Thunder Bay (16 page)

Out of the corner of his open eye, he saw Lima stumble and go down. Henry led the moose, held his breath, then let it out slowly and squeezed the trigger. He lost the animal for a moment in the jar of the recoil. When he found it again, he saw the moose pitch forward, coming to rest only a few feet from where Lima cowered in the muck.

Henry sat back. He began to shake. Numbly, he watched Wellington return and kneel beside his fallen companion. A moment later the man looked up and spotted Henry on the ridge.

Henry stood, worked his way down, and waded into the swamp grass and black water. Even at a distance, he could hear Lima’s moans.

Henry went first to the moose. The animal’s right eye socket was nothing but a deep, bleeding hole. In the wake of the adrenaline flood he’d felt on the ridge, Henry experienced an overwhelming sadness at the death of this great and beautiful creature.

“You?” Wellington asked with disbelief. “It was you? That was one hell of a shot, boy.”

Henry turned. “I’m not a boy.”

“Son of a bitch,” Lima moaned.

Wellington carefully lifted the other man’s leg clear of the black soup. Lima shouted something in Spanish that Henry didn’t understand but guessed was a curse. Wellington paid no heed as he worked his fingers along the muddy pants leg.

“Broken,” he pronounced. “Pretty bad, I’d say. We’ve got to get him to a doctor.”

Henry didn’t know what to say. The nearest doctor was a lot of miles, a lot of paddling, a lot of portages away. How did he explain that to a man looking to him for help?

Wellington’s eyes moved past Henry. Woodrow was slogging toward them across the marsh, rifle in hand. His eyes dropped to the moose as he passed.

“Can you walk?” he asked Lima.

“Fucking Christ no,” the man replied, as if Woodrow had asked the world’s stupidest question.

“We can carry him,” Wellington suggested.

Woodrow shook his head. “Too far. We would only hurt him more. There is another way.” He motioned to Henry. “Come with me.”

“Where are you going?” Wellington grabbed Woodrow’s arm.

Woodrow shot him a hard, dark look, and Wellington let go. “We will be back,” Woodrow said. He turned away and made for the break in the ridges.

Henry followed to the place where Woodrow had hidden his canoe. They paddled back to camp.

“Take the ax,” Woodrow instructed. “Cut three saplings seven feet long. Strip the branches, then cut one of the saplings in half. Bring them back here.”

Henry did as he’d been told. When he returned, he found Woodrow waiting with rope cut into many sections of varying lengths. His uncle lashed the saplings together in a rectangle seven feet long and half that wide. He tied the sections of rope across the frame in a kind of mesh hammock.

A travois, Henry realized. They were going to lay the white man on it and haul him out of the woods.

They placed Woodrow’s construction across the gunwales of the canoe. Before they shoved off, Woodrow fixed Henry with a cold stare.

“I have never seen a better shot from a hunter.”

Henry looked down. “Kitchimanidoo must have guided me,” he said, giving credit to the Great Spirit.

“Me,” Woodrow replied, “I would have left them to the moose.” Henry’s moment of pride in the beauty of his kill shot was shattered.

“It is done,” Woodrow said, and he spoke of it no more.

At the marsh, they lifted Lima onto the travois. The man cried out, but once he was settled in the rope hammock, he grew quiet. Woodrow had fashioned a harness, which he shouldered himself.

To Henry he said, “Cut meat from the moose and bring it.” Then he began the labor of hauling the injured man to the canoes.

They broke camp immediately. The rest of that day they retraced the route they’d followed coming in. Woodrow paddled the canoe in which Lima lay. Henry took the stern of the other with Wellington in the bow. At every portage, they lifted Lima onto the travois, and
Woodrow pulled him to the next lake. Henry and Wellington each shouldered a canoe and double packs that were slung across both chest and back. It was exhausting work, and they went much slower than when they’d entered the wilderness.

They took three days to reach the place where Luukkonen had dropped them.

“What now?” Wellington asked after they’d pulled the canoes onto shore. “That outfitter won’t be here for a week.”

“You and me, we will walk the logging road,” Woodrow replied. “If we are lucky, a truck will pick us up.”

“Why both of us?”

“Because a logging truck will not stop for an Indian.”

“We leave Carlos alone with the boy?”

“He is not a boy. And he will care for your friend.”

Wellington seemed to understand that there was no choice. He knelt beside Lima. “I’ll be back, Carlos. I’ll bring a doctor. We’ll get you fixed up, eh.”

Lima’s eyes were bloodshot and shaded yellow. He squeezed Wellington’s hand in parting.

Henry made camp. He constructed a lean-to that would shelter Carlos Lima from the sun and would keep the water off him if it rained. He gathered firewood. He made stew from the last of the moose meat and wild rice and dried mushrooms, which he fed to Lima in small spoonfuls.

That night he heard the howl of a wolf pack nearby. Had they caught the scent of Lima, he wondered, an animal injured and vulnerable to attack? Henry kept watch with a cartridge in the chamber of his rifle.

Midmorning the next day, the men returned in Luukkonen’s pickup. They brought a doctor. While the physician examined Lima’s leg, the outfitter hovered over his shoulder and shook his head.

“You’re lucky it was Woodrow with you,” he told Wellington.

Wellington scowled at Henry and his uncle. “I’ve been thinking. It strikes me as odd that you two just happened to be around when that moose charged. I’m thinking you were following us.”

Henry didn’t know what to say, but Woodrow spoke immediately.

“Your safety was our responsibility. We could not keep you safe if we could not see you.”

“Forget it, Leonard,” Lima said, grimacing. “There’s nothing for us here. I hate this place. I will never come back.”

The doctor stood. “We need to get him to my office right away if we’re going to save that leg.”

They put Lima in the bed of the pickup.

Luukkonen spoke quietly to Woodrow. “I’ll come back for you and Henry directly. And I’ll see to it these men pay the full two weeks. You’ve earned it.”

Henry stood beside his uncle and watched the pickup disappear along the trail into the trees to the south. For a long time he could hear the growl of the engine and the clatter of the suspension. When he could hear it no more, he turned to Woodrow.

His uncle stared at the place where the truck and the men had gone. “Lima said they would not be back.” His eyes slid to Henry. “The hand of Kitchimanidoo.” He nodded once in sober agreement and, Henry thought, acceptance, because Woodrow had believed they were better dead.

“What now, Uncle?”

Woodrow drew a tobacco pouch from his shirt pocket. “First we give thanks.” He turned in a circle, sprinkling a bit to the north, west, south, and east, and finally dropping a little in the center of the circle. “Now I’m going into the lake and wash away the smell of the white men.” He leaned toward Henry and sniffed. “And you, Nephew, you could outstink a skunk.”

Woodrow walked to the lake. Henry stood a little longer looking in the direction the truck had gone. Kitchimanidoo had saved the white men. Why, Henry couldn’t say. It didn’t matter. He was rid of them. He would never have to see them again.

Or so he believed.

F
or the next two years Henry continued to live with his uncle on Crow Point, growing well into his manhood, strong in body and spirit, and strong in his resolve to live the old ways. He saw unhappy changes continue to creep onto the reservation. Some Shinnobs managed to purchase automobiles, and the dust they raised could be seen above the trees, like smoke from a spreading fire. In Allouette there was electricity and plans for a telephone line. There were radios and, in Aurora, access to movies. He sometimes ran into young Shinnobs who’d graduated from the boarding schools and they told him about jazz and Charlie Chaplin and dances like the Charleston and the shimmy. He heard that the Ojibwe on the Red Lake Reservation had created a lucrative commercial-fishing industry and were selling tons of netted walleye to retailers in Minneapolis and St. Paul and Chicago. White people had always believed that what they had was what the Ojibwe should aspire to. That seemed to be the growing sentiment among Shinnobs on the rez as well. As more and more whites crowded the forests, the Ojibwe, in the things they wanted and in the dreams they had, came more and more to resemble them.

There was another change, this one more personal. In the summer he turned eighteen, Henry fell in love. It was Woodrow’s fault.

“There’s a girl,” his uncle said one day when he’d returned from town. “She lost her folks years ago and went to a government school in Wisconsin. She knows your sisters there. Her name is Broken Wing.”

“Dilsey,” Henry said. He remembered her from long ago. She’d already gone to the boarding school at Hayward, Wisconsin, before he
was sent to Flandreau. She was younger than he, and Henry remembered her as scrawny and silly.

“She has come back to teach on the rez,” Woodrow said. “She is staying with her mother’s uncle.”

Henry was concentrating on cutting strips of birch bark to use in making a torch for spearfishing that night. Without looking up he said, “So?”

“Go to Allouette, Nephew. See her.”

Henry couldn’t imagine why he’d want to see the girl, but he did as his uncle suggested.

He didn’t find her in town; he was directed to the mission. It was late afternoon when he arrived. The shadows of the trees at the western edge of the clearing were growing long, turning the meadow grass a brooding blue. Henry approached the clapboard building. He heard her voice first, high and beautiful, singing words to a song he didn’t know.

“ ‘Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today ...’ ”

He stepped through the open door into the one-room building. He was startled to find not the scrawny, silly girl he remembered, but a woman with long coal black hair and smart brown eyes. She was arranging books on a shelf along one wall of the mission. His shadow slid into the room ahead of him, and seeing it, she stopped singing and turned.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Dilsey?”

“Who are you?”

What Henry wanted to say was,
The man you’re going to marry.
What came off his tongue was, “Uh ... uh ...”

The rest of his efforts at courting weren’t much better. For all his skill in the forest, his knowledge of the plants and the animals, his legendary prowess with his rifle, he was an awkward suitor. Dilsey seemed amused by him, but not moved in the same way as he. When, in the spring of the following year, a white teacher from Chicago named Liam O’Connor came to Allouette to open a real school on the reservation, Dilsey’s true affections quickly and obviously settled on the newcomer, whom she soon married. This left Henry cold and bitter.

“You sit and scowl like an old badger,” Woodrow declared not long after. “Get up, Nephew. It is time to build.”

For the rest of that summer and into the early fall, Henry labored with his uncle to cut and lay the logs for a one-room cabin on Crow Point. The logs were cedar, and the roof was cedar covered with birch bark. Woodrow arranged for floor planks to be cut at the mill in Brandywine, which was owned and operated by Shinnobs.

When the first snow fell in early November, the cabin was finished. It was a blessing because, in the depth of the winter that followed, Woodrow fell ill. There were no doctors on the reservation. Henry turned to Dollie Bellanger, who was a Mide, a healer, to do what she could for Woodrow. The winter was long and harsh, and life slipped further and further from his body, until all that was left one overcast day in April were a few ragged breaths and his final words to Henry:

“My life with you has been good, Nephew. Do not be alone now.”

Henry buried Woodrow in the cemetery behind the mission. Despite his uncle’s advice, he remained alone in the cabin on Crow Point. There were relatives across the rez, uncles and aunts and cousins, but Henry kept away from them all. He tried to disappear into the forest, but it seemed an empty place without Woodrow. Finally he simply settled into the cabin and did not leave.

In the early fall, more than four months after Woodrow died, as Henry fished from the rocks along the shore of Iron Lake, he spotted a canoe gliding toward him from the south. In a few minutes, he could make out that it was Luukkonen, the outfitter. Although he’d had offers to guide after his uncle passed away, Henry had turned them all down. He had no need of money, and going into the wilderness without Woodrow was still too hard.

Luukkonen pulled up to shore.
“Anin,”
he greeted Henry, formally and cordially.

“What do you want?” Henry replied.

The outfitter stepped from his canoe and, though he hadn’t been invited, sat down near Henry. He smoothed his walrus mustache and watched Henry’s fishing line in the water.