Alone on the Shield

by Kirk Landers

“Now, you need a name, and since you aren’t giving me one, I’ll make one up. Just a temporary thing, okay? ’Til we find your owner. How about ‘Yeller’? Like Old Yeller.”

  She shook her head.

  “No. You need a more original name. Gabe Pender wouldn’t give you someone else’s name, would he?”

  The dog looked her in the eye again and wagged his tail, curiosity and anticipation on his face.

  “Here’s a good name for you. How about Asshole?” The dog’s tail whacked against the ground. “No. It would be hard to explain to someone who heard me call you. Or to your owner, if he cares.”

  She thought about it more as she ate.

  “Chaos,” she said, breaking the silence. The dog startled at the sound of her voice, stared at her. “That’s your name. Chaos. Boy, what a perfect name. A yellow storm named Chaos.

  “Okay, Chaos. Here’s the deal. Don’t steal my food and don’t capsize my boat, and everything else will be fine. If you don’t want to come with me, you don’t have to. If you want to, though, be there when I shove off. I’m not waiting for you.”

  After she washed dishes, Annette paddled out to the far rocks to dump the fish entrails for the scavengers. Chaos jumped in the canoe before she did. She started to make him get out, thought the better of it, positioned him in front, where she could watch him, and set out again.

  Later, back in camp, he sat next to her on a boulder overlooking the lake as she sipped tea and watched the day fade to night. He leaned against her. She leaned against him. It was relaxing. His warmth felt good in the chill of the night. They stayed like that until all light was gone, listening to the soft sounds of water lapping at the shore, seeing the first stars blink on in the heavens. Annette sighed and let a tumble of images pour through her inner vision. Christy smiling at her as she left. Her granddaughter peeking up at her from her bed. Paddling in a pristine Quetico rock garden years ago, towering boulders rising above her. She saw her home. Her parents. College. The young Gabe Pender. Pleasant memories from near and far. Sweet, wistful visions from a life that still seemed short.

  As Annette kneeled at the water’s edge to rinse her cup, two loons began an exchange of mournful wails, one on her lake, the other on the next lake west. Rising from the dark of night in a vast, empty wilderness, their calls sang of love and a misty sadness, of loneliness and the memory of intimacy. Their night music was a serenade to the bittersweet nature of life, she thought. You start your life as a collector of precious moments and end it clinging to them. No matter how much you love the people you love, we all end up on different lakes, calling to each other in the night.

  When she opened the tent, Chaos shot in. She thought about pulling him out. She had never let dogs sleep in her house, or her tent. But she relented. He was a pretty good guy, and he was scared and lonely. She knew what that was like. It would be nice to snuggle with a kindred spirit tonight.

  13

  Pender felt like he’d been shot and the bullet was lodged in his vertebrae, and every time he moved, the bullet ground against the bone and tried to sever the large nerve inside, tried to paralyze him. He knew it wasn’t a bullet, but the pain was exhausting and the fear that he might inflict permanent damage on his spinal cord lurked like a sneering doubt in the shadows of his mind. He paddled warily under a pewter-gray sky so ominous he could taste metal in his mouth. He kept a close watch to the north for signs of a canoe and hugged the shore in case he had to make for cover. He didn’t expect the fat boys to double back, but you never knew.

  He experimented with his paddle stroke, trying to find a combination of reach and rhythm that would propel him without making his back worse. He settled on short strokes, with very little reach forward and none to the rear. He eliminated J-strokes, the paddle motion used to keep the canoe tracking straight. Pender’s J-stroke included a slight twist in his torso that produced pain. Not crippling pain, warning pain. Warning that if he J-stroked for a couple of hours, he’d be crippled by nightfall.

  He paddled through a few minutes of misty precipitation, but the gray sky never erupted. The still morning air gave way to light breezes out of the southwest, pushing him on his way. He labored to his first portage. His map promised a short, rough trail following the banks of a creek. No precarious climbs, not much up and down.

  Pender sloshed through calf-deep water to shore and unloaded his gear. The pain had been manageable. Movement had kept his back muscles warm and out of spasm. He hadn’t had to bend much to unload the boat. He took a moment to change from sandals into boots to make the hike to the next lake as easy as possible.

  He shouldered the food pack and grabbed paddles and life jacket for the first carry. It went quickly and easily, as did the second trip.

  By the time he launched into the next lake, he actually felt better. The walking had been a good break from paddling. Bending still produced pain, but it was manageable.

  Pender paddled into a deep, narrow chasm, its walls towering above him in steep green slopes and jagged cliffs. The waterway was called a lake on the map, but it was a creek system, so narrow in places that his paddle sounds echoed from the walls. For a little more than an hour, he soaked in the stunning beauty of Quetico and forgot about his pain, his lost life, and the impossibility of his situation. As he traversed the narrowest part of the cavern, a bald eagle floated overhead, searching for fish, passing so close to Pender he could see the precise line where its white feathers gave way to the tawny brown feathers of its main body.

  He had wanted to paddle this water for as long as he had been coming to Quetico, this eerily narrow, freakishly deep passage gouged from ancient rocks by forces of nature beyond the imaginations of most humans. He wanted to fish there, to experience fighting a big northern lurking in the icy depths of a narrow, bottomless creek. But he resisted the temptation to dig out his fishing gear. He had to make time or he would miss Annette. He would let her down. That was playing on his mind more and more. He would have just made it to the island in time if he hadn’t gotten hurt; now he was in trouble. Everything was slower for him—paddling, portaging, breaking camp. He was in danger of missing Annette, and there was nothing worse than the shame that came with breaking a promise. Even though they probably wouldn’t even like each other, he couldn’t let her down.

  He promised himself he’d come back to this place as he pushed on as hard as he could. He’d camp here and fish here. He’d lie in his canoe and watch the eagle float overhead. He’d climb to the top of the cliffs. He’d paddle into the boggy reaches of the lake, maybe fish for bass, look for moose. Breathe.

  Pender increased his paddling cadence as much as he dared. At the northeast end of the lake, a small bay to the right held the portage into the next lake in the creek system. That was where the fat boys would be looking for him. But Pender veered left, heading into an obscure narrow inlet lined by steep cliffs on one side and rolling slopes on the other. The inlet was virtually invisible from the main lake, looking like just another gap in the shoreline. It led to a portage trail into a different creek system—a lot less attractive than the one he was leaving, but faster to Annette’s island.

  When he finally found the portage trail, he knew it was going to be a bitch. The trail was actually a rock-ribbed water path that drained runoff from the heights above. It dropped more than a hundred feet at an angle severe enough to look like a small waterfall when the heavens opened up. The sight would inspire wonderment—unless you had to climb it with a hundred pounds of gear on your shoulders, in which case the emotion would be more like dread.

  He tried not to think about how hard the portage was going to be. He tried to just keep himself on automatic pilot. He had to make time. He had to protect his aching body. He lashed the paddles and life jacket to the food pack, hoisted it on his shoulders, and slipped through the forest opening to the rocky trail that seemed to climb vertically to the sky.

  As much as he had trained for this trip, by the time he reached the top of the climb he was puffing
for air and his back ached. Sweat streamed off his head and body. His legs felt watery, his head light. He wanted to take a minute to catch his breath, but he pushed on, knowing if he took a break, it would become a habit and he’d never get to Annette’s island on time.

  The landscape flattened out, and the forest gave way to large openings of boggy terrain—some of it solid with grassy covering, some of it a floating island formed by tangles of roots and detritus with grasses and scrub growing on it. In places, the ground sagged under Pender’s weight, and water seeped into the void left by his boots. Twice his boot crashed through the surface and he sank into the muck up to his knee as stabbing pain shot through his back and bitter curses poured through his clenched teeth.

  By the time he reached the end of the trail, his back throbbed. He was tired and soaking wet with perspiration. His boots were full of dark water. He had several new mosquito bites. He ignored the discomfort, put it in a closet in his mind, and closed the door to it, focused on what he needed to do. Like Vietnam. He peeled off the pack and went back for the rest of his gear. When he reached the quaking bog where he had crashed through the surface on the first trip, he took time to mark a detour with branches and small rocks.

  The second carry started with disaster. He slipped on the first ascent and slid several feet down the precipice on his knees and shins. The front of the canoe banged hard against the rocks above, jarring his neck and shoulders where the portage yoke rested. His boots caught on embedded rocks just in time to keep him from tumbling into a pitched roll down the slope and maybe breaking his neck with the portage yoke. As it was, his pants were torn and he had raw strawberries on both shins and knees. More scars for the collection.

  When he crested the steep slope, Pender was a wreck, and he still had many miles to go if he was to get to Annette’s island on time. He used his anxiety to propel him forward through the pain and misery, even as another part of his consciousness wondered if Annette would be laughing if she saw how badly he had botched this portage, how stupidly he had allowed himself to fall when he hurt himself in the first place. She would have a hard time taking him seriously, he thought. He was having a bit of a hard time with that, too.

  * * *

  Annette and Chaos woke to skies draped in dark, low-hanging clouds like a funeral, the air still and the waters eerily calm. Annette took her time, making a hot breakfast and sipping coffee, waiting to see if a storm would blow in. She fried eggs and ham over a camp stove, fed Chaos the remains of her breakfast, and then washed the dishes. The sky was still gloomy, but there were no other signs of a storm. She struck camp, loaded the canoe, and tried to get Chaos ready for paddling. It was a delicate exercise. He had to ride atop a pack, which would raise the canoe’s center of gravity and put them at risk of capsizing if he moved around too much.

  She tried having him jump on the pack in front of her after she was seated and could brace the boat. He jumped aboard but wanted to circle before lying down, then lay with his weight off center. His weight and position made the boat list dangerously to one side.

  Annette ordered him off the boat with words and a hand gesture. He jumped off. She got out of the canoe and ordered him on again, patting her hand on the pack. He jumped back on and started his circling routine again. “No!” she commanded. She grasped him by the collar and forced him to lie down, then pushed him until he was centered. Each time he tried to stand or move, she corrected him by pulling him down and nudging him back into place.

  When he was stable, she got into the canoe herself . . . and he stood and circled to face her. She got out of the canoe and went through it all again. After another fifteen minutes of trial and error, she set off for the portage to the west. In the twenty minutes it took to get to there, Chaos started to rise several times. Each time, she bumped his head with her paddle blade and yelled “No!” before he got out of the prone position. His last attempt to get up came as they neared shore for the portage. She corrected him, then stopped the canoe several feet from shore and waited. He started to rise again, and she corrected him again. After a minute of stillness, she got out of the canoe in knee-deep water. As he started to rise, she corrected him again.

  “You’re going to have to do this on command, old friend,” she said. “So we’re going to make every take-out and put-in a learning exercise.”

  When she got to the bow of the canoe, she said, “Go ahead,” and gestured to shore. Chaos sprang from his down position into the water and splashed ashore with the unrestrained glee of a child in a chocolate factory.

  As Annette hauled her gear, Chaos ran riotously along the trail and crashed into the brush to follow animal scents. But when she began loading the canoe, the dog clung closely to her.

  “Guess you don’t want to miss another boat, huh?” She said it with a smile but with a tinge of sadness, too. He was a good guy. He didn’t deserve to be left behind.

  Annette crossed the next lake in a light sprinkle and still winds. She looked for signs of the trippers who had passed her camp the night before, but they were long gone.

  Her next carry was what she called a “separation portage” when she plotted trips for customers. The trail was nearly a mile long and semirugged, with lots of rolling terrain. Many canoeists avoided such tests. There were scores of beautiful lakes that could be accessed via shorter, easier trails. So long, difficult portages created separation from human traffic. Your reward for taking the long haul was days of travel in an empty wilderness.

  Despite her strength and conditioning, Annette was breathing hard and perspiring when she completed the first carry. Her legs felt like rubber and her shoulders ached from the pads of the canoe yolk pressing down on them for more than thirty minutes. Still, she paused only to drink deeply from her water bottle, then hustled back to get the rest of her gear. Resting would just add time and pain to the process. She kept moving and focused her mind on other things.

  So she thought about what Pender would think of her if he could see her now. A Chicago lady would call her pace “power walking,” she thought. A Chicago lady would be wearing designer gym clothes, and her body would be model trim. Pender wouldn’t see her until she had showered, had her hair done at some posh salon, put on a designer dress and heels, did her face with makeup that was just right for the season, lipstick in this season’s shade.

  What would he think of his old flame now, a wilderness woman? How long since she had worn heels? Twenty years? Thirty? Had she ever worn them in Canada? What about makeup? She couldn’t remember a time she’d worn makeup since she immigrated to Canada. She had a couple of dresses and she wore them on special occasions, but she could barely remember what they felt like.

  By the time Pender saw her, she’d have three days of wilderness exertions clinging to her, that outdoorsy fragrance that comes from sweat and rain and all-the-time fresh air, from chill nights and warm days and cooking over a wood fire, from baths in water so cold it made your skin purple. Maybe he’d like that, though. He loved Quetico. How prissy could he be? Maybe he’d prefer rugged outdoor grannies to young debutantes with big silicone breasts and short skirts.

  And maybe pigs would fly.

  Annette’s conversations with herself did nothing good for her self-esteem, but the carry was over before she really knew it, before she had resolved anything.

  Chaos had reveled in the long double portage, racing back and forth from one end to the other, racking up miles of exercise. He was more than ready to clamber aboard the canoe again and laze in the gray sun that was just beginning to burn through the morning overcast. The moment Annette gestured for him to jump on the front pack, he sprang lightly to his spot, circled once and flopped down—perfectly centered. Annette smiled, impressed. “Well done, Mr. Chaos,” she said.

  They were making good time and Chaos was steady in the boat, so Annette shifted to a relaxed pace. It was a big lake, stretching about five kilometers east to west with a large bay on its west end and a smaller bay south of that. It was a deep, cold-w
ater lake popular with lake trout fishermen in the spring but less visited in the summer.

  She made notes on her map about the condition of the campsites, then rigged her fishing pole with a heavy, deep-running silver spoon and spent twenty minutes jigging for lake trout in one of the deepest parts of the lake. They were deep in August, fifty feet, a hundred feet, or even deeper, and much harder to find and catch than bass or walleye. But this was a rare opportunity to fish for summer trout from a canoe: calm winds, overcast skies, cool water. Any kind of wind made deep-water fishing from a canoe more difficult than it was worth.

  As Annette cast the heavy rig and let it flash and tumble into the depths, she looked about. From the middle of the lake, the shoreline looked flat and featureless, even though most of the shore was lined with steep bluffs that would make her next portage a good physical test. That was the thing about summer trout fishing: aesthetically, it sucked. You’re in the middle of a big lake. You’re fishing blindly in deep, deep water. You can’t do much to get the fish to bite—just lift up the line and let the lure drop and flutter, hoping the flash will make some hungry trout strike, and keep doing it for as long as your mind can stand it.

  It’s just that she had a taste for trout, and if she got lucky, she could get one big enough to feed both of them.

  As she jigged, she wondered what Pender was doing and where he was. She figured he was in the central region of the park by now, moving west to their meeting place. He’d be on one of the small lakes there. He told her he preferred small lakes, clear water, and pine forests. Then again, when they compared trip notes, it was clear he had plenty of experience in the bogs and the spruce and birch forests. It would be like preferring a Mercedes and settling for a BMW, Annette thought. She had no use for luxury cars, but she tried to frame his life against the culture of conspicuous consumption that was the hallmark of the America she had left behind.