William Krueger - Boundary waters

By the time he reached the fire, his hands felt rigid as a couple of frozen pork chops. Stormy quickly helped him strip off his wet clothes. Cork had to hold himself back from walking right into the flames.

“The canoes?” Stormy asked.

“No good. Smashed. He did it. Packs are there.” Cork spoke in a quivering staccato, his voice on the edge of breaking. “Tried to bring mine up. More wool clothes for us. Left it on the other side of Hell’s Playground.”

“How about Arkansas Willie?”

Cork gave his head a dismal shake.

“It’ll be dark soon,” Stormy said. “I’ll get your pack. Louis, put something hot together for this man.”

After Stormy left, Louis pulled a pot from the wet supply pack and some dehydrated vegetable soup tightly sealed in a plastic bag. In a few minutes, he had a pot of soup on the coals at the fire’s edge and the smell was like heaven to Cork.

“How has he been?” Cork whispered to Louis, and nodded at Sloane.

Louis shook his head. “Quiet.” He stirred the soup. “Do you think he’ll be okay?”

He’s got a hole in him a rat could crawl through, Cork thought. And we’re in the middle of a wilderness. And it’s going to be cold night soon. No, Louis, there’s no way in hell our friend is going to be all right.

But he said, “That’s in the hands of Kitchimanidoo.”

The ranger wasn’t in the drive at the home of Sarah Two Knives, nor did Sarah answer Jo’s knock at her door. Jo headed back into Allouette to LeDuc’s, the small grocery store that also sold bait and tackle and fishing licenses and served as the reservation post office. At the counter where the cash register sat, George LeDuc paused in his restocking of a candy bar shelf and greeted Jo with a smile.

“Hey, counselor.”

George LeDuc was not only an elder but also a member of the tribal executive council, and Jo knew him well. He was nearing seventy, had thick white hair, white teeth, a broad face,

and a strong, broad build. He’d outlived two wives already and was on his third. He wore a gray sweatshirt that had printed across the front KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY BODY.

Francine, George’s wife, a woman in her midthirties and seven months pregnant, stepped in from the back room. “Hi, Jo.”

“Francine, you look wonderful.”

“That’s what George says, too.” She laughed, and covered her mouth.

“Like a garden getting close to harvest.” George put his arm around her and smiled.

“I’m looking for Sarah Two Knives,” Jo said.

“I figured,” George replied. “We heard there’s bad it going down in the Boundary Waters. Majimanidoo, the old ones are saying.”

“You’re one of the old ones,” Francine said.

“Young enough still.” George patted her swollen belly.

“It’s not good,” Jo said.

“Federal agents is what we heard.” George looked as if he’d taken a drink of vinegar. “That’s never a good sign.”

“Do you know where I can find Sarah?”

“At the community center,” Francine said. “She and Lydia are working on the Iron Lake Initiative.”

“ Migwech,” Jo said. Thanks.

The community center was a new brick building constructed with profits from the Chippewa Grand Casino. It housed the reservation administration offices, a clinic, a gym, and a day-care. Jo found Sarah Two Knives and her mother, Lydia Champoux, in a conference room set up with computer equipment. Sarah was at the computer. Lydia was scanning a sheet coming off the printer. The Iron Lake Initiative, a program to which many men and women on the reservation gave time, was an effort to consolidate reservation land. Like many reservations in Minnesota, Iron Lake was a patchwork of holdings-tribal trust land, land allotted to tribal members, land that had been sold or leased to non-Indians, and land belonging to the county, state, or federal forest service. The purpose of the initiative was to buy back land wherever possible in the hope that ultimately the reservation would exist again in the configuration spelled out in the original treaty of 1854. Jo had supplied legal counsel when the initiative was first being established, but since then, the Iron Lake Anishinaabe had carried on the work entirely on their own.

Men, Jo had noted long before, tended to smoke or drink or pace when they were worried, feeding their bodies to the anxiety. Women were more likely to find something to occupy themselves. It didn’t surprise her that Sarah and Lydia were working on the initiative.

“ Anin, Lydia. Anin, Sarah,” Jo said in greeting.

“ Anin, Jo.”

Lydia Champoux taught Native American studies at Aurora Community College, and her courses were among the most popular of the college’s offerings. She was a small woman with braided silver hair and light brown eyes. She was dressed in jeans and a denim shirt. Tiny blue ceramic feathers dangled from her ears. Normally, Lydia-a woman of refreshing intelligence and wit-would have smiled, but Sarah had no doubt informed her of the situation, and Lydia, like Sarah, appeared braced for the worst.

“It’s bad, isn’t it,” Sarah said. She swiveled in her chair and the bearings squealed.

“I wish it were better,” Jo admitted. She sat near Sarah and explained the situation.

“So they’ve found no sign of Louis and Stormy,” Lydia summed up darkly.

“Not exactly. They found trail signs left where the first dead man was discovered. Sheriff Schanno believes they’re the kind Boy Scouts use.”

“Wendell’s doing,” Lydia speculated. “He was always teaching Louis the old ways. The Boy Scouts learned everything from Indians.”

Jo said, “The search plane and helicopter are concentrating on Wilderness Lake now. Sheriff Schanno’s pretty sure that’s a good bet.”

“Wilderness is a very big lake,” Lydia observed. “Although they are big in our hearts, as far as that country is concerned, Louis and Stormy and Cork are quite small.” She took an unhappy look at the sky outside the conference room window. “And there isn’t a lot of daylight left.”

“I’m sorry to have to bring you such bad news,” Jo said.

“Thank you,” Sarah Two Knives told her. “It’s more than those majimanidoog would offer us.”

“Have you seen any sign of Wendell?” Jo asked.

Lydia shook her head. “I watch the stovepipe on his trailer home. When there’s smoke, I visit. There’s been no smoke for a long time. Let’s hope he’s burning a fire somewhere else.”

“I’m going back to Aurora, back to the men who’re responsible for all this. Would you like to come?”

“What for?” Sarah said. “It won’t change what’s happening out there. Will you let me know when you get any news?”

“Absolutely.”

“Jo.” Lydia reached out and laid a hand on Jo’s arm, an unusual thing for an Anishinaabe. “I’ve seen alcohol and despair cause men to kill one another senselessly. That’s a sad, sad thing. But this is different. This feels like a battle.”

“I think probably it is.”

“Then we should pray for our men to be strong and cunning and ruthless in destroying whatever evil is out there against them.”

Jo nodded and said, “Amen.”

The sun, as it set, struck fire to the trees along the shoreline of Iron Lake. High above the water, a flight of Canada geese, late in migrating, pointed themselves south in a long dark finger, and fled the North Woods. The lake surface was still and empty. Across it lay the reflection of the low sun, like a long fiery crack, as if the placid surface were only a thin shell over a molten sea beginning to break through. As she passed the trailer of Wendell Two Knives, Jo checked the stovepipe. No smoke.

Driving back to Aurora, she considered the situation as it stood. Fifteen years earlier, Marais Grand had been murdered. Now people associated with her daughter had died-two in California and at least one in the Boundary Waters, the man named Grimes. Benedetti and Jackson and Harris had all thought the recent deaths were tied to the old murder, the result of someone trying to cover tracks. But the death of Marais Grand had been explored and explained, so what was the motive for these other killings?