Steve Hamilton - Blood is the Sky

I took the left and drove west down the Trans-Canada. There were lots more trees. This was officially the most goddamned trees I’d ever seen in one day. About twenty minutes later, we saw a gravel road heading off to the right.

“Think that’s it?” I said.

“There’s no sign,” he said. “Don’t you think there’d be a sign?”

“I can keep going.”

“Go a little while more. If we don’t see something soon, we’ll come back.”

We drove ten more minutes. There was nothing but a sign telling us that Longlac was a hundred miles away. I stopped in the empty road, did a three-point turn, and headed back the other way.

“Let’s try it this time,” he said when we came back to the road. “If it’s not this one, then it must have been east instead of west.”

I took the gravel road, and held on tight as it twisted its way through the forest. It was one blind turn after another as I fishtailed the truck on the loose gravel.

“Take it easy, Alex.”

“Who are we gonna hit?” I said, turning the wheel hard.

“Look out!”

I slammed on the brakes, and felt the truck start to slide.

“Son of a bitch!”

We came to rest with all four wheels in half-frozen mud. The moose stood there in the middle of the road, all gangly legs and long nose, looking at us with mild interest.

“That would have been great,” I said, as I put the truck in reverse. “We come all the way up here and get killed by a moose.”

“Can you get out of this?”

I gave it some gas. The wheels spun. I tried putting it back in drive, to see if I could rock our way out. The wheels spun again. I turned the key, and we sat there for a while, listening to the engine cool off.

“Now what?” he finally said.

“Try the phone.”

He turned it on. “It’s not getting a signal now.”

“I was afraid of that. We’re too far north.”

“We’ll have to walk,” he said. “Maybe the lodge is right up this road.”

“I’m sure it is,” I said as I opened my door. “The Lone Ranger never got lost when Tonto was around.”

As we got out of the truck, the moose stepped slowly off the road and into the woods.

“That’s a big one,” I said. “For a female.”

“Yep. I’m glad you missed her.”

“Which way you think? North to the lodge, or south back to the highway?”

“Let’s try north first.”

We started walking north. The air was a hell of a lot colder up here. I zipped up my coat.

“What’s the Ojibwa word for moose?” I said.

“Moozo.”

I nodded. “Wawa and moozo. So far, it’s a pretty silly-sounding language, Vinnie.”

“I just realized what your Ojibwa name should be,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Madawayash.”

“What’s it mean?”

He smiled. “I’ll tell you later.”

We walked. The road twisted its way through more trees and more marshland with grass growing eight feet tall.

“Tire tracks,” Vinnie said, kicking at the ground.

“Recent?”

“Looks like it.”

“What kind of vehicle?”

He looked at me. “One with tires.”

“Was the driver right-handed or left-handed?”

“You’re funny.”

“Come on, you’re the Indian guide. Where are the tracking skills?”

We had walked maybe two more miles, and were about to give up and turn around. But then we went around a bend and the road ended. There were three vehicles parked among the trees-one jeep and two pickup trucks-and then through the trees we could see blue water.

“I’m guessing this is Lake Peetwaniquot,” I said.

“I think we found it.”

“They don’t need a sign on the road. Either you know how to get here or you don’t.”

I looked at my watch. It was almost five o’clock. There was some daylight left, but the sun hung low enough in the west to cast long shadows. As soon as we had stopped moving, the air felt cold again.

“Let’s go see who’s here,” Vinnie said.

“Lead the way.”

We walked down the path, the trees opening up to a clearing and a large cabin overlooking the lake. As we got closer we could see a couple of smaller sheds set back in the woods, and a long dock. There was a floatplane tied up to it, and two aluminum boats with outboard motors.

“Hello!” Vinnie said. The sound died in the cold wind. Nobody answered.

“There’s got to be somebody here,” I said.

We walked down closer to the lake. The wind was just strong enough to kick up a light chop in the water. The floatplane bobbed up and down.

“Hello!” Vinnie said again.

Nothing.

We walked out onto the dock, passing a large weighmaster’s scale and several propane tanks. There was no sound but our heavy footsteps on the wood, the wind blowing in off the lake, the hollow clunk when the boats came together, and the plane’s left float working up and down against the rubber bumpers on the dock.

“It’s a nice lake,” I said. It was maybe a half mile across, with nothing but trees on the far shore.

Vinnie wasn’t looking out at the water, but at the dark, seemingly empty window of the cabin. “Let’s see if anybody’s in there,” he said.

We were halfway there when the man stepped out from the shed.

Blood.

That’s all I saw at first. The man was covered in blood.

“Whatcha boys need?” he said.

“You own this place?” Vinnie said.

That broke the spell. I saw the man clearly, with the full-length canvas apron, the gloves. He was a little guy, not more than five feet tall. And he must have been about my age, which made me wonder why he called us boys.

“Nah, you want Helen,” he said. “I just work here.”

“You’re butchering something?” Vinnie said.

The man looked down at his gloves. “A moose,” he said. “What a goddamned mess.”

A woman peeked her head around the door behind him. She was the same size as the man, and you could tell in a second they’d been married forever. “Who is it, Ron?”

“Couple of men,” he said. He didn’t introduce us to her. Instead he just turned around and went back to her. They disappeared into the shed and closed the door.

“What’s the matter with you?” Vinnie said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”

Just a little blood, I thought. No problem.

“I take it that woman in the shed wasn’t Helen,” he said. “You suppose she’s in the main cabin?”

“Let’s go see,” I said. “I thought they’d never stop talking.”

We went up the path to the front door of the cabin, climbing a set of wooden stairs that desperately needed a new coat of paint. The whole place had a run-down look about it, from the cracked foundation to the porch ceiling overrun with spider webs. We knocked on the front door. Nobody answered.

Vinnie looked at me, knocked on the door again, and then opened it. The room we stepped into was a lot nicer than what I expected, based on how the place looked from the outside. A big wooden table stood in the center of the room, with eight hand-carved chairs. There was a stone fireplace on the back wall that my old man would have approved of, and a great moose head looking down at us, its rack of antlers as wide as a piano.

“Hello!” Vinnie said. “Anybody here?”

“Back here!” a voice said. “Come on in!”

There was a door in the far wall of the room. As we stepped around the table, I looked up at the moose head. He seemed to stare right back at me.

Vinnie pushed the door open slowly and peeked inside. It was an office, with a rolltop desk and a big window overlooking the lake. The woman inside was fiddling around with the antenna on a small television. Where she expected to get a signal from, I couldn’t even guess. Maybe a CBC station out of Timmins.