Windigo Island

by William Kent Krueger

  Cork felt a hand on his back. “Hey, you okay?”

  He recognized Puck Arceneaux’s voice.

  “I think so.” Cork rolled over and found the three kids he’d met earlier staring down at him.

  “It’s you,” Puck said. He glanced down the shoreline, where the shadow man had gone. “Who was that?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Figures.”

  “How so?” Cork thought about standing, decided to give it another minute.

  “White man comes to the rez, asks insinuating questions, thinks nothing of it. We have problems here, Mr. O’Connor, but they’re our problems.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  He started to push himself up. Puck and his friend gave a hand.

  “You want an escort back to the hotel?” Puck asked.

  “I’ll be fine, thanks.”

  Cork made his way across the parking lot, trying to walk upright so that the kids who watched him wouldn’t see just how much he hurt.

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  “Called you a chimook, huh?” Daniel English sipped his morning coffee at the breakfast table in the hotel and considered what Cork had told him about the attack the night before. Chimook was an unkind Ojibwe reference to white people. “Bad Bluff Shinnob, you think?”

  “Or somebody who knows enough to sound Shinnob.”

  “Demetrius Verga?” Jenny asked. “He was married to an Anishinaabe woman. And from what you told us, he could be a man with a lot of skeletons in his closet.”

  “Whatever this guy used on me, he knew what he was doing.”

  “A cop?” English asked.

  “Or a veteran maybe,” Cork said.

  “Or a sailor,” Jenny threw in.

  Cork looked at his watch. “We’d best get going. Got a long drive ahead of us.”

  Jenny said, “So we just forget about what happened to you last night?”

  “I’ve got the bruises. I won’t forget. But right now we have other business to attend to.”

  It was a little after first light when they headed off. A heavy mist had rolled in from the lake, and they drove to the Arceneaux home through a wet gray that obscured most of Bad Bluff. Louise was ready, sitting in her wheelchair near the front door. She’d brushed her hair and put on a little makeup. She wore a loose-­fitting white blouse and jeans, the right pant leg folded under her stump and held in place with what looked like an embroidered elastic headband. A small overnight bag sat in her lap. She looked frightened.

  Red Arceneaux wheeled her out to English’s pickup and helped her in. He collapsed the wheelchair and laid it in the truck bed. He went back into the house and brought out a couple of old wooden crutches and a long khaki-colored canvas bag two feet in length that looked to Cork as if it might contain a rolled tent. These he laid in the pickup bed alongside the flattened ­wheelchair. He went back into the house and returned with ­another bag.

  “Louise’s insulin stuff,” he explained to Cork. “Special carrying case. Keeps the medicine cooled.”

  He kissed his sister good-bye, told her not to worry about anything and that he’d take care of the kids. Then he shook hands all around and said, “Migwech. Chi migwech.” When they drove away, he was still standing in the drive in the cluttered yard, a big, solid, hopeful man eaten, in less than a minute, by the shifting mist.

  The thick mist hid sun and just about everything else. Daniel English, in the lead, went slowly. Cork and Jenny followed at a distance that was safe but not so great that they would lose sight of the pickup’s taillights. The road was mostly empty. Cork kept an eye on his rearview mirror. In this pea soup, he didn’t want a careless driver screaming up on him from behind and colliding with the rear end of his Explorer. A couple of miles outside of Bayfield, he noticed a pair of headlights, dim through the fog, keeping pace. It could just have been a cautious driver, but after Cork’s encounter with the man in the shadow the night before, his radar was on high alert.

  After several miles, he flashed his headlights at Daniel English and pulled to the side of the road. Behind him, the trailing vehicle did the same.

  “What’s up, Dad?” Jenny asked.

  “Stay here.” Cork got out.

  English had stopped, too. He left his truck and walked back to the Explorer. “Anything wrong?”

  Cork nodded toward the phantom vehicle behind them. “Being followed.”

  “Know who it is?”

  “Fog’s too thick.”

  “Should we find out?”

  “Yeah, let’s do that.”

  The two men began toward the headlights. As soon as they approached, the lights retreated. They stopped, and the lights held steady.

  “Whoever it is, they don’t care that we know about them,” English said.

  “Maybe they just want to make sure we’re actually leaving town.”

  “I think we should ask,” English said.

  “I’m with you,” Cork said. “Now.”

  Together, they broke into a run. The vehicle swung a quick one-eighty and headed back the way they’d all come.

  “You get make or model?” Cork asked breathlessly when they finally stopped running.

  English breathed hard and fast and said, “Too foggy.”

  As they stood on the gravel of the shoulder, staring in the direction the vehicle had gone, a pair of headlights broke through the gray curtain of mist and came straight at them. They leaped off the road into the drainage ditch, which, fortunately, was dry at the moment. The vehicle sped past and vanished back into the fog ahead of them.

  They stood in the wild grass, looking where the vehicle had gone.

  “Pickup truck,” Cork said. “White. That’s all I got.”

  “Same here,” English said. “Think he’ll be waiting up the road?”

  “Only one way to find out. You carrying?”

  “My service firearm. A Glock. It’s in my truck.”

  “Maybe you should have it handy.”

  “Ten-four,” English said.

  They drove carefully, every pair of eyes in the vehicles scanning the gray murk ahead, behind, to the side. But whoever it was had apparently accomplished whatever they’d set out to do, and the rest of the drive to Superior was uneventful.

  They stopped at a Perkins for breakfast. They didn’t talk much. The pea-soup fog had not thinned, and they watched headlights on the highway creep out of the gray only to disappear again.

  “Does he know I’m coming?” Louise asked.

  “Henry? I haven’t called, but I suspect he does. Henry has a way,” Cork said.

  “I met him once,” Louise said. “I was just a kid, ten years old. My mama was sick, and the doctors couldn’t seem to figure out what was wrong with her. She went to see him, and I went with her. He was old, I remember. He had white hair.”

  “He told me it’s been that color since he was twenty,” Cork said. “He fought a windigo, and the battle turned his hair white.”

  “A windigo?” Louise said. “That’s just something out of ­stories.”

  “Many unbelievable stories have a basis in fact.”

  “You believe in windigos?” she asked.

  In answer, Cork said, “Henry once told me that there are more things in the woods than a man can ever see with his eyes, more than he can ever hope to understand. So I’m willing to consider the possibility of almost anything. Also, I once heard a preacher say that the devil’s best defense is a person’s disbelief in his existence. So it’s always seemed to me prudent to be ready for the worst of what you can imagine.”

  “The worst,” Louise echoed, and her face puckered into worried creases.

  “Did he help her?” Jenny asked.

  Louise seemed confused for a moment, as if she’d lost the thread of the conversation. Th
en she understood. “Henry Meloux?” She looked at the gray outside and thought before she answered. “He told her he couldn’t cure what was wrong with her. He told her no one could. But he did help. He taught her how to die. And when the time came, she wasn’t afraid. It was hard to lose her, but I remember it as a good death.”

  They left Superior and crossed the Blatnik Bridge into Duluth, which was all fog and dim lights. It wasn’t until they were out of the city that they finally saw blue sky. At Two Harbors, they turned due north up Highway 2, and Cork’s heart gave a little kick of happiness to be heading toward Tamarack County and home.

  They came into Aurora under a blazing noon sun and stopped at the house on Gooseberry Lane. Jenny seemed desperate to see her son. Little Waaboo didn’t disappoint. He burst from the front door, bounded down the porch steps, and ran through the shadow of the front yard elm calling, “Mommy!”

  Trixie was right behind him, and behind the dog came Rose, all of them moving as if in a race. “He saw you,” Rose puffed, “and wild horses couldn’t hold him back.”

  Jenny lifted him, and he wrapped his little arms around her neck and squeezed so hard Cork thought he might end up choking her. But she made no complaint. Waaboo pushed himself free, and Jenny put him down and he gave his grandfather the same welcome. Then he put his face a couple of inches from Cork’s and said, “We fished.”

  “Did you catch a whale?”

  “We saw a snake. In the water. I didn’t know snakes could swim.”

  “Well, now you do, kiddo. Was it a scary snake?”

  “Snakes aren’t scary. Just wiggly.”

  Introductions were made. Jenny had called ahead, and Rose had lunch prepared and waiting on the patio in the backyard. English pushed Louise’s wheelchair along the flagstones, and they gathered around the table in the shade of an umbrella and ate chicken salad sandwiches and potato chips and drank lemonade. Waaboo sat between his mother and his grandfather. He spent much of his time stealing the potato chips from Cork’s plate and feeding them to Trixie under the table and pretending innocence.

  Louise seemed subdued at first, but Rose could put anyone at ease. Soon the two were talking as if they’d known each other all their lives.

  “Diabetes,” Louise said. “They tell me I may lose my other leg, too.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Rose put her hand over the other woman’s.

  “Do you want to know something?” Louise said to her.

  “If you want to tell me.”

  “I sometimes pray and tell God he can have my other leg if he just gives me back my Mariah.”

  “You know what I think, Louise? I think God wouldn’t ask that of you. And you know what I’m going to do? Until you find her, and I believe that you will, every hour that I’m awake, no matter what I’m doing, I’m going to say a prayer for you and your daughter. Every hour, that’s a promise.”

  “Thank you,” Louise said, and she began to cry.

  “Why is she sad?” Waaboo asked his mother.

  “Her little girl is lost.”

  Waaboo said, “Grandpa can find her.”

  And Cork thought that, in that regard, he could probably use a prayer every hour, too.

  • • •

  Jenny stayed at the house. Waaboo had missed her and wanted her, and she could not say no. Once again, Cork followed English, and they headed north out of Aurora to the gravel county road where the double-trunk birch marked the path to Crow Point. English prepared to lift the wheelchair from the bed of his pickup, but Louise stopped him.

  “I’m going to walk,” she said.

  English glanced at Cork, his look full of surprise and question.

  Cork said, “It’s a couple of miles, Louise. And there are some pretty rough patches.”

  Louise turned herself on the seat toward the open cab door. She handed her overnight case to Cork and said to English, “Get my crutches, my insulin, and that tent bag Red tossed in back.”

  English did as she asked. He shouldered the insulin bag, propped the crutches against the side of the truck, and handed her the canvas tent bag. She undid the tie and drew out an object that made Cork stare in amazement.

  It was a peg leg. A wooden peg leg. The wood was polished, fitted at the top with a kind of padded leather saddle and straps. Designs had been scrolled into the peg itself, so that, all in all, it was a lovely piece of woodwork.

  “They wanted to give me a plastic leg at the hospital,” Louise said. “I didn’t want a plastic leg. So Red made this for me, carved it out of a piece of driftwood he found on the lakeshore. He said the spirit in it was good and strong.” She strapped it on by herself and stood next to the truck. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “What about the crutches?” English asked.

  “Best bring them along, just in case.”

  “You don’t have to do it this way, Louise,” Cork said.

  “Yeah, I do. When my mama came, she could barely hold herself up, but she walked all the way to that old man’s cabin. She didn’t have nothing to pay him with, but she figured if she did that, he couldn’t say no to her.”

  “Henry doesn’t expect payment,” Cork said.

  “No, but he expects me to be bringing something I don’t have. I’m hoping this’ll help. Let’s go.”

  Walking alone, Cork could make the two miles to Meloux’s cabin in half an hour. In the company of Louise Arceneaux, he took that long to go less than a quarter of the distance. The day was hot. The woman was heavy and worked hard. Sweat poured down her face and soaked her clothing. Her breath came in gasps, and Cork was worried about things like heatstroke or a heart attack. But Louise Arceneaux did not give up. She stopped often to rest, sitting on a fallen tree trunk or a big rock in the shade of a tree along the way. Cork wished he’d brought a water bottle, and chided himself for the stupid oversight, but he’d had no inkling that this would be the scenario he’d deal with on the way to Meloux’s cabin. The path to Crow Point had always been such a simple walk for him, and he’d figured the hardest thing he and English would have to deal with was maneuvering the wheelchair across Wine Creek.

  When, after nearly an hour and a half, they reached that clear, clean stream, Louise finally asked for help. Cork and English both gave her a hand as she knelt and splashed her flushed face, and then, before Cork could stop her, cupped her hands and drank. He was going to warn her about giardia, the pernicious parasite that might be found in untreated water of the North Country and that could result in disaster for a person’s digestive tract. But given the circumstances and the revitalizing effect the cool water seemed to have on her, he held his tongue.

  By the time they broke from the trees and Crow Point was revealed to them, the sun had dropped low in the sky. The shadows were growing long. Where meadow met forest, Louise Arceneaux paused, leaning on the crutches she’d been using for the past forty-five minutes. The light was the color of lemon peel, and the meadow was deep green, and the wildflowers were like colorful confetti caught in the tall grass. After the arduous walk from the double-trunk birch, even to Cork, who’d been there more times than he could remember, it looked like the land of Oz. Louise was clearly exhausted, but in the lemon light, her eyes burned incandescent with hope. She looked toward Meloux’s cabin not more than two hundred yards distant, small and sturdy, and she said, nearly breathless, “I remember this.”

  As they walked the final distance through the meadow, Rainy came to meet them. She put her arms around Louise and said, “Boozhoo, cousin.”

  Louise leaned into her, and Cork was afraid the weight of the woman’s body and weariness would tumble them both. But Rainy held her up and said, “He’s expecting you.”

  That was enough. Louise walked on her own to the door of his cabin, where Henry Meloux stood waiting. The woman stopped short of him. They faced each other in a long silence.

  Meloux finally said, �
��Did you bring it?”

  Louise looked ready to collapse and cry. “I only brought me.”

  Meloux nodded, then he smiled and said gently, “Welcome, Niece.”

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  Meloux’s sacred fire ring lay just beyond a rock outcropping on the west side of Crow Point. It was an area bared of ground cover by the tread of countless feet during countless gatherings. The aspen-lined shore of Iron Lake edged the area to the north and west. South was the meadow and east the rocks. The fire ring lay at the heart of it all, a circle of stones that held a bed of ash and char and that was circumscribed by sawed sections of tree trunk, which served as seating. That night Meloux sat near the fire, his lined face a ripple of reflected flame. Cork was there and Rainy and Daniel English. Louise Arceneaux, a woman who’d exhausted all her strength in the pilgrimage to Crow Point, was not. She was sound asleep in the bed in Rainy’s cabin.

  Cork appreciated that Meloux had not turned the woman away, even though she’d come empty-handed, without bringing to him Mariah’s most precious possession. That bespoke the kindness of the old Mide. But it also puzzled Cork in a way, because Meloux, once he’d set down a requirement, insisted that it be followed, even if the point of it was a mystery to everyone except Meloux. Cork figured that Louise had been right: if Meloux saw what it took out of her to come to him, the old Mide couldn’t refuse her.

  They’d shared tobacco, all of them, in Meloux’s pipe, and now they sat in a semicircle around the fire, while the embers drifted toward the night sky and were lost among the stars. Cork had related everything that took place on the Bayfield Peninsula, and the old man had listened without comment. Finally Cork said, “Louise believes that with your help, we’ll find the answers.”

  “She has worked hard today,” Meloux said. “Tomorrow, she will work hard in a different way.”

  “Will you guide her in a sweat?” Rainy asked.

  “No, Niece. You will guide her.”