William Krueger - Boundary waters

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.

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.