TWENTY-TWO
Two days later, in the dark before sunup, Henry set out with his uncle once again for Luukkonen’s outpost.
The men were waiting, the outfitter with them. They were quiet white men but with eyes that said much. Eyes that said, Business. That said, No questions. That said, We will watch you, boy.
Like all white men, they shook hands.
“Leonard Wellington,” the tall one said. He had a big nose, deep-set eyes, light brown hair. He was older than Henry by a decade, maybe two. It was hard for Henry to judge.
The other looked to be Woodrow’s age, nearing fifty. He was smaller and heavier than Wellington, with a mustache like a thin black scar across his upper lip. Carlos Lima, he said his name was. He spoke in a way Henry had not heard before, a strange accent that rolled melodically off his tongue. He smiled often, baring teeth white as bleached bone.
The men’s gear and the packed supplies were already in the back of Luukkonen’s pickup. Henry and Woodrow threw in their own belongings and climbed into the open bed. The two white men sat up front with Luukkonen. It was a cool morning in late August, manoominike-giizis, the month of ricing, and the ride into the woods chilled Henry. They followed old logging roads for an hour through territory Henry barely knew, though Woodrow knew it well.
The outfitter finally pulled to a stop at the edge of a long, narrow lake backed by steep hills crowned with aspen. They unloaded two canoes from the trailer and stowed the gear. In the white men’s canoe was equipment whose purpose Henry didn’t know, although he suspected from what his uncle and Luukkonen had said that it was for finding gold.
“Two weeks from today,” Luukkonen said to Woodrow. “Noon. I’ll be waiting.”
“I will have them here,” Woodrow promised.
They paddled all day-six lakes, four portages, one rough passage along a swift rocky stream. The two white men spoke mostly to each other but at every portage conferred with Woodrow. They asked about rocks and hills and ridges, and Woodrow listened and nodded and pointed this way or that.
To Henry, Woodrow spoke the Anishinaabe name for each lake- Bear, Cedar, Face In A Cloud-and Henry committed them and the landscape to memory.
They camped that night beside a lake Woodrow called Opwagun, which meant a pipe bowl. It made sense considering the hills that ringed the water. Henry caught bass, which his uncle cleaned and pan-fried and served to the white men with wild rice and mushrooms. The men sat apart afterward, smoking cigars. They drank from a silver flask.
“Where are we going?” Henry asked in Ojibwemowin so the white men, if they heard, would not understand.
“North,” Woodrow replied. “Three more lakes. Tomorrow by noon.”
“Is there gold?”
Woodrow’s eyes hung heavily on the white men sitting near the lake at the edge of the firelight, then he stared up at the sky. The stars were like frost on the dark windowpane of night.
“If there is, and the white men find it, I will kill them.”
“Why?”
“When I was a boy, I traveled with my uncle to a place called the Black Hills. You have heard of it?”
Henry had read about it at the school in Flandreau. In his dormitory there was a Lakota, Sunning Turtle, who’d come from the Black Hills. Sunning Turtle was one of the boys who cried at night.
“It belonged to the Lakota by treaty, but white men found gold there. They stole the land, ripped the earth, turned the clear streams to mud, and built towns filled with the worst kind of people. Now, since the end of the Great War, I have heard that gold is even more valuable to white men. I believe, Henry, that if the hearts of their grandmothers were made of gold, they would cut them out.” His eyes went back to the men drinking by the fire. “If there is gold here, I would die to keep it a secret. And I would kill for that, too.”
Henry lay awake a long time that night thinking about killing the two men. He did not hate them and knew that Woodrow didn’t either. The killing, if it came to that, was not about hate. It was, in a way, about love, and even more about respect, emotions he felt strongly for Grandmother Earth. Killing was never a good thing, Henry decided, but perhaps sometimes it was the only thing.
They set up camp the next day at noon on the lake called Ishkode. The word meant fire, and Henry had been thinking about the vision he’d had of a lake with fire at the bottom. Was this what it had meant? The two men eagerly eyed the gray ridges along the far shore and spoke to each other in low, excited voices. They set off immediately with equipment, crossing the lake alone in their canoe. Henry took his new rifle into the woods and shot a wild turkey, which Woodrow prepared and roasted on a spit. The men returned near sunset looking tired and grumbling in reply whenever Woodrow spoke to them.
Good, thought Henry. They have been disappointed.
For three days it went this way. On the fourth, the men returned in a different mood. They didn’t say anything about what they’d found to Woodrow or Henry, but it was in their faces and in the bounce of the words they spoke to each other.
That night, lying beside his uncle after the men slept, Henry asked, “Did they find the gold?”
Woodrow said, “Not the gold, I think. They would be drunk. But something that makes them believe they might find gold.”
Soon after dawn the next day, the men left. This time Woodrow followed.
Henry fished and caught several walleye that would easily fill all their bellies that evening. He cleaned his rifle and waited, scanning the lake with uneasiness in the direction all the men had gone.
The two whites came first. Their boots and the legs of their pants were caked with mud. Woodrow was not with them.
“Where’s your uncle?” the man named Wellington asked. He didn’t seem as excited as he’d been the day before, but neither was he surly. Henry wasn’t sure what that meant.
Henry didn’t want to speak to them. He answered, “I do not know.”
“I hope you have a meal ready, boy,” the man named Lima said. “A big meal.” With his accent the word came out beeg. “I could eat a moose.”
Henry fed them the walleye, which he rolled in cornmeal and fried. He made drop biscuits and gave them blueberries he’d gathered and the men were happy.
Dark came, but not Woodrow.
“Should we worry, boy?” Lima asked. Then he grinned. A joke.
Henry remembered what his uncle had said about leaving people who treated him badly. These men were not so bad as many other whites, but maybe they’d said something to Woodrow.
The men sat at the fire. They’d put their pants near the flames to dry the mud. They drank coffee Henry had made and into which they poured some of whatever was in the silver flask. Their faces were flushed. The color was from spending the day under the sun and maybe from the work they did while they were gone across the lake, and from the paddling necessary to get there and back, and even a little from the heat of the fire. But it was also from what they drank.
Wellington wrote in a book bound in leather. Every night they’d camped, he’d spent time after supper writing by the firelight. He looked up from his book and caught Henry staring.
“Writing my memoirs,” Wellington said with a laugh. “I figure I’ll publish them someday, get famous.”
“You read, boy?” Lima asked.
Henry was tired of being called boy, but he held his tongue. He stirred the fire with a long, sturdy maple stick. “I read,” he said.
“Mission school or something?” Wellington asked.
“A school in South Dakota.”
“South Dakota?” Wellington laughed. “A world traveler, eh? Ever been to Canada?”
“No,” Henry said.
“I’m from Port Arthur. Know where that is?”
“No,” Henry said.
“You’re not alone.” Wellington gave a snort. “Me, I’m going to put that burg on the map, eh.”
Lima pulled a cigar from the vest pocket of his jacket. “You smoke, boy?”
“No,” Henry said.