Ice Hunter (22 page)

She studied him for a minute, then laughed. “Sorry. It's sort of a local joke,” she said.

“Mind your mouth,” the man said as he went into the office and slammed the door.

The young woman cringed and frowned. “I hate the mindset up here,” she said disgustedly. “I can't wait to get out. I started at Suomi and finished up at Minnesota Duluth. My degree's in forestry and horticulture. I want to open a nursery, but banks up here won't loan piss to a toilet and you can't get money unless you already have money. It's the same everywhere, I guess. Them that has gets more. I want to make some real money. Pop has had to struggle for everything. I want a cushion in my life, eh? The way people scrape along up here, there's no safety net. You make a mistake and you're screwed. I want more than that.”

She was clearly talking about something specific, but he sensed this wasn't the time to ask. “You're working here now?”

“Summer off. I teach in Chassel, but that's just for now. I'm probably going to head for Colorado or New Mexico. There's nothing up here for me.”

It was a familiar story. The U.P.'s youth left first chance they got. And rarely came back.

“Do you know the Knipe family?” Service asked.

“Assholes,” she said, tightening her jaw.

“Do a lot of people share your opinion?”

“I speak for myself.”

He wondered what her beef was and wanted to pursue it, but he had to see Gus Turnage in Houghton and he was still thirty miles away.

On the road north, he thought: Diamonds again. Out of left field this time. It was a non sequitur, but the woman clearly had no use for the Knipes. What had happened? He decided he would make it a point to visit the woman again and talk at more length.

Gus Turnage, the CO stationed in Houghton, was one of Service's closest friends. Gus was an elf of a man with the shoulders and arms of a blacksmith. Turnage had once been CO of the Year in Michigan and nationally in the same year, but shrugged off honors. He was the scoutmaster of a troop that won national awards nearly every year, but you would never hear this from him. Gus's wife, Pracie, had died in a head-on collision with a logging truck ten years ago and he had raised three sons alone. Good kids. Gus had become a CO the same year as Service and over the years their paths had crossed continuously. They'd had a lot of fun together.

Service pulled his truck into the
yooper court motel
, two miles south of the center of Houghton. The manager was Yalmer Wetelainen, who worked only to pay for his hunting and fishing obsessions. Wetelainen was forty, bald, thin, short, and partial to beer, especially his homemade, which he drank in copious quantities, mostly because it was cheap. Service and Turnage had once used a Breathalyzer on Yalmer at an all night nickel-dime poker game: The Finn drank a case of beer and shots of straight vodka in a fairly short time, but never registered legally drunk. Neither CO could figure it out. Yalmer drank like a fish and ate like a pig, yet he was an ectomorph with not even the hint of a paunch. Turnage and Service decided their friend didn't fit any known human physiological profiles and because of his unique metabolism, they nicknamed him Shark. It stuck.

Shark was waiting outside his office and waved as Service pulled in.

“Good, you're in civvies,” Wetelainen announced in his booming voice. “We're gonna go meet up with Gus.”

“Where's my room?” When he was in Houghton Service always stayed at the Yooper Court, and Shark always gave him a cut rate. In fact most COs got cut rates on virtually everything they bought; just recently the governor had tried to tube a senior DNR official over this. The official had disagreed publicly with Bozian on a wildlife resource issue and next thing he knew, the state attorney general's office charged him with buying for his personal use at a discount from a DNR-approved vendor and not paying tax on what he bought. The whole case got thrown out, but Bozian made it clear that anybody who got crossways with him was going to feel the full heat of state government. Service knew his name was on Bozian's hit list.

“Chuck your gear in my truck,” Shark said. “We're gonna bunk out to my camp tonight.”

His camp was a shack he called Valhalla, a small log cabin set near the Firesteel River, an area that could be tough to get into and out of, even if you had a good sense of direction, a compass that worked, and knew where you were going. The soil was mixed with clay and with even a modest rain, the roads were slipperier than black ice and nearly impossible to negotiate.

Gus's truck was already at the cabin when they arrived before sunset, but despite fast-moving evening shadows, the cabin was dark.

“C'mon, c'mon,” Shark said excitedly. He got out of the truck and took off into the woods without bothering with bug dope, but Service doused himself as he followed along. His pals were up to something. Shark was a unique man who made ancient weapons the way prehistoric Indians had. He hunted with a flintlock rifle he had made from scratch and a bow made from Osage orange wood he had gotten in Montana.

They walked for twenty minutes until they got to an area of steep ridges covered with pungent firs and mixed hardwoods. It was growing dark fast.

Nighthawks roared down from the light sky into the shadows, hunting mosquitoes.

“Where's Gus?” Service asked.

“Quiet,” Shark whispered almost inaudibly. “Geez-oh-Pete, for cryin' out loud, we're in the bloody bush, eh?”

Service shut up. The woods were Shark's church and his god was nature. You didn't talk in Shark's church.

At the edge of a ridge Wetelainen put out his arm and pointed for Service to sit down. They hung their legs over.

There was an open, grassy area below and a nearly full moon rising in a pink-orange sky. The two men sat in fading light and silence.

After an hour Shark tapped Grady's shoulder, leaned over, and mouthed, “Soon.” Then, grinning, he grabbed Service's arm and pointed down.

A dark shadow loped into the open area below and was followed by four lighter colors that danced and pranced and rolled and circled in tight coils. The larger animal carried its tail out straight, not down. Not a coyote. Service's heart raced.

Shark poked his arm hard. “Geez!” he whispered huskily. “Iszatsompin?”

A female wolf and her four pups played below them. When she sat and howled, her pups yipped and tried to copy her. Service felt a chill. These were the first gray wolves he had ever seen in the wild and they left him speechless. It was a glorious and beautiful moment, witnessing something few human beings ever saw. Especially in this state.

After thirty-one years as a territory, Michigan had become a state in 1837. By the early 1950s there were few deer left and no elk, moose, or wolves. Now, because of DNR action, there were two million deer in the woods, a thousand elk, five hundred moose, and more than two hundred wolves. The transplant programs had been tenuous, but they had all taken hold and the animals were spreading and prospering. In some ways seeing these wolves reinforced his faith in the system: Despite all the conflicts between so many petty interests and all the nasty politics, the DNR was making headway in restoring the state in ways that only future generations would fully appreciate.

Someday, he hoped, he would hear the howls of wolves in the Mosquito.

The animals cavorted for fifteen minutes in the open and then disappeared as silently and quickly as they had arrived.

“I need a beer,” Shark said, popping a tab and handing the warm can to Service. “You like my wolves?”

“Yours?”

“Fucking eh. I found the den and been watchin' over 'em. I'm their grandpappy.”

“Where's Gus?”

“He'd better be catchin' our dinner.”

The three friends ate a salad of fiddlehead ferns and fresh brook trout salted and peppered and pan-fried in butter with a pinch of brown sugar. They had canned corn mixed with red potatoes and sautéed with scallions and red peppers. They ate while kerosene lamps hissed and frogs chattered outside in the trees and somewhere in the distance coyotes yipped at each other.

“The wolves are the future,” Gus said, sipping a beer.

A future not yet assured, Service thought. Not by a long shot. All of this, so magical to behold, could be erased in no time.

Kermit Lemich, Ph.D., had a cluttered office in the basement of an old building called Schoolcraft Hall. The building sat directly above the Portage Ship Canal, smelled of mildew, and looked like a cellar that had once housed custodians, but Lemich seemed to have taken it over. His desk, phone, and gray metal file cabinets were in the center of a sort of open hub, surrounded by mounds and stacks of boulders and rocks of all sizes and colors, piled up to eight feet high. Every stone, Service saw, was marked in a code with some sort of white paint.

Service had to wind through a narrow canyon in the rocks and round a final sharp bend to enter Lemich's inner sanctum. The man was stocky with a gray crew cut and a bushy white handlebar mustache. He had an unlit cigar in his mouth and wore shorts and a red Hawaiian shirt. Overhead hung several colorful silk pennants, the sort that ice hockey teams and players exchanged at national and international tournaments. There were also three pairs of dusty goalie skates and some dog-eared goalie leg pads suspended from wire hangers overhead, and on a small space on the wall, several faded black-and-white team photos.

“Doctor Lemich?”

The man looked up and motioned the CO forward, using a wet-tipped cigar as his pointer. “Pull up a chair and call me Rocky,” the professor said.

Service sat gingerly in a rickety wooden chair at the side of a battered oak desk piled with papers and rocks. There was an antiquated Japanese laptop computer on the desk, and beside the desk a dented metal cart containing all sorts of computer components.

Lemich stared at him and after a few seconds said, “I'll be go to hell.
Banger
Service!”

Service stared at him.

“You don't remember me? Sudbury Wolves,” Lemich said. “You were playing Junior B with the Marquette Ironmen. Your coach set up a scrimmage with us and we thought it was pretty funny, some American Junior B snotnoses coming to play a Tier IOHA team. I'll never forget it. You were six-four, 230. You don't look much different now, which is better than most of us can say. You were what, sixteen, seventeen? And all our guys were licking their lips ready to give you snotnoses an ass kicking.”

Service did not recall the game. It had been nothing special, just one more among the hundreds he had played. His coach, Okie Brumm, was always taking his teams against superior competition. Usually older too.

“We won 4–3,” Lemich said, “but you won the war and we called you Banger after that. You were a legend; we all expected to see you in the NHL. Not your team,
you
. None of our guys had ever been hit that hard before, and every time one of our guys ran you, you lined 'em up and blasted 'em. I played some games with Boston, enough to qualify for a pension, but left hockey and got myself into Harvard. Rocks and pucks, both inanimate things. God, you were a helluva player, Service.”

“Just a journeyman.”

Lemich laughed and swallowed cigar juice and coughed. “Yeah, you sent a whole bunch of guys on journeys to bloody lala land. You were All-American at Northern Michigan. The Red Wings drafted you. See, I remember all this shit. How come you didn't go?”

Service hadn't thought about hockey in a long time. “I looked at the organization and it looked pretty shaky and disorganized and I didn't want any part of it. I joined the Marines.”

“Officer?”

“Grunt.”

“You get sucked into that Vietnam shit?”

Service nodded.

Lemich grimaced. “Figures. Still wantin' to crash the corners. Now you're with the DNR?”

“Twenty years.”

“Long time,” the professor said. “You were a helluva player, Service. I mean that. I've worked as a volunteer coach here with goalies. Johnny McInnes and I were pals. Johnny told me about the time you flattened one of his stars in a fight. You made an impression, Service. I've been around hockey all my life. If you'da gone to the NHL, you'da lasted twenty years up there. There's never been a checker as tough or as ferocious as you.” Lemich suddenly laughed. “I guess it's a good thing none of the Wolves tried to pick a fight with you that time!”

Service was embarrassed.

“You still skate?” Lemich asked.

“No.” He had simply walked away from the game. He no longer owned skates and had no idea where his mementos and medals were.

“You ought to. Maybe coach some kids. It'll keep your ass young, and there's nothing like kids to remind you how wonderful our game is.”

Service didn't want to talk hockey. That life was done, just like Vietnam, and he wasn't one to dog-paddle in the past. His old man had played for the Chicago Black Hawks in the 1940–41 season and had started the next year in Chicago, but the morning after Pearl Harbor he had gone down to the recruiting office on State Street and joined the Marine Corps, not returning until 1945. His old man never went back to Chicago; he had returned to the U.P., married, and three years later Service was born. But it was a hard delivery for his mother, and within a year she had died. The old man had become a CO when he got back from the war and, after his wife's death, had begun to drink too much and bury himself in his work. The old man had done his best for him, but Service knew that playing mother and father was too much for him. Often when the old man was out all night chasing bad guys or drinking, Service was dropped at various neighbors. Or with his Grandmother Vonnie, who thought he was crazy. Even before the shotgun deal.