“Some are good, some are not. The good ones will respect your skill and respect the land you take them into. The others will not. The worst are the ones with much money. Often they believe that the money makes them better than you. They might try to hide this, but it’s what they believe. Many do not bother to hide it at all.”
“Do you get angry?”
“Why would I be angry? Because they believe a thing does not make it so. There is no dignity in anger. But I am also not a kicked dog.”
“If they treat you that way, what do you do?”
“I leave them.”
“Alone? Up north?”
“It is a good lesson.”
“How do they get back?”
“Who says they do?”
Henry twisted around, expecting to see a grin on his uncle’s face. Woodrow didn’t smile. He dipped his paddle and pushed hard toward Crow Point.
TWENTY-TWO
Two days later, in the dark before sunup, Henry set out with his uncle once again for Luukkonen’s outpost.
The men were waiting, the outfitter with them. They were quiet white men but with eyes that said much. Eyes that said, Business. That said, No questions. That said, We will watch you, boy.
Like all white men, they shook hands.
“Leonard Wellington,” the tall one said. He had a big nose, deep-set eyes, light brown hair. He was older than Henry by a decade, maybe two. It was hard for Henry to judge.
The other looked to be Woodrow’s age, nearing fifty. He was smaller and heavier than Wellington, with a mustache like a thin black scar across his upper lip. Carlos Lima, he said his name was. He spoke in a way Henry had not heard before, a strange accent that rolled melodically off his tongue. He smiled often, baring teeth white as bleached bone.
The men’s gear and the packed supplies were already in the back of Luukkonen’s pickup. Henry and Woodrow threw in their own belongings and climbed into the open bed. The two white men sat up front with Luukkonen. It was a cool morning in late August, manoominike-giizis, the month of ricing, and the ride into the woods chilled Henry. They followed old logging roads for an hour through territory Henry barely knew, though Woodrow knew it well.
The outfitter finally pulled to a stop at the edge of a long, narrow lake backed by steep hills crowned with aspen. They unloaded two canoes from the trailer and stowed the gear. In the white men’s canoe was equipment whose purpose Henry didn’t know, although he suspected from what his uncle and Luukkonen had said that it was for finding gold.
“Two weeks from today,” Luukkonen said to Woodrow. “Noon. I’ll be waiting.”
“I will have them here,” Woodrow promised.
They paddled all day—six lakes, four portages, one rough passage along a swift rocky stream. The two white men spoke mostly to each other but at every portage conferred with Woodrow. They asked about rocks and hills and ridges, and Woodrow listened and nodded and pointed this way or that.
To Henry, Woodrow spoke the Anishinaabe name for each lake— Bear, Cedar, Face In A Cloud—and Henry committed them and the landscape to memory.
They camped that night beside a lake Woodrow called Opwagun, which meant a pipe bowl. It made sense considering the hills that ringed the water. Henry caught bass, which his uncle cleaned and pan-fried and served to the white men with wild rice and mushrooms. The men sat apart afterward, smoking cigars. They drank from a silver flask.
“Where are we going?” Henry asked in Ojibwemowin so the white men, if they heard, would not understand.
“North,” Woodrow replied. “Three more lakes. Tomorrow by noon.”
“Is there gold?”
Woodrow’s eyes hung heavily on the white men sitting near the lake at the edge of the firelight, then he stared up at the sky. The stars were like frost on the dark windowpane of night.
“If there is, and the white men find it, I will kill them.”
“Why?”
“When I was a boy, I traveled with my uncle to a place called the Black Hills. You have heard of it?”
Henry had read about it at the school in Flandreau. In his dormitory there was a Lakota, Sunning Turtle, who’d come from the Black Hills. Sunning Turtle was one of the boys who cried at night.
“It belonged to the Lakota by treaty, but white men found gold there. They stole the land, ripped the earth, turned the clear streams to mud, and built towns filled with the worst kind of people. Now, since the end of the Great War, I have heard that gold is even more valuable to white men. I believe, Henry, that if the hearts of their grandmothers were made of gold, they would cut them out.” His eyes went back to the men drinking by the fire. “If there is gold here, I would die to keep it a secret. And I would kill for that, too.”
Henry lay awake a long time that night thinking about killing the two men. He did not hate them and knew that Woodrow didn’t either. The killing, if it came to that, was not about hate. It was, in a way, about love, and even more about respect, emotions he felt strongly for Grandmother Earth. Killing was never a good thing, Henry decided, but perhaps sometimes it was the only thing.
They set up camp the next day at noon on the lake called Ishkode. The word meant fire, and Henry had been thinking about the vision he’d had of a lake with fire at the bottom. Was this what it had meant? The two men eagerly eyed the gray ridges along the far shore and spoke to each other in low, excited voices. They set off immediately with equipment, crossing the lake alone in their canoe. Henry took his new rifle into the woods and shot a wild turkey, which Woodrow prepared and roasted on a spit. The men returned near sunset looking tired and grumbling in reply whenever Woodrow spoke to them.
Good, thought Henry. They have been disappointed.
For three days it went this way. On the fourth, the men returned in a different mood. They didn’t say anything about what they’d found to Woodrow or Henry, but it was in their faces and in the bounce of the words they spoke to each other.
That night, lying beside his uncle after the men slept, Henry asked, “Did they find the gold?”
Woodrow said, “Not the gold, I think. They would be drunk. But something that makes them believe they might find gold.”
Soon after dawn the next day, the men left. This time Woodrow followed.
Henry fished and caught several walleye that would easily fill all their bellies that evening. He cleaned his rifle and waited, scanning the lake with uneasiness in the direction all the men had gone.
The two whites came first. Their boots and the legs of their pants were caked with mud. Woodrow was not with them.
“Where’s your uncle?” the man named Wellington asked. He didn’t seem as excited as he’d been the day before, but neither was he surly. Henry wasn’t sure what that meant.
Henry didn’t want to speak to them. He answered, “I do not know.”
“I hope you have a meal ready, boy,” the man named Lima said. “A big meal.” With his accent the word came out beeg. “I could eat a moose.”
Henry fed them the walleye, which he rolled in cornmeal and fried. He made drop biscuits and gave them blueberries he’d gathered and the men were happy.
Dark came, but not Woodrow.
“Should we worry, boy?” Lima asked. Then he grinned. A joke.
Henry remembered what his uncle had said about leaving people who treated him badly. These men were not so bad as many other whites, but maybe they’d said something to Woodrow.
The men sat at the fire. They’d put their pants near the flames to dry the mud. They drank coffee Henry had made and into which they poured some of whatever was in the silver flask. Their faces were flushed. The color was from spending the day under the sun and maybe from the work they did while they were gone across the lake, and from the paddling necessary to get there and back, and even a little from the heat of the fire. But it was also from what they drank.
Wellington wrote in a book bound in leather. Every night they’d camped, he’d spent time after supper writing by the firelight. He look
ed up from his book and caught Henry staring.
“Writing my memoirs,” Wellington said with a laugh. “I figure I’ll publish them someday, get famous.”
“You read, boy?” Lima asked.
Henry was tired of being called boy, but he held his tongue. He stirred the fire with a long, sturdy maple stick. “I read,” he said.
“Mission school or something?” Wellington asked.
“A school in South Dakota.”
“South Dakota?” Wellington laughed. “A world traveler, eh? Ever been to Canada?”
“No,” Henry said.
“I’m from Port Arthur. Know where that is?”
“No,” Henry said.
“You’re not alone.” Wellington gave a snort. “Me, I’m going to put that burg on the map, eh.”
Lima pulled a cigar from the vest pocket of his jacket. “You smoke, boy?”
“No,” Henry said.
Lima ran the cigar along the line of his mustache under his nose and inhaled deeply. “These are my own cigars. It’s what I do. Manufacture good smokes. You know the island Cuba?”
He’d heard of it, but had no clear idea of its location in relation to anything he knew.
“The best cigars, they come from Cuba, from my factory. Have one, boy. On me.”
Lima held it out, long and brown like the dropping of a big animal. Henry didn’t want the cigar, but he didn’t want to offend the man. He took it.
Lima pulled out a cigar for himself. “Now, you clip the tip like this.” He pulled out his knife and deftly sliced off a small nub at the end of the cigar.
Henry took his own knife and did the same. He was aware that Wellington watched him with gleaming eyes.
Lima struck a match on one of the rocks Henry had used to ring the fire. “Before you light your cigar, make sure the sulfur is burned out of the match head, okay? Sulfur can kill the taste of a good cigar. Don’t put the cigar in your mouth yet. Hold it in your hand and rotate it near the flame, like this.” He rolled the cigar between his index finger and thumb, near the match flame, until the entire tip on all sides glowed with ember. “Now you put it in your mouth and take a gentle puff or two to blow out the taste of anything not tobacco that may have come from lighting it. Only then are you ready to enjoy the pleasure of this truly fine product.” He looked at Henry expectantly. “Well, go on, boy.”
Henry imitated Lima’s actions and soon the cigar smoke crawled down his throat like a thick snake.
“Good, good,” Lima said with a big grin. “Enjoy.”
Henry didn’t. He got sick. After he’d puffed for a while, he became dizzy and had to lie down. The men guffawed. A little later, he stood up, stumbled out of the firelight, and puked. The men roared with laughter.
“Don’t worry, boy,” Lima called. “We’ll make a man of you yet.”
Later, as Henry lay in his bedroll, he thought to himself that if his uncle didn’t kill these men, he would do it himself.
He woke to the rustle of the tent flap. Woodrow entered and lay down on his bedroll.
“You fed them?” he asked.
“Yes,” Henry answered.
He wanted to ask where his uncle had been, but he knew if Woodrow meant for him to know, he would say. In a few minutes, he could hear the soft susurrus of deep breathing that told him Woodrow had gone to sleep.
Next morning he watched his uncle leave to follow the two white men again. Henry stayed back, dealt with the aftermath of breakfast, then took his rifle and a handful of cartridges and began to circle the lake on foot. Although he told himself he was going hunting, he didn’t look for signs of game. An hour later he came to the place along the far shoreline where the white men had drawn up their canoe. He didn’t see any sign of his uncle’s canoe, but he hadn’t expected to. Woodrow would have hidden it.
Henry easily found a trail broken through the undergrowth. It led toward the base of the ridge that ran the length of the lake and beyond. Henry paused, listened carefully, but heard nothing except the complaining of jays in the branches of a nearby poplar. He was curious about the men. He felt on the outside of whatever it was his uncle was thinking. He wondered at Woodrow’s silence, wondered if his uncle was merely watching or actively stalking. Truthfully, if Woodrow intended to kill the men to keep any gold they found a secret, Henry believed he should be a part of that. It wasn’t something he anticipated with pleasure, but it felt to him like a responsibility he should shoulder. Though Woodrow had not asked for his help, Henry believed it was the kind of thing a man—a true-blood Ojibwe— should be prepared to do.
The ridge was steep gray rock two hundred feet high. The top was capped with a mix of lithe aspen and sturdy spruce that shivered in a wind Henry couldn’t feel. The trail followed the base and was easy to read despite the rocky ground. From the far side of the lake, the ridge had looked solid. After half a mile, however, Henry came to a place where a second ridge folded against the first with a narrow break between them through which a tiny creek ran. The trail left by the men led beside the creek, and Henry followed.
On the other side of the ridges, he found a great expanse of marsh and understood immediately the mud that had caked the men’s boots and pants. He lost the trail in the soup of black water and yellow marsh grass. He climbed the ridge to high ground and scanned the tamarack trees that grew in profusion along the edges of the wetland. He saw no sign of the men or Woodrow.
It was midmorning. The sun had climbed halfway to its zenith. The day was turning hot. Henry found a place in the shade of a cedar and waited. Although he’d seen no evidence of Woodrow during his tracking, he was certain his uncle wasn’t far behind the white men. He wasn’t sure what waiting might accomplish, but he knew that the men would have to come back this way eventually—unless Woodrow did something to stop them.
He sat for two hours as the sun mounted directly overhead and the cedar shade shrank to nothing and the heat increased. His rifle lay across his legs. He’d chambered a cartridge, mostly to be able to say, if he was spotted, that he’d been hunting. He didn’t know if the men would believe him.
The screams came to him first. They were distant sounds that might have been animals, though he’d never heard animals like that. Then he saw the two white men burst from the tamaracks at the northern edge of the marsh and flail their way into the black muck at a desperate run. Wellington was in the lead, Lima a few yards back. They made it halfway to the break in the ridges before an enormous bull moose crashed out of the trees behind them, head lowered, his rack aimed at the men. Henry had no idea what the white men had done to enrage the animal, but in the North Country even an idiot knew enough to stay clear of a moose. Not even the biggest black bear was a match for a raging bull.
The legs of the moose lifted it high above the swamp water. It closed on the men quickly. Henry had no time to think. He knelt and brought his rifle into position. The Winchester was meant for smaller game, deer at most. As he sighted, Henry tried to think how with a single shot of a too-small-caliber bullet he could stop the moose. The round would never penetrate deep enough to reach the heart.
Out of the corner of his open eye, he saw Lima stumble and go down. Henry led the moose, held his breath, then let it out slowly and squeezed the trigger. He lost the animal for a moment in the jar of the recoil. When he found it again, he saw the moose pitch forward, coming to rest only a few feet from where Lima cowered in the muck.
Henry sat back. He began to shake. Numbly, he watched Wellington return and kneel beside his fallen companion. A moment later the man looked up and spotted Henry on the ridge.
Henry stood, worked his way down, and waded into the swamp grass and black water. Even at a distance, he could hear Lima’s moans.
Henry went first to the moose. The animal’s right eye socket was nothing but a deep, bleeding hole. In the wake of the adrenaline flood he’d felt on the ridge, Henry experienced an overwhelming sadness at the death of this great and beautiful creature.
“You?” W
ellington asked with disbelief. “It was you? That was one hell of a shot, boy.”
Henry turned. “I’m not a boy.”
“Son of a bitch,” Lima moaned.
Wellington carefully lifted the other man’s leg clear of the black soup. Lima shouted something in Spanish that Henry didn’t understand but guessed was a curse. Wellington paid no heed as he worked his fingers along the muddy pants leg.
“Broken,” he pronounced. “Pretty bad, I’d say. We’ve got to get him to a doctor.”
Henry didn’t know what to say. The nearest doctor was a lot of miles, a lot of paddling, a lot of portages away. How did he explain that to a man looking to him for help?
Thunder Bay (Cork O'Connor Mysteries) Page 12
