“If you need me, call my cell. I won’t get a signal up at Trickster’s Point, but leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m in range.”
While Stephen got himself ready, Cork made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, wrapped them, and put them in a knapsack along with some bottled water. When everything was ready, he kissed Jenny good-bye and gave Waaboo a big, gentle hug.
“Take care of your mommy,” he instructed seriously.
Waaboo said happily, “Bye-bye, Baa-baa.”
CHAPTER 10
They drove out of Aurora, along the southern shoreline of Iron Lake, then swung north toward Allouette.
When Cork was a boy, Allouette had been a collection of mostly BIA-built homes and trailers, with only a couple of the two dozen streets actually paved. There’d been an old, rotting community center, which had housed the offices of the tribal government, and also a small gymnasium, where the kids could play basketball, and where powwows and community celebrations were sometimes held and the jingle dancers and the drummers practiced. Across the street was LeDuc’s general store and next to that a small café called the Boozhoo. A block away was Alf Johnson’s Sinclair gas station, a two-pump operation that also sold tackle and live bait and beer. The dock on the shore of Iron Lake was a rickety old thing, and the boats tied up there were generally a sad-looking fleet of secondhand dinghies and rowboats mounted with sputtering outboards.
But Allouette had changed. There was a new, much larger community center designed by an Ojibwe architect and built entirely by Ojibwe contractors and laborers. It held not only a gymnasium and the tribal government offices but also a tribal-run preschool, a health clinic, and a number of new tribal-operated community services. The streets were paved, and every house had access to new water and sewer systems. There were burgeoning new businesses. LeDuc’s store had been updated, and next to it was the Mocha Moose, a coffee and sandwich shop that was the darling of Sarah LeDuc. Alf Johnson’s station was now a multipump Food ’N Fuel, and beyond it was a large new marina where a number of fine-looking Ojibwe-owned craft lay moored.
The whole reservation was changing. It had always been a hodgepodge of land owned by individual Ojibwe, or held in trust by the tribe, or leased to the federal government or private parties, or owned outright by whites, who, very soon after the earliest treaty signings, had purchased allotments for a song from Shinnobs who didn’t understand the reality of what they were giving away. Recently, the Anishinaabeg had begun a movement—the Iron Lake Initiative—for the purpose of reacquiring all the land that had originally been theirs by treaty. The land that had once belonged to The People was coming back to them.
This reflection of recent affluence was the direct result of the Chippewa Grand Casino, which had been constructed south of Aurora several years earlier and which was owned and operated by the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe.
Cork had mixed feelings about all this. He was very glad to see the Anishinaabeg—the people of his blood—finally able to do for themselves what the government on every level had failed to do. He was glad to see the optimism and enterprise that came with the casino gambling, which the Indians called “the new buffalo.” He was encouraged by the flaring of a new fire of Anishinaabe pride in a culture rich in history and wisdom and knowledge and unique tradition. But all this came at a price. In its early days, the Chippewa Grand had seen a good deal of corruption among its management. Oversight of bookkeeping and profits was always questionable, and true and fair distribution of the income was an issue of great and heated discussion among folks on the rez. One of the underlying values of the Ojibwe culture had always been a lack of interest in stockpiling wealth. What you had, you shared, and it was the sharing that was esteemed, not the having. Now, no matter how much people were given in casino allotments, it never seemed enough. Dealing with this sudden influx of money wasn’t always an easy affair for someone raised on nothing and less than nothing. If, for example, you were disposed to drinking, you probably drank more. If you were into drugs, you plunged deeper. If you’d been given to coveting the things you saw in other people’s houses—particularly the homes of white people on television sitcoms and dramas—you bought items you didn’t need or didn’t know how to use or didn’t even really understand the purpose of, and they accumulated and forced you to buy a bigger home or a longer trailer, and despite all you had, you still weren’t happy.
Welcome to the white man’s world, Cork thought.
Although there was an official state forest trail to Trickster’s Point, it was a five-mile hike. Cork had always preferred the more direct route, a two-mile paddle by canoe across Lake Nanaboozhoo. A couple of miles outside Allouette, he turned onto an old logging road that cut northeast through the reservation. The road was seldom used and had become more a memory of road. But two parallel lines of bent and broken undergrowth showed where, a day earlier, he’d twice driven his Land Rover, first with Jubal Little sitting where Stephen now sat, and then alone.
The logging road ended abruptly in a clearing full of sumac that had gone bare weeks earlier. Cork parked, and he and Stephen got out and made their way across the clearing to the shore of Lake Nanaboozhoo. There was a natural, sandy landing where Cork’s canoe lay tipped, with two paddles leaning against the hull. Stephen took the bow and Cork the stern. They lifted the canoe, righted it, and set it in the water. Stephen grabbed a paddle and a place in the bow. Cork took the stern, and they shoved onto the flat gray of the lake.
Its shape was a long, ragged arc with a lot of rocky inlets and small, wild islands. The southern half lay within the Iron Lake Reservation. The northern half was part of the Superior National Forest. The whole body of water sat only a stone’s throw from the area known as the Boundary Waters, a vast, unspoiled stretch of wilderness that went far beyond the Canadian border. Under the overcast sky, the pines along the lakeshore seemed dense and brooding, and the water ahead looked nearly black and cold and depthless.
An Ojibwe legend explained the lake. There was once a maiden so beautiful she believed that no man was worthy of her. She spent long hours gazing at herself in the clear water of a small pond near her village. Every young man who saw her fell immediately in love with her and tried to make her his wife. But the haughty maiden’s heart was ice, and the suitors were cruelly dismissed. They left with broken hearts and great lamentations. Nanaboozhoo, the trickster spirit, heard their cries and decided to teach the maiden a lesson. He disguised himself as an Ojibwe warrior, the most handsome young man anyone had ever seen. He appeared to the maiden as she sat gazing into the pond. The moment she saw his reflection beside her own, she fell deeply in love. She gave herself to Nanaboozhoo, body and soul. Their mating was so wild that it caused the ground around them to be pushed into hills, and so passionate that it melted the maiden’s icy heart, which created a small lake among the hills. Afterward, she fell asleep. When she awoke, she found that Nanaboozhoo had abandoned her, and she was alone. She began to weep and wept so long and so hard that the small lake became the very big lake the Ojibwe named to honor the trickster.
After half an hour, Cork and Stephen came around a long, pine-covered finger of land whose tip pointed northeast. From there they could see, rising on the far side of the lake, a rocky ridge capped with aspens. At the eastern end of that ridge, separated from the rest of the formation by a gap of roughly fifty yards, rose a solitary pinnacle that towered a hundred feet above the trees around it.
In the bow, Stephen nodded toward the pinnacle and said, “Niinag,” an Ojibwe word that meant “penis.”
From a distance, the long, aspen-capped ridge looked like a naked giant lying supine upon the earth, and the solitary pinnacle unmistakably resembled an erect phallus. Ojibwe tradition held that the ridge was a reclining Nanaboozhoo, and they called the tall rock pillar Nanaboozhoo’s Penis, though modern Shinnobs sometimes jokingly referred to it as Tricky’s Dick. On official maps and in official nomenclature, it was called Trickster’s Point.
/> They made their way across the lake, fighting a sudden cross-wind that had risen, and drew up to the shore. Stephen leaped from the bow and steadied the canoe for his father to disembark. They brought it fully out of the water and tipped it on the soft bed of needles beneath the pines that edged the shoreline, then started inland along a faint path that led toward the towering rock.
“Have you ever been here before, Stephen?” Cork asked.
“No, but there are some guys in school big into rock climbing. I’ve heard them talk about it. They say people have died climbing Trickster’s Point.”
“Only one that I know of, and that was a long time ago.”
The trail meandered through pines that quickly gave way to birch, and then Trickster’s Point loomed, a tower of slate gray stone sixty feet in diameter and more than a hundred and fifty feet high. Even in the cold air, the rock seemed to give off its own intense chill.
“Where did it happen?” Stephen asked.
“Follow me,” Cork replied.
He led his son around the base of the formation to the north face. He stopped at a fold in the rock where, despite the sleet and drizzle that had fallen since Jubal Little died, the ground was still darkly stained.
“Here,” he said.
Stephen stared at the place, nodded to himself, then asked, “What are we looking for?”
Cork’s son was not a hunter. Stephen had never shown any interest, and although Cork had hunted since boyhood and would have been happy to pass down to his son the particular legacy of his knowledge, he’d never pushed the issue. Stephen’s inclinations lay elsewhere, particularly in learning the way of the Mide, and Cork was fine with that. He was pleased that Henry Meloux had taken a special liking to Stephen.
Cork said, “Jubal went ahead of me and circled Trickster’s Point from the south. The arrow entered his chest from the right, from the east. So from there.” He pointed toward the rock ridge that was separated from the pinnacle by fifty yards and that formed the long mass which gave the impression of a giant lying on the earth. “The ground’s been trampled by the sheriff’s people. We probably won’t find anything useful this side of those rocks.”
“So we go up into the rocks?”
“Bingo,” Cork said.
“People leave footprints on rocks?”
“Not necessarily, but they may leave other signs,” Cork said.
“Didn’t the sheriff’s investigators look there?”
“They did. We’re going to adjust our thinking and our eyes to look for what they didn’t.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s go, and I’ll show you.”
Trickster’s Point had once been a part of the long, upthrust ridge, but over millennia, the thousands of cycles of freeze and thaw had shattered the great stone wall and left a gap littered with talus. They crossed the rock-strewn ground, and at the base of the ridge, Cork paused. From there, the wall sloped upward in a ragged chest of boulders and ledges that topped out a couple of hundred feet above him.
“Even the best of bow hunters isn’t effective much beyond fifty or sixty yards,” he said. “So whoever sent that arrow into Jubal had to be somewhere within the first ten or fifteen yards of the bottom of this slope, hiding behind one of those boulders.”
“So we’re looking for the boulder he hid behind?”
“Yes, but even more, we’re looking for an indication of how he came and how he left. By the time I got to Jubal, his killer was gone. I want to know where he went.”
“What exactly are we looking for then?”
“Anything that strikes you as unnatural or out of place. With every step, take a moment, and don’t just look with your eyes. Feel what’s around you.”
Stephen shot his father an easy grin. “You sound like Henry.”
“Pay attention just like you would with Henry, okay?”
“You got it,” Stephen said.
They separated from one another, a space of a dozen feet between them, then began slowly to make their way among the rocks and up the slope. Cork took his time, but Stephen seemed less careful and moved a little ahead of his father. Cork was about to caution him to be more observant when Stephen seemed to grow smaller before his eyes.
“Dad?”
“What is it?”
“Check this out.”
Stephen had stepped down into a kind of box, a recessed area bounded on all four sides by tall rock. When Cork dropped into the box with him, Stephen pointed toward the stone surface that faced Trickster’s Point.
“It looks like some kind of scraping, don’t you think?”
Cork bent and eyed the mark, which stood out white against the charcoal-colored rock. “That’s exactly what it is, Stephen. Maybe from a belt buckle where someone hugged that rock.” Cork took a position and eyed the base of Trickster’s Point where Jubal had fallen. “The logistics are right.” He knelt and scrutinized the ground. “See this?” He put his index finger to a small line of stone particles and dirt pushed against the face of the rock wall opposite the scraped stone. “I’d bet that’s from the shove of a boot as our killer positioned himself.” He stood up and looked at his son with certainty. “Good work, Stephen. You found the place.”
“Where’d he go from here?”
Cork scanned the wall right and left, then said, “Where would you go?”
Stephen studied their surroundings and shook his head. “We’re pretty much blocked in here. Hard to move either way.” He turned and scanned the slope behind them. “There’s a kind of a natural trough up that way. I guess that’s where I’d go.”
“That’s where I’d go, too. Let’s see what we find.”
Cork led the way, working slowly toward the top of the ridge, which was backed by the bare limbs of aspens and the gray overcast of the sky. He paused occasionally, pointing out to Stephen additional places where small rocks had clearly been displaced and, near the top of the ridge, a spot where a partial boot print had been left in a rare, thin layer of damp soil.
“Medium-size foot,” Cork noted. He’d brought a camera that hung in a belt pouch, and he pulled it out. “Probably a common sole type, so it won’t tell us much, but you never know.”
Cork took some digital shots, then he and Stephen continued to the peak of the slope.
The line of trees that topped the ridge began a couple of dozen yards back from the edge. The stand was full of undergrowth that had caught and held many of the fallen aspen leaves, so that it presented itself as an impenetrable-looking wall of gold. Cork and Stephen scanned the area at the lip of the ridge, and Cork said, “Well?”
Stephen squinted at the ground. “Lots of trampling.”
“Azevedo. One of Ed Larson’s team. I saw him come up.” Cork nodded far to the left of the trail that he and Stephen had followed up the slope. “He didn’t find anything.”
“The guy who was down there in the rocks came from somewhere.”
“Exactly,” Cork said. “So where?”
Stephen stood a moment, looking hard at the stand of trees. “There?” He pointed toward a place where the gold wall seemed to have been breached, where the leaves had been disturbed and had fallen to the ground.
“My guess, too,” Cork said. “Let’s go.”
They entered the woods and slowly moved among the aspens. The initial breach opened onto a trail that, because of the disturbance of the leaves among the undergrowth, wasn’t particularly difficult to follow. They paralleled the edge of the ridge for about twenty yards and then came to a place where the trees opened onto a tiny clearing, which offered a broad vista of the lake and shoreline, dominated by Trickster’s Point. As soon as they reached the clearing, they stopped abruptly. Both of them stood stone still, staring at the body splayed at their feet.
The man lay faceup, with an arrow shaft protruding from his left eye. A scoped deer rifle lay next to him, and his hunter’s cap had been knocked from his head. Cork could see that the arrow had gone clear through his brain and out the b
ack of his skull.
He knelt, and although he already knew the result, he nonetheless put his fingertips to the man’s carotid artery to check for a pulse.
“Dead,” he said. “And, from the looks of it, a day at least.”
Stephen’s face had gone ashen. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “So he was here when Mr. Little was shot?”
“He was here. I don’t know if he was alive then, but he was here.”
“Who is he?”
“No idea, Stephen.”
“What should we do?”
“Did you bring your cell phone?”
“You said cell phones don’t work up here, so I left it in the Land Rover.”
“Me, too,” Cork said. “No service there either. Okay, this is what you’re going to do. Take the canoe back the way we came. Here are the keys to the Land Rover. Drive into Allouette or however far you have to go before you get a signal, then call the sheriff’s office and report what we’ve found. Can you handle that?”
“Sure. But what about you?”
“I’ll wait here until the sheriff’s people arrive.”
“Alone with the dead guy?”
“It won’t be the first time,” Cork told him.
“But why? It’s not like he’s going anywhere.”
“I don’t want the body disturbed by scavengers.”
Stephen eyed the dead hunter a last time, with obvious revulsion, then gave his father a look Cork couldn’t quite decipher. “I hope I never get to the point where sitting with a dead man doesn’t bother me.”
He turned and began to make his way out of the trees while Cork thought about his son’s comment and decided that he hoped so, too.
CHAPTER 11
Cork stood at the edge of the ridge and watched his son paddle across the broad gray of the lake. It was like watching a small bird fly alone into a great threatening sky. He felt a deep sorrow in having to send Stephen on that lonely mission. No parent’s child should have had to go through what Stephen, in his brief sixteen years, had already been asked to endure. Cork felt an abiding loneliness as well, but this was for himself, because the tone of his son’s comment in parting hadn’t escaped his notice. Corcoran O’Connor attracted death the way dogs attracted fleas, a phenomenon that his son clearly recognized and just as clearly disapproved of. Cork thought every man wanted to be understood by his children, but—he looked toward the dead man, the second he’d kept company with in as many days—how could anyone understand this?
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