“What’s brought this curiosity on?” Hosea asked.
Odd looked at him, thought better of telling him, but did anyway. “I’m building a new boat. A bigger boat. I just wanted to see the skeleton.” He paused. “I’ve got the ribbands all set up. The keel is made. It’s one piece, carved it out of a white pine log.”
Hosea appeared interested. “How long is the keel?”
“Eighteen foot.”
Now Hosea appeared interested and impressed. “A single-piece keel eighteen feet long? The wood is sound tip to tail?”
“It came from a chunk forty foot long. It’s sound. It’s a goddamn work of art, what it is.”
“Why a new boat?” Hosea said.
“I’m tired of being wet.”
Hosea smiled, remembering the night of the storm last month, Odd’s willingness to risk his life in the skiff. “A little more cargo room?” Hosea pressed.
Now Odd smiled. “Yeah, a little.”
“But why the skeleton?”
“I’ve been achy. I don’t think I’ll be anymore.”
Hosea wheeled the skeleton back across the office. He covered it with a sheet. “I’ll tend to the rest of this later.”
Odd stepped down the hall and Hosea closed the door. After he turned the lock, he put the skeleton key in his pocket and led Odd downstairs.
VIII.
The moon hung gibbous and low, casting the snow in the gorge in bronze light. The only sounds were the wind and the flowing water beneath the snow. In an hour the sun would break over the lake.
Trond Erlandson and Hosea both wore fur coats and moose-hide mitts and hats pulled over their ears. They wore woolen socks beneath their sheep-lined boots and they covered their boots with felt. They stood on snowshoes and carried loaded Winchesters. The foreman withdrew from the inside of his coat a pair of field glasses that he trained first upriver and then down. The only thing they seemed to magnify was the cold. This was the eleventh night below zero and still two weeks until February.
Whispering, Hosea said, “We saw the otter scat smeared around below the lower falls. The wolf sign’s up and down this river like they couldn’t care less about you.”
Trond looked into the downriver darkness, measuring their whereabouts against a woodsman’s markers: deadfall, beaver lodge, muskeg, eagle aerie. “We’re only six miles from camp,” he said. He shook his head and spit the wad of snoose from his mouth, spit twice more and said, “Goddamn. Where was the bull moose they found?”
“Up on Bear Paw Lake. Just ten miles as the raven flies. And those ravens have been around.”
The bull moose had been found by a crew of sawyers working the northern parcel two days earlier. Frozen solid, its graying dewlap blowing in the stiff wind, leaning against an enormous white pine, it was but the most recent evidence of winter’s provenance. They’d found other creatures similarly dead. Each carcass a portent of hungry wolves.
The foreman followed the moonlight up the gorge once more. New snow had fallen the day before and in that light the drifts appeared lit from inside.
“I’ve been in these particular woods for three years and not seen them yet,” the foreman said. “I’ve heard them, I’ve messed my boots in their scat, I’ve seen what they can do to a caribou weighing four hundred pounds. But I’ve not set my eyes on them.” He spoke as much to himself as to Grimm. “But if they’re this close to camp —” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “We’re not talking about hugags or agropelters here.” He closed his eyes hard against the wind and when he opened them the moon was gone, swallowed by clouds.
He turned to Hosea. “You want the wolves why?”
“The bitches are in estrus, their glands are spilling with curatives.”
“I wouldn’t believe it if I’d never seen some of those potions you peddle.”
They hiked another quarter mile along the palisade’s edge, hoping for a better view of the river. They stood against trees not four feet from the precipice, the wind rising to their faces. They were silent now, waiting for the clouds to pass or the morning light to rise. The foreman already knew he would send for the dogs down in Two Harbors. He knew, also, that any wolf sign closer to camp would sharpen the auguries forming in the minds of the men.
There was no longer any reason to be standing on that cliff with Hosea Grimm but that he wanted to see the pack. So they waited. He knew the hour to be near five, the time of day he usually rose from his bunk and stepped outside to piss.
“There!” Hosea Grimm whispered, clutching the foreman’s shoulder. “There, below the falls.”
The foreman craned to see but found only dark.
“There again. Christ. Christ, yes.” Hosea Grimm lifted the Winchester to his shoulder and aimed downriver.
Still the foreman searched, pleading silently with the morning for light. But none came.
And then the flash of the gun, the concussion traveling up and down the gorge, trapped.
By the time they reached the lower falls the morning light was up. The clouds that had engulfed the moon stuck, so the day broke grainy and dim. But no matter, all the light in the world would not have illumined the wolves. Nor any tracks nor any sign at all.
“Fools persist,” the foreman said. “I lost a night’s sleep for what?”
“A vigorous hike is good for body and mind,” Hosea countered. “Cold air clears the lungs.”
“I get plenty of cold air, to say nothing of hiking around these woods.” The foreman checked his pocket watch. “This damn watch. It’s froze up on me.”
Hosea Grimm checked his own. “It’s nearly seven thirty. I’d best turn for town. Who knows what the peaked will require today. Yesterday it was Mats Barggaard with a nosebleed.”
“What did you prescribe?”
“Spiderwebs. A ball of spiderwebs.”
The foreman smiled. “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t heard about the ox shit you slathered all over that boy’s back after he fell into his family’s stove.”
“It worked — both the dung and the spiderwebs.”
“Tell me, with what would you remedy a frozen timepiece?”
“For that you’ll want Joshua Smith. He’ll be passing through before long.”
The foreman took a deep breath. “Sorry you didn’t get your wolf.”
“I’ll get one yet.”
“I believe you will.”
Hosea offered his hand. “I’ll see you in town.”
“Soon enough.”
As the two men parted ways on the river, an unkindness of ravens decamped from the high boughs of a white pine and flew up the gorge. Their cries were horrible and their moving shadow cast yet another shade on the snow.
Hosea Grimm turned back to the foreman and shouted across the river, “What did I say about the ravens?”
The ice road cut through the tallest stand of white pine along the river. Before the upper falls, the road veered south and plunged into Gunflint. The next morning Trond Erlandson sat his horse on the crest of the road looking onto the morning over the lake. A mile offshore the vaporous open water cemented his doubt. It clouded the sunrise. He looked down the shore for Isle Royale, but it was gone in the sea smoke.
He had once been a peaceable man — not given to the agitation that
was so much a part of his daily routine now — and the vista, though it complicated things, reminded him of that quiet part in him. When he had first arrived in these wilds, now thirty years ago, he’d looked on the country — in all its enormity and ungoverned beauty — as if it were his own private opportunity. Though he had worked tirelessly and with unchecked vigor, all he had to show for his labor was his authority. And his responsibility. He took neither lightly. He spit a stream of tobacco juice into the snow and spurred the horse forward.