Winter of the Wolf Moon

by Steve Hamilton

  He laughed. “You’ve been plowing out my driveway, too,” he said.

  “When I come over to knock you on your ass,” I said, “I don’t want to get all tired out having to climb over three feet of snow. When I come through your door, I want to be fresh and ready to go.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  “Just a little warning,” I said. “I think I’m almost back to one hundred percent.”

  “You know where to find me,” he said.

  He kept driving, through the Soo to the International Bridge. It was the first time I had been across since I was arrested. The customs agent asked Vinnie the usual questions, took a look at me, then let us through.

  “Where are we going, anyway?” I said.

  “Garden River Healing Center,” he said. “It’ll be a quick ceremony. It’s kind of a secret.”

  “How come I get to be here?”

  “I told you,” he said. “She asked for you.”

  “But I’m the enemy.”

  “Don’t even start, Alex. You helped her. She wants to thank you.”

  “What about all your cousins, the ones who told you not to trust me? Are they going to be there?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Great,” I said. “This will be a lot of fun.”

  “They feel bad about what happened,” he said. “For what that’s worth.”

  “It’s worth nothing,” I said. “Exactly nothing.”

  “Reminds me,” he said. “I think you probably ended up spending some money. Didn’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You were in the hospital twice,” he said. “That must have cost a lot of money.”

  “I’m covered,” I said.

  “Not all of it,” he said. “You had to end up paying for some of it …”

  “Vinnie,” I said. “If you’re talking about somebody paying me because of what happened …”

  “I’m just saying, Alex. You shouldn’t have to—”

  “So help me God,” I said, “if you say one more word about money …”

  “All right,” he said. “All right. I’m just saying.”

  “Vinnie …”

  “No more,” he said. “I’m done.”

  He drove all the way through Soo Canada, then east into the forest. A few miles outside the city, we came to the Garden River Reservation. It was another of the Ojibwa tribes, along with the Bay Mills and Sault tribes in Michigan, a few others in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Garden River didn’t have casinos, and they weren’t going to get them. The government of Ontario would soon be opening their own casino in Soo Canada, cutting the Canadian tribes right out of the game.

  “All these buildings are white pine,” he said as we drove in. “That’s to honor Chief Shingwaukonce. His name means ‘pine.’ ”

  “You don’t say.”

  “The healing center we’re going to has thirteen sides, one for each month in the old Ojibwa calendar. The white man stole one of our months, did you know that?”

  “I apologize on their behalf,” I said.

  “I’ll shut up now,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  We parked next to the healing center. There were maybe a dozen cars there. I looked at my watch. It was almost midnight.

  When we got out of his car, the snow crunched under out feet as though we were stepping on fine crystal. It was impossibly, inhumanly cold, all the clouds gone from the sky. We could see every star above us, and in the east a full moon burned brightly, casting a blue light on everything below.

  “Look at that moon,” Vinnie said.

  “It’s a moon, all right.”

  He shook his head and led me into the place.

  In the center of the healing center there was a round meeting room, with a high tin exhaust pipe rising through the ceiling. Below the pipe there was a large circle where the floor opened up all the way to the ground. There was a great mass of sand there, and after my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could see that the sand had been formed into the shape of a turtle. On the turtle’s back was a hearth, also made from sand. The sweet smoke rose and hung in the air before leaving the room through the exhaust pipe. A man stood next to the sand turtle, his shirt decorated with ribbons, red, yellow, black and white.

  There were chairs placed in a circle all around the turtle, at least thirty tribal members already sitting. They all looked up at us as we came in. I recognized Dorothy’s parents on the far side of the room.

  “I take it they don’t see many white men in here,” I whispered.

  “I hope you realize what an honor this is,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This is a sacred place,” he said as he sat down. “You know, like church? Think you could put a lid on it for a little while?”

  I shut up and sat down next to him.

  When Dorothy came into the room, I could barely recognize her. Her face was scrubbed clean, her hair pulled back straight as if it were still wet. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, or any of the earrings she had on the night I met her. As she came through the circle and stood next to the man, she caught my eye and gave me a quick smile.

  The man unwrapped a clay bowl from a red blanket that was lying at his feet. From the edge of the fire he took an ember and lit whatever was inside the bowl. Dorothy whispered something into his ear, and then he looked up at me. Slowly he walked over to me, carrying the smoking bowl in front of him.

  “What’s happening?” I whispered to Vinnie. But it was the medicine man who answered me.

  “We call this smudging,” he said. As he held the bowl next to my heart, the smoke rose all around my head and then filled my lungs as I breathed it. “This is Shkodawabuk, or sage,” he said. “It was one of our four medicines. Tobacco is from the east, cedar from the south, sweetgrass from the north and sage from the west.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to his words. For the first time in many days, I started to feel warm. Just a little bit.

  “We use sage today, because sage is the medicine of purification and rebirth. As the sun sets in the west, the day dies and is reborn again after the night.”

  When I opened my eyes again, I looked around at all the men and women, young and old. They were all watching me with quiet faces. Then the medicine man took his bowl to Vinnie, and then on to the next person until he had worked his way through the entire room.

  Then he came back to Dorothy and performed the same ritual, enveloping her with the smoke from the bowl. When he finally spoke to the room, his message was brief.

  We are many tribes, divided by borders and boundaries, but one people.

  Dorothy Parrish has come back to our people, but in a way she never left, because we all belong to each other, and to the Earth.

  We welcome her back to us and wish her well on her journey.

  When the ceremony was over, the tribal members approached her one by one to hold her hands and give her their best wishes. I stood on the outside of it all, watching her.

  When she finally looked over at me, I saw the medicine man look at his watch and say something to her. She nodded and said something in return, and then came over to me.

  “Alex,” she said. “Thank you for coming here.”

  “You look good,” I said.

  “I don’t know what to say. You helped me so much.”

  “I’m glad you’re safe,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about everything that happened to you. I didn’t mean to pull you into the middle of everything.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t plan it that way,” I said.

  “You know, as soon as I met you, I knew I could trust you. I had been running so long, and I just wanted to stop. I knew you’d do the right thing, no matter what. You know what I mean?”

  “I think so,” I said. I looked around the room and lowered my voice a notch. “When you took that bag …”

  “I was still trying to decide what to do with it that night. Either take it to the police. Or
else give it back to Molinov, ask him to go away and leave me alone. Leave all of us alone.”

  “You get points for guts,” I said.

  She smiled. “Did you see that moon tonight?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “There was a fall moon the night I met you. Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You called it the wolf moon.”

  “Yes,” she said. “The wolf moon, for protecting those close to you.”

  “What’s this one called?”

  “This is the ice moon,” she said. “For resting until it’s warm again.”

  “Sounds like my kind of moon.”

  “I should go,” she said. “I hope I see you again some day.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “A reservation somewhere. Here in Canada. I just want to be somewhere where I can have a little peace for a while.”

  “I hope you find it,” I said.

  “I will. I have my family back now.”

  “Hey, you never did tell me your Ojibwa name.”

  “It’s Waubun-anung,” she said. “It means ‘Morning Star.’ ”

  “That’s a good name,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Take care of yourself,” I said. “Morning Star.”

  She gave me a kiss on the cheek, then left with the medicine man.

  Vinnie and I walked back out into the night. We got into the car without saying a word. We drove back through Soo Canada, back over the bridge, into Soo Michigan and then west toward Paradise. The only sound in the car was the steady hum of the heater. “I’ve been thinking about getting a hockey team together again,” he finally said. “Do you want to play?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said.

  “You were good in goal,” he said. “We could use you.”

  “You are kidding,” I said. “Please tell me you’re making a joke.”

  “You should play,” he said. “It’s not good being by yourself all the time. You think too much.”

  When we were in Paradise, he asked me if he could buy me a drink at the Glasgow.

  “It’s late,” I said.

  “Jackie will still be there,” he said. “He’ll let us in.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “Not tonight.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. He dropped me off at my cabin.

  “It was good to see her,” I said.

  “I’m glad you got the chance,” he said. And then he left.

  I stood outside my cabin for a while, breathing in the cold air, looking up at the ice moon.

  So now what? Before any of this happened, I had made a vow to myself, of all the things I was going to do when the springtime came. The debts I was going to repay.

  I pulled my coat tight around my neck.

  Where is all my anger now? Where is the fire? I just feel tired and sore and cold.

  Everything hurts. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to move.

  It hurts to live.

  The hell with it. Vinnie’s right. I think too much.

  Whatever happens will happen. I’ll make things right again someday, no matter what I have to do, or where I have to go. And this man Molinov, it sounds like he may be hunting the same game. I have a feeling I’ll be running into him again.

  But not tonight. Tonight I will close my eyes and feel the smoke touching my face again, the smoke of burning sage with its promise of a new day.

  I need to rest. I need to heal myself.

  For now, there is nothing to do but sleep under the ice moon.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Steve Hamilton’s next book

  THE

  HUNTING WIND

  NOW AVAILABLE FROM ST. MARTIN’S/MINOTAUR PAPERBACKS!

  When the lefthander found me, I was sitting in my usual chair in front of the fire, trying to stay warm. The calendar said April, but April in Paradise is still cold enough to hurt you, and I could feel the sting of it in my hands and on my face. I sat there by the fire, watching the baseball game on the television over the bar, nursing a cold Canadian beer as the lefthander made his way in the darkness. He knew where he was going, because he had a hand-drawn map in his back pocket, with a little star on the right side of the road as you come north into Paradise. The Glasgow inn, that was his destination. He knew I’d be there. On a cold Tuesday night in April, where else would I be?

  His trip began early that morning in Los Angeles. He boarded a 747 and flew to Detroit Metropolitan Airport. He had to wait two hours there, and he had already lost three hours in the time change. So the sun was going down when he finally got on the little two-propeller plane with twelve passengers, a pilot, and a co-pilot who doubled as the flight attendant. That plane took him first to Alpena, where he sat on the runway for a half-hour while half the passengers got off. The co-pilot got out and sprayed the ice off the wings, and then they were in the air again. The plane was noisy, and cold, and it bounced around in the wind like a paper kite. It was after eleven o’clock at night when they finally touched down at Chippewa County Airport. There are only two flights per day that land there, two little airplanes like the one the lefthander was on that night. The funny thing is that those little airplanes land on a runway that’s over two and a half miles long. It’s one of the longest runways in the country, long enough to be on the space shuttle’s emergency back-up list. The lefthander asked one of the other passengers why the runway was so long, because that’s the kind of thing the lefthander does. He asks strangers questions as if he’d known them his whole life. And they always answer him, because he has this way of making them feel at ease.

  “This used to be an Air Force Base, ay,” the stranger said. He was a local man from the Upper Peninsula, so he had that yooper rise in his voice. “Kincheloe Air Force Base, back in World War Two. Did ya know the Soo locks were the most heavily defended position in America back then? I guess they figured if the Japs or Germans were gonna bomb us, they’d start at the locks and cut off our ore supply.”

  “That’s interesting,” the lefthander said. I’m sure he said it in a way that made the stranger feel that it really was interesting, and that therefore the stranger must be an interesting man himself. That’s the kind of thing the lefthander can do, with just two words.

  The airport terminal itself is a one-room hut sitting next to that long runway. The lefthander went into the terminal and picked up his luggage. It didn’t take long because the co-pilot just grabbed the suitcases two at a time and carried them in himself. If the lefthander was worried about getting his rental car at such a tiny airport at eleven o’clock at night, he had no reason to be. A woman named Eileen was there waiting for him, keys in hand. That was her job, after all. When somebody reserves a car, she stays up late that night and waits for the plane to come in. The lefthander signed a form, took the keys from her, and thanked her. He thanked Eileen with a smile that she’d remember for months afterward, I’m sure. Then she went home to bed.

  He found his rental car in the parking lot. Across the street from the airport there is a factory where they recondition auto parts, twenty-four hours a day. The factory sends up a constant stream of smoke, and the light from the airport makes the smoke look silver against the night sky. He must have stood there and looked at the smoke for a moment, breathing in the cold air. The coat he had just taken out of his suitcase was not warm enough. He had started his day in California, where it was seventy-one degrees. Here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on an April night a good three weeks after the official start of spring, it was twelve degrees.

  He left the airport and drove down a lonely road with no streetlights. It must have seemed then like he’d come to the end of the earth. There were still piles of gray snow on either side of the road, what remained of the mountains made each year by the snowplows. When he found I-75, he took that north toward Sault Ste. Marie. The Soo, as the locals call it. But he didn’t get to see the Soo itself that night, because the map he had laid
on the seat next to him told him to take M-28 west, right into the heart of the Hiawatha National Forest. He passed through a couple of small towns named Raco and Strongs, and then he hit M-123. He took that road north. After a few miles he could see Lake Superior in the moonlight. There was ice on the shore.

  When he saw the sign, he knew he had finally reached Paradise. “Welcome to Paradise! We’re glad you made it!” He paused at the single blinking red light in the middle of town, and then he found the Glasgow Inn a hundred yards up on the right. He pulled his rental car into the lot and parked it right next to my twelve-year-old Ford truck with the woodstove in the back, covered in plastic.

  I didn’t know about any of this at the time, of course. About the plane to Detroit and then the plane to Chippewa County, about the words to the stranger or the smile for Eileen the rental car lady. I didn’t know he was coming all this way to see me on that night. The Detroit Tigers were playing a late game out on the west coast, the same coast Randy had spent all day flying away from. I was just sitting by the fireplace at the Glasgow Inn, watching the game on the television that hung over the bar. The place is supposed to resemble a Scottish pub, with the big overstuffed chairs and footrests. It’s a lot more inviting than most bars I’ve seen. And Jackie, the owner of the place, cannot be trusted to do anything right on his own, so it is my duty to stop in every night and share my wisdom with him. He never listens to me but I keep going back anyway.

  I own some land up the road, with six cabins my father had built back in the sixties and seventies. I live in the first cabin, the one I helped him build myself in 1968. The other five I rent out to tourists in the summer, hunters in the fall, and snowmobilers in the winter. Spring is the off season in Paradise, a time to clean out the cabins and wait for the snow to melt.

  There was a time when spring meant something else, the four years I was catching in the minor leagues. A lifetime ago. I didn’t think about those days much anymore. A lot of time had passed since then, and a lot of things had happened. Eight years as a police officer in Detroit. A dead partner and a bullet still inside my chest. And then fifteen years up here in Paradise, spending nights like this one watching baseball on television and not even thinking about the days when I played the game myself. I certainly wasn’t thinking about Randy Wilkins, a lefthander I had caught back in triple-A ball in 1971. When he opened the door and stepped into the place and shouted my name, I couldn’t believe it was really him. If the Pope himself had come through the door wearing his big hat, I wouldn’t have been more surprised.