Bullhead takes in a long weary breath. The air smells of old snow and open water. Across the river a chickadee sits perched on an icy limb. Its feathers are puffed around its body, causing its head to look small. Even the little birds make their own way, not nearly so weak as her kind, who are born without feathers, warm fur, or thick hide. She pulls off her rabbitskin mitt, looks at her fingers, the mean scar on her thumb. Yes, the Anishinaabeg were given the power to dream. And yet they are so fragile, so dependent, that they must take the very skins of other animals and wear them over their own to stay warm.
The chickadee sits puffed on its limb. The river water is dark, but also light in the places where it carries the color of the clouds. Bullhead follows the movement of the water. It slides in smooth sheets, circles and bends, wrinkling in lines that shrink and expand. Constant, constant. Constantly changing. Always the river, yet never the same. Slowly, the waters claim her, and her thoughts dissolve into the current. Gone is Bullhead, mother of three. Gone daughter, sister, clan member, widow. There is just the swift water as it twirls and glides, moves in smooth sheets that carry her downstream.
The sky lightens for a brief moment, illuminating Grey Rabbit’s hands and the patches of lichen, squash-orange and green, and then the light is gone and the rock face goes dull. Grey Rabbit looks to the sky as the long yellow crack in the cloud mantle passes, moving swiftly toward the big water. She must finish her work and get back to Little Cedar. She’d left him lying quietly by the fire, whispering to the cattail warrior in his hand.
Deep into the night she sits with him, willing herself to keep a close watch. But each night sleep overtakes her, and another child appears. The last was a girl, crying in her cradleboard. She disappeared into the woods, carried off by a creature made of ice.
Food. They need food. They had talked of moving on, in hopes of finding the animals in another place. Soon they will have to. Grey Rabbit rubs snow across her scraped knuckles, then wipes clean the long edge of her bone.
Bullhead makes her way toward the rasping sound. Her time at the river has soothed and calmed her, allowing her to see more clearly, to notice the wind-carved snow behind tree trunks, and the soft pink patterns in the bark of the red pines. “Ah, good.” She spots a dark vole in the snow, its feet curled and frozen, its head half eaten. She turns the rodent over in her hand, and drops it into the fish basket.
Her son’s wife looks small standing before the rock wall that rises from the forest. She has scraped a good amount of lichen already. She works hard every day, focused as a hawk, yet she stays as distant as one, too. Something troubles the girl. Something more than Little Cedar. Bullhead ducks below a snow-laden bough. She has tried sharing a number of stories about hunger, of times when she’d worried over her own children, but none of them have nudged Grey Rabbit to speak. She can only trust that the girl will confide if she needs.
“Don’t be so lazy.” Bullhead sets her basket on the ground. “Get those, up there.” She pouches her lips toward a high spot on the rock. “Those are the good ones. Those taste like beaver tail.”
Grey Rabbit smiles at the joke, though her smile fades when she sees what is in the fish basket.
Bullhead takes a scraping bone from Grey Rabbit’s bag and chooses a spot of her own to work. It’s an ancient rock with a solemn spirit, home to moss and lichen, and two small cedars growing out of a high crack. She places an offering at the base of the rock.
The two work in silence, tending their own thoughts, while their scraping falls into a shared rhythm.
Herring on a stick, slowly crisping near the fire. A line of herring, one more succulent than the next.
Little Cedar crying in his cradleboard, disappearing into the woods.
A bird’s call breaks the silence. It echoes off the high rock wall. Bullhead and Grey Rabbit stop scraping, and turn to meet each other’s eyes. Again, the bird calls, and they look to the trees, smiling at each other with growing delight. They search the bare limbs and the green pines for the one that cawed, black crow—whose return marks the coming of spring.
1902
Gunnar straps on his skis, then hoists his pack. The warmer days are turning the snow wet and heavy, so the more distance he can cover before the sun rises, the better. He’s no stranger to the hour before night gives way to day, as he’s up and rowing to his nets as soon as the sky holds enough light to navigate. Sure, it’s not exactly the same in the woods. Woods cling to darkness longer than water.
He winds the scarf Berit knit around his face, straps his poles on his wrists, and shoves off. For a time he can follow the cuts of the logging sleighs, its snow-covered width discernable in the dark. The grade is downhill so he uses his edges, slowing to avoid scraps of bark that are large enough to throw him over.
It’s likely John got the rabbits to his Mrs. He can feel her on the other end of his journey, and he’d love to let loose and ski at full steam. But he has to keep from working up too much of a sweat. If the temperature drops suddenly it will freeze on him.
The woods are quiet except for the swish of his skis and the wool-to-wool of his pant legs. The lake isn’t visible, but its icy smell is in the air. He can feel it below like a sleeping animal, breathing its dark watery breath. It was quite a story that John had told him. A giant, twenty miles long and turned to stone, lying face up in the lake. He couldn’t quite follow the whole tale, or tell whether this Nana’b’oozoo was a man or a god. Maybe he was some type of Indian troll. Humanlike. Shape-shifting. In Aunt Dorte’s stories back home, trolls often turned to stone. John could have made the yarn up to distract him after his own grim tale, but that didn’t seem to be the case. He’d told it like it was true. It would be something to see, this Nana’b’oozoo, a sleeping giant in the lake.
The sleigh cut looks like a grey floor, laid along the bottom of a dark cave. No sign yet of the dawn. Gunnar loosens his scarf, already warming as he poles up an incline. It was good of John to hear out his story, not that he feels much better for the telling, not that it changes what he’d done. He reaches the top of the hill and takes the slope down, gliding past the indiscernible woods, keeping to the grey trail, as that day, indelibly set in his mind, unfolds before him in the darkness.
It was a fresh pine morning with rippling dark breakers, the lake still billowing from a two-day northwester, and he was worried about his catch. The northwesterly wind was still blowing strong enough to keep him from getting back to land. It finally let up late-morning, and so he launched his skiff into the lake. He rowed straight-lined away from shore, practically feeling Berit’s thick silence as she watched him through the windowpane. They’d fought. Sure. Well, not exactly. A small quip the night before and no words exchanged come morning. It was a pattern that had grown too familiar. Too many things had grown in place of the children.
The first stiffness left his shoulders as he worked the oars, his course taking him over familiar lake bottom—the basalt table that continues off his cove, with its high spot that he has to skirt, and the group of mammoth boulders, then the scattered few that are visible only when the lake lies flat, at five fathoms, still visible at seven, before the bottom drops away.
The air was crystal and sharp, smelling of pine pitch and rot, and the seagulls were crying loops in the air, following in hope of easy food. He positioned himself first by pine and stone face, then by the shapes of the familiar ridges. As he rowed, the land transformed itself as always from a stagnant footing, solid with home and wife, to an abstraction of shape and texture, a tool for navigation, and a goal that meant safety if the weather were to turn. He was hoping there’d been no damage to his gang, though the herring should be fine if he could get them in soon.
At the top of a swell, he spotted the red cloth fastened to his uphauler, then down he went into a trough, where there was nothing to see but water and sky. The swells were too big to bring her in standing, so he waited for the lake to lift him again, adjusted his course, and rowed on.
The gulls settled on the dark blue water, paddling back and forth, watching him work his ropes. “You best forget about it,” he addressed the flock. “I’ll not be tossing any storm herring today.” One more day of weather and the fish would have been ruined, gone so soft that bones would poke through their flesh when he went to pick them from the nets. Sure he gets tense when he can’t get out; he hadn’t meant to speak to her so curtly.
He started in at one end of his gang, hauling a section of net to the surface, lifting it across his boat, the cold water running from the ropes. One by one he freed herring from the mesh and dropped them into the bottom of the skiff. They were fine. The catch was fine. Too much time he could spend worrying.
When the section of net was cleared of fish, he pulled himself along below it, bringing a new section up and over, then watching the cleared one fall back to the lake, corks up, leads untangled. Everything was rolling and shining and wet as he rode up and down with the swells, the herring at his feet like sickle moons. He worked methodically, choking the fish in one section of net after another, his eyes moving from his task to the water, to the ridges, to the sky—always watching for weather.
A gull squawked and shit white in the boat as he started in on a new net. But something was wrong. The net resisted him. Its pull was skewed, and it wouldn’t come over the gunnel like it should. And sure if that net wasn’t one of his best. Not good. Not good at all. He hadn’t been able to afford new nets for some time. Maybe if he’d worked more of that year’s winter timber. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave, not with Berit so low.
He maneuvered himself further along, watching the net as he pulled it from the water, then the cleared side to make sure it sank back right. Could be that the lake had tossed a timber his way. The bulk of the problem was coming right up. There. A couple fathoms below, and it looked like a huge ball of a mess. Almighty. He couldn’t afford this. The weight of it was starting to strain, turning him so he was taking the swells at an angle. Then he stopped pulling. It lay below him in the water.
A man.
There was a man tangled in his net.
He rose and fell, rose and fell, and the sun shone and sparkled on the water.
A head and shoulders cocooned in the mesh. Black hair, or else some kind of cap. His thoughts raced nowhere and everywhere at once, like the blue sky and water that was all around him.
There was a man in his net. The fish lay in the bottom of the boat and the gulls bobbed on the water, watched with round eyes. He hauled the net closer to the surface. Something shone white. It was a hand. He felt his breakfast in his throat.
A man. A dead man. Wound in his net. He was wearing dark wool. If it was a uniform he’d never seen it. He pulled the straining net higher, and the body rose up and broke the surface along the skiff.
A white ear was sticking through the mesh. Water lapped at a waxy cheek.
He rose and fell with the body, feeling like he was in a dream. Even the fish at his feet looked unfamiliar. If he could wake and start the day over, open his eyes to Berit’s back. But it was no dream, sure as the cold in his fingers. He’d have to get the man into the boat.
The coat’s silver buttons were tangled in the net, and his leads were wound up and through. The man’s leg was bent at an ugly angle, but he couldn’t tell whether it was from his net or sometime before. Cutting him out would be the fastest, but he’d lose the net for certain that way.
He took hold of a cork to get a sense of what was what. The body shifted and the face rolled toward the sky. Black hair growing from a porcelain forehead. A mustache over lips like a bruise. His breakfast surged up again and he turned away. Water drops shed from the ropes, hit the surface in expanding circles.
He couldn’t afford to lose the net. He had no choice but to untangle him. He’d let the steamer know at the end of the week. He tried not to look at the face as he worked, unwinding the leads, tugging the net here and there. How long he’d been down was impossible to know, the way the lake holds things as they are, too cold for bloating gases, too cold to rot wood.
The buttons were impossible, so he cut them off the coat and let them sink out of view. A glint of light flashed as the body rolled. It was his other hand, his finger, a gold wedding band.
A gull paddled close, turned its head side to side.
Berit.
He couldn’t bring a body home to Berit. Already, she worried too much, feared for him in weather and not.
The white face stared up to the sky, unrelenting in its lifelessness. The most gruesome thing he’d ever seen.
He rode the swells.
She’d never forget it. He couldn’t bring the body in.
Would it be so wrong to leave him to the lake? Every man who had ever worked on the water had to come to terms with his own drowning there. There was probably a law, but who was to know. Laws were made for towns, for the problems of people who lived as close as stacked wood. They didn’t really apply to him. God’s laws were a different matter, but he hadn’t killed the man. He was dead when he found him.