The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  As we neared the lodge we passed outlying guest cottages, some built like dak bungalows from the Indian raj, others styled after Mongol yurts. They were scattered among scenic groves of pine and aspen. Small islands of cedar and juniper dotted the grounds as well, scenting the hot noonday air with spices. There was even a petting zoo for children—baby sheep, fallow deer, wolf pups, and a lion cub among the cuddly attractions. They seemed to be getting along well together. Indeed, the lion was lying down with the lamb.

  The main lodge was a dazzler—a miniaturized version of London’s Crystal Palace. All glass and spires and Victorian gingerbread. It was surrounded by a wide moat on which I saw floating Muscovy ducks, emperor geese from Alaska, and slim, graceful black swans with red paddles and bills. “All the way from Down Under,” Cora said. “They’re native to Australia.”

  “How do they survive the Wisconsin winters?” Ben asked.

  “Oh, we move them to an aviary out back. It’s heated. We have all the ‘mod cons’ here at Shikaree.”

  “How much property do you keep fenced?” I asked her.

  “Just under 13,000 acres,” she said. “Daddy foreclosed on twenty square miles that belonged to a bankrupt lumber company. It went bust in the Depression. The parcel included Twodoggone Lake, where he built the old lodge.”

  “What ever happened to it?” Ben asked.

  “Oh, it’s still in fine shape,” Wanda said. “I live there part of the year now, since my husband passed on. Summers mostly.”

  “And the Gar Wood?”

  “We put it out to pasture after Daddy died. That was in ’64. An aneurysm, but he died happy—fighting his last muskie. The Gar Wood went to Dearborn, I think—one of Henry Ford’s museums anyway.”

  She parked in front of the Crystal Palace and we crossed the drawbridge. The lounge area bristled. Its floors and walls were covered with heads, horns, and hides, from wisent to yak to barasingha, Père David’s deer to a full-body mount of the massive Siberian tiger that had done for Cora’s last husband. As we entered, a familiar figure strode toward us—Florinda Wakerobin, as scowling, stout, and sturdy as ever though her hair had gone snow white.

  “I knew I’d see you rascals again before I died,” she said. “Only the good die young.”

  Then she smiled.

  If I’d had the horn with me I could have played “That Old Gang of Mine.”

  9

  THE ELEPHANT REVEALED

  Pheasants, peacocks, and Northern European capercailzie strutted the lawns that led down from the palace’s screened veranda to a nearby pond. I’d heard of capercailzie, the world’s largest grouse, but never seen them before. They grow up to ten pounds, with dark plumage—almost black—and wide, fanlike tails. Capercailzie is a Scots Gaelic word meaning “forest horse.” During the mating season, and to demonstrate dominance throughout the year, the males expand their bright red cheek pouches and boom like a herd of galloping stallions.

  We watched the big birds strut their stuff as we lunched. Almost as colorful were the young waitresses in saris and caste marks who served us. They slipped to and from the kitchen bringing bhagari jhinga for starters—jumbo shrimp in a creamy pink sauce spiced with cayenne, coriander and jalapeños—followed by poached Firesteel salmon filets, early cohoes I think, seasoned with panchphoran, a mixture of five spices: cumin, fenugreek, fennel, and popped brown mustard seeds, along with a black teardrop-shaped number called kalonji, which tasted powerfully of oregano. Papadoms, pita bread, and basmati rice in abundance accompanied this humble repast. All of this was explained by our proud hostess. We washed it down with ice-cold steins of Old Milwaukee beer.

  The waitresses said not a word and kept their eyes cast demurely downward through their comings and goings. “Don’t be taken in by their Hindustani ways,” Florinda whispered to me. “They’re Chippewa girls from the rez, and all good Catholics. The waitresses eat what we do. That’s why we’re having fish—it’s Friday.”

  Tony Mezzoni showed up with our duffel. After lunch we went out for a “post-prandial stroll” with the shotguns. “Good for the digestion,” Cora said. She and Wanda carried light English doubles, round-action Dicksons with side levers, in 28 bore. The grounds were thick with game birds. Within a hundred yards of the lodge Jake flushed half a dozen ringnecks, a brace of chukars, and a covey of Huns, along with a flock of pale, strong-winged, grouse-like birds unfamiliar to me that flew out low and fast as sheet lightning. I emptied both barrels after them and never touched a feather.

  “That’s the rare Himalayan snow partridge,” Cora said. “They’re almost extinct in their homeland but adapt to this climate with exceptional vigor. Pretty soon they’ll start outbreeding even the pheasants. They’re already outfeeding them. You’d better not miss the next time, Doctor.”

  “So you allow your birds to breed in the wild?” Ben asked. “I’d have figured it was all put and take in these commercial operations.”

  “No, my gamekeeper sometimes stocks birds from the aviaries out back, but only after a bad winter. And then mostly pheasants or chukars. The Hungarian partridge do well here, too.

  As we skirted the pond, Jake nosed into a clump of reeds and flushed a brace of woodcock—but woodcock twice the size of what he was used to. Ben dropped them with a nice right and left, and Jake fetched them both to his hand. “They’re the European species, Scolopax rusticola,” Cora said. “Much bigger than our timberdoodles. The only trouble with them is that, like their American cousins, they migrate—clear down to the Gulf Coast, or so I’m told. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is rather miffed at me about that. Afraid they’ll crossbreed with our native birds or some such nonsense.”

  Tony Mezzoni, who’d been relieved from his watch at the upper river gate, followed us along with a gamebag. Soon it was bulging.

  “None of these birds go to waste,” Cora said. “What the shooting guests don’t eat or take home with them we contribute to soup kitchens in Ashland, Duluth, and the Twin Cities. Same with the excess meat left behind by the big-game hunters.”

  “Those towns must have the best-fed indigents in America,” I said. “You’d pay $100 a plate for snow partridge under glass in Chicago, more for saddle of sambhur. Aren’t you tempted to sell your game birds and venison to the restaurants?”

  “Not at all,” Wanda said. “She’ll leave that to the Elephant when he buys her out.”

  “Is that the pachyderm in musth? The one you want us to rescue you from?”

  “Yes,” Cora said. “My next-door neighbor, Fritz Cardigan. You’ve probably heard of him. Cardigan Enterprises, second only to Microsoft in cyberworld skulduggery. He made his first billion before he was twenty-five—in weapon-systems electronics during and after Vietnam. Now he’s into computers and he wants to buy this property for a new ‘think tank.’ His dream, he says, is to own the whole Firesteel from the estuary to the headwaters. He ‘musth’ have it!”

  “Fritzie had a brief but intense flirtation with the counterculture during the late ’60s,” Wanda said. “Vietnam horrified him despite the money he made from it, and he hates what he calls ‘the blood sports.’ He equates hunting and fishing with war. Can’t bear to see duck hunters or trout fishermen cruising ‘his’ water. The sound of gunfire gives him nightmares, he says. Yet his guards routinely put shots across the bows of passing boats. And the game wardens look the other way.”

  “You’ll meet him tonight,” Cora said. “He’s coming to dinner. I invite him now and then, on the theory that while one should keep one’s friends close, it’s wise to keep one’s enemies even closer—the better to anticipate his moves, of course. But that doesn’t mean he’ll enjoy himself. He’s a perfervid vegetarian, so I’m serving roast haunch of steppe wisent, blood rare.

  “Fritzie’s on to your tricks, hon,” Wanda said. “He’ll bring along a cooler of mesclun and Japanese seaweed, just like last time.”

  “What the hell is a steppe wisent?” Ben asked.

  “It’s the European
bison, Bison bonasus,” Cora said, launching into her tour guide mode. “They’re nearly extinct nowadays except for a small herd, maybe 250 animals, in the Bialowiecza Forest of Poland. The Shikaree herd may be bigger than that by now. They used to range across all of Europe, from France to the Caucasus, and possibly well into Asia, but the last totally wild herd was wiped out for meat during the First World War. During the interwar period, the Poles used animals retrieved from zoos to breed replacements. Steppe wisents, in spite of their name, do well in the woods. They thrive here. In Poland they’re prized by poachers, and with all the turmoil that followed the collapse of the East Bloc who knows how many are left there?”

  “Don’t you get poachers here as well?” Ben asked.

  “Tony and his crew take care of that,” Cora said. Tony smiled and nodded.

  Cora had assigned us to a dak bungalow near the palace. After the shoot Ben and I took showers, shaved, and got dressed. A housemaid had unpacked and tidied our clothes. We donned freshly pressed khakis and went out on the screened gallery, where an ice bucket, glasses, and a bottle of single-malt awaited us. There were bowls of fresh-fried cashews to accompany our libations—tale caju, Wanda had called them, seasoned with salt, pepper, cayenne, and ground cumin seeds. We poured drinks and kicked back.

  “What do you make of all this?” Ben asked.

  “Like I’ve died and gone to heaven. I guess you’re right after all. The present has a whole lot to offer that’s better than the past.”

  He shook his head and reached down to scratch behind Jake’s ears. The dog lay at his feet and mumbled through his doze. The sun was sloping down toward the river, and a pleasant chill crept into the air. Muddy Range Rovers groaned past in the distance, coming back from the field after a day of hunting, their roofracks heavily laden with the carcasses of game—gutted antelope, red deer, big bluegray nilghai, sheep, an enormous brown bear. The bear’s tongue lolled from its mouth, crusted black with dried blood.

  “I don’t like it one bit,” Ben said. “These birds and animals don’t belong here, no matter how ‘wild’ they’re supposed to be.”

  “But if they weren’t here they’d be nowhere. Most of these species are headed for extinction in their native habitats, if they’re not wiped out already. There’s no room for them anymore. It’s like you said, ‘too many fucking people.’”

  “It’s still wrong. A hunter should work for his shots. These guys get driven to the pasture or woodlot where what they’ve paid for is waiting. They get out, crawl on their bellies for a few yards, and squeeze the trigger. The guide guts it out, winches it up on the roofrack, and they’re home in time for the cocktail hour.”

  “It’s not that easy,” I said. “You heard what Cora told us. Sometimes it takes all day, all week, for some of these hunters to connect with horns they’re looking for. And sometimes they never do.”

  “And that’s all to her advantage though,” he said. “She charges sixteen hundred a day for these cottages, and really big bucks on top of that for the animal. It’s all commerce, Harry. And that’s not what hunting’s about. You’ve got to bleed a little to be worthy of taking a life. I’m never happier than coming back in from a day of busting the brush for grouse, pounding the hills from dawn to dusk, legs turned to wood, the backs of my hands ripped by briers, grouse hunter’s hands, and maybe a bird or two cooling in the game pocket.”

  He knocked back half of his single-malt and made a sour face. “That’s when you’ve earned a drink, a good stiff belt of Dickel on the rocks—not this seepage from a peat bog. And maybe a handful of Planter’s peanuts.” He picked a few cumin seeds from the nut bowl, then threw them back. “What are these, rat turds?”

  “You know what you are, Benjamin? A Catholic masochist—a latter-day Saint Francis of Assisi pursuing stigmata in the grouse woods.”

  And you’re envious of the rich, I might have added but didn’t.

  “I wish we were back on the river,” he said at last. “This place gives me the willies.”

  There were two blue blazers hanging in the closet next to our shirts. The breast pockets bore tastefully stitched emblems depicting a topee-topped sahib blasting a tiger from atop a rearing elephant, and the words “Shikaree Lodge.”

  “Are we supposed to wear these?”

  “I guess they dress for dinner around here,” I said. “Look, they’ve even laid out a selection of ties for us. Regimental colors, old bean. With a name like Slater you should opt for the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. They quarry a lot of slate in Wales. I’ll go with the Household Cavalry.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “you can be a bit of a horse’s ass at times.”

  We walked over to the palace. The evening was mild, with a soft afterglow suffusing the sky to the west. Strange horses impeded our progress—hammerheaded cayuses with stiff black manes and long, wild tails. The odd, pale yellow cast to their coats echoed the sunset. They spotted us, snorted, and hit out for the woods. Wild horses.

  “This place gets weirder and weirder,” Ben said. He looked up at the sky. “If we were on the water now, there’d be a spinner fall. A good one with the temperature like this.”

  “There’ll be another tomorrow night.”

  “But how many tomorrows do we have left?”

  A woman stood on the drawbridge watching the horses run. As we got closer I recognized her. It was Molly Bellefont, all spiffed out in a cocktail dress.

  “Hi, guys,” she said as we approached. “Mom said you’d be here. Those are Przewalski’s horses, by the way.”

  “Who’s Przewalski?” Ben asked, probably imagining some sausage maker from the South Side of Milwaukee.

  “Nikolai Przewalski was a famous Russian explorer of the late nineteenth century, a major player in what the Brits called the Great Game. He named these horses when he found them in Sinkiang and Tibet. They’re the only truly wild horses left in the world.”

  “They aren’t anymore, not these anyway,” Ben said. “Hell, we got within ten feet of them before they spooked.”

  “A more important question,” I said. “Who’s ‘Mom’?”

  “Why, Cora of course,” she said. “She told me you were here when I got in this afternoon from upriver. She wants me down here to meet Mr. Cardigan. It seems he has designs on the river—a hostile takeover, she calls it—and she hopes I can help her in balking him.”

  “Did you and Ned ever catch that bull newt?”

  “It’s not a newt . . .”

  “I know, salamander. Did you nail him?”

  We went into the lounge. “Yes, Ned stunned him with the electrodes, along with two hundred or more larvae, just little ones. So that means there’s a female in the river as well, but we couldn’t find her.”

  “Could she be ranging downriver?”

  “It’s possible. But we zapped every pool in the swamp and found no others, so that means she can’t possibly reproduce.”

  “But what killed all those brook trout up there? Two giant salamanders couldn’t have eaten all of them.”

  “That’s a very good question . . . ”

  The room was a blur of white noise—a klezmer band blaring in one corner, guests circling and talking, the clink of cocktail glasses, and the high piercing shriek of overdressed women in faux reaction to men’s lame jokes. Molly pointed out some of the notables to us, sportsmen all. From Chicago, then, came the Hector Schechters and Pete Cosmolino, big in bonds down Windy City way; and a tall state senator from Madison named Dorsey Diffendaffer whom I’d known at Marquette, where he’d been a basketball star under Al McGuire; and Chalmers Caracal, who nearly died in a gliding accident last summer down near Odessa, Texas. And the Spudnuts, man and portly wife, both of whom had eight South African safaris under their ample belts; and Schuyler Fahnestock, the holder of the International Game Fish Association’s all-tackle record—6 pounds, 4¼ ounces—on oyster toadfish (Opsanus tau); along with an extended family named Glimmerglass, from somewhere in Tennessee, who gobbled at everyone who passe
d. The Glimmerglasses, Molly explained, were ardent turkey hunters. They’d come to fill out their life lists of large dead game birds on peacocks, rheas, and capercailzies.

  In a far corner of the room stood Gus Kohlfresser plotting stratagems for the morrow with his hunting partner, Durian Spleen. They were nibbling liverwurst cheesecake and chasing it with bock beer. Both men were big in organ meats, Molly advised us, and were here to experiment with exotic flavors.

  The mob-connected Congonis were on hand from Detroit, along with Django Quagga, the noted Namibian rap star, whose objective on this safari, Molly said, was to lasso a Przewalski’s horse and ride it bareback to a standstill. Django had a number already written, and a video crew from Entertainment Tonight was standing by, locked and loaded, to tape the epic struggle.

  From Milwaukee came the Schornsteinfegers; Carlo Sears and Karl Garst with their wives; the Glomar-Fitch brothers; and O.B.G. “Whitey” Evergreen, the jet-ski mogul, wealthy industrialists all. Molly directed our attention to a table at which were gathered a conclave of Cheatweeds and Buelcks, pharmaceutical tycoons from Kenosha intent on cornering the market in anti-aging drugs. They were at Shikaree to “collect” a shaggy wild goat called the serow. Molly gave us her usual school-marm lowdown: “Native to China, the Himalayan massif, Assam, Burma, and northern Honshu, the serow’s meat is at best mediocre, but some parts of the animal are believed to have medicinal value.”