William Krueger - Northwest Angle

“But you know the way, and you’re blind,” Stephen pointed out.

“I learned the way early, and in those early days I came here often. It’s a special place. A powerful place.”

“Where now?” Bascombe said.

He’d no sooner spoken the words than they heard a sound like a firecracker exploding.

“What was that?” Rose said.

“Sounded like a gunshot,” Bascombe said.

“A rifle,” Powassin said. “A big rifle. In that direction.” The old man pointed ahead and to the left.

“Cork?” Rose said.

Mal shook his head. “I don’t think he took any kind of firearm with him.”

“Hunters?” Stephen said.

“Nothin’ in season,” Powassin replied. “Then again, maybe what’s being hunted hasn’t got a season.”

Bascombe said, “I think we should have a look-see.”

And he eased the throttle forward.

TWENTY-THREE

Atop the bluff, Cork had hunkered behind a blind created by the trunk and branches of the fallen aspen. He’d waited patiently for the hunter to appear on the outcropping where the few ragged cedars still stood. His clothes had begun to dry, and his muscles had begun to cramp, and when the hunter didn’t show, he’d begun to believe he’d been miserably off target, miscalculated completely. All his predictions about the man’s behavior had been wrong. He was afraid that being wrong could lead too easily to being dead.

He should continue to wait, he knew, to be patient, to trust his instincts. That’s what his years as a hunter had taught him. But things were different when the life of his daughter and an innocent child were at stake. Where he hid, he had a view of only the upper half of the cedar-topped outcropping. If the man chose not to climb that promontory, Cork realized he might not even see the hunter. He battled with himself over the urge to get up and stand at the edge of the bluff for a clear view all the way to the waterline. What held him back was the stubborn certainty that the hunter, when he reached the end of the island, would climb the height for the view it would give him. That’s exactly what, in his place, Cork would have done.

Then he heard the baby scream.

He leaped up and looked north. At three hundred yards, he couldn’t see much. He dashed to the edge of the bluff, where he had a clear view of the base of the outcropping and the little beach on which the dinghy lay crushed. He saw the hunter standing there, sighting his rifle. He followed the line of the barrel and spied the distant image of Jenny scrambling madly at the edge of the trees. He realized the hunter was probably drawing a bead. He gave a shrill whistle, earsplitting, waved his arms wildly, and screamed, “Up here, you son of a bitch!”

The hunter turned his head. Quicker than Cork had ever seen a man move, he swung the rifle, and the scope was dead on Cork.

Cork hit the ground and heard the shot in the same instant. The bullet snipped the branches of the fallen aspen behind him. He rolled left and lifted his head, risking a glance to see where Jenny and the baby might be. On that far little island, he saw nothing. He threw a look toward the base of the outcropping. The hunter, too, had vanished.

Cork wasted no time. He knew where the man was headed: back to the cigarette boat, which would shoot him across the channel to Jenny and the baby. Cork turned and stumbled through the devastation that littered the back of the bluff, desperate to reach the lake, knowing he was in a race he had almost no hope of winning.

Jenny swept the baby into her arms and, without a glance back, bounded deeper into the trees. She heard the distant crack of the rifle and tensed for the impact of the bullet, but nothing happened. She kept running while the baby screamed into her breast and his little arms flailed madly.

But where to go?

She reached the tiny clearing where they’d bedded for the night. God, how long ago that seemed, those hours of quiet, of sanctuary. She looked up the rock wall her father had scaled several times in the night to keep his vigil. Where was he now? She wished they’d never formed this plan of separation. What had they been thinking? Didn’t they have a better chance together than separated? Alone with the baby, she was helpless against a hunter and his rifle.

For the briefest of moments, she had a deep, gut-wrenching temptation: Leave the baby. Without the baby, she could run. She could swim to another island. She could hide herself. The screaming baby would become a decoy while she escaped. What was this child to her, after all? A foundling, nothing more. She had no responsibility for him. If she hadn’t stumbled on him, he would have been dead by now anyway. Leave him. Leave him to the thread the fates had already spun for him.

But, with almost no effort at all, she put that temptation behind her. She knew that, whatever the outcome, the thread of her own fate was now bound up with the child’s. They would both live or they would both die together.

With a fiery strength of purpose, she hit the rock wall and began to climb, clutching the baby to her with one hand and clawing her way toward the top with the other. She had no idea what she would do when she got there, but she knew that the hunter, if he wanted his prey, would have to climb, too. At the very least, she would buy time, and at the moment, time seemed to be the only hope she had.

As Cork descended the back side of the bluff, he discarded his shirt and sneakers and even the knife, anything that might hold him back in the water. When he hit the lake, he was down to his black Lands’ End swim trunks. He made a long, arcing dive into the green-tea-colored water and began stroking as if hellhounds were nipping at his bare feet.

The wind was with him on this crossing. The swells as they swept forward carried him on their crests. It didn’t matter. Jenny and the baby were alone on that island, and if he’d had to swim through a lake of hellfire to get to them, that’s what he would have done. Each time he tipped his head to breathe, he listened a fraction of a second for the sound of the cigarette boat’s powerful twin engines.

As he swam, his brain went swiftly over the elements of the situation. The island where the girl had died was a quarter mile long. It was an impossible landscape to cross quickly. Even if the hunter kept to the shallows and skirted the devastation on the island itself, the shoreline offered its own obstacles. The man with the scoped rifle would not have an easy time returning to his launch.

Cork stroked hard and decided to believe that he had a good chance of making it to Jenny first.

He was three-quarters of the way there when he heard the engines. He didn’t hear them on the air. It was the lake that carried the sound to him when his whole head was submerged. The dull, unmistakable drone of propellers churning water. He didn’t pause for even an instant but kept digging at the lake with his cupped hands, shoving distance behind him. His breath came in gasps, and his lungs were ablaze. His legs were made of hot lead. Yet he drove himself harder.

He felt the wet, velvety touch of lake weed on his chest and, looking up, saw that he was only a dozen yards from shore. He glanced north, just in time to see the cigarette boat swing into the channel. With five more strokes, Cork was ashore and running for cover. The cigarette boat was still a hundred yards out, closing fast.

He didn’t know for sure where Jenny was, but he knew where they’d spent the night, and he made for that tiny clearing. If she wasn’t there, he hoped she would be above it, seeking high ground, which in his own thinking was now the only possibility of an advantage they might have. If the hunter had to come up after them, maybe they could find a way to keep him at bay. It was the thinnest of hopes, but it was something.