back this way until tomorrow afternoon. There might be someone at the south end of the lake, at Sanctuary Cove. Over the years he’d met a few people from down that way, but he didn’t know any of them by name apart from Likely La Cloche, and he got around on crutches these days, so it was unlikely he’d be up in March. Maybe some ice fishermen, but . . . No, the whole idea of trekking twenty kilometers into the teeth of the wind was nuts. It would be dark before he got there, with no guarantees there would be anyone to take him in.

  Nate looked again at the camp. He tried to imagine knocking on the door. “Hi, my name is Nathaniel Crow and you’re trespassing.” He didn’t think that would go down any too well.

 
; But there was somewhere close he could go.

  He swallowed hard. He was shuddering already from the cold, but the thought of going over to the Hoebeeks’ made him shiver deep in his bones. But wait, there was somewhere else!

  First sign of any trouble . . .

  “Up the hill,” said Nate to himself. The miner’s shack. That made more sense. The path was nearby and he had been going to head up there anyway, to text his parents as soon as he could. Might as well let them know the camp had been invaded while he was at it. His father would know what to do. Nate even began to think there might be a silver lining to this escapade. After all, he’d caught an intruder red-handed. Instead of getting a dressing down, Nate might get a medal. Yeah, right.

  He pulled back into the undergrowth and set out in a wide circle around the outhouse, not wanting the man to catch sight of his snowshoe prints when he did eventually come over this way. He looked up and saw the first of the orange plastic markers, fluttering on the branch of a naked alder. But even as he veered toward the path that led to the cliff, he saw something he really didn’t want to see, and it stopped him dead.

  Snowshoe tracks leading up the hill in a zigzag path through the bush.

  This was getting truly weird. Who was this guy who knew so much? Nate was too cold to stop and think anymore. The upside of this discovery was that he wouldn’t have to break trail and he could get up there all the faster. Then he did stop and think. He thought about the guy on the stoop staring in this direction. And even as he thought about just why the intruder might have been doing that, he looked up the hill himself and saw another one of them coming down.

  The sunlight slanting through the trees hit the man, mercifully too busy keeping his eye on the steep path to bother looking beyond the toes of his snowshoes. Nate shrank back into the trees and waited silently, out of sight, trying to keep his chattering teeth from giving him away. This one was meatier, dressed properly for the cold with the hood of his parka up and the string drawn tight under his chin. There wasn’t a lot of face visible, but Nate could see he was frowning, deep in thought.

  He was either concentrating on the path or worried about something. Then he reached the head of the outhouse trail and, with his ski poles in one hand, untied his hood, whipped off his toque, and shook his head like a swimmer coming up from under. As Worried Man hit the yard, Nate heard the door of the cabin open a third time, as if Shades had been waiting. He crossed his arms, looked amused.

  “My, my,” he said. “You look like Santa didn’t leave you that new bike you were hoping for.”

  “They can’t make it,” said Worried Man.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Shades said, and laughed. There wasn’t anything cheerful about the sound.

  “There’s some good news,” said Worried Man. “A chance to get outa here without the bird.”

  “Well, well,” said Shades, on an enthusiastic upnote. “Bye-bye, birdie. Is this Brother Kev’s doing?”

  “Yeah,” said Worried Man. “He has a plan.” By then, he had reached the cabin, where he ditched his poles and stood with his legs apart, his hands on his hips, his back arched, breathing hard. “We need to check back with him.”

  Shades nodded, took off his sunglasses, and massaged his closed eyes with a thumb and forefinger. Worried Man kicked off his snowshoes, and whatever else the two men said was lost to Nate as they reentered the camp.

  Any chance of heading up to the miner’s cabin was lost. If they were going back there to check with Kev, who knew how long he would have? Should he wait it out? No, he was too cold. He knew he could only make the trip if he could light a fire once he got there and get some food in him. He couldn’t take that chance now. He needed shelter right away, and there was only one option left. A place he knew well. A place he loved. A place he had spent many summers in and out of. And a place he could barely imagine entering.

  It was one thing working up some body heat tromping in from the track, knowing a warm fire and lunch were waiting. But hanging about in the shadows had dropped Nate’s core temperature far too low. He needed to get warm, and soon.

  As quickly as possible, he made his way back to where he’d left the Woods pack, strapped it on, and then backtracked up the trail to the fork that led to the Hoebeeks’ place. He was about to turn down that trail but stopped himself just in time. There was a chance somebody would find the path he’d made coming in from the train. The last thing he needed to do was lead them right to the Hoebeeks’ door. So he tromped up the trail a bit farther until he found a conveniently bushy spot and literally dove in, rolling on one shoulder and not quite making it to his feet again. Instead, his snowshoes tangled and he ended up on his back. With the Woods pack on, he felt as vulnerable as a flipped turtle. It was almost funny. He stared up at the tall trees rising above him seeming to converge as if toward a heavenly vanishing point. The tops swayed, mesmerizing. The snow wasn’t cold when you were lying in it. Not really. He was this lumpy snow angel.

  A vision of Art and Trick Hoebeek lying in their PFDs flashed before his eyes — their faces staring up into the November sky, their arms out to their sides, skin as white as paper, mouths too numb to speak, as the freezing water of Ghost Lake sucked the last calories of heat out from them.

  Nate scrambled to his feet. He stood for a moment, regaining his balance. He hadn’t been there to see them like that, but the image was fixed in his head anyway. He was dizzy from the fall, from hunger. He was losing it. And he still had a hard slog ahead of him. He glanced back out at the trail where his northbound steps stopped abruptly. There was nothing to show he’d dived into the bush, but what did he expect they’d think if they followed the trail back to this point? That he’d just flown away? Been airlifted — picked up in a UFO tractor beam? He shook his head. It was the best he could do.

  It took him close to twenty minutes to fight his way through the bush to a spot directly behind the Hoebeeks’ place, a distance he could have walked in three minutes on the path they’d made from his place to Dodge’s, through the glade of trees that separated the two camps. Directly before him was the shed where the Hoebeeks kept their four-by-four and snowmobile. Art was one of those swaggering men who was all about Go Big or Go Home. Only the top model of anything was going to be good enough. And right now, that 600 Indy Polaris in the shed was giving Nate ideas. But that would have to wait. All he could afford to think about was getting out of the cold.

  He was about to cut between the motor shed and the woodshed to the camp, which was only about fifteen yards away across open ground, when he realized that a path directly from where he stood to the back door would be visible if one of the intruders happened to wander over this way. He leaned forward, his hands on his knees, the weight on his back oppressive. He closed his eyes. To hell with it, he thought. And then he imagined his father by his side, calm and strong. Waiting. Waiting for Nate to figure it out.

  He groaned. Then, reluctantly — and with a few foul words thrown in — he made his way still farther west, circling the Hoebeeks’ place, wading through the brush like a man through a swamp all the way around to the far side of the house, until finally he was in a place where his tracks would be completely out of sight. And all the time now, the smoke from his own camp was in his nose as if taunting him: a warm fire in his own woodstove and here he was only a hundred yards away playing hide-and-seek.

  He knew where the Hoebeeks’ key was hidden. He knew this place almost as well as his own. They had built a brand-new two-story camp about three years ago, a bigger, fancier place than the Crows’, suitable for a family of five — what had been a family of five back then. There were only the two of them left now, Dodge’s mom, Fern, and baby Hilton. Nate somehow doubted she’d ever come here again. So he was looking at a ghost house, he thought, and then immediately wished he hadn’t.

  He made his way around to the back door, on the north side of the camp. He stayed close to the wall, inching along, hoping the disturbed snow wouldn’t stand out too much
so close to the building. It didn’t really matter anymore; the only thing Nate was thinking about was the woodstove in the living room. He knew for a fact there would be dry wood stacked right beside the stove in a deep box: wood and kindling and paper, matches on the shelf above. It was the way you left camp — ready for the next person who came up.

  Having shucked off his snowshoes, Nate opened the door with shaking hands and closed it behind him. It was pitch-black inside. The place was completely boarded up on the main floor. As his eyes adjusted, he could see some light drifting down the staircase from the second-floor landing window. None of the windows upstairs were boarded, but the bedroom doors were closed.

  He leaned his back against the door, breathing hard. It was only slightly warmer inside than out. He could do something about that, but he’d need to be able to see what he was doing. After a moment, he opened the door again to let in some light and then rummaged through the pack for his headlamp. He found it, put it on, and hauled the Woods pack inside. He closed the door again and then remembered his snowshoes. Wasn’t much point in leaving no tracks if you left the damn snowshoes and poles sitting on the back stoop for all to see.

  It was spooky, looking at this otherwise familiar place through a flashlight’s beam.

  “Dodge?”

  He whispered the name. Waited. Nothing. What did he expect? He knew he was being absurd, but he had to say it. What he hadn’t counted on was that talking out loud in the dark only made the whole thing eerier still. It wasn’t as if he really believed Dodge was there, not the Dodge he knew anyway. But in the deep gray dimness that surrounded the cone of light from his headlamp, it wasn’t hard to believe another Dodge might be lurking around here somewhere. An angry, otherworldly Dodge — a ghostly wanderer with every right in the world to demand another shot at life in whatever form he could grab it.

  “Dodge, if you’re here, it’s me, Nate.”