Boundary Waters Read online

  There was not much he could say to that, so he turned and moved down the long corridor through the tall grass the others had followed before him. Willie Raye brought up the rear.

  A hundred yards into the grass, they came to the small bay. The canoes were in the water, the gear secured under the midship and stern thwarts. Stormy Two Knives and Louis stood beside one canoe, Sloane and Grimes beside another. Harris looked at his watch irritably.

  Cork nodded agreeably at the canoes that had been chosen. Eighteen-foot Kevlar Prospectors. He said to Raye, “Sturdy, but light for portages.”

  “Will we have to portage much?”

  “I can’t say for sure because I don’t know where we’re going. But you can’t go far in the Boundary Waters without having to portage some. I assume this one’s ours, Harris?” Cork moved to the last canoe.

  “You and Raye. Two Knives and the boy in that one. Sloane and Grimes in the other. Stow your gear and get started,” Harris ordered.

  “Reminds me of a sergeant I had back in ’Nam,” Raye said under his breath. “He didn’t last long, and it weren’t Charlie that got him.”

  Cork secured the packs under the thwarts. “You know how to handle a paddle?” he asked Raye.

  “I’ve run a few rivers in the Ozarks in my day,” Arkansas Willie said. “But if you don’t mind, I’d just as soon you take the stern.”

  “Okay by me.”

  “Two Knives and the boy’ll take the point,” Agent Sloane said. “Grimes and I will follow. O’Connor, you and Raye bring up the rear.”

  Cork steadied the canoe as Willie Raye got in.

  Stormy and Louis’s canoe glided onto the lake, moving fast and smooth. Sloane made his way awkwardly to the bow and nearly tipped his canoe before he took up his paddle. Grimes shoved them off and they moved out.

  Arkansas Willie dug his own paddle into the smooth water of the little bay and asked over his shoulder, “What was it the woman called those guys? Magic something?”

  “Not magic,” Cork said. “Maji. Majimanidoog.”

  “Majimanidoog. What’s that mean?”

  “Majimanidoog.” Cork considered it as they cleared the bay and followed the other canoes onto the body of the lake. “Well, in the Christian tradition,” he finally replied, “I guess you might call them devils.”

  16

  IN THE AFTERNOON, a wind rose up, not strong but steady, and it fought her as she tried to work the canoe across the lake. She was making for a big island with a tall gray cliff along the southern edge and pines over it all, thinking she would stop there awhile and rest. It didn’t seem far, but the wind made everything a struggle.

  In the house in Malibu, she had a weight room. She worked out every day, paid a trainer to guide her toward a perfect body. She did it for business, so that before she went onstage, she could slide into clothing that fit her like a surgical glove. In the Boundary Waters, she didn’t worry about how she looked. She hiked. She swam. She cut wood. She didn’t think of it as exercise, something she had to build into her schedule. The feeling it gave her was different—better—than any workout she’d ever done.

  But she was tired now. She’d been on the lake for hours. The steady wind slapped the water against the bow, and she fought to keep the canoe moving straight. Her arms ached, and she felt blisters rising on her hands. Still, the big island got no closer.

  She remembered crossing the lake with Wendell many weeks before. He’d given her the stern, told her to take them across. The wind had been against them then, too.

  “Yield a little,” Wendell had counseled. “Don’t fight a losing battle. Give in to the wind.” They’d come around and moved with the wind until they reached the lee of an island and used its protection to reset their course.

  She gave up battling, chose a small gathering of rocks to the north, and let the wind help her there. She dragged the canoe half out of the water and lay down on sun-warmed rocks. The wind, no longer an enemy, cooled her. She stared up into the sky and marveled at all the unnoticed elements of the air that drifted by—a long gossamer thread spun and cast by a spider, bits of milkweed fluff, the yellow dust of pollen. After a while, she took a granola bar from her pack and ate it, then drank from her water bottle. She wished she had her guitar. In the hidden cabin, she’d fallen in love again with her music.

  When she was young, especially after her mother had died, she’d used music to grieve. It had flowed out of her like tears. Willie Raye had seen this and encouraged her. Those days were good between the two of them. Later, they fought, often and hard. Willie claimed she was ungrateful and wrongheaded, and maybe she was. But she didn’t see it that way. He sent her away, to boarding schools where she learned to use her music to rebel. At fifteen, she had her own band. Angry punk rock lyrics from a girl who sang with a Tennessee drawl. She didn’t like the music, but it was a formidable weapon. Eventually, Willie Raye offered her a grudging compromise: tone down her music, return to her country roots, and he’d produce her work.

  She was in love again with the music she made and so were those who bought her first CD. It had gone platinum. For a while, she and Willie Raye felt almost like a family again. As near to a family as they’d ever been, anyway. But as always, Willie had to run the show. Eventually, they ended up back at the place where they’d started, on opposite sides of angry words, she screaming that he was not her real father and had no business controlling her life, he hauling up a wretched refrain that was always a variation on ungrateful. At eighteen, with her platinum CD propelling her, she put together her own show and left for Branson, Missouri. And, oh God, did they love her there.

  After Branson, she’d gone to L.A. The heavy drinking and the up-and-down ride on a carousel of drugs had started then. She moved away from her heart, away from the place where her music flowed up like the cool, pure springs of the Boundary Waters. She could write a song in a drugged haze. Her producer would take it, graft on harmonics and instrumentation, give it grit, and she would grind it out for the business, make a video she’d slide through like a snake. Her music sold, sold big, but she hadn’t loved it for a long time. It was like living with a man she loathed but couldn’t leave because he paid the bills.

  She studied the glittering blue of the lake, worked her cramped hands, rolled her aching shoulders. Pulling the map out of her pack, she looked at it a long time, and at the lake, and after a while she began to understand a thing or two. She found the big island with the cliff on the south, found the small protrusion of rocks where she was. She had drifted north of the arrows Wendell had drawn across the lake. The wind would make it hard to get back on line. But if she yielded, if she let the wind help her to the eastern shore, she could hug the shoulder of the land as she worked her way south, to the blue line called the Deertail River that, according to the map, would be her way off the lake.

  She’d grown chilled as she sat idle and she put her jean jacket back on. There was also a chill to the wind itself. She looked up at the sky. High cloud wisps were caught on the sky like down feathers on a blue blanket. Something about the sky disturbed her, although she couldn’t say what, and she drew herself up and moved back to the canoe.

  On the water, she paused a moment. Every part of her body hurt, but there was no help for that now. There was work to be done, and no other to do it but her. She took a breath, shoved down the pain, and dug her paddle into the lake.

  17

  STORMY TWO KNIVES set a hard pace. He never seemed to tire. Partly, this was due to his build, his massive upper body with its foundation in cutting timber and its elaboration in the boredom of prison life. Partly, it was his anger. He stabbed at the water like a man in a killing mood. Louis didn’t complain. When he was tired, he rested his paddle across the gunwales. The canoe never slowed.

  Cork watched the two agents closely. Grimes was an easy read. If he were a dog, he’d have been a pit bull. He struck Cork as an odd type to have been successful in the Bureau. Too independent and dangerously glib with
his authority. Cork wondered what his service file looked like. Rife with reprimands he cared little about, probably. But Cork could tell why Grimes had drawn this assignment. He knew wilderness. He handled a paddle like he was born to it. He was strong on the portages. Cork suspected it was Grimes who’d chosen the canoes and selected the agents’ gear. In a fight, Cork would have appreciated the man on his side.

  Agent Dwight Sloane was a harder read. The authority of the big black man was quiet, considered, even a little reluctant, which was as odd in its way as the heavy-handed enthusiasm of Grimes. He let Louis lead them without comment, questioning the boy occasionally on distance and direction. With Stormy, he was different—hard and watchful. He kept father and son apart on the portages and eyed Stormy intently whenever they rested. Cork knew the gun and the money the agents claimed to have found were part of a frame. Although he’d never stooped to such tactics himself when he’d been a cop, he knew plenty who did and who didn’t feel such zealousness was wrong in the pursuit of justice. Cork had often seen distrust of Indians in the eyes of white men, but it surprised him in Sloane, in the man who’d taken the trouble to learn the meaning of the word ma’iingan.

  By the time sunset was at hand, they’d portaged three times, the longest a muddy hundred rods over bad trail. They double-portaged, leaving some packs behind to be retrieved when the canoes had been successfully carried to the next body of water. It took longer and was harder than Sloane must have imagined. Although he said nothing, his big body moved slower and slower with each hour and each portage.

  The sky was a pure evening blue with the high clouds pink as flamingo feathers when they completed their final portage along a shallow creek called Sandy’s Gold and reached the big body of water Cork knew as Bare Ass Lake.

  “We need to stop,” Sloane grunted. He eased out of the Duluth pack he was carrying that held most of the food and sat down with his back against a tall jack pine. “We should eat something. And I need to do a radio check-in.” But he made no move to do either. He simply closed his eyes.

  Cork scanned the lake. Sandy’s Gold emptied into a small inlet. Beyond that, the water opened up in a rough circle that stretched away to the horizon unbroken by a single island. Officially, it was named Embarrass Lake, and the story was that it was embarrassed because it had no islands. It was known locally as Bare Ass Lake. Same reason.

  “Which way do we go from here, Louis?” Cork asked.

  The boy pointed due north.

  “What’s that mean?” Sloane asked. His eyes were open, just barely.

  “It means we should keep going,” Cork said. “It’ll be a hard paddle to reach the other side before dark, especially if the wind changes.”

  “Why would the wind change?” Sloane asked.

  “I’m not saying it will. But if it does, we could be in trouble.”

  “Then we stay here,” Sloane said.

  “We’ll reach the woman faster if we don’t,” Cork said.

  Sloane let out a big sigh. “Fifteen minutes won’t make much difference either way. Grimes, what have we got to eat?”

  Grimes bent to the pack Sloane had shrugged off. “Jerky,” he said. He glanced at Louis. “And how about a Snickers bar, kid?”

  “What do they call this lake, Louis?” Arkansas Willie asked. He’d been asking every time they reached a new lake. He seemed to love the sound of the Ojibwe names and the stories Louis recounted that he’d been told by his Uncle Wendell.

  “She Does Not Weep,” Louis said.

  Willie Raye sat down on the trunk of a fallen pine. He kneaded the muscles of his upper arm. “Pretty name.”

  “Yeah,” Grimes said. “So what gives?” Although he didn’t seem anxious to admit it, he’d listened as closely as Raye to the stories Louis told.

  Between bites of his Snickers bar, Louis related the story his uncle had told him.

  “Once there was a great hunter who lived here with his wife and children. Everyone said he was the greatest hunter in the world. Nanabozho heard this and was angry because he considered himself the greatest hunter in the world.”

  “Who’s this Nanabozho?” Grimes asked.

  “He’s a spirit full of tricks,” Louis said. “He’s always causing trouble.”

  “You ought to relate,” Raye said to Grimes.

  Grimes only flashed him a grin. “Go on, kid.”

  “One day, when the children were playing alone, Nanabozho disguised himself as a bear and came and snatched them. He hid them in a cave far away, then he returned to the hunter’s wigwam disguised as an old man. He told the hunter he’d seen a huge bear carry away the children. The hunter’s wife was very upset, but her husband assured her she shouldn’t worry. He would hunt the bear and he wouldn’t come back until he found the children. Nanabozho thought it was all very funny. He followed the hunter, and he was surprised at how well the hunter tracked. Within a few days, the hunter had found the cave where Nanabozho had hidden the children. He had won Nanabozho’s admiration. But when they went into the cave, the children weren’t there. The hunter found tracks of the Dakota, a warring tribe, leading from the cave. He vowed to pursue the Dakota until he’d rescued his children. He told Nanabozho, who was still disguised as an old man, to return to his wigwam and give his wife this news. Ashamed, Nanabozho returned. The wife listened and remained very calm. Nanabozho was amazed by her reaction, but she explained that her husband was the greatest hunter in the world and he would bring the children back, even if it took years. She grew old waiting, but she never cried, because she kept on believing in her husband. In the end, Nanabozho turned her into this beautiful lake where she still waits without tears for the return of her husband and her children.”

  “That’s a great story,” Willie Raye said. “And you tell it well, Louis.”

  Grimes scanned the lake, a deep unbroken blue in the late afternoon light. “She Does Not Weep. No tears, right? And those would be islands?” He thought a moment. “So tell me, kid—how does a place get a name like vagina?” and he laughed.

  While Sloane had been on the radio, Cork had been watching the sky. “We should go now,” he said when Sloane finished his transmission.

  Sloane must have heard the urgency in his voice. He looked where Cork was looking and saw what Cork had seen. Rising on the horizon like smoke from a great fire was a thick bank of clouds.

  “On your feet, gentlemen,” Sloane said. “Let’s move out quickly.”

  18

  NEAR SUNSET, the wind shifted suddenly and clouds appeared. They swept out of the northwest, red in the last light of day, angry looking. Halfway across the sky, they turned a sinister black. They swallowed the stars and headed hungrily for the rising moon. Dark came fast. Shiloh didn’t reach the Deertail River, where she would finally leave the big lake. Instead she found a small cove, drew the canoe onto shore, and settled in behind a clumping of big rocks that provided some protection from the cold the shifting wind had brought. She gathered wood. Using her knife, she cut shavings for kindling, one of the first things Wendell had ever taught her, and she built a fire. She poured water into the small cooking pot she’d brought and dumped in one of the packs of dehydrated vegetable soup. When she finally sat down beside the flames to watch the soup warm, she was dead tired. Blisters welted her palms. Her lips were dry and cracked. Her long black hair felt like mowed, dried hay.

  But she knew where she was. And she knew how she’d gotten there. And she’d begun to believe, really believe, that she could get herself out.

  The soup bubbled. The smell of it made her mouth water. She used her gloves as pot holders and moved the small pot off the fire and onto a flat stone. While the soup cooled, she lay back against her own quivering shadow on one of the tall upright rocks and closed her eyes. She’d been afraid to leave the familiar little cabin that morning, but the morning seemed so long ago. Now, full of the day, full of the distance she’d traveled alone on her own, she smiled and felt like singing.

  “Oh, the wate
r is wide,” she began softly with her eyes closed. “I cannot cross o’er. And neither have I wings to fly. Give us a boat that will carry two. And both shall cross, Shiloh and I.” It was a song her mother used to sing to her, and it was one of the first Shiloh had ever learned to play. All her life, whenever she needed comfort, whenever she wanted to express a deep inner peace, whenever she felt—or needed to feel—connectedness, she sang the song. Although she remembered very little of her mother, the song was like an unbroken cord between them.

  She let the feel of the song linger a minute, then she opened her eyes. In the trees ten yards beyond the fire, two embers glowed. Puzzled, she leaned forward and looked carefully. She made out the moist black muzzle between the glowing eyes and, a moment later, caught sight of the flash of huge white canines.

  Terrified, Shiloh stared at the great timber wolf. Out of the darkness, the timber wolf stared back.

  19

  THE DARKNESS THAT SWALLOWED THE MOON, and the wind that rose behind the darkness changed things. Cork moved his canoe to point and used a compass to hold their direction. At first he tried to keep them on line, but eventually he turned west by northwest and quartered across the wind. They couldn’t see the shoreline, nor could they see one another. Cork lashed a flashlight to the stern thwart and called out to the others to do the same so they wouldn’t lose anyone.

  Although Louis had not been able to give any location names recognizable on the map, Cork believed they were headed to the Little Moose River that ran north of Bare Ass Lake. It was a common route to the lakes deeper in the Boundary Waters. To reach the Little Moose, they needed to make a landing in an inlet called Diamond Bay. Once they’d made the landing, the portage to the Little Moose would be easy. But in the dark and fighting the wind, who knew where they’d hit shore?

  Cork was tired. He worried about the others. Stormy could probably paddle through the night and not miss a stroke. Grimes and Sloane, who brought up the rear now, had been struggling to keep pace, mostly, Cork suspected, because Sloane was weakening. Cork had no way of knowing how far they’d all come or how much farther they had to go. But there was nothing to be done about it except put their shoulders into the effort, stroke after stroke.