Only the Dead (3 page)

Lance thought about what he’d seen at the creek a few hours earlier. As if somebody had quickly retreated so he wouldn’t be seen.

Willy breathed hard as he straightened up in his chair and slowly reached for the glass of water on the table. Once again Lance saw how the old man’s hand shook as he raised the glass to his lips. Some of the water spilled over the side, running down his wrist and under his shirtsleeve, but Willy didn’t seem to notice. When he finally managed to get the glass into position, he tilted his head back and emptied it in three big gulps. Then the glass had to travel in the opposite direction, back to its place on the table. Lance realized that all his muscles had tensed up while the whole drinking ritual was under way. Willy straightened up and pressed one hand to his stomach. Then he proceeded to belch for several seconds. Lance could smell it from the other side of the table. Finally the old Indian exhaled audibly and sank back against his chair.

“That’s better,” he said. “Now where were we?”

“The man was approaching the hollow tree where he’d hidden the knife,” said Lance. “But someone was there.”

“Yes, he saw the back of a man disappearing among the trees. He got worried, but when he looked inside the hiding place, the knife was still there. That night he was finally able to keep the knife at his side, and the next day he attached it to his belt and began using it, which was what he’d always wanted to do. Even though the knife was magic, it was still a knife. And it was a good one. He used it every single day. He cut off slices of moose meat, gutted fish, and whittled splinters of wood that he could use to light a fire in the hearth. But at night he would place the knife on the soft bed he had made for it. And there they would lie, stretched out next to each other like any other married couple.

“One day when he went down to his canoe at the lake, he again saw a man disappearing among the trees. And even though he saw him only from the back, he felt sure it was the same man he’d seen near the hollow tree. He followed him into the woods for a short way, but the man was gone. He wasn’t happy about this, because he thought it had something to do with the knife. He wondered if the man might be a spirit who was looking for it. For a moment he even considered throwing the knife into the lake, but when he held it in his hand, he felt as if he were about to kill a friend, and he couldn’t do it. He continued to carry it with him in the daytime, and placed it beside him when he slept at night.

“Until one day when he went over to Hat Point again to set out his nets. That was when he noticed a canoe drifting nearby. He had no idea where it had come from, because he hadn’t seen or heard anyone. When the two canoes were only a stone’s throw from each other, he realized the man in the other canoe was Swamper Caribou. He knew the medicine man had disappeared several months earlier. Everyone knew about it. He’d also heard that Swamper had been killed and eaten by an ice giant, a so-called
windigo.
Now he understood that it was Swamper he’d seen earlier, and it made sense that the knife belonged to the spirit world. Swamper Caribou’s spirit had come to take it back.

“The man paddled for shore as fast as he could go, but the whole time he could hear the oar strokes of the other canoeist coming closer. When his canoe scraped bottom, only a few yards from shore, he jumped out and began wading toward land. But he was worn out after paddling so hard, and he slipped and fell. As he lay on his back in the shallow water, hardly able to move, he was certain the end had come. With the last of his strength he propped himself up enough on his elbows so he could look behind him. But no one was there. Nor did he see any canoe other than his own, which was several yards away.

“After that the man stopped going outside. He would lie on his bed all day long, staring at the knife that lay next to him on its own little bed made from the scrap of cloth from his jacket lining. He couldn’t stop looking at it. If he tried to do something else, his mind would remain focused on the knife, and he was no longer capable of accomplishing anything. He felt himself more strongly connected to the knife than to any human being, even his own mother. He didn’t understand it, nor did he have any wish to understand it. He just wanted to
feel
it. That was his only wish.

“But one day something occurred that he had long expected would happen. He was lying there looking at the knife when the door opened and Swamper Caribou stood in the doorway. The man was as frightened as anyone would be when confronted by a spirit. He lay there next to the knife, staring at the figure in the doorway. Swamper Caribou came over to the man, who could feel the blazing eyes of the medicine man on him. He knew that now he was going to lose the knife, the only true friend he had. The medicine man squatted down, picked up the knife, and studied it closely. He looked pleased and nodded to himself. Then he said, ‘You have taken something that does not belong to you.’ The man was so terrified to hear the spirit speak that he couldn’t muster a single word in reply. ‘This knife belongs to someone else. He needs it where he is now,’ said the spirit. Then the medicine man stood up and calmly left the house.

“The man had survived an encounter with the spirit world, but he was completely changed. Friends and neighbors hardly recognized him. He never smiled anymore, and they soon forgot that they’d ever heard him laugh. He grew thin and his hair turned gray. Over the course of only a few weeks he had become an old man. One day in the fall he was standing on the wharf here in Grand Portage, waiting for the steamboat from Duluth. A big crowd always gathered for the arrival of the boat. Some came to meet family members or acquaintances who had gone to town; others were waiting for supplies. But most people just came to see the boat and the crowd. The man was standing there with his uncle. Neither of them had any special reason for being there. They were just watching the boat pull into the dock. That was when he caught sight of Swamper Caribou’s spirit up on the deck, together with a group of passengers about to come ashore in Grand Portage. His uncle could tell something was wrong because the man kept pointing as he gawked and tried to say something, but not a word came out of his mouth. When his uncle asked him what was the matter, the man finally managed to whisper in his ear that he could see a spirit standing on the deck of the steamboat. And it wasn’t just any old spirit, either. It was the spirit of Swamper Caribou. It stood alone, just to the left of the group of passengers, and it was smoking a pipe.

“But his uncle laughed loudly. ‘That’s Swamper Caribou’s
brother
you’re looking at, you miserable fool,’ he said. ‘Do you really think spirits travel by steamboat?’ It was the brother that he’d seen all along. He was the one who had crept around in the woods, and he was the one who had come to get the knife so that the other medicine men could once again send it out onto the lake. Even though the whole mystery was finally solved, the man never returned to his former self. And he didn’t get his wife back, either.”

A few seconds passed before Lance realized that this was the end of the story. He had a feeling Willy was trying to tell him something about Mary, about their marriage. Maybe even something about what he’d done wrong. But what had happened had simply happened, and he was not solely to blame. That was just how things had turned out. And in the end Mary no longer wanted to live with him. She probably realized she’d chosen the wrong man. Suddenly Lance felt terribly tired. He’d been out hunting all day and had to get up early in the morning too. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was five to eleven.

“What exactly does this story have to do with your dream?” he asked.

“I forget now,” replied Willy.

“You
forget?
”

Willy threw out his hands in apology. “I’m an old man,” he said. “My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

“But why was it so important to tell me all this?”

Willy looked as if he didn’t quite understand the question. “Well, you were so preoccupied with Swamper Caribou the last time you were here,” he said.

“Sure, I guess so . . . ,” said Lance.

“You asked me whether I knew any old stories about him. You even showed me a photograph. Or did I dream that too?”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“A picture of his brother,” Willy went on.

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“Didn’t you say that one of your ancestors killed Swamper?”

“I did say that.”

“Why?”

“Er, because . . . because of the coincidence of time and place. Swamper Caribou disappeared in March 1892, around the time of the full moon, which was on the sixteenth of the month.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s mentioned in an issue of the
Grand Marais Pioneer
from that year. I have the Historical Society archives at home, you know. Joe Caribou, Swamper’s brother, had gone to see the editor to report his brother missing. And that’s where it said the full moon was on March 16.”

“And what about this ancestor of yours?”

“Thormod Olson, a relative on my mother’s side of the family. He arrived alone, at the age of fifteen, in March 1892. He walked across the ice at night, in the moonlight, the whole way from Duluth to where Tofte is today. In my family the story goes that he fell through the ice and then survived a long cold night in the woods.”

“But you don’t believe that?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Lance hesitated a few seconds before replying.

“In the historical archives there’s an old diary that was written by one of my great-grandmothers. My mother’s paternal grandmother. Thormod Olson finally made it to their cabin, and they nursed him back to health. But in the diary she writes that he had two deep wounds in his right arm. To me it sounds as if he had tried to defend himself from being stabbed, or something like that.”

“Stabbed by Swamper Caribou?”

“Maybe.”

Lance didn’t mention what else he’d discovered in the diary—the fact that his great-grandmother Nanette, whom everyone had always described as French Canadian, was actually Ojibwe. Not necessarily full-blooded, but still. Andy and Lance Hansen both had Ojibwe blood in their veins. This was something that Lance hadn’t told anyone.

“Then maybe it’s not really so strange that I thought you should hear this story, is it?” said Willy.

“No. You did the right thing to call me.”

“Besides, it’s Sunday tomorrow, so you can sleep in.”

“No, I can’t. I’m going hunting.”

“Oh, right. Because you didn’t shoot anything today?”

“I
chose
not to shoot.”

Lance looked down and noticed that the legs of his pants were spattered with tiny drops of blood.

“I ran over a cat. Had to kill it.”

“You should wash up before you leave. You’ve got some blood on your face too.”

“And you didn’t say anything until now?”

“It doesn’t bother me. But in case you stop at a gas station or something . . . You look like you murdered somebody.”

Lance went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. Blood was sprinkled on his forehead, his nose, and his right cheek. It looked like he had freckles. How long had he pounded on that poor animal? It was as if the blows had been inside him, just waiting to get out, and he hadn’t even stopped when the cat lay still. He turned on the faucet, and as he was about to put his hands under the stream of water, he saw that they, too, were spattered with blood. Fortunately nobody had seen him like this. Only Willy. He was sure about that. But then he remembered the other car, which had stopped right next to him. He had kept on bashing the cat, and after a few moments the car had driven off. Was it possible someone had recognized him? So what? He’d run over a cat and had been forced to put it out of its misery. Any responsible person would have done the same.

In the hall he put on his boots and jacket. Then he opened the door to the living room and stuck his head inside. Willy was still sitting in the same easy chair, with his hands clasped on his stomach.

“I’ll be off now,” he said.

“No, sit down,” said Willy.

“But . . .”

“Just for a moment. You come here so seldom.”

Lance went into the room and sat down again, this time wearing his jacket and boots.

“When you and Mary got divorced . . .” Willy began, but then stopped himself. After a pause he continued. “I’ve always considered you to be a good man, Lance. But don’t you think you tend to get a bit . . . obsessed? Get totally lost in . . . well, one thing or another?”

Lance realized that he had no desire to continue this conversation.

“Isn’t that true?”

“
Obsessed?
The fact that Mary and I got divorced was . . . But things are fine for everybody now, right?”

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do. Isn’t everything fine? With Jimmy and Mary? They’re okay, aren’t they?”

“Sure, but I don’t think anybody believes
you’re
okay anymore.”

Instead of making a joke or brushing the remark aside, Lance simply sat there, looking around the room as if searching for a peg to hang it on.

“I was wondering whether you might have become . . . obsessed with something again.”

“I’m perfectly fine,” said Lance.

The old man reacted with an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

Lance stood up.

“Don’t go,” said Willy.

“I don’t have time for this,” said Lance, and he left.

3

ONLY
THE
ROWANBERRIES
, hanging in big clusters, shimmered in the gray light. Lance sat in his car, waiting for his brother. Taped to the middle of the steering wheel was a photograph of his seven-year-old son. The radio was on, but turned down too low for him to hear what was being said. A flock of waxwings was eating berries from the rowan trees that stood between the parking lot and the river. It was an annual sight in November.

He took a heart-shaped Dove chocolate out of his jacket pocket, removed the thin foil wrapper, and placed the candy on his tongue. His mouth quickly filled with the sweet taste. As always, he smoothed out the wrapper to read what it said inside.

“Your secret admirer will soon appear.”

A second later Andy pulled into the parking lot. Lance got out. The air felt damp, but it wasn’t raining. He opened the back of the Jeep. There lay the wrench, with a big white tuft of fur stuck to the dried blood. His rifle, a .243-caliber Savage with fiberglass stock, was wrapped up in a brown blanket. After casting a quick glance at his brother, who was still sitting in his Chevy Blazer, Lance unwrapped his gun. Then he hid the wrench under the blanket.

Only when he heard Andy close his car door did he turn around.

“Early, aren’t you?” said his brother. He had on dark green rain gear, just like Lance. And he was wearing a Minnesota Twins cap.

“Not really,” replied Lance, slamming the magazine into place. Beyond the trees, where the waxwings were still stuffing themselves with rowanberries, he could see the froth on the river as it rushed past the steep slopes of the rocky section, just before the bridge. It looked like something between a waterfall and rapids. He could clearly hear the roar of the water. Below the bridge the river slowed and calmly traversed the last few hundred yards until it reached the lake down near Baraga’s Cross.

“So where did you say you saw that buck in the summer?”

“Right up here.” Andy opened the back of his vehicle. He took out his rifle and slung it over his shoulder. “But whether it’s still around . . .”

“Is your cell phone fully charged today?”

“It’s working fine.”

“I sure hope so, since I can’t find the walkie-talkies.”

Andy looked at his brother for a moment without commenting.

“Your turn to drive?” he finally asked.

Lance nodded.

“I suppose it’s natural to divide it up into shorter drives, right?” Andy went on. “Because of the power line.”

“Yeah.”

“And if nothing happens by the time you get there, we’ll make another attempt.”

“Farther up, near the big bend in the river,” said Lance. “There should be some great posts in the hills over there.”

He looked at his watch. “How much time do you need to get up to the power line?”

“Shall we say half an hour?” replied Andy.

LANCE
MUST
HAVE
BEEN
about ten at the time. Their father had taken the two boys along on a fishing trip, and they had borrowed a cabin. All these years later, Lance couldn’t recall where it was located, but he did remember that they’d caught some fish. He had a clear memory of frying and eating the fish in the cabin at night. But that wasn’t what he was thinking about as he sat in the car with his rifle beside him, waiting in the parking lot near the Cross River.

It must have been after they were done fishing. The cabin had to have been some distance away from where they’d been fishing because they’d arrived by car. It was late in the evening, but the moon shone brightly over the woods. They were planning to stop somewhere to look at the moon. But first their father had turned onto a narrow side road that was almost completely overgrown, with a ridge of tall grass between the tire ruts. Tree branches scraped over the roof of the car.

They’d walked a short way along a path, and then he saw it very clearly up ahead. The moon high above the treetops. It must have been a full moon, he thought. Or at least almost full. Yet it was so dark on the path that he had trouble making his way forward. Two dark figures were in front of him, one short and one tall, his little brother holding his dad’s hand. Finally they emerged onto what looked like a viewpoint. Could it have been Carlton Peak? he wondered. But no, it must have been much farther away from Lake Superior. It was the sight of the lake that he happened to think about now. They stood there together, the father and his two sons, somewhere in the woods, at an elevated spot with a view. Their father must have taken them there to show them exactly what Lance was now thinking about. The dark forest world all around them, spreading out in every direction. Not a single electric light, only the darkness of night and the metallic gleam of the huge body of water beneath the moonlight. Surrounded by darkness, it looked like it was floating in space. How could he have forgotten
that?

And now here he sat, half a lifetime later, out hunting with Andy. He ought to be feeling good. I like hunting, he thought, always have. But here he sat, as if in a tunnel, with the rest of the world blocked from view. A tunnel that led only one way and shut out everything else. Andy was somewhere up ahead in the tunnel. Lance wasn’t sure what all these thoughts meant, but the tunnel image best described what his life was like now.

It’s not much of a life, he thought. Andy was a murderer, and he himself wasn’t really any better. When he lay in bed at night, unable to sleep, it was usually because he was thinking about Lenny Diver, the twenty-five-year-old Ojibwe man from Grand Portage who was in jail in Minneapolis. He’d been charged with the murder of the Norwegian canoeist Georg Lofthus. Lance knew Diver was as good as convicted even before the trial began. The murder weapon, a baseball bat with the victim’s blood on it, had been found in his car. And he’d also given a phony alibi. In other words, he might as well have confessed to the whole thing. But he hadn’t. On the contrary, Diver stubbornly denied being anywhere near Baraga’s Cross on the night in question. And Lance believed him. He knew the baseball bat that had been found in Diver’s car had the initials “AH” carved into the wood, just like on Andy’s bat. And with his own eyes he’d seen his brother drive down the road to Baraga’s Cross just hours before the murder occurred. The next day Andy had shown up at the ranger station and told Lance and everyone else who was there that he’d been out at his cabin on Lost Lake the previous night. He claimed to have gone out in his boat to fish and had stayed out there until midnight. But Lance knew he was lying. So he was enormously relieved when he heard that they’d arrested an Ojibwe and that the blood found at the crime scene proved the killer had to be a man with Indian blood. It had to do with a gene mutation that was found almost exclusively in American Indians.

But his relief abruptly vanished when he discovered that his great-grandmother Nanette had been Ojibwe. Which meant that the evidence from the crime scene was not conclusive when it came to determining whether Lenny Diver or Andy Hansen had committed the murder. And with that, Lance was right back where he’d started, harboring a strong suspicion that his brother was the guilty party. This knowledge had transformed Lance into a corrupt police officer who was protecting a family member from the law.

Yet even worse was the thought of Lenny Diver sitting in a cell in Minneapolis, awaiting the court trial in which he would undoubtedly be given a life sentence. He was there because Lance had not come forward with the truth. Isn’t that the same thing as taking a life? he thought. A form of murder, just slower. In spite of everything, Georg Lofthus must have died quickly. For Lenny Diver, it would take the same length of time for him to lose his life inside the prison walls as it would have taken him to spend his life outside.

A half hour must have passed by now. Lance turned up the volume on the radio, which had been on the whole time but turned down so low that it was nearly inaudible. He caught the tail end of the news broadcast. A helicopter had been shot down, several soldiers had perished, but he didn’t hear where this had happened.

It was eight thirty. Time to head out. He decided to do his best to ensure that this hunting expedition was as brief as possible. Today he was going to shoot the first deer that came within range, regardless of its size or sex.

He went to the back of the Jeep to get out the small backpack that held a thermos of coffee, a bottle of water, and two chicken salad sandwiches. He slipped his arms through the straps of the backpack, then slung his rifle over his right shoulder and began walking across the parking lot toward the woods.

As soon as he got in among the low birch trees that grew at the end of the parking lot, he became covered with a thin layer of moisture, from his hair all the way down to his boots. It wasn’t raining, but all the branches were laden with shiny drops. The air felt damp, like a thick mist, as he breathed it into his lungs, but there was no rain or fog. It was just an overcast November day, the kind that never gets fully light. Lance was moving slowly. Cautiously he pushed aside the branches as he tried to make his way through the trees. He wasn’t especially good at this. Andy was the expert at stalking prey. But it didn’t really matter, because in this dense birch forest he wouldn’t be able to shoot at anything. So he kept his rifle slung over his shoulder, but he still tried to move as quietly as possible. They didn’t want some deer to race past Andy’s post at too high a speed. Then it would be difficult to hit. The ideal scenario was for the deer to approach at a slow pace, nervous and on guard, of course, but not panic-stricken. Like when the deer had appeared at Copper Pond yesterday. It wasn’t frightened; it had simply stood there, checking the scents and the terrain. If Andy had come tramping through the woods, shouting loudly, that same deer would have been nothing but a brown streak racing across the marsh. Then Lance remembered how his brother had knocked on the window on the wrong side of the Jeep. Had he even been anywhere near Copper Pond?

He veered to the right, heading closer to the sound of the river. The source of Cross River was in the huge complex of marshes deep within the Superior National Forest. It started out as a slow-moving and meandering current, more like a wide, quiet creek. Gradually it increased in size by absorbing water from the countless other small creeks, but it continued to flow gently through the extensive, almost-level conifer forests. When only a couple of miles remained, the river took on a more impressive form. The flat, at times slightly undulating, forest landscape abruptly changed to a hilly terrain that ended down by the narrow shoreline and Highway 61. These hills finally allowed the river water to become a foaming, rushing torrent. Then, after this short but dramatic phase, the Cross River calmly flowed on for roughly two hundred yards before emptying into Lake Superior at Baraga’s Cross.

Lance was still near the lower, steep part of the river. A bit higher up the water passed through several clefts, but the Cross River would never be as spectacular as, for instance, the Cascade River or the Manitou.

At one spot he found fresh deer scat. After that he was even more cautious, carrying his rifle in his hands, ready to shoot at a moment’s notice. He would have preferred to happen upon a deer and get this hunt over with as quickly as possible, but from experience he knew that would be difficult. He’d never shot a deer that way, when taking the role of driver. Andy, on the other hand, had done it several times. He had no idea how his brother was able to sneak up on deer, which were such wary animals.

Where in this area would he be most likely to find a deer at this precise moment? The answer was “on the slopes along the river.” He didn’t ask himself why, just blindly trusted his experience, which was not simply the result of a quarter century of deer hunting but was based equally, or maybe even more, on the fact that these woods were his workplace all year round.

The river was his most important partner. Because of the high water level, he figured it was improbable that any deer would try to cross the river, which meant that the current would serve as a reliable right flank for him. He was the left flank. If he was careful to maintain a certain distance from the river, the deer would probably continue straight ahead. Ideally this would lead the animal to a lethal encounter with Andy’s Winchester up near the power line. From that position he would have an unobstructed line of fire. But if Lance got too close to the river, he would remove his own left flank, and the deer might flee in that direction. So he made a point of keeping the desired distance from the river.

He suddenly became aware of a sound and then realized that it had actually been present for a while. It was the sound of rain striking his Gore-Tex clothing. At the moment it was no more than a drizzle. He pulled up his hood. This was good hunting weather. A fall day with sunshine and a cloudless sky might be beautiful, but sounds carried much farther through crisp, clear air. Smells did too. No, gray days that hovered like wet woolen blankets over the forest—those were the best. Then the chances were greater for getting close to a deer.

Lance stopped at the top of a small rise with a view of the river. He was breathing hard. He wiped the mixture of rain and sweat from his brow and proceeded to examine the terrain, in particular several clearings along the river. But he didn’t see anything of interest. The only thing moving was a small flock of songbirds, apparently searching for food in the birch trees. Then the birds moved to a fir tree only a few yards away. One of them crept headfirst down along the slippery trunk. Lance knew that only a nuthatch could do that. The flock looked to be a mixture of nuthatches and black-capped chickadees, with maybe a few boreal chickadees or brown creepers.

He thought of his mother holding up the palms of her hands, the way someone does to catch the first drops of rain. They had been standing outside a small house on a secluded street in Two Harbors, where she and Lance’s father had lived during the first year of their marriage. One morning she had gone to the kitchen window to look outside. It was snowing, and snow had already covered the trees and the fence. Oscar was out there feeding the birds, as he did every morning. But Inga said this time a little bird had landed on his hand. And soon more did the same. They were swarming around her husband as he stood there in the yard with the snow falling all around. When she saw how surprised Lance was to hear about this incident, Inga asked him whether he’d ever seen his father feeding birds from his hand. No, Lance had told her. His mother thought this was strange, because she said Oscar used to feed the birds in their yard in Duluth when Lance was growing up. But he couldn’t recall seeing anything like that, and it had bothered him ever since. If he’d really seen his father do something as special as that, why didn’t he have even the slightest memory of it? And if he’d forgotten about his father’s ability to attract the birds, what else might he have forgotten?