William Krueger: Trickster's Point

“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.”

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?”