The midewiwin Henry Meloux beat the mitigwakik, the Mide drum, and spoke to the spirit of Wendell Two Knives, guiding him on the Path of Souls, cautioning him against the dangers and distractions on his way west to the Land of Souls. Wendell Two Knives was guardian of tradition, respectful of the old ways. Tradition dictated that a man be buried with the implements that had defined his life. There was no burial for Wendell Two Knives; his body was never found. Instead, Meloux placed on the fire a strip of birch bark, Wendell’s deer-bone awl, a wooden bowl of pitch, and a cijokiwsagaagun, the small spatula Wendell had used to seal the seams of his canoes.
“Our brother, you leave us,” Meloux said in the language of the Anishinaabeg. “Our brother, to the Land of Souls you are bound.”
George LeDuc stepped forward. He was not ashamed to let his emotion show in tears.
“I knew Wendell Two Knives all my life. As boys, we wrestled. Wendell was stronger and smarter and usually beat me. I was a better shot. When we hunted, Wendell was never envious and was always glad for me when I brought home the deer. He was a good man who never turned away when someone needed his help. All of us on the rez, we’re better people because of him. I will miss my friend.”
Others spoke, each in their turn honoring Wendell Two Knives. Then Henry Meloux said, “Our brother was aadizookewinini, a storyteller. In our stories do we remember who we are. In our stories do we tell our children’s grandchildren about the ways of our people. Wendell Two Knives gave the gift of his stories to the Anishinaabeg. He gave his stories as a trust to his nephew’s son, Louis. The snow has fallen. It is winter. The time for telling stories.”
For one so young to be asked was an honor. Louis came fully into the firelight, a small boy with a great heart. The snow had whitened his hair, making him seem an old man already. Cork, who was watching, knew there was indeed something wise in the boy, far beyond his years.
Louis told this story.
“There was a man who knew Noopiming—Up North in the Woods, the Boundary Waters—better than any other man. He knew not only the lakes and rivers, but also the rocks and trees and animals. He loved all life there, held sacred the belief in the manidoog, the spirits who dwelled in that place. And he was blessed in return with a skill in building canoes that glided across water smoothly and swiftly as birds in air. The man was called Ma’iingan, for he was brother to the wolf.
“A woman came and asked Ma’iingan for help. She asked for a place to hide in Noopiming, for she was being pursued by a terrible majimanidoo. The good man Ma’iingan led her to a special place and hid her there. He brought her food and he kept her safe.
“One day the majimanidoo, in the shape of the woman’s father, appeared before Ma’iingan and begged to be taken to her, claiming he was worried and wanted to see with his own eyes that she was well. At first, because his heart was so good that he did not recognize evil in another, Ma’iingan was fooled. But the true spirit of the majimanidoo could not be hidden for long, and before they reached the woman’s hiding place, Ma’iingan saw the majimanidoo for the evil it was. He refused to go any farther. Using all his terrible magic, the majimanidoo tried to force Ma’iingan to tell him where the hiding place was, but to no avail. In anger, he killed good Ma’iingan.
“The spirit of Ma’iingan stood on the Path of Souls but did not want to make the journey yet. He cried out to Kitchimanidoo, imploring the Great Spirit to let him stay a little longer in Noopiming, to keep safe the young woman, to fulfill his promise to her. Kitchimanidoo heard the good man’s plea. The spirit of Ma’iingan was given the shape of a gray wolf, for that was his totem, and allowed to return.
“In the meantime, brave hunters from several tribes had joined to track the majimanidoo. The evil spirit was powerful and many hunters lost their lives. And all the while, the majimanidoo drew closer and closer to the young woman. But Ma’iingan, in the form of the wolf, prowled the woods, guarding and guiding the woman, keeping her just out of reach of the evil that tracked her. Not until the hunters finally killed the majimanidoo and the woman was safe did the noble spirit of Ma’iingan begin the journey to the Land of Souls.
“But the wisdom of Kitchimanidoo grants the return of Ma’iingan in the shape of his brother the wolf whenever there is someone in Noopiming in need of help. And you can still hear the voice of Ma’iingan raised with his brothers, singing in the wilderness, in the land he loved so well.”
Louis stepped back, and his father laid a hand proudly on the boy’s shoulder.
“What a good man leaves behind him is forever,” Henry Meloux said. “Until the trees no longer touch the sky, Grandmother Earth and her children will hold with respect the memory of Wendell Two Knives.”
The snow fell softly on Meloux and melted. Drops gathered along the deep lines of his skin and reflected the firelight in a way that made the old midewiwin’s whole face seem aflame as he spoke in the language of The People:
K’neekaunissinaun, ani-maudjauh.
K’neekaunissinaun, cheeby-meekunnaung.
K’neekaunissinaun, kego binuh-kummeekaen.
K’neekaunissinaun, k’gah odaessiniko.
Our brother, he is leaving.
Our brother, on the Path of Souls.
Our brother, do not stumble.
Our brother, you will be welcome
ATRIA BOOKS
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HEAVEN’S KEEP
WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER
Coming soon in hardcover from Atria Books
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Heaven’s Keep. . . .
PROLOGUE
IN THE WEEKS AFTER THE TRAGEDY, AS HE ACCUMULATES pieces of information, he continues to replay that morning in his mind. More times than he can count, more ways than he can remember, he juggles the elements. He imagines details. Changes details. Struggles desperately to alter the outcome. It never works. The end is always the same, so abysmally far beyond his control. Usually it goes something like this:
She waits alone outside the hotel in the early gray of a cloudy dawn. Her suitcase is beside her. In her hand is a disposable cup half-filled with bad coffee. A tumbleweed rolls across the parking lot, pushed by a cold November wind coming off the High Plains.
This is one of the details that changes. Sometimes he imagines an empty plastic bag or a loose page of newspaper drifting across the asphalt. They’re all clichés, but that’s how he sees it.
She stares down the hill toward Casper, Wyoming, a dismal little city spread across the base of a dark mountain like debris swept up by the wind and dumped there. As she watches, a tongue of dirty-looking cloud descends from the overcast to lick the stone face of the mountain.
She thinks, I should have called him. She thinks, I should have told him I’m sorry.
She sips from her hotel coffee, wishing, as she sometimes does when she’s stressed or troubled, that she still smoked.
George LeDuc pushes out through the hotel door. He’s wearing a jean jacket with sheepskin lining that he bought in a store in downtown Casper the day before. “Makes me look like a cowboy,” he’d said with an ironic grin. LeDuc is full-blood Ojibwe. He’s seventy, with long white hair. He rolls his suitcase to where she stands and parks it beside hers.
“You look like you didn’t sleep too good,” he says. “Did you call him?”
She stares at the bleak city, the black mountain, the gray sky. “No.”
“Call him, Jo. It’ll save you both a whole lot of heartache.”
“He’s gone by now.”
“Leave him a message. You’ll feel better.”
“He could have called me,” she points out.
“Could have. Didn’t. Mexican standoff. Is it making you happy?” He rests those warm brown Anishinaabe eyes on her. “Call Cork,” he says.
Behind them the others stumble out the hotel doorway, four men looking sleepy, appraising the low gray sky with concern. One of them is being led by another, as if blind.
“Still no glasses?�
� LeDuc asks.
“Can’t find the bastards anywhere,” Edgar Little Bear replies. “Ellyn says she’ll send me a pair in Seattle.” The gray-haired man lifts his head and sniffs the air. “Smells like snow.”
“Weather Channel claims a storm’s moving in,” Oliver Washington, who’s guiding Little Bear, offers.
LeDuc nods. “I heard that, too. I talked to the pilot. He says no problem.”
“Hope you trust this guy,” Little Bear says.
“He told me yesterday he could fly through the crack in the Statue of Liberty’s ass.”
Little Bear’s eyes swim, unfocused, as he looks toward LeDuc. “Lady Liberty’s wearing a dress, George.”
“You ever hear of hyperbole, Edgar?” LeDuc turns back to Jo and says in a low voice, “Call him.”
“The airport van will be here any minute.”
“We’ll wait.”
She puts enough distance between herself and the others for privacy, draws her cell phone from her purse, and turns it on. When it’s powered up, she punches in the number of her home telephone. No one answers. Voice mail kicks in, and she leaves this: “Cork, it’s me.” There’s a long pause as she considers what to say next. Finally: “I’ll call you later.”
In his imagining, this is a detail that never changes. It’s one of the few elements of the whole tragic incident that’s set in stone. Her recorded voice, the empty silence of her long hesitation.
“Any luck?” LeDuc asks when she rejoins the others.
She shakes her head. “He didn’t answer. I’ll try again in Seattle.”
The van pulls into the lot and stops in front of the hotel. The small gathering of passengers lift their luggage and clamber aboard. They all help Little Bear, for whom everything is a blur.
“Heard snow’s moving in,” Oliver Washington tells the driver.
“Yep. Real ass kicker, they’re saying. You folks’re getting out just in time.” The driver swings the van door closed and pulls away.
It’s no more than ten minutes to the airport where the charter plane is waiting. The pilot helps them aboard and gets them seated.
“Bad weather coming in, we heard,” Scott No Day tells him.
The pilot’s wearing a white shirt with gold and black epaulets, a black cap with gold braid across the crown. “A storm front’s moving into the Rockies. There’s a break west of Cody. We ought to be able to fly through before she closes.”
Except for Jo, all those aboard have a tribal affiliation. No Day is Eastern Shoshone. Little Bear is Northern Arapaho. Oliver Washington and Bob Tall Grass are both Cheyenne. The pilot, like LeDuc, is Ojibwe, a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles band out of Wisconsin.
The pilot gives them the same preflight speech he delivered to Jo and LeDuc the day before at the regional airport outside Aurora. It’s rote, but he throws in a few funny lines that get his passengers smiling and comfortable. Then he turns and takes his seat at the controls up front.
They taxi, lift off, and almost immediately plow into clouds thick as mud. The windows streak with moisture. The plane shivers, and the metal seems to twist in the grip of the powerful air currents. They rattle upward at a steep angle for a few minutes, then suddenly they’ve broken into blue sky with the morning sun at their backs and below them a mattress of white cloud. Like magic, the ride smoothes out.
Her thinking goes back to Aurora, to her husband. They’ve always had a rule: Never go to bed mad. There should be a corollary, she thinks: Never separate for a long trip with anger still between you.
In the seat opposite, Edgar Little Bear, not a young man, closes his purblind eyes and lays his head back to rest. Next to him, No Day, slender and with a fondness for turquoise and silver, opens a dog-eared paperback and begins to read. In the seats directly ahead of Jo and LeDuc, Washington and Tall Grass continue a discussion begun the night before, comparing the merits of the casinos on the Vegas strip to those on Fremont Street. Jo pulls a folder from the briefcase at her feet and opens it on her lap.
LeDuc says, “Hell, if we’re not prepared now, we never will be.”
“It helps me relax,” she tells him.
He smiles. “Whatever.” And like his old contemporary Edgar Little Bear, he lays his head back and closes his eyes.
They’re all part of a committee tasked with drafting recommendations for oversight of Indian gaming casinos, recommendations they’re scheduled to present at the annual conference of the National Congress of American Indians. Her mind isn’t at all on the documents in her hands. She keeps returning to the argument the day before, to her final exchange with Cork just before she boarded the flight.
“Look, I promise I won’t make any decisions until you’re home and we can talk,” he’d said.
“Not true,” she’d replied. “Your mind’s already made up.”
“Oh? You can read my mind now?”
She’d used the blue needles of her eyes to respond.
“For Christ sake, Jo, I haven’t even talked to Marsha yet.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t know what you want.”
“Well, I sure as hell know what you want.”
“And it doesn’t matter to you in the least, does it?”
“It’s my life, Jo.”
“Our life, Cork.”
She’d turned, grabbed the handle of her suitcase, and rolled it away without even a good-bye.
She’s always said good-bye, always with a kiss. But not this time. And the moment of that heated separation haunts her. It would have been so easy, she thinks now, to turn back. To say “I’m sorry. I love you. Good-bye.” To leave without the barbed wire of their anger between them.
They’ve been in the air forty-five minutes when the first sign of trouble comes. The plane jolts as if struck by a huge fist. LeDuc, who’s been sleeping, comes instantly awake. Washington and Tall Grass, who’ve been talking constantly, stop in midsentence. They all wait.
From up front, the pilot calls back to them in an easy voice, “Air pocket. Nothing to worry about.”
They relax. The men return to their conversation. LeDuc closes his eyes. Jo focuses on the presentation she’s put together for Seattle.
With the next jolt a few minutes later, the sound of the engines changes and the plane begins to descend, losing altitude rapidly. Very quickly they plunge into the dense cloud cover below.
“Hey!” No Day shouts toward the pilot. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Fasten your seat belts!” the pilot calls over his shoulder. He grips the radio mic with his right hand. “Salt Lake, this is King Air N7723X. We have a problem. I’m descending out of eighteen thousand feet.”
The folder that was on Jo’s lap has been thrown to the floor, the pages of her careful presentation scattered. She grips the arms of her seat and stares out at the gray clouds screaming past. The plane rattles and thumps, and she’s afraid the seams of rivets will pop.
“Goddamn!” No Day cries out. “Shit!”
LeDuc’s hand covers her own. She looks into his brown eyes. The left wing dips precariously, and the plane begins to roll. As they start an irrevocable slide toward earth, they both know the outcome. With this knowledge, a sense of peaceful acceptance descends, and they hold hands, these old friends.
Her greatest regret as she accepts the inevitable—Cork imagines this, because it is his greatest regret as well—is that they didn’t say to each other, “I’m sorry.” Didn’t say, “I love you.” Didn’t say good-bye.
Look for this free collection of excerpts from all of William Kent Krueger’s Cork O'Connor novels at your favorite ebook seller.
The William Kent Krueger Reader's Companion: A Collection of Excerpts from the Cork O'Connor Novels
Praise for Northwest Angle
“William Kent Krueger can’t write a bad book. Northwest Angle is one of his best. A complex crime novel that contains meditations on the difficulties of loving and the paths we take to reach God, this Cork O’Connor novel has everythin
g you want in a great read: depth, action, and credibility.” —Charlaine Harris, New York Times bestselling author
“… part adventure, part mystery, and all knockout thriller… Catch-your-breath suspense throughout.” —Booklist
Praise for Vermilion Drift
“As always, Krueger’s writing couples the best of literary and commercial fiction, with intelligent, well-defined characters populating the story. Although the book contains violence, the author never makes it extraneous or graphic. He is one of those rare writers who manage to keep the suspense alive until the final page. Krueger fans will find a feast in between these covers, and for those who have yet to sample his fine and evocative writing, the book offers a complex yet completely believable plot, all tied up in words sharpened by one of the modern masters of the craft.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Rock-solid prose combines with effective characterizations and a logical if complex plot for a thrilling read. This book succeeds on every level and ought to attract the author a deservingly wide readership.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
Praise for Heaven’s Keep
“One of today’s automatic buy-today-read-tonight series… thoughtful but suspenseful, fast but lasting, contemporary but strangely timeless. Krueger hits the sweet spot every time.” —Lee Child
“A powerful crime writer at the top of his game.” —David Morrell
Praise for Red Knife
“Outstanding…. Simply and elegantly told, this sad story of loyalty and honor, corruption and hatred, hauntingly carves utterly convincing characters, both red and white, into the consciousness. Krueger mourns the death of ideals and celebrates true old values. As Cork tells an Ojibwa friend, ‘Maybe you can’t alter the human heart… but you can remove the weapons’—the first step, perhaps, in blazing a trail toward sanity and hope.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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