Wellington’s eyes moved past Henry. Woodrow was slogging toward them across the marsh, rifle in hand. His eyes dropped to the moose as he passed.
“Can you walk?” he asked Lima.
“Fucking Christ no,” the man replied, as if Woodrow had asked the world’s stupidest question.
“We can carry him,” Wellington suggested.
Woodrow shook his head. “Too far. We would only hurt him more. There is another way.” He motioned to Henry. “Come with me.”
“Where are you going?” Wellington grabbed Woodrow’s arm.
Woodrow shot him a hard, dark look, and Wellington let go. “We will be back,” Woodrow said. He turned away and made for the break in the ridges.
Henry followed to the place where Woodrow had hidden his canoe. They paddled back to camp.
“Take the ax,” Woodrow instructed. “Cut three saplings seven feet long. Strip the branches, then cut one of the saplings in half. Bring them back here.”
Henry did as he’d been told. When he returned, he found Woodrow waiting with rope cut into many sections of varying lengths. His uncle lashed the saplings together in a rectangle seven feet long and half that wide. He tied the sections of rope across the frame in a kind of mesh hammock.
A travois, Henry realized. They were going to lay the white man on it and haul him out of the woods.
They placed Woodrow’s construction across the gunwales of the canoe. Before they shoved off, Woodrow fixed Henry with a cold stare.
“I have never seen a better shot from a hunter.”
Henry looked down. “Kitchimanidoo must have guided me,” he said, giving credit to the Great Spirit.
“Me,” Woodrow replied, “I would have left them to the moose.” Henry’s moment of pride in the beauty of his kill shot was shattered.
“It is done,” Woodrow said, and he spoke of it no more.
At the marsh, they lifted Lima onto the travois. The man cried out, but once he was settled in the rope hammock, he grew quiet. Woodrow had fashioned a harness, which he shouldered himself.
To Henry he said, “Cut meat from the moose and bring it.” Then he began the labor of hauling the injured man to the canoes.
They broke camp immediately. The rest of that day they retraced the route they’d followed coming in. Woodrow paddled the canoe in which Lima lay. Henry took the stern of the other with Wellington in the bow. At every portage, they lifted Lima onto the travois, and Woodrow pulled him to the next lake. Henry and Wellington each shouldered a canoe and double packs that were slung across both chest and back. It was exhausting work, and they went much slower than when they’d entered the wilderness.
They took three days to reach the place where Luukkonen had dropped them.
“What now?” Wellington asked after they’d pulled the canoes onto shore. “That outfitter won’t be here for a week.”
“You and me, we will walk the logging road,” Woodrow replied. “If we are lucky, a truck will pick us up.”
“Why both of us?”
“Because a logging truck will not stop for an Indian.”
“We leave Carlos alone with the boy?”
“He is not a boy. And he will care for your friend.”
Wellington seemed to understand that there was no choice. He knelt beside Lima. “I’ll be back, Carlos. I’ll bring a doctor. We’ll get you fixed up, eh.”
Lima’s eyes were bloodshot and shaded yellow. He squeezed Wellington’s hand in parting.
Henry made camp. He constructed a lean-to that would shelter Carlos Lima from the sun and would keep the water off him if it rained. He gathered firewood. He made stew from the last of the moose meat and wild rice and dried mushrooms, which he fed to Lima in small spoonfuls.
That night he heard the howl of a wolf pack nearby. Had they caught the scent of Lima, he wondered, an animal injured and vulnerable to attack? Henry kept watch with a cartridge in the chamber of his rifle.
Midmorning the next day, the men returned in Luukkonen’s pickup. They brought a doctor. While the physician examined Lima’s leg, the outfitter hovered over his shoulder and shook his head.
“You’re lucky it was Woodrow with you,” he told Wellington.
Wellington scowled at Henry and his uncle. “I’ve been thinking. It strikes me as odd that you two just happened to be around when that moose charged. I’m thinking you were following us.”
Henry didn’t know what to say, but Woodrow spoke immediately.
“Your safety was our responsibility. We could not keep you safe if we could not see you.”
“Forget it, Leonard,” Lima said, grimacing. “There’s nothing for us here. I hate this place. I will never come back.”
The doctor stood. “We need to get him to my office right away if we’re going to save that leg.”
They put Lima in the bed of the pickup.
Luukkonen spoke quietly to Woodrow. “I’ll come back for you and Henry directly. And I’ll see to it these men pay the full two weeks. You’ve earned it.”
Henry stood beside his uncle and watched the pickup disappear along the trail into the trees to the south. For a long time he could hear the growl of the engine and the clatter of the suspension. When he could hear it no more, he turned to Woodrow.
His uncle stared at the place where the truck and the men had gone. “Lima said they would not be back.” His eyes slid to Henry. “The hand of Kitchimanidoo.” He nodded once in sober agreement and, Henry thought, acceptance, because Woodrow had believed they were better dead.
“What now, Uncle?”
Woodrow drew a tobacco pouch from his shirt pocket. “First we give thanks.” He turned in a circle, sprinkling a bit to the north, west, south, and east, and finally dropping a little in the center of the circle. “Now I’m going into the lake and wash away the smell of the white men.” He leaned toward Henry and sniffed. “And you, Nephew, you could outstink a skunk.”
Woodrow walked to the lake. Henry stood a little longer looking in the direction the truck had gone. Kitchimanidoo had saved the white men. Why, Henry couldn’t say. It didn’t matter. He was rid of them. He would never have to see them again.
Or so he believed.
TWENTY-THREE
For the next two years Henry continued to live with his uncle on Crow Point, growing well into his manhood, strong in body and spirit, and strong in his resolve to live the old ways. He saw unhappy changes continue to creep onto the reservation. Some Shinnobs managed to purchase automobiles, and the dust they raised could be seen above the trees, like smoke from a spreading fire. In Allouette there was electricity and plans for a telephone line. There were radios and, in Aurora, access to movies. He sometimes ran into young Shinnobs who’d graduated from the boarding schools and they told him about jazz and Charlie Chaplin and dances like the Charleston and the shimmy. He heard that the Ojibwe on the Red Lake Reservation had created a lucrative commercial-fishing industry and were selling tons of netted walleye to retailers in Minneapolis and St. Paul and Chicago. White people had always believed that what they had was what the Ojibwe should aspire to. That seemed to be the growing sentiment among Shinnobs on the rez as well. As more and more whites crowded the forests, the Ojibwe, in the things they wanted and in the dreams they had, came more and more to resemble them.
There was another change, this one more personal. In the summer he turned eighteen, Henry fell in love. It was Woodrow’s fault.
“There’s a girl,” his uncle said one day when he’d returned from town. “She lost her folks years ago and went to a government school in Wisconsin. She knows your sisters there. Her name is Broken Wing.”
“Dilsey,” Henry said. He remembered her from long ago. She’d already gone to the boarding school at Hayward, Wisconsin, before he was sent to Flandreau. She was younger than he, and Henry remembered her as scrawny and silly.
“She has come back to teach on the rez,” Woodrow said. “She is staying with her mother’s uncle.”
Henry was concen
trating on cutting strips of birch bark to use in making a torch for spearfishing that night. Without looking up he said, “So?”
“Go to Allouette, Nephew. See her.”
Henry couldn’t imagine why he’d want to see the girl, but he did as his uncle suggested.
He didn’t find her in town; he was directed to the mission. It was late afternoon when he arrived. The shadows of the trees at the western edge of the clearing were growing long, turning the meadow grass a brooding blue. Henry approached the clapboard building. He heard her voice first, high and beautiful, singing words to a song he didn’t know.
“ ‘Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today ...’ ”
He stepped through the open door into the one-room building. He was startled to find not the scrawny, silly girl he remembered, but a woman with long coal black hair and smart brown eyes. She was arranging books on a shelf along one wall of the mission. His shadow slid into the room ahead of him, and seeing it, she stopped singing and turned.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Dilsey?”
“Who are you?”
What Henry wanted to say was, The man you’re going to marry. What came off his tongue was, “Uh ... uh ...”
The rest of his efforts at courting weren’t much better. For all his skill in the forest, his knowledge of the plants and the animals, his legendary prowess with his rifle, he was an awkward suitor. Dilsey seemed amused by him, but not moved in the same way as he. When, in the spring of the following year, a white teacher from Chicago named Liam O’Connor came to Allouette to open a real school on the reservation, Dilsey’s true affections quickly and obviously settled on the newcomer, whom she soon married. This left Henry cold and bitter.
“You sit and scowl like an old badger,” Woodrow declared not long after. “Get up, Nephew. It is time to build.”
For the rest of that summer and into the early fall, Henry labored with his uncle to cut and lay the logs for a one-room cabin on Crow Point. The logs were cedar, and the roof was cedar covered with birch bark. Woodrow arranged for floor planks to be cut at the mill in Brandywine, which was owned and operated by Shinnobs.
When the first snow fell in early November, the cabin was finished. It was a blessing because, in the depth of the winter that followed, Woodrow fell ill. There were no doctors on the reservation. Henry turned to Dollie Bellanger, who was a Mide, a healer, to do what she could for Woodrow. The winter was long and harsh, and life slipped further and further from his body, until all that was left one overcast day in April were a few ragged breaths and his final words to Henry:
“My life with you has been good, Nephew. Do not be alone now.”
Henry buried Woodrow in the cemetery behind the mission. Despite his uncle’s advice, he remained alone in the cabin on Crow Point. There were relatives across the rez, uncles and aunts and cousins, but Henry kept away from them all. He tried to disappear into the forest, but it seemed an empty place without Woodrow. Finally he simply settled into the cabin and did not leave.
In the early fall, more than four months after Woodrow died, as Henry fished from the rocks along the shore of Iron Lake, he spotted a canoe gliding toward him from the south. In a few minutes, he could make out that it was Luukkonen, the outfitter. Although he’d had offers to guide after his uncle passed away, Henry had turned them all down. He had no need of money, and going into the wilderness without Woodrow was still too hard.
Luukkonen pulled up to shore. “Anin,” he greeted Henry, formally and cordially.
“What do you want?” Henry replied.
The outfitter stepped from his canoe and, though he hadn’t been invited, sat down near Henry. He smoothed his walrus mustache and watched Henry’s fishing line in the water.
“A man come looking for your uncle dis morning,” he finally began. “I told him Woodrow had gone to his reward and he asked about you. Wants to hire you.”
“I don’t guide anymore.”
“I told him dat. He’s pretty stubborn, dis one.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know it’s hard for you in dese woods. I imagine everywhere you go reminds you of Woodrow. But dis is different, Henry. He wants to go way up nort. Canada.”
Henry began to reel in his line. He was tired of talking to the man.
“I don’t want to go to Canada.”
“You ever been in a airplane, Henry? Dis man, he’s going to fly you up dere. Sounds pretty good.”
“I’m not interested.”
Luukkonen leaned nearer. “Henry, I’m tinking it would be good for you. I’m tinking you need to get away for a while.”
Away.
Away hadn’t occurred to Henry. Away meant the boarding school in Flandreau. Or for Dilsey and his sisters, the school in Wisconsin. Or for his parents and Woodrow and so many others on the rez, away simply meant death.
“Dere’s nutting for you here right now, Henry. Go away for a while. Maybe when you come back, tings will be different.”
The outfitter was right. What was there for him here? What he loved had passed or was passing. Go away, Luukkonen advised. The Finn was offering him a different kind of away than he’d thought of before, one that suddenly and powerfully appealed to Henry.
“All right,” he agreed.
“One ting I didn’t tell you,” Luukkonen said. “Dis man who wants you. You know him. His name is Wellington. Leonard Wellington.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Wellington had changed little. He didn’t seem as tall to Henry, who’d grown several inches since their last meeting. His hair was thinner. But he still had a hatchet blade for a nose and a too proud look in his eyes.
Wellington stared at Henry with astonishment.
“Christ, you’ve filled out,” he said. “Left that boy you were a good distance back, eh.” He offered his hand. It was tanned and rough. “I was sorry to hear about your uncle, but awfully glad to have you on the expedition. Luukkonen told me you understood the terms.”
They had been simple. Henry agreed to sign on for as long as necessary at five dollars a week. He was to maintain camp, provide fresh meat and other native food to supplement the supplies, and see to the safety of the expedition members, meaning Wellington and his partner, Carlos Lima. “As long as necessary” was vague, but Henry wasn’t concerned. He didn’t care how long he was gone. And he could already feel fall in the air and knew that it wouldn’t be long before winter closed the door to any expedition far to the north.
“Well then.” Wellington rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Let’s get started.”
Henry had canoed past a floatplane tethered to the dock behind the outpost. He’d seen a few such planes. Sometimes men used them to reach lakes deep in the Northwoods without having to paddle and portage their way in. It struck Henry as not only lazy but disrespectful to the spirits of the deep forest.
Yet here he was throwing the propeller to help Wellington start the plane and then climbing afterward into the belly of the beast with the same purpose in mind. Wellington had observed that the boy Henry had been was far behind him. As he felt the plane glide across the surface of Iron Lake and lift free of Grandmother Earth, it seemed to Henry that he’d never been so far from who he’d thought he would become.
To see the earth as an eagle would, what magic. The lakes like puddles of rainwater in deep grass. The high, formidable ridges no more than wrinkles. The great woods a green sea stretching away as far as he could see. Once inside the plane, Wellington didn’t speak to Henry. He sat at the controls and seemed deep in thought. The plane had only two seats and Henry wondered where he would sit once Lima was aboard. There was an empty area in the rear that Henry suspected was waiting to be filled with supplies. He also suspected he’d end up there, too. He didn’t care.
Near noon, a great shining water appeared ahead of them. The plane began its descent.
Wellington finally spoke to Henry. “Lake Superior.”
Kitchigami, Henry thought. He’d never se
en the big water, though it was well known to him.
As they flew over the squat buildings of a town below, Wellington spoke again. “Fort William. And up there across the river, that’s Port Arthur.”
Canada, Henry understood.
The plane landed smoothly and motored to a dock where Henry saw two people waiting. One he recognized. Carlos Lima. The other was a woman about Henry’s age.
“Damn,” Wellington swore under his breath then cut the engine.
Lima tied the plane to the dock. Wellington opened his door and stepped down. Henry followed him. Lima had changed, grown visibly older. He’d put on weight and his mustache was thicker, with a dullness to it that made Henry think of a little gray mouse. Lima looked on him with the same disdain he’d had in the summer Henry saved his life.
Thunder Bay (Cork O'Connor Mysteries) Page 13
