Trickster's Point Read online

  The names on Meloux’s list were all familiar to Cork, and, for almost all of them, he could see neither the reason nor the twisted moral fiber that would result in sending an arrow into Jubal Little’s heart. But there were two possibilities that did stand out. The first was Isaiah Broom, the man who’d brought the news of Jubal’s death to Crow Point. All his life, Broom had been an agitator and activist on behalf of the Iron Lake Ojibwe and, during Jubal Little’s gubernatorial campaign, had been an outspoken opponent. Cork had seen raging anger in the huge Shinnob enough times to believe he might be capable of murder.

  The other name was Winona Crane.

  “Winona hunts in the old way?” he asked.

  “Sam Winter Moon told me that she was as good a hunter as he had ever taught.”

  The door opened, and Rainy stepped in, bringing with her not only the wet chill from outside but also the good smell of freshly baked biscuits. “Breakfast’s ready,” she said brightly.

  * * *

  After they’d eaten, Meloux said, “When you told me last night about the voice from the woods, I thought maybe it was a manidoo.” He was speaking of the spirits that, in his unique understanding, filled the world around him. “But it was not a manidoo who came knocking last night with that arrow. I have been out already this morning, looking.”

  “Did you find tracks?”

  “None that these old eyes could see.”

  Through Meloux’s windows, Cork observed that the clouds seemed to be hanging lower and lower, and he knew that very soon they could deliver icy rain or more sleet or even snow, so that whatever tracks there might be would be obscured. “I’ll have a look myself.”

  “Mind if I come?” Rainy asked.

  “Go,” Meloux said to her before Cork had a chance to respond. “From me, you learn to heal. From Corcoran O’Connor, you learn to hunt.”

  “I don’t intend to shoot anyone, Uncle Henry,” Rainy told him.

  “Not today, perhaps,” the old man said with an enigmatic smile. He waved them out. “I will clean the dishes.”

  Cork and Rainy pulled on their coats and stepped outside. The wind was up again, and the air was damp and held a sharp chill. The temperature, Cork figured, was just above freezing. This kind of weather was harder on him than the most bitter winter blows. The damp wind seemed to push right through his outerwear and drove spikes of wet cold into all the bones of his body. He flipped his coat collar up and drew on his gloves and snugged his cap more firmly on his head. Though she zipped her own coat up to the neck, Rainy seemed less bothered by the weather.

  “Where do we begin?” she asked.

  Cork said, “The door of your cabin faces west. That’s where the arrow came from. Let’s head that way and see what we find.”

  He made a long arc in front of the cabin five yards out, moved another five yards distant and walked another arc in the opposite direction. In this way, he moved farther and farther from the cabin, studying the meadow for signs. All he found was evidence of Meloux’s attempt at tracking. There’d been no hard freeze yet that season, and last night’s sleet had mostly melted, so the ground was clear and soft. He knew that if there had been anything, even Meloux, with his bad eyes, would have found it.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” Rainy asked. “Footprints?”

  “Not just a print, although that would be helpful. The meadow grass is long and dead, so if someone had walked here there’d be stalks bent or broken. If someone knew what they were doing and didn’t want to leave a trail, they wouldn’t have come into the meadow.”

  “Why are you looking here then?”

  “Eliminating possibilities.”

  Rainy pointed to the west. Fifty yards distant stood a tall rock outcropping in a roughly semicircular shape. Beyond it lay the fire ring where Meloux often conducted ceremonies of one kind or another. “If I were going to shoot an arrow from someplace that wouldn’t leave a trace, I’d shoot from those rocks.”

  Cork said, “That would be my first choice, too.”

  “Then why aren’t we looking there?”

  He stopped and turned to her. She wore a gray wool cap that she’d knitted herself. Her black hair was done in a long braid that disappeared beneath the back collar of her coat, but loose wisps fluttered about her face in the wind, dancing restlessly across the tawny skin of her cheeks. Her eyes were the color of cherrywood, and were intense with her desire to understand and to learn. In that moment, out of all context of his purpose that morning, Cork was struck by how beautiful she was to him. He cupped her face in his gloved hands and kissed her and felt how soft her lips were against his own and, despite all the cold that drove against them, how warm they were.

  She seemed caught by surprise. “What was that for?”

  “Appreciation,” he said.

  She smiled. “I like being appreciated. But what for?”

  “Just being here,” he said. “I like being with you. I like not being alone in this.”

  She reached up and touched his cheek. “I love you, Cork O’Connor. I’m happy being the one who makes you not alone.”

  Cork felt another kind of kiss against his face, the wet kiss of snow. He looked up and saw flakes beginning to fall.

  “Okay,” he said, returning of necessity to their task, “the rocks would be my choice for shooting the arrow, but it’s an incredibly difficult shot. First of all, it’s more than fifty yards away. The odds of hitting the door from that distance aren’t great. And when you factor in the dark . . .” He shook his head.

  “Night-vision goggles?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or a nightscope of some kind mounted on the bow. They have them. But think about the wind. It’s stiff this morning, but it was even stronger last night. It would take a phenomenal bow hunter to pull off that shot. Even Jubal Little, who was the best I ever saw, would have been hard-pressed.”

  Rainy looked up at the slant of snowflakes the wind was shoving out of the sky. “We should take a look pretty quick, shouldn’t we?”

  There was a path from Meloux’s cabin to the rocks, and they followed it. As they walked, Cork studied the ground, which was worn bare from the passage of countless feet, but he saw nothing of interest. The path cut through the rocks, and as soon as they were on the other side, Cork and Rainy were hit by the smell of char. Black ash lay deep inside the stone circle of the fire ring, and around the circle sat sections of wood cut for sitting. It was an area that had a sacred feel to Cork. He’d seen great healing occur there. But it was also a place that, on more than one occasion, had been the scene of violent death. Meloux consecrated and reconsecrated the ground, and Cork had come to accept that it reflected the way of life as Kitchimanidoo had created it, of dark side by side with light, of peace cheek and jowl with conflict.

  Almost immediately he found something.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to the rock outcropping on the east side.

  Rainy looked where he’d indicated but shook her head. “I don’t see anything.”

  Cork ran his index finger along a faint line of dirt across the slope of a rock. “A boot left this. My guess would be as someone climbed to the top for a shot at your door.”

  Cork ascended the outcropping, looking for another sign.

  “Anything?” Rainy called from below.

  “No.” He came back down.

  “How can you be sure it was left last night?”

  He took off his glove and touched the line of dirt. “Still damp,” he said. He turned. “There’s going to be evidence of that boot somewhere on the ground.”

  Rainy said, “I see all kinds of tracks here.”

  “Old tracks,” Cork said.

  Beyond the fire ring, a dozen yards to the west, lay the shore of Iron Lake, which was lined with aspens whose branches had gone bare with the season. The lake surface was choppy in the wind, and the low clouds seemed to breathe gray into the water. Cork walked to where fallen aspen leaves covered the lakeshore.

  “Here,
” he said and knelt. “Do you see?”

  Rainy stood beside him and looked at the short stalk of wild oat that he indicated. “It’s broken,” she said.

  “Broken in one place, yes, but creased in two others,” Cork pointed out. “The stalk broke under the weight of the boot, which forced it down. Then the boot pressed it into the ground and created these two creases on either side of the sole. The distance between the two creases gives us an indication of the width of the boot. It’s good sized. Makes me think it’s a man.”

  “How do you know that’s not an old track?”

  “Damp dirt on the stalk, just like on the rock over there.” Then Cork nodded toward the lake. “And you can see faintly where his boots have pressed into those fallen aspen leaves.”

  Rainy said, “He came from the lake.”

  Cork nodded. “Probably by canoe, since we didn’t hear a motor.”

  “But you heard him speak in the woods before you got here.”

  Cork shrugged. “Maybe Henry was right and that was a manidoo. But it’s more likely that whoever it was knew I’d be coming here and arrived ahead of me and hid until I came down the trail and then followed me. It’s someone who knew I’d come here.” He nodded with a grudging admiration. “A good hunter knows the pattern of his quarry.”

  “So, someone who knows you well?”

  “Not necessarily. We haven’t been exactly covert in our relationship, Rainy. It’s pretty common knowledge, at least on the rez. And long before you came to Crow Point, I was out here all the time looking to Henry for advice, spiritual and otherwise.”

  “You think this might have been a Shinnob?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Is it the same person who killed Jubal Little?”

  “It could be, but if you were the murderer, would you keep offering clues that might lead back to you? And if you’d spent a lot of time trying to point the finger of guilt somewhere else, why muddy the waters with something like this?”

  “So, two different people, you think?”

  “I can’t say that at this point either. I don’t know my quarry yet, so I don’t know his pattern.”

  “His? You’re sure it’s not a woman?”

  “If it is, she has awfully large feet.”

  “If I were a woman and wanted to throw you off, I might wear big boots. Just a thought.”

  “A good one,” Cork allowed.

  Rainy offered him a sad little smile. “You really have no idea what’s going on, do you?”

  “Nope. Do you?”

  “I can tell you two things. The murderer is someone who didn’t particularly care for Jubal Little. And it’s someone who doesn’t particularly care for you. Implicating you kills two birds with one stone, you see?”

  Cork stared at the restless gray water of Iron Lake. The wind was out of the west, carrying snow like ash from a distant fire. Despite his coat and gloves and cap, he was cold to the bone. “Jubal’s murder was well planned,” he said. “The killer knew we’d be hunting at Trickster’s Point, probably had known for a while. He probably knew that eventually Jubal and I would separate, and maybe even knew where. If I understood how that was possible, I’m betting I’d be pretty close to figuring out who it was.”

  “It’s got to be someone who knows you, Cork. Someone who knows you pretty well,” Rainy said. This understanding clearly troubled her.

  “There’s a positive side,” Cork replied in a voice as cold as that late autumn wind. “I know them, too.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Cork said good-bye to Rainy and Meloux and walked back to his Land Rover. It was Sunday morning. He glanced at his watch. A few minutes before ten. The bell would be ringing at St. Agnes, calling the faithful to Mass. He wondered if Jenny and Waaboo and Stephen were going that morning. Usually they all went together, which Cork enjoyed very much. He didn’t think of himself as particularly devout, but church was something that they did as a family, and in Cork’s life, family, even more than God, took center stage. God was generally a distant ideal, but a hug from one of his children or the sound of Waaboo’s giggling were things wonderfully real to him and blessedly comforting and, in their way, sacred.

  The wind had died. The temperature had risen a few degrees, and the snow had turned to a light drizzle that, every so often, dripped off the bill of his cap. The woods, as he walked the trail, were still and quiet. Although the air was filled with the scent of evergreen, it was the smell of wet earth that he noticed, of all the summer growth that was dead now, of leaves gone gold or red or brown and fallen and lay wet and rotting, becoming again the earth from which they sprang. Usually, when he walked this familiar trail, his heart was light, but now all he could think about was death. Cork felt overwhelmed by the weight of all those in his history whom he’d loved and who’d died violently. His father, his good friend Sam Winter Moon, his wife, and now Jubal Little.

  He stopped and wondered: Had he really loved Jubal?

  * * *

  In the first spring after Cork’s father died, Sam Winter Moon had given Cork a gift, a recurve bow that Sam had made himself. Cork had rifle-hunted with his father, but that was something so many in the North Country did. There were bow hunters as well, but not many men hunted as Sam Winter Moon did, stalking in the old way, and Cork had heard of no one who equaled Sam’s prowess with a bow. He longed to learn, but his father had once told him that Sam had to make the offer. It was not a skill he shared lightly. And it was one he shared only with those in whom the blood of The People ran. When Sam gave Cork that beautiful, handmade recurve bow, Cork understood it was the invitation he’d been waiting for.

  All that spring and through the summer, Sam Winter Moon taught him the way of the bow. Sam had a cabin on the Iron Lake Reservation, and whenever he could get away from his burger joint, he and Cork would head out to the cabin, where Sam had a workbench and tools—nocking pliers, a broadhead wrench, a fletching stripper and fletching jig, taper tools, an arrow saw. Sam taught Cork the proper way to make and true an arrow, splice feathers for fletching, and although he used manufactured broadhead tips for his hunting, how to make an arrowhead from a chunk of flint. First he taught Cork to shoot at stationary targets, usually a hay bale on which Sam painted circles and a bull’s-eye. Once Cork was able to group the arrows tightly, Sam set up a moving target, a stuffed rabbit he’d affixed to the center of a short two-by-four board mounted on tricycle wheels, which he pulled in rapid jerks across the yard while Cork attempted to send an arrow into its heart. He tossed small burlap pillows stuffed with dried grass into the air to simulate the sudden flight of a game bird. He taught Cork how to move carefully, soundlessly through the forest, and the signs to watch for as he stalked. Finally, in the fall, they began to hunt small game. Cork was clumsy at first, but Sam was patient, and eventually Cork’s arrows began to find their marks. In that first year, they didn’t hunt large game, but Cork continued to bring down anything edible, and to offer to the elders of the Iron Lake Ojibwe more rabbit, grouse, wild turkey, and duck than they’d probably had since before the white man came.

  The next fall, he and Sam hunted white-tail deer. It was challenging in a way that rifle hunting with his father had never been. To kill a deer required that he be almost close enough to hear it breathing. It was a shockingly intimate experience, and after he’d brought down his first buck, he understood why it was necessary for his own spirit that he sing to the spirit of the animal he’d killed, that he explain the violence and promise the beautiful creature that his body would feed The People, and they would be grateful.

  In the spring of his freshman year, Cork ran track for Aurora High School. He was tall and had long legs, and his specialty was hurdles. Jubal was on the track team, too, and whatever Jubal did—and he could do just about anything—he did well. The one thing he refused to do was run hurdles. Cork understood that it was, in a way, a gift Jubal was offering him.

  Cork wanted to offer something in return, something important, and
he asked Sam Winter Moon if he’d be willing to teach Jubal how to hunt in the old way. He knew that it was a skill Jubal wanted desperately to learn, but Cork had so far refused to ask Sam to teach him. He’d refused for two reasons, both purely selfish. First, if Sam agreed to teach Jubal Little, Jubal would undoubtedly become better at it than Cork. And second—and more important—it meant that Cork would have to share with Jubal the man who now, in many ways, filled the gap left when Cork’s father died. In his own mind, however, Cork had begun to think of Jubal as a brother, and so he finally decided to offer this gift. But Sam said no.

  “It’s something I share with Shinnobs,” he told Cork.

  “What if Jubal was Indian but not Shinnob?” Cork asked.

  Sam shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. That boy’s white.” Then Cork saw a little glint in Sam’s dark eyes. “But if he was Indian, I suppose I might.”

  Cork talked to Jubal, who was reluctant to share the secret of his blood, even with Sam Winter Moon. Cork told him that he suspected Sam already knew, and Jubal seemed taken aback.

  “You said something to him,” Jubal accused.

  “No, honest I didn’t. But if you told him, he’d keep your secret, I know he would. And he’d teach you to hunt like he does, I swear.”

  In the end, Jubal agreed, and when he’d told Sam the truth of his past, Winter Moon said, “The white man took almost everything from us and gave us in return mostly disease and alcohol. But there’s one thing he can’t take from us unless we let him, and that’s our dignity, Jubal. There’s a great heritage in being Indian. I’ll teach you to hunt in the old way, but in return, I want you to begin to think of yourself in a different way. Accept that the blood of your Blackfeet father flows in you, and be proud of that, even if you don’t say a word about it to anyone. Deal?”

  Jubal thought it over and nodded seriously. And that, as it turned out, led to the first time Cork had seen murder in Jubal Little’s eyes.

  * * *

  In the fall a few weeks before Cork turned sixteen, he went hunting in the old way with Jubal Little and Sam Winter Moon. They drove in Sam’s old pickup to an area on the eastern edge of the rez, where the backsides of the Sawtooth Mountains were visible in the distance. It was an area well known to the Ojibwe, an area in which big bucks were often taken.