He was tempted to make a dash for the river, but he heard Meloux’s age-old advice in his head: patience. He waited nearly half an hour, then followed up the slope into the birches.
They’d left the dead man behind. Just left him, food for wolves and crows. Whatever their purpose, it was important enough to abandon Flynn, their comrade, the woman’s brother. Cork knew that if she ever had him in her sights again, she wouldn’t miss.
He did his best to put that thought aside and headed west toward the sound of the river.
CHAPTER 16
Rainy watched them come, walking slowly across the meadow, Daniel a little in the lead, Trevor Harris following. Trevor stumbled, caught himself, walked on. He was staring at the ground as if it fascinated him. More likely, she thought with a sinking heart, he was drunk.
There was another reason for her to be concerned. Leah Duling was with them.
“Boozhoo,” Rainy called in greeting. “Welcome.”
Leah looked beyond her into the empty cabin. “Where’s Henry?”
“At the sweat lodge, preparing himself. The others are there, too, tending the fire, heating the Grandfathers. What are you doing here, Aunt Leah?”
“I stumbled onto Daniel in Allouette and he told me about the sweat. It’s been a long time since I attended one. I thought it might be interesting.”
“All right,” Rainy said, but not without misgivings. “If you’re ready, Trevor, we’ll go there now.”
“Yeah,” the young man said. “Sure. Whatever.”
She led them to the sweat lodge, where Stephen stood by the sacred fire. She introduced him to Leah and Trevor Harris, and there was a cordial exchange.
Then Leah said again, “Where’s Henry?”
“He’s in the lodge already.” Stephen nodded toward the open flap that showed only darkness inside. To Daniel, he said, “Will you take the Grandfathers in?”
Daniel grabbed a pitchfork that leaned against the trunk of a birch. He scooped a red-hot rock from the coals, and Stephen took a cedar broom and brushed away the ashes. One by one Daniel carried the stones inside the lodge.
“Henry says that’s enough,” he said at last. “It’s time to begin.”
To Trevor, Rainy said, “You have something cooler on under your clothes, I hope.”
“Daniel suggested swim trunks.”
Stephen had already begun to remove his clothing. As Trevor worked at dropping his pants and stepping out of them, he almost fell over. Daniel caught him and helped him stand upright.
“Have you been drinking?” Rainy asked.
“Not much,” Trevor replied.
“I’m not sure you should do this.”
“I want to. I want to try at least.”
“All right. There will be several sessions during the sweat. After each session, you may come out of the lodge to cool and refresh yourself. If you feel ill or are having any difficulty at all at any time, I want you to leave immediately. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“Okay, you need to take off your watch and that ring. Nothing goes into the sweat lodge that is unnatural to this place.”
“This is a Rolex,” Trevor said.
“I’ll make sure it’s safe,” Daniel promised.
From a pouch she carried, Rainy took tobacco and offered it to the spirits. She gave Stephen and Trevor Harris each a little tobacco and explained to Trevor, “Sprinkle it into the sacred fire as an offering and ask for what it is you would like to receive during the sweat.”
The young man thought a moment, threw the tobacco into the fire, and said, “I want to know if my sister is safe.”
Rainy figured it was a reasonable request, but if he’d asked for her advice, she would have suggested asking instead for the peace of spirit that would help him understand why he was given his vision and what it meant for him and his sister.
Which is what Stephen did: “I thank the spirits for the gift of feeling what can’t always be seen with eyes, and I ask them to help me understand and use this gift in the way they have intended.”
Rainy explained to Trevor, “After you enter the lodge, you will remain silent unless Henry asks something of you or until it’s your time to ask something of the spirits. It will be very hot, maybe uncomfortably so. If you feel at all ill, tell Uncle Henry and he’ll give you permission to leave.”
“I’m a little nervous,” Trevor confessed.
“Everybody is the first time,” Stephen assured him. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.” Trevor gave him a brave smile.
Stephen went first, crawling through the lodge opening. Trevor hesitated a long moment, eyeing the darkness inside, then went down on his hands and knees and followed Stephen. Rainy lowered the covering over the entrance. She heard her great-uncle speak quietly to the two young men. Not long after that, Henry’s voice rose in song and prayer, accompanied by the beat of his water drum.
“What now?” Aunt Leah asked.
“We wait and we offer our own prayers,” Rainy said.
It was, by then, late afternoon, and the light that filtered through the overcast was fading. Through the bare birch trees beyond the lodge, the surface of Iron Lake had turned the color of charcoal. Rainy believed in the power of the sweat ceremonies, but her heart seemed to reflect the heavy darkness of the lake. She knew exactly where that darkness came from. Fear, pure and simple, and it rose from her concern about Cork’s safety.
“Primitive ceremonies,” Leah said. The woman sat on a sawed-off section of pine log near the fire. “I’ve seen every kind there is. Voodoo in Jamaica. Ashanti drumming in Africa. Dukun healing ceremonies in Borneo. Your uncle Lucius dismissed them as heathen. The irony was that he never saw the similarities in his own Christian beliefs.”
“And you, Aunt Leah?” Rainy asked. “Do you dismiss them?”
“The first godforsaken place Lucius took me was in the heart of Africa. A disease-ridden Mandinka village. Lucius offered prayers, which as far as I could see, made no difference. Their shamans performed their dances. Same effect. I decided maybe medicine might be worth a try, so I became a nurse. After that, wherever we went, Lucius offered God, and I offered antibiotics. It’s always seemed to me that a shot of penicillin does more good than the most fervent prayer or primitive symbols drawn in ash. Or,” she said, eyeing the sweat lodge, “ancient rituals.”
“But you did sweats when you were young, on the rez.”
“Young and foolish. I never had a vision. I never knew anyone who did. You, Rainy, you claim to be a holy person, a Mide. Have you, in all the sweats you’ve done, ever had a vision?”
“A Mide isn’t holy, Aunt Leah, just a healer.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’ve never had a vision. But I know others who have,” Rainy said. “Stephen, for example. And Henry has had many.”
“I don’t know about Stephen. But Henry, he’s an old charlatan.”
Rainy detected more sadness in the words than bitterness. “Aunt Leah, one of the helpful elements of a successful sweat is that the spirit surrounding it is open and positive.”
“You want me to leave?”
“Just try to keep an open mind and an open heart.”
“I’ve lived among African natives, South America Indians, primitives in Borneo. I’m nothing if not open-minded.”
“Let’s take a walk,” Rainy said. She wrapped her hand gently around her aunt’s arm and drew her up and away from the others.
They went to the lake and stood on the shoreline. A breath of air came across the water, fresh and pungent with the scent of evergreen. Rainy closed her eyes and drew it in and slowly let it out. With it went her anger at her aunt’s behavior.
“Would you tell me the story?” she said.
“What story?”
“Of
what happened between you and Uncle Henry.”
“Not much to tell.”
“He hurt you once. Deeply.”
“What woman hasn’t been hurt deeply by some man?”
“Uncle Henry isn’t just some man. When were you last here, on Crow Point?”
“Fifty years ago.”
“What brought you?”
The woman stared across the charcoal-colored lake, and Rainy knew that what she was seeing was something at a distance not measured in miles.
“I wasn’t quite twenty, still living on the rez, Lac Courte Oreilles. This was even before you were born. My best friend fell ill, terribly ill. Winona Duling. An aunt you never knew. Your family asked Henry to come and do what he could. She died anyway.”
“Sometimes what a Mide offers isn’t a healing of the body, Aunt Leah.”
“I understand. He gave her great comfort in the end.” She was quiet, remembering. “There was something unique about him. Mesmerizing. I fell in love with him. I believed he loved me, too.”
“When he returned to Crow Point, you followed him,” Rainy guessed.
Leah’s face took on a sadness that came from a place so powerful in her heart that Rainy felt it in her own. “I discovered I wasn’t so special to him. Or special enough that he wanted to take me for his wife.” In the next instant, the sadness vanished, and an old, old anger, like an ancient evil spirit, seemed to possess her. “I wasn’t the kind of girl to stay in the way he wanted, not if he wasn’t my husband.”
“So you returned to Lac Courte Oreilles?”
“There was a revival going on in Hayward. Winona’s brother, your uncle Lucius, got the spirit and declared that he had received the calling. Oh, did he have a voice like thunder. He’d been in love with me forever. He asked me to marry him. Wasn’t the first time. But this time, I said yes. I followed that man all over the earth. I was faithful to him until the end.”
“But you never forgot or forgave Henry. Is that it?”
Those hard, dark eyes stared back at her.
“Why are you here, Aunt Leah?”
“It’s been a long time since I had a chance to observe a sweat.”
“What I mean is why have you come back at all? Why now?”
Leah said slyly, “Maybe I’ve had my own vision.”
Rainy studied her, trying to see beneath the malevolence that so distorted her aunt’s face. Before she could press Leah further, get nearer the source of the bitter poison so that she might offer something helpful, something healing, she heard the sound of terrible retching coming from the direction of the sweat lodge. She turned back and saw Trevor Harris bent over among the birch trees, puking his guts out.
CHAPTER 17
There was still light in the day when Cork reached Mudd Lake. Long and narrow, the lake lay between two high ridges of gray rock capped with a mix of pine and aspen. He found where the Asemaa fed in, and he climbed to a place among the trees on the eastern ridge where he could see anyone approaching along the course of the river. Although the whole way there he’d tried to formulate some kind of plan, he’d come up with nothing that had a ghost of a chance of springing Lindsay Harris free. When he’d been taken, they hadn’t bothered to frisk him, and he still had the old Barlow pocketknife that his father had given him when he was twelve and that he always carried with him into the Boundary Waters. But what good was a small knife against the rifle they had? And how did one man take on a party of three whose purpose, whatever it was, was so important to them that they would kill or die for it?
His clothes had dried, but he still smelled of the rank muck of the marshland. He was hungry but put that need aside as he lay on a bed of pine needles and carefully watched the Asemaa. All the while, he went over and over in his head all that he knew about Lindsay Harris and her missing grandfather, looking for some clue that would help him understand the why of all this.
John Harris—Johnny Do—had been a kind of hero to Cork, funny, smart, ambitious. Cork had looked up to him like an older brother, in a way. But Harris had left Aurora and not returned, and the man he’d become was a mystery to Cork. However, that he’d found the time to make a trek into the Boundary Waters with his grandchildren said something about him, something good.
When Harris vanished, his grandchildren had insisted on being a part of the search effort to locate him. Even when the search had officially ended, they were clearly not prepared to give up on their grandfather. Which said something about them.
It wasn’t much to go on, but there was one possible thread which Cork thought might connect Lindsay’s abduction with her grandfather’s disappearance. Perhaps there was some vital piece of knowledge that both Harris and his granddaughter possessed that was worth all this bloody effort. If that was it, did this mean that Harris had not given it to the kidnappers, and they hoped Lindsay would? And if Harris hadn’t given them what they wanted, did that mean he was dead? And if that was true, what was Lindsay Harris’s life worth?
He spotted them coming, portaging along the river. The tall man was in the lead, carrying one of the canoes. Behind came Lindsay Harris, with the other canoe on her shoulders. The kid came next, visibly limping. The woman with the rifle brought up the rear. She also carried a pack. As Cork lay still with his eyes focused on the approaching party, he heard a faint sound at his back. He rolled over quickly and found that he was being scrutinized by two gray wolves. He didn’t believe there was any reason to be afraid. He’d spotted wolves before in the Boundary Waters and in other parts of the Northwoods, and he knew they were predators that almost never attacked humans. There was something else, too. The side of Cork’s heritage that was Anishinaabe was Ma’iingan, Wolf Clan. These wolves were part of his dodem. And so he gazed at them and they gazed back and he said quietly, “Boozhoo, Nisayenyag.” Hello, my brothers.
The animals turned and slowly trotted away among the trees. Before they were lost completely from his sight, they stopped and looked back. He envied them. They were in their element, and because they had each other and maybe the rest of a pack somewhere near, they weren’t alone. He was also grateful because he chose to think of their appearance as a good sign and it gave him hope.
He returned his attention to the people below. They’d stopped at the edge of the lake and unburdened themselves. They sat on the ground, and the way their bodies sagged spoke of their exhaustion. The tall man handed around a water bottle, and they all drank from it. The tall man spoke to the woman, then rose and pulled something from his pack. The sat phone. He moved away from the others and made a call. Or tried, but probably wasn’t successful, because he looked at the woman and shook his head. He glanced up at the top of the ridge, where Cork lay. Cork pressed himself to the earth, but kept watching. The tall man spoke to the woman, and she rose with obvious reluctance. She handed the rifle to the kid and said something that must have included Lindsay, because they both looked at her and the kid nodded. Then the woman followed the tall man, who brought the sat phone with him.
They retraced their path along the river, then began to climb the ridge, coming up the same way Cork had come. He slid from the edge and crept away a couple of dozen yards and lay himself flat behind the trunk of a lichen-covered pine that had fallen long ago and was slowly rotting back into the earth. In a few minutes, he could hear their footsteps. They stopped not far from where he’d been watching them. He didn’t dare rise to look, but he could hear them clearly as they spoke.
“Let’s hope we get something up here,” the tall man said. There was a long silence, then: “Isaac? Where’s Cheval?” Silence. “Can we get another pilot?” Silence. “All right. We’re at Mudd Lake. We’ll stay overnight, then head north. I’ll check in at noon tomorrow, and let you know where we are. If you’ve got someone else who can fly us out, we’ll figure another pickup point.”
Now the woman spoke. “What is it?”
“The RCMP
picked up Cheval last night,” the tall man said.
“Constable Markham?”
“Yeah, Markham.”
“Why?”
“Cheval got drunk and belligerent and Markham arrested him.”
“Is Isaac posting bail?”
“He’s working on that now, but it won’t happen until sometime tomorrow at the earliest.”
“So we keep going?”
“O’Connor is on his way out of the Boundary Waters. He can’t possibly make it before late tomorrow, but as soon as he does, he’ll bring the police back with him. We need to be long gone by then.”
“I wish I’d killed him.”
“Because it would have helped us, or because of your brother?”
“I owe him payback.”
“The balance doesn’t work that way.”
“Mine does.”
“Your brother tried to kill the man. What was he supposed to do?”
The sound of her breathing, fast and angry, carried to Cork. “She better be worth all this trouble.”
“We won’t know until we get her there.”
Cork thought they’d leave then, but he didn’t hear any footsteps.
Finally the tall man spoke, sounding bone-weary. “The weather’s beginning to clear. Means it’ll be cold tonight. We’d better get ready for it.”
Now Cork heard them head away. He lay still for a long time, then slowly raised his head and confirmed that he was alone again. He crept back to the edge of the ridge. He watched as below him the others prepared for the night on the shore of the lake. He looked up and saw that the tall man had been right. The cloud cover was finally beginning to break. In the cleared patches, Cork could see the faded blue of an evening sky.