Ice Hunter

by Joseph Heywood

  Shark was waiting outside his office and waved as Service pulled in.

  “Good, you’re in civvies,” Wetelainen announced in his booming voice. “We’re gonna go meet up with Gus.”

  “Where’s my room?” When he was in Houghton Service always stayed at the Yooper Court, and Shark always gave him a cut rate. In fact most COs got cut rates on virtually everything they bought; just recently the governor had tried to tube a senior DNR official over this. The official had disagreed publicly with Bozian on a wildlife resource issue and next thing he knew, the state attorney general’s office charged him with buying for his personal use at a discount from a DNR-approved vendor and not paying tax on what he bought. The whole case got thrown out, but Bozian made it clear that anybody who got crossways with him was going to feel the full heat of state government. Service knew his name was on Bozian’s hit list.

  “Chuck your gear in my truck,” Shark said. “We’re gonna bunk out to my camp tonight.”

  His camp was a shack he called Valhalla, a small log cabin set near the Firesteel River, an area that could be tough to get into and out of, even if you had a good sense of direction, a compass that worked, and knew where you were going. The soil was mixed with clay and with even a modest rain, the roads were slipperier than black ice and nearly impossible to negotiate.

  Gus’s truck was already at the cabin when they arrived before sunset, but despite fast-moving evening shadows, the cabin was dark.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” Shark said excitedly. He got out of the truck and took off into the woods without bothering with bug dope, but Service doused himself as he followed along. His pals were up to something. Shark was a unique man who made ancient weapons the way prehistoric Indians had. He hunted with a flintlock rifle he had made from scratch and a bow made from Osage orange wood he had gotten in Montana.

  They walked for twenty minutes until they got to an area of steep ridges covered with pungent firs and mixed hardwoods. It was growing dark fast.

  Nighthawks roared down from the light sky into the shadows, hunting mosquitoes.

  “Where’s Gus?” Service asked.

  “Quiet,” Shark whispered almost inaudibly. “Geez-oh-Pete, for cryin’ out loud, we’re in the bloody bush, eh?”

  Service shut up. The woods were Shark’s church and his god was nature. You didn’t talk in Shark’s church.

  At the edge of a ridge Wetelainen put out his arm and pointed for Service to sit down. They hung their legs over.

  There was an open, grassy area below and a nearly full moon rising in a pink-orange sky. The two men sat in fading light and silence.

  After an hour Shark tapped Grady’s shoulder, leaned over, and mouthed, “Soon.” Then, grinning, he grabbed Service’s arm and pointed down.

  A dark shadow loped into the open area below and was followed by four lighter colors that danced and pranced and rolled and circled in tight coils. The larger animal carried its tail out straight, not down. Not a coyote. Service’s heart raced.

  Shark poked his arm hard. “Geez!” he whispered huskily. “Iszatsompin?”

  A female wolf and her four pups played below them. When she sat and howled, her pups yipped and tried to copy her. Service felt a chill. These were the first gray wolves he had ever seen in the wild and they left him speechless. It was a glorious and beautiful moment, witnessing something few human beings ever saw. Especially in this state.

  After thirty-one years as a territory, Michigan had become a state in 1837. By the early 1950s there were few deer left and no elk, moose, or wolves. Now, because of DNR action, there were two million deer in the woods, a thousand elk, five hundred moose, and more than two hundred wolves. The transplant programs had been tenuous, but they had all taken hold and the animals were spreading and prospering. In some ways seeing these wolves reinforced his faith in the system: Despite all the conflicts between so many petty interests and all the nasty politics, the DNR was making headway in restoring the state in ways that only future generations would fully appreciate.

  Someday, he hoped, he would hear the howls of wolves in the Mosquito.

  The animals cavorted for fifteen minutes in the open and then disappeared as silently and quickly as they had arrived.

  “I need a beer,” Shark said, popping a tab and handing the warm can to Service. “You like my wolves?”

  “Yours?”

  “Fucking eh. I found the den and been watchin’ over ’em. I’m their grandpappy.”

  “Where’s Gus?”

  “He’d better be catchin’ our dinner.”

  The three friends ate a salad of fiddlehead ferns and fresh brook trout salted and peppered and pan-fried in butter with a pinch of brown sugar. They had canned corn mixed with red potatoes and sautéed with scallions and red peppers. They ate while kerosene lamps hissed and frogs chattered outside in the trees and somewhere in the distance coyotes yipped at each other.

  “The wolves are the future,” Gus said, sipping a beer.

  A future not yet assured, Service thought. Not by a long shot. All of this, so magical to behold, could be erased in no time.

  Kermit Lemich, Ph.D., had a cluttered office in the basement of an old building called Schoolcraft Hall. The building sat directly above the Portage Ship Canal, smelled of mildew, and looked like a cellar that had once housed custodians, but Lemich seemed to have taken it over. His desk, phone, and gray metal file cabinets were in the center of a sort of open hub, surrounded by mounds and stacks of boulders and rocks of all sizes and colors, piled up to eight feet high. Every stone, Service saw, was marked in a code with some sort of white paint.

  Service had to wind through a narrow canyon in the rocks and round a final sharp bend to enter Lemich’s inner sanctum. The man was stocky with a gray crew cut and a bushy white handlebar mustache. He had an unlit cigar in his mouth and wore shorts and a red Hawaiian shirt. Overhead hung several colorful silk pennants, the sort that ice hockey teams and players exchanged at national and international tournaments. There were also three pairs of dusty goalie skates and some dog-eared goalie leg pads suspended from wire hangers overhead, and on a small space on the wall, several faded black-and-white team photos.

  “Doctor Lemich?”

  The man looked up and motioned the CO forward, using a wet-tipped cigar as his pointer. “Pull up a chair and call me Rocky,” the professor said.

  Service sat gingerly in a rickety wooden chair at the side of a battered oak desk piled with papers and rocks. There was an antiquated Japanese laptop computer on the desk, and beside the desk a dented metal cart containing all sorts of computer components.

  Lemich stared at him and after a few seconds said, “I’ll be go to hell. Banger Service!”

  Service stared at him.

  “You don’t remember me? Sudbury Wolves,” Lemich said. “You were playing Junior B with the Marquette Ironmen. Your coach set up a scrimmage with us and we thought it was pretty funny, some American Junior B snotnoses coming to play a Tier IOHA team. I’ll never forget it. You were six-four, 230. You don’t look much different now, which is better than most of us can say. You were what, sixteen, seventeen? And all our guys were licking their lips ready to give you snotnoses an ass kicking.”

  Service did not recall the game. It had been nothing special, just one more among the hundreds he had played. His coach, Okie Brumm, was always taking his teams against superior competition. Usually older too.

  “We won 4–3,” Lemich said, “but you won the war and we called you Banger after that. You were a legend; we all expected to see you in the NHL. Not your team, you. None of our guys had ever been hit that hard before, and every time one of our guys ran you, you lined ’em up and blasted ’em. I played some games with Boston, enough to qualify for a pension, but left hockey and got myself into Harvard. Rocks and pucks, both inanimate things. God, you were a h
elluva player, Service.”

  “Just a journeyman.”

  Lemich laughed and swallowed cigar juice and coughed. “Yeah, you sent a whole bunch of guys on journeys to bloody lala land. You were All-American at Northern Michigan. The Red Wings drafted you. See, I remember all this shit. How come you didn’t go?”

  Service hadn’t thought about hockey in a long time. “I looked at the organization and it looked pretty shaky and disorganized and I didn’t want any part of it. I joined the Marines.”

  “Officer?”

  “Grunt.”

  “You get sucked into that Vietnam shit?”

  Service nodded.

  Lemich grimaced. “Figures. Still wantin’ to crash the corners. Now you’re with the DNR?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “Long time,” the professor said. “You were a helluva player, Service. I mean that. I’ve worked as a volunteer coach here with goalies. Johnny McInnes and I were pals. Johnny told me about the time you flattened one of his stars in a fight. You made an impression, Service. I’ve been around hockey all my life. If you’da gone to the NHL, you’da lasted twenty years up there. There’s never been a checker as tough or as ferocious as you.” Lemich suddenly laughed. “I guess it’s a good thing none of the Wolves tried to pick a fight with you that time!”

  Service was embarrassed.

  “You still skate?” Lemich asked.

  “No.” He had simply walked away from the game. He no longer owned skates and had no idea where his mementos and medals were.

  “You ought to. Maybe coach some kids. It’ll keep your ass young, and there’s nothing like kids to remind you how wonderful our game is.”

  Service didn’t want to talk hockey. That life was done, just like Vietnam, and he wasn’t one to dog-paddle in the past. His old man had played for the Chicago Black Hawks in the 1940–41 season and had started the next year in Chicago, but the morning after Pearl Harbor he had gone down to the recruiting office on State Street and joined the Marine Corps, not returning until 1945. His old man never went back to Chicago; he had returned to the U.P., married, and three years later Service was born. But it was a hard delivery for his mother, and within a year she had died. The old man had become a CO when he got back from the war and, after his wife’s death, had begun to drink too much and bury himself in his work. The old man had done his best for him, but Service knew that playing mother and father was too much for him. Often when the old man was out all night chasing bad guys or drinking, Service was dropped at various neighbors. Or with his Grandmother Vonnie, who thought he was crazy. Even before the shotgun deal.

  He didn’t like thinking about his past, except as it related to his job. What was it about work being a living and not a life? He tried to block out his ex-wife’s words and refocus on his purpose in meeting with Lemich.

  “Maybe we can take in a game sometime,” Lemich said.

  Service agreed, only to get the subject changed.

  Lemich chewed his cigar. “Okay, if this isn’t about hockey, what the hell do you want?”

  Service opened a plastic bag and put the aerial photos on the professor’s desk. He had never owned a briefcase. He used grocery bags to haul around what he needed.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  Lemich drummed his fingers and leaned down close to the photos.

  “Granite. Was there a fire?”

  Service nodded.

  “Geologists are dirt-grubbers, not flyboys.” He pushed the photos back to Service. “Circular formation, but it’s hard to say if that’s significant or serendipity. I need to analyze the rocks chemically. Rocks are real. Appearances can mislead you, but chemicals rarely lie. If you make a mistake, it’s your fault, not the rocks’. They are what they are. At an eyeball, this stuff looks vaguely volcanic, but I just can’t tell for sure. Have you got magnometer readings?”

  “What’re they?”

  “They measure the strength of magnetism. You chart the lines, you can pick out highs, lows, shapes of magnetic structures. Good shit, can tell you heaps.”

  “How do you measure?”

  “Well, first it has to be a planned, methodical survey. A chopper carries a package of instruments, and the pilot goes up and down the plot. Then the readings get translated and mapped by a computer.”

  “Always by chopper?”

  “Usually. It’s the fastest and most economical way.”

  “What’s the instrument package look like?”

  “I can show you,” Lemich said. He went to a file drawer and pulled out a pamphlet. “This is a book about geology for kids, but there’s a good photo.”

  Service blinked when he saw what the professor was pointing to.

  “Weird, eh? A lot of people in the business call it a bird, but I sure as hell don’t see a resemblance to any bird I know of.”

  “Canada goose,” the conservation officer said.

  Lemich looked. “A honker? I’ll be damned. You’re right.”

  The chopper over the Tract had been measuring magnetism. Right where the gems had been found. Not a coincidence, Service thought.

  “That’s a Huey in the picture,” Service said. “Do they always use Hueys?”

  “Not always, but pretty much. They’re old pieces of shit, but they’re roomy, they still fly, and they’re cheap and fairly reliable if you don’t push ’em too far or too high.”

  “Does the university do magnetic surveys?”

  “Shit no. Can’t afford to keep a chopper on staff, or even the magnometer. We rent what we need and bring it in. Some of the faculty do some as part of their work, but we always have to go get most of what we need.”

  “Including the instrument package?”

  “Yep. We have the computer programs to translate, but not the hardware.”

  “Are there places that rent this stuff in the U.P.?”

  “Nope. I know outfits in Boulder and Butte. There might be half a dozen in the whole country. ’Course, if you get one of them in, you still need a technician to calibrate the instrument package and make sure you have an accurate interface with the computer program. That stuff can be touchy, especially in a chopper, shaking all over the sky. Otherwise, you get gobbledygook and pixel snaps.”

  “Do the companies have these kinds of technicians?”

  “Most do, but when we do surveys, we use our own people.”

  “Tech has such people?”

  “Three, I think. What’re you after?”

  You had to read people, Service thought. Take a chance.

  “It’s complicated,” the conservation officer said. “Might be easier if I showed you. Got a couple of days for some fieldwork?”

  Lemich grinned, dug a specimen hammer out of a desk drawer and held it up. “Can I crawl around in the dirt and whack some rocks?”

  15

  Gus Turnage was waiting for Service at Shark Wetelainen’s motel office. Shark had a fly-tying table crammed into his office; hackle capes, snowshoe hare fur, jungle cock feathers, and tail feathers from turkeys and pheasants, patches of moose, deer, and elk hair were scattered all over the place. It was a pure sportsman’s chaos, no place for everything and nothing in its place, but it only looked a disaster to others. He was actually meticulously organized and always operating a season ahead in preparing his equipment and tying flies.

  “Good meeting?” Turnage asked, offering a cup of fresh coffee.

  “Ain’t no good meetings!” Shark barked, not bothering to look up from a tiny vise where he was fashioning a gaudy steelhead fly with holographic flash above.

  Service gave Turnage three names. “These people are technicians. They measure magnetism and they all work for Tech. I need for you to talk to them. I want to know if they’ve done a job recently on the Mosquito, either for Tech
or freelance. All these university types freelance and consult.”

  Gus grunted. “Can do. Posthaste?”

  “Please.”

  “Piece of cake,” Turnage said.

  “Cake?” Shark said, looking up suddenly. “Who’s got cake?”

  As soon as he left Shark’s place, Service got on his phone and dialed Harry Digna. A woman answered the phone.

  “DNR, Officer Service. Is Harry there?”

  He heard the woman pass the phone. “DNR. What have you been up to this time.”

  “Nothin’, just keep your nose out of my business, eh?”

  The woman cursed and her voice receded.

  “Yeah?” Digna answered.

  “You’ve been quiet, Bird.”

  “I’ve been asking around,” Digna said. “It’s not easy, eh?”

  He didn’t expect Digna to come up with anything, but pushing helped keep him in line and there was always the possibility of luck. Birdman ran with lowlives with loose lips.

  “Tougher than the alternative?”

  “I told you I’d do it.”

  “That your wife who answered?”

  “Don’t push,” Digna said nervously.

  “This is a friendly chat,” Service said. “When I push, you’ll feel it.”

  “You get your rocks off fucking with people’s minds?”