It is evening. No-see-ums swirl around his head, put off only by Grandfather's liberally applied bay leaf oil on his bare skin. Around the lake stand dense evergreens as old as anyone Grandfather can remember and far older still. They are fir, hemlock, cedar, and pine, forming a velvety fragrant thickness over the earth. Protruding into the water, like creamy brown natural leather, a sand spit simmers in the late-summer sun.
Near the spit there is a small clearing carpeted with spring-fed grasses and edged with the softer verdant hues of huckleberry and myrtle. In the midst of this meadow the cabin enjoys the shade of hand-planted mountain bilberry, the leaves tinged with the first autumn color. There is no breath of wind. The water, soft as satin, glistens under the bursting yellow-reds of sunset.
Grandfather stands beside him and puts a strong hand on his shoulder. Kier wants to understand the power in this touch, a better touch than he has ever felt, a healing salve to his loneliness. His father is dead. For many days there was little feeling. Life on ice. Now a sense of loss has eaten a giant hole out of his middle. All that stands between him and the incomprehensible abyss is Grandfather's hand.
A fish hawk rises on the wind. Kier watches his namesake, and something about the bird stirs him. There isn't a way to say what he is experiencing except that it is a longing. So he lets the sense of this go through him without trying to understand it. There is a gentle squeeze on his shoulder and once again he is aware of the hand. It is as if it is guiding him to the bird.
"A man might know the currents on which he glides and then he would be free," Grandfather says.
As Kier waits and remembers, he wonders about the currents. In his mind is a puzzle, the pieces of which are strewn about- very few of them put together. There is his mother and her iron will. That is part of the puzzle. His dead father. That is a bigger piece.
Immediately after his father's funeral, his mother had moved them another ten miles from the Tilok reservation. Before this precipitous relocation, they had been a good two miles outside the reservation and on the outskirts of Johnson City. Their new house was in the forest to the far side of town and surrounded by white people. His mother said only that the world was mostly white and not red and mat he better "get used to it." She worked for a local groceryman and was said to be very good at keeping his books.
Kier went to a public school and worked by the lamplight every night under his mother's tutelage. Grandfather moved off the reservation in order to be with them, and with him, Kier escaped to the forest to learn Indian ways. Tracking became a passion. His mother tolerated that part of his life, maybe even in her own way encouraged it, but it was always subserviant to his studies, always trivialized.
Nathaniel Wintripp, Kier's father, was a half-blooded Tilok Indian whose own father had been of Spanish descent. By trade Nate was a stonemason. He had been the most prolific and artistic craftsman in the rural areas nearest mountainous Wintoon County. But Nate Wintripp had a certain reserved aloofness about him. He'd grown up with his grandparents and struck out to live on his own at age seventeen. Although he ably supported himself through two years of Chico State University, he quit after the second year to work full-time in his growing business.
Kier had struggled to know his father. He wanted to get beyond the pats on the head to something undefinable, to something he didn't understand. On October 12, 1969, his father flew into a rage, banged Kier's wrists on a washbasin, stalked out the door, and never came back. A month later, Nate Wintripp was dead, never having let his son, Kier, find the bond that he so fervently pursued.
After his father walked out, a quiet desperation seemed to grip Kier's mother. It ran so deep that for years he couldn't bear the thought of stepping from the groove that she was charting for him. Although she was pure Tilok, he could not determine what she wanted to be-except for one incontrovertible opinion that she held with utter conviction. Even though he must be a success in the white man's world, even though he must have the best university education, even though he must bear no trace of his lineage in his speech, he would marry an Indian woman or certain calamity would befall him. After all, Nate, her own husband, being half white, could never really accept an Indian. How would a white woman ever accept Kier?
In the secret places of his soul, Kier wondered if his father could ever have accepted him. Or if his father accepted no one. Or if Kier wanted something from his father that was not to be found on this earth. It seemed to Kier that just before his father's death, they had been somehow reaching for each other. There was, he had imagined, a peaceful joy that lay just beyond his reaching fingers, that was forever snatched away at the very moment of his most profound awareness. He could not reconcile the shame he felt when he thought of his father.
He did not try to create this missing bond of communion with his mother. Theirs was a union fashioned from the mutuality of their struggle to survive on little income in a mountain town and from their shared tragedy.
Kier did not sort out the cauldron of emotions that he buried in a place in his mind and covered over with layers of keen intellectual musings. When he met his first wife-a white woman-the uneasy feeling was passed off by the simple observation that he had never made a genuine friend nor found a genuine love. He knew only male comrades in adventure and female partners in sex. This he supposed was a good and sufficient reason for the temporary loss in equilibrium. When he reached to grasp and share his new bride's love, he floundered as if drowning, with no concept at all of swimming. It frightened him.
Now he relived the feeling. His breaths grew deeper and there was tightness inside him. He felt the shame. His mother's raw determination still felt like a dead weight crushing his soul. This stew of old emotions had brought him to a place where he could not taste certain of life's flavors. He could not, it seemed, taste the flavor of love or savor it with another. What he didn't know was why.
Jessie had heard nothing during the several minutes since Kier had left. Then she heard a single shot. As Kier had suggested, she put Miller in the lead, with his hands cuffed behind, and backtracked on Miller's trail. Shortly they heard more shooting.
"Tonto's a bullet-ridden carcass," Miller said.
"Shut up," she said, wondering if he was right and feeling a lot more than she expected. They traveled easterly, then angled to the north, heading away from Claudie's and the Volvo, until they came to the creek. Finally, leaving Miller's track, they turned south down the creek. Jessie understood Kier's logic. New tracks that took a different direction heading off toward the Donahues' would need explaining.
Walking in the water, she discovered a torture more exquisite than any she had known-save one. The pain was bluer than the dead blue of a particular glacial lake that would forever stand in her memory. The sensation spreading in her feet was like the lifeless cold of that pristine water: A horrible, bone-deep ache that would, she knew, eventually cut her feet from her body. She had thought they would simply go numb; well, they did, but only after pain like a twisted gut. Kier's strategies and this wilderness seemed to demand suffering.
At first, as she and Miller walked, Jessie thought of survival, of spotting the next paramilitary trooper before he spotted her.