Alone on the Shield

by Kirk Landers

  And yet she obeyed her husband with the silent acquiescence of a housemaid. Annette tried to understand how that could be, but she couldn’t. No one had ever treated her that way, not even Rob. Not even the youthful Pender.

  Which got her thinking about the photos on the Menu website, the ones showing Pender posing with famous chefs and restaurateurs, with beautiful talk-show personalities, speaking to large groups of sumptuously dressed power people. He had lived the life of the American ideal. Rich. Well known, if not famous. Connected to the glitterati. He was still an attractive man and probably well off. He could have his pick of countless women, all of them younger and more attractive than her.

  What kind of man leaves that behind to spend a month in the wilderness and rendezvous with a grandmother with weather-beaten skin and the wardrobe of a coal miner? The more she thought about it, the more she figured he must not be interested in sex anymore. Maybe the divorce did it. Or just age. It happened. A whole industry had evolved to help mature men get boners at the right time. She snickered at the thought.

  Maybe the rendezvous really would be just a picnic and a handshake, two old friends getting caught up. When she told Christy that’s how it would be, that’s what she expected. But in the dark, lonely moments of the Canadian night, she sometimes dreamed that it would be like old times. They’d meet. They’d touch. The electricity would flow again. She’d feel those feelings, like when they were kids in college. As she dreamed it, she felt it, and the sensation was so intense she sometimes had to get up and walk it off, let the chill of the night divert her thoughts back to the here and now, create space from the impossible fantasy. She was a sixty-year-old grandmother, far past the age of torrid sex and steamy love affairs.

  9

  Pender paddled easily all day, hugging the Canadian side of the border lakes, basking in the beauty of a perfect day in Eden. He kept focused on the here and now, the waterfowl bobbing on the water, the bow of his canoe slicing through the water, the forest next to him, jack pines giving way to spruce, birch to red pines, to species he couldn’t identify.

  When he stopped to make coffee, he thought about the fat fishermen and wondered if they had found their canoes yet. He could picture them, hopping mad, wanting blood, threatening to come after him. He laughed at the thought. His leisurely pace was probably faster than they could sprint, and they wouldn’t have any idea what direction he was traveling. Maybe next year they’d go to a fishing lodge or some kind of shit-kicker convention where they belonged.

  In midafternoon he cast a lure out and trolled it behind the canoe, fishing for dinner as he went. Forty minutes later he boated a meal-sized northern pike on the edge of a reef, filleted it on a rocky islet, and then looked for a place to camp.

  He favored the Quetico side of the border lakes because it was less used and Canada didn’t require trippers to camp in designated campsites. It would be easy to disappear in Quetico, and that’s what he wanted—a total departure from the grid.

  He found an obscure island covered with pines that was perfect for his needs. Its lake-facing shore rose steeply to fifty-foot bluffs, making canoe access almost impossible. He paddled to the other side, which was separated from the mainland by a narrow channel clogged with reeds and brush, making access difficult for canoeists. There was no established campsite on the island or the mainland, so there would be no neighbors and no ranger patrols stopping by. Pender picked his way through the vegetation and rocky rubble to shore and hauled his gear well into the tree line, out of sight from the channel. There was just enough flat land for a campsite, and it was perfectly secluded, shielded from the main body of the lake by the tall mound that consumed the rest of the island. He built a fire ring in a small opening in the trees, cleared rocks and pinecones from a space where his tent would go, and collected dead wood for his fire.

  He cooked his meal while the sun was still bright so the flames wouldn’t give away his presence, and he kept the fire small, almost smokeless. He hiked up the mound behind his campsite to eat, perched on a rock overlooking the lake, taking care to stay in the shadows so no roving ranger would see him and come by to check his permit. He didn’t have one. He was off the grid. He believed in paying for permits to support the wilderness, had always done it, and he’d make this trip right someday, too. But for right now, this trip was different. This was about escape, a big up yours to everyone who ever drew lines or made rules or told you to just wait your goddamn turn. He needed to disappear from that world and melt into this one the way a wolf could, just slip into the green and vanish like a dream at sunrise.

  Pender ate slowly and got outside himself mentally, focusing on the world around him. An eagle floated high overhead in search of fish. Two canoes moved slowly in opposing directions on the big lake, maybe fishing, maybe just enjoying an early-evening paddle. A scrawny squirrel stared at him from ten feet away, and he stared back, thinking the squirrel probably never saw a human being before, because, really, who but Pender would ever camp here?

  When the meal was over, the dishes washed, and the campfire ashes dispersed, he set up his tent and wrote in his journal. He told his daughter about his trip, described the lake he was on, what he’d been thinking about, how he hoped she was well. As the early-evening calm swept over the woods and water, he moved back up the bluff and found a comfortable perch overlooking the lake. He relaxed and let his senses take in the gentle transition from evening to night in a world as quiet as a whisper.

  An hour before dark, he noticed two men in a canoe moving rapidly south. They were big men, and they paddled hard and fast. He thought they were looking for a campsite because they stopped at the two established campsites Pender could see. At the first one, they hailed the camp from the water and two campers came down to the beach. After a short exchange Pender couldn’t hear, the canoeists paddled directly to the second site. Again they sat offshore and hailed the site, but this time, no one returned their greeting. Instead of taking the campsite, though, they paddled farther south, moving fast. Pender was puzzled. If they weren’t looking for a campsite, what were they doing?

  Then it hit him with a jolt. They were looking for someone. He felt a shock through his entire body. He knew who they were, even though it wasn’t possible. It was the fishermen. Two of the four. He had managed to piss off two beer-swilling, fat-gut fishermen who could paddle like the wind and were mad enough to strangle a bear.

  It couldn’t be. No one was crazy enough to search for someone in a canoe in this wilderness. It was impossible. There were maybe two dozen different ways he could have gone between their camp and here. It was impossible they’d come this way. But deep inside, Pender knew it was them. Jesus, what were the odds?

  He took a breath, told himself to think like a recon man. They had played the odds that he’d stay on the border lakes, and they’d guessed right about which direction he went when he got to the border. That wasn’t so remarkable. Tomorrow would be much more difficult for them. They’d have to guess if he stayed on the border, slipped back into the Boundary Waters, or paddled into Quetico. There were so many trip options for him the only way they could trail him would be asking other canoe parties if they’d seen him. His disadvantage was being a solo canoeist. There weren’t many. Fewer still in a seventeen-and-a-half-foot uncoated Kevlar boat. But if no one saw him, the trail would run cold tomorrow.

  He broke camp in the dark the next morning. Before he got under way, he stared into the blackness to the south, where the fat boys had gone, searching for lights or any sign of a canoe, listening for any sound. Nothing. He paddled in the opposite direction for an hour in darkness and the dimmest light of early morning, avoiding the logical portages into the Quetico hinterlands, heading instead for a long, hard trail no rational canoeist would use.

  Shortly after first light, he located the portage trail at the northern extremity of a deep bay, but his hope for a surreptitious entry into Quetico was smashed. Just a few steps from the trail was a tent with a canoe out front. T
wo men making breakfast saw him and waved.

  Bad luck, he thought. If the fat boys asked here, they’d be on his trail again. But then again, the fat boys would be nuts to burn an hour to check out this deep bay. The odds were much better that they were tired of looking for him. They’d have jobs to get back to, families waiting.

  Pender took the precaution of stashing the gear for his second trip back in the trees, out of sight from the bay. He loaded a pack and the canoe and started down the trail. It was a grueling hike with a mix of steep grades and muddy flats, but Pender enjoyed the workout, knowing no one else would be dumb enough to use this trail.

  As he struggled through his second trip, he encountered two paddlers going the opposite way. Young guys. Late teens, early twenties maybe. They exchanged greetings. One called out, “Hey, nice boat. I bet that thing flies, eh?”

  Pender smiled, nodded, and kept moving, but the damage was done. Another canoe party had seen him and they saw his canoe and they saw where he was going.

  When he got to the other side, a third member of the group was just hoisting a pack on his shoulders.

  “Nice boat.” He wanted to start a conversation.

  “Thanks,” said Pender, placing his canoe in the water, then loading both packs, trying to keep moving.

  “Traveling by yourself?”

  “Yup.”

  “Doesn’t that get lonely?”

  “Nah.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Lac La Croix.” There was logic to Pender’s lie. A loop from here back to Lac La Croix was a good trip plan for a strong paddler. If the fat boys talked to this group, they’d leave this lake in the wrong direction and never see or hear of Pender again.

  He stepped into the canoe and paddled into a lake he’d never seen before, leaving in his wake three more people who knew he entered the lake that morning. He still wasn’t worried that the fat boys would find him, but he’d survived Vietnam thanks to luck and caution, and he’d play it safe for a couple days, just in case, keep moving, avoid popular lakes, camp in hidden sites.

  He paddled and portaged north and east, covering more lakes that he’d never seen before, encountering no one. He was getting into Quetico’s least-seen parts.

  Each morning he woke before sunrise, struck camp in the dark, pushed off as the sky lightened. Paddled long and hard as if he was racing, portaged hard and fast, for no other reason than to feel the exhaustion. To create physical pain that got his mind off everything else. To be exhausted enough to sleep through the night and not think about his train wreck of a life.

  He took his breakfasts on the water as he watched the sun rise above tree-studded bluffs, listened to the gulls and loons. He made coffee at a morning portage. Lunches came at the end of midday portages, a quick sandwich and a handful of peanuts on the beach, washed down with cold lake water. Dinner was fish cooked over a campfire to conserve his freeze-dried rations and stove fuel.

  Pender considered himself a poor fisherman at best, but even he could catch a meal-sized northern or bass in Quetico. He started looking for promising structures around four o’clock each day—rocky reefs, steep-drop cliffs, deep weeds, and creek mouths. He’d invest a half dozen casts in each, and then move on, trolling a lure to the next spot. He’d catch his fish and fillet it on a nearby rock structure, leaving the remains for the gulls and scavengers. Then he’d look for a campsite at least a kilometer away from where he cleaned the fish. He’d prepare his meal before setting up camp, partly to enjoy the freshest fish in the world, partly so that if a bear lured in by his cooking aromas refused to leave, he could depart with little trouble. It had never happened to him, but an old guide had told him about the technique and he adopted it for himself ever since. The guide told him that sometimes you had to pitch your tent in the dark, so Pender had practiced pitching his tent at night in the backyard of his fashionable suburban home. His wife and daughter thought maybe he was losing his mind, but he insisted that being the only person on the block who could pitch a tent in the dark would bring great status to the family. He was the only one who thought that was funny.

  He lost himself in the rhythms of the days. The silence. The hard work. The tired muscles. Falling asleep to the weeping calls of the loons and breezes whispering in the conifers. The days became a blur. Rain, sun, fog. The quiescence of the mornings, the afternoon breezes. The portages in smears of green and granite. Blue-water lakes, coffee-colored bogs. Clouds. Mist. Sun.

  He tried to focus on the moment. Staying on his bearing mark. Regulating his paddling cadence. Carving his strokes to correct for wind and waves. Scanning for movement, for the chance to see a moose or bear or wolf. He tried to keep his idle time to a minimum and use it to plan the next day.

  Tried not to think about his life. The disaster of his life.

  Each night as he ate in the glow of dying campfire embers and washed dishes in the light of a headlamp, he allowed himself to think about Annette. He tried to think about her with detached passion, to keep his expectations low. This was not a time in his life for optimism. But the thing was, he had never forgotten her. Of all the people in his life, there had probably never been a week that he hadn’t thought about her at least once. Her voice. Her smile. Her beauty. The goodness of her that he could feel, even when they were arguing madly. Which was often.

  “I hope you get drafted and you go to Vietnam and you get shot and you die there!”

  God, the greatest breakup line ever. He had thought about it just about every day he was in the army. Freezing his ass off in basic training. Boiling in the putrid heat in advanced infantry training. And especially in Vietnam. Swatting mosquitoes, sitting in the rain all night waiting for Charlie to walk into an ambush, drinking warm beer in camp, mounting a prostitute on R&R. It was always there. The woman he couldn’t get out of his mind wanted him dead. Even when he could realize she didn’t mean it, it hurt.

  Forty years later, sitting in the middle of an empty wilderness, trying to deal with the end of his life, he still remembered what she had said, her voice when she said it, her precise diction that added such elegance to everything she said.

  “I hope you get drafted and you go to Vietnam and you get shot and you die there!”

  He wondered what she looked like now. The small photo of her in the brochure revealed a slim build and strong facial structure, but that was it. She’d have some lines and wrinkles. God knows he did. He wasn’t expecting a college beauty. Didn’t want one. His ex was a glamour girl, and look how that turned out. It would be enough if Annette was just a nice person. No shattered ego, no seething anger about life’s unfairness. The opposite of him.

  But he told himself to expect the worst because that’s how these things always turned out. It would be fun for a day or two. Talk about old times, conjure sweet reminiscences of that brief moment of innocence they shared. Get caught up on the last forty years. Where were you when this happened or that? When did you think of me? What did you think? Your kids. Your business. Your life ’til now. What’s next?

  Then it would get real. Life’s disappointments. Arguments, maybe, like old times, over conflicting priorities. She had given up everything to live a principled life. She was a good-hearted Canadian, and she’d made something of herself. He had moved from one moral shit storm to the next—war, corporate war, and the accumulation of wealth. She would find it hard to respect him. He couldn’t blame her, but he was done with the judgments of others. Two, maybe three days on the island, he told himself. Then he’d move deeper into Quetico, where only the lost souls go, hoping a compass and a map and the haunting isolation of a beautiful void would somehow bring meaning to their lives. He would bushwhack into no-name lakes, slog into remote bogs, scramble up heights no man had seen in a hundred years, just for the sheer hell of doing it. He would seek out Quetico’s most impossible portages and follow them to lakes of oblivion. And when he got tired of it all or when he ran out of food or when the cold weather came, he’d come out of the wilderne
ss and take a train somewhere far away.

  10

  “The Copellas are due in three days,” Annette told Christy. They were reviewing the notes she had compiled in preparation for her trip. “They’re not the greatest paddlers, so I want you to take care of their trip plan and take them to the launch yourself.”

  Christy nodded.

  “If there’s any wind, you be down here with binoculars and watch them cross the lake,” Annette said.

  “Okay, Mom!”

  “And have your canoe with you, just in case they need a rescue.”

  “Stop it! I know how to take care of customers.”

  “I just want to make sure you don’t have Eric or one of the other summer people handle it.” She shrugged. “They’re nice people, and they deserve our best.”

  Christy watched her mother organize gear in the small outbuilding they used for their outfitting business. Their canoe customers left from Canadian Shield Outfitters, but they carried Quetico Outpost gear, carefully packed by Annette and Christy the night before. Annette was distracted tonight, too caught up in her own thoughts, smiling too wide at quips that weren’t that good, her face too animated when she spoke.

  “Are you nervous?” Christy asked.

  “What, that you’ll run off with Eric when I’m gone?” She straightened from her labors, and the two exchanged glances.

  “You know what I mean,” Christy said. “It’s, you know, exciting. Exotic, sort of.”

  “You mean it’s weird. I think that’s what I like about it. At my age, you don’t get to do too many weird things with men anymore.” She put her hands on her hips and looked at her daughter thoughtfully.

  “What if he tries to force himself on you?”