Desolation Mountain Read online

  “Not lost. But I’ve been in battles like these before. There are always casualties.” He changed the subject abruptly. “Talked to Stephen lately?”

  “I’ve tried. He’s burrowed deep inside himself.”

  “He’s like a sleepwalker. I tell him something, and, poof, it’s gone from his head.”

  Rainy flipped her long black braid so that it hung at an angle between her breasts. Her fingers slowly traced the strands of the plaiting, in a way that made Cork think of rosary beads. “I’m wondering if he’s seen something.”

  “I’ve wondered that, too. But it could be just that he’s getting used to college. Or maybe it’s Marlee. There’s nothing like a woman to addle a guy’s brain.”

  “I’m going to ignore that remark,” Rainy said. “He hasn’t gone out with Marlee Daychild in weeks. And he just seems so unsettled. More and more I’m thinking he’s had another vision, Cork. And I think this one scares him.”

  They both knew Stephen had a right to be afraid. Before the bullet that caused his limp was fired, Stephen saw the man who would shoot him in a vision. He saw his mother’s death years before it happened. He saw the threat from a monster, a murderer of young women who’d called himself Windigo and who’d tried to kill Cork and Jenny. It hadn’t escaped their notice that Stephen’s visions had always foreshadowed terrible things.

  Cork said, “I wish he’d share what he’s seen.”

  “It would be an unburdening,” Rainy said.

  “Practically speaking, it might help us get ready for whatever’s coming.”

  “Something to do with the proposed pit mine, you think?”

  For years, a large corporation had been at work to secure the permits necessary to begin a huge open-pit mining operation that would extract copper, nickel, and a number of heavy metals from an area adjacent to both the Iron Lake Reservation and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. In Tamarack County, a region once wealthy because of the iron ore that underlay everything, the issue had been divisive. With the iron mines having closed or closing and good-paying jobs evaporated, there was a considerable element applauding the possibility of the return of industry. On the other side were the Iron Lake Ojibwe and many other groups who feared that the mine would ruin the pristine wilderness and the clean water. Their fears weren’t unfounded. While iron mining had brought wealth, at least for a time, it had made much of the North Country resemble the barren surface of the moon.

  “I’m thinking something more personal.” Cork put his hand over hers as she worked her braid, stilled it. “He talks to Henry. Could you talk to Henry?”

  “I can try. But what’s between Uncle Henry and Stephen will probably stay between them, unless Stephen indicates otherwise.”

  “Maybe a sweat?”

  “Until Stephen is ready to share, he’ll be as hard to crack as a walnut.”

  “A sweat couldn’t hurt.”

  “I’ll suggest it. You smell good, by the way. Like French fries. How’d the new Waaboo Burger do?”

  “A winner. Everybody loved the bison patty, and everyone who knows our grandson loved the name.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me a bit. The world loves Waaboo.”

  Rainy picked up a book from the nightstand and prepared to read. It was a novel titled Downwind of the Devil. The author was Jennifer O’Connor. When she wasn’t helping run Sam’s Place or involved in all she did as mother and wife, Jenny wrote stories. Downwind of the Devil was her first published novel, a fictionalized account of the hunt for a missing Ojibwe girl, in which she and her father and the monster who called himself Windigo were deeply involved. It had done well enough that Jenny was under contract for a second novel. She wouldn’t tell her family what it was about, but they all suspected it would be another telling of a story in which some of them played a part.

  Cork picked up the book he’d been reading every night for a week, To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the many American classics he’d never read, but one that both Jenny and Rainy had insisted he should. Within ten minutes, his eyes fluttered closed. He felt Rainy slip the book from his hands, turn out the light, and he was wrapped in a blanket of sleep.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  Next morning, well before sunrise, Cork heard Stephen leave the house. He slid from bed and stood at the window, watching Stephen walk away in the blue, early light, and his heart twisted. His son was struggling and Cork didn’t know how to help. Rainy had advised patience. Which was the same advice her great-uncle Henry Meloux might have offered. Good advice, Cork knew, but it didn’t mean he wouldn’t suffer along with his son. He dressed quietly, hit the bathroom, went downstairs to make coffee. A few minutes later, he stood on the front porch, sipping from the steaming mug in his hand and breathing in the cool air of approaching dawn. Gooseberry Lane was quiet, the neighbors still abed.

  With the exception of a few years as a cop in Chicago, he’d lived in Aurora, Minnesota, his whole life. His roots on his mother’s side went back to a time long before white men muscled their way into the North Country and began the destruction of the natural order, a ravaging that had never really ended. His Anishinaabe heritage might not show on his face, but it shaped his conscience. As he stood in the cool, evergreen-scented air, in the fresh feel of that fall morning, he understood the calm probably wouldn’t last. He was more and more certain that Stephen had had a vision, seen something, and the things that Stephen saw had always been monstrous.

  He picked up the morning paper from where it had been thrown under the porch swing and headed back inside. Rainy was awake and up, pouring coffee from the pot he’d made. He heard footsteps coming downstairs, heavy, probably Daniel English, his son-in-law, ready for work. Daniel was an officer with the Iron Lake Ojibwe Department of Conservation Enforcement. When explaining, he generally referred to himself as a game warden. Like Jenny, he was a writer, a poet. Like his aunt Rainy, he was full-blood Ojibwe, an enrolled member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

  “That coffee smells good,” he said as he entered the kitchen. He wore his willow-green uniform. Rainy poured him a cup of the brew.

  “You’re up early,” Cork noted.

  “A lot on the agenda today. We’ve had reports of a couple of poachers on the rez. We’ve tried tracking them, but they keep slipping away.”

  “Jenny tells me you won’t be going to the town meeting tonight,” Cork said.

  “I’m on Waaboo duty. Putting our little guy down for the night.” Daniel sipped his coffee and looked satisfied. “You’re not going either, I understand.”

  “Somebody’s got to sell the new Waaboo Burger.”

  Daniel dropped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster. “How’d it go yesterday?”

  “Sold like hotcakes.”

  “Waaboo was excited last night. He kept saying, ‘People are eating me.’ ”

  Rainy laughed. “Everybody could use a little Waaboo in them.”

  After Daniel had gone, Cork put on his jacket and kissed Rainy.

  “You haven’t had breakfast yet,” she said. “Where are you off to?”

  “To talk to Henry.”

  “About Stephen? I’m not sure he’ll tell you much.”

  “Can’t hurt to ask.”

  “I told you I’d talk to Uncle Henry myself.”

  “When will you see him next? Between your clinic work and the town meeting with the senator, your schedule’s packed.” He kissed her again. “Meet you in bed tonight.”

  He drove north out of Aurora, along a graveled county road that followed the shoreline of Iron Lake. The woods were a mix of broadleaf and needle in which autumn had created great islands of gold and red among the evergreens. The cabins along the lake, mostly resorts and summer homes, looked deserted now, but on weekends they were still alive with activity and would continue that way until the leaves had been stripped from the trees and the color was gone. Come winter, the population of Tamarack County would shrink significantly.

/>   He parked at a double-trunk birch several miles north of town, locked his Expedition, and began the long walk through the forest, following a path familiar to him since childhood. The sun was just about to rise, and the strip of clear sky above the path was a pale red, the color of water mixed with blood. On either side of him, the birds, those who had not yet wisely headed south, cried to one another with harsh, territorial challenges. Squirrels chattered at his intrusion. He startled a doe and her two fawns, who bounded away and disappeared among the trees. Everything about the morning and the walk along this familiar path, which normally would have calmed him, felt unsettling. The blood-colored sky, the contentious birds, the angry squirrels, the startled deer, all seemed to signal threat. He thought maybe this was a glimpse of what Stephen must feel when he’d had one of his ominous visions.

  A mile in, he crossed onto rez land. A mile farther, he broke from the trees onto Crow Point. He stood at the beginning of a broad meadow filled with tall grass and with wildflowers still blooming—marigolds and oxeyes and asters and Canadian horseweed. On the far side rose two simple cabins, between them an outhouse. The nearer cabin had been Rainy’s for many years. Now its sole occupant was Rainy’s aunt by marriage, a septuagenarian named Leah Duling. The far cabin had been on Crow Point for more than eight decades and during all that time occupied by Henry Meloux, who was Rainy’s maternal great-uncle and more than a hundred years old.

  Smoke came from the stovepipes on both cabins, but Cork headed toward Meloux’s place. Before he arrived, the door opened.

  “I’ve got oatmeal with walnuts and dried blueberries ready,” Leah said from the threshold. “Henry told me you won’t have eaten.”

  Without any forewarning, Meloux was expecting him, one of the many mysteries of the ancient Mide. Cork found the old man at his small table, a book opened before him. When he was young and a renowned hunter, Meloux’s eyes were like those of an eagle. His vision, though no longer eagle-sharp, was still good enough that he didn’t require glasses. Cork saw that the book was Downwind of the Devil.

  “She tells a good tale, your Jennifer,” Meloux said, looking up. He was a part of the events at the heart of the story. “But she has simplified much.”

  “Most readers aren’t as astute as you, Henry.” Cork removed his jacket and sat with the old man. “I want to talk to you about Stephen. I think he’s had a vision, and I think he’s shared it with you.”

  “First, we have some breakfast,” Meloux said.

  Leah dished up oatmeal for them all and joined them at the table. Meloux gave a blessing in Ojibwemowin, most of which Cork didn’t understand.

  “Maple syrup?” Leah offered.

  Cork knew she’d tapped the trees and boiled down the sap herself. She was well into her seventies, but seemed younger, the effect, Cork suspected, of life on Crow Point in the company of Meloux.

  They ate in silence. The hot oatmeal sat well on Cork’s empty stomach. When the meal was finished, Meloux said, “Let us build a fire, Corcoran O’Connor. We will smoke and talk.”

  Leah wasn’t invited to join them, and she made no comment as Meloux gathered his tobacco pouch and pipe, eased on his old plaid mackinaw, and walked out the door.

  “Migwech, Leah,” Cork said in thanks.

  She glanced where Meloux had gone. “He probably won’t say anything to you, but he’s worried.”

  “About what?”

  Leah shrugged. “He doesn’t say anything to me either.”

  Cork followed Meloux across the meadow along a path that ran between two rock outcrops. On the far side, Iron Lake stretched away, mirroring the morning sky, and near the shoreline was a stone fire ring. Sawed sections of hardwood had been spaced around the ring for sitting, and cut firewood was laid up against one of the outcrops. Cork had helped Meloux build more fires here than he could remember. He gathered wood and kindling, used his pocketknife to curl off dry tinder, built a small tepee at the charred center of the fire ring. Meloux handed him a wooden match, and Cork struck a flame.

  While Cork fed the growing fire, the old man took pinches of the mixture—tobacco and red willow—from his beaded pouch. He offered these to the four directions of the earth, and to the center, then put a bit into the pipe bowl. Cork sat with him. Meloux lit the tobacco mixture and they smoked together, while the fire crackled before them.

  “Something’s coming, Henry,” Cork finally said.

  The old man replied, “You have visions now?”

  “I feel it.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “Unsettled. Watchful.”

  “Afraid?”

  “That, too. Stephen has had a vision.”

  “He told you this?”

  “No, but he’s clearly troubled, and he won’t talk about it. Except to you. He’s shared the vision with you, hasn’t he?”

  “You ask a question I cannot answer.”

  Which Cork took as an answer. He leaned toward the old man. “It must be a frightening vision, because it worries you, too.”

  Meloux’s eyes were soft brown and unreadable. “You see into my heart now?”

  “Leah told me. What is it that you know?”

  “Not the answer you are looking for. But I will tell you this. These woods are alive, and all that is living speaks. To a human who listens, knowledge is given. Stephen listens. Maybe the spirit of what is alive here has spoken to him. Maybe if any man quiets himself enough, he also can hear what is being said.”

  “You’ve listened, Henry. What have you heard?”

  “I was talking about you, Corcoran O’Connor. I believe if you quiet yourself, what it is that you are looking for will become known to you.”

  “I’ve never had a vision.” Cork heard the brusqueness in his voice and tried to calm himself, tamp down his frustration. “I doubt I ever will.”

  “A vision is not everything.” Meloux’s face took on a soft cast. “You have a keen mind, Corcoran O’Connor, and a warrior’s heart. You also have a warrior’s impatience. Quiet yourself. Use your head and your experience and the quiet, and perhaps you will not need a vision.”

  “You listen, Henry, better than Stephen, better than anyone. Can’t you just tell me what you know?”

  Meloux took a good while to answer. The wind shifted. The smoke from the fire drifted across Iron Lake, casting a dark, gray shadow over the blue surface.

  “There is a beast in these woods that does not belong here,” Meloux finally said. “What exactly, I do not know. But it is huge and it is evil. And that is all I can say.”

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  At a quarter to three that afternoon, Stephen turned his steps toward Sam’s Place. He was scheduled to work until closing with his father and with a high school senior named Naomi Burns. The day was warm but overcast, thin clouds muddling the sky. He walked along the streets of Aurora with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slumped. Fallen leaves as colorful as pieces torn from a Mediterranean tapestry littered the sidewalks. Over the course of his twenty years, he’d been down these streets a thousand times, knew them like he knew the lines that crossed his palms. They were part of who he was and also part of what he struggled against. It was comfortable, this small, familiar town, this isolated county. Every day he slid into life there like a finger into a glove. More and more, he’d begun to think that to understand the man he was at heart, he would have to separate himself from all that was familiar.

  His father had abandoned Aurora when he was a young man and spent nearly a decade in Chicago before returning. His sisters, too, had left. College took Jenny away for a long time before she returned and settled down to family life in Aurora. Annie had been gone forever—in Iowa and New Mexico and California and now in South America, for a second time. Stephen had seen only a little of the world, and he’d begun to hunger for more. He’d also started to wonder, if he were far away, would the terrible things he sometimes saw not be able to find him?

  His father was inside Sam’
s Place, preparing for the dinner crowd, which would begin arriving in an hour or so. Naomi was there, small and quiet, with streaks of color like cotton candy in her hair. She stood at the prep table, tossing coleslaw in a big stainless-steel bowl. His father looked up from the burger patties he’d been preparing next to the grill.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Around,” Stephen replied.

  “I tried to call.”

  “I didn’t feel like talking.”

  Cork wiped his hands on some paper toweling. “How about we talk now?” He led the way into the back of the Quonset hut, poured himself some coffee from the pot he’d made earlier, held the mug out in offering to Stephen, who shook his head.

  “I went to see Henry,” his father told him. “I figure you’ve had a vision, and since you won’t talk about it to anyone except maybe him, I went to find out what he knows.”

  Stephen’s first thought was that this was a trespass, that his father had stepped across a line. Then he realized that, in its way, it might be an unshackling. He couldn’t share the vision himself because it felt too personal, too close, and was still too indecipherable. What good would it do to bring others in if it accomplished nothing except to make them as afraid as he was? Now that what he’d seen was in the open, he thought differently. He had no illusions that his father, who could sometimes be a stump when it came to sharing his own emotions, could help him understand the meaning and purpose of the vision. Even Henry had been unable to do that. But he felt as if a weight had been lifted from him, and now his father might help to shoulder some of the burden.

  “So he told you?” Stephen said.

  Cork shook his head. “But he admitted that he believes something bad is out there in the woods, and he doesn’t know what it is. Look, Stephen, I don’t want to intrude on a thing so personal to you as a vision. But if there’s something out there, something really bad, don’t you think it would be best to figure out what it is? Maybe together we can do that.”