Tom’s hands felt like they’d swollen to twice their size. His palms were chafed red and his fingers seemed like little sausages, ready to split if he bent them too far. Every hour or so he’d spelled Busher at the oars, pulling their little craft smoothly in and around the countless coves and points of land that made up the Raquette Lake shoreline. “Damn lake goes on forever,” Tom said after hours of poking into every crevice.
Busher grunted. “Wouldn’t be such a chore if I wasn’t ’spectin’ to get shot every time I see a leaf move.”
Tom didn’t answer. He’d felt like he was wearing a target too. He didn’t like it any more than Chauncey.
“Didn’t sign on to get any extra holes in me. The holes I got suit me fine,” Busher added.
Tom wanted to tell him to shut one of his, but thought better of it. The chances of finding Tupper were slim enough as it was without losing his guide. Tom looked at him hard. “You’ll get double your regular rate and then some. I gave you my word on it,” Tom said. He knew his emphasis on word wasn’t lost on Busher, and hoped that the guide was a man of his.
Tom knew well enough how Chauncey felt. Tom’s stomach was knotted up and his jaw ached with the constant tension. Several times they put ashore to check likely spots more thoroughly than they could with the binoculars. They stalked the woods, moving with silent steps, crouching low, but found nothing but squirrels and one partridge that burst almost from under Tom’s feet in a flurry of wings and feathers. Tom had almost fired at it and his heart raced for minutes after, feeling like it made enough noise to be heard clear to Albany.
Despite their efforts, they’d found no sign of Tupper. It was as if the lake had swallowed him whole.
The end of the day crept over the mountains to the east. It was still a couple of hours until dark, and fatigue had at last dulled their edgy nerves.
“He’s here,” Busher said as Tom put down his glasses with a grunt of frustration. Tom had been glassing the shoreline as if he wouldn’t give up the search even in darkness.
“I know it,” Tom said, though, in truth, Tupper could be miles behind them.
“No doubt he knows we’re here, too. But if you’re willin’, I have a thought on how we might just surprise our Indian friend.”
Tom rubbed the swollen lump on his head. It ached and had throbbed whenever he’d taken a turn at the oars. He shrugged it off. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
Tupper rowed all night, resting only when his muscles screamed or his bleeding hands needed tending. Though his hands were raw and slippery with blood, he’d kept to the oars. Though his body ached and his wounded side bled through his shirt, he would not stop. Tupper had no doubt that he would be followed. Sooner or later they’d give up trying to find his body. They’d round up some more hounds and they’d track him to the lake. He was almost delirious. Fatigue, pain, and blood loss had left him reeling. Still, he goaded himself on.
He saw them searching as he lay concealed during the day, had watched as they rowed by his hiding place. The boat lay submerged in just four feet of water, enough so it wouldn’t be seen unless a man was right on top of it. Now that the sun had set, it was again time to move.
He smiled as he lifted out the stones that had kept her concealed on the bottom. The boat rolled and bobbed as he lightened the load. Like an otter, it could not be kept down.
He’d need her speed that night. He’d chosen his hiding place well, a place that was mostly open with little underbrush to shelter him. It was the sort of place that any pursuer would tend to pass over. That had been the way of it. He’d slept most of the day away, never moving unless he had to, and even then not before he was certain there was no one near.
Tupper had seen the two men moving slowly, well out from shore, late in the afternoon. He’d caught the glint of glass from the big one and knew they were using binoculars. Tupper had remained motionless behind a log that lay behind a thin screen of young beech. He didn’t raise the rifle he’d stolen from Durant, though he was tempted. The shot would have been a long one, a thing he wouldn’t chance with a gun he’d never fired.
As he thought this, he realized with a start that they knew he was armed. It was the only reason those two would have stayed so far from shore. Tupper cursed and his temples throbbed with the effort not to scream. It was bad enough they’d tracked him this quickly, but to know too that he’d stolen the rifle seemed almost supernatural to Tupper.
“The devil is with them, Segoewa’tha himself,” he growled through clenched teeth.
His side seemed to burn brighter as he said this, the pain running deeper than the ruined skin and the bruised muscle. His hopes of eluding them or catching them flat-footed with the rifle were illusions. He’d have to play a different game now. They were ahead of him, waiting in some narrow place where they could shoot him from shore or block his escape and capture him. Outlet Bay, or the carry to Forked Lake were likeliest. That was not going to happen, Tupper told himself.
“Stupid white men,” he said, spitting on the ground. “Fools to think they can catch an Ongwe’onwe that easily.”
Tupper began to plan as he lifted the last few rocks out of the boat in the deepening gloom. He emptied the water and packed his gear, stopping before he set off only to empty his bowels. He was careful to bury his shit under the leaves before he went. What he didn’t see was the lone guide boat far out in the lake. It had disappeared behind a point of land before he was ready to push off.
Busher had set about making a lean-to almost immediately after they’d gotten into position. In short order he had a small shelter with a pole frame roofed in bark and hemlock boughs. A soft bed of boughs covered the ground as well. As night fell Busher kindled a small fire and set a pot to boil.
“I know,” Busher said as he caught Tom’s look, “but I figure he knows we’re here anyhow.”
“Still no point giving him any more goddamned advantage than he’s got already, Chauncey.”
Busher shrugged. “You like your pork ’n’ beans cold, that’s fine by me. ’Sides, since we made the portage, we’re way ahead of him and the trees will cover our smoke. He won’t be along for some time yet.”
“Shit,” Tom said. Busher grinned. He didn’t care much for cold beans either.
“Burn the right wood an’ a man can be on top of it before he’ll see the smoke,” he said.
Tom had to admit the fire hardly threw off any smoke, and what there was of it was being carried off by the breeze, which was picking up. Tom shrugged and walked off. Busher seemed to know what he was about, so he let it go.
Braddock sat on a rock at the shoreline, his boots almost in the water. This was a good spot. The lake was narrow here, though still wide enough that a boat hugging the far shore would be tough to spot once the night set in. Busher was betting that Tupper would have to either come this way or abandon the boat and take to the woods. There were other options open to a man like Tupper, they just weren’t as likely.
“He could haul his damn boat over a mountain, if he was crazy enough I suppose,” Busher said when they talked about it. “A man can do lots of things, if he sets his mind to it. All we can do is take our best guess.”
This hadn’t been much assurance to Tom, though he had to admit that out here, with the world virtually empty in every direction, a compass could point, there wasn’t much else to be done. Braddock hoped Tupper wouldn’t take to the woods. Finding him out there without dogs was a job he did not relish.
“Damn near to impossible,” Busher had said. “Damn near. There’s probably over two hundred thousand acres of forest back o’ this lake. Miles an’ miles to anywhere. He gets in there, you might not see ’im, ever.”
After a quick meal, Tom waited by the shore, the .30-40 Winchester across his knees and lukewarm pork and beans in his belly. He watched as the moon scaled the mountains and sent a silvery stream flowing across the lake. A gusting breeze blew, ruffling his hair. Busher had said it would bring some weather by morning.
> Already the stars way off in the south and east were hooded by a low, brooding mass of black sky. Tom hoped that the guide had put enough bark on the lean-to. He hated a wet night in the woods.
The thought set him in mind of the many wet nights he’d spent in the army. There was no recalling them all. They ran into one another in an endless stream of mud, spongy boots, and soaked blankets. Even now, twenty-five years later, he couldn’t smell wet wool without it coming to mind. So, as he watched the lake he thought not of Tupper but of those few years a lifetime gone when a wet bed seemed an adventure.
He was able to shake it off then. Like a sleek young retriever with a duck in his mouth, he’d gripped those years and shaken off their miseries, most of them. Still, they had left their mark as they had on everyone who’d served.
Braddock shrugged off his memories. He wasn’t sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere so he could reminisce, he told himself. But in the stillness of the night thoughts speak loudly.
As he watched the empty lake it was Mike who spoke to him. It was as if the boy were there beside him, telling him the things he’d been too deaf to hear. Tom knew how he’d have felt if he’d been stopped, treated like a boy, a hindrance to real men. But, the truth was that Mike wasn’t a boy at all, Mike was only a few months younger than most of the men Tom had served with in the Twentieth New York.
Tom’s head throbbed. He shifted his rifle on his knee. He wished Mike was there, wished he could tell him how he felt, how wrong he’d been to treat him like a boy. But that wouldn’t happen. Mike was twenty miles away, safe in the Prospect House, and hating him.
Braddock checked his watch. He had to hold it up almost to the tip of his nose to see the hands, and only then once he’d angled it toward the moon’s faint light. It was 10:15. He’d wake Busher in another hour. They’d agreed to watch in shifts until the early morning hours, when they figured it was likeliest Tupper would try to slip by. They’d both stand guard then.
Tom got up off the rock and rubbed his rump, gone numb from the cold, hard stone. He leaned against a birch whose bark seemed to glow, magnifying the moonlight in a spectral kind of way. He listened to the breeze in the branches, the lake lapping the shore, the hollow sound of their boat bumping against unseen rocks. It had been many years since he’d been out in the natural world at night. He didn’t count the city as the natural world, though he’d seen plenty of it by gaslight. Not realizing it, he had missed the great outdoors. He hadn’t known it was so. Thinking back, it was one of the things he recalled fondly from the war, the solitary hours standing guard under the stars, the sharpening of the senses when the world lay still.
Braddock didn’t realize at first that the hollow bump, bump, bump he heard was not entirely of their boats’ making. Other boatlike sounds had crept in on the lapping waves. Perhaps it was the breeze that was picking up. It blended the sounds so they became almost one.
The craft was upon him before he knew it was there, sliding by just a couple hundred feet from shore. Startled, Braddock raised his rifle. He strained to see the sights but couldn’t and cursed as he aimed. He thumbed back the hammer and nestled his finger on the trigger, tightening as he focused on his target. The rifle boomed, a tongue of flame lighting the scene for a fraction of a heartbeat. In that brief instant of Winchester lightning, Tom saw it was Mike he’d shot at.
Tupper heard the shot. His head snapped around and he cocked an ear to catch the echoes. His neck ached with the sudden movement and his head swam.
“What you make of that?” he asked his grandfather’s spirit sitting silently in the stern. He knew the shot was not directed at him. It had been too far off. He knew, too, that his pursuers would not have given away their position like that.
“Some things a man knows, some he believes. The rest he guesses,” the spirit said as Tupper held the oars still. “What a man knows is but a drop in an ocean of knowing.”
“Hmph,” Tupper grunted. The old man’s spirit said nothing.
“Shot was over ta Forked Lake,” Tupper said at last, as if the old man was really there. The fact that the spirit was no longer just inside his head, but sitting in the back of his boat, made no impression on him at all. It seemed a natural enough thing, a manifestation that was just as real in its way as the physical, simply different. He gave it no thought.
The shot convinced him he’d done the right thing to double back. Whether it was the men he’d seen, the big cop and the guide, or just a hunter, the way to Forked Lake was blocked. He cursed his luck. If he’d been able to gain just a few more hours on them he’d be halfway to Long Lake by now.
“Goddamn steamers!” he said. “No man rowing could have caught me up like that.”
“Fire and water,” his grandfather said. “White men turn the world against us. The beaver in the pond and the trees in the forest are weapons in their hands.”
Tupper’s shoulders slumped over his oars. He wilted under his grandfather’s words and his aching body sent waves of pain coursing through him. His head hung and his oars dragged as he thought of the truth in those words. But it was a momentary thing, a passing thunderhead of despair.
His boat rocked in the breeze that swept in gusting breaths across the lake. Tupper looked about. There was nothing to be seen, save a pinprick of light where he knew a camp to be. He was alone.
“Ain’t caught yet, goddamnit,” he said aloud. He flexed his arms at the oars, feeling the bruises and scrapes, but also feeling the strength that was in them. His grandfather’s spirit smiled.
“Quiet old man! Heard enough from you,” Tupper said with a warning frown. The old man seemed to laugh.
“Good. Good,” he said. “The trout does not jump into the boat, Jim.”
Tupper had to smile at that as he picked up his oars again. He remembered his grandfather saying that in another lifetime, when his pants were short and his hair long. “No, he doesn’t,” Tupper said as he started to row again. “The Honio’o may think they have me, but they do not. Not all the steamboats on all the lakes can make it so. They must catch me man-to-man, in the forest or on the water. Here I am strong and they are weak.” The long oars groaned as Tupper pulled. The craft sliced through the water. Tupper knew where he was going.
“Mike! Mike!”
Busher came at a run, his rifle ready.
Tom held a hand out. “It’s my son. Don’t shoot,” he said, wading into the lake as if he might walk out to the boat. He’d only meant to fire a warning shot, to capture Tupper alive, but in the dark the best he’d been able to do was point somewhere ahead of the boat. He couldn’t be sure.
“Dad?”
“Jesus, Mike, you all right?” Tom called as he splashed into the lake up to his waist, his voice cracking. The boat turned toward shore, a deeper shadow on the blue-black water.
“Don’t shoot! It’s me. It’s Mike.”
Tom caught the bow of the boat without a word, reaching for Mike with groping arms. An oar bumped him as he caught Mike’s hand. He pulled the boy to him, rocking the boat and nearly capsizing it in his haste. He hugged him in the dark, an awkward embrace with the hard edge of the boat digging into his middle.
“Dear God, Mike I thought I killed you,” Tom said, gripping him in vicelike arms. Mike hugged him back. Tom could feel him tremble.
“I’m okay, Dad.”
“You’re sure you’re all right?” Tom asked, squinting in the dark, holding him at arm’s length. “I—” he started to say, but Busher interrupted. He pulled at the bow of the boat, saying, “Best get you dried off, cap’n. I’ll stoke the fire.”
Once the boat was beached and Busher had added wood to the fire, Tom started stripping off his wet clothes. Mike took off his boots, propping them on sticks near the fire. Tom hung his wet pants from a nearby branch and, like Mike, propped his boots and socks as close to the fire as he dared. All was done in a silence punctuated only by the snap and pop of the fire. The flames grew, casting them in shifting reds and yellows so that at
last they could see each other. Neither of them looked. The sides away from the flames were all in shadow.
When they had taken care of their wet clothes and Tom had rummaged in his pack for dry things for himself and a fresh pair of socks for Mike, he stood on the opposite side of the fire as Mike put the socks on.
“What the hell are you doing here, Mike?” Tom asked. There was no anger in his voice, only fatherly exasperation and a hint of something else. Mike picked up his head and looked straight at Tom. He could have sworn there was a touch of pride in the question. His jaw almost dropped. The fire crackled, sending a flock of sparks up into the blackness.
“I had to,” Mike said, rubbing his hands by the fire.
A grim pursing of his lips and a nod were Tom’s only reactions. He noticed Mike’s hands in the firelight. They were red and raw.
“You rowed all that way, didn’t you? Didn’t take a steamer.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Didn’t want anybody to see me.”
“Your mother know?” Tom asked. He figured he knew the answer.
Mike shrugged with a guilty twist of his head. It was the one thing he wished he’d done.
“If I left a note…,” Mike began.
“You figured she’d have sent them after you,” Tom said. He took a deep breath. “She’d have been right to. You know that, don’t you?”
Mike didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Tom heaved a sigh and shook his head slowly.
“We’re gonna have to get word to her,” he said as he rubbed his temple. It had been throbbing since he’d taken that shot. “She’ll be crazy with worry. You know how she can get.”
Mike, who had been watching Tom with quiet intensity, allowed a tight grin to play across his lips. “Yeah, I know,” he said.
Busher got up another pot of beans, cutting chunks of pork and tossing them in as the pot began to simmer. He tossed a can behind him. It bounced and clanked in the darkness.
The Empire of Shadows Page 23