Periodically, Cork visited the old cabin on Widow’s Creek, looking for an indication that Solemn might have returned to the place where he’d spent good times with Sam. Early one sunny Sunday morning in the middle of May, he drove to the rez, through Alouette, and up north toward Widow’s Creek. The wild grass was high on the narrow track that led between the pines to Sam’s old cabin. Cork parked and went inside. The place smelled musty and abandoned. He saw that a spider had spun a web in one of the kerosene lanterns and had already trapped and bound in silk a bounty of tiny prey. As he stood in the middle of the empty cabin, he heard a scurrying under the bunk. He understood. The cabin was gradually being taken over. In the end, the woods would reclaim the land and the materials Sam had borrowed to build his little home.
He walked to the creek. The snowmelt was over, and the water was clear now, fed by a spring that bubbled from a rocky hillside about a mile northeast. Sam had erected his cabin beside a little waterfall below which the creek widened into a pool a dozen feet across. The water Sam drew from the pool he used for everything-drinking, cooking, bathing. All winter long, even when the deep cold put a hard shell of ice over the creek, Sam kept a hole cleared in the pool. The bucket with which he carried water was still there, sitting upright on a flat rock on the bank. Cork glanced inside. A black snake lay coiled at the bottom. It lifted its head toward Cork. The fork of its tongue tasted the air. It was a harmless racer, not dangerous at all. Still, its presence in the bucket startled Cork and left him feeling uneasy.
He looked around once more and was about to return to his Bronco when something caught his eye and his ear. A couple of hundred yards south along the creek, a dozen crows circled, dropped, and rose. They cawed furiously in the way of those scavengers when they were squabbling over carrion. Their cries grated against the stillness of the woods and added to Cork’s sense of disquiet. He began to make his way through the bog myrtle that grew thick along the banks of Widow’s Creek. It didn’t take him long to realize he was following a faint trail that had recently been broken through the thorny shrub growth.
Everything about the scene felt a degree off, as if the whole compass of that place had been shifted. His uneasiness deepened into a true sense of menace, and he found himself wishing he’d brought his rifle.
The crackle of the brush as he pushed through alerted the crows. At his approach, they scattered. They’d been feeding on something at the center of a patch of ostrich ferns grown a yard high. Cork could see an outline of crushed greenery, but the growth was too thick and too high for him to be able to make out immediately what was there. The size, however, was about right for a human body. He caught a glimpse of soft tan like a leather coat, and almost immediately was assaulted by the smell of rotting flesh. He steeled himself and went forward.
It was death, all right, but not exactly as he’d anticipated. The carcass of a yearling whitetail lay on a bed of bloodied ferns. Its throat had been shredded, its stomach cavity ripped open, emptied. Cork suspected it had been brought down by wolves who’d feasted and left the rest for scavengers. He stood awhile looking down at the raw flesh that was so thick with flies it appeared to be covered by rippling black skin. What was it he’d expected? What was it he’d feared? That it would be Solemn he’d find there? And why was that? Because death would have explained easily how Solemn had been able to drop so completely off the face of the earth. And because a shadow had come over all of Cork’s thinking now, a darkness that shaded all his expectations with foreboding.
The crows cried at him bitterly from the branches in the pines where they’d fled. Cork left the place and walked back to his Bronco, unable to shake the sense that in these woods there was a great deal that wasn’t right.
14
Cork’s sense of uneasiness persisted. Because it had arisen in the woods, and because it seemed to be something that came out of a place in his own sensibility that defied logic, he finally decided to seek counsel with a man who understood such things.
Henry Meloux was one of the Midewiwin, a Mide, a member of the Grand Medicine Society. He was an old man, very old, who lived alone in a cabin on a section of the rez far north on Iron Lake. Late one sunny afternoon when he’d enlisted the help of both Annie and Jenny to run Sam’s Place, Cork drove north out of Aurora, along back highways, until he reached a place at the edge of a graveled county road where a double-trunk birch marked the entrance to a footpath through the pines. Cork parked his Bronco, got out, and began to walk the trail. After a while, he knew he’d passed from land under control of the U.S. Forest Service onto that which belonged to the Iron Lake Ojibwe. Three-quarters of a mile in, he danced across a string of rocks that spanned a stream called Wine Creek. The name came from the color of the water, a reddish hue due to the iron-rich area through which it flowed and the seepage from bogs along its banks. A few minutes later, he broke from the trees into a clearing that extended all the way to a narrow peninsula called Crow Point that jutted into Iron Lake. Cork could see Meloux’s cabin on the point. The structure was as old as Meloux and just as sturdy. It was built of cedar logs, with a board roof covered with birch bark. The bark worked as well as shakes or shingles and was easier to replace. Smoke came from a stovepipe that thrust up from the roof, and even at a distance, Cork could smell the spices of a stew.
The cabin door stood wide open.
“Henry?”
He received no answer and he stepped inside. Meloux’s cabin was a reflection of time itself. The walls were adorned with many items that harkened to an earlier day. A bow strung with the sinew of a snapping turtle, a deer-prong pipe, a small toboggan. There was also a cheesecake calendar, circa 1948, from a Skelly gas station. Nailed to a post near the potbellied stove was a color Polaroid of Henry Meloux standing with the activist Winona LaDuk. And lying on Meloux’s bunk was the most recent Lands’ End catalogue
The stew simmered in a cast-iron pot on the stove. Fish, wild rice, onions, and mushrooms, spiced with sage and pepper. The table was set with two bowls and two spoons. Cork wasn’t surprised that Meloux had set a place for him. The old man had an uncanny knack for knowing when he was going to receive a visitor.
The barking of a dog came from somewhere near the end of the point. Walleye, Henry Meloux’s old yellow hound. The barking became louder, and Cork figured Meloux was on his way up from the lake. He stepped outside. The low afternoon sun shone directly in his eyes, and for a moment, he was blinded. He put up his hand to block the light, and he saw two silhouetted figures walking together with the dog trotting alongside them. Meloux was obvious, small and just a little stooped, but the other wasn’t clear to Cork. As they came nearer, Cork saw exactly who it was that accompanied the old man, and he let his surprise show.
Solemn Winter Moon smiled when he saw Cork in the doorway. He nodded and said, “It must be time.”
Meloux put another bowl and spoon on the table and dished up stew. The men ate without speaking, Meloux filling the quiet of the one room with the sound of his slurping as he sucked from his spoon. He’d tossed Walleye a big ham bone, and the dog gnawed contentedly in the corner. When they’d eaten, Cork took a pack of Lucky Strikes he’d bought at the Food ’N Fuel on his way out of Aurora and held the cigarettes out to Meloux. The old Mide accepted the offering. Without a word, he stood up, and Cork and Solemn followed. Meloux walked outside, led them down a path toward the lake, between two rock outcroppings to a place where sooted stones ringed a circle of ash. The lake spread before them, water the color of apricots, reflecting a sky full of the afterglow of sunset. Meloux sat on a maple stump, the other two on the ground. Walleye, who’d trotted along, circled tightly a couple of times and, with a tired groan, eased himself onto the dirt near his master. From the pack Cork had given him, Meloux took one cigarette. Carefully, he tore open the paper and let the tobacco fall loose into his palm. He pinched the tobacco and sprinkled a bit to the west, to the north, to the east, and to the south. He took another pinch and offered it to the sky, and then a final sprinkling offered to the earth. When this was done, he took another cigarette for himself, then passed the pack to the others. Meloux wedged a wrinkled hand into the pocket of his bib overalls and drew out a small box of wooden matches. One after another, the men lit up and smoked for a while, letting the silence that had begun with the meal linger. In the apricot light, Cork studied Solemn’s face.