Shadow of the Wolf Tree (30 page)

47

Baragastan

THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 2006

Grady Service got the names of others who had seen Rigel Tahti and drove to the Bog Lake area to talk to two individuals.

According to Kragie, Asdis Henriksdottir worked at the casino in Baraga. She was forty-something, and Service immediately recognized the name as Icelandic. The short-haired woman was dressed in shorts and Birkenstock sandals, her toenails painted bright blue; she wore a halter top that didn't hide much, and lived in a year-round house on a forty-acre parcel off Norway Lake Road, where it intersected Forest Highway 2460.

“Officer Kragie told me you've seen Rigel Tahti out this way.”

“I din't tell 'im dat so he'd go blabbin' it around, eh,” she answered. “Youse know what people say about dem Tahtis: Get on dere wrong side and youse got youse a problem, hey.”

“Ms. Henriksdotter.”

“I ain't no
Mizz.
Youse can call me Asdis. The name means goddess in the old Norse language, or so my folks told me. I'm a Miss. I was married onct, but the hubby was a lazy bugger, so I sent 'im packin'.”

“Rigel Tahti?” Service said, trying to get her back on track.

“Yeah, I seen him, okay? Fact is, I seen 'im coupla times a week, always in same place, 'boot quarter-mile below where da Norway Lake Road joins da Forest Highway. Dere's big bunch a hemlocks on west side of road. Seen him right dere. You want a drink, some coffee, somepin'?”

“No thanks.”

“I work up casino. Youse gamble?”

“No.”

She grinned. “No problem. You come see me sometime, won't be no gamble, eh?” She winked at him and he hurried to get away from her.

The second witness was also a woman, this one elderly, slow-moving and cautious.

“Mabel Tiles? I'm Detective Grady Service of the DNR. Officer Kragie told me you've seen Rigel Tahti around here.”

The Tiles's place was south of where Henriksdottir had seen the man. It was small and didn't look like it was insulated for year-round occupancy. The woman had her hair bunched under a white kerchief, and wore a red plaid jacket and hiking boots that looked well used.

“Yes, I've seen him just north of here, by the hemlocks,” she said. “He's stopped in here a couple of times, and made wood for me. Nice, polite young man.”

“You're not afraid of the Tahtis?”

“You listen to gossip up here, you'd never meet anyone.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Yesterday he stopped by. Walks all the way from his place in Sidnaw.”

“Does he say where he's going?”

“Nossir, he's not real talkative. I get the feeling he's a troubled young man.”

“He was here. Did you see which way he walked when he left?”

“I walked out to the road with him.”

Service asked him to show her, and she did. The condition of the tracks told him that her story of timing was accurate. Rather than start at the hemlock grove, he decided to start here and asked permission to leave his truck, and the woman had agreed.

The going was slow at first, and it took him four hours to cut fresh tracks, which moved steadily southeast from Bog Lake across low rises and ridges and kept a more or less steady course, veering only to avoid escarpments and the hazards of endless muskeg bogs. Mostly the trail stayed with contours, sometimes crossing open, rocky areas. But Grady Service was always able to locate traces again on softer ground or in weeds and grasses, and as he hiked he felt certain that the person ahead of him was neither trying to obscure his track, nor throw off followers. The boot print was the same here as at Tiles's place.
Has to be him.

He wouldn't call it an easy trail to follow, but neither was it difficult. Overall it showed the tracks of someone who seemed to know where they wanted to go and was not paranoid about being followed, all of which didn't add up to OTG behavior.

Six hours after leaving his Tahoe, Grady Service saw a man sitting on a boulder, rendered orange and pale green by lichen patches. The man was staring out at an expanse of muskeg, black spruce, and wild cranberries. Using his binoculars Service saw that the man was clean-shaven, with long legs, a thick neck, and big black boots.

The man walked another two hours, the route finally ending at a cabin cut into the side of a hill and overlooking a beaver pond with black water. The cabin was made of blackened logs, its yellow chinking showing a dire need of serious attention. The metal roof was rusted orange-brown, but there was a shiny new metal chimney poking up.

Service estimated the cabin at twelve by eighteen feet. The man went inside, came back out, lit a cigarette, swatted at insects, and went back inside. Smoke soon began to snake from the metal chimney.

He had left the Tiles's place at 0900, and it was now going on 6 p.m. If Tahti had been at the Tiles's place yesterday, what had taken him so long to get here—if this was his intended destination, and not an intermediate stop?
No way to know until you talk to the man.
He found himself thinking about Tuesday and told himself to stop. It had been a long time since a woman had actually intruded into his thoughts, and he wasn't sure how he felt about this development.

Grady Service found a place above the cabin in some ground-hugging junipers and slept against a cedar snag until first light, ignoring the insects trying to devour him. With light hinting in the east he eased down to the cabin and found a place to the left of the door, which finally eased open a few seconds after 5 a.m. The man stepped outside in his underwear, stretching and yawning.

Service said, “DNR. Good morning.” He held his badge out so the man could see. You Rigel Tahti?”

The man had short hair, military style, just starting to grow out and looking raggedy. “Morning,” the man said with a smile and nod. “Yah, I'm Rigel. You lost?”

Unstartled, no apparent nervousness—a simple question and greeting.

“Philosophically or geographically?”

The young man grinned. “Let me take a leak and then we can talk.”

Business complete, Tahti said, “You're a long way from somewhere.”

“How far is Art Lake?” Service asked.

The man cocked an eyebrow, his first sign of concern. “They sic you on me?”

“They?” Service asked. “I've got some tea bags in my ruck if you can supply the water.”

“Water, fire, evaporated milk, even some sugar. Come on in, but watch your head. This place wasn't built for people our size.”

Tahti was not at all what he had been led to expect.

Water boiled and tea bags steeping, Service said, “You have some sort of problem with Art Lake?”

“Was my
ukki
had issues with them.”

“
Ukki?
”

“My grandpa Tahti.
Ukki'
s a Finnish word.”

“That would be Helveticus Tahti.”

“Hell himself. You knew him?”

“My old man did, long time back.”

“He was a mean sonuvabitch, but he was always good to me after my old man died.”

“You say he had problems with Art Lake?”

“They stole property from him.”

“He call the police, get a lawyer?”

“That wasn't Hell's way, and what would have been the point? The Art Lake people had all the skids greased around here in those days.”

“What sort of property?”

“Personal hunting and trapping territory—deer, bear, rats, beavers, otter, his sugarbush, berries, south of the lake.”

Sugarbush was a Native American term for maple trees, their traditional source of sugar. “He owned the land?”

“Not exactly, but everyone in these parts knew it was his winter territory.”

“Ownership by use.”

Rigel Tahti smiled and nodded. “That describes it. It wasn't the sort of land he thought anyone would actually ever spend money for—especially city whites.”

“I got a sense that maybe you've had your own trouble with the Art Lake people.”

“Figured that's why you humped all the way out here.”

“Nope, I was just passing by.”

Tahti laughed out loud. “Sounds like a line of bull to me. I wouldn't call what happened real trouble.”

“What
would
you call it?” The kid seemed intelligent, well-spoken, friendly, and not in the least bit hinky.

“A by-product of urban sprawl. I bought some land out here while I was in the service. It touches Art Lake property. They don't like having anyone so close. I bought the land from a friend of my aunt's, and later she heard that Art Lake wanted it and their lawyers confronted my aunt's friend, but I'd already bought it legally, and done's done.”

“They could've made you an offer.”

“Nope, but they did fire a couple of warning shots in my direction.”

“
At
you, or in the general direction?”

“I heard the rounds nip the tree branches. Two shots, one to my right and one to my left, bracketing me. I took them as a message for me not to come any further north, even on my own land.”

“You should have called the cops.”

“Like I said, Art Lake has influence, and I'm a Tahti. Who would be believed? Why waste everyone's time? No harm, no foul. I got their message.”

“But you thought they called me.”

“It's how they do things, I hear.”

“You just let them shoot at you and slough it off?”

“I was in Fallujah,” the young man said matter-of-factly. “The hajis were always sniping at us. Over there we considered it a form of intercultural communication,” he explained with a wry grin.

“This place is a long way from nowhere,” Service said.

“How'd you find me? This shack isn't easy to locate.”

“Luck,” Grady Service said. “How much land do you have here?”

“I inherited four hundred acres from my dad and bought another hundred and twenty while I was overseas.”

“The cabin looks like it's been here a while.”

“It was one of Hell's trapline shacks. He had a dozen of them all over the U.P. After Art Lake took his hunting land, he moved here, just a little bit south of them, and kept at it. He was pretty stubborn. I used to snowshoe out here with him in wintertime when I was just a wee guy. I loved being in the woods with him.”

“You've got a house in Sidnaw.”

Tahti narrowed his eyes and his young face hardened. “You seem to know a lot about me.”

“How'd you get out of your enlistment? We keep hearing bout stop-loss.”

Tahti took on a vacant stare. “My discharge was honorable, but let's just say that we had some brass who didn't appreciate some questions I asked, which they construed as criticism. I thought I was raising legitimate issues on behalf of my guys. They didn't. All of my buddies were held over, but they cut me loose. Who are you, and what exactly do you want?”

“I've got some questions,” Service said.

“What kind of questions?”

Service considered pressing the man, but decided not to. “I was hoping you'd been inside the Art Lake property, but that doesn't matter anymore. You've given me a way in.”

“I don't understand.”

“Shots fired, reckless discharge of firearms.”

“But I haven't filed a complaint.”

“It's not necessary when public safety is at issue. You told me about it, now I'll have to look into it.”

“I don't want trouble. I just want to be left alone.”

“To live off the grid?”

“Why the heck would I do
that
?”

“You know how word goes around up here. You've been spotted out this way several times.”

Tahti shrugged. “The gossip up here is pure bullshit. I'm engaged, and my fiancée would like to have a camp out here, so I've been coming out to look for a good cabin site and figure how to cut a road into it. She's a grad student at Northern, and I'm enrolling in the fall on the GI Bill—if it comes through. I've been waiting a long time already. I could afford it on my own, but it seems to me it's a matter of principle. I did my duty, now Uncle Sam needs to step up and do his. I filed before I was discharged, and they've made me re-file twice more since I got out. I figure they're just yanking my chain because they can.”

The GI Bill had been similarly plagued in the wake of Vietnam. This kid did not seem at all like an OTG type. “I didn't think you had the look of a buckskinner,” Service said, “and you're not the first vet to be screwed after the dirty work's done.”

“I've had enough of living rough. You a vet?”

“The Suck, same as you,” Service said. “You ever buy a hunting license?”

“I always hunted and fished with Hell when I was a little guy, and he didn't buy licenses. Said his birth certificate was all he needed. After he got killed I got into team sports and had no time for the woods, but I'm going to start again. My fiancée hunts and fishes,” he added proudly.