Kristin put her papers aside.
"Christian ethics," she said, as though she were weighing their general usefulness. "I don't think Genesis likes hunter-gatherers much. I think it favors the shepherds."
"I must look it up. You always learn something, right? Reading Genesis."
Early the next morning, two of Michael's colleagues from State came by in a Jeep Cherokee. Kristin served them coffee and handed out bagged sandwiches to take along.
Alvin Mahoney, a tall, balding historian with a rosy drinker's face, presented Michael with his hunting piece.
"Remember this? Remington twelve-gauge?"
Michael jammed three deer slugs into the magazine and pumped them forward to get the feel of the gun.
"You can put six in there," Mahoney reminded him. "Only if you do — remember they're there."
"Yep." Michael lowered the shotgun, unloaded it and stuffed the shells in his jacket pocket.
The third hunter was a sociologist named Norman Cevic, whom students liked to think of as coming from New York, though he was actually from Iron Falls, a tough little smelter town on the lake not far away. Norman did his best to affect a streetwise quality for the small-town adolescents at the university. He was about the same age as Mahoney, twenty years older than Michael, though he seemed younger.
"Norm went out opening day," Mahoney said. "Straight out of the shotgun. So to speak."
"Wasn't it a zoo out there?" Kristin asked. "I mean humanwise?"
"Not if you know the territory," Norman said. "I didn't see a soul."
"You took the canoe?" Michael asked.
"Sure." Norman Cevic had a gravelly voice that amused the students. "Had to use it to get in there. Didn't see a soul," he told them again.
No one said anything. Paul was lurking in the kitchen doorway in his bathrobe. Norman took a sip of coffee.
"Except," he said, "Hmongs. I saw some Hmongs in the distance. Probably walked all the way in there. No snow yet."
"They need the meat," Kristin said. "They live on it."
"Roots," Norman said. "Winter greens. Squirrel. Raccoon."
"How did you know they were Hmongs?" Paul asked from his half-concealment.
"Good question," Norman said. "Smart kid. We should take him hunting next year. Want to know how?"
Paul looked to his father, then nodded.
"How I knew they were Hmongs," Norman declared, as though it were the title of a lecture. He had been cradling a Mossberg thirty-thirty in one arm while he drank his coffee. Now he put the cup down and let the rifle slip through his fingers until he was holding it by the tip of the barrel just short of the end sight. "Because," he told Paul, "they carried their weapons by the end of the barrel. Sort of trailing the stock."
"Huh," said Alvin Mahoney.
"Which is how they carried them in Vietnam. And Hmongs are very numerous in Iron Falls. So," he said, addressing himself to young Paul, "when I see a man in deep woods carrying a rifle that way I presume he's a Hmong. Does that answer your question, my friend?"
"Yes sir," Paul said.
"Hmongs are a tribal people in Vietnam and Laos," Norman told Paul. "Do you know where Vietnam is? Do you know what happened there?"
Paul was silent for a moment and then said, "Yes. I think so. A little."
"Good," said Norman. "Then you know more than three quarters of our student body."
"Mr. Cevic was in Vietnam during the war," Kristin told her son. She turned to Norman, whom she rather admired. "How long was it that you spent there?"
"A year. All day, every day. And all night too."
Just before they left the telephone rang. From his wife's tone, Michael knew it was his teaching assistant, Phyllis Strom. Descended from prairie sodbusters, Kristin did not always trouble to enliven her voice when addressing strangers and people she disliked. She had a way of sounding very bleak indeed, and that was how she sounded then, impatiently accumulating Phyllis's information.
"Phyllis," she sternly announced. "Says she may not be able to monitor midterms on Thursday. Wonders if you'll be back?" There was an edge of unsympathetic mimicry.
Michael made a face. "Phyllis," he said. "Phyllis, fair and useless." In fact, he felt sorry for the kid. She was engagingly shy and frightened of Kristin.
"I told her you'd left," his wife told him. "She'll call back." The new and rigorously enforced regulations required chastity in student-faculty collaborations, but Kristin was not reassured. She imagined that her anxieties about Phyllis were a dark, close secret.
"Do I really have to come back for this?" Michael said as they went out to the car. "I'll call you from Ehrlich's tomorrow night after six."
They drove past dun farm fields, toward the huge wooded marshes that lined the Three Rivers where their narrow valleys conjoined. In about four and a half hours they passed Ehrlich's, a sprawling pseudo-Alpine bierstube and restaurant.
"I want to go on to the Hunter's," Michael said.
"The food's not as good," Mahoney said mildly.
"True," said Michael. "But Hunter's sells an Irish single malt called Willoughby's on their retail side. Only place they sell the stuff west of Minneapolis. And I want to buy a bottle for us to drink tonight."
"Ah," Mahoney said. "Sheer bliss."
On his tongue, the phrase could only be ironic, Michael thought. Bliss was unavailable to Mahoney. It was simply not there for him, though Michael was sure he'd like the Willoughby's well enough. But for me, Michael thought, bliss is still a possibility. He imagined himself as still capable of experiencing it, a few measures, a few seconds at a time. No need of fancy whiskey, the real thing. He felt certain of it.
"How's Kristin?" Norman asked Michael.
"How do you mean, Norm? You just talked to her."
"Has she seen Phyllis Strom this term?"
"Oh, come on," Michael said. "Think she's jealous of little Phyllis? Kris could swallow Phyllis Strom with a glass of water."
Norman laughed. "Let me level with you, buddy. I'm scared to death of Kristin. Fire and ice, man."
Mind your business, he thought. Cevic had appointed himself sociologist to the north country. In fact, Michael thought, at home the ice might be almost imperceptibly thickening. Kristin had taken to rhapsodizing more and more about her father, upon whose forge her elegantly shaped, unbending angles had been hammered. The god in the iron mask, mediator of manhood and its measure. Still alive under the granite. A man might well dread his own shortcomings in that shadow.
"Smartest move I ever made," said Michael, "marrying that girl. Definitely sleep nights."
Perhaps, he thought, that had not been the best way to phrase it, for Cevic the curious and curiously minded.
The landscape grew more wooded as they approached Mahoney's cabin, where they planned to spend the night. Farm fields gave way to sunken meadows lined with bare oak and pine forest. Thirty miles along they came to the Hunter's Supper Club, a diner in blue aluminum and silver chrome. Incongruously attached to the diner, extending from it, was a building of treated pine logs with a varnished door of its own. At eye level on the door was the building's single window, a diamond-shaped spy hole, double-glazed and tinted green. A hand-painted sign the length of the roof read "Souvenirs Tagging Station."
They parked beside the half-dozen battered cars in the lot and walked across the sandy, resin-scalded ground and into the metal diner. There were banquettes and a counter and a heavy young waitress in a checkered dress and blue apron. The restaurant itself was empty except for two old farmers at the counter who shifted themselves arthritically to see who had come in. From the bar, which sounded more crowded, came jukebox music. Waylon Jennings's "Low-down Freedom."