Light rain began to fall when they got down to the riverbed. The water was still angling down, moving fast, and there was a light mist from the falls, the river about seventy-five feet across. Service had no idea how wide it was below, but they needed to move down the right wall and he led them across. He stopped on the other side and put on his rain jacket and gloves. The temperature had dropped fast since they left the trailhead, as it always could in the Superior watershed, especially this time of year.
“Cold front coming across the lake,” he told them. “Supposed to hit the area around noon.”
Moody sniffed the air. “I smell snow. She’ll be wet and slippery.”
McCants looked at Service and winked, got no response, rolled her eyes, said, “I know . . . focus.”
“Have you seen the grotto?” Gutpile asked.
“No, but Jake’s been there with Santinaw. They’ve been scouting the area for a couple of days.”
“That crazy old Indian’s still alive?” Moody asked.
“Candi, you and Gary will set up closest to the grotto, then Gut, and I’ll be last so I can maneuver to meet and talk to Jake. Everybody on 800s, earphones. Only Jake and I will talk. Acknowledge with clicks.”
The canyon was more of a gorge and the river wasn’t deep, but it moved with force, driven by gravity and slope. The rocks all along the way were slick and they had to be careful of their footing. The sides of the gorge were nearly vertical, in shelves twenty to thirty feet high, stacked on each other. Here and there was some greenstone and exposed strata. Shards of broken stone littered the river, having been snapped off by the cycles of freezing and thawing. At one point, McCants raised her fist and they all squatted. A beaver came swimming up the river toward a two-foot-deep pool, carrying a six-foot-long aspen toward a small dam in the making. The structure wouldn’t survive the winter, but failure never deterred beavers. Service thought about how far the animal had to drag the aspen and sympathized.
The rain fell heavily for nearly an hour, then let up, and as the temperature continued to fall, turned to snow. Snow wouldn’t raise the river level, which wouldn’t impede the movement of things up the river. Service was almost glad to have the snow, knew the ground was too warm to hold it, that it would hit and soon melt.
They got into their hides just before noon. Service met with the group one final time and told them he didn’t know how long they would be there, but to get comfortable and be prepared for a long wait. There were no smartass remarks now. They had all done surveillance and stakeouts many times, understood what had to be done, and were getting their minds into the zone where time would pass and they would stay attentive only to the moment. Some people never developed the ability to do this.
Service found a place under an overhang that afforded some protection from the wet snowflakes and got on the 800. “We’re here,” he said.
The captain said, “Might get two inches tonight. Our friend says that bird is not yet on the ground. Nantz got off safely.”
Service toggled his transmitter twice, click click. Where the hell was the other aircraft?
He needed to talk to Mecosta, but would let him take the initiative.
The snow intensified around three o’clock, coming down so heavily that it was impossible to see across the river, which was about ten feet from where they were. Leaves were shooting down the river, brightly colored wrinkled rafts. The river level had risen, but not much. A mature bald eagle came soaring down from upriver, got almost to the surface, saw one of them and lifted off, scattering feathers. Service could hear its wings batting the air as it struggled for altitude and safety.
Behind him a mink pussyfooted along the rocks, saw him, and reversed direction. He could smell the animal’s musk.
In a pool by his hide he saw four steelhead on a gravel bed. A chrome female flashed in the low light as she finned and shook to clean the area in preparation for putting out her eggs while the three males bumped and chased each other behind her, jockeying for position.
A gray jay came down to the river to drink and looked at him. Gray jays lived in Canada, came down to the U.P. for winters, which in Service’s opinion, put their intelligence in question.
Mecosta made contact just before dark. “All subjects are out of the grotto,” Service heard in his earpiece. “Going back to camp. Takes them about twenty minutes to get to the trail, thirty minutes up to the cabin, load time if they’re bringing more stuff, fifty minutes to be back in the grotto.”
Service radioed, “New arrivals at the cabin?”
“Don’t know. Santinaw is with me.”
This was good. They didn’t need anybody without a radio wandering around until they knew what they were dealing with.
“Santinaw says there’s another entrance to the grotto,” Mecosta said.
“Somebody ought to get inside while they can.”
Another entrance? “Where are you?”
“On top.”
“I’m coming up.”
“No elevator,” Jake said. “Just climb up where you are and Santinaw and I will find you.”
Service looked up at the rocks above, figured it was between one hundred fifty and two hundred feet. While he had light he had visually marked several routes, but in darkness it would not be an easy climb and there was a lot of loose rock and stone to contend with all the way. “I’m climbing,” Service said.
It took an hour to make the climb, with only a few times where he had to backtrack for safer footing. It was steep but he stayed at it, and when he finally crawled over the top he was drenched in sweat. He sat on the edge and took a drink of water.
“You have the grace of a turtle,” Santinaw whispered from the dark. “We could hear you coming for thirty minutes.”
“Three minutes for me,” Jake Mecosta said.
Santinaw chuckled. “Don’t understand how you two could catch anything.”
Service was tired and beginning to chill. “While we’re bullshitting, nobody is in the grotto and nobody is covering their route. We have people down there. Let’s move.”
The entrance was nearly two hundred feet back from the rim, beside some large oaks and between two boulders. Service used his penlight to look into the hole. “This looks like an old copper pit,” he said.
Santinaw said, “From those who came before the people.”
Service didn’t say anything. To every Native American, their own tribe was “the people” and other tribes something less. The old copper pits had been dug out by Indians who lived in the area thirty-five hundred years ago, where they found surface copper, dug around it, building fires to break off the metal. Copper from the Great Lakes had been traded all over the continent. He had never seen such a pit east of the Keeweenaw, but there were patches of copper here and there in the central U.P. and this was not a total surprise.
“Why didn’t you say something about this earlier?” he asked Santinaw.
“If you get to be my age, you’ll understand.”
“Have you ever been down this?”
“I don’t think so,” Santinaw said. “It’s hard to remember.”
“But it goes down to the grotto?”
“It will or it won’t.”
“Goddammit, old man.”
“I’m old, the earth is older. Things move around. Perhaps it went all the way once, maybe it still does.”
Service heard an urgent whisper in his earpiece. “Hey, up there, we have traffic down here.” It was McCants.
Service answered with two clicks. “They’re back,” he told Mecosta.
“I’ll go down with you,” the other officer said.
“No, somebody has to sit their trail, monitor traffic.”
Service toggled his 800. “Give me a count, how many visitors.” He got back five clicks, evenly spaced.
“Five,” he told Mecosta. “Others
will come.”
Service radioed the captain. “Bird down?”
“Five straight up.”
Five? What the hell had taken them so long?
Service sat and put his feet in the hole, shone his light down into the darkness, and saw rocks jutting out. “The angle doesn’t look too bad,” he said, hoping it would stay that way.
“The earth moves,” Santinaw reminded him.
The tunnel was a tight squeeze in some places, wider in others. Generally he could make steady progress downward. At one point he took out his compass, but the needle refused to settle. There was iron ore in the rock as well. He climbed down with his face against the wall and did not lift one foot until the other one had purchase. He checked his watch periodically and a minute or so after the forty-minute mark, he saw light below him. Faint, but definitely light. He could feel air coming up the shaft. The light was reflected against a boulder at the base of the hole right under him, maybe five feet down. He carefully lowered himself to the bottom and belly-crawled forward toward the light source. He was moving horizontally now and there was some rubble on the floor, but the sides of the tunnel were smooth; he felt them and guessed it was an old mineshaft. He hoped it was through hard firm bedrock, not soft and porous limestone. At the end of the horizontal shaft there was a large boulder blocking the exit and lights moved and bounced beyond his vision, spilling over the top: flashlights. He undid his pack, took a swig of his water, closed the pack up again. He got to his knees and stood in a crouch. Training: never try to see it all at once from concealment. He would make minor adjustments, try to see what was ahead of him in quadrants, assemble the whole picture in his brain.
He was about to take his first peek when he heard voices, men shouting happily, boisterously. He froze against the rock, waited. Heard some crashing not far in front of him, wanted to look, needed to. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, started to push up again.
A flash lit the tunnel, sent him down hard, banging his elbow, causing the arm to go numb. Jesus! In front of him there was crackling, popping, and smoke began to roll in across the blocking rock. Fuck, a fire.
He lay with his feet away from the grotto, moving his arm, trying to unfreeze it, get feeling back into his hand. The smoke was rolling in, but sliding over his head in a visible line, like a layer of gauze. It reminded him of mosquito netting in a barely detectable breeze.
When something touched his leg, he kicked instinctively, but his leg was caught and he looked back.
“I remembered it comes through,” Santinaw said. The old man patted his leg affectionately before releasing it. The old man tapped him again and Service looked back. He handed a cloth to Service and took one for himself and poured water on it and tied it over his nose and mouth. Service understood. Makeshift filtering for their lungs.
Service followed suit, told himself he had to look, had to do something.
Santinaw crawled up beside him.
There were voices in on the other side of the rock, two, three; no, he couldn’t differentiate. Not speaking English, heard movement, things being dropped. Wood crashing on a fire—logs being added. The clanging of metal, something heavy being wrestled around. A voice was singing some sort of high-pitched thing, no tune, just sounds that grated at him.
Santinaw said, “Death song.”
“That’s not Ojibwa,” Service said.
“Death song,” Santinaw repeated.
“Where’s Jake?”
“It was boring with him. I like to look around.”
Jesus Christ. Metal grated metal, made a screech. Above. Then another sound, a new one, high to low, anguish, fear. Also above.
He looked up at the flow of smoke, knew he couldn’t break the stream or it would cascade down and choke them. Right now the smoke was moving smoothly through the tunnel and up the back shaft like a chimney. They needed to keep it that way.
Santinaw tugged on his jacket. “Makwa,” he said.
Mak-wa, Ojibwa for bear.
“Pa-gid-ji,” the old man added, pointing upward.
Bear above. Bear above?
“The picture,” Santinaw whispered.
The picture, bear in a hanging cage. No fire in the picture. Fire here, bear above.
Shit, he thought.
“Its man-i-to is afraid,” Santinaw whispered.
So is mine, Service thought. He studied the smoke, had to get up there to take a look.
“Be-ka,” the old man said.
Slowly, don’t disrupt the smoke.
More chain sounds, sharp, pained squeals.
He got up, turned his head sideways, looked under the smoke, saw several men dressed in saffron robes, like bonzes, the Buddhist monks who burned themselves in Vietnam to protest the war.
Chain sounds again, overhead but closer. He looked again, slightly downward, saw a huge stainless steel vat. What the hell?
Then it hit him: Christ! What had Tara Ferma written in her e-mail, that bears would be lowered into boiling oil? Shit shit shit.
Now the animal screamed a long, angry cry and banged the cage. As the chains rattled, Service understood that he had run out of time.
He looked again. Now he could see the animal, blond, almost pale pink in the glow of the flames. It was shaking the cage, its eyes wide, as it began to scream and bash its head against the steel bars.
Eight feet off the ground and descending. Protect the animal, he told himself. He took out his 800, hissed, “Go now!” and slithered over the rock, falling four or five feet to a stone floor, got up, saw the huge fire under the vat, huge boulders around the whole thing to render it a cauldron, heard McCants screaming, “DNR! Police!” Saw the cage descending, ran forward, sprang off a boulder to wrap the cage with his arms, driving it sideways, momentarily weightless, almost flying, then crashed on something hard, his feet in the fire. He jerked them out, stomping his feet to dump embers and something struck him hard on the left shoulder and he felt warmth on his arm. He rolled to his belly and got up, a cacophony of voices surrounding him, English, another language, none of it making sense, men with their hands up and shouting, the beams of flashlights knifing around, the sound of cuffs being fastened. Gary Ebony was holding a guy by the collar, yelling “Stop kicking me, asshole!”
Santinaw pushing him aside, grinning. “It’s a beautiful animal. Your pants are on fire.”
Service slapped at his trousers, watched Santinaw kneel beside the cage, begin speaking to the bear in a quiet voice.
His shoulder was burning, something not right. He went outside, breathed in the fresh air, saw the snow was still falling. Gutpile suddenly beside him, holding him up. “Steady, partner.”
“How many?” he yelled at McCants.
“Nine,” she said.
“There should be ten.”
He grabbed for his 800, but he had lost it somewhere, and yelled at McCants, “Call Jake, tell him we’re at least one short here!” Moody helped him sit, offered him water.
“The whole lot of these buggers are swacked on something,” Moody said. “Girl scouts coulda took the whole lot of ’em.”
Santinaw sat down beside Service, held his hand. “Mak-wa was frightened. His spirit decided to leave.”
Service looked back at the unmoving animal.
“It was a beautiful animal,” Santinaw said. “Someday I will have to leave, but not until I see the woman in Eben again. It’s hard to leave when you have a good woman.”
Service took another swig of water. “What’s Jake say?”
McCants said, “He’s on the way to the cabin.”
Santinaw patted Service’s hand. “It was brave what you did. I think this animal’s spirit will honor you.”
Service shook his head, offered the bottle of water to the old man.
“Mig-netch!” Santinaw said. “You’re a lot nicer man than you
r father was.”
They were standing in the cabin with Mecosta and the captain. Alger County deputies were moving prisoners to Munising. Someone had placed a call to the regional agent for U.S. Fish and Game. He lived in Grand Rapids and tried to cover the U.P. from there, which was a joke.
The body on the floor was face-down in a pool of blood. Service put on latex gloves, reached down. The head was blown off, leaving nothing.
“Shotgun,” Jake Mecosta said. “Close range.”
“Preserve the site,” the captain reminded him.
Fuck the site.
Jake said, “I found him this way.”
Service lit a cigarette and walked outside with Mecosta. “Jake, do you still have the anonymous voice mail message?”
“Sure.” Mecosta opened his phone, punched in the numbers for his mailbox, held it up for Service to listen.
“Familiar?” Jake asked.
It was, but not the voice he expected.
41
The apartment was a duplex in the student shopping district on Third Street. Next door was DuPendre’s Café. The sign on the glass had weathered, lost some letters, read, dupe d café. The irony wasn’t lost on him as he rapped on the door of the apartment.
“Daysi,” Service said when Aldo’s Ojibwa girlfriend opened the door. He had met the girl a year ago and she had been pretty, but plump.
Now she was thinner, older looking, with huge eyes, long black hair.
“You called Jake Mecosta,” he said.
“Who?”
“No bullshit, Daysi. I’m not in the mood.” His left shoulder ached from the fall. His right shoulder burned where it had been stitched. The bear had clawed him during his grab of the cage, a reminder of the un-Disney-like reality of nature.
She looked him in the eye, her shyness gone. “I made the call for Aldo. He just gave me words to say. I didn’t know what it meant.”
Service said, “Where is he?”
“At the hospital with his grandfather.”
Chasing a Blond Moon Page 45
